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Total 60 articles, created at 2016-05-30 18:03 1 Asus arrives in your home with the Zenbo robot (4.15/5) Google Home, on legs? 2016-05-30 12:14 1KB feedproxy.google.com 2 Nvidia chief downplays Google’s A. I. chip Nvidia's chief executive says he's not phased by Google's new chip for machine learning, even though Nvidia has staked part of its (2.06/5) future on building chips for A. I. 2016-05-30 06:36 3KB www.computerworld.com 3 Asus Launches New ZenFone 3 Series Smartphones (2.04/5) After circulating teaser videos of the ZenFone 3, Asus has finally introuduced their newest line in the ZenFone 3, coming in three variants; ZenFone 3, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe and ZenFone 3 Ultra. Asus kicked off the press day at the Computex trade show in Taipei... 2016-05-30 09:26 1KB pctechmag.com 4 The Asus ZenBook 3 slays the Apple MacBook in specs and price (1.04/5) Eat your heart out Apple 2016-05-30 10:29 2KB feedproxy.google.com 5 Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU power up next-gen phones

(1.03/5) Computex 2016 - At its Computex press conference this morning, ARM announced two new pieces of mobile SoC IP that it believes will... 2016-05-30 12:21 3KB techreport.com 6 Staring at your phone? The next ARM chips are just for you

(1.03/5) ARM, the company behind the architecture of most mobile processors, created its next-generation chip designs for sustained high performance and longer battery life. 2016-05-29 20:00 3KB www.itnews.com 7 SpellForce 3 coming 2016, here are a few new details (1.02/5) Will be a prequel to the first two games. 2016-05-30 11:30 1KB www.pcgamer.com 8 WordPress plug-in flaw puts over 1M websites at risk

(1.02/5) Owners of WordPress-based websites should update the Jetpack plug-in as soon as possible because of a serious flaw that could expose their users to attacks. 2016-05-30 06:00 2KB www.computerworld.com

9 ASUS Announces Transformer 3 Pro: 2-in-1 with Core i5/i7 (0.05/5) Not to be outdone on the subject of 2-in-1s today, ASUS has announced a second 2-in-1 to complement the newly... 2016-05-30 08:01 1KB www.anandtech.com 10 Computex 2016: ASUS Republic of Gamers 10 Year Press Conference 06:59AM EDT - And that's it. Lots of quick fire announcements, (0.03/5) we'll get more details in the press kit I imagine... 2016-05-29 22:59 5KB www.anandtech.com 11 Dell Adds 3 New Models to Build Out Smart Printer Portfolio All three new printers from Dell offer onscreen self-help graphics that provide step-by-step instructions for troubleshooting and error recovery. 2016-05-30 16:22 3KB www.eweek.com 12 Millennials Willing to Pay More for High- Speed Web Access More than three-quarters of millennials surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that they expect to be able to stream video wherever they are. 2016-05-30 16:22 3KB www.eweek.com 13 Watch these exciting dry ice experiments (pictures) Who knew so many people love dumping dry ice into their swimming pools? See some of the best viral videos from science enthusiasts who couldn't wait to transform their pools into giant science projects. Though as cool as it looks, don't swim in dry ice... 2016-05-30 17:47 860Bytes www.cnet.com 14 Kingdom of Loathing dev reveals West of Loathing An 'adventure RPG' set in the Old West. 2016-05-30 13:00 1KB www.pcgamer.com 15 Asus pushes forward a modular gaming PC standard 'Rising Neo Gamers' 2016-05-30 11:03 1KB feedproxy.google.com

16 You can now read the whole Bible in emoji Scripture for millennials 2016-05-30 10:47 1KB feedproxy.google.com 17 MTN offering free 4G SIM Card upgrades, free 1GB Data & Power bank MTN Uganda in a bid to maintain its stance as the largest 4G network in the country, started a drive to have many of its 3G subscribers join up the 4G revolution. The telecom giant is offering to upgrade your 3G SIM cards for free to the faster,... 2016-05-30 10:37 1KB pctechmag.com 18 Ibuki heading to Street Fighter V - here's a trailer Ibuki's stocked up on bombs for her latest appearance. 2016-05-30 10:00 1KB www.pcgamer.com 19 Apple Watch 2 release date, news and rumors Predictions are pouring in for an updated Apple Watch this year 2016-05-30 09:39 8KB feedproxy.google.com 20 5 unusual things you can do with IBM's Watson From creating your own granola to clothes shopping 2016-05-30 09:10 6KB feedproxy.google.com 21 Adventures In Pair Programming : Phil Horowitz, senior software engineer at Perforce Software, shares his experiences with pair programming. Proponents of the practice say it's a good way to improve code ownership, insure continuous code review, increase productivity, and reduce distractions (read: keep people... 2016-05-30 09:06 7KB www.informationweek.com 22 Outcast is being remade as Outcast - Second Contact After Kickstarter failed to get off the ground in 2014. 2016-05-30 09:00 1KB www.pcgamer.com 23 HTC smartwatch gets delayed... again Will it be worth the wait? 2016-05-30 08:35 1KB feedproxy.google.com 24 GIGABYTE Aero 14: Thin Gaming Laptop with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M and 10-Hour Battery Life GIGABYTE has introduced its new Aero 14 gaming laptop, which weds a relatively thin form-factor with high-performance components such as an Intel... 2016-05-30 08:30 3KB www.anandtech.com

25 How to edit videos with iMovie Apple films 2016-05-30 08:30 4KB feedproxy.google.com 26 Job Opportunity: UN Information Technology Operations Officer – World Food Programme About World Food Programme: The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is the United Nations frontline agency against world hunger. It is the largest and longest serving humanitarian agency in Uganda. Currently WFP focuses on three priority areas namely: Emergency Humanitarian Action (EHA)... 2016-05-30 08:22 2KB pctechmag.com 27 Data Storytelling: What It Is, Why It Matters Telling a compelling story with your data helps you get your point across effectively. Here are four tips to keep your data from getting lost in translation. 2016-05-30 08:06 9KB www.informationweek.com 28 MSI's gaming PC backpack makes tether- free virtual reality real Freely walk around in VR 2016-05-30 08:00 1KB feedproxy.google.com 29 Venturer BravoWin 10KT review: This 10in Windows 10 tablet-laptop hybrid costs just £150, making it an excellent deal for students Even the cheapest Windows 10 laptops can be out of budget for many students, and a more affordable alternative might be a budget 2-in-1 tablet-laptop hybrid such as this £150 Venturer BravoWin 10KT. We find out exactly what you get in return for not a... 2016-05-30 08:00 9KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 30 Move over Skylake: An Asus PC with Intel's Kaby Lake chip is coming in Q3 The wait for Intel's Kaby Lake chip will end in the third quarter, as the first PC with the 7th Generation Core chip was announced at Computex. 2016-05-30 07:40 3KB www.itnews.com 31 Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg To Connect With Space Station Astronauts Via Facebook Live In a statement by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Facebook Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg will speak with three astronauts currently living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) 12:55 p.m EDT (7:55 p.m EAT )Wednesday, June 1st... 2016-05-30 07:35 2KB pctechmag.com 32 The Future of Transactions: Mobile Money Merchant Payments Merchant payments add a significant use case for mobile money in developing countries by enabling customers to pay for goods and services from their mobile wallets. Across the developed world, cards and NFC enabled POSs are being used to pay for everyday purchases, but the question remains... 2016-05-30 07:25 3KB pctechmag.com 33 Meet Avalon, Asus's audacious, tightly integrated vision for the future of DIY PCs Asus ROG's Avalon concept PC makes a compelling case for rethinking the basic bones of computer design. 2016-05-30 07:18 5KB www.itnews.com 34 9 Raspberry Pi Projects For Your Summer Vacation The right Raspberry Pi project can make the summer fun and educational. Here are nine possibilities that fit the bill. 2016-05-30 07:06 2KB www.informationweek.com 35 Apple stores to sell Apollo "personal cloud. " It's back to the future all over again I thought we'd finally got to an understanding that the cloud is the best place to store consumer data. It seems I was wrong. 2016-05-30 07:00 4KB www.computerworld.com 36 ARM Unveils Next Generation Bifrost GPU Architecture & Mali-G71: The New High-End Mali Over the last few years the SoC GPU space has taken an interesting path, and one I admittedly wasn’t expecting. At the start... 2016-05-30 07:00 4KB www.anandtech.com 37 iPad Pro 2 release date and specs rumours: When will Apple launch a new iPad Pro Will the iPad Pro 2 simply match the specs of the current 9.7in model or will we get more? We investigate. 2016-05-30 07:00 3KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 38 Pwned: 65 million Tumblr accounts, 40 million from Fling, 360 million from MySpace That "set" of accounts compromised in the Tumblr hack was actually 65 million. Have I Been Pwned added another 40 million from the 'dating' hookup site Fling. The MySpace hack had more than 360 million email addresses in it. All of these mega... 2016-05-30 06:17 4KB www.computerworld.com 39 Office machine mania: The paradox that limits productivity So-called knowledge work hasn’t exactly led to a modern-day Industrial Revolution when it comes to how basic, everyday business gets done. 2016-05-30 06:03 8KB www.itnews.com 40 Iran orders messaging apps to store data of in-country users Iran has ordered messaging apps to transfer data and activity records of Iranian users to local servers within one year, a move that will give the country a greater ability to monitor and censor the online activity of its people. 2016-05-30 05:40 2KB www.computerworld.com 41 Mafia 3 trailer is a virtual tour of New Bordeaux City is inspired by the best bits of New Orleans. 2016-05-30 05:16 1KB www.pcgamer.com 42 How to export a Live Photos movie into OS X Apple leaves it opaque how to extract the movie version of an iOS Live Photos. 2016-05-30 05:00 2KB www.itnews.com 43 What are phone jammers trying to tell us? Cellphone jammers are illegal. So why do people keep using them? (Hint: because tech moves too slowly.) 2016-05-30 03:30 7KB www.computerworld.com 44 Meze 99 Classics headphone review: beautifully crafted cans The Meze 99 Classics are an exhilarating experience for the serious music lover. 2016-05-30 03:00 8KB www.itnews.com 45 ... And other related duties IT pilot fish has worked for this major city's public school district for years, and by now he knows the ins and outs of all the systems -- technical and bureaucratic. 2016-05-30 03:00 1KB www.computerworld.com

46 Microservice architecture is agile software architecture Just as agile development solves an engineering bottleneck, microservices solve an architectural bottleneck 2016-05-30 03:00 8KB www.infoworld.com 47 Why I switched back to Firefox Remember when you ditched Firefox for Chrome and pinkie-swore you’d never go back? Yeah, me too 2016-05-30 03:00 1KB www.infoworld.com 48 10 things we love about the new Firefox browser Mozilla took its vanishing market share to heart and fought back with one of the most notably improved products in recent memory 2016-05-30 03:00 3KB www.infoworld.com 49 New products of the week 5.30.16 Our roundup of intriguing new products from companies such as Actiance and Black Duck Software. 2016-05-30 02:57 7KB www.itworld.com 50 What you missed in tech last week: Updategate, Windows Phone woes, GoT piracy The top 10 stories from the past seven days,Software ,Windows,Mobile,piracy,Security 2016-05-30 00:00 2KB www.theinquirer.net 51 MediaTek's Pump Express 3.0 charges a smartphone from 0 to 70 in 20 minutes The Taiwanese chipmaker's new battery solution looks promising, but will only be available at the end of the year. 2016-05-30 00:00 1KB www.cnet.com 52 Veterans bootstrap the transition from battlefield to tech Leveraging their leadership and technology skills, vets are joining one of the fastest-growing industries. 2016-05-30 00:00 3KB www.cnet.com 53 Apple's plan to sell used iPhones in India officially gets rejected Luckily for the Cupertino, California-based company, it still has hopes of opening up its own retail stores in the populous nation. 2016-05-30 00:00 1KB www.cnet.com 54 Asus ZenFone 3 Family Includes Unibody ‘Deluxe’ With Invisible Antennas, Snapdragon 820, 6GB RAM | HotHardware Asus definitely impressed us with its ZenFone 2 family of products, which offered solid performance (via an Intel Atom SoC) and very attractive pricing off-contract and unlocked. Asus is back at it again with the new ZenFone 3 Android smartphone lineup, and the Taiwanese... 2016-05-30 00:00 2KB hothardware.com 55 iOS 10 features: the top 10 things we want to see Manual camera controls, user accounts, Apple Pay improvements and more,Phone ,Apple,Mobile 2016-05-30 00:00 3KB www.theinquirer.net 56 AMD Radeon RX 480 Polaris GPU Caught Running Doom At 1440p | HotHardware Time and again we've talked about there not being any mulligans on the Internet—once you put something on social media, it's there to stay even if you delete your post. An AMD executive is finding this out after a deleted Twitter posted continues to make the... 2016-05-30 00:00 2KB hothardware.com 57 AMD's gaming-optimized AMDGPU-PRO driver for Linux is in beta A new gaming-optimized AMD driver is good news for 3D gaming on Linux, especially SteamOS. 2016-05-30 00:00 4KB www.pcworld.com 58 ARM Details Built on ARM Cortex Technology License As part of today's announcements, we're able to provide more information on ARM's new "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" license... 2016-05-29 23:00 4KB www.anandtech.com 59 The ARM Cortex A73 - Artemis Unveiled It’s only been a little over a year since we had a good look into ARM’s Cortex A72 presented at ARM’s TechDay event in London... 2016-05-29 23:00 9KB www.anandtech.com 60 Microsoft's Satya Nadella follows Apple’s Tim Cook to India Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is visiting India, reflecting the growing importance of the country as a market for multinational technology companies. 2016-05-29 19:50 2KB www.computerworld.com Articles

Total 60 articles, created at 2016-05-30 18:03

1 Asus arrives in your home with the Zenbo robot (4.15/5) We've already seen laptops and phones from Asus at this year's Computex event, but it wouldn't be a tech show without a curveball these days - and so enter the Zenbot, the friendly looking robot that Asus wants you to use to control your home. Yes, it's like Google Home or the Amazon Echo , except it walks and talks and has a few more social capabilities. From entertaining the kids to keeping elderly people company, it looks like an ambitious product from the Taiwanese company. Zenbo can read out emails, calendar events and recipes, make video calls, order items off the web, stream media, interact with other parts of your smart home and much more - or at least that's what the demo video suggests. Presumably developers are going to have to get on board to help Zenbo fulfil its potential. The robot can play games or read out stories for kids, as well as alert you if an elderly relative is in trouble. Asus says it learns over time too, becoming better attuned to your preferences and lifestyle thanks to some integrated AI smarts. Zenbo is also reminiscent of "social robot" Jibo , which first appeared on Indiegogo a couple of years ago. The platforms for all these functions are already in place, it's just a matter of creating a device that can pull them all together. Asus only just announced Zenbo so we're waiting on some of the details, but a price of $599 has been mentioned (roughly £410 or AU$835). How long it's going to be before you can order one of these friendly home robots remains to be seen. Article continues below Zenbo family robot destroys Computex with cuteness before it even begins cnet.com

Asus unveils Zenbo, a cute robot for the home priced at $599 computerworld.com ASUS Unveils Zenbo Smart Companion Robot anandtech.com

Asus unveils Zenbo, a cute home robot that won't break the bank pcworld.com 2016-05-30 12:14 By David feedproxy.google.com

2 Nvidia chief downplays Google’s A. I. chip (2.06/5) Nvidia has staked a big chunk of its future on supplying powerful graphics chips used for artificial intelligence, so it wasn't a great day for the company when Google announced two weeks ago that it had built its own AI chip for use in its data centers. Google's Tensor Processing Unit , or TPU, was built specifically for deep learning, a branch of A. I. through which software trains itself to get better at deciphering the world around it, so it can recognize objects or understand spoken language, for example. TPUs have been in use at Google for more than a year, including for search and to improve navigation in Google Maps. They provide "an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning" compared to other options, according to Google. That could be bad news for Nvidia, which designed its new Pascal microarchitecture with machine learning in mind. Having dropped out of the smartphone market, the company is looking to A. I. for growth, along with gaming and VR. But Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang isn't phased by Google's chips, he said at the Computex trade show Monday. For a start, he said, deep learning has two aspects to it -- training and inferencing -- and GPUs are still much better at the training part, according to Huang. Training involves presenting an algorithm with vast amounts of data so it can get better at recognizing something, while inferencing is when the algorithm applies what it's learned to an unknown input. "Training is billions of times more complicated that inferencing," he said, and training is where Nvidia's GPUs excel. Google's TPU, on the other hand, is "only for inferencing," according to Huang. Training an algorithm can take weeks or months, he said, while inferencing often happens in a split second. Besides that distinction, he noted that many of the companies that will need to do inferencing won't have their own processor. "For companies that want to build their own inferencing chips, that's no problem, we're delighted by that," Huang said. "But there are millions and millions of nodes in the hyperscale data centers of companies that don't build their own TPUs. Pascal is the perfect solution for that. " That Google built its own chip shouldn't be a big surprise. Technology can be a competitive advantage for big online service providers, and companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft already design their own servers. Designing a processor is the next logical next step, albeit a more challenging one. Whether Google's development of the TPU has affected its other chip purchases is tough to know. "We're still buying literally tons of CPUs and GPUs," a Google engineer told The Wall Street Journal. "Whether it's a ton less than we would have otherwise, I can't say. " Meanwhile Nvidia's Huang, like others in the industry, expects deep learning and AI to become pervasive. The last 10 years were the age of the mobile cloud, he said, and we're now in the era of artificial intelligence. Companies want to better understand the masses of data they're collecting, and that will happen through AI.

Nvidia chief downplays challenge from Google’s AI chip itworld.com

Nvidia chief downplays challenge from Google’s hyper-specialized AI chip pcworld.com 2016-05-30 06:36 James Niccolai www.computerworld.com

3 3 Asus Launches New ZenFone 3 Series Smartphones (2.04/5) After circulating teaser videos of the ZenFone 3, Asus has finally introuduced their newest line in the ZenFone 3, coming in three variants; ZenFone 3, the ZenFone 3 Deluxe and ZenFone 3 Ultra. Asus kicked off the press day at the Computex trade show in Taipei with an absolutely enormous lineup of products, with their newest smartphones all of which share a similar, seamless metallic design but come in very different sizes, Mashable reports. ZenFone 3 , is a mid-ranger, with a 5.5-inch full HD display screen, a 16- megapixel camera on the back, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 processor, 4GB of RAM while the ZenFone 3 Deluxe comes with a 5.7-inch full HD display screen, a 23-megapixel back camera, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, an Adreno 530 GPU, 6GB of RAM and a fingerprint scanner and finally the ZenFone Ultra which falls between the other two; sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 652 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 23- megapixel camera, and a fingerprint scanner too. According to Mashable, what sets it (ZenFone Ultra) apart, is its 6.8-inches HD resolution display screen size, probably the largest Android device that calls itself a phone instead of a tablet. With it’s 4,600mAh battery that keeps it running for a long time can even be used to charge other devices, at up to 1.5A. According to Android Authority, the starting prices range from 249 USD to 499 USD. Here is a quick specs: Asus ZenFone 3 gets its own accessories, and they're super pretty cnet.com

ASUS Announces the ZenFone 3 Series, with 6 GB Deluxe Model and 6.8-inch Ultra Model anandtech.com 2016-05-30 09:26 Nathan Ernest pctechmag.com

4 The Asus ZenBook 3 slays the Apple MacBook in specs and price (1.04/5) If you were a fan of the ZenBook UX305, you're going to love the ultra-thin ZenBook 3. Asus pulled the wraps off of its MacBook rival at Computex 2016, touting the Ultrabook weighs in at a scant 2 pounds and 11.9mm (0.46-inches) thick. By comparison, the Apple MacBook.51-inches (13.1mm) tall and tips the scales at 2.03 pounds (0.92kg). The weighting and thickness reductions are even more striking when you consider the previous ZenBook UX305 weighed 2.64 pounds and was 12.9mm thick (0.51-inches). Despite scaling down the weight and size of the ZenBook, the model 3 is a powerhouse thanks to an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB PCIe SSD. Asus hasn't skimped on the premium built quality either. The 12.5-inch screen is covered by a big sheet of Gorilla Glass 4 and the body of the laptop itself is made from "aerospace-grade aluminum alloy," which the electronics firm claims to be 40 percent than most other laptops. As for making it so thin, Asus explains it developed the world's thinnest 3mm fan to keep the laptop's Core I-series processor cool while keeping it incredibly thin. Oh and it has a fingerprint scanner for good measure and letting users sign in with Windows Hello. The ZenBook 3 also utilizes a Thunderbolt 3/USB-C port for charging to top off an empty machine back to 60% in 49 minutes. What's more, Asus claims users can expect nine hours of usage. Surprisingly all of these premium features come with an affordable price tag. The ZenBook 3 starts at only $999 with an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and 256GB SSD. That said, the price goes up to a more significant $1,499 with the 512GB SSD upgrade. You can also get a richly specced machine with the added Core i7 processor, 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM for $1,999. Article continues below Asus ZenBook 3 Tramples Apple’s MacBook With Thinner And Lighter Chassis, Core i7, 1TB SSD | HotHardware hothardware.com 2016-05-30 10:29 By Kevin feedproxy.google.com

5 Cortex-A73 CPU and Mali-G71 GPU power up next-gen phones (1.03/5) Computex 2016 - At its Computex press conference this morning, ARM announced two new pieces of mobile SoC IP that it believes will drive the demanding applications that smartphone owners will want to run on next-generation devices. The company says 4K gaming, VR, and augmented reality will all increase the performance demands on mobile SoCs. ARM is rising to this challenge with the Cortex-A73 CPU and the Mali-G71 GPU. The Cortex-A73 CPU core is claimed to deliver 30% more performance than ARM's previous high-end core, the Cortex-A72, while improving power efficiency by up to 30% over the older design—at least, when it's fabricated on a 10-nm process. The A73 core doesn't deliver this improvement by becoming a wider machine. Indeed, ARM says the chip is a two-wide design, as opposed to the A72's three-wide front end. Instead, the company suggested that a blend of process and architectural improvements will let the chip hit higher peak clocks—up to 2.8GHz, as opposed to the A72's 2.5GHz—and extract more performance from features like an improved branch predictor. Where the A73 may really shine is in applications like games and VR that require sustained performance from the SoC. Past high-end mobile SoCs have been tailored to handle "bursty" workloads, where a user might run a demanding application for a short time and then perform less-demanding tasks the rest of the time. VR, AR, and gaming applications offer the chip no such relief: it has to run flat-out for long periods without overheating. The more-efficient A73 core is designed to specifically address this problem. One of ARM's slides suggests the A73 core has basically eliminated the delta between peak and sustained CPU performance in certain tasks. On a simulated Spec2K benchmark, a 2.8GHz, 10-nm A73 is claimed to deliver 1.3 times the peak performance of a Cortex-A72 and 2.1 times the peak performance of a Cortex-A57. The A73 also delivers this performance in a smaller die area than past ARM cores: just 0.65 mm 2. That small area makes room for SoC designers to add more resources like GPU cores to their chips. ARM has some new GPU IP for those chip designers to play with today, too. The Mali-G71 GPU core is claimed to deliver some impressive performance improvements over ARM's previous high-end GPU core, the Mali-T880. The company says the G71 is up to 50% faster than the T880, and it purports to deliver 20% better energy efficiency, 40% better performance density, and 20% more bandwidth than that older part even when it's fabricated on the same process. G71 is also more scalable than the T880. Implementations of this GPU can include up to 32 shader cores, up from 16 in the older part. The Mali-G71 is the first GPU to use ARM's next-generation Bifrost architecture. Bifrost gives the G71 support for the Vulkan low-overhead graphics API. It can also take advantage of a fully-coherent system interconnect to DRAM to enable heterogenous computing. From a chip- layout perspective, Bifrost also purports to reduce the number of "wirelets" needed to connect shaders, a move that ARM claims has a positive impact on performance, as well. ARM already has a number of partners signed up for the A73 and G71 IP, including Hisilicon, Huawei, Marvell, Mediatek, and Samsung. The company says we should expect to begin seeing SoCs with Cortex-A73 cores and Mali-G71 GPUs in devices around the end of this year or in early 2017. ARM's next-gen Cortex-A73 chips are just right for your phone computerworld.com 2016-05-30 12:21 by Jeff techreport.com

6 Staring at your phone? The next ARM chips are just for you (1.03/5) You’re probably spending more time with your smartphone, and ARM’s noticed. The company behind the architecture of most mobile processors has created its next-generation chip designs for sustained high performance and longer battery life. ARM is announcing the Cortex-A73 CPU at Computex in Taipei on Monday. Chips based on the design will be a little faster than their predecessors, but this generation is more about efficiency, ARM says. That fits what’s happening in phones now, according to Tirias Research analyst Paul Teich. “We kind of have enough power in our smartphones,” he said. And with screens about as big as most consumers want, and phones thin enough, the size of the battery will stay the same for a while. What’s still changing is how people use their phones, Teich said. They’re playing more demanding games, watching more movies on planes and starting to do some virtual reality, which means putting the screen to the test just an inch from your eyes. These aren’t short bursts of activity like loading a Web page or fighting off an ambush in a video game. They’re ongoing activities where users need a consistent quality of experience. For example, at very close range, such as in virtual reality, users quickly grow sensitive to delays and to pixel size, said James Bruce, ARM’s director of mobile solutions. Chips have to be able to power these applications without using up too much energy. At the end of a long viewing or gaming session, users still want to be able to make a call. Cortex-A73 chips should perform at nearly their highest speed for long periods of time, ARM says. The gap between peak and sustained performance is much smaller than on the company’s last CPU design, the Cortex-A72. ARM’s partners can produce CPUs with different numbers of cores to meet their needs. The Cortex-A73 is intended for top-of-the-line smartphones as well as less powerful handsets priced as low as US$200, he said. The company is also introducing a new GPU design, the Mali-G71, based on its next graphics chip architecture, called Bifrost. Like the Cortex-A73, it will be more efficient and designed for sustained performance, ARM says. But it could also take some mobile devices to a new level. The Mali-G71 can be built with as many as 32 shader cores, the kinds of processing units that software uses to draw objects. That’s twice as many as there were in ARM’s last premium graphics chip and beats some of the separate GPUs used in midrange laptops, the company says. High-end versions of the chip could go into still cameras, TVs, drones and even virtual-reality headsets as well as high-end phones, Bruce said. At the low end, those with just four cores could be used for low-resolution phones. The new CPU and GPU should find their way into chipmakers’ SoC (system-on-chip) products for delivery in phones next year, ARM says. ARM's next-gen Cortex-A73 chips are just right for your phone computerworld.com 2016-05-29 20:00 Stephen Lawson www.itnews.com

7 SpellForce 3 coming 2016, here are a few new details (1.02/5) SpellForce is that series that mixes RPG and RTS mechanics—you know, the one with the scantily clad sorceresses on the box art. Sure, other real-time strategy games have added roleplaying elements in more recent years—notably Dawn of War 2—but SpellForce has been doing it for ages. After two main entries and a few expansion packs, publisher Nordic Games is nearly ready to unleash the third. SpellForce 3 will be out this year, if the newly minted Steam page is accurate. There aren't many other details on that Steam page, but it mentions that SpellForce will take place before the first two games, and that it supposedly won't require you to have played them to enjoy it. However, "fans will still find a lot of interesting connections" in the 30+ hour-long single-player campaign. Searching around the net a bit, I've seen reports that the game will do away with global resources, meaning you'll need to physically transport goods between points on the map. You'll be able to play as Humans, Orcs and Elves here, with each race coming with their own special units. SpellForce 3 is coming sometime this year, and Grimlore Games is handling development duties—an in-house Nordic Games development studio. (Cheers, RPS .)

What's really new in SharePoint 2016? computerworld.com 2016-05-30 11:30 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

8 WordPress plug-in flaw puts over 1M websites at risk (1.02/5) Owners of WordPress- based websites should update the Jetpack plug-in as soon as possible because of a serious flaw that could expose their users to attacks. Jetpack is a popular plug-in that offers free website optimization, management and security features. It was developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the WordPress open-source project, and has over 1 million active installations. Researchers from Web security firm Sucuri have found a stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that affects all Jetpack releases since 2012, starting with version 2.0. The issue is located in the Shortcode Embeds Jetpack module which allows users to embed external videos, images, documents, tweets and other resources into their content. It can be easily exploited to inject malicious JavaScript code into comments. Since the JavaScript code is persistent, it will get executed in users' browsers in the context of the affected website every time they view the malicious comment. This can be used to steal their authentication cookies, including the administrator's session; to redirect visitors to exploits, or to inject search engine optimization (SEO) spam. "The vulnerability can be easily exploited via wp-comments and we recommend everyone to update asap, if you have not done so yet," said Sucuri researcher Marc-Alexandre Montpas in a blog post . Sites that don't have the Shortcode Embeds module activated are not affected, but this module provides popular functionality so many websites are likely to have it enabled. The Jetpack developers have worked with the WordPress security team to push updates to all affected versions through the WordPress core auto- update system. Jetpack versions 4.0.3 or newer contain the fix. In case users don't want to upgrade to the latest version, the Jetpack developers have also released point releases for all twenty-one vulnerable branches of the Jetpack codebase: 2.0.7, 2.1.5, 2.2.8, 2.3.8, 2.4.5, 2.5.3, 2.6.4, 2.7.3, 2.8.3, 2.9.4, 3.0.4, 3.1.3, 3.2.3, 3.3.4, 3.4.4, 3.5.4, 3.6.2, 3.7.3, 3.8.3, 3.9.7, and 4.0.3.

Flaw in popular WordPress plug-in Jetpack puts over a million websites at risk itnews.com 2016-05-30 06:00 Lucian Constantin www.computerworld.com

9 9 ASUS Announces Transformer 3 Pro: 2-in-1 with Core i5/i7 (0.05/5) Not to be outdone on the subject of 2-in-1s today, ASUS has announced a second 2-in-1 to complement the newly announced Transformer 3. Dubbed the Transformer 3 Pro, this portable is a more direct competitor to Microsoft’s popular Surface Pro lineup. Although the standard Transformer 3 is not necessary a budget option, of the two Transformers it is the cheaper one, utilizing what’s likely a Core M processor and having all-around weaker specifications. However for users that need more processing power (Core i5/i7), more storage (Up to 1TB, PCIe), and more RAM (up to 16GB), the Pro offers all of this in the same form factor. The Transformer 3 Pro also brings over the rest of the feature set offered by the base Transformer 3, including a USB Type-C port with Thunderbolt 3 connectivity, and a 12.6" 2880x1920 screen. The higher specifications – particularly the use of an Intel Core i5 or i7 processor – puts it in direct competition with Microsoft’s Surface Pro. And at 8.35mm thick, I’m curious how the cooling system on the Pro compares to what Microsoft has done, as putting a 15W CPU in such a thin form factor is by no means an easy feat. Finally, like its Core M based sibling, ASUS has not yet announced a shipping date for the Transformer 3 Pro. But a starting price has been announced, with the Pro starting at $999. ASUS Announces the Zenbook 3: A Macbook Competitor with Core i7, 16GB DRAM and 1TB SSD anandtech.com

ASUS Announces the Transformer 3: Here’s a Kaby-Lake 2-in-1 anandtech.com 2016-05-30 08:01 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

10 Computex 2016: ASUS Republic of Gamers 10 Year Press Conference (0.03/5) 06:59AM EDT - And that's it. Lots of quick fire announcements, we'll get more details in the press kit I imagine...! 06:56AM EDT - Now a pro gaming team on stage. AHQ. Also some gamers and streams from Taiwan 06:54AM EDT - A guy with every (almost every) ASUS ROG motherboard and a number of GPUs, peripherals etc 06:53AM EDT - Now there are 10 men on the stage 06:52AM EDT - Now talking about the fans 06:51AM EDT - ROG Strix GTX 1080, 1936 MHz GPU boost, Direct CU III cooling, wing-blade fans, and AURA RGB lighting 06:51AM EDT - ROG Strix brand introduced, different to Strix 06:50AM EDT - Now ROG Centurion, 7.1 Gaming Headset using HiFi grade ESS headphone amp 06:50AM EDT - Mechanical keyboard, MechTAG keyboard with ROG Aura RGB LED effects 06:49AM EDT - 'Hydro overclocking system' 06:49AM EDT - so dual 330W power supplies ? 06:49AM EDT - 660W 06:48AM EDT - Intel-K SKU at 4.4 GHz, dual GPU in SLI at 1428 MHz 06:48AM EDT - 'World's most powerful gaming laptop' 06:48AM EDT - Now the ROG GX800 06:48AM EDT - Not sure if 180 Hz is the base, or the overclock...? 06:47AM EDT - New ROG Swift PG248Q - 24-inch GSync, overclockable 180 Hz, 1ms response 06:47AM EDT - 'most powerful desktop pound for pound' 06:46AM EDT - 3D-Vapor Chamber tech: dual hidden airflow tunnels 06:46AM EDT - 3D Mark score shows +71% with two cards 06:45AM EDT - Two GTX 1080 with Core i7 in a 20 liter chassis 06:45AM EDT - On Desktop, ROG G31 Edition 10 announced 06:45AM EDT - This will be a retail product 06:44AM EDT - 'Form Factor Redefined' 06:44AM EDT - Avalon is a prototype 06:44AM EDT - Easy to access GPU, plug and play SSD, Supporting Liquid cooling 06:43AM EDT - Swappable IO module 06:43AM EDT - 'Project Avalon' 06:43AM EDT - Rampage V Edition 10 06:43AM EDT - X99, premounted IO shielt, upscaled audio 06:42AM EDT - New 10 year anniversary motherboard 06:42AM EDT - 'ROG started as a small project in the Motherboard division' 06:41AM EDT - 'ROG General' 06:41AM EDT - Derek Yu on stage 06:41AM EDT - Photo op time with the presenter 06:40AM EDT - No more talk on BDW-E though right now 06:40AM EDT - He also just mentioned Broadwell-E 06:39AM EDT - I think he just announced the GX800 laptop 06:39AM EDT - $113 billion hw/w sales 2015, ~255m eSports viewers, 1.3B PC gamers 06:38AM EDT - Also in an leather jacket 06:38AM EDT - Gregory Bryant, CVP of Connected Home and Commerical Client, from Intel on stage 06:37AM EDT - 'Power gamers with more epic innovations' 06:37AM EDT - 'Gaming No.1' 06:36AM EDT - Mentioning liquid cooled laptops, hybrid thermal cooling on motherboards, LEDs on GPUs, first to a GSYNC gaming monitor 06:34AM EDT - Going over some of ASUS' previous ROG design wins 06:34AM EDT - 'Legacy is a lifetime of achievements with a decorated wall of fame' 06:33AM EDT - 'We like to dance on the misery of our adversaries' 06:32AM EDT - ROG Commander in Chief 06:32AM EDT - In a long leather coat 06:32AM EDT - Jonney Shih on stage 06:32AM EDT - Youtube personality on stage... I think? 06:31AM EDT - 'Neo gamers are rising' 06:30AM EDT - countdown from 10 06:30AM EDT - lots of bass and a heartbeat video 06:30AM EDT - It begins 06:06AM EDT - The venue is the same as last year - a local popular club that can be hired out for private events. There's plenty of lights that look like lasers with the stage smoke in the air 06:05AM EDT - Five minutes past and it's not started. Perhaps they're going for 6:30PM local? 05:50AM EDT - We're still writing up stuff from the Zen conference. There's never enough time...(!) 05:48AM EDT - The press event starts on the hour, we now see gaming seats behind the cover. It's clearly for the gamers 05:45AM EDT - On the right of the stage is a big cover which seems to have some of the new ROG products behind 05:43AM EDT - In the group of super ASUS fans is someone I know through the overclocking scene. DrWeEz, an overclocker from South Africa, and I were part of the same professional overclocking group and we briefly held the #1 spot in the world as a team (though some skillful score submissions early in one of the Pro OC seasons) 05:41AM EDT - Lots of people and media, of course 05:32AM EDT - The final press event of the day - the annual Computex Republic of Gamers press conference. This year is ASUS' 10 year anniversary for ROG, and as part of the celebrations have invited some of ASUS' most intense fans to Computex and the press event. Billy and I are here covering the announcements as they fly in, and we expect Jonney Shih to make another appearance as well as an Intel executive and one of their sponsored gaming teams.

ASUS Announces the ZenFone 3 Series, with 6 GB Deluxe Model and 6.8-inch Ultra Model anandtech.com Computex 2016: ASUS Zenvolution Press Conference Live Blog anandtech.com

Computex 2016: ARM Press Conference Live Blog anandtech.com 2016-05-29 22:59 Billy Tallis www.anandtech.com

11 Dell Adds 3 New Models to Build Out Smart Printer Portfolio All three new printers from Dell offer onscreen self-help graphics that provide step-by-step instructions for troubleshooting and error recovery. Computer maker Dell announced three additional members of its line of smart printers for medium-to-large organizations: the Color Smart Printer S5840cdn, Smart Printer S2830dn and Smart Printer S5830dn. The S5840cdn is a single-function, A4 (letter-sized) color laser printer, aimed at large workgroups sharing a printer in business environments such as banking institutions, schools and government offices with high print volumes. It offers paper handling to reduce paper jams; flexible media handling so workers can print on a variety of media sizes, weights and types, including vinyl and optimized printer color calibration; and a unique low-melt toner formulation. In addition, onscreen self-help graphics provide simple step-by-step instructions for troubleshooting and error recovery. "Companies that have not replaced their printers in the last two to five years might be surprised to discover how rapidly the technology has changed," Orlando Lacayo, senior product line manager for Dell, told eWEEK . Dell's new smart printers offer companies not only faster print times than their predecessors, he noted, but also easier usability, which means less- frequent paper jams, more intuitive troubleshooting and setup; and low-melt toner formulation for exceptional print quality and lower energy consumption. Additional benefits include optimal productivity, thanks to technologies that enable long-life imaging components, support for a wide range of mobility platforms, intuitive and simple-to-use control panels with larger touchscreens, security features to protect against unauthorized printer access while safeguarding sensitive information and other specialized features. Dell printers now support all major mobility platforms including Windows, Android, iOS and Google Cloud print. "Ease of use is very important and it is one of Dell’s key design principles," Lacayo said. "The goal is to increase workforce productivity through end-to- end simplicity and provide an ultimate user experience throughout the life of the printer, from setup to use and troubleshooting. " The S2830dn is a mono, single-function laser printer with navigation and printer menu settings on a 2.4-inch color LCD, as well as onscreen graphics with step-by-step walkthroughs for quick troubleshooting. The S5830dn is a single-function A4 (letter-sized) mono laser printer with a 4.3-inch color LCD touchscreen control panel that lets workers print directly from a USB drive. The printer offers additional savings with a lower cost- per-page-printing when using the optional Extra-High-Yield Toner Cartridge. Dell printers include features such as intuitive, smartphone-like color touchscreens, longer-lasting components for fewer interventions, simple paper path design for less-frequent paper jams, convenient onscreen self- help graphics for more intuitive troubleshooting and simple to use and maintain printer features that can run smoothly with minimal IT intervention, he said.

2016-05-30 16:22 Nathan Eddy www.eweek.com

12 Millennials Willing to Pay More for High-Speed Web Access More than three-quarters of millennials surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that they expect to be able to stream video wherever they are. Millennials are willing to pay for higher levels of service, and half of millennials polled would pay 5 percent of their annual salary for super-fast Internet, according to a CommScope survey of 4,000 millennials and baby boomers in San Francisco, London, Sao Paulo and Hong Kong. The survey revealed more than 85 percent of millennials have a smartphone, and more than three-quarters of millennials surveyed agreed or strongly agreed that they expect to be able to stream video wherever they are. "In our analysis of the survey data, what was most surprising was the high quantity of millennial respondents willing to pay a fairly sizeable portion of their income for super-fast Internet," Elise Vadnais, business development analyst at CommScope, told eWEEK. "Of note, when the income ranges of respondents were reviewed, it was revealed that respondents were evenly spread among lower, average and above average income ranges, making income level a non-factor relative to this trend. " Vadnais said this shows great opportunity for Internet service providers as they look to understand their millennial customers’ evolving needs and wants, which have proven to be much different than their previous, traditional customers. "This prioritization of high-speed connectivity by millennials epitomizes the large group of service provider customers eager to consume and pay more for their services— if they are delivered in the way millennials want them," Vadnais said. "These services must be differentiated from those delivered previously, with greater flexibility and customization, greater capacity and coverage. If service providers cannot deliver services tailored to the millennial preference, they may risk becoming irrelevant to their largest potential consumer base. " The survey also found three-quarters of millennials said they would like to adjust the speed of their Internet services depending on their activities— and pay accordingly. In addition, millenials revealed they were most interested in intelligent home systems that can adjust the temperature and lighting based on my activity, online purchases being delivered to them within an hour, wherever they are, and smart mass-transit systems that direct and optimize their route and anticipates service needs based on behavior patterns. "We are going to see a lot of web access devices and tools evolve into meaningful applications in real life, creating significant benefits and efficiencies in daily reality, and the demand for these innovations will be fueled by the early-adopting millennials," Vadnais said. "With the onset of everything being connected and computed through the Internet of things, millennials’ preference for connectedness and meaningful applications is only going to rise rapidly from here. "

2016-05-30 16:22 Nathan Eddy www.eweek.com

13 Watch these exciting dry ice experiments (pictures) GoPro, Pixpro, or Ricoh? You can spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a 360-degree camera. We tested three of them to find out what kind of quality and ease of use you can expect at each price point.

2016-05-30 17:47 Bonnie Burton www.cnet.com

14 14 Kingdom of Loathing dev reveals West of Loathing Stickman MMO Kingdom of Loathing has been going since 2003, and I'm just going to stop and think about how wonderful that is for a moment. Lovely. But I'm actually here to inform you that its developer Asymmetric Publications has announced a new game: West of Loathing. As you might have guessed from the title, it's set in the West Country, and sees you drinking cider instead of health potions, and...no, wait, it's set in the Wild West. The American one with all the cowboys and the farting and the beans. Here's a teaser trailer: West of Loathing is being described as an "adventure RPG", and you can see what that means in the above video. Basically, it means dialogue, sidescrolling, turn-based battles, comedy, and other exciting things. West of Loathing will be out "Early 2017", so says the Greenlight page , and that's entirely too far away.

2016-05-30 13:00 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

15 Asus pushes forward a modular gaming PC standard At Computex 2016, 'ROG General' Derek Yu took the stage with a particularly flamboyant leather jacket to announce a whole modular PC standard called standard called Project Avalon. Taking a page out of Razer's Project Christine, Avalon takes your traditional desktop PC and makes every component plug and play for easy upgradability. This includes a plug-in SSD cage and something even as unheard of as a cable-free PSU interface. Asus claims it will revolutionize PC form factors with a user-friendly interface. The PC also isn't holding back features hardcore PC gamers expect including full support for liquid cooling. Beyond creating its own case, Asus also hopes to extend Project Avalon as a PC case standard other manufacturers will adopt and create their own cases. On top of announcing a new standard, Asus isn't ready to let go of its old form factors. The electronics firm also introduced the ROG G31 Edition 10 as a beefed up and updated version of the Asus ROG G20, while also being a special ROG 10th-anniversary gaming desktop PC Inside the compact, 20-liter chassis, asus managed to squeeze in two Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards and an Intel Core i7 K-series processor for the ultimate 4K UHD gaming experience. To help cool it all, Asus has also integrated a 3D vapor chamber (first introduced in the Asus ROG G752 gaming laptop with dual air channels. Article continues below

2016-05-30 11:03 By Kevin feedproxy.google.com

16 You can now read the whole Bible in emoji Quick, digital, easy to understand, pictorial: emoji really is a language made for the 21st century. It's the world's fastest-growing language and can be used everywhere from classic literature to movie blockbusters. Now there's a new emoji publication to enjoy (or turn your nose up at): The Emoji Bible. Covering all 66 books, from Genesis to Revelation, the book has been about six months in the making, its anonymous author told The Guardian. A computer program was used to automatically translate 200 corresponding words into 80 emoji characters. "I thought if we fast forwarded 100 years in the future, an emoji bible would exist," the writer (or illustrator) of the work says. "So I thought it'd be fun to try to make it... I wanted to make it similar to how you might text or tweet a Bible verse, by shrinking the total character count. " You'll have to cough up £2.49 (or $2.99 or AU$3.99) to get the whole of the good book but various snippets can be previewed via the official @BibleEmoji Twitter account. Apparently, the reception has been largely positive, the author says. Whoever is behind the Emoji Bible ("scripture for millennials") is also welcoming feedback and suggestions to improve the work. At nearly 3,300 pages in length, it's likely to take a long while to read, even with the visual shortcuts. Perhaps it could be a more effective way of engaging young people than trying to tempt them into church on a Sunday morning - the Emoji Bible author is certainly hoping so - but as yet there's been no official message of approval from the church. Article continues below

2016-05-30 10:47 By David feedproxy.google.com

17 MTN offering free 4G SIM Card upgrades, free 1GB Data & Power bank MTN Uganda in a bid to maintain its stance as the largest 4G network in the country, started a drive to have many of its 3G subscribers join up the 4G revolution. The telecom giant is offering to upgrade your 3G SIM cards for free to the faster, more reliable 4G at any of its service centers countrywide. This comes with 1GB of free data and the chance to win a Power Bank. In a recent interview with Steven Kirenga , the Enterprise Marketing Manager of MTN Uganda, he says the adoption of 4G has been impressive so far; “The market has responded well to the call of upgrading to the fastest and widest 4G network. It’s clear our customers want more than fast speed, they want the fastest speed available in Uganda and we are happy that they resonated well with our message and joined our LTE.” Although the cost of 4G devices is still remain a challenge to many people, MTN promises to engage equipment manufacturers to ensure that we get the right 4G devices are the right cost.

2016-05-30 10:37 Staff Writer pctechmag.com

18 Ibuki heading to Street Fighter V - here's a trailer And the next character to be added to Street Fighter V is... Ibuki. The ninja was first introduced in SFIII:Third Strike, and returned for Street Fighter IV. Now, perhaps inevitably, she's being added to SFV— there's no release date given, but it will probably be fairly soon, if previous characters are any indication. Here's a trailer: Bombs! Bombs are the main difference to Ibuki's previous iterations, and who knows how they'll shake up her character. We do know how Guile reacts to these new throwables, however: by exploding, just a little bit. As with the other characters, you can either buy ibuki with 'Fight Money', earned through play, or you can shell out for the Season Pass to be given access immediately.

2016-05-30 10:00 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

19 Apple Watch 2 release date, news and rumors The Apple Watch 2 release date is shrouded in so much mystery that not even Siri knows the answer, despite her advanced knowledge of the company's forthcoming WWDC 2016 conference dates. Asking my Apple Watch "When does the Apple Watch 2 come out? " only gets me to this message: "Apple.com should be able to answer that question. Continue on the iPhone. " There are two important things you should know about this answer. First, of course Apple's official website doesn't reveal such juicy information. I've checked. Everyday. Second, this is one of the many areas in which the Apple Watch throws you to the iPhone instead of handling tasks itself. There's plenty of room for improvement and a need for a sequel. Siri, apps and fitness tracking need a serious tune up, and more sensors and even greater waterproof guarantees should be added in Apple Watch for 2016. There's tangential evidence that such an iPhone-compatible smartwatch for 2016 is in development at the Cupertino company. Let's get into the latest rumors point-by-point. Although Siri didn't answer my question about the Apple Watch 2 release date, there are at least two distinct points in 2016 in which I could see the company's next wearable launch. Unsurprisingly, we didn't see next iPhone-compatible smartwatch announced on March 21, as some had previously thought. An annual cycle for the wearable is a bit overeager for even diehard Apple fans. Instead, iPhone SE and iPad Pro 9.7 graced the stage. Oh, yes, Apple Watch was there, too - and not just the white one on CEO Tim Cook's wrist. New Apple Watch bands and a lower price were all we got. That means the launch may happen either in a few days on June 13 alongside iOS 10 at Apple's WWDC 2016 event, or in September along with the likely iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus debut. Of the two release dates, the more cautious September launch sounds a lot like Apple's slow and steady approach to new product categories. However, a WWDC 2016 announcement would still go along with the Q2 2016 release date estimate that the chairman for Apple Watch supplier Quanta hinted at. Barry Lam from Quanta said in 2015, "Quanta and Apple are currently developing the second-generation of the Apple Watch, expected late next year in the second quarter. " A new report suggests that Apple Watch supplier Quanta will be responsible for all the production on the Apple Watch 2, as the company has lowered its order from its initial estimates. Sources from the upstream supply chain suggest the Apple Watch 2 will go into production in Q2, suggesting it'll be launched before the expected iPhone 7 launch in September. This would give Apple enough time to tinker with its smartwatch and not make early adopters feel too cheaped with a rigid 12-month-upgrade schedule. Whether it's a true reinvention for a incremental Apple Watch S upgrade remains to be seen. There may be some wiggle room with the Apple Watch price, considering US retailers had the iPhone smartwatch on sale for some time before the company recently lowered the official price. It launched at a hard-to-justify starting price of $349 (£299, AU$499), and the unofficial price drop during Black Friday took it down to $299 at some stores. Four months later, Apple made it official. Introducing the Apple Watch 2 at this new price from the get-go would put the gadget in more hands and on more wrists. Just don't expect the gold Apple Watch Edition price to budge from $17,000 (£13,500, AU$24,000). Apple CEO Tim Cook just teased that "you'll see the Apple Watch getting better and better," and he soon expects "people will say, 'How could I have ever thought about not wearing this watch?'" He could be hinting at an inevitable watchOS 3 software update, it'll take an Apple Watch 2 hardware announcement to meet those high expectations. Ipso facto, he just confirmed the new Apple Watch. Right now, plenty of people can live without the Apple Watch, and even Cook acknowledges this: "We're still in learning mode. We're learning fairly quickly, though. We know a lot more than we did a year ago. " There's a lot of promise behind these statements, even if the Apple boss doesn't distinctly mention the Apple Watch 2 by name. Watch OS 2 was a small step forward with improvements, like better native app support, tetherless Wi-Fi and the ability to watch videos, reply to emails and make FaceTime audio calls. New Apple Watch 2 features, coupled with a watchOS 3 update, are bound to let you do more directly from the smartwatch, too. The rumor of a GPS chip for running, without your phone in tow, persists. Most recently, we heard that the next Apple Watch will be thinner by measures of up to a 40% reduction in thickness. However, that could be meant for the Apple Watch 3. There's a good chance that the next Apple Watch won't mix things up much in terms of design. Or at all, if Ming-Chi Quo's insider knowledge ends up becoming truth. Apple wearable won't boast any visual changes to the design, according his sources as reported by to AppleInsider. A more significant Apple Watch refresh could happen some time after, possibly in 2017. While he suggests that the design might not change one bit in the next Apple Watch, the specs, as you'd imagine, will be getting a big boost. We're currently unsure of exactly which components will be improved upon, but it's relatively safe to assume we might see a bump up in screen resolution, onboard storage and battery life. A new wireless chipset is said to allow for basic communication tasks to be handled without a paired iPhone, and the same technology may also mean that lost Apple Watches could be found using Wi-Fi triangulation. A source talking to Phone Arena went on to claim that the Apple Watch 2 will have a video camera, allowing users to make and receive video FaceTime calls rather than just audio ones. New models might be launched too, providing users with more than just the standard, Sport and Edition versions available now. It's not clear exactly what form these new models will take, but new materials could be on the cards, such as titanium, platinum and perhaps even Liquidmetal. But if you're hoping the appearance will change or we'll see a circular smartwatch from Apple you might be out of luck, as another leak suggests that the Apple Watch 2 will have the same screen size, shape and resolution as the first Apple Watch - this is the way the Cupertino firm does things, after all. One thing which will apparently change according to the same source is the thickness of the screen, which will be made thinner to allow for a larger battery. Yet that clashes with previous rumors that the juice pack will be staying the same, albeit with possible software improvements to improve its life. It could also have a new breed of smart band to go along with it, as a recent patent application has been filed for a strap that has light fibres woven in, meaning you'll be able to get notifications from your wrist all the way around. Hopefully it won't flash or be too overt - simply function as a second screen that could give more information than the smaller screen could. Overall we're really not sure what to expect from the Apple Watch 2 just yet, and we're sure it will hold plenty of surprises and features beyond what we've heard so far and beyond what the original Apple Watch (which will be getting Watch OS 2) is capable of. While the March 21 Apple press conference didn't usher in the second coming of the Apple Watch, we'll be scanning the internet and reading between the lines of Apple statement (and the lines of iOS 9.3 code) for even the smallest suggest of the Apple Watch 2 and even a minor Apple Watch S upgrade.

2016-05-30 09:39 By Matt feedproxy.google.com

20 5 unusual things you can do with IBM's Watson One of the best ways to understand IBM's Watson is to shop for a biking jacket. That might seem like an odd statement, but it's true. The North Face has tapped the power of Watson to help you find the right spring attire, and so have several other companies. IBM has built up Watson into a celebrity that has 'appeared' on Jeopardy and in recent commercials. Yet, its natural language processing ability is a good example of cognitive computing for any IT worker or executive trying to understand the future of the industry. According to IBM, 80% of all data in the world is unstructured data – in other words, snippets of facts scattered everywhere. Each of the examples detailed in this slideshow is a good 'state of the industry' showcase. Without the 'Powered by Watson' capability on demonstration, there would be too much unstructured data and not enough guidance. Most chatbots for shopping, customer support, and technical advice will be powered by similar technology meant to sift through a database and the cloud. Before explaining each example, it's important to first give a quick summary of IBM Watson and why it even exists. All companies have some form of structured data. This might be the directory of employee records in HR or the images used for a website. You can predict with some degree of accuracy how your storage needs will change over time, based on the usage pattern over the past few years. For example, you might predict that you'll hire a certain number of employees and allocate a set amount of storage for each one. That makes budgeting plans easier, security infrastructure less of a nightmare, and avoids abject chaos. But unstructured data? It's much more of a sprawling web. There might be millions and millions of documents scattered all over a network. Technically, IBM Watson is a service that runs on 90 servers with 2,880 processor cores running concurrently. It has 16TB of RAM. Yet, the core function is related to IBM's DeepQA technology, essentially a question and answer system. A human can ask a question and IBM Watson finds the answer. So in this article we'll cover five of the best examples of how this works. That's right, IBM Watson can help you "design" your granola. While it might seem cheeky, the brand uses Watson to analyse thousands and thousands of possible ingredient combinations. Once again, this is a good example of analysing unstructured data. If you pick an ingredient like Blackberry Powder, Watson will determine that Dried Pomegranate Arils and Red Bean Crisps match up nicely. You can remove an ingredient (like the Blackberry Powder) and Watson will suggest an alternative (like Coriander). The alternative to this incredible intelligence would be to tap an expert chef who already knows which recipes work best for granola. People don't go shopping for clothing. They shop for clothes that match up with an activity, such as hiking or power walking. Yet, the amount of unstructured data related to adventure sports is scattered all over the globe. Most stores don't keep a mountain biking expert on staff at all times. That's why The North Face uses Watson to guide customers to the right product. You begin by entering a phrase like "Biking in London in March" to kick things off. You enter whether you are male or female. Watson might ask if you expect rain or snow, and if you prefer any custom options. You'll then see a selection of products, not a laundry list of sizes and colours, but rather clothing that matches up with your upcoming activity. It takes the 'unstructured' database of an e-commerce site and makes it more of a human-centric experience. Choosing a wine is more complex than you think. You might like a red wine, but is it plush, soft, tannic and sweet? Does it have a hint of strawberries? Is it 'perfumed' just right? Even for wine connoisseurs, you might not know all of the proper terms, but you do know which flavors you like. The Wine4.me app uses IBM Watson to look through an inventory of products to match up with taste preferences. You don't need to use the right terms or even know the brands and labels, you just need to indicate which flavours you like. It's another good example of having the AI do the hard part of searching through hundreds of wine options looking for preferences, rather than expecting the shopper to have all of the expertise. Workplace wellness is a serious issue. But most of us can't visit the doctor on a weekly basis or get constant wellness check-ups. The CafeWell Concierge app employs IBM Watson so that users can type in questions about diet, nutrition, and exercise. For example, you can ask about which recipes work best when you are trying to lose weight or how exercise impacts sleeping. The app is another good example of presenting information that is important and vital to a customer, yet usually consumes the time of nurses and doctors. Also, many of the answers to health questions are fairly routine. A final example of handling unstructured data – one that might be the best example of how IBM Watson can help – pertains to a Hilton concierge robot named Connie. Hilton installed this robot as a test at the Hilton McLean hotel in Virginia over in the US. Guests can walk up and ask questions about bus routes or sporting events, and Connie will search through reams of data to find the answer – in seconds. In this case, Watson learns from each interaction, knowing which questions are asked the most and incorporating insight from previous discussions with guests into new answers. The idea is not to replace human workers, but to give them more meaningful tasks than repeating the same answer all day about how to get to the airport.

2016-05-30 09:10 By John feedproxy.google.com

21 Adventures In Pair Programming Imagine that you had someone looking over your shoulder at work at all times. Things that you do every day, like checking Facebook for a quick break or drafting an email to your boss, are different with a coworker watching. It may come as a surprise, but our company arranged that very thing. On purpose. We're talking about "pair programming. " While it's not widely practiced, most software developers are familiar with the concept. At its most basic, pair programming is exactly what it sounds like: two people working on the same problem, usually on the same machine. Proponents of pair programming say it is a good way to improve code ownership, insure continuous code review, increase productivity, and reduce distractions (read: keep people on task). The main argument against it is that it is more expensive to use two people to do something one person might be able to do alone. The one aspect that is often ignored in the paired programming discussion is how it affects learning. You'll soon see that the opportunities for learning may be one of the best arguments for paired programming. When we set out to develop our first cloud-based product, we knew that developing cloud-based software would require learning a completely new set of tools and processes, compared to the on-premises products we'd worked on in the past. We needed someone to help us expand our skillsets. We chose Pivotal Labs, the consulting firm and incubator that helped start Twitter. Pivotal has a very important rule, however. They require pair programming. Little did we know, this was going to be quite the adventure. [What will catapult your career to the next level? Read 8 Non-Tech Skills IT Pros Need to Succeed .] Our pair programming adventure began each morning by picking a new partner from our team of eight people -- four from Perforce and four from Pivotal Labs. We practiced ad hoc pairing, developing with different people every day. Our team members ran the gamut of development experience, from the most junior to the most senior. This diversity proved difficult to manage. By its very nature, the effectiveness of pair programming depends on the individuals practicing it. It leads to a lot of different personality clashes. Picture all the moods from Pixar's Inside Out. The only issue we ran into was usually someone who stopped talking and coded on their own, leaving their partner hanging. This didn't happen too often, though, and was resolved without much intervention. While there were constant disagreements, they were usually constructive and led to good conversations about how to implement something. Personally, it took me about a week to fully acclimate. The first day was the toughest, the next day was considerably easier. We all learned to adjust the process as we went along, but this led to one of the first roadblocks we encountered: project overload. You know the scene in the movie The Fifth Element where Mila Jovovich learns everything she needs to know about planet Earth by scanning her eyes over a monitor? That's how fast you learn in pair programming. Okay, maybe not quite that fast, but with someone sitting next to each of us explaining new concepts in real-time (whether languages, processes, or tools), we all were in development overdrive. This makes pair programming intense, especially at the beginning. At the end of the first day, I couldn't go home. Before I could face humans again, I put my phone on airplane mode, ignored my usual online accounts, and went to the gym for two hours of self-imposed isolation. But the good news is that things got easier geometrically over the first week. By week two I was fully acclimated. I don't think this would happen to me if I did a full day of pairing again. Adaptation has become a skill that I'm confident I'll take with me to other environments. As frightening as this sounds, the "togetherness" ended up having a tremendously positive impact beyond the initial goal of learning cloud development. Pair programming forces teams to examine every feature from multiple angles and perspectives, something that's not possible with individual coding. You may think that collaborating through code reviews is an efficient system, but it's nothing compared to getting real-time feedback from the person next to you. Code quality vastly improves when you have to explain or defend your decisions, and when you're able to stop someone and have that person explain things to you. Another benefit is something that can morbidly be summed up as a reduction in "bus value," the impact on the project if someone on your team got hit by a bus. Pair programming democratizes knowledge. Everyone becomes familiar with a variety of tools, processes, and project areas. While pairing takes an additional investment of time and resources, the organization is essentially spreading and increasing value across an entire team. When we brought our project back to home base, we became a cultural outlier. We pushed pairing as hard as we could, but eventually we realized it wasn't a good fit for everyone. Ultimately, this led us to practice pair programming on a limited basis. The takeaway from the experiment is that we now see pair programming as a skill, rather than a process to be implemented and reinforced from an organizational standpoint. If someone asks me, "Do you want to pair? " I can respond "Yes," "No," or "Why are you bothering me, I'm eating lunch? " We still pair once in a while, when a problem gets tough or we need a new set of eyes, but it's no longer the default or a required practice. We came to pair programming expecting to become better developers, and we succeeded -- but not for the reasons we thought. We learned that being a good developer isn't only about speed or grasp of languages and methodologies. Good development is more social than we ever imagined. It's an opportunity to geek out with your coworkers and reignite your passion for your work, while also helping to evolve your skills and overall code quality. If you are a CIO or development leader considering implementing pair programming, our experience shows that, instead of seeing it as an all-or- nothing policy, think of it as a skill for your programmers to acquire, and as a way to boost the knowledge of your whole team. We went from being in a fairly isolated culture to being an extremely open and talkative one. Now, we're somewhere between those two points. Your own teams will need to determine where they're most comfortable working along that spectrum. The more you can push towards collaboration the better off you'll be. If you think of it in those terms, it can be a success, whether or not your whole team turns full-time to pair programming. Ready For A New Job?. InformationWeek's hosted, searchable job board can help you find your next gig. Start your search today.

2016-05-30 09:06 Phil Horowitz www.informationweek.com

22 Outcast is being remade as Outcast - Second Contact Big Ben (that's the video game publisher and not the grand London timepiece) has announced its intention to publish a remake of Outcast— and it's being developed by Appeal, the studio behind the original. The remake will be released "at the start of 2017 under the name Outcast - Second Contact", with a remastered soundtrack and voice acting, and with new character models, animation and environments. Oh, and we might have to hold a memorial service for the original's striking voxel-based 3D art assets, as they're being swapped for the more widely used polygons. NeoGAF dug up the press release and a German announcement video, although you can watch it with subtitles. It doesn't show any screenshots or footage of the remake, but it does shed a bit more light on the team's plans. We can expect images of Second Contact soon, the first trailer a bit later after that, and if the remake does well, there may even be a sequel. Of course, there already was an Outcast reboot in the works a few years ago, but the Kickstarter failed to reach its funding goal. Back in December 2014, a slightly jazzed-up version of the original game appeared on digital stores, that had been reworked to perform and look better on modern PCs.

2016-05-30 09:00 By Tom www.pcgamer.com

23 HTC smartwatch gets delayed... again Bad news for anyone out there desperate to get their wrists on the long-rumoured HTC smartwatch: its launch has been pushed back again, this time to the autumn, according to a tweet from well-informed serial tipster Evan Blass. The timepiece had been due to arrive next month but it seems HTC engineers need yet more time to get everything right for the device. The release date has already been pushed back several times - obviously the Taiwanese firm isn't taking any chances. Don't forget HTC was named as an original Android Wear partner back in 2014 - that's two years ago, by our maths - and since then it's had nothing to show in the wearable space except some fitness devices developed in partnership with Under Armour. When the hardware finally does arrive, the software will be ready: Google just announced Android Wear 2.0 , which brings with it better fitness tracking, more independence from tethered smartphones, and support for handwriting recognition. Perhaps the fact that no one's really nailed an Android Wear smartwatch yet is giving HTC pause for thought - there are several decent models out there, certainly, but none that you would really class as must-have gadgets for 21st century living. Let's hope when the HTC smartwatch sees the light of day it's worth the wait - it definitely won't be a rushed job. In the meantime, the company will be focusing on selling as many HTC 10 smartphones and HTC Vive VR kits as it can. Via PhoneArena Article continues below

2016-05-30 08:35 By David feedproxy.google.com

24 GIGABYTE Aero 14: Thin Gaming Laptop with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M and 10-Hour Battery Life GIGABYTE has introduced its new Aero 14 gaming laptop, which weds a relatively thin form-factor with high-performance components such as an Intel Skylake-H CPU, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M GPU, along with a high- resolution display and a claim of a 10-hour battery life. The new notebooks are designed for those who would like to have decent performance in games, but who are not ready to sacrifice mobility for gaming. The GIGABYTE Aero 14 is based on the Intel Core i7 H-series processor (four cores with Hyper-Threading technology, 6 MB LLC cache, 45 W TDP, dual-channel DDR4 memory controller, integrated Intel Gen9 graphics core) and is equipped with a 14” IPS display panel with a 2560×1440 resolution. The system can be equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 965M (1024 stream processors, 64 texture units, 32 raster operations pipelines) or the 970M (1280 SPs, 80 TUs, 48 ROPs) graphics adapters, up to 32 GB of DDR4 memory (using two 16 GB SO-DIMMs) as well as two SSDs in M.2 form-factor (with PCIe 3.0 x2 interface). For some reason, GIGABYTE decided not to reveal exact details regarding things like Wi-Fi as well as the amount of VRAM, but it is natural to expect the PC of this class to feature 802.11ac. In a bid to make the system even friendlier to gamers, GIGABYTE included a keyboard featuring five programmable keys to simplify input of complex key combinations. Other I/O capabilities of GIGABYTE’s Aero 14 include one USB 3.1 Type-C receptacle, three USB 3.0 ports, a TRRS audio connector, a SD card reader, an HD webcam, built-in speakers and microphones as well as an HDMI 2.0 and an mDP display output. The Aero 14 comes in a full aluminum chassis, though, we are not dealing with a unibody design here. GIGABYTE offers three color options for the display lid, with black, green and orange to emphasize gaming nature of the device. Despite of rather powerful hardware inside, the Aero 14 boasts with a 10- hour battery life (obviously, when the integrated graphics core is used), which is in-line with that of modern business notebooks. To make such long battery life possible, GIGABYTE integrated a 94.24 WHr lithium-ion polymer accumulator into its gaming laptop. The Aero 14 is 19.9 mm thick and weighs 1.89 kilograms, making it one of the lightest and thinnest notebooks with gaming-grade hardware inside. The Aero 14 from GIGABYTE will, among other products, compete against Razer’s Blade , which is also relatively thin (17.9 mm) and sports a 14” display. When compared to the Aero, the Razer Blade has a higher resolution 3200×1800 display, slimmer chassis, as well as Thunderbolt 3 support. However, GIGABYTE’s machine has larger battery, potentially more DDR4 memory (because the Blade uses soldered down DRAM and cannot be upgraded), potentially higher amount of storage (thanks to two M.2 slots) as well programmable keys. Exact pricing of GIGABYTE’s Aero 14 will depend on actual configuration, but typically, gaming machines from the company are not overpriced.

2016-05-30 08:30 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

25 How to edit videos with iMovie Apple has made it really easy to edit your home movies on a Mac with its iMovie app. But with the release of the iPhone and iPad , Apple went one step further and introduced an iOS version of iMovie to enable you to edit on the go. Apple's iMovie is now available as a free download on the latest iPhones. With iMovie for iPhone, you can edit wherever you are, taking advantage of the long battery life of iOS devices and maybe whiling away the time on a long train journey by doing something creative. Video clips recorded on an iPhone can be turned into movies or trailers. Movies use a range of different templates such as News, Travel or Neon (good for creating pop videos); trailers are like mini-movies packed with text overlays. Trailers have names like Fairy Tale, Romance and Superhero, and create short clips just like adverts for your favourite films. One big tip: you can record video in both portrait and landscape orientation, but we strongly recommend you use landscape if possible, even if you shot your video in portrait mode. Landscape enables you to see longer video clips, editing is easier overall, and the icons feature accompanying text in case you forget which one does what. For more tips on composing videos on your iPhone, check out our guide on 10 tips for shooting better video on your smartphone . So, forget what you think you know about video editing – that's it's cumbersome, requires expensive hardware, and is maybe the preserve of 'proper' computers. Here's how to put together a cinematic masterpiece on the move with the iMovie app… Launch iMovie and you'll be presented with your video clips by default. To begin a new project, or to view an older one stored on your iPhone, you need to tap Projects in the top menu. You'll also notice Theater, which is a new cloud feature to use with your Apple TV . Under Projects choose New Project. You have two options, either Movie or Trailer. Movie is what you'll want most of the time. Now you get to choose a theme from the templates that iMovie offers you. There's only eight to choose from, sadly. We've chosen 'Modern'. Tap Create Movie and you'll then be asked to select some media. Tap the first icon to insert existing video, or tap the camera icon to record some video. When inserting media you'll be shown all the video clips on your iPhone. Preview clips using the Play button. Tap the arrow button on the clip and it'll be added to the timeline below the live preview window. Add a few more clips to build up your project. You'll notice in your library that any movie clip or part of a clip that's used in the project now has an orange line under it. The white line represents the playhead, and the image shown above is the frame that the playhead is over. This playhead is stationary; move your project by dragging it left or right. You can fine-tune your edit straight from the timeline: tap any clip to bring up yellow handles. Use the yellow handles at each end to add parts of that clip to your project or remove parts. To condense the view in the timeline, move two fingers away or closer together in the timeline. This is a useful way of dealing with long videos and saves you scrolling for ages! To change the order of your clips, tap and hold one. The clip will pop out of the timeline. With a finger still touching the screen, drag that clip to another position on the timeline. If you release your finger while the clip is out of the timeline, it's removed from the project entirely. You can perform more complex edits, like inserting a new clip in the middle of an existing one. Move the playhead over the clip, then select it. Swipe down over the playhead to cut the clip in two. You can now insert a new clip in between the two new parts you've created. A transition is added between clips. You can alter transitions by double- tapping them. Choose between no transition, a cross-dissolve, or one based on your chosen theme, with a set duration. The icon changes to reflect the choice, and the transition itself is shown in real time.

2016-05-30 08:30 By MacFormat feedproxy.google.com

26 26 Job Opportunity: UN Information Technology Operations Officer – World Food Programme About World Food Programme: The UN World Food Programme (WFP) is the United Nations frontline agency against world hunger. It is the largest and longest serving humanitarian agency in Uganda. Currently WFP focuses on three priority areas namely: Emergency Humanitarian Action (EHA); Food & Nutrition Security (FNS); and Agriculture & Market Support (AMS). WFP has operations in various parts of the Country. Job Summary: The Information Technology Operations Officer manages the implementation of the Information and Communication Technology infrastructure supporting WFP operations in Uganda, ensuring that ICT systems conform to WFP corporate standards and are properly maintained. Key Duties and Responsibilities: Qualifications, Skills and Experience: The applicants for the United Nations UN World Food Programme (WFP) Information Technology Operations Officer vacancy should: Professional Competencies: How to apply : All candidates who desire to join the United Nations World Food Programme to submit their applications online via this link . Step 1: Register and create your online CV. Step 2 : Click on “Description” to read the position requirements and “Apply” to submit your application . To be considered for this vacancy, you must complete Step 1 and 2. Deadline for submission is 5th June 2016.

2016-05-30 08:22 PC Tech pctechmag.com

27 Data Storytelling: What It Is, Why It Matters Organizations can do a lot more with their data if they understand it better than they do. While businesses continue to invest dollars in business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools, they aren't necessarily getting the information they need to improve business decision- making. Data visualizations help by transforming complex information into something easier to understand. However, two people can interpret the same data visualization differently. Notably, data visualizations tend to answer "what" questions, but they don't tend to explain the "why," or provide other contextual information. Data storytelling does exactly that. "Data storytelling weaves data and visualizations into a narrative tailored to a specific audience in order to convey credibility in the analytical approach, confidence in the results, and a compelling set of insights that is actionable to the audience. " said Ryan Fuller, general manager at Microsoft and former CEO and cofounder of enterprise analytics company VoloMetrix, in an interview. "The narrative is the key vehicle to convey insights, and the visualizations are important proof points to back up the narrative. " Executives, managers, and employees have always told stories as part of their everyday work experience, but they are increasingly being required to use data to support their points of view, claims, and recommendations. The danger, of course, is data can be tortured into saying almost anything. "One of the biggest mistakes is trying to fit the data to the story, which often results in a jumbled narrative that doesn't arrive at a compelling conclusion," said Francois Ajenstat, VP of product development at BI and analytics solution provider Tableau , in an interview. "Always start with the data, then build your story around it, rather than vice versa. " After speaking with experts in data science and analytics, we've developed the following four tips to help guide your data storytelling. Effective data storytelling is a lot like storytelling generally. The data story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It should also include a thesis (or a hypothesis), supporting facts (data), a logical structure, and a compelling presentation. Yet, all too often, those responsible for analyzing data are unable to present it in a way that's meaningful to the audience. "A common mistake is spending too much time on the technical aspect or methodology and not providing much creativity in pointing out how the data can help the business," said David Liebskind, VP of analytics at consumer financial services company Synchrony Financial , in an interview. "While data visualization tools are effective, the human element to provide context, interpret results, and articulate insights and opportunities is a critical factor to influence key stakeholders and generate dialogue to drive strategic decisions. " [From fashion to food to healthcare, IBM's Watson has many guises across different industries. To learn more about them, see IBM Watson: Machine- of-All-Trades.] Like good stories generally, data stories should be designed to have an intended effect, which may be to evoke emotion, sway an opinion, justify a course of action, or inspire further exploration. "An effective story includes an engaging and timely message, a point of view, an attractive visualization, and the right target audience," said Zoher Karu, VP of global customer optimization and data at eBay, in an interview. "Classic structures in storytelling include three distinct acts: finding the conflict, adding the characters, and calling out the drama. The most successful data storytellers find a way to use these acts for impact. " When it comes to data stories, the "conflict" is the question, the "characters" are the data, and the "drama" is the relationships among the data and what the data is actually saying. "Great storytelling should reveal truths which are hidden and not easy to interpret from just reading or browsing the data or through simply plotting," said Vivian Zhang, founder and CTO of NYC Data Science Academy . Sound data analysis starts with a hypothesis, but erroneous assumptions are sometimes made about how analytical results should be presented. One common mistake is to build a one-size-fits-all presentation that doesn't align very well with the needs of any particular audience. "Knowing your audience is key," said Byrne Hobart, lead Internet analyst at data intelligence company 7Park Data , in an interview. "Too often, the data will make sense to those who put reports together but not to those who might actually read them. A good rule is to have someone outside the organization read it and explain what it means. If they interpret it correctly, you're on a good path. " One reason to tell data stories, rather than using traditional data visualizations, is to ease and expedite the decision-making process. "Data storytelling is important because everyone is competing for time and attention with executives," said Synchrony Financial's Hobart. "Therefore, it is essential to understand your audience and synthesize complex data into a meaningful and compelling story that can be [acted] upon in order to drive strategic decisions and guide business strategy. " Like data analytics and data visualizations, data storytelling may lack a connection to business outcomes. When it misses on this point, it may be informative, but not necessarily actionable. "Too much business intelligence usage is not close enough to the points where decisions get made," said James Richardson, business analytics strategist at BI and data visualization tool provider Qlik. "Data storytelling can break down that barrier by really connecting people with what the data is saying. " Different people have different opinions about who should be responsible for creating data stories. After all, the best analytical minds aren't necessarily the best storytellers, and the best storytellers aren't necessarily data scientists or business analysts. Martin Brown, general manager of digital marketing consulting and software development firm FM Outsource , said in an interview that he often has data scientists, business analysts, and marketers collaborating on a story. In doing so, he often finds there are three versions of the same story. "Ideally, it would be a data scientist with a flair for articulate and emotional evocation. However, I am still looking for this elusive person," said Brown. Since unicorn data scientists are so rare, some organizations are combining different types of expertise. As a result, team members may include IT staff, data scientists, analysts, marketers, and those with other roles as appropriate. "[Data storytelling] is definitely an interdisciplinary activity," said eBay's Karu. "Data scientists are needed to extract patterns in the data, visualization experts are needed to convey the message in a compelling easy-to-understand manner, marketing [needs to be included] to understand the needs of and reach the desired target audience, business domain experience is necessary to home in on the right set of questions, and an editorial staff is needed to communicate the surrounding text in a compelling way. " Vendors are doing their best to simplify the task of data storytelling so the individuals analyzing information can present their findings in a manner that's easy for others to understand. "The best person to tell the story of the data is likely the person who analyzed the data, but that person can be anyone from a marketing specialist to a data scientist," said Tableau's Ajenstat. "The closer you are to the data, the better you understand the context around the situation, and the more qualified and capable you are to really tell that story to stakeholders. " Good data stories include enough information to state a case, but not so much information that the audience struggles to understand the point. "Data stories should address a specific goal and rely only on data and findings that support that goal," said Microsoft's Fuller. "Data storytellers should avoid clouding their story with findings that don't directly address the objective of the analysis. Don't distract your audience -- keep your story clear, simple, and impactful. One criticism of ineffective data stories is a failure to get to the point fast enough. Far too much time is spent on explaining what went into the analysis, which seems justified, since so much time was spent on it behind the scenes. However, the effort itself and the explanation of it need to be weighted differently. "Most data science follows an iceberg rule: About 10% of the work gets presented, and the other 90% supports it, so it's critical for data scientists to wrap a narrative around their data," said 7Park Data's Hobart. "Complex charts and graphs that don't provide context aren't helpful. Draw out the most important points and use data to back it up, rather than unloading lots of data onto the reader. " Ready For A New Job? InformationWeek's hosted, searchable job board can help you find your next gig. Start your search today.

2016-05-30 08:06 Lisa Morgan www.informationweek.com

28 MSI's gaming PC backpack makes tether-free virtual reality real A few days ago MSI teased its PC backpack system and now at a press event in Taiwan we have a more concrete idea of how it will power untethered VR experiences. Aside from looking like a cross between a motorcycle backpack and the rocketeer's jetpack, the MSI Backpack PC is actually smaller than Mini-ITX systems as well as both the Xbox One and PS4. Despite its diminutive size, it features a mobile-based Intel Core i7 K-series processor and a desktop grade Nvidia GTX 980. Though, don't get too attached to this specification as the product is still on a long road to development. The Backpack PC we saw was merely a working sample (without a finalized name no less) and MSI has plans to integrate Nvidia's new Pascal-based GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs. MSI is also treating this backpack system as a full-on PC, which means users will be able to upgrade the components from the graphics to storage and memory. One thing users will constantly be changing out is the batteries. Early design sketches and a mockup of the Backpack PC (Image Credit: Joel Burgess) The Taiwanese electronics firm project users will get at least an hour and 30 minutes in virtual reality on a single charge. Unfortunately, the hip-mounted batteries aren't hot swappable as it is on HP's own VR backpack concept For longer play sessions as either a VR system or a portable gaming desktop, users could plug in the Backpack PC into the wall. Pricing and availability has yet to be announced, but stay tuned to this space for our upcoming hands on review. Article continues below

2016-05-30 08:00 By Kevin feedproxy.google.com

29 Venturer BravoWin 10KT review: This 10in Windows 10 tablet-laptop hybrid costs just £150, making it an excellent deal for students By Marie Brewis | 2 hours ago See full specs £149.99 inc VAT Even the cheapest Windows 10 laptops can be out of budget for many students, and a more affordable alternative might be a budget 2-in-1 tablet-laptop hybrid such as this £150 Venturer BravoWin 10KT. We find out exactly what you get in return for not a lot of money. Also see: Best budget tablets 2016 UK. This 10.1in Windows 10 tablet with magnetic docking keyboard is available in the UK through Amazon. It costs £149.99 with free standard delivery, while a slightly larger 11.6in model costs £199.99. At this price it’s roughly in line with the Chuwi HiBook , a Chinese hybrid tablet-laptop that dual-boots Android and Windows and costs £143.42 from Geekbuying. Performance is much the same, but the Chuwi has a significantly better build. The trade-off, of course, is the uncertainty of buying the Chuwi from a Chinese importer, and the fact you’ll have to pay extra for the keyboard and may incur a fee for import duty. The fact you can buy this Venturer from Amazon UK is a real advantage. It could be with you tomorrow (provided you choose one-day delivery), with no extra charges - and should something go wrong, getting hold of tech support should be easier. (We say should, because we didn’t require the services of tech support or customer services during our review of the BravoWin 10KT). Given that a copy of Windows 10 direct from Microsoft will cost you £99.99, this tablet with keyboard offers extraordinary value. See all budget tablet reviews. The Venturer BravoWin 10KT budget tablet is available in all black, all silver, or a combination of silver and black (reviewed here) or gold and silver. So far so good, then. Until you take the Venturer BravoWin 10KT out of the box. This Windows 10 hybrid has a lot of advantages, but decent design and build quality are not among them. This thing looks seriously cheap. The Venturer resembles the sort of computer you would have expected to buy five, maybe even 10, years ago. It’s made from black and silver plastic, and there has been no obvious attempt to produce something appealing to the eye. Nothing sits flush with anything, leaving cracks and crannies everywhere for grime to find its way inside. Chunky bezels framing a non-laminated screen finish off the budget look. Unlike most modern computers it has an oversized physical reset button, plus a volume button and speaker that bizarrely sit on the rear of the device. Usually you would find a Windows button on the front of a Windows 10 tablet serving as a Home button, but here it’s far too small and out of mind low down on the Venturer’s left edge. Thankfully there’s also a Windows key on the keyboard, providing you have it docked. And things get worse. When we test phones and tablets we tend to assert pressure to them in the hands to see whether they flex or show any other signs of weakness. The Venturer creaks as soon as you pick it up. Two silver-painted plastic end panels sit either side of the screen, screwed in place but perhaps not as tightly as they should be. It just doesn’t feel as though it’s going to withstand bashing much about in your school bag, which is odd, given that Venturer targets it at kids. Also see: Best Windows tablets 2016 UK. There’s even a DC input for power - which we thought might be the final nail in the coffin, until we realised that bizarrely this budget Venturer tablet can also charge over Micro-USB. A saving grace. It’s fair to say we’ve been pretty harsh on this Windows 10 tablet’s design so far, but there are some upsides, too. The keyboard, for a start, is far easier to use than that which is sold with the Chuwi, and it’ll lean back further to provide a more comfortable typing position. It’s large enough to be reasonably comfortable to use for long periods, and the floating scrabble tile keys - although a little noisy in use - are well spaced. We love the fact this budget Windows tablet comes with a UK keyboard, and even the trackpad is usable, a 90x40mm component with virtual left- and right-click buttons either side. If you don’t want to use it, you simply pull off the keyboard (which docks magnetically) and switch to tablet mode. The keyboard is a touch smaller than the screen, with just the silver plastic end caps overhanging it at either side. The screen has huge bezels and it isn’t laminated, with viewing angles that could certainly be improved, and rounded corners that don’t sit nicely against the tablet’s rectangular frame, but it is an HD IPS screen and it is a useful size at 10.1in. This panel doesn’t offer the deepest contrast or the brightest display we’ve ever seen, and working outdoors in direct sunlight could be problematic, but pushed up to its max it’s quite acceptable, and colours are realistic. The Venturer isn’t bad for ports and connections, given the price. As we mentioned earlier there is both a DC input and a Micro-USB port for charging, as well as a Mini-HDMI port and a full-size USB 2.0 port, plus 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Our only quibble is that all these ports sit on the left edge of the Venturer when docked, making them less easily functional for adding, for example, a USB mouse for right-handed users. Lefties should be in their element, of course, and you can always stick with the built-in touchpad and instead use this port for a USB drive or external hard drive. Also on this edge are a microSD slot for adding up to 64GB of removable storage (very useful, given that there’s just 32GB of internal storage) and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The Venturer BravoWin 10KT is fitted with front and rear cameras, both rated at 2Mp. That’s acceptable for video chat, but we don’t forsee you making much use of the rear camera - Venturer might as well have not included one. The best thing about this tablet’s build, though, is how easily portable it is. At 266x168x10.6mm and 600g it slipped right into my shoulder bag and didn’t weigh me down too significantly. Add the keyboard and it’s heavier, at 1080g, and thicker, at 23mm - but that’s still fairly portable for what is in essence a full Windows 10 laptop. The Venturer BravoWin 10KT runs the 32bit edition of Windows 10 Home on a 1.33GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor and 2GB of RAM. It’s not a speed demon, but it’s perfectly up to the job of browsing the web, reading and replying to emails, checking out what’s happening on Facebook and even playing the odd streamed movie or YouTube clip. It will start to struggle if you try to do too much at once, but then again a 10.1in screen isn’t ideally suited to multi-tasking. If you need a bigger screen you can use the Mini- HDMI port to hook it up to a TV or monitor. Casual games are even a possibility, given the results of our GFXBench graphics test. Although the Venturer would run only the T-Rex component, it did so at 22fps. We run the onscreen version of this test, so here the only HD resolution would have helped it to perform. We also ran the PCMark 8 Home and Geekbench 3 general processing power benchmarks on the Venturer, and in both cases it scored on par with the Chuwi HiBook. We recorded 1105 points in PCMark 8 and 2205 in the multi-core component of Geekbench. Our final test is JetStream, which measures JavaScript performance in web browsing. The Venturer scored 35.341, which is a tad behind the Chuwi HiBook's 37.423 when running Windows 10, and better than many mid- range smartphones. Venturer doesn’t specify the exact battery capacity of this tablet, but says it’s good for eight hours life. Battery life is an incredibly difficult thing to judge, given that everyone uses their devices differently. We’ll update this review with our PCMark 8 battery test results as soon as they are completed. Also see: Best budget laptops 2016 . Follow Marie Brewis on Twitter. If you don’t mind what it looks like, the Venturer BravoWin 10KT is an ideal budget option for students. It costs just £150 and can be with you tomorrow, and that price includes a magnetic docking keyboard and a full copy of Windows 10. It’s easily portable and sufficiently capable, if not a speed demon. Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 vs GTX 1070: What's the difference between GTX 1070 and GTX 1080? A price… 1995-2015: How technology has changed the world in 20 years How to sell your artwork online as prints, iPhone & iPad cases, collectables and more The best free web browser games for Mac: 10 great HTML5 games you can play in Safari (or other web…

2016-05-30 08:00 Marie Brewis www.pcadvisor.co.uk

30 Move over Skylake: An Asus PC with Intel's Kaby Lake chip is coming in Q3 The wait for Intel's Kaby Lake chip will end in the third quarter this year, as the first PC with the 7th Generation Core chip was announced at Computex. Kaby Lake, the successor to Intel's Skylake Core processor chips, will be in the Asus Transformer 3 tablet. The device is much like Microsoft's Surface Pro 4, and will ship in the third quarter starting at US$799, according to a blog entry on Microsoft's website. The Transformer 3 was among a gaggle of PC and phone products announced by Asus at Computex. No other Kaby Lake PC has been announced yet, but expect Lenovo, HP, Dell and others to follow suit. Intel hasn't yet announced details of Kaby Lake, and a company spokesman declined to share further information about the chip. He also said the company won't talk about the chip in detail at the trade show in Taipei. Intel's current 6th Generation Core chips are based on the Skylake architecture, and Kaby Lake will be the successor. Kaby Lake has the underpinnings of Skylake, and like all chip upgrades, is expected to be faster and more power-efficient. On devices containing Kaby Lake chips, Microsoft will not support versions of its OS prior to Windows 10. Kaby Lake is the third Core chip design to be built with the 14-nanometer production process, and was added as Intel strayed from its traditional model of releasing two Core chip designs for each production process improvement. Manufacturing issues caused Intel to delay a move to the 10- nm process, and it added Kaby Lake to continue delivering yearly chip upgrades. The Transformer 3, which has a 12.6-inch screen, gives some insight into what top-line Kaby Lake PCs may look like. The tablet PC has a Thunderbolt 3 port, which can drive two 4K displays and doubles as a USB C connector. Intel has been looking to integrate the controller for that inside its chipset, and also to improve integrated graphics on its chips. The screen on the Transformer 3 displays images at a resolution of 2880 x 1920 pixels, compared to 2736 x 1824 pixels on Microsoft's Surface Pro 4. According to Asus, the Transformer 3 weighs 695 grams and is 6.9 millimeters thick. A keyboard can be attached to turn the device into a laptop. The device has a 13-megapixel camera and can hold an SSD up to 512GB in capacity, and up to 8GB RAM. The primary competition to Kaby Lake will be AMD's chips based on the Zen architecture, which will first appear in gaming PCs by year end, and desktops and laptops next year. Asus announced other Transformers at Computex. The Transformer 3 Pro tablet also has a 12.6-inch screen, but is thicker than the Kaby Lake Transformer, at around 8.35 millimeters, and heavier, at 798 grams. It has a Skylake chip and can be fully loaded with up to 16GB of memory and 1TB of SSD storage. It will ship in the third quarter, starting at $999. It has USB-C (including Thunderbolt support), HDMI and USB 3.0 ports, and a fingerprint reader. The Transformer Mini tablet, with a 10.1-inch screen, will also arrive in the third quarter, although Asus won't yet say at what price. There's a new laptop too: The ZenBook 3 is 11.9 millimeters thick, weighs 910 grams and has a 12.5-inch screen. It will ship in the third quarter starting at $999.

2016-05-30 07:40 Agam Shah www.itnews.com

31 Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg To Connect With Space Station Astronauts Via Facebook Live In a statement by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Facebook Co-founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg will speak with three astronauts currently living and working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) 12:55 p.m EDT (7:55 p.m EAT )Wednesday, June 1st. The Earth-to-space call will be seen live on Nasa’s Facebook page , where users can also submit their questions to be answered. During the 20-minute Facebook Live video call with NASA astronauts, Tim Kopra, Jeff Williams, and Tim Peake (European Space Agency), Zuckerberg will ask questions submitted by Facebook users. In an announcement posted on Faceboook by NASA, gave an example of questions users may want to ask, “What is it like to live and work in microgravity orbiting the Earth? What sorts of out-of-this-world science is underway in the space station’s laboratories? How does the research in space help prepare to send humans on a Journey to Mars?” Earlier this month, the social media giants launched an interactive map for its Live Video feature, giving users a window into what’s happening in the world in real-time, from friends to topics to games and so forth, that you’re interested in. The feature is rolling out slowly across the globe and to access the interactive map, users need to visit the new Live Video app is available on the left navigation bar. 2016-05-30 07:35 Nathan Ernest pctechmag.com

32 The Future of Transactions: Mobile Money Merchant Payments Merchant payments add a significant use case for mobile money in developing countries by enabling customers to pay for goods and services from their mobile wallets. Across the developed world, cards and NFC enabled POSs are being used to pay for everyday purchases, but the question remains if mobile money can, or will, have the same levels of usage in the developing world. In Uganda for example, there are a number of agents who are small retailers, and are paid a commission to facilitate the exchange of cash and electronic money. A merchant, on the other hand, will accept electronic payments in exchange for the goods or services he/she provide. The 2015 State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money by GSMA states that; approximately twelve million transactions per month and more than US$ 325 million transacted, merchant payments represent 1.9% of total mobile money transaction volumes and 4.1% of total mobile money transaction values. The report further states that Mobile money providers have reported only a handful of online payments, totaling 0.5% of total merchant payment volumes (which is less than 60,000 transactions). Uganda providers have managed to get only a handful of merchants to date. Benefits and Opportunities For mobile money providers, merchant payments have a huge potential to increase mobile money transaction volumes. As a product, merchant payments have caught the attention of mobile money providers because of the sheer magnitude of retail payments in the market and the opportunity it represents to integrate the mobile wallet more deeply into everyday life. The merchant can now sell to people across town, across the country and take payment around the clock. GSMA Recommendations Mobile money providers need to invest significant resources in merchant acquisition or partner with specialists to build an active merchant network. Focused and dedicated teams with specific skills are needed to educate and convince merchants to use the service. A strong value proposition is essential to hold merchants’ interest and deliver sustainable transaction volumes. Using segmentation to attract the right merchants with an appropriate commission structure will help build a quality merchant network. Providing merchants with a complete experience (fast settlement and access to their transaction data) will increase their confidence in the system.

2016-05-30 07:25 Jeddy Genrwot pctechmag.com

33 Meet Avalon, Asus's audacious, tightly integrated vision for the future of DIY PCs The PC’s DIY hardware ethos is both a blessing and a curse on computing. On one hand, the open ecosystem fuels innovation and serves as a major selling point for enthusiasts. On the other, the basic design of PCs hasn’t really changed in decades. You slot motherboards, storage, and various add-in cards into a case and wire them up. That underlying structure helps sustain the universal natural of PC hardware —but now Asus’ Republic of Gamers brand thinks it “can do better.” At Computex 2016, Asus ROG showed off its Avalon concept PC, a computer that tightly integrates all aspects of the PC for a redefined design, but still supports the platform’s DIY strengths. The end result is a creation largely devoid of wires and something that looks more like a premium stereo system than a traditional computer. Oh, and “Unlike the purely aspirational concepts often see in the tech industry, this prototype is a working system built on existing technologies that are viable to put into mass production,” Asus says. Shots fired, Project Christine. The Avalon design taps into Asus’ expertise in creating virtually every major PC hardware component. The main thrust ties the motherboard more closely to the case itself, rather than having them exist as two fully individual elements—though Asus says “That’s not to say that boards have to be inexorably tied to specific cases, just that closer collaboration creates interesting opportunities.” One major advantage to that is port flexibility, Asus says. Avalon’s motherboard extends right to the front of the case, so various ports and indicators can be built right into the motherboard and appear on the PC’s face, rather than needing to be connected to the front panel with extenders and extra cables. Swappable rear I/O panels for the Asus Avalon concept PC. Meanwhile, the rear I/O panels are modular components of their own inside Avalon. In other words, you can swap them out to create a Frankenstein that meets your individual needs, rather than being limited to a selection of ports hardwired into your motherboard, as is the case with traditional PCs. “VR rigs require additional USB ports to connect headsets and controllers, workstations often need faster networking and redundant ports, and home- theater PCs can benefit from upgraded audio,” says Asus. The custom 600W power supply Asus created for the Avalon concept PC features an edge connector rather than cabling. Those rear I/O panels connect to the Avalon’s motherboard using a PCI-E- based “edge connector.” Asus relies on edge connectors throughout to make the Avalon as wire-free and hassle-free as possible; the company even created a 600-watt small form factor power supply for the concept that relies on that simple PCI-E connection rather than the traditional rat’s nest of power cables. All power to secondary hardware flows through the motherboard itself. The bays you see on the front of the Avalon concept PC house hot- swappable storage, which makes switching out SSDs as simple as switching out floppy disks. The storage capabilities reside on a daughter card that connects directly to the motherboard inside. The Avalon motherboard with various daughter cards connected at the bottom. Funky! High-powered graphics cards are the one component that still requires additional power cabling inside Avalon, though Asus says it’s possible to rework graphic card design to function with edge connectors, instead. GPUs reside in their own compartment at Avalon’s outer edge, blowing hot air out through the ventilated edge of the PC. The motherboard features an integrated backplate with threaded holes so that you can connect aftermarket CPU cooling solutions directly to it. Asus hopes that the voltage regulator modules on the motherboard’s underbelly can be connected to the chassis to have the case itself act as a heatsink for the system. That’s a trick that some small form factor and silent PC cases already perform—and one that plays neatly into the Avalon’s integration concept. As a concept PC, there’s no pricing or release date information tied to Avalon, though Asus says it’s “right on the edge of what’s possible.” The prototype certainly seems like a compelling idea, at least in theory, and still manages to embrace DIY potential despite its tighter overall system integration. That said, part of the reason that PCs have stuck to traditional designs for so long is because the usual case-motherboard-power supply- add-in card design works so well, and it resists hardware lock-in. Tying motherboard design so tightly to the case plays well to Asus’ jack-of-all- trades strengths, for example, but it might leave more specialized hardware vendors like EVGA out in the cold. What do you think? Asus wants to know. Now that it’s revealed Avalon to the world, the company’s looking for feedback from the industry and PC enthusiasts.

2016-05-30 07:18 Brad Chacos www.itnews.com

34 9 Raspberry Pi Projects For Your Summer Vacation Summertime, and the coding is easy. Well, if not easy, at least more accessible when you think about projects to do for your own enjoyment or as recreation with kids. The thing is, summer is the time for fun projects, and if they have something to do with the out-of-doors, so much the better. The Raspberry Pi is one of the two platforms that has changed the do-it- yourself embedded control world. (The other? Arduino. I'll get around to the latest on that one in a future article.) Since the RasPi was introduced in 2012 it has gone through several revisions and a number of different versions , becoming more powerful, more capable, and smaller in the process. In every case, though, the RasPi has remained a tiny Linux computer that can pack a lot of computation into a very compact package. Beyond the basic hardware and software capabilities, the platform has also generated a widespread and very active community that has been busy expanding the range of RasPi possibilities and sharing information on what can be done around this incredibly popular computer. [See 8 Raspberry Pi Tools That Fire up Your Programming Skills .] If you've been waiting to dive into the world of the Raspberry Pi, or if you have already dipped your toes into the RasPi realm and are looking for your next project , then here are nine possibilities to get you thinking, coding, and (maybe) soldering. Among these are some projects that are easy, projects that are challenging, and projects that will be perfect for modifying and turning into your very own creation. I'm ashamed to admit that my own Raspberry Pi projects have been fairly tame, so far, but the research for this article has me thinking about things that need to happen on my workbench. What about you? Are you an active member of the Raspberry Pi "maker" community, or have you just thought about what you might do with one of these little powerhouse units? Are there projects you've completed that you would like to share with the community here or projects on this list you think should have been ditched for an alternative? Let me know -- and let me know what you've got planned to get your Summer tech kicked off in the right direction. Ready For A New Job? InformationWeek's hosted, searchable job board can help you find your next gig. Start your search today.

2016-05-30 07:06 Curtis Franklin www.informationweek.com

35 Apple stores to sell Apollo "personal cloud. " It's back to the future all over again News today from a justifiably proud Promise technology that Apple (yes, THAT Apple) is going to be selling Promise's Apollo "personal cloud appliance" at its stores globally. Any time Apple does anything it's a big deal so it is worth having a bit of background about Promise. The company is a 25-year veteran of the storage industry. Traditionally active in the enterprise arena, it produces its own enterprise storage hardware and vertical offerings tailored to the video, rich media and other industries. It seems the enterprise wasn't quite enough for Promise and hence they've decided to enter the consumer market. As I mentioned, Apollo, their market entry product, is a "personal cloud appliance. " In other words, before the cloud became sexy it would have been called a big beefy external hard drive. Of course, cloud is all the rage so now it's a personal cloud. The idea of Apollo is to let individual users, and their circle of friends and family, have control over the storing and accessing of digital content from their own private space. According to Promise, unlike current market products, Apollo is the first to let families, small business, home offices or workgroups easily and privately store and share their digital content. I won't quibble or point out that Western Digital and Synology have similar personal cloud products and have done for a decade or so. I also won't point out that previous attempts to redefine an external hard drive as anything other than the humdrum thing it really is have failed. We'll just dig right in and look at what Apollo is trying to offer here. The press release articulates a bewildering array of selling points: the fact that Apollo will help ease up space on phones, tablets and laptops; the fact that (shock, horror) users can access their data remotely; the fact that there is lots of capacity here (4 TB for those who were interested); and finally, the fact that, once purchased, there is no ongoing cost with Apollo. Where to start? If Promise really wants to resolve the issue around storage space on devices, then surely creating another device (notwithstanding that it is a standalone one) is counter intuitive, no? If Promise really wants to move the needle on remote access, you'd think that a cloud file storage solution would be the easiest way to do so. If capacity is an issue, I've not heard of anyone maxing out their Dropbox or other cloud storage vendor's capacity. The cost saving one I'll grudgingly accept, but cloud storage is pretty cheap on the scale of things. Not wanting to concede any of the glaringly wrong things with this product, Promise shouts from the rooftops how valuable this is: “We are proud to offer consumers a personal cloud appliance that provides an easier, safer way to store and share their photos, videos and files with their family, friends, and colleagues,” said James Lee, CEO of Promise Technology. “Apollo marks a significant moment for Promise, but it is just the beginning as we are creating a complete family of cloud appliances to meet the diverse needs of all our users.” Do you need to ask? My view is obvious. There is nothing novel or innovative in this. It is, perhaps, moderately useful as a small office backup device, assuming it is priced competitively against all the other external hard drives out there. But this is in no way a cloud -- it delivers few of the benefits that the cloud does and just introduces problems. I mean, apart from anything else, what happens when the house in which your "personal cloud" resides burns down? I'm not, in any way, shape or form convinced.

2016-05-30 07:00 Ben Kepes www.computerworld.com

36 ARM Unveils Next Generation Bifrost GPU Architecture & Mali-G71: The New High-End Mali Over the last few years the SoC GPU space has taken an interesting path, and one I admittedly wasn’t expecting. At the start of this decade the playing field for SoC- class GPUs was rather diverse, with everyone from NVIDIA to Broadcom (and everything in between) participating it in it. Consolidation in the GPU space would be inevitable – something we’ve already seen with SoC vendors dropping out – however I am surprised by just how quickly it has happened. In just six years, the number of GPU vendors with a major presence in high-end Android phones has been whittled down to only two: the vertically integrated Qualcomm, and the IP- licensing ARM. That ARM has managed to secure most of the licensed GPU market for themselves is a testament to both their engineering and their IP licensing efforts. ARM’s path into this market has been non-traditional, having acquired an essentially unknown GPU vendor a decade ago, and growing it into the 800lb gorilla it has now become. ARM’s expertise in IP licensing, coupled with a somewhat unusual GPU architecture, has proven to be a powerful combination for the company as they have secured a number of significant wins from the high end to the low end. Much of this growth was built on the back of the company’s GPU architecture of the last few years, Midgard. Initially launched in 2012, Midgard has been the cornerstone of ARM’s Mali 600, 700, and 800 series designs. As ARM’s first unified shader design for GPUs, Midgard has been extended over the years to support newer features such as geometry tessellation and 10bpc color, along with newer APIs such as OpenGL ES 3.1/3.2 and Vulkan. However as Midgard approaches its fourth birthday and the SoC GPU landscape evolves, Midgard’s time at the top will soon be coming to an end. Amidst the backdrop of Computex 2016 and alongside their new Cortex- A73 CPU, ARM is announcing their next generation GPU architecture, Bifrost. A significant update to ARM’s GPU architecture, Bifrost will first be deployed in ARM’s Mali-G71 GPU. One of the interesting aspects of SoC GPU development over the years is that it has been a very distinct echo of larger discrete GPU development. Many innovations and changes that first show up with dGPUs will show up in SoC GPUs a few years later, as newer manufacturing processes allow for those developments to fit within the extreme space and power requirements of an SoC-class GPU. At the same time mobile games/graphics development follows a similar path, with mobile application developers picking up rendering techniques first used elsewhere. ARM’s architectural development, in turn, has been a good example of this process. The non-unified Utgard architecture gave way to the unified Midgard architecture in 2012, about 6 years after dGPUs first made the transition. And as we learned when we examined the Midgard architecture in depth , Midgard was an architecture well suited for the rendering paradigms of the time. Midgard’s shader core, in short, was an Instruction Level Parallelism-centric design, employing a Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) instruction format. To achieve maximum utilization out of Midgard’s shader cores, you needed to be able to extract a significant amount of ILP – 4 concurrent instructions – in order to fill all of the slots in a shader core. This sort of design maps well to basic graphics workloads, as 4 color component RGBA is a natural fit for the 4 lanes of ARM’s VLIW-4 design. Furthermore VLIW designs are traditionally very space efficient, as there’s relatively little overhead logic, which is always a boon for the tight constraints of the SoC space. However getting back to what we said earlier about SoC GPUs being an echo of discrete GPUs, as we’ve seen there, VLIW does have a limited shelf life. Newer rendering paradigms often work with just 1 or 2 components at once, which leaves open lanes that need to be filled to achieve full GPU utilization. A good shader compiler can help here, but it does become an escalating technology war over time, as getting good performance becomes increasingly compiler-centric, and writing a compiler that can extract the necessary ILP is a challenge in and of itself. What history has shown us – and what is going to happen again in the mobile market – is that rendering workloads will continue to shift away from a style that is suitable for VLIW.

2016-05-30 07:00 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

37 iPad Pro 2 release date and specs rumours: When will Apple launch a new iPad Pro Apple recently launched the iPad Pro 9.7in following the original but when will a new model be available? Here we take a look at the possible and rumoured iPad Pro 2 release date and specs. See: Best new tablets coming 2016. For now we're calling it the iPad Pro 2 since that's the logical way to name it for now. However, Apple could well just call the tablet the new iPad Pro – we won't know until Apple makes it official but that's what we're going with for now to make it simple. There a few possibilities for the iPad Pro 2 launch but we're not expecting anything before this autumn, despite WWDC coming up shortly in June. With the original iPad Pro launching in September 2015 and the 9.7in following with a March 2016 launch date, it's September time this year when we expect to be the earliest for the iPad Pro 2 reveal. That would mean an upgraded model of the larger iPad Pro and probably the smaller 9.7in model getting a refresh in March 2017. While that makes total sense, there's a second possibility. Apple could wait until March 2017 to launch both iPad Pro 2 models at the same time. A third option would be to launch the iPad Pro 2 in two sizes this autumn but we think that's the least likely since the 9.7in wouldn't be old enough to warrant a new version. When it launched, the original iPad Pro didn't come in a 256GB storage capacity but Apple add it to the line-up with the introduction of the iPad Pro 9.7. We expect the iPad Pro 2 to come in the same storage options which are currently available. What we do expect is that the iPad Pro 2 to come in the latest Rose Gold colour which seems to be all the rage across Apple's other products including the iPhone and MacBook. It's fairly easy to predict that Apple will bring the specs of the iPad Pro 2 to at least match the 9.7in model. That means adding the True Tone display which automatically adjusts the white balance for a more realistic experience, the 12Mp iSight camera with Live Photos and 4K video recording and the 5Mp front FaceTime HD camera with a Retina Flash. Those changes would make the iPad Pro 2 level with the current 2016 iPad Pro but it wouldn't be Apple if there weren't some features not seen before on an iPad. This could simply come in the form of a new processor but we hope for more since the current A9X is more than dependable. This is all speculation on our part but as rumours emerge we'll add them here. We are perhaps a little too far away from the launch for anything juicy so check back soon.

2016-05-30 07:00 Chris Martin www.pcadvisor.co.uk

38 Pwned: 65 million Tumblr accounts, 40 million from Fling, 360 million from MySpace After signing up for Have I Been Pwned? when Troy Hunt started the site in 2013, I had received no notifications about any account being compromised in a data breach. But then whammo! I get two notifications for two separate breaches in a relatively short time. The one today was about Tumblr, an account I barely remember even signing up for. Tumblr claimed “a third party had obtained access to a set of Tumblr user email addresses with salted and hashed passwords from early 2013.” The reality, according to the HIBP notification, is that 65,469,298 people were pwned in the Tumblr data breach from February 2013; the compromised data included email addresses and passwords. In other words, dumped data from another old hack came out of nowhere and jumped to number three in HIBP’s top 10 breaches. A hacker going by “peace_of_mind” was selling the Tumblr data on the darknet marketplace The Real Deal. Peace told Motherboard that Tumblr had used SHA1 to hash the passwords and also used salt, making them hard to crack. The data is “essentially just a list of emails” and “he was only able to sell it for $150.” “Peace” is also selling the compromised account data from Fling, LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace. The LinkedIn hack of 2012 supposedly exposed 6.2 million password hashes, but that ended up missing the mark by a tremendous amount since a hacker was selling 167 million LinkedIn user records. 117 million had passwords, which were stored in SHA1 with no salting. Then there’s more than 65 million accounts compromised from Tumblr and over 40 million from Fling. “This data has been lying dormant (or at least out of public sight) for long periods of time,” Hunt wrote. Although the total records added to HIBP in the last six days is 269 million, Hunt said all of those latest hacks will “pale in comparison” once he gets hold of and adds the compromised MySpace records. The MySpace hack contained over 360 million email addresses in it. LeakedSource reported the “data set contains 360,213,024 records. Each record may contain an email address, a username, one password and in some cases a second password. Of the 360 million, 111,341,258 accounts had a username attached to it and 68,493,651 had a secondary password.” The data, which had been provided by “Tessa88,” included 427,484,128 total passwords that were stored in SHA1 with no salting. Sadly, “very few passwords were over 10 characters in length (in the thousands) and nearly none contained an upper case character.” MySpace had chosen not to respond when contacted, so LeakedSource has included a list of top passwords as well as the top email domains. LeakedSource, which has accumulated over 1.6 billion records , has search capabilities. If you find your personal information in the leaked databases, you can contact LeakedSource and ask for it to be “removed free of charge.” This “trend” of data being sold from really old hacks has Hunt “really curious.” He wrote, “Even if these events don't all correlate to the same source and we're merely looking at coincidental timing of releases, how many more are there in the ‘mega’ category that are simply sitting there in the clutches of various unknown parties?” 2016-05-30 06:17 Darlene Storm www.computerworld.com

39 Office machine mania: The paradox that limits productivity In the Roaring Twenties, standardization and mass production were the disruptive business models. Automation transformed the production of cars, sewing machines and bicycles. It was implemented with a revolutionary approach — industrialization — that seems ridiculously obvious today: First simplify, then standardize and only then automate the work. Industrialization succeeded wildly in manufacturing and distribution, delivering the greatest surge in productivity and economic wealth the world has ever known. This happened because businesses have a mania for office machines that promise to reconcile an impossible paradox. Executives want the productivity benefits of office automation. But, unlike their peers in the plant, they reject the disruptive simplification and standardization required for effective use of automation. Technology vendors simply indulge them. Their sales pitches amount to claims that using their office machinery will “subtly force” knowledge workers to standardize their work methods. The appeal of this route is undeniable. Simply write a check and let the technology simplify and standardize work activity. Trouble is, it doesn’t work. Think of installing a moving assembly line in a factory and expecting it to “subtly force” workers into mass production. Generations before computers arrived, office automation technology was routinely failing to “subtly force” standardization. It began with the mechanical duplicating, sorting and accounting machines of the 1920s. The machines arrived, but workers were not “subtly forced” to simplify and standardize. The same situation occurs today in digital workflow office technology. The paper files are gone, but the zigzag, ineffective workflows remain. The workflow technology merely accelerates and conceals error- prone, nonstandard work processes. Despite a century of office machine mania, productivity growth remains stalled in today’s knowledge work organizations. It’s time to move forward by adopting the disruptive industrialization methods of the early 1900s. To continue the revolution in the office will require us to look at knowledge work in an entirely different way. This will disrupt all that we believe. But it was no different in 1920, when no part of the revolution was obvious. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, photos of Model T automobiles rolling off the Ford Motor Company’s first moving assembly line in 1913 imply an inevitably organic automation evolution. But the reality was chaotic and the outcome uncertain. Production “engineers” were adventurous machine shop managers stealing ideas to increase productivity. They appropriated the notion of a moving assembly line after visiting Gustavus Swift’s innovative Chicago slaughterhouse. Adapting it for cars was fraught with setbacks. Ford management nearly halted these early efforts when an engine fell off and smashed a worker’s leg. They pressed on, furiously forcing simplification and standardization. An inventory of more than 1,200 sizes of metal tubing was reduced, in one fell swoop, to 50 standard sizes. Everyone howled, but it worked. Wrench sizes were standardized. These live on in hardware stores today, marked “SAE” for Society of Automotive Engineers. Within months, thousands of individualistic machinist-craftsmen were forced to simplify and standardize their work. Automation followed this industrialization. Assembly times for autos fell by an incomprehensible 70 percent. By 1917, advocates of industrialization methods for office work emerged. W. H. Leffingwell successfully industrialized a large advertising organization, achieving a fourfold increase in total productivity. Improvements included a simplified office workflow and standardized forms, ads and job activities. These were disruptive changes — forced upon the workforce. Office machinery was brought in afterward. But managers rejected this successful, disruptive industrialization approach. Office automation producers have always struggled to prove the business case for their products. In the early 1990s, scholars began to refer to the economy-wide failure of computer technology to increase productivity growth as “The Productivity Paradox.” But the true paradox is the fact that management continues to try to “subtly force” standardization of knowledge work with technology, even after a century of failure. The success of disruptive industrialization techniques is rejected. And now a new wave of technologies is again expected to “subtly force” standardization without disrupting the knowledge work status quo. Does any of the following look familiar? As a disruptive alternative, you could invest a fraction of that cost to create and manage interchangeable data elements, or “parts,” for your knowledge work assembly lines. The majority of data wrangling involves mundane tasks, such as normalizing inconsistent data fields. Customer names, for instance, are sequenced differently: Some are first name, last name; others are last name, first name. Like manufacturing industrialization, this requires early, disciplined planning and documentation as the data elements are born. But even if it gets out of control, like the proliferation of tubing sizes in Ford plants, it can quickly be forced into a manageable number of standards. Purchasing this sexy technology might prove a pleasant diversion, but it is overkill. More than two-thirds of knowledge work is mundane, similar and repetitive, as our first-hand research in hundreds of companies reveals. Merely implementing a basic 1920s era inventory control capability — something simpler than is currently used for office furniture — would be a more effective and valuable investment. For example, the finance group at one of the world’s largest securities firms generates more than 40,000 routinely produced management reports, almost one for each employee. There are no standards. Virtually anyone in the business can request and design a report. The names of the reports vary: Some have descriptive titles, but others may list only the report producer’s name and a date. There is no central warehouse or catalog of available reports. Users have no choice but to request a new, costly, custom report. Before you rush to purchase any of these dubiously complex breakthroughs, a thorough study of your knowledge work activities would deliver a much greater, near-term return. That’s because roughly 40 percent of knowledge work activity is avoidable: error correction, rework, customer overservice and similar low-value efforts. Industrial revolutions result from eliminating unnecessary variation, especially among that which hides in plain sight. Consider the humble craft of bricklaying. Bricks and mortar had been in use for almost 8,000 years when, in the early 1900s, Frank Gilbreth set about eliminating wasted motion in the personal workflows of individual bricklayers. Productivity skyrocketed from about 300 bricks per day to more than 2,500. Today, after decades of development, robotic bricklaying technology is inching closer to feasibility. Over the past century, competitors forced manufacturers to revolutionize disruptively. During that same period, however, knowledge workers have preferred to purchase technology from vendors who promise an alternative to the heavy lifting of simplification and standardization. Silicon Valley’s latest offerings again propose to elegantly automate the status quo. These represent next-generation technologies to pave today’s labyrinthine cow paths of knowledge work operations. Office machine mania continues. And the paradoxical dream of productivity without disruption endures.

2016-05-30 06:03 William Heitman www.itnews.com

40 Iran orders messaging apps to store data of in-country users Iran has ordered foreign messaging apps to transfer data and activity records of Iranian users to local servers within a year, a move that will give the country a greater ability to monitor and censor the online activity of its people. The country’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace has issued instructions to foreign messaging companies active in the country, requiring them “to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity," news reports said , quoting state-run media. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are already blocked in the country, whose government holds a tight control over Internet access by its people. The requirement that the data be stored on local servers could give the government easier access to the information as then the domestic operations of the messaging companies would likely be subject to local regulations. The messaging app most likely to be affected by this move is Telegram, which is very popular in the country and has an user base of about 20 million, or one of every four persons in the country, according to Reuters. “While hardliners have met the meteoric rise of messaging apps like Telegram in Iran with strenuous opposition, more moderate members of the Iranian establishment see in the platform an opportunity for getting state- approved content to its massive user base,” according to a report by Small Media in London . In April, Mahmoud Vaezi, the country’s minister of communications, told a local news agency that Telegram had promised to close down pornographic channels within 24 hours of receiving a request from the the Iran government.

2016-05-30 05:40 John Ribeiro www.computerworld.com

41 41 Mafia 3 trailer is a virtual tour of New Bordeaux Mafia 3 takes place in New Bordeaux, a fictional take on legendary New Orleans. There are clear benefits to creating fictional cities over real ones – real cities weren't designed for high speed car chases and shoot outs, after all – but it looks like 2K Czech has been careful to include all the bits of New Orleans you'd definitely want to explore in a game. There are nine districts in New Bordeaux, and according to the studio spokespeople in the below video, they're all very different. There's the famous French Quarter – dotted with whiskey bars and jazz venues – as well as the wharf and docking districts, a large swamp area and The Hollow, which is the "very poor" area of the city. The Mafia 3 release date is October 7. Dave Houghton went hands-on with the game, and came away impressed. "Mafia III’s version of New-Orleans is evoked with both gloss and grit, a lazy, hazy, summertime heat permeating its streets just as bullets and foul-mouthed slurs fill the air," he wrote.

2016-05-30 05:16 Shaun Prescott www.pcgamer.com

42 How to export a Live Photos movie into OS X Sarah Kruberg would like to extract the movie file (.mov) from Live Photos she imports them into Photos for OS X: As I understand it, a Live Photos image has a .jpeg file and a .mov file: the still JPEG shown normally and the .mov file “activated” when viewing the live portion (either on the iPhone 6s or in photos). She took a number of Live Photos on a trip, but discovered after importing them and deleting them she couldn’t figure out how to get access to the movie files. Apple makes it both easy and opaque. When you import a Live Photos into Photos for OS X, the app tags them: you can see the Live Photos icon in the lower-left corner of a full preview of image alongside the text label “LIVE”, and the icon also appears if you view information about the photo (Windows > Info). Hover over the LIVE label when viewing the full photo, and it plays the associated movie. At left, the Live Photos label on an image; at right, the Info palette’s petite indicator. However, Photos doesn’t give any indication a .mov file exists. The Info palette only says it’s a JPEG; if you select File > Export > Export [X] Photo(s), it exports a JPEG. It’s only when you Option-drag an image into the Finder or select File > Export > Export Unmodified Original For [X] Photo(s) are both the unmodified JPEG and the associated MOV retrieved. You can also use the Image Capture app with an iPhone connected via USB, select the iPhone, choose Live Photos images, and then import them, and both the JPEG and MOV for each image are transferred. iCloud.com only shows the JPEG version; there’s way no way to view a Live Photos or export a MOV, but it does retain those files and sync them among iOS and OS X. We’re always looking for problems to solve! Email yours to [email protected] including screen captures as appropriate. Mac 911 cannot reply to email with troubleshooting advice nor can we publish answers to every question.

2016-05-30 05:00 Glenn Fleishman www.itnews.com

43 What are phone jammers trying to tell us? Cellphone jammers prevent phones from working. They're being used in cars, public places and exam halls. Jammers aren't new -- they've been around for years -- and they're illegal in many countries, including in the U. S., but use of jammers is growing fast. But are phones really the problem? And are jammers really the solution? I think cellphone jammers are being used as a Band-Aid, as the wrong solution to solve three societal problems that should be solved by much better technology. Here are the three biggest problems cellphone jammers are trying, and failing, to solve, and what I think are the better solutions. A Florida man named Jason R. Humphreys wanted to save lives by preventing people along his daily commute from using their phones while driving. So Humphreys installed a cellphone jammer in the back of the passenger seat of his SUV. The scheme worked for two years, as far as Humphreys knew. But the police, whose own communications were occasionally disrupted by his jammer, were less than thrilled. So they tracked him down and caught him two years ago. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission fined him $48,000 for breaking U. S. laws against the use of jammers. As I've expressed in this space before, I think that drivers distracted with smartphones would be distracted by something else without smartphones. In other words, smartphones don't cause accidents, humans do. The horrible reality is that human drivers kill around 1.24 million people a year worldwide. That's a far higher annual rate than the number of people who die in wars. Humphreys' misguided action was the wrong solution to the problem. What we really need is to transition to self-driving cars as quickly as possible. The sooner we do it, the more lives will be spared. A Chicago man named Dennis Nicholl was arrested recently for allegedly using a cellphone jammer on a commuter train. Police were tipped off when photos of the man with his jammer started circulating online. After other commuters started talking on their smartphones, Nicholl pulled out a jammer, flipped a switch, and all the phones went silent. Nicholl's attorney said his client only wanted a little peace and quiet. Comedian Dave Chappelle recently used a product from a company called Yondr to silence calls during 13 of his comedy gigs in Chicago. Yondr makes a lockable, radio-proof bag -- a kind of Faraday cage. As they entered the venue, Chappelle fans were required, as a condition of admission, to put their smartphones inside a Yondr bag, which was then locked. They were allowed to keep possession of the bags, but those who wanted to use their phones had to leave the no-phone zone and have someone unlock the Yondr bag as they exited. The problem that Nicholl and Chappelle are trying to solve is that other people's smartphone use is annoying and distracting, respectively. Silencing all the phones is the wrong way to go. The better solution is the coming age of hearable computing, which I wrote about last year. This new generation of wearable processes all of the sounds coming into your ears before letting you hear them. By using a smartphone app, you can adjust and customize what you hear and what you don't. When these smart earbuds hit the market for real, Nicholl will be able to produce his own peace and quiet, and Chappelle -- and his audience, for that matter -- can choose to hear only his own brilliant humor, plus the sounds of laughter and applause, regardless of whether someone in the audience is rudely chatting on the phone. Cheating is a massive problem worldwide, especially for entrance exams for colleges, universities, professional training and the military. India's northernmost state, Jammu and Kashmir, is tackling the problem of cheating by installing 800 cellphone jammers at testing centers statewide. One recent high-visibility case illustrates the problem: A student in India named Wasim Ahmed at Nawab Shah engineering college was caught cheating. He kept a smartphone in his underwear with a microphone in his shirt and a Bluetooth receiver in his ear. He whispered the questions to a confederate on the phone, who gave him the answers. Behavior like Ahmed's is repeated around the world, though the specifics may vary. Earlier this month, a scandal erupted at Thailand's Rangsit University medical college when four students were caught cheating on entrance exams. Two of them wore glasses with built-in cameras, and three wore smartwatches. The glasses captured photos of the exam questions. On a break, the test-takers handed the glasses to someone who took them and sent the photos to confederates at an ad-hoc "command center" located elsewhere. The accomplices researched the questions and texted answers back to the test-takers, who could see the SMS messages on their smartwatches. The good news is that they were caught. (These aren't the kind of people you want controlling your general anesthesia during surgery.) The problem of using Internet-connected devices to cheat is so bad that Iraq actually turns off much of the nation's Internet to prevent sixth graders from cheating . Internet-assisted cheating appears to be a major problem. But the real problem is that most exams are built around an antiquated concept of learning. If cheaters can cheat by getting data from the Internet, there's no reason to memorize that information in the first place. We're all becoming information cyborgs, with instant, real-time information and communication, artificial intelligence bots, and all the world's knowledge at our fingertips at all times. Meanwhile, our most advanced computers are no match for the human brain, and may never be, despite what the futurists are always telling us. Everyone will be far better off, and cheating will be obsolete, when we teach and test human creativity instead of human memorization. Or, better yet, all exams should be "open smartphone" exams, where one's ability to use a smartphone to look up facts, details and answers is part of what's being tested. Because that's how the world works now. The students taking exams today will never live in a world without the mobile Internet. When people use cellphone jammers, they're almost always trying to solve a problem that's different and much larger than the one they think they're solving. The reality is that smartphones exist. Wireless communication exists. Access to the Internet from anywhere exists. And smartphones and wireless gadgets are quickly becoming universal and ubiquitous. The best solution to whatever societal problems these realities appear to create is rarely to simply block the phones. The best solution to the problems created by technology is always better technology.

2016-05-30 03:30 Mike Elgan www.computerworld.com

44 Meze 99 Classics headphone review: beautifully crafted cans Use commas to separate multiple email addresses Your message has been sent. There was an error emailing this page. By Theo Nicolakis TechHive | May 30, 2016 3:00 AM PT Bargain headphones at a luxury technology show? I met Antonio Meze, founder and chief designer of the company that bears his name, while attending the NY Luxury Technology Show, in Manhattan. The distinctive gold tone, stylish wooden ear cups, and obvious build quality of the Meze 99 Classics headphones caught my eye as I wandered the crowded show floor. I decided to give them a short audition. Antonio had the 99 Classics connected to the superb-sounding Questyle QP1R hi-res music player, which I had just finished reviewing. While a show like that is a horrible environment to audition audio equipment, the 99 Classics passive noise isolation was surprisingly good. Certain audio cues hinted that these headphones were worth a serious, extended listen. I asked Antonio if I could request a pair for review, and he obliged. The Walnut Gold Meze 99 Classics. My review pair took a several weeks to arrive, since Antonio and his team wanted me to be among the first to receive the new silver-accented version. When I first opened my review pair, I absolutely loved the look. The gold accents on the pair I auditioned at the show weren’t my style. But the silver pair is stunning. The brushed silver look is a perfect complement to the richly grained, genuine walnut ear cups (Meze says its wood is harvested from sustainable sources). In hand, the 99 Classics didn’t disappoint. They have a sturdy, but relatively light feel to them. Their build quality? Superb. The included accessories were a treat, too. The 99 Classics come in a nicely styled hard-case with a soft inner lining. There are also two cables: a short cable with an inline microphone, and a much, much longer cable without an inline microphone. I wish other headphone manufacturers would follow this example. The shorter cable was perfect to take the headphones on the go with a portable digital audio player, while the longer cable showed its merit for extended listening sessions where a preamp or headphone amplifier might be some distance from where you prefer to sit and relax. The included two-prong airline and 1/4-inch adapter are icing on the cake. The Meze 99 Classics come with all the accessories you could ask for. As with many of the higher-end headphones I’ve reviewed, the Meze 99 Classics’ ear cups aren’t labeled right and left; instead, both sides take the included Y cable and each arm of the cable is labeled as left or right. This is especially convenient with the inline microphone. Some prefer the microphone on their left; others on their right. Meze gives you your choice. In real-world use, however, the inline mic was hit or miss. During one call in particular, I had to switch from the 99 Classics to my Bowers & Wilkins C5 in-ear monitors, because the person on the other end of the phone had such a difficult time hearing me. The Meze 99 Classics are symmetrically designed. There is no right or left ear cup; the left and right channel is determined by the cable. Another of my very few complaints about the 99 Classics was that the L and R designation isn’t printed in black. Therefore, it’s sometimes difficult to see which is the left side and which is the right side of the cable unless you’re in just the right light. To try and address this, there is a small tactile ridge on the left cable jack, so that you can feel which is the left side without looking; still, I think the Meze team should have a better visual cue. Wearing the 99 Classics was a joy—mostly. They were light and comfortable, even for very long listening sessions spanning hours. In fact, the more I wore them, the more I liked wearing them. Part of that comfort I attributed to the elastic tension headband. Unlike some headphones where you manually adjust the tension, the headband on the 99 Classics auto adjusts. The only potential drawback is that if you like your headphones to have a certain tightness, you can’t perform that adjustment with the 99 Classics. But for me personally, the elastic tension headband worked like a charm. Above the elastic tension headband is a dual-arm aluminum arch that secures the ear cups. The aluminum arms sets the pressure of the ear cups against the side of your head. While it worked well, the aluminum headband did transfer noticeable vibration into the ear cups with even slight rubbing. I should also note that if you’re not careful, the cable will also induce noise when rubbing against your clothes. I don’t want to paint the picture that you have to be a statue to wear these. I used them while walking and even during light jogs. Everything was fine. I’m simply saying that the 99 Classics didn’t reject abrasion-induced noise as well as other headphones I’ve reviewed or own. The elastic headband expands to fit your head. There is no way to manually adjust the fit. Sitting down to listen to the 99 Classics was a revelation. My immediate reaction was, “Wow, these cans have some real bite!” Playing music was a dynamic, engaging experience. Playing “Claw Trucks” from the Mad Max: Fury Road soundtrack was like a clinic. It’s one of the few headphones I’ve listened to that has been able to unleash the raw, unadulterated attack of the instruments. When paired with the gorgeous-sounding QP1R, the bottom end was completely controlled, articulate, and authoritative. I don’t use those words lightly. The 99 Classics walnut ear cups with silver accents. The 99 Classics exhibited exceptional dynamics and brought just about every track to life. They could also slow down, mellow out, and reveal nuances and details in the music. When I turned on superbly recorded music such as Alexis Cole’s Dazzling Blue , recorded by Chesky Records, things just came to life. With complex orchestral pieces and even jazz tracks from Holly Cole or Patricia Barber, I found that the 99 Classics had an uncanny ability to lift up instruments that were seemingly recessed through other headphones. I’m not saying that this is better or more accurate. I’m simply saying that it was a noticeably different, but also euphonic, experience. The meticulous attention Antonio and his team paid to voicing the 99 Classics was obvious, and it pays off in spades. The Meze 99 Classics are stylish and exhibit superb attention to detail. I will also caution one final note. While the 99 Classics were easy to drive with just about any digital audio player or mobile phone I tried them with, they sounded different depending on which digital player I paired them with. That’s a compliment to the 99 Classics. Choose wisely. While $309 might seem expensive to some, the Meze 99 Classics are a downright bargain (Amazon's price is $50 higher for whatever reason). Their aesthetics, build quality, and sonic performance could easily command hundreds more. If you are serious about music, then don’t overlook the Meze 99 Classics. Easily and highly recommended. This story, "Meze 99 Classics headphone review: beautifully crafted cans" was originally published by TechHive . Theo Nicolakis Start your new computer off right with solid security tools, productivity software, and other programs... Got Apple Watch questions? Come on in. These graphically intense PC games dial the eye candy up to 11 -- and make your PC sweat while they're... Nvidia's chief executive says he's not phased by Google's new chip for machine learning, even though... So-called knowledge work hasn’t exactly led to a modern-day Industrial Revolution when it comes to how... Owners of WordPress-based websites should update the Jetpack plug-in as soon as possible because of a... 2016-05-30 03:00 Theo Nicolakis www.itnews.com

45 ... And other related duties IT pilot fish has worked for this major city's public school district for years, and by now he knows the ins and outs of all the systems -- technical and bureaucratic. "While originally hired to write a user manual for a system under development, I have been a Cobol and assembler programmer, a IBM systems programmer, Unix and network administrator, and just about everything in between," fish says. "Some time ago, the building facilities department put a small kitchen area in our office, where we had a microwave and coffee maker. They also added a deep kitchen sink. "One day I was at the sink, washing the dead insects off the visor on my motorcycle helmet. A fellow walking by -- a new manager who had just moved to our department from one of the schools -- looked at me and then asked if I should be doing that on 'company time.' "I kept scrubbing and replied, 'It's in my job description, under Other Related Duties.' "He gave me a blank look and said, 'In what way?' "I replied, 'I am de-bugging an important safety system.' "He walked away without another word, shaking his head. "And now he's the department head... "

2016-05-30 03:00 Sharky www.computerworld.com

46 Microservice architecture is agile software architecture Since the term “microservices” hit the software industry like a bolt of lightning in 2014, technical professionals of all stripes have been analyzing this new architectural style from their own frames of reference. Having lived through the rise and fall of service- oriented architecture, I had the same reaction as many others: How does microservice architecture differ from SOA? The more I learned about the case studies that led to the creation of the term “microservices,” the more I recognized that this question would not capture the essence of this new software movement. The first thing to recognize about the microservice movement is that it has been empirically defined. Microservice architecture emerged from a common set of patterns evident in companies like Amazon, Netflix, SoundCloud, and Gilt (now part of HBC Digital). Applications at these companies that were monolithic evolved over time into decomposed services that communicated via RESTful APIs and other network-based messaging protocols. However, the commonalities were not restricted to architectural patterns. The companies at the forefront of microservices also shared a common approach to software development, had similar organizational structures and cultural practices, and shared an affinity for cloud-based infrastructure and automation. Many companies that succeed with microservices have followed a similar progression driven by a desire for development speed and scalability. In early 2001, a group of software professionals published the Agile Manifesto as a statement of values on how to improve software development. Although the principles stated were not new -- they were a consolidation of ideas from extreme programming, scrum, lean, and more -- the unified voice caught the industry’s attention. Just as microservice architecture is frequently defined in contrast to monolithic architecture, the manifesto differentiates agile software development from “ documentation- driven, heavyweight software development processes.” The agile approach sought to remove the overhead and risk of large-scale software development by using smaller work increments, frequent iterations, and prototyping as a means of collaboration with users. The adoption of agile methods in the industry grew consistently following the publication of the manifesto. The spread of agile methods also led to the popularization of continuous integration (CI) in the software industry, a common practice from extreme programming. CI sought to combine software components as early in the lifecycle as possible in order to minimize the impact of code integration issues. However, many of the early agile adopters found that once they had removed the bottlenecks in the coding, they hit snags in releasing the software. These difficulties were only amplified by the popularization of SaaS as an increasingly preferred deployment option. To address the need for more frequent software releases, the practice of continuous delivery (CD) started to gain traction in 2006, taking the internal CI concept and applying it to the external view of software deliverables. CD takes scrum’s quality-focused “potentially shippable product increment” literally, defining a deployment pipeline to bring changes to production as quickly as possible. Virtualization and cloud computing removed technological barriers to CD, and new tools emerged to institutionalize CD practices. The combination of agile and CD was improving both the speed of production and the quality of the software produced. Still, there were bottlenecks. Agile’s primary scope was on the development of software, while CD extended that scope to include production deployment, an operations task. In most organizations, development and operations were consciously divided in both reporting and mission. In 2009, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond from Flickr gave an influential talk at the O’Reilly Velocity conference detailing how they had bridged this gap. From experiences like theirs, the devops movement arose to address this cultural divide. Organizations found that combining development and operations responsibilities in the same team led to highly effective continuous delivery practices. As collaboration increased between dev and ops, so did empathy. Developers designed solutions that included an operational perspective from the outset, and operations people used an engineering approach to tackle problems that were previously dealt with procedurally. Greater use of automation in day-to-day tasks resulted in greater system stability and resilience. Netflix's Simian Army approach to testing the resilience of production systems is an extreme example of this. The organizations that followed this "agile progression" -- from addressing software development to deployment to organizational structure -- now had alignment in these areas. Many of these agile pioneers were Web native and provided their software solutions in a single application stack. As the complexity and scale of their businesses increased, they found that this architecture not only became an impediment to new feature delivery, but caused stability issues due to brittleness and lack of scalability. In parallel, several companies -- such as SoundCloud -- discovered that breaking their monolithic applications into discrete, business-focused services was more suitable to their agile delivery methodology and devops culture. This is the true origin of microservice architecture. Microservices are the architectural phase of the agile progression. Microservices are the architectural phase of the agile progression. In a 2013 post on his blog “Coding the Architecture,” software architect Simon Brown speculated about what an agile software architecture would look like. He points out that an agile architecture does not naturally emerge from agile development practices. Rather, it must be consciously sought. Note that his description of agile software architecture is a perfect match for microservice architecture (emphases mine): Companies like Amazon, Netflix, SoundCloud, and Gilt encountered an architectural bottleneck when they reached a certain scale. This barrier motivated them to focus on the architecture, as Brown encourages, and they landed on microservices. There are important lessons to be gleaned from tracking this agile progression through to its architectural phase. First of all is that agile software development, continuous delivery, devops culture, and microservice architecture are all bound by a common set of goals: to be as responsive as possible to customer needs while maintaining high levels of software quality and system availability. Although these phases evolved in a particular order from the industry perspective, there is no right sequence for an individual organization to follow. For example, Amazon adopted an architecture that forced changes to its organization. By contrast, SoundCloud evaluated its delivery methodology and made changes to its team structure and architecture as a result. If you are evaluating how you can adopt microservices, it is important to understand where your organization is on the agile progression. Are you an agile shop? If so, who is looking after the architecture of your applications? If not, are you on a path to adopt agile practices? Do you have CD and deployment pipelines in place? What is the relationship between your development and operations teams, and who owns those responsibilities? Weighing the answers to these questions against your primary goals for adopting microservices will help you chart the right course to success that includes incremental wins along the way.

2016-05-30 03:00 Matt McLarty www.infoworld.com

47 Why I switched back to Firefox Remember when you ditched Firefox for Chrome and pinkie-swore you’d never go back? Yeah, me too. But recently I needed to test a web-based app in Firefox, so, with some hesitance, I took the plunge and installed it. I opened the browser, and saw a lean, minimalist user interface with cool, gray icons on the toolbar. But where was orange-y Firefox? Did I launch the wrong browser? Turns out, the good folks at Mozilla took their shrinking market share to heart and fought back with one of the most notably improved products I have seen in recent memory. Impressive performance improvements (Mozilla claims that Firefox is now the fastest of the top three browsers), a customizable menu and toolbar, 64-bit architecture, streamlined ‘reading’ view, and a way-better-than-Chrome-or-IE settings manager that could easily set a new standard. To continue reading this article register now Learn More Existing Users Sign In

2016-05-30 03:00 Susan Perschke www.infoworld.com

48 10 things we love about the new Firefox browser Remember when you ditched Firefox for Chrome and pinkie-swore you’d never go back? Yeah, me too. But recently I needed to test one of our Web-based apps in Firefox, so, with some hesitance, I took the plunge and installed it. Turns out, the good folks at Mozilla took their vanishing market share to heart and fought back with one of the most notably improved products I have seen in recent memory. Here are 10 things we love about Firefox. (Read the full story .) [ Also on InfoWorld: Why I switched back to Firefox . | Find out how Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE, and Opera measure up in the HTML5 shoot-out . | Get a digest of the day's top tech stories in the InfoWorld Daily newsletter . ] I opened the browser, and saw a lean, minimalist user interface with cool, gray icons on the toolbar. Mozilla claims that Firefox is now the fastest of the top three browsers. The new Firefox provides a clear, concise, simple way to customize your menu and toolbar. This is an option to view a streamlined version of the Web page you are on, eliminating videos, ads, and background images. The reading view allows you to get straight to the heart of the content, with no frills or distractions. I really appreciate the clean format for doing research and reading news, especially when traveling and needing to conserve bandwidth. In the new Firefox, the settings manager is a breeze to use. Firefox boasts excellent browsing privacy. Browsers like Chrome and IE are quite invasive, and seek to manage, or at least stealthily observe, as much of your online life as possible. Firefox takes a refreshing approach to Web privacy. It actually seeks to protect it. Many of the privacy settings are part of the private browsing feature. With private browsing enabled, Firefox operates in stealth mode, where no information, such as cookies, passwords, files, browsing history etc., is saved to the user’s computer. How often have you made a search on Amazon, only to see ads for the very product you searched for appear on websites afterwards? Tracking protection prevents this from occurring. You can essentially stay in private browsing mode by enabling the "do not track history" setting. There are a number of security add-ons for Firefox; one provides the option to allow browser scripts such as Java and JavaScript to run only from trusted sites to prevent cross-site scripting and other script-related attacks. Mozilla offers online support with quick solutions to common issues like how to optimize Firefox to work with specific sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, or how to run a Firefox Health Report, which provides information about your browser’s performance and stability over time. Another notable improvement is the move to 64-bit architecture, which Mozilla rolled out late in 2015. Although many older add-ons aren’t compatible with the new 64-bit version, the improved performance and fault tolerance far outweigh this minor inconvenience.

2016-05-30 03:00 Susan Perschke www.infoworld.com

49 49 New products of the week 5.30.16 Our roundup of intriguing new products. Read how to submit an entry to Network World's products of the week slideshow. Key features: The Actiance Platform addresses communications challenges for healthcare and pharmaceutical organizations in the midst of changing regulations by ensuring companies meet industry-specific data retention and security requirements. With the Actiance Platform for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, organizations can embrace new communications channels while protecting data and ensuring compliance. More info. Key features: Peekr is Aqua’s SaaS security scanner for Docker images. The API allows you to automate vulnerability management of Docker images. This version adds REST API access and Aqua increased its monthly quota to 50 scans per user, increasing its usefulness in automated environments. More info. Key Features: This Web site scans uploaded software for unpatched known vulnerabilities within open-source components of the code so they can be fixed. More info. Key features: Bomgar Connect is an easy-to-use, cloud-based remote support solution that enables SMBs to provide fast, reliable support to end- users and customers. Features screen sharing, remote control, file transfer, and chat technology. More info. Key features: Up to 2 years of ink included with 12 Super High-yield ink cartridges. Business-capable features include automatic two-sided printing, up to 20-sheet ADF, and wireless and mobile device connectivity. More info. Key features: The newest version of CloudBerry Backup offers the ability to restore both Windows Server system images and operations on Azure; and support for larger data backups to Azure. More info. Key features: Powered by Glint's AI-for-HR technology, Glint Action Planning empowers managers to better understand, plan, and execute the most effective responses to employee engagement challenges. More info. Key features: A new front end makes data integration, preparation, analytics and visualization a fluid, iterative process. Smart Execution adds the processing power of Spark without the technical complexity. More info. Key Features: Patented technology that allows organizations to reduce their Exchange journaling to just a single set of centralized or regional journal mailboxes without multiple journal mailboxes and archiving tasks in each location. The solution redistributes journal mail in a round-robin fashion, allowing messages for all users to be evenly distributed into a centralized mailbox set. Learn more. Key features: MH-CURE smartphone application provides major advances in enterprise-level clinical communications. MH-CURE integrates multiple capabilities, enabling clinicians to use one device/one application for all their communications and collaboration needs. More info. Key features: Better financial management from the ability to track and forecast future costs. Greater audit calculations clarity enabling smoother audits. Expanded reporting capabilities to better communicate SAM insight to wider organization. More info. Key features: enables third party risk monitors, security operations centers and threat researchers to use advanced threat scoring to make better decisions using actionable threat intelligence. More info. Key features: Nutanix Xpress is a hyper converged platform addressing the IT needs of smaller organizations through simplified deployment, management, and lower TCO, with support for the entire infrastructure stack. More info. Key features: lets you add ultra-fast, ultra-portable data storage to your USB-C enabled tablet or laptop, including MacBook, Chromebook Pixel and Dell XPS 12. This USB 3.1 Gen 2 drive enclosure features a built-in USB-C cable that makes it easy to connect a 2.5 in. SATA hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) to your computer through its USB-C port. More info. Key features – Dimension 2.1 means new reporting and management capabilities like a Subscription Services Dashboard, Policy Usage Report, and User Anonymization in the update of WatchGuard’s data visualization and reporting suite. More info. Key features: IRIS (the Intensified RAM Intelligent Server) is the first truly computational-defined storage solution, offered in three variations: IRIS Compute, IRIS Vault and IRIS Store. More info. Key features - Fireware 11.11, WatchGuard’s security-hardened operating system provides better network visibility for SMBs. IT pros can scan for rouge devices with Network Discovery and explore infected machines in real-time with Botnet Detection. More info. Key features: A secure, effective, remote, OOB console access solution for Gigabit Ethernet environments. Features 24 RJ45 serial ports, onboard v.92 modem with dialback security, plus monitoring, alarm and event logging functions. More info. Key features: The SXL-6500 is a highly-scalable, turn-key, rack-mount archive combining a powerful XenData SX-550 Series archive server and an Oracle SL150, an expandable robotic LTO-7 library. More info. Key features: Tenable Network Security unveiled new dashboards and Assurance Report Cards, helping customers act on key findings of Verizon’s 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report to enhance organizational security postures. More info. Key features : The Dell Wyse 3030 LT thin client offers organizations a highly secure, affordable solution with broad connectivity that can be easily scaled for deployments of all sizes. More info. Key features: An enterprise content management offering to enhance teamwork and collaboration, refining case management capabilities and extending business analytics. Further simplifies process optimization, and facilitates team communication and data-driven decision making. More info. Key features: Openprise Data Diagnostic is a free tool providing a quantitative assessment of the quality of companies’ marketing data in Marketo. It determines the data’s readiness for advanced, data-driven marketing initiatives. More info. Key features: Malwarebytes Breach Remediation for Mac removes malware and adware quickly and cleans OS X systems in less than a minute. Separate GUI and command line programs enable flexible deployment using popular Mac management solutions. More info. Key features: Fluid Analytics for Life Sciences turns massive volumes of data into actionable insights for faster, safer and more effective clinical operations, real world evidence analytics and clinical decisions. More info. Key features: Spirent Temeva is a new SaaS platform delivering three applications (TrafficCenter, MethodologyCenter and CloudStress) through a single platform to test, measure and validate next-generation networks and clouds. More info. Key features: The only true enterprise RPA platform offering centralized management of a digital workforce meeting needs of business operations and IT. It's also an execution engine for AI and Machine Learning. More info.

2016-05-30 02:57 Ryan Francis www.itworld.com

50 What you missed in tech last week: Updategate, Windows Phone woes, GoT piracy IT'S A BANK HOLIDAY in the UK so, while we're nursing our hangovers and watching re-runs of game shows, we've handily rounded up the top news from last week for you to catch up on. It wouldn't be a weekly news roundup without Microsoft making an appearance, and the company's Updategate saga continued. As well as the reappearance of KB3035583, aka GWX , Microsoft found itself in users' bad books after it was revealed that a sneaky trick, more than 30 years into its existence, saw the 'X' button becoming the one you click to signify 'Yes, I accept the upgrade'. The move provoked outrage and Microsoft made a surprise U-turn, saying in a statement: "We've added another notification that confirms the time of the scheduled upgrade and provides the customer an additional opportunity for cancelling or rescheduling the upgrade. " We've rounded up the top 10 stories from last week below. The Motorola Razr might be about to make a comeback Flipping hell Updategate: Microsoft uses technique to lure you to Windows 10 from the 'X' button Yes means yes. No means yes. Here means no. But only for eight hours. Possibly Apple's 12.9in iPad Pro can now run Windows 10 apps Thanks to Parallels Access 3.1 Google may have helped Foxconn give 60,000 jobs to robots The companies have been talking about it for a long time Project Ara: Google won't let you touch smartphone's processor, screen or RAM Because you ain't fussed, according to the firm HBO fails at beating piracy by leaking latest Game of Thrones episode itself HBO Norway may be due a flaying Windows Phone claimed just 0.7 per cent of global smartphone sales in Q1 But it could be worse, it could be BlackBerry Get out: celebrity WhatsApp Gold for proles is a scam Don't make an ass of yourself Alphabet boss Eric Schmidt admits he uses an iPhone 6S But it's OK cos he thinks the battery life is crap BT's 5.6Tbps fibre breakthrough would let you download 200 HD films in one second But it's probably not going to be available to customers anytime soon

2016-05-30 00:00 www.theinquirer.net

51 MediaTek's Pump Express 3.0 charges a smartphone from 0 to 70 in 20 minutes Those hour-long waits to get your phone charged enough to leave the house may soon be a thing of the past -- if your smartphone is powered by a new MediaTek processor, that is. MediaTek says its new processors will allow users to charge their phones from 0 percent battery to 70 percent in 20 minutes. The feature, called Pump Express 3.0, will only be available at the end of the year, and will be available on the MediaTek Helio P20 and future smartphone chipsets. The Taiwanese company also claims its USB-C charging technology is the first in the world to directly charge the battery, bypassing charging circuitry to avoid overheating the phone. 2016-05-30 00:00 Aloysius Low www.cnet.com

52 Veterans bootstrap the transition from battlefield to tech The vet-turned-tech- entrepreneur oversees a program at LinkedIn designed to raise the profiles of veterans using the social network for business professionals. A typical day includes analyzing veteran member data and taking meetings with federal officials or veterans groups to increase awareness of LinkedIn's programs. But there are military men and women who have experience in tech, including working with high-tech intelligence systems, satellites, robotics, drones and cyberdefense, often in stressful environments that their civilian counterparts don't have to deal with. "They are able to thrive in organizational settings," Call said, adding that tech training in the military is becoming standard. Veterans' attention to detail, leadership and teamwork makes them appealing to tech companies, he said. Between 2007 and 2011, an estimated 200,000 veterans transitioned each year from the military to civilian life due to retirement or completing their tour of duty, according to the Department of Defense. Also, an estimated 1.5 million veterans, many who have spent time in either Iraq or Afghanistan, will be looking for jobs within the next five years, according to the US Department of Labor. About a quarter of them will land in the tech industry, Webster estimates. Similar findings prompted Webster, a former senior manager at Sun Microsystems and the daughter of a soldier who served in the Korean War, to seek changes. VIT has now expanded to 10 cities nationwide, including New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC. "Veterans know how to apply all of the technical traits they learned on the battlefield," Webster said. "They're also not afraid of taking risks. " Ben Vickery, who attended a Vets in Tech session last week in San Francisco, agrees. The former Marine Corps sergeant served as a linguist in Afghanistan and now works on financial automation at Google. He has some ideas he might want to apply to the "gig economy" -- think companies like Lyft and Uber -- and was looking for guidance and inspiration from vets-turned- entrepreneurs. "I've heard so many horror stories about people who have a good idea but ruin it by not understanding when to incorporate, when to hire and when to get financing," he said. VIT was recognized as one of more than 40 tech, aerospace and telecommunications organizations committed to training or hiring more than 110,000 vets and their spouses over the next five years. Amazon plans to hire 25,000 during that time. The strategy to hire more vets in tech and other industries is apparently working, according to a survey of more than 2.1 million veteran and military members on LinkedIn, which will be released Tuesday. Highlights include the fact that the rate of unemployed veterans is at 3.9 percent, 1 percentage point less than the nation's overall unemployment rate and that IT is the number one industry for vets. Networking is key: Vets have 26 percent more connections than nonveterans on LinkedIn. Also, more than 180,000 professionals who are veterans have identified themselves either as an executive, president, vice president, owner or partner of a business, LinkedIn's survey said. Call believes this is just the beginning of more veterans joining the ranks of the employed. "We're seeing a drastic change," he said. "Our goal is to drive that unemployment rate for veterans down to zero. "

2016-05-30 00:00 Terry Collins www.cnet.com

53 53 Apple's plan to sell used iPhones in India officially gets rejected If Apple wants to bolster its presence in India, it will have to find ways other than selling old iPhones. "We are not in favour of any company selling used phones in the [country], however certified they may be," she said. Selling refurbished iPhones would have allowed Apple to offer its iconic smartphone at a dramatically lower price point without sacrificing its premium branding. Fortunately for Apple, there is some good news when it comes to opening its own stores in India, its other big strategy in the country. The finance ministry recently told Apple that if it wished to open stores in the country, it would have to sell at least 30 percent locally-sourced goods. Sitharaman noted that she was in talks with the finance ministry to reconsider offering Apple a waiver from these local sourcing rules.

2016-05-30 00:00 Manish Singh www.cnet.com

54 Asus ZenFone 3 Family Includes Unibody ‘Deluxe’ With Invisible Antennas, Snapdragon 820, 6GB RAM | HotHardware Starting off with the range-topping model, we have the ZenFone 3 Deluxe which sports an aluminum unibody design with absolutely no antenna lines. How Asus managed to beat competitors like HTC and Apple to the punch (which use unibody designs with plastic antenna lines) remains to be seen. The ZenFone 3 Deluxe features a large 5.7-inch Super AMOLED display with a Full HD resolution. While some may be disappointed by the absence of a QHD screen, it should result in better battery life. Powering the smartphone is a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with up to 6GB of RAM, and you’ll find Adreno 530 graphics and an integrated Qualcomm X12 LTE modem. Other features include a 23MP main camera (Sony IMX318 sensor) with f/2.0 lens and optical image stabilization, a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor, and a USB 3.0 Type-C port with Quick Charge 3.0 support. Moving on, the ZenFone 3 sits a little lower on the specs ladder with its 5.5- inch Full HD display. Unlike the ZenFone 3 Deluxe with its metal unibody design, the ZenFone 3 opts for 2.5D Gorilla Glass on the front and back of the device. Processing duties are handled by a Snapdragon 625 processor with 4GB of RAM, while additional features include a 16MP rear camera with Asus TriTech autofocus and a rear-mounted fingerprint sensor. The final member of Asus’ new smartphone family is the ZenFone 3 Ultra. This smartphone features a massive 6.8-inch Full HD display, which would make holding the device up to your head for phone calls looks positively comical. The ZenFone 3 Ultra also features a unibody design that ditches the antenna lines and uses the same 23MP Sony image sensor for its rear camera as the ZenFone 3 Deluxe. The ZenFone 3 Ultra is powered by a Snapdragon 652 processor with 4GB of RAM and uses a huge 4,600 mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0 support. The ZenFone 3, ZenFone 3 Ultra and ZenFone 3 Deluxe are priced at $249, $479 and $499 respectively.

2016-05-30 00:00 hothardware.com

55 iOS 10 features: the top 10 things we want to see IT'S JUST TWO WEEKS until iOS 10 will make its debut at WWDC on 13 June. If rumours are anything to go by, iOS 10 won't have too many surprises, and Apple is reportedly planning to showcase updates to Siri and a new and improved Apple Music application. That's not enough to get us excited, so we've rounded up the top 10 features that we think, and hope, Apple will include in iOS 10. 10. Manual camera controls The iPhone camera is fine, but the lack of manual camera controls that allow the user to set their own preferences is a pain, especially as most rivals offer this. Apple should change this with iOS 10 to include more controls natively in the camera app to adjust things like white balance, aperture and the type of photo you’re taking: portrait, sport, night time and so on. These could be easily turned off for those happy with quick and easy snapping, but this would be a nice addition for those keen on getting the most from their device and one long missing from iOS. 9. Easier batch photo upload to emails Emailing photos has long been a chore on the iPhone, and Apple has yet to listen to the desperate pleas of users who are sick of the laborious process and of being limited to five images per email. There are some complicated workarounds out there, but surely technology has advanced far enough in the past nine years that the iPhone can handle sending more than five images at once? What’s more, it seems odd that there’s no option to attach images while in Apple’s native Mail app. Instead, you need to do so via the Photos application. 8. Third-party Siri integration Siri is pretty useful, especially with ability to use it hands free on the new models. However, its inability to work with other apps is a shame and something we’d love to see. It may take some time for developers to get their apps ready for this, but that’s what WWDC is for. Imagine if you could open Spotify and start a playlist from the other side of the room? Or ask Siri to open Facebook and post a status update? Or even open an app to make a booking or reservation? 7. Redesigned volume controls There’s something very un-Apple about the fact that the volume control interface appears right in the middle of the screen, often obscuring the thing you’re watching as you adjust the volume. It would not seem too much of a design overhaul to move it to the side with a more subtle, but equally easy to use, interface that didn’t get in the way of what you’re watching. 6. More/downloadable live wallpapers One of the less talked about features of iOS is that it comes with Live Wallpapers, allowing you to set dynamic backgrounds as your Lock or Home screen. This was boosted with the launch of the iPhone 6S with the addition of support for setting Live Photos as wallpaper, but iPhone 6 owners are still left with Apple’s pre-loaded options, of which there are only seven. These are also all exactly the same, albeit with a different colour scheme. We hope iOS 10 brings the option to download more, and that Apple will launch an HTC-style store where you can find yourself a snazzy new dynamic background. Sure, there are some apps in the iTunes Store that offer downloadable Live Wallpapers but most of them are also full of nasty ads .

2016-05-30 00:00 www.theinquirer.net

56 AMD Radeon RX 480 Polaris GPU Caught Running Doom At 1440p | HotHardware Time and again we've talked about there not being any mulligans on the Internet— once you put something on social media, it's there to stay even if you delete your post. An AMD executive is finding this out after a deleted Twitter posted continues to make the rounds. More specifically, it's the picture he posted of an unannounced Radeon RX 480 running Doom at 1440p that's gaining traction. The post is no longer on Twitter, but the accompanying picture lives on. It was taken at a "Polaris Tech Day" event in Macau in which select members of the press got a sneak peek at Polaris , AMD's next generation GPU architecture built on a 14nm FinFET manufacturing process. The hope is that Polaris will bring parity to NVIDIA's Pascal architecture That will be no easy feat, Polaris is kicking all kinds of tail right now in the form of the GeForce GTX 1080 and GeForce GTX 1070 , both of which are faster than a Titan X and cost less. But lest we forget about AMD's presence in the graphics sector, the aforementioned picture hints that Polaris packs a punch. First things first—the monitor in the picture is a Lenovo Y27F. That's a Full HD 1080p monitor with FreeSync support and the ability to run at a 144Hz refresh rate. If that's the case, how can the demo run at 1440p? It's most likely using AMD's Virtual Super Resolution feature, which allows games to render at higher resolutions than a monitor supports. AMD usually prices its X80 cards in the $250 to $300. By showing off the Radeon RX 480, there's a good chance AMD will initially target the middle tier with Polaris, not the high end. And if the Radeon RX 480 is able to maintain 60 frames per second at 1440p in Doom, you can expect the performance of its next mid-range part to be on par with its current Radeon R9 390 or a Radeon R9 Nano. That's not a bad scenario, either for AMD or gamers.

2016-05-30 00:00 hothardware.com

57 AMD's gaming-optimized AMDGPU-PRO driver for Linux is in beta AMD has been working on a new Linux graphics driver stack , and it’s finally becoming usable. You can install the gaming-optimized AMDGPU-PRO driver on Ubuntu 16.04 today, and Valve just added it to the latest beta version of SteamOS. Traditionally, there were two AMD graphics drivers on Linux. When you installed your Linux distribution of choice, you got the default “Radeon” driver. This driver was completely open-source so it could easily be distributed and developers could help improve it and keep it compatible with the latest software. It was perfectly fine for basic desktop use and very light gaming. But it was slower than AMD’s gaming-optimized driver when it came to 3D gaming. AMD also provided a driver known as “fglrx.” This driver is completely closed-source, so you had to install it after installing your Linux distribution. AMD’s developers have struggled to keep it compatible with the latest Linux kernel and graphical X server. It's more optimized for gaming and provides faster graphical 3D performance, but has its own unique bugs. Even new driver releases like “Radeon Software Crimson” for Linux are still based on fglrx, which is why they’re so disappointing. With AMDGPU, AMD has gone for a hybrid approach. The core driver, known as AMDGPU, is open source. Developers can work on and improve it, and it can come with your Linux distribution. In fact, Ubuntu 16.04 already ships AMDGPU. AMD is also providing a binary package known as AMDGPU-PRO. This is a closed-source component that enables more optimized 3D performance in games. It effectively plugs into the underlying open-source driver. This means that AMD is really just working on one driver, and improvements the open-source community makes to the underlying driver will also help AMD’s closed-source driver. Nvidia hardware is still split between an open-source and separate closed- source driver, but Nvidia has traditionally done a better job of supporting its closed-source driver. Yes, there’s still a closed-source component. AMD and Nvidia both seem to believe this is necessary. It may be for a variety of reasons—the source code may include code licensed from other companies that can’t be open- sourced, for example. Or AMD and Nvidia may both want to hide their optimizations so their competitors can’t look at and copy them. AMDGPU-PRO is still in beta, which is why Ubuntu recommends sticking with Ubuntu 14.04 if you’re a Linux gamer with AMD graphics. But you can try AMDGPU-PRO today, if you have the hardware. AMD offers a download page where you can download the AMDGPU-PRO driver for Ubuntu 16.04. At the moment, only Ubuntu 16.04 is supported. Its installation guide will help you install the beta driver on your Ubuntu system by entering the appropriate commands. It’s a bit of work at the moment, but there should be an easier way to get this driver when it’s stable. This driver will also appear in more Linux distributions going forward. Valve just added it to the beta of SteamOS 2.80. This driver also enables Vulkan support for supported AMD GPUs on Linux, which is a big deal for SteamOS. Bear in mind that this driver isn’t yet compatible with anywhere near as many AMD graphics processors as the older driver is. At the moment, AMD says the driver is only compatible with AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, R9 Fury, R9 Nano, R9 M395X, R9 380X, R9 380, and R9 285 graphics processors. Eventually, AMD plans to support hardware going back to the GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” GPUs—that’s the Radeon HD 7000 series and newer. Older hardware won’t be supported with the AMDGPU driver.

2016-05-30 00:00 Chris Hoffman www.pcworld.com

58 ARM Details Built on ARM Cortex Technology License As part of today's announcements, we're able to provide more information on ARM's new "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" license. The license was first officially revealed in ARM's quartely financial call back in February, however at the time the company wasn't ready to talk about the exact details of this new license. We covered ARM's business and licensing models back a few years ago in a dedicated article which goes into more depth what kind of options vendors have when deciding to license an ARM IP. ARM likes to represent the licensing model in a pyramid shape with increasing cost and involvement the higher you get on the pyramid. Until now vendors had two main choices: Use one of the various available Cortex licenses, or get an architectural license and develop one's own microarchitecture based on ARM's ISA. The former licensing options varied depending on what kind of engagement and deployment a vendor is looking for. Lead licensees for example get early access to new microarchitectures but also have to pay more for this access and it's possible that they will have to deal with still immature toolkits and documentation, both which would then require more invovement and investment on their part. Vendors who are willing to wait a bit more or who aren't looking in an as deep engagement are able to use some of the cheaper licenses and more mature tools and documentation. The common limitation of all current Cortex licenses however is that a vendor is not able to change any aspect of the microarchitecture. If a customer needed a feature that ARM's cores didn't provide, they had to go with an architectural license and develop their own microarchitecture from scratch. Currently examples of such licensees with shipping custom microarchitectures include Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung. The new license being detailed today is the "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" license, which is quite a mouthfull and will unofficially refer to as "Built on Cortex"/BoC from here on. The new BoC license represents a new "tip of the pyramid" for Cortex licenses with even greater engagement than that of lead licensees. The new license allows vendors to request changes of an ARM microarchitecture and use this customized IP in their products. The way this works is that basically ARM provides its engineering and design services to the vendor who wants a certain aspect of an "off-the-shelf" Cortex design customized. Under the license's terms, ARM still owns and controls the IP, however the changes requested for that particular vendor's design is not shared or made available to other vendors. An example of a customization that a vendor would be able to request is the instruction window size. An increase in the instruction window size would increase the IPC of a microarchitecture, however this can cause higher area and power which would need to be compensated by more implementation work by the vendor. While ARM didn't want to go into details of what other customization options a vendor would have, they say that it will have a rather limited scope and things such as altering decoder width or changing the execution resources of a microarchitecture are beyond the scope of the license. In general, it seems more that the license is meant to allow vendors to tweak and configure the knobs on some aspects of a microarchitecture rather than do significant changes to the way the µarch works. What is in my view the most important and controversial aspect of the new license is that it allows vendors full branding freedom on this customized CPU design. This means that a Built on Cortex licensee is free to give the resulting new core any name it sees fit. We'll however still be able to differentiate the core from a full custom microarchitecture as ARM still requires a disclaimer / footnote / subtitle with the "Built on ARM Cortex Technology" phrase. In February ARM disclosed that Qualcomm is the first costumer signed up for this license, and what this means for the Snapdragon SoC lineup is currently still unclear. If this new licensing model will be able to allow vendors to truly differentiate their products beyond just the marketing aspect is something we won't know until the first designs come out and will be tested, and until then, the verdict on ARM's new license is still open.

2016-05-29 23:00 Andrei Frumusanu www.anandtech.com

59 The ARM Cortex A73 - Artemis Unveiled It’s only been a little over a year since we had a good look into ARM’s Cortex A72 presented at ARM’s TechDay event in London. Over the span of this year we’ve seen various vendors not only announce SoCs with the new core IP but actually deliver devices in high volume. HiSilicon’s Kirin 950/955 definitely left a long- standing impression on the industry by providing incredible power efficiency gains while continuing to improve performance. Fast-forward to 2016. Another year, another TechDay, this time from ARM’s brand-new offices in Austin Texas. So for today we have the pleasure to have a very deep look at ARM’s new Artemis CPU microarchitecture: The Cortex A73 is ARM’s new premium mobile CPU micro-architecture meant to succeed the Cortex A72 in consumer segments. Before we dive into details of the new CPU, it’s important to try understand and recap ARM’s CPU recent microarchitectures released the last few years. The Cortex A9 was an incredibly important design for ARM as, in my view, it provided the corner-stone for SoC and device vendors to create some of the designs that powered some of the most successful devices that brought with them a turning-point in smartphone performance and experience. Apple’s A5, Samsung’s Exynos 4210/4412, and TI OMAP4430/4460 were all SoCs which made the A9 a very successful CPU micro-architecture. Following the Cortex A9 we saw the introduction of the Cortex A15. The core was a substantial jump in terms of performance as it provided the single largest IPC improvement in ARM’s Cortex A-profile of application processors. While the A15 represented a large performance boost, it came at significant cost in terms of power efficiency and overall power usage. It took some time for the Cortex A15 to establish itself in the mobile space as the first designs such as the Exynos 5250 and 5410 failed to impress due to bad power efficiency due to various issues. It’s at this point where ARM introduced big. LITTLE with the argument that one can have the best of both worlds, a high-power performant core together with a low-power high-efficiency core. It was not until late 2014 and 2015 did we finally see some acceptable implementations of A15 big. LITTLE solutions such as the Kirin 920 or Exynos 5422. The Cortex A57 succeeded the Cortex A15 and was ARM’s first “big” core to employ ARMv8 64-bit ISA. Accompanied by the high-efficiency Cortex A53 cores this represented an important shift not unlike the x86-64 introduction in the desktop PC space well over a decade before. The cores came at a moment where the industry was still at shock of Apple’s introduction of the A7 SoC and Cyclone CPU micro-architecture, beating ARM in terms delivering the first 64-bit ARMv8 silicon. Suddenly everybody in the industry was playing catch-up in trying to bring their own 64-bit products as it was seen as an absolutely required feature-check to remain competitive. This pressured shift to 64-bit was in my view a crippling blow to many 2015’s SoCs as it forced vendors into employing sub-optimal Cortex A57 and A53 designs. HiSilicon and MediaTek saw an actual regression in performance as flagship SoCs such as the Kirin 930 and Helio X10 had to make due with only A53 cores for performance as they decided against employing A57 cores due to power consumption concerns. The Kirin 930 or the X10 were in effect slower chipsets than their predecessors. Only Samsung was fairly successful in releasing reasonable designs such as the Exynos 5433 and Exynos 7420 – yet these had respectively regressed or barely improved in terms of power efficiency when compared to mature Cortex A15 implementations such as the Exynos 5430. Then of course we had sort of a lost generation of devices due to Qualcomm’s unsuccessful Snapdragon 810 and 808 SoCs, a topic we’ll eventually revisit in our deep dive of the Snapdragon 820 and Exynos 8890. Some readers will notice I left out the Cortex A12 and A17 – and I did that on purpose in trying to get to my point. The Cortex A12 was unveiled in July 2013 and presented as a successor to the Cortex A9. The core had a relatively short lifetime as it was quickly replaced within 6 months with the Cortex A17 in February 2014 which improved performance and also made the core big. LITTLE compatible with the Cortex A7. The Cortex A17 saw limited adoption in the mobile space. In fact, among the few SoCs such as Rockchip’s RK3288 and some little known chips such as HiSilicon’s Hi3536 multimedia SoC, it was only MediaTek’s MT6595 that saw moderate success in design wins such as Meizu’s MX4. The MT6595 was actually an outstanding performer for its time delivering among the highest power efficiency while still providing excellent performance thanks to its 2.2GHz clock, all while competing with SoCs which had manufacturing node advantages. Unfortunately the Meizu MX4 suffered from some questionable hardware component choice and software decisions which ended up handicapping the device when it came to real- world battery life and performance. The overall impression of the MT6595 left me asking myself how the device ecosystem would have evolved if vendors hadn’t insisted on moving onto the 64-bit architectures but rather had chosen to adopt A17-based designs. It looked like the A17 wouldn’t have had much issues in scaling in clock and power and would have represented the better alternative for flagship devices until the new A72 and FinFET manufacturing processes became available. Having finished my tangent on my view of ARM’s microarchitecture history, it’s time to get to the main story today, and that’s the new Artemis microarchitecture used in the Cortex A73. As ARM releases more and more microarchitectures with product names that often don't represent the evolution of a given microarchitecutre, it can get complicated when talking about successors to certain designs. I reached out to ARM to see if there's a more fitting terminology when refering to designs that a clearly related to one-another, and in fact it seems there is. For example, the A15, A57, A72 all belong to the Austin family of microarchitectures, and as one would have guessed from the name, this is because they originated from ARM's Austin CPU design centre. The A5, A7 and A53 belong to the Cambridge family while the Cortex A12, A17 and today's new A73 belong to the Sophia family, owning its name to the small city of Sophia-Antipolis which houses one of Europe's largest technology parks as well as ARM's French CPU design centre. Refering to their design location is however not enough to disambiguate microprocessor families, as we'll see completely new designs come out from each R&D center. In fact, this has already happened as the A12/17/73 can be seen as a new generation over the preceding the A9 microarchitecture and as such can be referred to as a "second generation Sophia family". This is an important notion to consider as in the future we'll be seeing completely new microarchitectures come out of ARM's various design teams. The Cortex A73 being still in the same Sophia family effectively means the design is very much a 64-bit successor to the Cortex A17. The new core effectively inherits some of the main characteristics of its predecessor such as overall µarch philosophy as well as higher-level pipeline elements and machine width. And herein lies the biggest surprise of the Cortex A73 as a A72 successor: Instead of choosing to maintain A72’s 3-wide, or increase the microarchitecture’s decoder width, ARM opted to instead go back to a 2-wide decoder such as found on the current Sophia family. Yet the A73 positions itself a higher-performance and lower-power design compared to the larger A72. ARM has recognized that power efficiency is a top priority for today’s smartphones. Two words that kept being repeated during the TechDay presentation was “sustained performance”. Performance of today’s mobile devices, and especially smartphones, is limited by their thermal envelope. The thermal envelope is the amount of heat that the body of the device is able to absorb and dissipate until it reaches an equilibrium state. We’ve covered this extensively in recent reviews when testing the amount of time that a device is able to sustain its peak performance before it has to throttle its speed in order to maintain safe and comfortable operating temperatures. In the past this has been mainly a problem during heavy 3D workloads when SoCs dissipate power at the limits and often exceeding the thermal capabilities of the devices they’re employed in. With some exception the vast majority of today’s flagships are not able to maintain their peak performance for more than a few minutes, and this can be felt in everyday use-cases and can hinder a device’s experience. Over the last 2 generations this has been of especially grave concern as we’ve seen CPUs with peak power regularly exceeding 5W and some problematic SoCs reaching well into 10W+ figures. It’s imperative that the industry resolves these power and power efficiency concerns as device vendors continue to strive for thinner and lighter smartphone designs. SoCs such as the Kirin 950 which display excellent thermal characteristics must become the norm for the ecosystem to evolve and advance. ARM understands this and that is why the Cortex A73’s main focus is power efficiency and sustained peak performance. ARM felt that it could achieve these goals with a 2-wide design by improving various aspects of the micro-architecture while still maintaining the same IPC of the Cortex A72.

2016-05-29 23:00 Andrei Frumusanu www.anandtech.com

60 Microsoft's Satya Nadella follows Apple’s Tim Cook to India Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella is visiting India, reflecting the growing importance of the country as a market for multinational technology companies. Nadella’s visit follows the first trip to India by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who visited the country this month to drum up support for the company’s plans to offer refurbished iPhones in the price-sensitive market as well as to get permission to set up its wholly-owned stores in the country. Both deals appear to have been blocked by regulators , according to reports. While Apple was largely seen as lacking focus on India until recently, when its China revenue fell 11 percent, while iPhone sales in India grew 56 percent year-on-year in the last quarter, Microsoft has been a long-time player in the Indian market. It announced in September last year the availability of Microsoft Azure services from local datacenter regions in the country, followed by Office 365 and CRM Online services. The public cloud services market in India is projected to grow 30.4 percent in 2016 to US$1.26 billion, according to Gartner. With the local cloud services offered by Microsoft, regulated industries such as the banking and financial services industries, government departments and state-owned enterprises will be able to keep their data on servers within the country. During his one-day visit to India, which a Microsoft spokeswoman described as part of a tour of some Asian countries, India-born Nadella will meet with customers, startups and developers, apart from addressing CEOs at an event hosted by industry association, Confederation of Indian Industry. An issue that is likely to surface during Nadella’s visit, his third since taking charge as CEO, will be Microsoft’s bid to provide connectivity to rural areas on vacated TV spectrum. That move has run into opposition from mobile service providers who want the spectrum to be auctioned. Besides its sales and marketing operation, Microsoft also does global product development, support and research in the country.

2016-05-29 19:50 John Ribeiro www.computerworld.com

Total 60 articles. Created at 2016-05-30 18:03