Tag: style-details

US team to switch speed skating suits due to poor physics

Shani Davis wearing the Under Armour suit in question, in the race that placed him eighth overall. NBC The Under Armor speed skating suits meant to help US Olympic team members win may have actually been slowing them down, writes the Wall Street Journal in a report . A “design flaw” meant to aid with one element of the skaters’ physics may be hurting them in another way, resulting in no US skaters finishing higher than seventh place despite high rankings going in. The US requested a change on Thursday, and in the early hours of Saturday it was decided that the team could revert to the suits they used in previous World cup events, also made by Under Armour. The suits were designed with a vent on the back that is supposed to allow heat to escape. But the WSJ now suggests that the same vent may be letting air into the suit, creating drag and affecting skaters’ low stance. Kevin Haley, senior vice president of Under Armour, already copped to the problem, telling the WSJ “we’ll move heaven and earth to make them better.” Long-track team coach Ryan Shimabukuro refused to criticize the suits, but skater and 1,000-meter world-record holder Shani Davis claimed to have had his fastest start ever in the 1,000 meter race Wednesday while wearing the suit. An NBC commentator speaking over the event’s delayed broadcast in the US also asserted that the start was “the fastest [he’d] seen [Davis] open up this year.” Still, he finished eighth. Heather Richardson, the top-ranked women’s skater, finished seventh in the 1000m event; Brittany Bowe, the world record-holder for the same event, finished eighth. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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US team to switch speed skating suits due to poor physics

Windows 8.x reaches 200 million licenses sold

Microsoft marketing chief Tami Reller announced that the company has sold 200 million Windows 8 licenses in the 15 or so months that it has been on the market. This number includes only OEM and retail copies of the operating system and excludes volume licenses. The company previously announced that Windows 8 had reached 100 million copies sold in May of last year, a rate of sales that matched Windows 7. That operating system, however, reached 240 million sales within the first 12 months, demonstrating that Windows 8 is clearly not selling as fast. Still, in a PC market that’s shrinking—and which started shrinking even before the release of Windows 8—200 million copies is perhaps not too shabby. PCs as a whole are not selling as fast as they were during Windows 7’s heyday, and both Windows and Office are suffering as a result. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Windows 8.x reaches 200 million licenses sold

Skeleton from one of the earliest Americans yields its genome

The burial mound in Montana where the skeleton was found. Texas A&M University The peopling of the Americas via the Bering Sea land bridge is one of the more confusing events in recent history. Some of the earliest signs of human occupancy are actually in Chile. After that, the first distinct toolmaking culture, the Clovis people, appeared in the interior of North America, and rapidly swept across the continent. There are also indications that a separate migration occurred down the Pacific coast, possibly associated with people who had distinctive skeletal features, while the Inuit seem to be relatively recent arrivals. The sudden appearance of the Clovis toolset has caused some people to suggest that the Clovis were a distinct migration by a passage between ice sheets directly into North America’s interior. Others have even suggested that they arrived from Europe, brought by people who crossed the ice through Greenland (an idea that’s favored by a certain Bigfoot researcher ). Now, researchers have completed the genome of an individual who was buried with Clovis tools in Montana 12,500 years ago. The results suggest that the migration into North America was more unified than some thought. Although Clovis tools are relatively common at many North American sites, they’re generally not associated with skeletal remains. And there have been no distinctive skeletal features that label remains as belonging to a distinctive Clovis ethnic group. All of which makes Montana’s Anzick site exceptional: it contains remains that were placed with Clovis tools, unambiguously tagging the skeleton as belonging to this group. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Skeleton from one of the earliest Americans yields its genome

Mini-desktops are a rare bright spot in a shrinking PC industry, says Intel

Intel’s Haswell NUC sitting on top of Gigabyte’s larger (but more powerful) Brix. Intel sees mini-PCs as one of the rare PC markets where growth is possible. Andrew Cunningham The wider PC industry isn’t doing so well, and last week’s news that Sony would be selling off its VAIO business is just the latest indication. That doesn’t mean things are all bad—there’s still some growth to be found, and one area where it’s happening is in mini-desktops like Intel’s NUC or Asus’ upcoming Chromebox . Intel tells us that sales of truly tiny PCs (things near the size of the NUC, Gigabyte’s Brix Pro , or Lenovo’s M93p Tiny ) have gone from “almost zero in 2012” to over a million units in 2013. And yet, these mini desktops don’t always make sense. If you want something compact for your desk that saves you cable clutter, an all-in-one will frequently be a better option. If you want something more powerful, a more traditional micro ATX or even mini ITX PC can be purchased or built for less money, often with a greater amount of CPU and GPU power. We spoke with Lisa Graff , Vice President of Intel’s PC Client Group, to get a better idea of how these desktops are doing and who exactly is buying them. Business-friendly features in a tiny package Graff came in from the datacenter group last year to run Intel’s desktop business.  “When I came in there were a number of areas in desktop that were growing, kind of bucking the trend of some of what we’re seeing in the PC business,” Graff told Ars. “And as we started to drill in, this was one of the areas—all-in-ones were clearly a growth area, but this mini-desktop, really, the growth has been incredibly strong.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Mini-desktops are a rare bright spot in a shrinking PC industry, says Intel

Biggest DDoS ever aimed at Cloudflare’s content delivery network

Ruthanne Reid A distributed denial-of-service attack targeting a client of the content delivery network Cloudflare reached new highs in malicious traffic today , striking at the company’s data centers in Europe and the US. According to a Twitter post by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, the full volume of the attack exceeded 400 gigabits per second—making it the largest DDoS attack ever recorded. The attack used Network Time Protocol (NTP) reflection , the same technique used in recent attacks against gaming sites by a group called DERP Trolling. NTP is used to synchronize the time settings on computers across the Internet. The attack made fraudulent synchronization requests to NTP servers that caused them to send a flood of replies back at the targeted sites. Reflection attacks have been a mainstay of DDoS tools and botnets, but the use of NTP in such attacks is relatively new. Last year’s attack on Spamhaus , which previously set the record for the largest DDoS ever, used a Domain Name Service (DNS) protocol attack—a much more common approach that takes advantage of the Internet’s directory service, forging requests for DNS lookups from the intended target and sending them to scores of open DNS servers. The size of the traffic directed back at the target from these requests far exceeds the size of the requests sent to the DNS servers, which is why the technique is often called a DNS amplification attack. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Biggest DDoS ever aimed at Cloudflare’s content delivery network

Newegg’s answer to Amazon Prime: $50 per year for expedited shipping

Newegg If you’re the type of person who makes electronics purchases on a whim but then agonizes over which shipping to choose, you may be happy to hear about  Newegg Premier . Taking a page out of Amazon’s playbook, the venerable electronics retailer launched its “Newegg Premier” program on Tuesday. For $50 per year, subscribers will get “free expedited shipping” of three days or less, early-access to sales, free and no-fee returns, and a “dedicated customer service telephone number” (all similar benefits to Amazon Prime). But unlike its competitor, Newegg Premier won’t give you access to Alpha House (sorry, John Goodman) or any of the company’s other online media. “We always seek ways to improve the customer experience, and implementing a benefit program is the latest example of how we’re making it easier and more rewarding to shop at Newegg.com,” said Soren Mills, chief marketing officer of Newegg North America, in a statement . “Free expedited shipping is in itself a great benefit, but beyond that we’re including many other perks to enhance the shopping experience.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Newegg’s answer to Amazon Prime: $50 per year for expedited shipping

Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0: An interview with Silk Road’s new boss

Aurich Lawson Silk Road, the infamous and anonymous online marketplace specializing in illicit goods, sells everything from pot to black tar heroin. If you can smoke it, inject it, or snort it, there’s a good chance Silk Road has it. Well, had it. Late last year, the FBI burst into a local branch of the San Francisco Public Library and arrested one Ross Ulbricht, the alleged kingpin who ran the site. It all happened while Ulbricht’s laptop was open and he was logged into his encrypted accounts. In the days that followed, the feds dropped a host of charges on Ulbricht, including several salacious accusations that Ulbricht attempted to arrange hits on various people he thought had betrayed him or blackmailed him. The feds also arrested several people accused of being major sellers, creating anxiety for those who ever bought or sold on the site. The Silk Road was closed . It didn’t take long to return. Just as the previous Silk Road operator had done, the new owner called himself “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR). The name came from a character in The Princess Bride who passes his piratical business down from one individual to the next, each of whom uses the same name to ensure continuity. So in a move that would seem to tempt fate, the new DPR built another version of Silk Road and restarted the drug marketplace. Read 42 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Dread Pirate Roberts 2.0: An interview with Silk Road’s new boss

LibreOffice upgrade targets Windows integration and power users

Document Foundation LibreOffice 4.2 is now out, featuring improved integration with Windows and new features for power users and the enterprise. “LibreOffice 4.2 offers two Windows-specific improvements for business users: a simplified custom install dialog to avoid potential mistakes, and the ability to centrally manage and lock-down the configuration with Group Policy Objects via Active Directory,” the Document Foundation wrote in an announcement today . “All users benefit from better integration with Windows 7 and 8, with thumbnails of open documents now grouped by application and a list of recent documents, both showing on the task bar.” Windows users aren’t the only ones to benefit from the latest release of the open source office suite, which is also available on OS X and Linux. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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LibreOffice upgrade targets Windows integration and power users

Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

We’re apparently not the only ones who forgot AppUp was a thing—the store closes in March. Intel Intel’s AppUp store for Windows apps has been around since January of 2010, though you could be forgiven for forgetting about it. Intel apparently wants to forget, too: the company announced today that the AppUp store will be closing its doors on March 11, 2014, “after which no new content or apps will be available for download.” An extensive FAQ about the closing covers most of the important facts. E-mail support for AppUp apps will be available until June 15, 2014. The AppUp client application and some apps will continue to function after the store closes, but  many applications “require communication with the AppUp client and may not work after May 15, 2014.” Apps purchased through AppUp will no longer receive updates once the store closes, nor will Intel be able to send product keys for keyed apps after March 11. If you want to download the AppUp client and install it now, you’ll either need to find it from another download source or contact Intel customer service. Intel is offering refunds for some paid apps here , but that page isn’t yet functional, and it’s not clear what criteria a purchase will need to meet to be eligible for a refund. Refunds will only be available between now and December 19, 2014. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Intel closes AppUp, its PC app store (Intel had a PC app store?)

Amazon mulling price hike for Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service

Amazon has just reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2013 . According to The Verge , Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak mentioned that the company is considering a price increase for its Amazon Prime customers in the US. The decision hasn’t been made, but high shipping costs could prompt a price increase of between $20 and $40 a year for the service. Prime began life as a service that offered free two-day shipping on many items for a flat, $79-a-year fee. As Amazon has branched out into tablets and streaming media, perks like the Instant Video service and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library have been added to sweeten the deal. The potential price increase would be the first since Prime was introduced in the US in 2005. Amazon reported income of $239 million on sales of $25.59 billion for the fourth quarter of 2013, lower than analysts had expected. The company’s guidance for the first quarter of 2014 projects sales between $18.2 and $19.9 billion and expects income to be somewhere between a profit of $200 million and a loss of $200 million. Read on Ars Technica | Comments        

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Amazon mulling price hike for Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service