Tag: yorker-vanity

Los Angeles cops do not need to hand over license plate reader data, judge finds

This LAPD patrol car is equipped with a LPR unit, mounted just in front of the light bar on the roof of the vehicle. Steve Devol A Los Angeles Superior Court judge will not force local law enforcement to release a week’s worth of all captured automated license plate reader (ALPR, also known as LPR) data to two activist groups that had sued for the release of the information, according to a decision issued on Thursday. In May 2013, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD) in an attempt to compel the agencies to release a week’s worth of LPR data from a certain week in August 2012. The organizations have not determined yet whether they will file an appeal. The organizations had claimed that these agencies were required to disclose the data under the California Public Records Act . In late July 2012, the ACLU and its affiliates sent requests to local police departments and state agencies across 38 states to request information on how LPRs are used. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Los Angeles cops do not need to hand over license plate reader data, judge finds

Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it

Most of Intel’s announcements lately have focused on low-power chips, but every now and again it throws a bone to its high-end desktop users. Today we’re getting our first look at Haswell-E and a new Core i7 Extreme Edition CPU, a moniker reserved for the biggest and fastest of Intel’s consumer and workstation CPUs (if you want something faster than that, you’ll need to start looking at Xeons). We already got a little bit of information on these chips back in March , when Intel made announcements related to refreshed Haswell chips (“Devil’s Canyon”) and a handful of other desktop processors. Though much of today’s information has already leaked, we’ll run down the most important stuff for those of you who don’t follow every leaked slide that makes its way to the public. The CPUs Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read More:
Haswell-E arrives, bringing a $999 8-core desktop CPU with it

Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

A simulated map of the WiFi signal in Jason Cole’s two-bedroom apartment. Jason Cole A home’s Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation . The Helmholtz equation models “the propagation of electronic waves” that involves using a sparse matrix to help minimize the amount of calculation a computer has to do in order to figure out the paths and interferences of waves, in this case from a Wi-Fi router. The whole process is similar to how scattered granular material, like rice or salt, will form complex patterns on top of a speaker depending on where the sound waves are hitting the surfaces. The author of the post in question , Jason Cole, first solved the equation in two dimensions, and then applied it to his apartment’s long and narrow two-bedroom layout. He wrote that he took his walls to have a very high refractive index, while empty space had a refractive index of 1. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the article here:
Mapping Wi-Fi dead zones with physics and GIFs

US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta. Kevin / flickr The US Administrative Office of the Courts (AOC) has deleted nearly a decade’s worth of documents from four US appeals courts and one bankruptcy court. The deletion is part of an upgrade to a new computer system for the database known as Public Access to Court Electronic Records, or PACER. Court dockets and documents at the US Courts of Appeals for the 2nd, 7th, 11th, and Federal Circuits, as well as the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, were maintained with “locally developed legacy case management systems,” said AOC spokesperson Karen Redmond in an e-mailed statement . Those five courts aren’t compatible with the new PACER system. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original post:
US courts trash a decade’s worth of online documents, shrug it off

Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

According to the slides, there will be three new NUC boards spread across give different boxes, all launching in the first half of 2015. FanlessTech We’re generally fans of Intel’s NUC (“Next Unit of Computing”) mini-PCs, which use Ultrabook parts to create reasonably capable desktop PCs that can fit just about anywhere. When last we heard about new Broadwell-based versions of the boxes, they were due to launch in late 2014, but delays of higher-performance Broadwell parts  has apparently pushed them back. New Intel slides from FanlessTech now show seven new NUC boxes launching in the first half of 2015. The slides also tell us what kind of boxes we can expect, though there are no big surprises here; the Broadwell NUC lineup is broadly similar to that of Haswell. There appear to be three boards: one high-end Core i5 model, one middle-end Core i3 model, and one Core i5 model with Intel’s vPro technology integrated to make it more appealing to enterprises. All appear to come in two types of enclosures, one with extra room for a 2.5-inch SATA III hard drive and one without. This makes for a total of six Broadwell NUC boxes. The revised NUC roadmap. FanlessTech All six boxes will share most of the same ports and features: two display outputs, Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, NFC, M.2 slots for SSDs, support for up to 16GB of RAM, and changeable lids (these may just be for customization purposes, though past rumors have suggested that some could be used as wireless charging pads). The vPro models will use two mini DisplayPorts while the standard i5 and i3 boxes will use one mini DisplayPort and one micro HDMI port, and all models appear to come with Intel’s 7265 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.0 adapter soldered on—with current models, you must supply your own mini-PCI Express Wi-Fi card. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View article:
Leaked slides show details for next-gen Intel mini-PCs, new CPUs

Prosecutors hit Silk Road suspect Ross Ulbricht with new drug charges

The US government claims these are Ross Ulbricht’s fraudulent identification cards. United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of NY Federal prosecutors have tacked on three new charges in the criminal case against Ross Ulbricht, the suspect that the government has identified as the mastermind of the Silk Road online drug marketplace. According to a 17-page amended indictment filed late Thursday night, the government added one count of “narcotics trafficking,” one count of “distribution of narcotics by means of the Internet,” and ” conspiracy to traffic in fraudulent identification documents .” Previously, Ulbricht had been indicted in February 2014 on four formal criminal offenses: narcotics trafficking conspiracy, continuing criminal enterprise, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

View post:
Prosecutors hit Silk Road suspect Ross Ulbricht with new drug charges

49ers’ stadium Wi-Fi served 25,000 concurrent users, 2.13TB in all

Levi’s Stadium crowd on August 17, 2014. Jim Bahn The San Francisco 49ers’ heralded Wi-Fi network  served its first NFL crowd in a preseason game on Sunday, and the team has now released statistics showing that it was able to serve lots of data to lots of fans, just as intended. “We offloaded 2.13 terabytes during the event,” 49ers VP of Technology Dan Williams told Mobile Sports Report . The newly built Levi’s Stadium has 68,500 seats and more than a third of attendees used the Wi-Fi network simultaneously. “We peaked at 24,775 (roughly 38 percent of attendance) concurrent connections with an average of 16,862 (roughly 25 percent of attendance),” Williams said. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original post:
49ers’ stadium Wi-Fi served 25,000 concurrent users, 2.13TB in all

Blizzard no longer expects World of Warcraft subscriber growth

The World of Warcraft isn’t usually this empty, but it’s getting there… For about six years after its early 2005 launch, it looked like there was nothing that could stop the runaway success of Blizzard’s World of Warcraft , which grew to a peak of 12 million paid subscribers by the end of 2010. Since then, though, the game has seen a long, mostly uninterrupted slide in its player numbers, with only 6.8 million subscribers as of July . Blizzard obviously isn’t happy about this trend for one of its biggest products but seems to have accepted that things aren’t going to change any time soon. “We really don’t know if [ World of Warcraft ] will grow again,” lead game designer Tom Chilton told MCV in a recent interview. “It is possible, but I wouldn’t say it’s something that we expect. Our goal is to make the most compelling content we can.” A new expansion pack like the upcoming Lords of Draenor could juice those subscriber numbers, as previous expansion packs have seemed to do. Chilton seems to see a bit of diminishing returns in this strategy, however. “By building expansions, you are effectively building up barriers to people coming back. But by including the level 90 character with this expansion, it gives people the opportunity to jump right into the new content.” Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Continued here:
Blizzard no longer expects World of Warcraft subscriber growth

Steve Ballmer leaves Microsoft board

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has announced that he’s stepping down from the company’s board, effective immediately. With his ownership of the LA Clippers , teaching, and “civic contribution” taking his time, Ballmer wrote  that he’s now “very busy,” and with both a new NBA season and new class of students, it would be “impractical” for him to remain on the board. In announcing his departure, Ballmer expressed confidence in new CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership, noting that although there are challenges ahead, there are also great opportunities, and he said that Microsoft’s mix of software, hardware, and cloud skills is unmatched in the industry. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Excerpt from:
Steve Ballmer leaves Microsoft board

A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it

We’ve all had this first-world problem, but USB is still leagues better than what came before. Like all technology, USB has evolved over time. Despite being a “Universal” Serial Bus, in its 18-or-so years on the market it has spawned multiple versions with different connection speeds and many, many types of cables. The USB Implementers Forum , the group of companies that oversees the standard, is fully cognizant of this problem, which it wants to solve with a new type of cable dubbed Type-C . This plug is designed to replace USB Type-A and Type-B ports of all sizes on phones, tablets, computers, and other peripherals. Type-C will support the new, faster USB 3.1 spec with room to grow beyond that as bandwidth increases. It’s possible that in a few years, USB Type-C will have become the norm, totally replacing the tangled nest of different cables that we all have balled up in our desk drawers. For now, it’s just another excuse to pass around that dog-eared XKCD comic about the proliferation of standards . While we wait to see whether Type-C will save us from cable hell or just contribute to it, let’s take a quick look at where USB has been over the years, what competing standards it has fought against, and what technologies it will continue to grapple with in the future. Read 26 remaining paragraphs | Comments

More:
A brief history of USB, what it replaced, and what has failed to replace it