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Total 80 articles, created at 2016-03-18 12:01 1 Surface Book review Microsoft's Surface Book is a clever piece of kit but does that make it worthy of the

(2.00/3) "ultimate laptop" crown?,Laptops,Portable,Tablets ,Microsoft,Surface Book,laptop,tablet,Windows 10,Surface Pen,Surface,Microsoft Surface 2016-03-18 12:01 929Bytes www.computing.co.uk 2 Microsoft Edge Gains Extension Support And Pinned Tabs In Latest Preview Build

(2.00/3) This, well, this has been a long time coming. Windows 10 launched officially on July 29, 2015, and with it... 2016-03-18 06:03 3KB www.anandtech.com

(2.00/3) 3 New Stagefright exploit puts millions of Android devices at risk Millions of Android devices are at risk yet again after researchers found a new way to exploit an older vulnerability that was previously patched by Google. 2016-03-17 19:24 3KB www.itworld.com 4 Apple's hybrid cloud plan: Google, AWS, Microsoft Azure like most companies Apple is diversifying its infrastructure-as-a-service footprint with Google along with (2.00/3) Amazon Web Services. Repeat after me: Every enterprise will have multiple cloud infrastructure providers. 2016-03-17 14:03 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 5 Exasol shrinks its in-memory database onto an Intel NUC for proof-of-concept analytics work Free edition of Exasol's in-memory database designed to run on a single server or PC for big-data pilot projects,Big Data and Analytics ,Intel,Exasol,Big Data Summit,in-memory database,Big Data 2016-03-18 12:01 3KB www.computing.co.uk 6 Nine out of 10 UK CIOs 'concerned' about EU's new data protection laws Organisations face fines of up to four per cent of global turnover under new EU data protection laws,Leadership,Legislation and Regulation,Security ,CIO,GDPR 2016-03-18 12:01 2KB www.computing.co.uk 7 Half of organisations would struggle to get mission-critical systems up-and-running in hours following a disaster - UPDATED Computing research: organisations fear terrorism almost as much as flooding,Security,Leadership ,security,Disaster Recovery,Business Continuity,Fujitsu 2016-03-18 12:01 969Bytes www.computing.co.uk 8 Five things to expect from Apple's imminent iPhone launch All the rumours about Apple's 21 March launch in one handy place,Hardware,Mobile Phones,Communications ,Apple,iPhone 2016-03-18 12:01 2KB www.computing.co.uk 9 The data scientist - a role dissected Computing research investigates whether a data scientist is really any different from a data analyst, data engineer or BI specialist,Big Data and Analytics ,Big Data,Big Data Summit,data science,data scientist,Analytics 2016-03-18 12:01 893Bytes www.computing.co.uk 10 Microsoft SharePoint 2016 and Project Server 2016 released to manufacturing Latest version of Microsoft's collaboration platform is now integrated with Project Server,Business Software,Applications ,Microsoft,SharePoint,project management,collaboration 2016-03-18 12:01 3KB www.computing.co.uk

11 CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch's ambitious plan to bring FTTP to 100 UK towns and cities - and beat BT in the process Firm's £90m acquisition of Kcom in December has made it a force to be reckoned with in the broadband space,Telecoms ,BT 2016-03-18 12:01 807Bytes www.computing.co.uk 12 Budget 2016: Osborne announces moves to boost broadband, coding, 5G and driverless cars Chancellor also unveils initiatives that should help smaller tech companies and start-ups ,Budgets and Investment,Strategy,Careers and Skills ,5G,Driverless cars,Budget 2016-03-18 12:01 924Bytes www.computing.co.uk 13 Rural Payments Agency chief: GDS and Defra didn't listen to warnings that CAP project was failing 'I was not in a position to have my opinion prevail,' says RPA's Mark Grimshaw,Government,Leadership ,Government,Agriculture,Public sector 2016-03-18 12:01 2KB www.computing.co.uk 14 LinkedIn being used as a 'front door' to phishing attacks Computing's research reveals phishing is the top threat to businesses, and is increasing in severity, while attacks use novel methods to make potential victims feel comfortable before sending their payloads,Hacking,Business Software ,Mimecast,phishing,Cyber security,email,LinkedIn 2016-03-18 12:01 4KB www.computing.co.uk 15 If you have less than a petabyte of data you don't need Hadoop 'Use it when you need it but when you don't, don't bother,' says Vincent de Lagabbe, CTO of bitcoin analysis firm Kaiko ,Big Data and Analytics ,Cassandra,Apache Software,Apache Spark,Hadoop,Bitcoin 2016-03-18 12:01 3KB www.computing.co.uk 16 TfL CIO Steve Townsend on the Internet of Things, Big Data, chief digital officers and reporting into marketing Townsend explains how 'customer experience' has meant he has had to change his reporting line and investigate the use of IoT,Leadership,Internet of Things,Big Data and Analytics ,CIO,TfL 2016-03-18 12:01 973Bytes www.computing.co.uk 17 EUV Lithography Makes Good Progress, Still Not Ready for Prime Time At the recent annual SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Intel, TSMC and other leading semiconductor companies said that significant strides have been made in... 2016-03-18 08:40 14KB www.anandtech.com 18 Lattice and MediaTek to Collaborate On Reference Smartphones For SuperMHL over USB-C Lattice Semiconductor and MediaTek have joined forces to create reference smartphones with 4K video outputs using USB Type-C connectors and cables. The outputs... 2016-03-18 08:16 3KB www.anandtech.com 19 NVIDIA Announces GameWorks SDK 3.1 Innovation is hard work. Doing work that has already been done elsewhere can be satisfying, but also annoying - no-one wants... 2016-03-18 08:16 2KB www.anandtech.com 20 Best Tablets: Q1 2016 The last time we updated our tablet guide was right around the Christmas shopping season. We haven't seen many tablet launches since then... 2016-03-18 08:16 12KB www.anandtech.com

21 Logitech Announces G610 Orion Brown And G610 Orion Red Mechanical Keyboards Today Logitech unveiled two new mechanical keyboards under their G branding, with the G610 Orion Brown and G610 Orion Red. As I’m sure... 2016-03-18 08:16 2KB www.anandtech.com 22 AMD Unveils GPU Architecture Roadmap: After Polaris Comes Vega Although AMD’s GDC 2016 “Capsaicin” event was primarily focused on game development – it is the Game Developers Conference, after all – AMD did... 2016-03-18 08:16 3KB www.anandtech.com 23 How Yahoo Keeps Trying to Reinvent Itself Yahoo is under more pressure than ever to increase returns for investors. Here's a look at steps CEO Marissa Mayer has taken to reinvent Yahoo. 2016-03-18 09:26 1KB www.eweek.com 24 'Game of Thrones' meets Dr. Seuss in 'Oh, The Places It'll Snow' This mashup of the classic Dr. Seuss book "Oh, the Places You'll Go" and the violent fantasy world of Westeros makes for a whimsical take on the very adult "Game of Thrones" TV series. 2016-03-18 00:07 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 25 Razer Unveils The Updated Razer Blade: Chroma Keyboard, Skylake, And A Lower Price The 2015 Razer Blade was a nice evolution in the history of Razer’s 14-inch gaming notebook lineup. This 0... 2016-03-18 05:21 4KB www.anandtech.com 26 Sony to Start Selling PlayStation VR in October for $399 Sony has published the price of its PlayStation VR virtual reality headset and confirmed its final specifications and launch timeframe on Tuesday. The company... 2016-03-18 05:21 4KB www.anandtech.com 27 The Corsair Strafe RGB Mechanical Keyboard Review with MX Silent (Red) Switches Cherry's MX Silent switches are making their debut on the Corsair Strafe RGB gaming mechanical keyboard. Corsair has the exclusive on the MX... 2016-03-18 05:21 3KB www.anandtech.com 28 Kishonti Announces GFXBench 5 Aztec Ruins At GDC Today the 2016 Game Developers Conference kicked off, and Kishonti hasn't wasted any time in announcing the latest version of their GFXBench benchmark... 2016-03-18 08:16 2KB www.anandtech.com 29 Hands On With the Retail Oculus Rift: Countdown to Launch By far the dominant theme at GDC 2016 has been virtual reality. If you’re not a hardware vendor directly creating VR products, then... 2016-03-18 08:16 2KB www.anandtech.com 30 Intel's Skull Canyon NUC is Official: $650, Shipping In May Back in January, Intel had provided us with information about the Skull Canyon NUC based on a Skylake H-Series CPU(with Iris Pro... 2016-03-18 08:16 1KB www.anandtech.com

32 VRScore: Crytek and Basemark Announce New Benchmark Release Virtual Reality has definitely been playing the slow and steady race for a while now. Thankfully, with the approach of consumer VR headsets going... 2016-03-18 08:16 5KB www.anandtech.com 33 GDC 2016: Tearing & Freesync/G-Sync Support Coming to Windows' UWP Apps With the recent release of the first major games built for Windows’ Universal Windows Platform runtime, the current limitations of UWP has been a... 2016-03-18 08:16 2KB www.anandtech.com 34 Domino's robot finally removes last vestiges of human contact from pizza delivery Even though it's just a prototype for now, this robot could one day deliver pizza to you while you sit at home in your pyjamas on a Friday night. But is that really a future you want to live in? 2016-03-18 08:19 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 35 Pokemon main series sales reach new milestone This is how many mainline Pokemon games have been sold since 1996. 2016-03-18 00:07 957Bytes cnet.com.feedsportal.com 36 Microsoft Rolls Out Windows 10 Mobile To Windows Phone 8.1 Devices The journey of Windows 10 Mobile from announcement to release has certainly been a strange one. The OS itself was announced roughly one year... 2016-03-18 00:03 2KB www.anandtech.com 37 MSI Releases Vortex: A Mac Pro-Like SLI PC for Gamers and VR, from $2199 We originally laid eyes on the final design back at CES , but now MSI has begun to sell its Vortex gaming desktops in... 2016-03-18 00:03 6KB www.anandtech.com 38 Radar scans reveal hidden chamber in King Tut's tomb The first scans of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun's underground tomb revealed what might be the "discovery of the century". 2016-03-18 08:19 2KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 39 The Drivers and Benefits of Edge Computing Internet use is trending towards bandwidth-intensive content and an increasing number of attached “things”. At the same time, mobile telecom networks and 2016-03-18 07:10 1KB www.itworldcanada.com 40 India's Micromax gets knocked down by the Chinese After a huge loss of market share that has largely gone to new Chinese entrants like Gionee and Oppo, Micromax needs to quickly figure out a new game plan if it wants to get its punch back. 2016-03-18 05:05 5KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 41 Maddening! More ways to catch the NCAA tourney could put a crimp on productivity March Madness could cost companies nearly $4 billion as fans watch games during the workday. 2016-03-18 00:07 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 42 Guidance on what to do with an older UPS “When should an older UPS be replaced with a new one?” is a question that virtually all data centre owners will have 2016-03-18 06:03 918Bytes www.itworldcanada.com

43 Inside Acura's church of the NSX Acura's new Performance Manufacturing Center is where one of our favorite supercars is born again. 2016-03-18 06:05 6KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 44 AWS resolves connectivity issues with Telstra and Optus Amazon Web Services has resolved and restored connectivity to customer networks and the AP-Southeast-2 Region after Telstra and Optus customers reported internet connection issues. 2016-03-18 04:08 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 45 Intel Updates True Key App to Simplify Security Intel Security, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel (and previously known as McAfee) has updated its True Key password manager application to... 2016-03-18 06:03 5KB www.anandtech.com 46 ZOTAC to Offer Small Form-Factor PC with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 GPU Various kinds of small form-factor PCs are on a roll these days. Mini-ITX systems have been offering performance of full-size desktops... 2016-03-18 06:03 4KB www.anandtech.com 47 GDC 2016: Imagination Demonstrates PowerVR Vulkan SDK & PowerVR Ray Tracing Among the many companies showing off their latest development wares at GDC this week is Imagination. As opposed to their new GPU IP launches... 2016-03-18 06:03 2KB www.anandtech.com 48 The Intel NUC6i5SYK Skylake UCFF PC Review The evolution of computing platforms has left the traditional desktop PC market in a precarious state. However, the miniaturization trend has provided some bright spots... 2016-03-18 06:03 7KB www.anandtech.com 49 GDC 2016: Geomerics Demonstrates Updated Enlighten Lighting Tech As some of our regular readers may already be familiar with them, ARM’s Geomerics division is one of the more unusual parts of ARM’s... 2016-03-18 06:03 2KB www.anandtech.com 50 11 things we learned at SXSW 2016 At this year's tech, film and music fest in Austin, Texas, the president and first lady stole the show. And, of course, there was Grumpy Cat. 2016-03-18 06:05 4KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 51 US government demands for vendors' source code are nothing new Whether you think the push to get source code is overreach or not, governments around the world have done it for years. Often, they just have to ask -- or steal it. 2016-03-18 03:32 5KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 52 Everything arriving on Amazon Prime in April 2016 "The Big Lebowski" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" are just two of the titles to be added to Amazon's catalog in April. 2016-03-18 00:07 1KB cnet.com.feedsportal.com 53 iPhone SE set for March unveiling 'identical' to iPhone 5s: Report Spoiler alert: A reputable Apple-watcher has published the details for the iPhone SE, and it's not what some were expecting. 2016-03-18 02:42 1KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

54 Lenovo to invest big in enterprise, mobility, PC Lenovo Australia managing director Matt Codrington said the company will be making large investments in its enterprise, mobility, and PC business. 2016-03-18 02:23 5KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 55 IBAC unveils a web of misconduct in Victorian schools The Victorian corruption watchdog has heard that a AU$100 million project blowout was not the only concern in the state's education system, with its inquiry revealing tales of lavish spending, boys' clubs, money funnelling, and blatant abuse of power. 2016-03-18 02:04 9KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 56 Alarm bells for budget smartphone maker Ringing Bells Indian government agencies are on the trail of Freedom 251 smartphone manufacturer Ringing Bells for allegedly flouting the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA). 2016-03-18 00:30 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 57 Wearables get fashionable with new Michael Kors Access smartwatches Coming this Fall 2016-03-17 23:45 1KB feedproxy.google.com 58 Nacon reckons it's made the world's first eSports-ready controller Go pro 2016-03-17 23:44 2KB feedproxy.google.com 59 Vehicles 'increasingly vulnerable' to hacking, FBI warns The FBI and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned on Thursday that the rising use of computers in vehicles poses increasing risks of cyberattacks. 2016-03-17 22:25 2KB www.itnews.com 60 Twitter rolls out algorithmic timeline by default: Here's how to disable it Your timeline will now appear out of order by default. 2016-03-17 22:16 1KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 61 Telstra stumps up for another free data day, begins engineering review Following on from its network outage last night, Telstra will offer free data to customers on Sunday April 3, and conduct an engineering review. 2016-03-17 22:12 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 62 At Last, EMC Finally Joining the All-Flash, All-the-Time Fraternity Despite claiming to be a leader in enterprise storage, EMC suffers from a fragmented architectural approach across market tiers. Because HPE offers all flash in its family of 3PAR StoreServ Storage products, it can assure customers it has a consistent architecture for the future. 2016-03-17 17:19 5KB www.computerworld.com 63 GDC 2016: Cloudhead Games Reveals Inspiration for Call of the Starseed [VIDEO] Maximum PC speaks with Mike from Cloudhead Games about Call of the Starseed, the first episode of The Gallery VR puzzle solving game. 2016-03-17 17:13 2KB www.maximumpc.com 64 How to face swap: How to create a face swap picture in Snapchat PLUS face swap alternatives It's mega-disturbing, but face swapping is a new craze and that's thanks to Snapchat. Here's how to face swap with your friends, along with a number of alternatives for if/when Snapchat removes the feature. 2016-03-17 15:59 5KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk

65 Oscar Isaac gets apocalyptic in a brand new X-Men trailer Two more months to wait 2016-03-17 15:31 1KB feedproxy.google.com 66 This portable ultrasound will beam images straight to your phone New gadget expected to resonate with doctors 2016-03-17 15:18 1KB feedproxy.google.com 67 Oracle Q3 takeaways: Ellison unfazed by Microsoft moves SaaS customer growth reaches new heights, Ellison responds to Microsoft's Linux migration, and on-premise revenue declines. 2016-03-17 15:12 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 68 Here's how to get your iPhone or iPad ready for iOS 9.3 Apple is expected to announce the release of iOS 9.3 at next week's event, which means that you have a few days to get your hardware ready for the upgrade. 2016-03-17 15:08 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 69 Reality Check: Virtual reality isn't a real market. Yet You're probably hearing a lot of endless, excessive and short-term virtual reality hype. For example, at SXSW 2016, a great deal of time and energy is being devoted to VR experiments, new media announcements, and demonstrations. The reality? The vast majority of consumers aren't there yet. 2016-03-17 15:00 1KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 70 Hands on: LG G5 review LG takes 5 and retools its flagship Android phone 2016-03-17 14:47 14KB feedproxy.google.com 71 iPhone 7 Plus UK release date, specs & features rumours: Apple's next iPhone could feature dual-cameras and wireless charging Apple's next phablet will be the best iPhone yet, with new specs and features - potentially including dual-cameras and wireless charging. Here's your guide to the iPhone 7 Plus rumours, including the iPhone 7 Plus UK release date, UK price and specification. 2016-03-17 14:47 7KB www.pcadvisor.co.uk 72 Razer prices Core external GPU housing Razer prices Core external GPU housing. Not cheap, sadly. 2016-03-17 13:41 2KB feedproxy.google.com

73 Huawei tops global list of patent applications Chinese networking equipment manufacturer applied for 3,898 patents last year, topping the global list of top applicants that also included Qualcomm, ZTE, and Samsung. 2016-03-17 13:26 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 74 You can now find IBM Watson in Formula One racing pits Will Watson's supercomputing boost team and driver performance? 2016-03-17 13:21 3KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 75 QuickBooks Self-Employed now offers automatic mileage tracking The new feature targets users in the delivery and driving space, like Uber and Lyft drivers. 2016-03-17 13:15 2KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 76 Encrypted email service ProtonMail comes out of beta, unveils iOS and Android apps Strong encryption and privacy are a social and economic necessity, says company chief: service has more than one million users. 2016-03-17 13:06 4KB zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

77 Lessons learned from AlphaGo AlphaGo CEO Demis Hassabis describes what achievements were made from AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol 2016-03-17 12:57 1KB sdtimes.com 78 Tigo Tanzania launches innovative nano lending scheme to its Mobile Money customers Tigo Tanzania has today announced that it will launch an easy to access nano lending product to its stable of mobile financial services. This new product will not require collateral and offers immediate access to small loans to Tigo Pesa users. Tigo Head of Mobile Financial Services, Ruan Sawnepoel... 2016-03-17 12:23 3KB pctechmag.com 79 Alphabet plans analytics platform to help cities solve traffic problems Sidewalks Labs, a unit of Alphabet, is teaming up with the U. S. Department of Transport to build a data and analytics platform that promises to help cities understand where people go and how they get there so they can better design transportation infrastructure to suit. 2016-03-17 12:06 1KB www.itnews.com 80 Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch Gets De Grisogono Flash Samsung is partnering with luxury watchmaker de Grisogono to create a flashy, limited- edition Gear 2 smartwatch encrusted with diamonds, with the latest tech onboard. 2016-03-17 12:05 3KB www.informationweek.com Articles

Total 80 articles, created at 2016-03-18 12:01

1 Surface Book review (2.00/3) The Surface Book is Microsoft's first attempt at a laptop proper. It has been painted as a device that will blur the lines between laptop and tablet. But is it more first-generation Surface, or has...

Fitbit Blaze review feedproxy.google.com 2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

2 Microsoft Edge Gains Extension Support And Pinned Tabs In Latest Preview Build (2.00/3) This, well, this has been a long time coming. Windows 10 launched officially on July 29, 2015, and with it came the new web browser to replace Internet Explorer, which was named Edge. If you go back to our Windows 10 Review , Edge brought some nice features with it, but it was really lacking in functionality at the same time. From not being able to right click and save a file (that’s fixed now) to having no ability to sync across devices (sort of fixed), Edge was an improvement over Internet Explorer and a step back at the same time. For most people, the one big issue that was missing was extension support. Internet Explorer used a plug-in model, and that was deprecated with Edge, but until today there have only been mentions of Extensions coming to Edge. After much waiting, that finally changes today. Microsoft has taken the wraps off of the feature, bringing it to the Windows Insiders in a new build which came out late today. As with most new feature additions in Windows 10, the update to Edge is made available to those in the Fast Ring first, and over time it will be deployed to the other rings, and then to all users. The Extensions were shown off at Build in 2015, so the actual coding part is known. Edge extensions are very similar to Google Chrome extensions, so developers will be able to quickly port their extensions over for Edge. At the moment there are only three extensions , but expect this to increase quickly. Microsoft specifically calls out upcoming support for popular extensions such as AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, Amazon, LastPass, and Evernote. As an avid user of LastPass myself, not having it has made using Edge quite cumbersome so I look forward to the day that this arrives. For this initial build, extensions have to be sideloaded by downloading them from the site and then installing them, but as was laid out at Build last year, extensions will be added to the Windows Store to make it easier to safely install and remove extensions as needed. Additionally, Edge is also adding support for Pinned Tabs, which keep tabs always open and on the very left of the tab bar whenever the browser is opened. Simply right click the tab bar when on a page, and you can pin it to the side. The site title bar will be just the favicon for the site, to save space on the bar. Finally, Edge in this preview build now has Paste and Go support from the context menu. I’ve heard people requesting this so I think it’s a pretty popular request. The Fast Ring has certainly become “faster” lately, with more builds coming out than ever before. Up to this point, the new feature additions have been small as Microsoft changed core support inside of Windows 10, but with the new Redstone release set for the next couple of months, expect more features to be added in the upcoming builds. Source: Windows Blog

Microsoft releases first Edge extensions preview in newest Windows 10 test build zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 2016-03-18 06:03 Brett Howse www.anandtech.com

3 New Stagefright exploit puts millions of Android devices at risk (2.00/3) Millions of Android devices are at risk yet again after researchers found a new way to exploit an older vulnerability that was previously patched by Google. NorthBit, based in Herzliya, Israel, published a paper outlining Metaphor, a nickname for a new weakness they found in Stagefright, Android's mediaserver and multimedia library. The attack is effective against devices running Android versions 2.2 through 4.0 and 5.0 and 5.1, NorthBit said. The company said its attack works best on Google's Nexus 5 with stock ROM, and with some modifications for HTC's One, LG's G3 and Samsung's S5. The attack is an extension of other ones developed for CVE-2015-3864, a remote code execution vulnerability which has been patched twice by Google. The security company Zimperium found the original Stagefright flaws in early 2015, which affected millions of devices. Google has since had to repeatedly issue patches and fixes for problems in Stagefright that researchers continue to find. Zuk Avraham, CTO and founder of Zimperium, said via email his company withheld publishing a second exploit it developed for Stagefright due to the risk it posed and the large number of devices that could still be affected. But NorthBit's research paper "provides enough details for professional hacking groups to complete a fully working and reliable exploit," he said. NorthBit published a video of a successful attack, which requires a bit of social engineering. The victim has to be tricked into clicking on a link and then staying on that Web page for some time while the exploit runs. It can take between a few seconds to up to two minutes for the exploit to finish its work. In the video , the victim, who is using a Nexus 6, opens a link leading to cat photos, while NorthBit shows the exploit churning away. On Android versions 5.0 and 5.1, the exploit will bypass ASLR (address space layout randomization), a defense intended to make exploitation more difficult. NorthBit estimated about 235,000,000 Android devices run versions 5.0 and 5.1, and about 40,000,000 devices run some 2.x version of Android without ASLR. "Looking at these numbers, it's hard to comprehend how many devices are potentially vulnerable," NorthBit wrote. Partly in response to danger posed by Stagefright, Google said in August it would move to a monthly patching schedule and work closer with major Android vendors to ensure more prompt patching. Google will likely quickly issue a patch, wrote Chris Eng, vice president of research with Veracode, in an email. But the distribution of Stagefright patches has been spotty. "Patching application vulnerabilities is especially challenging for the Android community with the number of different manufactures and carriers charged with the responsibility of issuing patches to devices," Eng said. Google could not be immediately reached for comment. (Steve Ragan of CSO contributed to this report.) Stagefright exploit puts millions of Android devices at risk computerworld.com 2016-03-17 19:24 Jeremy Kirk www.itworld.com

4 Apple's hybrid cloud plan: Google, AWS, Microsoft Azure like most companies (2.00/3) Apple will reportedly spend about $400 million to $600 million to run parts of iCloud on Google Cloud Platform in a move to diversify its cloud services away from Amazon Web Services. In other words, Apple's infrastructure is going to look a lot like every other enterprise's. One storyline here via CRN is that Google's cloud business scored a coup. Of course, it did. Google needs large enterprise customers that can be referenced. AWS, Microsoft Azure and IBM have plenty of them. Google also hired former VMware CEO Dianne Greene to lead its Cloud Platform operations and woo customers. Now the tech press can get carried away with the AWS vs. Google enterprise cloud war. Who can resist? The AWS vs. Google thread is a tech sports story for sure. But it's not zero sum. Let's replace Apple with any other large enterprise like 3M. The diversification move barely warrants a mention. Why? Every enterprise will have multiple cloud infrastructure vendors as well as its own infrastructure. AWS at 10: A look at how Amazon revamped the enterprise cloud computing pecking order | Dropbox to wean off of AWS, eyes hybrid approach, its own infrastructure | Cloud computing goes hybrid as the norm: AWS, VMware, Azure duke it out Apple is a hybrid cloud poster boy. The company has spent billions of dollars on its own data centers to provide iCloud services. Part of that cloud footprint ran on AWS. Some rode on Microsoft Azure too. Now Google Cloud Platform will get a chunk. IBM's SoftLayer may get a piece too. What Apple is ultimately going for is an cost optimization strategy where it can toggle between cloud providers. Rest assured, Google gave Apple a sweet deal to have iCloud as a reference customer. Google and Apple are strange bedfellows, but is it any worse than Netflix completely running on AWS when Amazon has a streaming video service too? Nope. Add it up and it might be wise to keep infrastructure as a service in perspective. The raw compute game is commoditized and the real win will be moving customers up the stack. Will AWS suffer if Apple brings Google on for compute and storage? Probably not. Can AWS win if Apple uses more of the company's big data, database and analytics services while bringing Google infrastructure online? You bet. It's quite possible Apple diversifies and AWS can capture more revenue just because the cloud demand pie grows.

Apple reportedly dumps AWS and moves to Google's Cloud Platform theinquirer.net 2016-03-17 14:03 Larry Dignan zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

5 Exasol shrinks its in-memory database onto an Intel NUC for proof-of-concept analytics work Analytics software specialist Exasol has created an eye-catching way for potential customers to run proof-of-concept pilots for nascent big data projects - by offering a free version of its ExaSolution in-memory database that can run on a machine as small as an Intel NUC mini PC. Available to download now, the free trial version of Exasol's database is restricted to a single node rather than a cluster of servers. This means that potential customers can use it for proof-of- concept projects on a single system without having to invest in costly infrastructure before they are ready to deploy. It could also prove attractive as a way for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) to dip their toes in the water with big data analytics at relatively low cost, while big data projects are still largely the preserve of large organisations. The free edition appears to be offered as a virtual appliance, and requires a 64-bit operating system (Windows, Linux or Apple OS X) with at least 4GB memory and a virtual machine player such as VirtualBox, VMware Player or KVM. Exasol also advises that customers will get the best results with data volumes up to 100GB in capacity, while about 10 to 20 percent of the data should be kept in memory, which is limited to 10GB in the free edition anyway. Atheon Analytics, a specialist retail analytics consultancy partner of Exasol, has deployed the free single-node edition onto an Intel NUC mini PC in order to power its proof-of-concept data visualisations. Dubbed "Exasol-in-my-pocket", the demonstration unit proved capable of crunching through 250 million rows of trading data from a large supermarket, analysing statistics around waste reduction and stock control. "Customers are often surprised when we tell them that this device is our database server, but this mini PC is a great talking-point and ice-breaker as well as being the perfect tool to do our work," said Atheon Analytics managing director Guy Cuthbert. "We can bring in more data to our visualisations while at the client site and this allows us to create better proof of concepts. Additionally, by running the full Exasol database it takes no further effort to scale up to a multi-node cluster when the customer wishes to progress to a full implementation," he added. Exasol chief executive Aaron Auld said: "When talking about scalability we often talk about the ability to scale up to large clusters that can handle huge amounts of data, but to have a powerful analytic database that can scale down to a device that you carry around with you in your pocket is just as important for smaller scale implementations. " Join us for Computing's Big Data & Analytics Summit on Thursday, March 17th. Attendance is free to qualifying end-users , book your place now!

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

6 Nine out of 10 UK CIOs 'concerned' about EU's new data protection laws A whopping 87 per cent of UK CIOs are concerned that their organisation might be exposed under the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new report has found. The report, commissioned by Egress Software, asked 200 UK CIOs how concerned they are about the new regulations, which will become law in 2018. Only 13 per cent said they were not concerned at all by GDPR, but the majority (61.5 per cent) said that they were ‘a little concerned', and more than a quarter (25.5 per cent) said they were 'very concerned'. The GDPR represents a major change in the way that personal data must be managed for any organisation that does business in, or with, the EU. They will need to make sure they are able to delete all of a consumer's personal data quickly and completely from their systems, on request. There will also be mandatory reporting of serious data breaches and organisations will be expected to know what data might have been affected - within 24 hours, if possible. And organisations found to be in breach of the regulation face hefty fines of up to four per cent of global turnover. The findings from Egress's research chime with the conclusions of a report commissioned by software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider Intralinks at the end of last year. It found that more than half of global companies expected to be fined for non-compliance with GDPR , and that two- thirds of worldwide companies would review their business strategies in EU countries in the next year. Last month, Computing carried out an online poll of about 100 medium-to-large organisations and found that only 20 per cent were well prepared for GDPR, with a further 26 per cent stating that they have just started preparing for the regulation. Surprisingly, a total of 44 per cent were unaware or only vaguely aware of the new rules.

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

7 Half of organisations would struggle to get mission-critical systems up-and-running in hours following a disaster - UPDATED The mission-critical systems of the typical organisation in the UK would be down for hours in the event of a disaster, while recovering lost data would take a similar amount of time. But many admit that...

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

8 Five things to expect from Apple's imminent iPhone launch On 21 March Apple is expected to launch its long-rumoured iPhone 5SE - as well as unveiling a host of other new products and product updates. Taking place at a grand unveiling in Cupertino, California, not far from the technology giant's HQ, there's also expected to be a new iPad and refreshed Apple Watch models on offer, following months of speculation surrounding Apple's rumoured smaller, cheaper iPhone. We've rounded up five features you can expect from the incoming handset. Metal design Apple's last 'mid-range' iPhone, the iPhone 5C, was encased in brightly coloured plastic, but the iPhone 5SE is expected to look more like the iPhone 5S. It'll also have a bit of iPhone 6S about it, according to leaks showing that the iPhone 5SE will feature a curved glass front similar to that seen on Apple's latest smartphones. Apple's event invitation ( above ) also suggests that the handset will be available in the same colour options as the iPhone 6S. Four-inch screen Of course, the iPhone 5SE's standout feature will be a pint-sized 4in display, similar to that seen on the iPhone 5C before it. There's no word yet as to whether it will feature a boost in resolution, but speculation points to a "2.5D" display with curved edges that improves the tactile sensitivity of finger swipes. However, it apparently won't offer 3D Touch functionality. A9 processor Early rumours pointed to the iPhone 5SE having an A8 processor, but more recent leaks suggest that it will have the same A9 internals as the iPhone 6S. This means, in theory, that the smartphone will support Apple's Live Photos feature, and should match the firm's flagship devices when it comes to overall performance. Beefy battery The iPhone 5C had a fairly lacklustre 1,500mAh battery, but the iPhone 5SE will reportedly up the ante with a 1,715mAh unit. Affordable-ish price Apple will never make a cheap smartphone, but the iPhone 5SE, much like the iPhone 5C, will be more affordable than its iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus siblings. Prices for the iPhone 5SE will start at $450 for a 16GB model, the same as the iPhone 5, according to reports.

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

9 The data scientist - a role dissected The data scientist has been the object of fascination, awe and even envy ever since the big data boom began five years ago or so. Often compared with yetis and unicorns on account of their rarity, they...

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

10 Microsoft SharePoint 2016 and Project Server 2016 released to manufacturing Microsoft has officially released the latest version of its SharePoint platform for collaboration, file sharing and content management, adding new hybrid cloud capabilities alongside enhancements for users and administrators, as well as the latest version of Project Server that is now fully integrated with it. SharePoint Server 2016 this week hit release to manufacturing (RTM), meaning that the product is code complete, but Microsoft is currently offering for download only the release candidate (RC) version it made available in January. The full version will be generally available in the Microsoft Volume Licensing Service Center from early May, the firm said. Also hitting RTM was Project Server 2016 , the latest version of Microsoft's project and portfolio management (PPM) tool. This is now effectively tied into SharePoint, with the Project Server 2016 installer fully integrated into SharePoint 2016 so that a separate installer no longer needs to be run. SharePoint Server 2016 builds on the foundations of previous SharePoint releases, but further emphasises Microsoft's software-plus- services strategy with extended hybrid cloud support, such as cloud hybrid search allowing on- premises content and information held in the cloud to be returned from the one search result, the firm said. In fact, SharePoint Server 2016 has been developed with a common core platform shred with the cloud-based SharePoint Online, making it easier for customers to take advantage of SharePoint on-premises, in the cloud or in a hybrid scenario. Microsoft also said that SharePoint Server 2016 offers better deployment flexibility, enhanced data security, a unified development experience across server and cloud, and improved mobile access to content. "Billions of documents are stored on SharePoint sites-making it the centre of content management and collaboration for over a decade. Whether enabling students to work together or helping a company transform its entire intranet, we have continually evolved SharePoint to meet the changing needs of the digital workplace," said Seth Patton, general manager for Microsoft's SharePoint and OneDrive team, announcing the RTM on the firm's SharePoint blog. Meanwhile, Project Server 2016 includes anew capability known as Resource Engagements, intended to help project managers and resource managers align with each other on the amount of work and time periods required for resources associated with a project. Resource Engagements are an evolution of the old Resource Plan feature in Project Web App, Microsoft said, and so all of a customer's existing Resource Plan data will be converted to engagements as part of the upgrade process.

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

11 CityFibre CEO Greg Mesch's ambitious plan to bring FTTP to 100 UK towns and cities - and beat BT in the process The telecoms landscape has been dominated in the past few months by calls from the likes of Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone for Ofcom to force BT to turn its wholesale Openreach division into a separate entity....

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

12 Budget 2016: Osborne announces moves to boost broadband, coding, 5G and driverless cars Yesterday's Budget may have been light on major technology-related initiatives but it did feature initiatives that indicate the government is still keen to pursue the digital objectives it set out in... 2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

13 Rural Payments Agency chief: GDS and Defra didn't listen to warnings that CAP project was failing

The chief executive of the Rural Payments Agency (RPA), Mark Grimshaw, has suggested that senior chiefs at the Government Digital Service (GDS) and Defra did not listen to his fears about failings in its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) programme. The CAP programme was aimed at developing new systems and processes to support the implementation of the Common Agricultural Policy in England. It was established in 2012 to address previous failings in how CAP payments were delivered by the Agency. Earlier this month, MPs slammed senior leaders at the RPA, GDS and Defra for what they described as a "childish turf war" , which involved "dysfunctional and inappropriate behaviours" that were "inexcusable and deeply damaging" to the £154m programme. It led Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier to say that it was "frankly embarrassing to learn of senior and highly paid civil servants arguing to the detriment of hard-pressed farmers". RPA chief Grimshaw gave evidence on the scheme to the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. He suggested that there was an element of truth in the PAC report, but claimed that the language used had been sensationalised. "I am certainly not in the position of accusing the committee of being inaccurate and if those are the words I used then I will recant them here and now," he said. Grimshaw said he regretted being unable "to get over to the programme the requirements of the business from a delivery and functional perspective" - claiming that this was "a concern that will live for me for many years". "As a personal failing I was not able to communicate, and not able to get senior people to recognise, that the programme was in difficulty," he said. "I was not in a position to have my opinion prevail," he added. Grimshaw suggested that "all four senior officers" who had been given responsibility for the programme should share the blame for its failings. He also claimed that "almost all" outstanding 2015 payments will be made by the end of the month.

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

14 LinkedIn being used as a 'front door' to phishing attacks LinkedIn is now being used by hackers to make contact with potential victims, in order to encourage them to open their malicious emails, and click on their links. This was one of the revelations from Computing 's web seminar today titled 'Are you a phish or a whale?' Abby Ewen, IT director at law firm BLM, explained that her organisation has recently experienced a determined phishing attack. "We have had both via an email and telephone an attempt to extort money by someone purporting to be the CFO. It was intercepted both times because we have some very vigilant people trained to spot things that don't look right. We had one this week, a scam email passed to me by a partner, and the person who sent [the scam mail] had connected with the partner on LinkedIn prior to sending the email. "LinkedIn was used as the front door into the scam," she said. Phishing is now seen as the top threat to businesses in the UK, above more well-known and headline-grabbing criminal activities such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. This was one of the key findings of Computing 's latest research into IT security, presented during the webinar. Phishing is the art of acquiring sensitive information from a target by offering them bait, which could be a fake message from a friend or colleague, an invitation to an important meeting, or even a tempting shopping bargain. Click on the message or link, and your machine is infected with malware that scoops up your personal data. Whaling is exactly the same process, only with higher profile enterprise targets. Phishing is becoming increasingly prevalent because of its simplicity, said Orlando Scott- Cowley, cyber security specialist at Mimecast (pictured). "We use phishing to mean all the types of attack you see in email. Email has become the threat vector of choice because it's easy, there are no skills needed, and you can attach a pre-built piece of malware to your message. It has become far easier than the classic network or IP- based attacks we're used to seeing," said Scott-Cowley. One of the problems, he added, is that people trust their inboxes, and this misplaced trust is exploited by cyber criminals. "The problem is we trust our inbox too much, we feel like we're protected behind that infrastructure. Cyber criminals use that trust against us to trick us into clicking their links, wire transferring large sums of money to fraudulent accounts. " Ewan gave the example of a fake email which purported to come from vehicle registration and licensing body the DVLA, which appeared at BLM recently. "One day we had 2,500 copies of same email in 10 minutes, which purported to come from the DVLA. The email had a specific car registration number, and people still clicked on it [despite the registration number listed not being their own]. One person clicked who didn't even have a car! It's because people are very busy, and the default is to click on things. " BLM's Ewen described the protections she has put in place. "We now sandbox all attachments, and we receive around 35,000 per week, and we check all URLs that come in. We see between five and 10 malicious attachments per week. Of the 6,500 URLs clicked per week, about 10 go to malicious sites. It's interesting to see how messy the internal environment would be if we didn't have that protection," she concluded.

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

15 If you have less than a petabyte of data you don't need Hadoop Hadoop is unnecessary for smaller projects, and most firms should avoid using it unless they have to. That's according to Vincent de Lagabbe, CTO of Kaiko, a company that offers real-time tracking of bitcoin exchanges. "Considering the volume that we are dealing with Hadoop would be overkill. It was fancy technology for the time and people started using it for everything, but most things you can do without it. From experience, it's better to try to do without Hadoop - I mean use it when you need it but when you don't, don't bother," he said. Kaiko pulls in transaction data from the Bitcoin blockchain and also monitors the major exchanges to see who is buying the crypto-currency in order to track its price in real-time and provide additional information about the market. While speed and being able to handle unstructured data is important, volume is less of an issue for the firm. "If you've got less that a petabyte of data Hadoop is probably overkill," de Lagabbe said. Instead of Hadoop, the company is deploying DataStax Enterprise (DSE), a commercial distribution of the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database, to perform storage duties. "We didn't know what we were going to be putting into the database and we wanted something that could be flexible. Cassandra seemed like a pretty good solution to our requirements. We tried several other things but they weren't as stable for our usage. So Cassandra is our main data store. We store everything in it - blockchain data, exchanges data, everything else. " So why not opt for the free community version? "We chose DSE because we found it was more stable than the version we were using before, maybe because the builds are more carefully monitored, but I don't know," de Lagabbe said. "Then there's the extensibility, so you can easily have a Spark cluster on it to do further analysis. We have not deployed such cluster yet but we plan to do that for real-time streaming and in- memory map reduce jobs. "The support from DataStax has been helpful," he added. Recent research from Computing has found that Spark is catching up with Hadoop as a primary general-purpose big data platform - although the two are most frequently used together. Join us for Computing's Big Data & Analytics Summit on March 17th. Attendance is free to qualifying end-users, so book your place now before they all go

2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

16 TfL CIO Steve Townsend on the Internet of Things, Big Data, chief digital officers and reporting into marketing ‘Customer experience' is the main theme mentioned time and again by Transport for London CIO Steve Townsend throughout an interview at TfL's offices in Victoria, London. So important is customer experience,... 2016-03-18 12:01 www.computing.co.uk

17 EUV Lithography Makes Good Progress, Still Not Ready for Prime Time At

the recent annual SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Intel, TSMC and other leading semiconductor companies said that significant strides have been made in extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUVL) over the past year or so. Intel did not reveal when exactly it plans to start using EUV technology, but indicated that it will clearly utilize it once it is suitable for high-volume production of semiconductors and is sufficiently cost effective. Samsung and TSMC also intend to start inserting EUVL tools into production in the coming years. As chipmakers transit to newer process technologies every several years, sizes of transistors and electronic circuits within microprocessors shrink, making them more complex and powerful, but also harder to manufacture using traditional photolithographic methods. Feature sizes of today’s circuits within modern chips can be as small as 42 nm , whereas modern semiconductor production tools use deep ultraviolet (DUV) argon fluoride (ArF) excimer lasers with 193 nm wavelength. To compensate for this difference, Intel and other makers of advanced chips use multiple techniques to enhance resolution of photolithographic equipment. One of the key transistor density improving technologies is immersion lithography, which replaces the air gap between the lens and wafer with liquid, whose refraction index is higher than one. For example, purified deionized water has refraction index of 1.44 and this allows to enhance resolution of production tools by up to 40% depending on materials. Another key tech for contemporary semiconductor manufacturing is called multiple patterning, a semiconductor production technique that allows to increase feature density by resolving multiple lines on the same photoresist layer using multiple photomasks. Usage of multi-patterning essentially means that certain layers within one chip are exposed multiple times, which greatly increases complexity of manufacturing operations and stretches production cycles, essentially increasing costs of chips. Intel has been using multi-patterning since mid-2000s and its 65 nm manufacturing technology. The technique did not cause a lot of troubles at first, but things got very complicated with the 14 nm fabrication process because the number of mask steps significantly increased compared to previous-gen technologies. Meanwhile it is taking the company longer to develop its 10 nm manufacturing process, tune its designs and achieve high yields than it used to be, which is why the company had to delay its Cannonlake CPUs from 2016 to 2017. It's also important to note that Intel's 14nm process introduced air gap dielectric in certain interconnect layers, which dramatically increased the number of engineering problems to overcome as introducing voids into the interconnect leads to structural instabilities that must be controlled appropriately. Basically, as it becomes increasingly tougher to develop new manufacturing technologies and produce modern chips using currently available tools, the benefits of node-to-node transitions shrinks, which is rather dangerous for chipmakers from an economic standpoint. In order to address negative effects of multi-patterning, producers of step and scan systems used in semiconductor manufacturing significantly increased output of such tools, as well as enhanced their resolution and boosted their overlay and focus performance. For example, ASM Lithography (ASML), the world’s largest maker of scanners, claims that its latest TWINSCAN NXT:1980Di can process up to 275 wafers per hour and can be used to make chips using sub- 10 nm process technologies. While such scanners will be utilized going forward, with so many mask steps required, a new method of photolithography will make far more sense. EUV lithography, whose development started in 1985 and which used to be called Soft X-Ray, utilizes extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 13.5 nm. Using EUV can greatly enhance the feature density of chips without heavy reliance on multi-patterning and additional layers. For example, TSMC can produce 46 nm metal pitches with a single exposure, an operation that requires usage of four masks for an ArF scanner. Moreover, Intel has managed to produce wafers with 22 nm metal pitches using its own micro EUV tool. Among other advantages, EUV is expected to shrink cycle times and promises to increase yields of chips at advanced nodes. Unfortunately, EUV is an extremely complex technology that not only requires all-new step-and-scan systems for production of semiconductors, new chemicals and new mask infrastructure, but it is also so tricky to use that its actual resolution can end up far below expectations. It should be noted that generation of EUV light is a rather difficult process itself. Cymer, a division of ASML that produces light sources for lithography tools, is developing laser produced plasma (LPP) EUV sources. The LPP technology applies CO 2 laser to small tin droplets (which are around 30 microns in diameter), creating ionized gas plasma at electron temperatures of several tens of electron volts. The 13.5 nm radiation is then collected by a special ~0.5 meter mirror coated with several layers of molybdenum (Mo) and silicon (Si), in order to selectively reflect the maximum possible amount of 13.5 nm EUV light and direct it to the Intermediate Focus (IF) position at the entrance to the scanner system. To put it simply: in order to generate 13.5 nm EUV light in a special plasma chamber , you need a very powerful laser (because a significant amount of its power will be wasted); a generator and a catcher for tin droplets (in addition to a debris collector); as well as a special, nearly perfect, elliptical mirror. To make everything even trickier, since EUV light with 13.5 nm wavelength can be absorbed by almost any matter, EUV lithography has to be done in vacuum. This also means that traditional lenses cannot be used with EUV because they absorb 13.5 nm light; instead, specialized multilayer mirrors are used. Even such mirrors absorb about 30% of the light, which is why powerful light sources are needed. This level of absorption can lead to ablative effects on the mirrors themselves, which introduces additional engineering challenges. To learn more how EUV LPP light sources work, check out this video. The 13.5 nm EUV light generator needs to have a powerful light source that can expose economically viable amount of wafers per hour (or day). One of the key issues with the TWINCSCAN NXE scanners was that is their laser produced plasma EUV source was not powerful enough. Until recently, performance of experimental EUV equipment from ASML, such as the TWINCSCAN NXE:3300B scanners, was limited to around 500 wafers per day due to power source limitations. By contrast, the current-generation TWINSCAN NXT scanners can process from 175 to 275 wafers per hour (which is good enough, considering heavy usage of multi-patterning). The reliability of the droplet generator was mediocre just about a year ago. Moreover, lifetime of the collector mirror is a yet another point of concern due to the previously mentioned ablative effects. The progress of EUVL scanners as well as EUV source systems has been steady in the recent years. ASML, which is one of the major driving forces for extreme ultraviolet lithography, recently said it had hit multiple stability, availability and productivity targets in 2014 and 2015 and is optimistic about the future. According to ASML, in 2015 one of the company’s clients managed to expose more than 1000 wafers per day on the NXE:3300B, whereas ASML itself managed to hit 1250 wafers per day milestone on the NXE:3350B. ASML also said that it could operate a 200 W light source for one hour with full dose control. For HMV (high volume manufacturing) equipment, 250 W light sources will be needed. ASML is not sure when such light source will be made, but it hopes to hit this milestone in 2016 or 2017. Hence, there is still a long way to go for suitably powerful EUV light sources. At the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference, Intel confirmed that there were four running EUV tools with 80 W light sources around the world as of early 2016, up from one a year ago. Intel itself now uses the NXE:3300B tool with Cymer’s 80 W EUV sources on its 14 nm pilot line for 21 hours per day, leaving three hours for engineering and servicing. Britt Turkot, senior principal engineer in logic technology development lithography at Intel, said that experimental EUV production had demonstrated good overlay trends, stable critical dimension uniformity as well as good electrical testing and end-of-line yield results. Another piece of good news is that the reliability of the tin droplet generator also improved significantly over the past year. Intel indicated that the tin droplet generator now achieves 85% of its expected lifetime. Reflectivity of the elliptical collector also degrades in accordance with expectations. ASML and Intel are also seeing combined scanner and source availability (4- week rolling average) exceeding 70%, which is good enough for development, but is still unacceptable for mass production. ASML plans to increase availability of its tools to 80% this year. Extreme ultraviolet lithography no longer uses lenses and traditional glass photomasks (reticles), but utilizes specialized mirrors as well as multi-layer reflective photomasks. Even a minor defect in a photomask makes it unusable because it affects the final wafer. To discover such defects, makers of photomasks or chips can use currently available optical mask inspection tools, e- beam/multi e-beam tools (which are slow) or actinic patterned mask inspection tools, the latter of which have not been commercialized yet. For now, optical mask inspection tools based on 193 nm or other wavelengths can be used for EUV photomasks, but there is a problem. Since photomasks (reticles) in extreme ultraviolet lithography are even more vulnerable than conventional glass photomasks, they can be easily damaged by falling particles during exposure or even by 13.5 nm EUV light itself. To address this issue, Intel and ASML have been working collaboratively to add a special pellicle to protect the photomask. Protective films for EUV should be extremely thin, should not affect reflection characteristics of photomasks, and should sustain EUV power levels. Unfortunately, it is impossible to use currently available 193 nm mask inspection tools like scanning or tunneling electron microscopes to review an EUV reticle with a pellicle on it, according to SemiEngineering and industry sources. Only actinic patterned mask inspection (APMI) tools are useful for this purpose. However, the latter are not available today outside of academic labs like Berkeley's SHARP mask imaging microscope. As a result, semiconductor companies had to invent a way for mask shops to inspect reticles without pellicles using contemporary equipment and then install protection before shipping masks to fabs (which means that it will be impossible to inspect photomasks after the fact at fabs using current tools). According to the world’s largest CPU maker, its pelliclized reticles can sustain over 200 wafer exposures. However, defectivity levels on such pellicle membranes are still high, which means that flaws can essentially affect wafers and dramatically lower yields. Moreover, it remains to be seen whether producers can supply enough of such membranes. What is even more important is that to inspect reflective photomasks for EUVL, chipmakers will still need actinic patterned mask inspection equipment. Without such tools and timely repair of photomasks using e-beam tools, yields will inevitably become an issue, Intel has said. Since APMI tools do not exist today (even though KLA-Tencor is said to be developing such devices), it will take years before they reach the market. Moreover, such equipment will not be cheap, they will resemble scanners and will require EUV light sources. At the SPIE conference, Intel demonstrated successful defect mitigation strategies on multiple devices, and a healthy e-beam pattern defect repair capability. So, the situation with mask inspection and repairs is improving, according to the CPU maker. In general, the industry remains rather optimistic about EUV lithography thanks to two years of solid progress. All leading makers of semiconductors, including Intel, TSMC, Samsung and GlobalFoundries plan to use EUV tools as soon as it makes sense. All four chipmakers indicated on various occasions in the recent months that EUV lithography will be required for 7 nm manufacturing technology. At the SPIE conference, TSMC and Samsung re-affirmed plans to insert EUVL into 7 nm production. By contrast, Intel indicated that while it would prefer to use EUVL for critical layers at 7 nm, it would only use the tech when it is completely ready. At present, Intel is experimenting with EUV on its 14 nm pilot fab line and the results have been encouraging, according to the company. Nonetheless, Intel believes that to make EUV a reality, in addition to many other things, the industry needs to improve yields, decrease costs and develop an ecosystem of EUV photomasks. Finally, while step-and-scan systems with EUV's 13.5 nm wavelength will help to produce microprocessors and other chips using 5 nm and, perhaps, 7nm, technologies, contemporary 193nm ArF tools are not going anywhere. Virtually all chipmakers say that EUV scanners will only be used for critical layers of chips. For layers that can be produced using multi-patterning, DUV tools will be used. Intel, TSMC and Samsung have publicly said that they plan to start producing chips using their 10 nm manufacturing technologies in 2017. These process technologies have already been developed without EUV, and unless the chipmakers decide to introduce new versions that involve EUV for critical layers, EUV will continue to not be used for 10 nm. The leading makers of semiconductors are currently finalizing their 7 nm technologies this year, and they will have to make decisions regarding usage of EUV tools with their 7 nm nodes in 2018 – 2019, according to Peter Wennink, CEO of ASML. If currently available EUV tools meet expectations of chipmakers, they will order production TWINSCAN NXE systems and will use them two or three years down the road. Sources: Intel , Semiconductor Engineering , Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design , SemiWiki . Images courtesy of ASML , Cymer , TSMC .

2016-03-18 08:40 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

18 Lattice and MediaTek to Collaborate On Reference Smartphones For SuperMHL over USB-C Lattice Semiconductor and MediaTek have joined forces to create reference smartphones with 4K video outputs using USB Type-C connectors and cables. The outputs will use the superMHL technology and will thus be compatible with various other superMHL devices such as TVs. The companies have already built a reference phone that supports a superMHL output over USB-C using previously announced chips from Lattice and hope that makers of smartphones will embrace the solution. The USB Type-C technology and connectors are rapidly gaining traction across many industries. A number of modern notebooks, mobile devices and even desktops come with USB type-C ports. A good thing about USB-C is that it can be used to transfer alt mode data using a variety of protocols, including DisplayPort, Thunderbolt 3 and superMHL. Lattice (which acquired Silicon Image, a major developer of the MHL technology, about a year ago) clearly wants to capitalize on its expertise in the field of MHL and USB technologies by offering a reference implementation of single-lane superMHL over USB-C cables and connectors. The simplified single-lane implementation of the superMHL used here for phones supports transmission of video in 4K (3840x2160) resolution with 60 fps over USB-C or even traditional MHL cables. The superMHL over USB-C reference implementation by Lattice and MediaTek involves the Helio X20 system-on-chip (two ARM Cortex-A72, four Cortex-A53 at 2 GHz, four Cortex-A53 at 1.4 GHz, ARM Mali T880 MP4 graphics core, dual-channel LPDDR3 memory controller), the Sil8348 MHL transmitter as well as the Sil7033 port controller (which sets up MHL alt mode on USB-C and supports power data objects, which are needed to charge the phone). The superMHL implementation by Lattice and MediaTek supports best of both technologies’ worlds: 10 Gbps USB 3.1 transfer rate, 4Kp60 video, power delivery (for up to 100W of power), ability to connect to TVs with MHL using appropriate adapters. What is notable is that thanks the to the Sil7033 chip, simultaneous MHL and USB 3.1 connectivity is also supported. Lattice also offers Sil7013 and the Sil9396 port controllers for docks and accessories to establish MHL alt mode and convert MHL to HDMI transmission respectively. The creation of these reference devices is the latest salvo in the ongoing war Lattice is striking over the future of video out for mobile devices. MHL was decently common in previous generation devices, however with the switch to USB Type-C ports and the creation of alt modes, there is opportunity to start anew. Practically speaking, this is a war between superMHL and DisplayPort, which are the two major video out alt modes. One thing that will be crucial for enablement of 4K outputs using USB-C interconnection are quality USB Type-C cables. It is not a secret that there are cheap USB 3.1 Type-C cables that do not work as advertised and simply lack conductors, which can be repurposed. Such cables will not be able to support 4K output using USB-C. Cheap USB type-C cables that do not comply with standards are an industry-wide problem. If today many people may simply not notice issues with them because they are only used for data transmission with USB 2.0 hosts, in the coming years the problem will get much worse. Finally, Lattice and MediaTek did not reveal whether their UHD output over USB-C reference platform has so far been adopted by any makers of smartphones.

2016-03-18 08:16 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

19 NVIDIA Announces GameWorks SDK 3.1 Innovation is hard work. Doing work that has already been done elsewhere can be satisfying, but also annoying - no-one wants to reinvent the wheel every time. In the realm of 3D graphics, we are not limited to creating our wares from scratch - toolsets such as NVIDIA GameWorks are provided to developers allowing them to include advanced graphics rendering and physical simulation features into their products. The latest version, NVIDIA GameWorks 3.1, is being released this week. NVIDIA GameWorks SDK 3.1 introduces three new graphics technologies involving shadows and lighting. NVIDIA Volumetric Lighting involves simulating how light behaves as it scatters through the air, and was showcased in Fallout 4. Moving over to shadows, we will see NVIDIA Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows (HFTS) which involves rendering shadows that start as hard shadows nearer the casting object and transition to soft shadows further away. Lastly, in the new graphics features, we see NVIDIA Voxel Accelerated Ambient Occlusion (VXAO), which NVIDIA dubs as the highest quality ambient occlusion algorithm. What makes this version better than previous techniques is the ability to calculate shadows with all geometry in world space, versus older screen space techniques that can only cast shadows for geometry visible to the camera. Adding to the roster of PhysX features is NVIDIA PhysX-GRB, which is a new implementation of NVIDIA’s PhysX rigid body dynamics SDK. This new implementation provides a hybrid CPU/GPU pipeline that NVIDIA claims can improve performance by a factor of up to 6X for moderate to heavy simulation loads, especially for those that are large on compute shader register resources. NVIDIA Flow is the other update to PhysX which will introduce the ability to simulate and render combustible fluids such as fire and smoke, and this time simulation will not be confined to a bounding box. This should lead to much more flexibility and usefulness in games and other software in the future.

2016-03-18 08:16 Daniel Williams www.anandtech.com

20 Best Tablets: Q1 2016 The last time we updated our tablet guide was right around the Christmas shopping season. We haven't seen many tablet launches since then, but there have been a couple of notable changes in the market. There are also some new tablets on the horizon, and that means new flagship devices along with potential price drops on existing models. Both are great news for anyone interested in buying a tablet. As always, I'll begin with the iPads available from Apple due to the simplicity of that category, followed by the best offerings at a couple of price points from Android tablet manufacturers, with the best Windows tablets finishing things off. Even if your phone is an Android device or a Windows Phone, it's difficult to not give the iPad some consideration when looking for a tablet. It's can definitely be difficult to have to manage two different ecosystems with their own apps, but at this point the iPad still has a significant platform advantage over most tablets as far as applications and multitasking goes, and to improve multitasking and productivity further you really need to move to a full blown Windows tablet. The iPad line is fairly simple, with only a few options available, and most of them occupying their own screen size. For people who want a smaller tablet, Apple offers the iPad Mini 2 and iPad Mini 4. The former is definitely getting old, although at $269 it offers a fairly inexpensive entry to the iPad ecosystem. I think it's probably unwise to purchase an iOS device with only 1GB of RAM at this point, as we're moving closer to the point where developers can assume that productivity apps can take advantage of devices with 2-4GB of RAM. $399 gets you the iPad Mini 4 which offers significant improvements to the display, performance, and the size and mass of the chassis. The Mini 4 is definitely my recommendation for a small iPad because of the improved display and additional RAM to enable split screen multitasking, but the $399 price for the 16GB model can definitely be hard to swallow when you can get many small Android tablets for half the price. Click here to read our reviews of the iPad Mini 2 and the iPad Mini 4 . For a buyer that's interested in a more standard sized tablet, Apple sells the iPad Air and the iPad Air 2 respectively for the 16GB models. At this point I really wouldn't go for the iPad Air due to the limited amount of RAM it includes which prevents you from using split screen multitasking. As for the iPad Air 2, it's arguably still the best full sized tablet on the market despite the fact that it's being on the market for around 1.5 years. With Apple holding an event in around a week it may be better to wait until the end of the month before pulling the trigger on a 9.7" iPad, as Apple may have something new coming down the pipeline. At the very top of the iPad line sits the iPad Pro. The iPad Pro will inevitably be compared to the Surface Pro 4, but as Josh made very clear in his review of it, the iPad Pro and Surface Pro 4 are very different devices that target different users. The Surface Pro 4 is the best device for someone who wants a laptop-like device with tablet aspects, while the iPad Pro is very much a pure tablet. As someone who has actually adopted the iPad Pro for many tasks, I think the applications of it are fairly clear, along with the target market. Students are definitely a big group within it, as the combination of the iPad Pro and Apple Pencil is more than capable of replacing notes written on paper. Creative professionals will find enjoyment from the combination of the two as well. If you decide that the iPad Pro is the device for you, there are some considerations to make regarding accessories. I think the Apple Pencil is a must have for most users, although not all. The $99 price tag does add a significant amount on top of the price of an already expensive tablet, and so it's something to consider when comparing to other devices. As for the Smart Keyboard, it's definitely useful in some circumstances, but definitely not as necessary as the Apple Pencil. I think the lack of lap usability is a big drawback, and I've rarely ever used it apart from a few circumstances where I had to use SSH without a laptop around. Unless you really want the keyboard for typing up documents, I would probably pass on it, as at $169 it's very expensive. I took a look at a number of Android tablets back in 2015, and this year added the Google Pixel C to the list. In most cases the tablets I review all end up occupying their own price bracket, so it's not difficult to pick out the best at each price due to the limited competition. Unfortunately, it's pretty accurate to say that the past year hasn't been the greatest for Android phones or tablets due to issues with the available SoCs from Qualcomm, along with Android's general tablet problems. On top of that, all but two or three of the tablets that I reviewed had issues with display power usage or calibration. Despite that, I think there were three notable Android tablets that launched in the past year. Starting off with my recommendation for a low-cost Android tablet, I think the NVIDIA SHIELD Tablet K1 is the obvious winner of this category. The SHIELD Tablet K1 was originally sold for $299 before being recalled due to battery issues, but late last year it was re-introduced at a $199 price point with its new name. With most vendors having given up on providing compelling tablets at the $200 price point, the SHIELD Tablet K1 is mostly without competition. The performance provided by NVIDIA's Tegra K1 SoC is far greater than what you'd expect from a $199 device, and up until the launch of the Pixel C the GPU was unmatched by any other Android tablet. You can read our review of the SHIELD Tablet K1 in its original iteration here. The only complaint I really have about the SHIELD Tablet K1 is that while the display is a sufficiently high resolution at 1920x1200, the color gamut and accuracy is lacking. While this can be excused somewhat based on the $199 price tag, we're definitely getting to a point where a limited gamut isn't excusable on any device. Despite that compromise, I don't know of any current Android tablet that competes at this price point. When you factor in the game streaming support, relatively quick updates, and few tweaks to the Android UI, the SHIELD Tablet K1 is definitely worth considering. If someone is looking for a high end Android tablet, then the Galaxy Tab S2 is still a very good option. When I reviewed the Tab S2 I praised its thin and light build, and high quality AMOLED display, I wasn't fond of the use of plastic, the performance, or the battery life. On the hardware side it lags behind the aging iPad Air 2 which is quite unfortunate. Samsung does try to offer tablet-oriented features, like their split screen and separate window multitasking. Unfortunately, the features are limited by what changes Samsung can make, and they don't measure up to what you get on iOS or Windows. Fortunately, Google is coming through with their own multitasking implementation in Android N, and we'll hopefully see that make its way to the Tab S2. Finally, we have Google's own tablet, the Pixel C. The Pixel C has had a rocky lifetime, and it has only been out since December of last year. In its original form it was plaugued by problems relating to its WiFi, its touchscreen, its stability, and its performance. Since that time Google has issued a patch that significantly improved the touchscreen responsiveness and the software stability, and with that patch the Pixel C became what is arguably the best Android tablet on the market. It definitely isn't without its flaws, as the WiFi has a very short range and never comes close to achieving the speeds that it should, but unfortunately the current Android tablet market forces you to pick and choose between hardware related problems, and in the Pixel C's case its performance, display quality, and battery life are enough to put it above the competition. It's available for $499 in a 32GB configuration, or $599 for the 64GB model. The Pixel C has one major accessory, which is its keyboard cover. At $149 it's not something I would recommend due to the Pixel C's its general issues with wireless connectivity along with the limited use for the keyboard, but it is available for users who want it. One notable thing is that the keyboard has a very novel hinge implementation that allows you to set it to almost any angle without the need for a kickstand. The Windows tablet market is pretty much a Microsoft Surface market at this point. There haven't been any successors to the inexpensive Bay Trail tablets of two years ago, and most Windows tablets are really 2-in-1 laptops that either have a rotating hinge or can be split into two parts. There certainly have been some notable launches there like the ASUS T300 Chi, and of course Microsoft's own Surface Book, but they often end just being both a mediocre tablet and a mediocre laptop. Meanwhile, convertible devices like the HP Spectre x360 can be great laptops, but being convertible means you're always holding up a laptop, which is just far too heavy to comfortably use. With all that in mind, my recommendation from last Christmas hasn't changed. The Surface 3 and the Surface Pro 4 are the best you can get for Windows laptops. For many people the full Windows experience with legacy apps and a filesystem necessary for their daily workflow. The bonus on top of that with the Surfaces is tha you get a Windows experience that is free of the preloaded bloatware that other OEMs include. The entry model in the Surface line is the Surface 3. This is both a smaller and less expensive device than the Surface Pro 4, but it still runs a full copy of Windows. The display is a 10.8" 1920x1280 panel with a high degree of color accuracy, but at $499 the resolution is definitely much lower than it should be. Inside is an Intel Atom x7-Z8700 SoC, along with 2GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC NAND in the $499 model, or 4GB of RAM and 128GB of NAND in the $599 model. The additional RAM and storage for $100 is definitely worth it if you plan to be running any serious Windows software, although as the price moves even further beyond $499 the display's low pixel density becomes very difficult to accept. Adding on Microsoft's Surface Pen bumps the price up another $50, and the Type cover is $129 so the cost of the accessories brings the price up fairly quickly. Of course, the flagship Surface tablet is the Surface Pro 4. The Surface Pro 4 comes in more configurations than I could ever list here. The pricing ranges from $899 for the fanless model with an Intel Core m3-6Y30 CPU, a 128GB PCIe SSD, and 4GB of RAM, all the way to $2699 for a dual core Intel Core i7-6650U, 16GB of RAM, and a 1TB PCIe SSD. The average price for the Surface Pro 4 should make it pretty clear why I think it ends up competing more with high end laptops than iPads or Android tablets, but it is technically a tablet. From another point of view, the base model isn't really any more expensive than the iPad Pro once you factor in what Apple charges for accessories, and getting the full Windows experience will appeal to many people. Specs that are common to all models of the Surface Pro 4 are a 12.3" 2736x1824 display, 802.11ac WiFi, and an included Surface Pen. The battery capacities do vary based on the CPU you get, and the Core i5 and Core i7 models aren't able to be passively cooled like the Core m3 model is so they do use a fan for cooling. Microsoft's Surface Type Cover will still run you $129 on top of the price of the tablet, or $159 if you opt for the version that has a fingerprint scanner for authentication. Both Surface tablets can legitimately replace a full fledged Windows laptop, and in part that's because they excel at the types of tasks you would do on a laptop. The limited Modern UI app selection does put it in a different category than the iPad Pro, but I also think that many of the buyers interested in a Surface 3 or Surface Pro 4 want one specifically because it can run all of their existing Windows software. If you fall into that category, I really recommend you take a look our reviews of the Surface 3 and Surface Pro 4 , because Microsoft has executed the hybrid laptop/tablet idea better than any other company has.

2016-03-18 08:16 Brandon Chester www.anandtech.com

21 Logitech Announces G610 Orion Brown And G610 Orion Red Mechanical Keyboards Today Logitech unveiled two new mechanical keyboards under their G branding, with the G610 Orion Brown and G610 Orion Red. As I’m sure many of you have already guessed, the different naming doesn’t refer to the color of the keyboards, but the Cherry MX switches inside. Logitech, being one of the world’s largest maker of computer peripherals, already makes mechanical keyboards with their own Romer G switches, as Ian saw at his Logitech Tech Day in Switzerland , but it must be hard to compete against the weight of the Cherry MX name, so the G610 Orion features either Red or Brown versions of the Cherry MX lineup. Logitech calls the Cherry MX the “industry standard in mechanical switches” and that would be hard to argue at this point. The switches are rated for over 50 million keystrokes, and the wide array of switch models make them a favorite of a large range of people. Logitech has chosen the Brown, which have “a tactile bump for feedback” as well as the Red, which have “a linear keypress” and since everyone seems to have their own preference when it comes to the Cherry MX switches, it’s nice to see them offering two options. Key travel is 4 mm and actuation is 2 mm, and the switches are rated for a 45 gram actuation force. The keyboards also feature customizable backlighting, and while the light is a monochrome white, brightness levels can be adjusted on a per-key basis. The key lighting is controlled by the Logitech Gaming Software, and allows synchronization of the lighting with other Logitech G products. Other features of the keyboards are a fingerprint-masking matte texture, which is something I’d love to see on more laptops, and Logitech has gone with a 6-foot braided USB cable which not only looks better than plastic, they generally are a bit easier to work with as well. The keyboard features dedicated media keys, as well as full customization of the keyboard using the Logitech Gaming Software, including macro support for the F1-F12 keys. This and lighting can be controlled when you enable Game Mode. The keyboard itself is 153 mm x 443.5 mm x 34.3 mm and weighs 1.2 Kg. The Logitech G Orion Brown and Red keyboards will be available this month in the US and Europe, with a MSRP of $119 or €139, which is a bit less than the Logitech G910 Orion Spark. Source: Logitech

2016-03-18 08:16 Brett Howse www.anandtech.com

22 AMD Unveils GPU Architecture Roadmap: After Polaris Comes Vega Although AMD’s GDC 2016 “Capsaicin” event was primarily focused on game development – it is the Game Developers Conference, after all – AMD did spend a brief moment discussing their future GPU plans. For the first time in many years, AMD has published a GPU architecture roadmap. Plotting perf/watt against the years, AMD’s roadmap unveils two new architectures: Vega, and Navi. Essentially everything there is to know about these architectures is in this slide – AMD is being tight-lipped regarding further details – but this map gives us some tantalizing new information to work with. Vega is currently scheduled to come relatively quickly after Polaris. Depending on how literal you interpret this chart, the far left edge of the Vega box does fall into 2016, though obviously AMD intends to leave themselves some wiggle room here and not tie themselves down to specific dates. The fact that Vega comes this soon after Polaris is interesting; it seems hard to believe that it’s a direct successor to Polaris – I can’t see AMD replacing Polaris parts in less than a year – so this points to Vega being more of a cousin, and is where AMD’s naming system isn’t especially helpful in deciphering anything further. With Polaris confirmed to use GDDR5, Vega is notable for being the first AMD architecture to use HBM2, and the first parts in general to use HBM tech since Fiji. I’m presuming these are higher-end GPUs to complement the Polaris GPUs (the smaller of which we know to be a low- power laptop design), which is where HBM would be more cost-effective, at least at current prices. Meanwhile AMD has also confirmed the number of GPUs in the Vega stack and their names. We’ll be seeing a Vega 10 and a Vega 11. This follows Polaris GPU naming – which has finally been confirmed – with Polaris 10 and Polaris 11. I have also been told that Polaris 11 is the smaller of the Polaris GPUs, so at this point it’s reasonable to assume the same for Vega. Finally, farther out towards 2018 is an architecture AMD is calling Navi. This one I suspect will attract the most attention (even if it’s the farthest out) due to the ambiguity of its features: “scalability” and “next gen memory”. Similar to how it’s hard to see Vega directly replacing Polaris, it’s hard to see Navi directly replacing Vega after only a year. This leaves Navi rife for speculation; I could very well see it being a Polaris replacement since we’ll be nearly 2 years past Polaris, or perhaps something to do with AMD’s APU plans. Either way I don’t expect that this will be the last time AMD teases it before finally launching it.

Discussing the State of DirectX 12 With Microsoft & Oxide Games anandtech.com AMD Announces Radeon Pro Duo: Dual GPU Fiji Video Card For VR Content Creation anandtech.com 2016-03-18 08:16 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

23 How Yahoo Keeps Trying to Reinvent Itself Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is under greater pressure than ever to find some way to produce big returns for investors. The former Google executive was named Yahoo CEO in July 2012 with a mandate to return the once-high-flying Internet company to consistent growth. However, Yahoo has continued to struggle and Mayer's decisions during that period have been called into question by activist shareholders. To make matters worse, Yahoo's board has made selling the company one of its strategic options. Still, Mayer and her executive team keep working on restructuring plans. In recent weeks, Yahoo has made surprising moves, including abandoning some of its media properties. The company also continues to lay off workers in hopes of getting down to a size that will allow it to achieve the sustained profitability shareholders demand. Needless to say, Mayer has her work cut out for her. But there is no sign she is ready to throw in the towel. During a March 10 PBS interview, she said she wanted three more years to turn Yahoo around. This slide show will discuss what Mayer has done to reinvent Yahoo.

2016-03-18 09:26 Don Reisinger www.eweek.com

24 'Game of Thrones' meets Dr. Seuss in 'Oh, The Places It'll Snow' What would the "Game of Thrones" world look like if beloved children's book author Dr. Seuss wrote about Westeros, instead of fantasy book author George R. R. Martin? "I rewrote the Dr. Seuss poem 'Oh The Places You'll Go' with a 'Game of Thrones' twist, and then illustrated it as a book," Cohen wrote on Imgur. "Took a long time but I like how it came out -- I hope you all enjoy! " Of course, the whole homage is written in a typical Seuss-like rhyme, which makes the book even more endearing. "You've got your sword in hand, you've taken the black. But once you've said your vows, you can never go back. You're on your own. And you know what you know. But unfortunately, you know nothing Jon Snow. " We also see other "Game of Thrones" characters in the book such as Arya and Tyrion, all drawn in perfect Seussian style. Even White Walkers get a shout-out. Needless to say, just as in the "Game of Thrones" TV series, this book parody also shows many deaths and the Dying Place. But don't worry. There's also a very uplifting message about flying dragons. The fan-made book is so much fun to read, I actually wish it was an official book I could buy and proudly place on my bookshelf alongside Martin's weighty tomes. "So... be your name Jon Snow or Arya or Bran, Tyrion or Dany Targaryen You've come to Great Places! Today is your day! The Game of Thrones is waiting So...go on and play! "

2016-03-18 00:07 Bonnie Burton cnet.com.feedsportal.com

25 Razer Unveils The Updated Razer Blade: Chroma Keyboard, Skylake, And A Lower Price The 2015 Razer Blade was a nice evolution in the history of Razer’s 14-inch gaming notebook lineup. This 0.70”, or 17.8 mm thick notebook is built from a solid aluminum chassis, CNC milled and finished with a matte black finish. It is one of the thinnest and lightest gaming laptops around, and yet it still packs in a NVIDIA GTX 970M GPU. Today Razer is announcing an update to the Blade which brings some nice additions to one of the best built notebooks around. The exterior is very much the same design, which is not a bad thing. It is not identical though. Razer has shaved a bit of weight off of the package, and it is now just 4.25 lbs / 1.92 kg, down from 4.47 lbs / 2.03 kg on the previous generation. The overall finish is the same, but closer inspection reveals the addition of a USB-C port with Thunderbolt 3 as well. With Razer announcing the Razer Core external graphics dock at CES, it was a sure bet that the next Blade would also be compatible, and right on cue, Razer’s lineup which supports their external graphics dock has doubled. Keeping to the outside, another feature which Razer debuted at CES on the Razer Blade Stealth has also found its way to the Blade, and that is the Chrome keyboard. This anti-ghosting keyboard now supports 16.8 million colors on each individual key, and it supports the Razer SDK so that games and other applications can tap in to the Chroma software to customize the lighting effects on a per-application basis. I like Razer green, but user customization trumps that color any day, and this is a welcome addition. On the inside, there are some nice updates as well. The CPU is now an Intel Core i7-6700HQ processor, which has a 2.6 GHz base frequency and 3.5 GHz turbo, and this quad-core model also supports hyperthreading. Last year Razer bumped the memory up to 16 GB on the higher end version of the Blade, and that is now standard across the lineup, and it is of course DDR4- 2133 with the inclusion of Skylake. NVIDIA hasn’t released any new GPUs in a while, and as we wait for the new FinFET graphics cards to come sometime later this year, Razer has instead moved to the 6 GB GTX 970M option, up from the 3 GB version in the Blade last year. The wireless has also been switched to the Killer Wireless-AC 1535, which can help with latency when gaming. Finally, storage has been switched out to PCIe M.2 SSDs, and for 2016 there will only be 256 GB and 512 GB options, meaning the too small 128 GB version is thankfully no more. When games can be 50 GB on their own, that simply wasn’t enough storage for this type of system. The display is pretty much unchanged. Razer is sticking with their Sharp IGZO 3200x1800 touch display, which we’ve seen on the Blade since 2014. It is a solid panel, offering great clarity, along with good color accuracy. When I say pretty much, the one change is that the short lived 1920x1080p matte offering which lost touch capabilities, but improved battery life, is no longer available. Razer didn’t say whether this would be coming back, but they only told me they would continue listening to customer feedback. It’s possible that this model just didn’t have enough sales to justify the extra SKU. Possibly the biggest change though is the pricing structure. For 2015, the lowest cost Razer Blade was the 256 GB 1080p model, for $1999, and the touch version started at $2199 for 128 GB and $2399 for 256 GB. For 2016, the entry level Blade with the QHD+ touch display and 256 GB of storage is just $1999, and the 512 GB version adds $200 to that. At the same storage capacity, Razer has lowered the price $400, and it is $500 less for the 512 GB version. That’s a significant cut, although the Razer Blade was certainly a high priced offering before. With the aggressive pricing on the Razer Blade Stealth at $999, Razer seems to be making a move to be a bigger volume player than they were in the past. The 2016 Razer Blade will be available for pre-order on RazerZone.com tomorrow, with shipments starting in April. Source: Razer

2016-03-18 05:21 Brett Howse www.anandtech.com

26 Sony to Start Selling PlayStation VR in October for $399 Sony has published the price of its PlayStation VR virtual reality headset and confirmed its final specifications and launch timeframe on Tuesday. The company intends to start selling the unit in October for $399, which is slightly later than expected. While the product will be considerably more affordable than competing headsets from Oculus VR and HTC - though the sticker price does not include the required camera - its technical specs are somewhat behind its rivals. The Sony PlayStation VR head-mounted display (HMD) (CUH-ZVR1-series) features a 5.7” OLED display with 1920x1080 (960x1080 per eye) resolution, 90 Hz – 120 Hz refresh rate and approximately 100° field of view. The PS VR HMD is equipped with six-axis motion sensing system (three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer) as well as stereo headphones. Right now, Sony does not reveal many details about its VR headset, so, we do not know a lot of peculiarities of the HMD, such as display or motion to photon latencies. Nonetheless, based on what we do know about Sony’s VR headset, we can say that it uses a lot of custom-made components, which are optimized for virtual reality. Every PlayStation VR will come with a special processor unit, which will plug to the PlayStation 4 game console. Sony’s VR headset will connect to the processor unit using an HDMI cable, a PS4’AUX cable, as well as a stereo mini-jack. Sony does not disclose what is inside the processor unit, but it claims that it does 3D audio processing as well as enables multi-display capabilities. In particular, the processor unit can enable cinematic mode, which lets users watch content or play games (including currently available PS4 titles) on a large virtual 225” screen. In addition, the processor unit can show what happens in virtual worlds on TV screens (in mirroring mode) as well as show different content on TV and VR screens (in separate mode). The processor comes in at a relatively light 365 grams, so while Sony isn't disclosing much about the internals, it's unlikely to contain much in the way of high-powered hardware; perhaps a semi-custom processor of some kind. The processor unit will use three HDMI ports, a USB port and an AUX cable to connect to a TV, a PS4 and a PS VR. Each PlayStation VR headset will be bundled with the PlayRoom VR set of games by Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios. The PlayRoom VR suit will include six online virtual reality games. Sony claims that 230 game developers and publishers are working on 160 various PS VR software titles and 50 of them will be available already this year. Sony claims that such games as Eagle Flight , EVE: Valkyrie , Headmaster , Rez Infinite , Wayward Sky , RIGS: Mechanized Combat League , Tumble VR and Until Dawn: Rush of Blood may hit the market already in 2016. While the price of Sony’s PlayStation VR is not low and its bundle does not include the PlayStation Camera (around $50) needed to track the headset’s position as well as the PlayStation Move hand-tracking controllers (approximately $50 per unit), which are expected to be required for many games, it looks like Sony’s PlayStation 4 virtual reality platform will cost gamers less than competing PC-based VR platforms (albeit, at the cost of lower resolution). In order to try VR games on PS4, gamers will need to invest $399 in the PlayStation VR, $110 in the camera and controllers and $349 in the PlayStation 4 (around $859 in total, assuming they don’t have a PS4 and the aforementioned hardware). By contrast, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets will cost $599 and $799, respectively, and will require a relatively powerful PC that typically starts at $949. It remains to be seen how the lower MSRP of Sony’s virtual reality platform will affect its popularity among gamers, and whether Sony can wring any further economies of scale out of production. Nonetheless, lower price will be Sony’s trump in its competition against Oculus VR and HTC. Sony will begin to roll-out its PlayStation VR from October 2016 in Japan, North America, Europe and Asia, where it will cost ¥44,980, $399, €399 and £349. The company said that it decided to delay the release of its PS VR from the first half of the year to October in order to ensure that it can make enough hardware units. Another reason to delay the product could be readiness of VR games. Sony needs to ensure that their quality is high and performance is solid, which is why it needed to buy some additional time for developers.

2016-03-18 05:21 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

27 The Corsair Strafe RGB Mechanical Keyboard Review with MX Silent (Red) Switches Cherry's MX Silent switches are making their debut on the Corsair Strafe RGB gaming mechanical keyboard. Corsair has the exclusive on the MX Silent for the first year, and in this review we are examining the quality and features of the Strafe RGB keyboard as well as the performance of the new switches. Mechanical keyboards are now etched into the minds of PC enthusiasts, making the requested upgrade list alongside a specific mouse or headset. However, there are those who are reluctant because of the two major disadvantages of mechanical switches - price and noise. Price is something we'll come onto, but noise is a particular problem for those who want to use them in working environments or have their home PC inside a shared living space, such as the living room or bedroom. Some aftermarket solutions have appeared, in the form of silicon O- rings and pads, to dampen the noise that mechanical keys do when bottoming down. However, a very large portion of the noise actually does not come from the key bottoming down but from the spring that quickly resets the key up to its original position, meaning that even with O- rings or pads installed beneath the keycaps, a mechanical keyboard could not ever become really quiet. The growing adoption rate and sales of mechanical keyboards have given the manufacturers incentive to research and develop new products. Cherry, the original creator and patent holder of the keyboard mechanical switch, has created and patented "silent" versions of the MX mechanical switch. For the time being, only MX Red and MX Black switches are available as "silent" variants, which makes sense considering that the MX Blue switch is inherently noisy ("clicky"). Hopefully, silent versions of the popular MX Brown switch may appear in the future as well. Cherry currently holds a deal with Corsair, giving them exclusive use of the Silent product range for the first year after their launch. Corsair has thus released a new version of the Strafe , their middle-range mechanical keyboard, including RGB lighting and the new silent version of the MX Red switch. The new MX Silent switches increased the MSRP of the keyboard by $20 ($170 instead of the $150 for the version with MX Blue switches). The increase in price may be why the company decided not to use them for the time being on the more expensive K70 RGB and K95 RGB models. $20 should be more than an acceptable price difference for those seeking a silent mechanical keyboard (and would spend them on O-rings or pads anyway, with perhaps questionable results). It will be interesting to see if the Cherry MX Silent switch can truly deliver over the self-customization route, and we will find out in this review. The Strafe RGB comes in a well-designed, thick cardboard box. The artwork is based on a picture of the keyboard itself and has a black/yellow color theme, which is the "signature" livery of the Corsair Gaming brand. The use of Cherry's new MX Silent switches is very clearly noted on the front side of the box. Alongside with the keyboard, Corsair supplies a very basic manual, a wrist rest, a keycap removal tool and two sets of gaming keycaps. The first set is supposed to be for FPS gamers and the second for MOBA gamers. Both sets are contoured and textured. Two keycaps, the W and the D, exist in both sets but have different contours as a result. The wrist rest was not included in the "vanilla" version of the Strafe that we reviewed last year , so it is a positive sign to see it included here.

2016-03-18 05:21 E. Fylladitakis www.anandtech.com

28 Kishonti Announces GFXBench 5 Aztec Ruins At GDC Today the 2016 Game Developers Conference kicked off, and Kishonti hasn't wasted any time in announcing the latest version of their GFXBench benchmark. While GFXBench 4 is still relatively new, the demo showcased at GDC was for the upcoming GFXBench 5, which will have full support for Vulkan, Metal, and DirectX 12. This makes it a benchmark that targets all of the modern lower level graphics APIs introduced in recent times, and with the introduction of Vulkan on Android it means that we'll have a modern graphics benchmark using those APIs across all the major mobile and desktop platforms. The main benchmark shown from GFXBench 5 is the Aztec Ruins scene. Kishonti notes that the benchmark has been made to scale up from phones all the way to desktops, although they focus on highlighting many of the advantages that support for Vulkan on Android will bring for games, including reducing overhead to improve CPU efficiency, which can ultimately lead to improved battery life. As for what's new in GFXBench with Aztec Ruins, Kishonti states that the benchmark itself uses an entirely new in-house rendering engine which brings support for new effects like Dynamic Global Illumination, which is essentially a form of lighting that accounts for the illumination of certain surfaces caused by light that is reflected off of other surfaces. There are also various improvements at the engine level which take advantage of the new features included in Vulkan and other low level graphics APIs. In addition to its use as a benchmark for typical gaming devices, GFXBench 5 will also come with a VR testing mode that measures the rendering frame rate, frame rate stability, and latency information. It will also come with a demo mode that allows users with VR headsets to explore the benchmark's Aztec Ruins environment. GFXBench 5 is still in its development phase, and Kishonti plans to release it by Q3 of this year. It's also available for licensing within their benchmarking development program to partners and other companies that may find it relevant to their testing. For those who are at GDC or viewing the conference via streams there will also be a short demo session for the new benchmark at 6:20PM on Wednesday during the Khronos event.

Discussing the State of DirectX 12 With Microsoft & Oxide Games anandtech.com 2016-03-18 08:16 Brandon Chester www.anandtech.com

29 Hands On With the Retail Oculus Rift: Countdown to Launch By far the dominant theme at GDC 2016 has been virtual reality. If you’re not a hardware vendor directly creating VR products, then you’re explaining how your products are a good match for VR or make for a better VR experience. And if you’re a software developer, then you’re at a minimum toying with VR, if not outright designing games for it. If nothing else, it’s the session attendance figures that demonstrate just how important VR is at GDC: after Monday’s overflowing attendance of VR sessions as part of the show-within-a-show VRDC, GDC had to move all of the VRDC Tuesday sessions to double sized rooms to accommodate the crowds. This madness is not without good reason. For both software and hardware vendors, VR represents new opportunities in an already strong gaming market. Software developers get to experiment with new gaming paradigms on the cutting edge of tech, and hardware vendors can look forward to selling the more powerful hardware needed to drive a smooth VR experience. Today VR is a wild frontier, full of risk and rewards, and after this week’s GDC that frontier will be getting a little more civilized as the first consumer VR headsets begin shipping. VR is not a new idea – as our readers who were gaming in the 90s can recall with mixed feeling – but Oculus deserves the bulk of attention for bringing it back to the forefront and kicking off this wave of interest in and development of VR. Since their 2012 kickstarter they have developed the industry’s blueprint for VR hardware, combining fast refreshing OLED displays with modern sensors that can both quickly and accurately track headset movement. Oculus has iterated on headsets several times now, continually refining the display, optics, head tracking, and more, as they work to bring a retail quality headset to market. And now later this month those efforts will begin to pay off as they ship their first retail headsets to eager backers and first-time buyers. This brings us to today’s article, my hands-on session with the final, retail version of the Oculus Rift. As part of their GDC festivities, Oculus held a lengthy press demo to give us a chance to try out the retail hardware with a number of games being prepared for the headset, to demonstrate not only the hardware but the games and experiences that it will be driving. A full review of the Rift will be coming later, but for today I wanted to discuss my impressions of the retail hardware and the various titles I had a chance to try.

2016-03-18 08:16 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

30 Intel's Skull Canyon NUC is Official: $650, Shipping In May Back in January, Intel had provided us with information about the Skull Canyon NUC based on a Skylake H-Series CPU(with Iris Pro Graphics). Today, at GDC 2016, Intel made the specifications official. Pricing and availability information was also provided. The key aspect that was not revealed before was the dimensions. The Skull Canyon NUC (NUC6i7KYK) will come in at 216mm x 116mm x 23mm, with the volume coming in at just 0.69L. For comparison, the Skylake NUC6i5SYK (non-2.5" drive version) comes in at 115mm x 111mm x 32mm (0.41L), while NUC6i5SYH (2.5" drive bay-enabled) one is 115mm x 111mm x 48mm (0.61L). The rest of the specifications are outlined in the table below: Note that the HDMI 2.0 output is enabled by an external LSPcon (not Alpine Ridge). So, we will definitely have 4Kp60 output with HDCP 2.2 support over the HDMI port, making it suitable as a future-proof HTPC platform. From a gaming perspective, the availability of Thunderbolt 3 enables users to add an external graphics dock like the recently announced Razer Core eGFX module. Note that any external GPU will be able to talk to the CPU only over a PCIe 3.0 x4 link (which should be plenty in almost all cases). The Skull Canyon NUC will be available to pre-order on Newegg next month, with shipping in May 2016. 2016-03-18 08:16 Ganesh T www.anandtech.com

31 Qualcomm’s New SDK Enables Development of VR Apps on Snapdragon 820 Qualcomm on Monday introduced its first virtual reality software development kit, designed for its Snapdragon 820 mobile SoC. The new tools will enable software makers to create programs that take advantage of Snapdragon 820’s graphics processing capabilities (i.e. Adreno) as well as built-in sensors. Qualcomm confirmed that in addition to smartphones and other mobile devices, the Snapdragon 820 will also be used inside VR headsets. The Samsung Gear VR platform, as well as Google’s Cardboard, have demonstrated that smartphones based on contemporary high-end mobile SoCs can be used to enable virtual reality headsets. While graphics processing performance of mobile SoCs lags behind modern desktop graphics by AMD or NVIDIA, they integrate numerous sensors and technologies which can crucial for virtual reality equipment. In fact, positive virtual reality experience requires not only high-quality visuals and surround sound but also the complete immersion of the user and a sense of physical presence. As a result, precise sensors to track user’s movements and minimal latency are very important. But to fully utilize capabilities of modern mobile SoCs, software developers need a right set of tools tailored for VR software. Also, given the secrecy around the internal GPU Adreno graphics solution and its microarchitecture, any set of tools that can assist with graphics/DSP manipulation are a good thing to have. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon VR SDK, which will be available in the second quarter, supports a number of technologies that simplify development of virtual reality applications, such as games, 360° VR videos and a variety of interactive education and entertainment apps. The Snapdragon VR SDK supports DSP sensor fusion, which allows developers to access high-frequency inertial data from gyroscopes and accelerometers via the Snapdragon Sensor Core. The software development kit also allows developers to use the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP for predictive head position processing. Usage of the Snapdragon VR SDK reduces latency by up to 50% by using asynchronous time warp with single buffer rendering for a rapid transformation of rendered images in 3D space. Qualcomm says that its Snapdragon 820 SoC features 18 ms motion to photon latency thanks to various enhancements. The Snapdragon VR SDK also brings support for stereoscopic rendering with lens correction, color correction and barrel distortion, something that should improve the visual quality of graphics and videos. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 820 can render stereoscopic images in 3200x1800 resolution at 90 fps. In addition, the software development kit can help to generate menus that are readable in VR worlds thanks to UI layering. Finally, the Snapdragon VR SDK gives developers access to CPU, GPU, and DSP power and performance management in a bid to help them guarantee high and stable frame rates (90 fps) in low-power devices. Precise power management is also required to build sleek and lightweight VR headsets. While the launch of a special Snapdragon VR SDK is a significant step for Qualcomm in the field of virtual reality, what is really important is Qualcomm’s commitment to VR in general. The company claims that it developed the Snapdragon 820 with virtual reality in mind and it will continue to implement VR-specific technologies into its upcoming Adreno graphics cores, CPU cores as well as Hexagon DSPs. Keeping in mind that VR headsets will only get more complex in the coming years, all the technologies that Qualcomm manages to incorporate into its SoCs will be instrumental in improving the quality of VR content. For ecosystem enablement, Qualcomm will initially bring developers this VR SDK, and then also app development tools, device optimization tools, development platforms, and so on. In particular, Qualcomm claims that VR headsets based on the Snapdragon 820 are incoming, which will allow end-users to experience VR apps and content, whereas developers will be able to test their programs on commercial hardware.

2016-03-18 08:16 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

32 VRScore: Crytek and Basemark Announce New Benchmark Release Virtual Reality has definitely been playing the slow and steady race for a while now. Thankfully, with the approach of consumer VR headsets going on sale , more of us will be able to see the fruits of years of hard work. One very important aspect of any new consumer product is measuring its capability, and consequently the value. In the case of VR there are many pieces to the chain that can make or break the experience, so as a result Basemark and Crytek have taken that opportunity and teamed up to bring us VRScore, a new VR benchmark, which is being announced and made available to corporate customers today and to consumers later this year. Basemark and Crytek are collaborating with the goal to create a benchmark that shows how ready consumers are for VR, and the potential that VR could achieve. On one side we have Basemark, who brings their benchmarking pedigree, and on the other side is Crytek who have been a reference point in the world of game engines for over a decade. Last year they began work together on the VRScore benchmark , with the goal being to produce a real world VR benchmark based on a game engine currently in use for production of AAA titles. After being in development for a few months, Basemark and Crytek are ready to announce today that their VRScore benchmark will be available immediately for corporate customers. Consumers will be able to get their hands on the benchmark this June in both a limited free version and a fully functional Pro Version. With just over 3.5 years between us and the Kickstarter campaign for the Oculus Rift , we are finally on the cusp of enthusiast grade consumer VR coming to market. As has long been established, VR requires a high-resolution display running at a high refresh rate with low input latency. The VR chain can experience latency from the point the user gives input to the application processing that input, then from the application to output the data to the screen. In the mix is also the audio configuration, which by default needs to be positional and reactive. In the case of VR it just so happens that all of this is rolled into one package that isolates you from the outside world, so naturally any weak links in the chain quickly lead to a poor experience. For that reason, VR can require a particular care when preparing a system that will run a VR experience. In both the case of the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, the minimum requirements come out to what in today’s market is likely to be around an $800 custom build or more. More than a third of which will have to go into the GPU, which both systems have recommended a NVIDIA GTX 970, AMD R9 290, or better. The VRScore benchmark supports all major VR headsets. Including the HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift and OSVR. By being built on CryEngine 3, there is support for DirectX 11 and DirectX 12. Along with that, VRScore provides tests for measuring a plethora of metrics that are important for the VR experience: the latency factor, measuring the impact of the HMD and VR audio on the systems performance and also an analysis of the video experience. When these tests are completed then performance numbers for the HMD, GPU, and CPU are given. With these scores, an online database will be provided to see how a given machine compares with friends and others interested in VR. Yes, that's a 3.5mm plug After years of us all watching the industry work away at the challenges of a growing platform, we finally are approaching products we can buy off the shelves. Basemark and Crytek have been working to provide us with a benchmark to measure the readiness of our computers for the rigors of VR. While VR will be a very demanding endeavor for quite a long time, VRScore is an available option to measure the readiness of an existing or future system for VR gaming. We are also currently working with a few companies to provide other angles for VR metrics as well. VR has the stage set for a lot of growth in the future, but nothing can be controlled without first being measured. VRScore and other utilities like it will be necessary to find the value in VR systems this year and in years to come. Related Reading AMD Announces Radeon Pro Duo: Dual GPU Fiji Video Card For VR Content Creation EVGA Begins Selling "VR Edition" GeForce GTX Video Cards for VR Gaming Rigs HTC Vive Will Be Launching In April Priced At $799 Stepping Into the Display: Experiencing HTC Vive Testing the HTC (Re) Vive with Steam VR Oculus VR Reveals Retail Price of Its Virtual Reality Headset: $599 Oculus Rift Controllers, VR Games, And Software Features Announced Oculus VR Posts Recommended System Specs For Rift - Outlines Platform Goals Oculus Demos Crescent Bay and VR Audio

2016-03-18 08:16 Daniel Williams www.anandtech.com

33 GDC 2016: Tearing & Freesync/G-Sync Support Coming to Windows' UWP Apps With the recent release of the first major games built for Windows’ Universal Windows Platform runtime, the current limitations of UWP has been a hot topic in technical circles. When it comes to gaming, UWP as it stands is not up to par with the Win32 API we have come to know and tolerate. To that end, with Microsoft running a block of technical sessions at today’s GDC, I checked in on the state of UWP and where Microsoft is in addressing some of the concerns that have been raised over the past couple of weeks. The overall message from Microsoft right now is to wait and see. Talking to Microsoft representatives and speakers, the company is well aware of what’s being said and wants to address it. GDC just won’t be that venue. Rather the company will be updating the press and developers on UWP at BUILD 2016, Microsoft’s annual conference that’s taking place in two weeks. And while the company’s reps can’t make specific comments at GDC on what to expect later this month, I do consider it a positive sign that they are aware of what’s going on and that they are preparing what looks to be a serious response. Meanwhile on a related note, in this year’s DirectX 12 session, Microsoft has confirmed that they are going to be addressing the current refresh interval limitations of UWP. In short, Windows UWP will be gaining support for interval immediate refreshing, otherwise known as tearing. Tearing currently isn't allowed, and while tearing is not typically desirable, there are situations where the bare minimum latency it affords may be more useful than displaying a whole frame without corruption. This will also allow Freesync and G-Sync variable refresh rate technologies to work with UWP, as the underlying issues blocking them with the current system are much similar. As it stands there isn’t an ETA on this update, however it’s something the DirectX team has taken to heart, and with a bit of luck it may be sooner than later.

2016-03-18 08:16 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

34 Domino's robot finally removes last vestiges of human contact from pizza delivery If you want a picture of the future, imagine a bot delivering pizza to a human face -- forever. Maybe that's not exactly what George Orwell had in mind. In fact, we don't actually know when robots will start delivering you pizza, so put down the phone. But Domino's is eagerly anticipating that day, revealing a prototype for an autonomous wheeled delivery bot that it says could change the way we eat. Meet Domino's Robotic Unit -- a machine developed by Domino's team in Australia that is set to take over the jobs of awkward teens of the future. That's right. Someone designed a pizza-bot, not to feed your Bacchanalian desires for melted cheese and cured meats, but to address the dry crust of regulatory policy. And yes, we'd happily sit on the Joint Steering Committee for Pizza and Robotics, thank you very much. But the DRU has us asking all kinds of questions. Like, what happens on a Friday night, when young Dru is trying to meet his delivery quota and he gets attacked by hungry teens trying to crack open his brains to feast on the pizza within? And why would humankind curse a robot to roam the earth, Tantalus-like, delivering hot pizza without ever experiencing the joy of tasting a slice? Now Domino's is hoping to be part of the conversation too, calling on the Australian Government to give the people what they want -- a robot that won't judge them when they order three pizzas for a solo night in. Just don't expect it to be dropping by your place any time soon. DRU has certainly got us thinking about all the other robo-prototypes that have emerged from workshops over the years, only to vanish into obscurity or be shamelessly humiliated for failing at their one job. Hopefully Pizzoid (as we've dubbed it) will be different. The Automato Champions in the field You must learn to walk before you can run...

2016-03-18 08:19 Claire Reilly cnet.com.feedsportal.com

35 Pokemon main series sales reach new milestone Sales of mainline Pokemon games have now reached 200 million units worldwide, The Pokemon Company has announced. This figure counts copies of the core series sold through February 29 and does not include the franchise's numerous spinoffs. The Pokemon trading card game is also a massive hit, with more than 21.5 billion cards shipped to 74 countries and in 11 different languages to date.

2016-03-18 00:07 GameSpot Staff cnet.com.feedsportal.com

36 Microsoft Rolls Out Windows 10 Mobile To Windows Phone 8.1 Devices The journey of Windows 10 Mobile from announcement to release has certainly been a strange one. The OS itself was announced roughly one year ago, and around that time Microsoft stated that it would make its way to existing Windows Phone 8.1 devices in December. As December of 2015 came and went, they issued another statement which said that it would be pushed to the first part of 2016. The delays with the release of the OS were fairly well understood by users participating in the Insider beta program, as there were clearly areas that needed to be improved before the software could be widely released. However, October brought about an oddity of sorts as the Lumia 950 and 950XL launched with Windows 10 Mobile while the OS still felt unfinished to users who were beta testing it. While I won't get in to the state of Windows 10 Mobile as it launched in October, the launch of the 950 and 950XL made it clear that the OS needed to come soon to the rest of the Windows Phone user base. Today Microsoft has made good on their promise to bring Windows 10 Mobile to select Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 devices. Getting the specifics on which devices are supported is probably the most important part of the announcement, as the update does not cover all Windows Phone 8 devices, and it doesn't necessarily cover all devices that were originally eligible for the Windows Insider beta program. By brand, the devices that will receive the Windows 10 Mobile update are as follows: Lumia: 1520, 930, 640, 640XL, 730, 735, 830, 532, 535, 540, 635 1GB, 636 1GB, 638 1GB, 430, 435 BLU Win HD w510u, BLU Win HD LTE x150q MCJ Madosma Q501 I have to admit that I'd never heard of the MCK Madosma Q501, but it's a phone for the Japanese market, so hopefully those users will be pleased with the update. As for the devices from BLU, the update is limited to the Win HD and Win HD LTE. The former of those two is a Snapdragon 200 device with two Cortex A7 cores but 1GB of RAM, which makes it clear that the limiting factor here is RAM more than processing power. Finally, there's the Lumia devices. The list of eligible devices is fairly substantial, but there's again the caveat with models that came in two versions that you need the model with 1GB of RAM. To prepare for the update to Windows 10 Mobile and confirm your phone's eligibility Microsoft recommends that you download the Update Advisor application. They've also set up a support page with some more information about the upgrade.

2016-03-18 00:03 Brandon Chester www.anandtech.com

37 MSI Releases Vortex: A Mac Pro-Like SLI PC for Gamers and VR, from $2199 We originally laid eyes on the final design back at CES , but now MSI has begun to sell its Vortex gaming desktops in the US. The 6.5-liter systems resembles the design of Apple’s Mac Pro , using a singular fan and triangular core to pack a high- end CPU along with two GPUs and a lot of memory, offering impressive performance at a premium price. When Apple introduced its current-generation Mac Pro a little more than two years ago, the company clearly demonstrated that it was possible to build a small form-factor workstation with two professional GPUs and a multi-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with only one fan. Since then, a number of PC makers have released high-end small form factor desktops in the mini-ITX form-factor, but all of them were equipped with multiple fans and were still larger than Apple’s Mac Pro, or traditionally looked like PCs such as ASUS' GR20. Last year MSI decided to take a leaf out of Apple’s book and develop a gaming PC that would borrow Mac Pro’s triangle arrangement of CPU and GPUs as well as round design with one blower fan. The company first demonstrated its Vortex desktop last fall and has been refining its system since then. MSI showcased near final version at CES with a heavy bent on virtual reality support, but were still tinkering with the final specifications. Now MSI is finally ready to ship the Vortex. MXM Modules in play, showing Samsung GDDR5 MSI’s Vortex G65 platform is based on Intel’s Core i7-6700K processor as well as the Z170 chipset. With this combination, MSI will offer systems in two variants, with either two GeForce GTX 980 GPUs in SLI (the SLI-001) or GeForce GTX 960 GPUs in SLI (SLI-011). The MSI Vortex G65 systems are equipped with 32 or 16 GB of DDR4-2133 memory respectively, two 128 GB SSDs in RAID (M.2 form-factor with PCIe 3.0 x4 interface, no word on the exact models) and 1 TB HDD at 7200 RPM. The gaming machines also feature two Rivet Networks Killer Gigabit Ethernet E2400 controllers and one Killer Wireless-AC 1535 Wi-Fi controller (802.11ac) to support DoubleShot-X3 Pro as well as two Thunderbolt 3 ports (we're unsure if this is one controller or two at this point). As for external ports, the PCs have two TB 3, two DisplayPort 1.2, two HDMI 1.4 and four USB 3.0 connectors. There's no word if the TB3 ports also support USB 3.1, but given that it hasn't been advertised at this time we assume not. No word on the audio codec, as the rear of the chassis only has headphone/microphone jacks. The Vortex G65 systems from MSI heavily use custom-built hardware, such as the motherboard, cooling system, power supply and so forth. Nonetheless, they still use standard Intel’s LGA1151 processors, MXM graphics modules for the GPUs, PCIe SSDs, SO-DIMM modules for memory and so on, which sounds as if they can be easily upgraded at MSI select partners and retailers (in fact, select MSI’s partners can even upgrade MXM modules). Still, owners should keep in mind that the PCs are equipped with 450W PSUs, perhaps indicating that the parts on offer are specially binned for the low power/voltage characteristics needed for the Vortex. The Vortex G65 platform should fully support overclocking, but given thermal and power consumption constraints, it is hard to expect the Vortex G65 to be a good overclocker, but that is a natural trade-off between performance, style and size. It is worth noting that there are two really interesting things here with the GPUs on offer. Firstly, the GTX 980 in 8 GB form, as far as we can tell, has not been formally announced or released by NVIDIA. So either MSI is creating its own MXM module for this as an AIB partner, or they've pre- empted an NVIDIA announcement, or the part is a GTX 980 (notebook) with 8 GB of memory, which is currently listed at OriginPC. We had feared this was the 980M, which has 25% fewer CUDA cores, but is more common in 8GB form. Using the GTX 980 (notebook) variant makes sense, with a given TDP of 145 W per card, rather than 165 W per card on the desktop variant. Next, on the GTX 960 side: MSI puts the total VRAM at 6 GB for the SLI system, meaning 3 GB per card, which would imply a 192-bit bus. No GTX 960 variant has a 192-bit bus, nor does the GTX 960M, which means this is either a new unreleased version of the GTX 960 with an unbalanced memory allocation (which has happened before) or something more akin to a GTX 970M which does have a 192-bit bus, but they're calling it a GTX 960. It's an interesting mix of information here. We've asked for clarification. Update from MSI: For the GTX980 SLI, this is the MXM version (not the GTX980M but the GTX980). We are using the same graphics card as in our GT80 TITAN SLI. For the GTX960 SLI we are also using is the MXM version. Same MXM card we are using on the GTX970M. Since this is a “desktop” product, Nvidia new naming rule will not have the “M” in there and kick down the number to 960 [and so it has the same specifications as the GTX970M as far as CUDA cores/ROPs - ed]. Exploded view The MSI Vortex G65 system also comes with Dragon Center dashboard application, which allows to customize lighting of the PC case, monitor system performance, launch utilities and apps, fine-tune the system with personalized profiles and so on. Nahimic audio is also bundled in the package. MSI positions its Vortex G65 machines as SFF PCs capable of handling virtual reality games. The two graphics adapters can drive up to four monitors (and with Thunderbolt can connect to up to six displays), hence the system can be used not only for entertainment but also for work. At present MSI does not position its Vortex for professional applications, but it should not be a problem to build a workstation-class system of similar dimensions for the company and we would imagine some top-tier customers are already inquiring. MSI charges $2199 for the Vortex G65 SLI-011 system with two GeForce GTX 960 graphics adapters. The top-of-the-range Vortex G65 SLI-002 with GTX 980 in SLI costs $3999, which is in line with the price of an advanced Apple Mac Pro.

2016-03-18 00:03 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

38 Radar scans reveal hidden chamber in King Tut's tomb The scans, conducted in late November 2015 by radar specialist Hirokatsu Watanabe, revealed two chambers hidden behind the northern and western walls of the chamber where the pharaoh lies entombed. El-Damaty did not speculate on whether the rooms are filled with treasure but did note that the radar scan suggested the presence of metal and organic material in the northern chamber and organic material in the western chamber. However, while there is probably not a wealth of gold and gems behind the walls, the discovery could still be huge. Inside, he believes researchers will find the lost body of Queen Nefertiti, wife of Tutankhamun's father, the pharaoh Akhenaten. Akhenaten's body was probably found in the Valley of the Kings, according to DNA that links it to Tutankhamun. However, Nefertiti's body has never been found. Reeves believes that Tutankhamun's tomb was originally built for the queen, who died in 1330BC. However, when Tutankhamun died suddenly at the age of 19 in 1323, Reeves theorises, Nefertiti's body was set aside in a chamber that was plastered over and hidden, and the tomb given over to the young pharaoh. El-Damaty is a little more open to other possibilities. He believes the chamber could conceal Tutankhamun's mother, Kiya, or his half-sister and wife, Ankhesenamun. "Maybe it could be the lady of the family, as Reeves has said," he said. "But I think we could find Kiya, or Ankhesenamun. " Whatever is inside, we'll have to wait a little while to find out. "We can say more than 90 percent that the chambers are there," el-Damaty said. "But I never start the next step until I'm 100 percent. " The next step in the process will be further radar scans with more advanced equipment to get a more detailed idea of the chambers and their exact dimensions. These scans will also determine the thickness of the walls sealing the chambers from the tomb. What these further scans reveal will be unveiled at another press conference on April 1, when the team will also announce whether the chambers will be unsealed.

2016-03-18 08:19 Michelle Starr cnet.com.feedsportal.com

39 The Drivers and Benefits of Edge Computing Internet use is trending towards bandwidth-intensive content and an increasing number of attached “things”. At the same time, mobile telecom networks and data networks are converging into a cloud computing architecture. To support needs today and tomorrow, computing power and storage is being inserted out on the network edge in order to lower data transport time and increase availability. Edge computing brings bandwidth-intensive content and latency-sensitive applications closer to the user or data source. Types of edge computing include local devices, localized data centers, and regional data centers. The one that provides the deployment speed and capacity in-line with future IoT application demands are the localized 1-10 rack versions. These can be designed and deployed quickly and easily with either configured-to-order or prefabricated variants.

2016-03-18 07:10 www.itworldcanada.com

40 40 India's Micromax gets knocked down by the Chinese In an age of globalized brands dominating the marketplace, the ascent of Micromax was a much celebrated story. Here was a local company in a high-octane, ultra competitive industry taking on super-heavyweights like Samsung with ease and dominating the local market for smartphones. Micromax was much more than just a successful phone company. It epitomized the new India, wooing hip youngsters with affordable devices catered to them, with no other than Mr. Hugh "Wolverine" Jackman as their brand ambassador. Even as far back as two years ago, no one was doing this as successfully as Micromax. The company also had the audacity to spread its wings to other parts of the globe -- becoming the third-largest phone company in Russia in just two years, for instance. All that now seems a distant dream. In just about a year, Micromax's market share in smartphones has plummeted from a healthy 22 percent (at its peak in end-2014 where it actually eclipsed Samsung, according to some analysts, to become the largest phone-maker in India) to a startling low of 13 percent, according to research outfit IDC. This renders its assertive logo of a "punch", the result of a crowdsourced branding exercise a few years ago, into a cruel joke rather than a metaphor for its assertive success. This is not what should have happened to the leading Indian smartphone maker, that too in the hottest smartphone market in the world where shipments have been skyrocketing -- by 29% to 103 million units last year when compared to 2014. However, instead of flying off shelves, Micromax's phone sales actually slumped 12 percent in the last quarter of 2015 while the sector was growing 15.4 percent. It is the only brand in India to suffer the ignominy of a decline in growth in a sizzling market. Chinese brands such as Gionee and Oppo have destroyed Micromax's market share So why did Micromax lose its punch? "What the Indian brands did to the global brands two years ago, Chinese phone makers are doing to Indian brands now, and over the next year we see tremendous competition for Micromax and other Indian smartphone makers," said Tarun Pathak, analyst at Counterpoint Research in New Delhi, in the Mint newspaper article. The cruel irony for Micromax is that the same Chinese companies that manufactured Micromax's devices such as Gionee and Oppo are now firmly entrenched in India, and their phones are increasingly becoming attractive options to Indians to the detriment of Micromax's models. According to IDC, Chinese brands collectively dominate a staggering 22 percent of the market, up from 12 percent just a year ago. If rock-bottom prices weren't enough of a carrot to value- obsessed Indians, a no-hold-barred media onslaught boosted the fortunes of the Chinese companies. Apparently, four Chinese firms -- Vivo, OPPO, Gionee and LeEco -- collectively spent 55 percent of the 1,200 crore rupees ($200 million) shelled out last year for advertising smartphones in India. The slowdown in the Chinese smartphone market meant even more of a working capital imperative to try and corner the Indian market. Lenovo is the other huge success story in India, taking valuable share away from Micromax by going from a 0.6 percent share in 2014 to a staggering 10 percent, thanks largely due to the phenomenal success of its Moto line of phones. Chinese companies have also been aggressively harnessing ecommerce channels such as Amazon and Flipkart in flogging their phones and reaching the ballooning category of online shoppers rather than relying on retail outlets like Micromax does. Of course, according to news reports , Micromax didn't help their cause by not being able to attract funding when it most needed it, including failing to land big fish such as Alibaba (who were interested in picking up a 20 percent stake for $1.2 billion) allegedly because of unclear growth plans. This means that its plan to move its R&D and design functions in-house -- something Micromax sorely needed to cleave itself from China, save money, and enhance time-to-market -- capsized. And then, last week its CEO Vineet Taneja quit. For Micromax to reverse its unexpectedly dismal fortunes, it needs to put in strong leadership who can keep an eye on quality control and after-sales service as well as sculpt a clear agenda for the future, especially in an environment of vicious competition. Also, the brands that have done well have done so with a few products -- perhaps Micromax's dizzying line up is proving to be more of a liability than anything else. Finally, in an era where smartphones are more and more cheap commodities and every Android phone looks and feels like the other one, you have to work very hard to differentiate yourself. Engineering a rescue act with a new product identity will take some doing.

2016-03-18 05:05 Rajiv Rao zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

41 Maddening! More ways to catch the NCAA tourney could put a crimp on productivity The Madness will be inescapable for some college hoops fans. "There's nothing comparable like it at this time of the year when you have hardcore and non- basketball fans all interested in the tournament," Challenger said. "It's struck a chord in our country's consciousness. " Challenger's company reached its $3.9 billion figure after estimating nearly 51 million workers (earning an average hourly wage of $25.35 as calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) will participate in an office pool. Workers will spend at least one hour filling out their brackets and another two hours watching streams of games on Thursday and Friday. All told, that will cost companies about $1.3 billion every hour. Nearly half of those polled by KRC-Verizon survey said they will tune into the tournament. Of those, nearly 60 percent are men and 54 percent are between the ages of 18 and 33. The survey also revealed that millennials will spend nearly a third of their viewing time watching games streamed to their mobile devices. "We are seeing a trend of increased activity, particularly among millennials," said Chloe Mullins, a KRC research director. Challenger thinks employers should just go with flow by setting up viewing areas where workers can watch the games. That will boost morale and reduce data usage. "Be a team player," he said.

2016-03-18 00:07 Terry Collins cnet.com.feedsportal.com

42 42 Guidance on what to do with an older UPS “When should an older UPS be replaced with a new one?” is a question that virtually all data centre owners will have to answer. The answer is not always self evident and depends on several factors. There is no one right answer, but rather a range of right answers depending upon various factors including what the current and future capacity, redundancy and efficiency requirements are, what the outsourcing strategy is, and what has already been provisioned for in the electrical and physical infrastructure supporting the existing UPS.

2016-03-18 06:03 www.itworldcanada.com

43 Inside Acura's church of the NSX The 2017 Acura NSX is finally, finally here, much to the joy of enthusiasts everywhere. We recently had a chance to drive this bad boy out on the track at Thermal Springs in California, but what about how it's made? Acura flew me to Marysville, Ohio, to take a gander at its new $70 million, NSX-only factory, the Performance Manufacturing Center. Yes, that's right, while the original NSX was built in Tochigi and later, Suzuka, Japan, this ultramodern hybrid supercar is built in the rural Midwest. Fear not -- this all-new facility is an engineering feat, packed with more than enough tech to warrant the building of the world's next supercar. The NSX's nearly all-aluminum chassis starts off in the welding bays. If you think the machines haven't become self-aware, take a gander at the robots doing 100 percent of the welding on the NSX, and your tune may change. Watching these machines quickly and accurately move between welding spots is truly fascinating and frightening at the same time. Each frame will spend eight to 10 hours in the welding bays and will then proceed to a quality check, where the frame is measured to within 30 microns -- one-third the width of a human hair. Next up, the frame gets a dunk in a zirconium tank and an e-coat tank to help stymie corrosion. Other manufacturers use zinc phosphate, which creates a byproduct that must be disposed of in landfills. By using zirconium, Acura says it cuts more than 90 percent of that waste. All frames are painted black, and panels are sprayed individually and then attached to the car during assembly. The paint bay is surrounded by glass so that eager customers can come to the factory and see their baby-to-be getting all pretty. Panels receive a primer coat, and then depending on the color, they get between five and seven applications of paint. Two clear coats are then applied, the panels baked to perfection, and then two more clear coats finish things up. The whole process takes four days. In the end, the panels are scrutinized under high-intensity LED lights to find any irregularities. When it comes to assembly, it's all hands on deck. There are 22 build stations and each example spends 62 minutes at each station. Every NSX is completely hand assembled, with the exception of one robot that's necessary for the precision application of urethane on the exterior panels. The assembly stations all work with wireless torque wrenches to get the perfect turn of the screw every time. When a technician bolts something into place, the wrench will vibrate when the correct torque spec is reached. Builders can then double-check that on their computers. If the torque value is wrong, the computer will not allow the next piece to be assembled. The NSX is essentially put together from the inside out. The manufacturing technicians put in the guts of the car, including the engine, before applying the body panels. This allows Acura to guarantee the quality of the paint and the fit and finish of the interior. Perfection is the goal. The twin-turbo V6 and its three electric motors -- this is after all, a hybrid -- are hand-built in Anne, Ohio. We didn't get a chance to visit that facility, but saw a nifty slideshow. In conventional manufacturing, an engine can take two hours to build and be touched by the hands of 120 people. The nearly bespoke NSX powerplant, however, takes 5 to 6 hours to build and is touched by the hands of one master builder, who starts all 547 engine bolts by hand before torquing them to specification. All this attention to detail yields 500 horsepower and 406 pound-feet of torque from the gasoline- powered engine. The ante is then raised with the addition of the trio of electric motors, two acting on the front wheels and one mounted to the engine itself, for a total system power output of 573 hp and 473 pound-feet. The engine is subsequently mated to a nine-speed VCT dual-clutch transmission (imported from Japan), and then it's off to the dyno for a one-hour break in, equivalent to about 150 miles. Acura wants customers to have fun with their NSX right away, and hopefully buyers will get to a track with a qualified instructor ASAP -- there's nothing worse than seeing a beautiful piece of machinery wrapped around a telephone pole a half a mile from the dealership. After the break-in period, the engine and transmission are trucked over to the PMC and a few turns of the screw later, voilà! Another fully functional Acura NSX has entered the world. Acura's final confirmation stage includes wheel alignment, brake checks at all four wheels and a weight and ride-height check. The car is then driven into a garage bay with a four-post shaker (active floor) to simulate driving on rough roads, to make sure the suspension is in proper order. There are currently about 150 preproduction NSX models in existence, and the PMC plans on turning out eight to 10 cars a day for global distribution. Official production commences at the end of April. Assuming a seven-year product cycle, a four-day workweek and solid continued demand, we can expect around 13,000 of the supercars to be produced in total. With all the cool technological advances in this factory, let's hope some of these processes trickle down to more mainstream Acura and Honda products. I mean, who wouldn't want to see their Civic Type-R engine hand-built by one person? Okay, that may be pushing it, but the advances in anticorrosion processes and paint techniques, as well as the smart torque wrenches and the engineering of a nearly all-aluminum frame could certainly be applied to more affordable cars in the future.

2016-03-18 06:05 Emme Hall cnet.com.feedsportal.com

44 AWS resolves connectivity issues with Telstra and Optus Amazon Web Services (AWS) has resolved a connectivity issue that was preventing Telstra and Optus customers from accessing any AWS hosted websites on Friday morning. According to the AWS status page , all issues have been resolved and connectivity has been restored. The announcement was made almost an hour after internet connectivity issues were experienced. According to AWS, there were connectivity issues between some of its customer networks and the AP-Southeast-2 Region, as well as connection to non-AWS locations. AWS confirmed one of those customer networks included Telstra, while Optus customers tweeted that they were facing similar issues. "We experienced an Internet connectivity issue due to an impairment within Telstra's network which affected traffic from some end-user networks and the AP-SOUTHEAST-2 Region," AWS wrote on its status page. AWS, however, at the time noted connectivity to instances and services within the region was not impacted. Both Telstra and Optus had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication. The issue comes after Telstra's network was down for the second time in as many months on Thursday, with the telco unable to determine the root cause. The outage on Thursday was experienced across the country, with smartphones stuck on "SOS only" or "no service", unable to connect to either data or voice services. As compensation for the network disruption, Telstra announced it will offer free data to customers on Sunday April 3. Telstra last offered a free data day on February 14, following its national network outage on February 9. In the wake of the latest outage, Telstra CEO Andy Penn said the company will conduct a review of its network engineering. "While this is unrelated to a network outage last month, the congestion caused by people reconnecting to the network was similar," he said. "Following the last event we started a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred. "We will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review. "

2016-03-18 04:08 Aimee Chanthadavong zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

45 Intel Updates True Key App to Simplify Security Intel Security, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel (and previously known as McAfee) has updated its True Key password manager application to tackle one of the most notorious issues with password managers: inability to reset the forgotten master password. The new version of the app allows resetting the master password using other methods of authorization. The updated version will simplify managing of passwords and will further help Intel in its quest to “eliminate” passwords in general. Since computing is getting increasingly mobile, security of personal devices is getting increasingly more important. As a major developer of PC platforms, Intel has created a number of sophisticated technologies that can improve security of computing devices. For example, Intel’s latest processors support AES-NI instructions that speed up encryption and decryption using the advanced encryption standard (AES). In addition, select Intel’s platforms also support TXT (trusted execution technology) and TPM (trusted platform module) cryptoprocessors for enhanced security. While strong passwords and AES 256-bit encryption can generally help to make mobile gadgets more or less secure, it is not easy to remember many strong passwords consisting of letters and numbers. Meanwhile, if you use only one password and it leaks, your security fails completely. It does not matter how sophisticated are encryption or security technologies, they get useless the moment when passwords are compromised. To make platform security technologies less vulnerable to human factor, Intel and some other companies want to eliminate passwords and replace them with more robust methods of authentication, such as fingerprints, retina scan or facial recognition. In fact, thanks to technologies like Apple Touch ID and Microsoft Windows Biometric Framework, usage of biometric authentication mechanisms instead of passwords as well as password managers to store passwords for applications that do not support biometric authentication is increasing. Companies like IBM/Lenovo have offered password management for years with their ThinkVantage software, a proprietary program that only worked on their PCs. By contrast, Intel Security’s True Key password management application can work on various platforms; it is compatible with a variety of apps and can use different methods of authentication, including fingerprints, face, master password, trusted device, email and so on. For example, the True Key can use Intel’s RealSense cameras to recognize a face for Windows logon as well as third-party fingerprint scanners (i.e., Apple’s Touch ID). The Intel True Key always uses at least two factors to identify a person, which generally enhances protection, AES 256-bit encryption as well as Intel identity protection technology (IPT) where available. Since all biometric technologies are vulnerable to spoofing to some degree, True Key app allows biometric authentication only from the user’s own pre-selected trusted devices. Biometric templates for server-based facial recognition authentication (mathematical descriptions of biometric measurements) are stored on the True Key servers in encrypted form and are protected by a hardware security module (HSM). It should be noted that facial recognition is performed either completely in a server-based mode, or both on the user’s device and on the True Key servers. Meanwhile, the master password is not stored on True Key servers or locally on any device. It is used to generate the so-called key encryption key (KEK) as well as the authentication token (AT) using a large number of rounds of PBKDF2 with HMAC-SHA512 key derivation function with random salt values. The KEK is used to encrypt users’ passwords and wallet assets. The AT is used is used as one of the factors required to authenticate the user on the True Key servers. The multi-factor authentication and the rather sophisticated master password make it very hard for perpetrators to access the data (simply because it takes too lot of codes to crack using brute force — even if someone manages to get the master password or crack KEK and AT, they will also have to crack another method of authorization). Whenever the master password is changed, the True Key re-encrypts all data both locally and on servers. What is very important for many users is that Intel’s latest version of the True Key can reset even the master password by verifying other unique factors like owner’s face and/or fingerprint via a second device. So, even if you forget something, the application can relatively safely reset everything, which should simplify its usage for many people. Intel’s True Key application supports Apple Mac OS X, Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows operating systems as well as Google Chrome. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers (support for Apple Safari and Microsoft Edge is coming soon). Free version of the program supports up to 15 passwords, premium version can store up to 2000 logins and passwords for $19.99 a year.

2016-03-18 06:03 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

46 ZOTAC to Offer Small Form-Factor PC with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 GPU Various kinds of small form-factor PCs are on a roll these days. Mini-ITX systems have been offering performance of full-size desktops for several years now and even smaller systems are catching up in terms of performance. ZOTAC this week said that it had developed an SFF PC with NVIDIA’s mobile GeForce GTX 980 inside. The new system will be showcased at CeBIT and GDC trade-shows this month and will be available later in 2016. The ZOTAC ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 is based on an unnamed Intel Core i-series processor based on the Skylake micro-architecture as well as NVIDIA’s mobile GeForce GTX 980 graphics adapter. The card boasts with a fully-fledged GM204 GPU with 2048 stream processors, 128 texture units, 64 raster operations pipelines as well as a 256-bit memory interface. Performance of the mobile GeForce GTX 980 (which is not a card, but an MXM module) is similar to that of a desktop graphics board with the same brand name. It is unknown whether the version of the mobile GTX 980 is equipped with 4 GB or 8 GB of GDDR5 memory. The TDP of the mobile GeForce GTX 980 is 145 W, which is lower compared to a desktop GeForce GTX 980 (which dissipates up to 165 W), but is still very high. In a bid to cool-down the system with a 145 W GPU inside, ZOTAC had to invent a new liquid-cooling solution with multiple liquid channels and heat pipes. The company does not say a lot about its cooler right now and also does not show the final design of the PC. The only thing that ZOTAC officially demonstrated so far is the picture of the top cover of the system. Based on design pattern (which looks like comb, a pattern that is known to be efficient in dissipation of heat), it seems that heat dissipation was among ZOTAC’s primary concerns about this system. Another thing to worry about was acoustics: it is not easy to cool-down an SFF PC that dissipates over 160 W of power (even in case ZOTAC sticks to an ULV CPU, it will still have TDP of at least 15 W) without using high-speed/high-pressure fans. According to the company, it has managed to solve the problem thanks to its liquid cooling system and the PC is “whisper quiet”. The upcoming ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 packs a lot of processing horsepower and uses sophisticated cooling, but not at the cost of elegant appearance. The overall design of the ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 should look rather stylish thanks to grey metal with aquamarine inlays. ZOTAC yet has to announce all the details about its ZBOX MAGNUS EN980. At present, the company only says that apart from an Intel Skylake CPU and the GeForce GTX 980 GPU, the system features two Gigabit Ethernet controllers, one IEEE 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless module, a USB 3.1 controller with at least one type-C connector and so on. Keeping in mind rather advanced expansion capabilities of the ZBOX MAGNUS EN970 , expect the new system to feature an M.2 SSD, one or two 2.5” HDD, multiple HDMI 2.0 outputs, an SD card reader and so on. ZOTAC positions its new ZBOX MAGNUS as a small form-factor PC for VR gaming. The minimum graphics cards recommended for virtual reality by Oculus VR is AMD Radeon R9 290 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970. The MAGNUS EN980 can beat both of those graphics cards, so, there will be even a slight performance headroom in terms of graphics processing horsepower. What remains to be seen is which processor ZOTAC plans to use for its premium SFF desktop. Oculus VR recommends quad-core Intel Core i5-4590 (3.30 – 3.70 GHz, 6 MB cache) microprocessor (or equivalent) for VR Ready systems. Therefore, if ZOTAC wants to meet the guidelines, it will have to install a rather powerful quad-core CPU into its MAGNUS EN980. The ZOTAC ZBOX MAGNUS EN980 will be demonstrated at CeBIT and GDC trade-shows in the coming weeks. The manufacturer does not reveal anything about the price at the moment, but given extensive usage of high-end mobile components, do not expect the desktop to be affordable. ASUS Unveils the VivoMini VM65N: a NUC-Like mini-PC with GT 930M anandtech.com 2016-03-18 06:03 Anton Shilov www.anandtech.com

47 GDC 2016: Imagination Demonstrates PowerVR Vulkan SDK & PowerVR Ray Tracing Among the many companies showing off their latest development wares at GDC this week is Imagination. As opposed to their new GPU IP launches over the past couple of months – PowerVR Series7XT Plus and Series8XE – the focus for GDC is showing developers what they can do with their shipping hardware, and what new tools are ready for developers to use for the task. First off, following the recent release of the low- level Vulkan API 1.0 specification, Imagination has integrated support for the API into version 4.1 of their PowerVR Graphics SDK. As is the case with PC vendors, for mobile vendors Vulkan is a chance to shift towards a less CPU demanding and multi-threading friendly model for draw call submission, which is all the more important given the high prevalence of 4+ core CPUs on Android devices. To that end the company is also showing off its newest Vulkan tech demo, Sunset Vista , which uses Vulkan for both graphics and compute purposes, combining various graphical effects with a compute shader-driven foliage simulation. Meanwhile the company’s ray tracing team is continuing to show off the potential of their PowerVR Wizard technology now that the company has a working in-silicon implementation of the GR6500 ray tracing hardware. Imagination’s latest ray tracing tech demo in turn demonstrates ray tracing implemented over OpenGL ES using Imagination’s proprietary extensions. As with past demos the company is keen to show off hybrid rendering with classes of effects that are difficult or inefficient to implement via rasterization (i.e. regular GPUs) including specular reflections and efficient percentage closer soft shadows. Finally, along these lines, the company is also announcing a new collaboration with engine developer Unity this week. In 2014 the two announced that they were working together to implement real-time lightmap previews into the Unity editor. Now in 2016 that collaboration is taking a step forward; Unity and Imagination will be building a full-fledged software ray traced lightmap editor, with the goal of further improving the speed and quality at which lightmaps can be developed in real time. As this is a software implementation it isn't something Wizard GPUs can accelerate at this time, but it's easy to see how if everything were to go well for Wizard, Imagination and Unity could try to make that jump. Discussing the State of DirectX 12 With Microsoft & Oxide Games anandtech.com 2016-03-18 06:03 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

48 The Intel NUC6i5SYK Skylake UCFF PC Review The evolution of computing platforms has left the traditional desktop PC market in a precarious state. However, the miniaturization trend has provided some bright spots. Compact PCs have been around in the mini-ITX form factor for a relatively long time now. The market segment received a massive boost with the introduction of the ultra-compact form factor (UCFF) machines. It all started with the first Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) based on a Sandy Bridge processor. Every generation since Sandy Bridge has seen multiple NUCs based on the corresponding U- series processors, and Skylake is no different. It is not difficult to identify reasons for the popularity of UCFF PCs and Compute Sticks - performance per watt has seen considerable improvement, and much of the average consumer's traditional desktop work can be done with systems sporting a sub-20W TDP CPU. SSDs are becoming smaller and smaller, first with mSATA and now with M.2 form factors. High speed interfaces such as USB 3.0 have also become ubiquitous, removing the need for dedicating storage space inside the chassis for fast access to large amounts of data. The advent of mobile platforms have also made casual gaming quite popular - and power-hungry discrete GPUs are not needed for those. All these trends have enabled powerful palm-sized computers - the N ext U nit of C omputing. Intel has been pushing the performance per watt aspect and GPU performance heavily in the last few generations, making each successive NUC generation more attractive than the one before. We have already looked at multiple Broadwell NUCs. The Skylake NUCs currently come in two varieities - one based on the Core i3-6100U and another based on the Core i5-6260U. The i5 version is marketed with the Iris tag, as it sports Intel Iris Graphics 540 with 64MB of eDRAM. The NUCs have traditionally been barebones machines - the end-user could choose appropriate storage media for the OS, a mini-PCIe WLAN adapter, SODIMMs and an operating system. Starting with the Broadwell NUCs, Intel introduced some changes in the barebones approach. Only M.2 SSDs are supported (though, select models with the 'H' tag allowed for 2.5" drives). In particular, even though the Broadwell NUCs supported both SATA-based and PCIe-based M.2 SSDs, the PCIe links were only PCIe 2.0 x4. That changes in the Skylake NUCs with full support for PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 SSDs. While the Broadwell NUCs came with the Intel AC7265 WLAN adapter soldered, the Skylake NUCs come with the Intel AC8260 adapter soldered to the motherboard. The specifications of our Intel NUC6i5SYK review configuration are summarized in the table below. We used the same Samsung SM951 NVMe drive that Intel supplied with our review sample of the Broadwell-U Iris NUC. The Skylake NUCs are the first UCFF PCs to move to DDR4 for the SODIMMs. Corsair provided us with their 2x 8GB Vengeance 2400 MHz DDR4 SODIMM kit (the NUC only configured it for operation at 2133 MHz, though). The Intel NUC6i5SYK kit obviously doesn't come with any pre-installed OS. Drivers are available online only. In addition to the main unit, the other components of the package include a 65 W (19V @ 3.43A) adapter, a US power plug, a VESA mount (along with the necessary screws), user manual and a quick-start guide. The kit also includes a promotion for McAfee LiveSafe, but, thanks to the barebones concept, there is no 'bundled bloatware'. The gallery below takes us around the hardware in the unit. In the interest of full disclosure, it must be stated that all the benchmark numbers and usage impressions presented in the next few pages are based on the second unit that Intel sent us. Long story short, our first review sample got bricked due to a botched BIOS update, and Intel sent us a pre-configured unit the second time around. However, all benchmarking was eventually done with our own choice of NVMe SSD and DDR4 SODIMMs. On the first sample (using SODIMMs and a SSD different from what we eventually used), we were not able to install Windows 10, as the unit ended up BSOD-ing within a couple of minutes of starting the installation process. A search online indicated that we were not alone in experiencing such problems. The BIOS version on that sample (0028) was also quite dated. Fortunately, Intel had already seen such issues and indicated that it was due to the DDR4 SODIMM being based on 2133 MHz Hynix modules. The latest BIOS - 0036 - has a new setting in BIOS (Memory tab in Performance) for Round Trip Latency. Disabling this would apparently allow for these SODIMMs to work properly. Unfortunately for us, the BIOS update process ended up getting hung, and a power cycle after 20 minutes bricked the unit. Playing around with the BIOS jumper on the board couldn't recover the unit, and we had to move to the second unit for further benchmarking. For the second unit, we made sure to use non-Hynix modules. Corsair's supplied SODIMM kit was using DRAM from Samsung, and the second sample that came in already had the latest BIOS (0036) on it. This time around, Windows installed fine. Everything was checking out OK, but, when we started running PCMark 8 workloads, the unit ended up freezing. Our assumption was that Windows update had installed the latest graphics drivers, but, it turned out that we had to manually update it from 4331 to 4352. Updating the drivers helped resolved the freezing issue. After both these showstopper issues were resolved, we were able to proceed with our evaluation process. The Skylake NUCs differ from the previous NUCs even from the viewpoint of the chassis, but, before going into that, let us take a look at the Skylake-U platform that enables the updates. The PCH (Sunrise Point-LP) and the processor are integrated in the same package, even though the PCH is fabricated in 22nm, while the processor is in 14nm. The Skylake-U platform has plenty of updates (as shown in yellow in the slide reproduced below), but, relevant to the Skylake NUC is the availability of SDXC 3.0 support in the PCH. Skylake-U also obviously supports DDR4 (as the NUC6i5SYK only supports that), but that is not mentioned in the slide below. In terms of external design, we have a SDXC slot with support for UHS-I on one side. The HDMI port finally becomes full-sized. The consumer infrared sensor is retained in the front panel. Given that Intel is open to having I/O ports in the side panel, it might not be a bad idea to have a USB 2.0 port or two on one of the sides. In the table below, we have an overview of the various systems that we are comparing the Intel NUC6i5SYK against. Note that they may not belong to the same market segment. The relevant configuration details of the machines are provided so that readers have an understanding of why some benchmark numbers are skewed for or against the Intel NUC6i5SYK when we come to those sections. 2016-03-18 06:03 Ganesh T www.anandtech.com

49 GDC 2016: Geomerics Demonstrates Updated Enlighten Lighting Tech As some of our regular readers may already be familiar with them, ARM’s Geomerics division is one of the more unusual parts of ARM’s overall business group. Unlike the hardware IP ARM is best known for, Geomerics is responsible for developing and licensing technology for global illumination and indirect lighting. The group’s flagship product is Enlighten, which to date has seen use in a number of games. This year Geomerics is at GDC to show off the latest version of Enlighten, and the latest tech demo using it, Seastack Bay. In the last year Geomerics has been focusing on improving Enlighten’s performance and abilities particularly for open world games, which require lighting on larger scales and with new technical challenges such as day/night cycles and indoor/outdoor transitions. The latest version of Enlighten has in turn been further optimized for these scenarios. Geomerics tells us that overall lighting performance in large open world games has improved by upwards of 50%, and the company has tackled some thorny issues such as efficiently calculating indirect lighting between vertical surfaces. The latest Enlighten also has new features for landscape lighting, e.g. grass and trees. The key technical change in the latest version is the addition of level of detail support for large terrain lighting. With upwards of 5 different levels, like other LOD implementations Enlighten’s lighting LOD allows for environments to be lit at progressively lower resolutions the farther away the terrain is. This reduces the overall rendering workload by not assigning too much CPU time to small features that are too far away to be seen. This same technology has also been implemented for light probes – specific points in a scene where lighting is calculated – allowing probes to be skipped the farther away they are. Finally, all of this is in turn being used in the Seastack Bay tech demo being shown off at GDC. Seastack Bay is a 5km x 5km terrain chunk with a 1km beach front, specifically designed to demonstrate the new features of Enlighten. The demo was built in conjunction with Hellblade developer Ninja Theory, and is being demonstrated on both the PC and PlayStation 4.

2016-03-18 06:03 Ryan Smith www.anandtech.com

50 11 things we learned at SXSW 2016 When President Obama took the stage last Friday to kick off South by Southwest, he uttered two words that made the audience roar: "Thanks, Obama. " He was having fun with one of the Internet's favorite memes. You burned your toast this morning? #ThanksObama. You got a papercut? #ThanksObama. That doesn't mean there weren't other memorable takeaways. Startups from all over the world jockeyed for the attention of the press and early adopters in an attempt to become the next Twitter, the social media phenom that broke out here in 2007. Marketers tried to find a place in the limelight as more than 30,000 attendees roamed the dusty Austin streets. And, as they always do, people looked silly trying on virtual reality goggles. Here's a look a glimpse of what we learned during this year's festival. First, let's start with the president: 2. People will stand in line for just about everything It's not unusual to see people queuing up to get into a special event on Day 2 of SXSW. But dozens of people lined up in the hot sun on a Saturday morning outside a storefront with a large sign reading #catconcotions, which begged the question: why? Answer: to take a photo with social media star Grumpy Cat. A woman named Tara, who journeyed to Texas from Connecticut to check out SXSW, told us she stood in line for about an hour to get her picture snapped. 3. J. J. Abrams doesn't want you to watch Star Wars on your phone Or any movie, for that matter. The "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" director is a big fan of technology -- he put out an iPhone special effects app in 2011 -- but he also knows when not to use it. 5. South by Southwest? More like South Brands Southwest The brands have taken over. That's not new: SXSW has been overrun with media and product brands trying to get in with the cool kids for several years now. But this year, the gimmicks seemed bigger. "Mr. Robot," the USA show, had a Ferris wheel downtown with the show's title emblazoned across the installation. There was also a giant TIE fighter from Star Wars near the festival's official food truck plaza. Another thing we learned about the first lady: She likes Boyz II Men. When she was first asked about her husband's term ending, she responded with a line from the the song, "It's So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday. " 8. We didn't get the next Twitter or Foursquare, but people are trying. Each year, everyone tries to figure which startup "won" SXSW Interactive. In 2007, it was Twitter. Two years later it was check-in app Foursquare. Highlight and Meerkat are other social apps that flew high during the festival, only to come back to Earth once the technorati left Austin. This year, there was no clear winner, but that doesn't mean people weren't trying. 11. Online harassment won't be fixed in a day But SXSW did dedicate a day to talk about it. In October, the festival started a firestorm after it cancelled two panels about harassment in video gaming. After receiving heavy criticism and threats from media outlets to boycott the festival, SXSW instead created an all-day summit devoted to discussing online harassment. At the summit, held at a hotel across the river and away from most of the other programming at the Austin Convention Center, the check-in process was intensive. Security to get into the building was tighter than any other event at the conference, with a bag-check more stringent than when President Obama spoke at the festival the day before. There were also policemen stationed near each of the three ballrooms. "It's not about shutting people up," said Kami Huyse, a director for Civilnation, a nonprofit that fights against cyberbullying. Instead, it's about trying to find solutions. CNET's Connie Guglielmo contributed to this report.

2016-03-18 06:05 Richard Nieva cnet.com.feedsportal.com

51 US government demands for vendors' source code are nothing new News that the US government has made numerous attempts to obtain source code from tech vendors highlights the fundamental tensions between civil liberties and national security -- but such attempts are a normal part of how intelligence and law enforcement agencies operate. In the post-Snowden world, however, some vendors are far less comfortable talking about it than they used to be. Take Microsoft, for example. Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative makes source code available to "qualified customers, enterprises, governments, and partners for debugging and reference purposes". There's almost no information on the company's website about their Government Security Program (GSP). Just two sentences. But the first of those sentences notes that requests might come from "local, state, provincial, or national governments or agencies". When the GSP was launched back in 2003, however, Microsoft was happy to tell the media that Windows source code was made available to a number of governments and international organistions, including Russia, NATO, the UK, and China. Another report said that Australia, Austria, Finland, Norway, Taiwan, and Turkey were also on the list. Governments that sign up for a GSP licence aren't allowed to modify Microsoft's code and recompile it, but would anyone know if they did? That'd be harder in these days of cryptographic code-signing, but probably not impossible for some agencies. Here in Australia, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) -- our equivalent to and partner with the US National Security Agency (NSA) -- routinely asks for source code. Vendors hoping to sell secure products to Australian government agencies must submit to an ASD Cryptographic Evaluation. New Zealand government agencies also rely on the ASD's processes. Even the processes of close allies, such as the UK's CAPS scheme, the USA's FIPS-140, and the USA and Canadian Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP), according to the ASD, are not a replacement for an ASD Cryptographic Evaluation. And to pass an ASD Cryptographic Evaluation, vendors usually have to provide the source code. "To achieve a higher level of confidence in the implementation and architecture of the cryptographic security, greater scrutiny must be applied through an independent review of the source code. The provision of source code usually expedites the cryptographic evaluation as fewer assumptions are made about the ICT product, given that evaluators can view the full implementation as they require it," says the ASD website. Australia is a member of the Five Eyes alliance, so equivalent rules apply in the US, the UK, Canada, and New Zealand. Apple doesn't provide its iOS source code to agencies, as ZDNet reported on Thursday, but the company uses open source cryptographic code, such as OpenSSH, which can be evaluated separately. Given that Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors also have to sell their products, there's also nothing to stop agencies from just buying them, disassembling them, and reverse engineering the code. They have smart people, remember, and lots of them. Or they can infiltrate the supply chain, or just do spooky stuff and steal the code from someone who's already got it. None of this is exactly a secret. Nor is it a secret -- at least not any more -- that Microsoft effectively operated as an NSA branch office , giving the agency direct access to email flowing through Outlook.com at a "pre- encryption stage", helping the NSA circumvent Skype's video encryption, and much more. When I visited Microsoft's Redmond campus in 2010, they even boasted how every single image uploaded to their servers, even those in email, were run through their algorithms to detect child abuse material, in a joint project with the FBI. Do you imagine that all of these things no longer happen? Given that everything I've described so far is routine, and has been routine for years, why is this week's news significant? Because communications security isn't about operating system vendors any more. It's about apps that provide end-to-end encryption, where the vendor is in a "zero knowledge" situation, and can't decrypt communications even if they wanted to. The top-end spook agencies could still just reverse engineer everything, but it's a lot easier if you've got the source code. Most vendors don't talk about this stuff, for good reasons. For most vendors, their revenue growth isn't in the US any more, but in Europe, and in the so-called BRICS countries -- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. American products are rather less attractive to non-US customers when their data isn't being protected from the US government. Perception is everything. From governments' point of view, the new push is a logical extension of what they've always done. Whether you agree with that is a separate question, of course -- and one you'll need to take up with your political leaders.

2016-03-18 03:32 Stilgherrian zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

52 Everything arriving on Amazon Prime in April 2016 My favorite Christmas movie is headed to Amazon in April. That's right, I'm talking about "Gremlins. " If you have fuzzy memories about Gizmo and Stripe, you've clearly forgotten how dark this movie is. Don't confuse the borderline horror-comedy "Gremlins" with the overly- comedic "Gremlins 2. " Speaking of fuzzy memories, "Teen Wolf Too" also arrives on Amazon in April. What's that? You don't remember such a movie? A lot of people have blocked it out of their working memories, but "Teen Wolf Too" is the story of the cousin of the main protagonist of "Teen Wolf. " See, that's how the title is "Teen Wolf Too" because he is also a teen wolf. It's not really a true sequel, like "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel. " Check out the full list below to see that i forgot to mention "Batman," "The Big Lebowski" and season 2 of "Veep" are also hitting Amazon Prime in April. 2016-03-18 00:07 Iyaz Akhtar cnet.com.feedsportal.com

53 iPhone SE set for March unveiling 'identical' to iPhone 5s: Report Apple's iPhone SE: Everything you need to know We've rounded up the latest rumors to see what's expected. Previous rumors indicated Apple would incorporate design from the iPhone 6s into the new smartphone, which will be aimed at the budget market. Instead, the iPhone SE will look "almost exactly the same" as the iPhone 5s -- aka a boxy design. Further, the iPhone SE is said to have an A9 processor, M9 chip for always-on "Hey Siri" support, NFC for Apple Pay, 12-megapixel camera with Live Photos, and 4k video. It will come in 16GB and 64GB storage offerings, in silver, rose gold, and space gray, priced at $450 off-contract. Apple is also expected to unveil a 9.7-inch iPad Pro and new Apple Watch bands at the media event.

2016-03-18 02:42 Jake Smith zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

54 Lenovo to invest big in enterprise, mobility, PC With a research and development budget north of $1.2 billion this year, Lenovo is determined to deliver results across its broad portfolio from mobility to enterprise, and even PC. Lenovo Australia managing director Matt Codrington told ZDNet that despite increasing competition, Lenovo is focused on making continued investments to grow its market share and position in the Australian market. In the mobility space for example, Codrington reassured the company's presence in the smartphone market under Motorola's Moto brand is still "very active". He said Motorola in fact grew in Australia last year, and the company plans to make investments there to ensure that growth continues. He attributed part of the growth to the partnership the company forged with Vodafone and the release of its Moto X Force handset. The company purchased Motorola Mobility from Google back in 2014 for $2.91 billion, and announced in January that it had plans to slowly combine the Motorola and Lenovo brand names under "Moto by Lenovo". Last August, the company's ANZ product manager Danny Adamopoulos revealed the company was looking to launch its Moto Maker service in Australia, with Codrington at the time saying it was only a matter of time before Australia would see the arrival of it. Moto Maker was initially launched in the US in November 2013 through established partnerships with all the major wireless carriers. The service is also available in France, Germany, the UK , and China. Codrington said the company's global approach to the smartphone market will be very similar to how the company has grown its PC business -- one sector he reassured is still "very relevant". "Our focus for the coming year primarily is to continue to drive speed and efficiency. The investment in innovation is absolutely key and scaling the enterprise business because we've got a really solid business. Much like the PC side, we'll grow that business a little," he said. According to Codrington, while commercial devices are evolving to cater for the mobile workforce, the PC is still a "foundational" tool for the office and business, noting that the PC market is still a $230 billion market. He said Lenovo's success in the PC market has been due to its ability to scale the business' "breadth and depth of products". Codrington's remarks echoed what Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanqing said earlier this year during the Consumer Electronics Show -- noting that the company will focus on making PCs more productive , and that means using cloud to support them. "For different groups of customers, we have a different product, and also we have a different cloud to meet their requirements," Yang said at the time. "We need to work with Microsoft on Office 365, we can work with Salesforce.com on customer CRM, we can work with Workday on human resources. These kinds of cloud must be connected to devices, so this will be Lenovo's strategy: Every device will be connected to a certain cloud, no matter if it is PC, tablet, or smartphone. " Meanwhile, Lenovo's enterprise business remains on track to achieve $5 billion in enterprise revenue. Codrington said the company will continue to build out its enterprise partnerships in order to deliver suitable capabilities to customers, who at the moment are looking for out of the box solutions cloud solutions. Lenovo has so far signed partnerships with Nutanix , Datacore, Simplivity, and more recently Juniper . "We have customers who have traditional infrastructures and are looking to understand how they can engage with a cloud model. We're lucky to give them a solution that works out of the box and is extremely scalable," he said. "I think it's at the forefront of our customers' thinking right now and how they can become more agile in this space because it's changing and evolving so quickly. They can invest in it without risk to the business. " With the education and healthcare sector still being key priorities, the company recently installed Phoenix, a high performance supercomputer system, as part of a contract with the University of Adelaide, and another supercomputer for Melbourne Health to be used by Victorian Life Sciences for cancer research. Codrington added that the company is also in talks with a number of government customers. On the question of whether the company has its sights set for any more acquisitions, Codrington said: "Lenovo has shown that we have an interest in organic growth and making sure we are procuring the right partnership, joint venture, or acquisitions. Based on that, I think we are open to making sure we can build out the right portfolio". In January 2014, the company announced the acquisition of IBM's x86 server business for $2.3 billion. Okta, Box better integrate for enterprise mobility management zdnet.com.feedsportal.com 2016-03-18 02:23 Aimee Chanthadavong zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

55 IBAC unveils a web of misconduct in Victorian schools Victoria's Independent Broad-based Anti- corruption Commission (IBAC) has wrapped up its 18-day investigation into the failed multimillion dollar state schools IT project. Spiked in 2013, electronic learning initiative Ultranet was purpose-built for Victorian schools to bring an online education network to connect its students, teachers, and parents by providing access to online learning materials and student information. Ultranet was rarely used due to the amount of technical issues it faced from day one, and the scheme was consequently scrapped when costs blew out from AU$60 million to the AU$180 million total. Although the true cost of Ultranet may never be known, IBAC heard that the total could be somewhere in the ballpark of AU$180 million and AU$240 million -- all for a computer interface that was supposed to connect students, staff and parents but never really worked. Throughout the inquiry it was revealed that there were so many backdoor payments and secret deals happening , even the most senior auditors have found it hard to trace what money was spent and where. Print solutions provider cum IT services firm CSG was awarded the failed contract back in 2010. A blatant abuse of power by officials during the tender process became obvious during the hearings into misconduct within the education department. Well-known for its tight-knit boys' club, the questionable actions of past and present bureaucrats quickly unravelled during the hearings as allegations of dodgy deals, lavish junkets, destroyed documents, and overspending were confirmed. The blame pointed towards Darrell Fraser, the former principal at Glen Waverley Secondary College in Victoria. During his time at Glen Waverly, Fraser allegedly had his finger in every pie imaginable. Throughout the course of the hearing, many blamed Fraser for the failings of the Ultranet project by breaking procurement rules, while others argued his rule-breaking and "liberal" spending of department money was all for the good of education. His lawyers argued for him to be questioned in private, or not at all -- claiming anything he said could prejudice any future criminal trials -- but when he finally took the stand he said nothing many did not already know. Fraser admitted funnelling almost AU$1 million into CSG and claimed he did so to save the project. Fraser confirmed allegations he destroyed 10-12 tubs of documents he took home with him when he left the department, and also admitted to spending AU$1.4 million on a day-long project launch -- which included dancing girls, internet booth displays, and trade show fees -- although he said he never realised it cost that much. Fraser was not the only official to come under scrutiny, as other senior department officials admitted purchasing over AU$110,000 in shares in Australian-listed CSG, using insider information, taking jobs with the company that was awarded the contract, and going on lavish overseas junkets. Previously, IBAC heard that a private company called Cortecnica Property Limited was registered in 2002 with its principle place of business recorded as at the secondary college. Cortecnica, which later commercially developed the college's intranet system, had a director by the name of Frank Aloisio, who was also the school's technology and development manager. It was alleged by counsel assisting Ian Hill QC that Fraser was instrumental in Cortecnica's inception. Cortecnica folded six months later and in 2003 Fraser commenced discussions with Oracle Corporation regarding a collaborative project, Hill alleged. Hill told the corruption commission that Oracle and the school then collaborated on the design and prototype development of a solution that leveraged off both the Oracle L360 solution and the Glen Waverley Secondary College's intranet, with the expectation that Oracle would take that platform to the rest of the schools in the state. Previously, the commission heard that both Fraser and Aloisio left the school in early 2004, with Fraser promoted to the position of deputy secretary within the Department School Education Secretariat and Aloisio taking up a consultancy role at Oracle. In 2004, the Victorian Education Department reported that it had started a research and development program to produce a proof-of-concept student-centric IT centre to support online teaching and learning. After finding no commercial system that matched the department's requirements, it signed a research agreement with Oracle Australia in 2004. From the agreement came the Students@Centre portal, which was trialled from January 2006 at 12 government schools in Melbourne with around 630 teachers, 10,000 students, and 300 parents. That proof of concept was decommissioned in March 2007. In November 2006, the then Premier of Victoria Steve Bracks announced a commitment to develop and deploy a state-wide online teaching and learning system to be called the Ultranet project. The first request for tender for the development and management of the Ultranet project was released to the marketplace in August 2007, with IBAC hearing a company known as Cinglevue Proprietary Limited was first registered on the same day. "Significantly, the directors of that private company were Mr Aloisio, a Gregory Tolefe, a Gregory Martin, and a Tony Sala," Hill said. "At that time, Tolefe was employed by ASG Group Limited, and it appears that Aloisio was now engaged by ASG on a consultancy basis. Martin was an employee of Oracle. " It was then revealed that at the conclusion of the first Ultranet tender, ASG and RM Asia Pacific were the only two shortlisted companies selected to proceed. In 2008, Aloisio ceased his engagement with ASG and commenced employment as a business analyst with CSG, Hill told IBAC. "It was around that time that CSG acquired Cinglevue Proprietary Limited for a sum of approximately AU$5 million," he said. Former public servants played coy at the beginning of the inquiry, but had no choice but to make admissions when secretly recorded telephone conversations were played during the hearings. One of those expletive-ridden bugged phone calls led to the suspension of current regional director Matt Dunkley. During that conversation Dunkley told former acting deputy secretary John Allman "you told me you f***ing destroyed all the evidence as soon as you knew ... the empire was gone". It is believed Dunkley was also removed from the department's integrity committee -- set up after IBAC began its investigation. Former education minister Bronwyn Pike also found herself at the centre of the corruption scandal, admitting she did not act on allegations linked to the Ultranet tender process because it "was not her job". She was first made aware of probity concerns about Fraser -- who was revealed as being her friend -- in 2008 but was told the allegations were from a disgruntled bidder and followed standard departmental procedure, which was forwarding the email on. Pike's friendship with Fraser and former department secretary Jeff Rosewarne, which continued well after her time as education minister, was highlighted numerous times during the hearing. In another bugged phone call played to the hearing, Pike agreed to a secret meeting with both of them, well after numerous corruption allegations against the pair were aired. IBAC heard that in another conversation, Pike told Fraser: "You know how those things get blown up" after he told her about his secret payment to CSG. Pike was education minister between 2007 and 2010 and spearheaded the government's plan to modernise the education system -- including major technological upgrades to schools across the state. At the completion of the hearing, IBAC commissioner Stephen O'Bryan said he would prepare a report which would be tabled in Parliament later this year. Public examinations have now closed; however, IBAC said the hearing formed just one part of its ongoing investigation into alleged serious corruption at the education department. The corruption commission said that Operation Dunham is still an open investigation, and once the investigation is complete, it will release a public report with findings and recommendations, currently slated for sometime this year. As a result of its investigation, IBAC has the right to refer matters to other agencies for action, or to consider the commencement of criminal proceedings.

2016-03-18 02:04 Asha Barbaschow zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

56 Alarm bells for budget smartphone maker Ringing Bells Several Indian government agencies are keeping a watch on Delhi-based Ringing Bells Private Limited, which announced the production of smartphones for 251 rupees (around $4) per piece. The company, which launched the Freedom 251 smartphone in February amid much fanfare -- and in the presence of leaders from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party -- received a tremendous response from feature phone users and those unable to afford the high prices of other smartphones on the market. However, the company closed online booking after reporting over 3 million registrations online within a few days. "We are in the process of compiling the emails and issuing these [smartphones] to the first 2.5 million registrations very soon," the company's website said, without mentioning delivery dates. Following charges that it was cheating people, the management, which promised to deliver the new product from April, announced that buyers pay cash only after delivery. However, the government, which received complaints against the company, asked the Directorate of Enforcement to investigate allegations that Ringing Bells has flouted the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA). Even the Serious Fraud Investigating Office (SFIO) in the Corporate Affairs Ministry has ordered scrutiny of the company's books, and the Department of Electronics and IT has been reviewing all issues pertaining to the company, Indian Minister for Communication and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad told Parliament on Wednesday. "The government, through various departments, is taking steps to protect the interest of consumers," he said, adding that a team from SFIO submitted its report along with a request seeking information from Registrar of Companies, a week after the Freedom 251 smartphone was released last month. Sharing suspicions held by members of Parliament of another Ponzi scheme to cheat the people, the minister said that company representatives were directed to comply with the Indian safety standards as required under "Electronics and Information Technology Goods (requirements for compulsory registration) Order, 2012". Even the Indian Cellular Association (ICA) expressed doubts over the technical specifications of the smartphone as advertised by the company, saying that they could not manufacture a product at such a low price of 251 rupees. ICA associate director Bijesh Roul told ZDNet that it was practically not possible to sell a smartphone with those specifications. "The Bill of Material" (BoM) value of Freedom 251 with so many features, even if it outsourced from cheapest supply chain, will cost more than $40 per phone and if the taxes and duties are included, the price would be between $65-$70 in the open market," he said, and pointed out that even if buyers want to purchase it on any ecommerce platform it would cost around $60. According to the Freedom 251 manufacturers , the device has a 3.2MP AF Rear Camera and .3MP Front camera, and with its inbuilt touchless technology, "is Ideal for perfect Selfie". "With its 1450 mAh battery, Freedom 251 comes with 1.3 GHz Quadcore Processor capable of fast and responsive performance. 1GB RAM and 8GB internal memory, all the space you need. SD card support (expandable up to 32GB)," it adds.

2016-03-18 00:30 V L zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

57 57 Wearables get fashionable with new Michael Kors Access smartwatches Android Wear recieved another boost this week from Michael Kors, which today unveiled a new line of smartwatches for its Fall 2016 line The line, called Michael Kors Access, arrives later this year with a "sporty" model for men and a "glamorous" version for women. At least one of the watches will come with interchangeable leather and silicone wristbands, though from the images, it looks like there will be metal band options as well. Along with being powered by Android Wear, it'll include exclusive display faces, but that's all we know in terms of specs. Instead, the focus for Michael Kors is bringing tech smarts to a designer watch, and with a starting price of $395 (about £273, AU$517), we don't imagine a powerful beast under the watch face. "I thought, 'Why can't tech accessories be chic and glamorous?'," said designer Michael Kors. "After all, technology is impacting life more and more. It should reflect your personal taste as much as anything else, but it should also give you access to all the experiences that you want. " You can check out the women's Michael Kors smartwatch in the video below. Article continues below

2016-03-17 23:45 By Farrha feedproxy.google.com

58 Nacon reckons it's made the world's first eSports-ready controller Any serious eSports player will tell you that if you're not playing with a keyboard and mouse, you're not playing. In games like Counter-Strike, hairline accuracy isn't just an advantage, but a necessity – especially with hundreds of thousand of dollars prize money at stake – which is why even the pro controllers usually just don't cut it. Nacon reckons it's made the first controller that eSports players will be able to use and not be at a disadvantage against someone using a keyboard and mouse setup. The gamepad was built with the help of French pro gamer Norman "Genius" Chatrier, and if you haven't already noticed, looks very much like the Xbox One Elite controller. Nacon's is PC-only, but that's where it wants to be, and it reckons its offering is both more precise and more customisable than Microsoft's. While neither the software nor hardware is final, we saw that the current customisation settings are vast, including options to adjust sensitivity, dead zones, button mapping and the joystick response curve. Nacon says the right stick has an amplitude of 46 degree compared to the normal 38, and there are weights on either side of the gamepad that can be swapped out. There's only one pair of rear paddles, though, the Xbox Elite pad has four. Nacon is aiming at the first-person shooter market. Although it says the controller could be used by League of Legend players, it sees its product as one for the Counter-Strike and beat-em-up market. We gave it a spin on Counter-Strike, and while the right stick felt highly precise, it will be the pro players that'll decide if it's good enough for the big leagues. We liked how, with the simple press of a button, we could switch between four custom profiles on the controller during a game. Nacon told us it wants to propose the controller to some eSports leagues, but it still has work to do before the controller is fully ready. For one thing, it thinks it can make the right joystick better. It's also speaking to students at the eSports Academy in France for more feedback. The controller will cost 79 euros (around $90/£60) when it arrives, but the company is going to do a crowdfunding campaign over the next couple of months, with an aim to get the controller in gamers' hands this October. Article continues below

2016-03-17 23:44 By Hugh feedproxy.google.com

59 Vehicles 'increasingly vulnerable' to hacking, FBI warns The FBI and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration warned on Thursday that the rising use of computers in vehicles poses increasing risks of cyberattacks. The warning comes eight months after a high- profile demonstration published by Wired showed how a Jeep Cherokee could be remotely controlled over the Internet. Fiat Chrysler later recalled 1.4 million vulnerable vehicles. Manufacturers see great promise in designing vehicles with advanced networking capabilities for everything from entertainment to fleet management. But computer security experts have criticized the industry for not taking stronger steps to prevent software vulnerabilities that could have lethal consequences. The FBI said that although manufacturers are now trying to limit the communications that can happen between different on-board systems, the linkages can still provide "portals through which adversaries may be able to remotely attack the vehicle controls and systems," the advisory said. Third-party devices intended to be plugged into a vehicle diagnostic port can also "introduce vulnerabilities by providing connectivity where it did not exist previously," the agency said. Some insurance companies offer telematic control units (TCUs) that plug into a vehicles' On- Board Diagnostics II (OBD-II) port. The unit can provide data to the insurance company, which can be used for risk profiling. In August, University of California researchers showed how a dongle from Paris-based Mobile Devices Ingenierie could be remotely accessed. They were able to apply the brakes of a Corvette and turn on its windshield wipers. Mobile Devices Ingenierie issued a software update. The FBI said consumers should pay attention if manufacturers issue software updates for their vehicles and also be cautious when connecting third-party devices. 2016-03-17 22:25 Jeremy Kirk www.itnews.com

60 Twitter rolls out algorithmic timeline by default: Here's how to disable it Twitter has made a major change to its service on Thursday, rolling out an algorithmic timeline by default, as it hopes to attract new users by making it easier to find content. This is a 180-degree turn from the reverse chronological order timeline Twitter has had since it launched in 2006. Twitter began testing the algorithm-based timeline in February, but it was opt-in. It's essentially an extension of its "While you were away" feature that recaps tweets based on what Twitter's algorithm thinks you want to see. The feature is beginning to roll out to users, who are seeing a "Never miss an important tweet" prompt at the top of their timeline on both mobile app and desktop. Luckily, it's very easy to turn off and gets you back to the old Twitter experience: For desktop users, the process is the same. Navigate to "Show me the best Tweets first" under Settings. For the average person, an algorithmic timeline could mean the noise of Twitter is kept out, something Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, has been thinking about deeply. "We continue to show a questioning of our fundamentals in order to make the product easier and more accessible to more people," Dorsey said in July.

2016-03-17 22:16 Jake Smith zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

61 Telstra stumps up for another free data day, begins engineering review Telstra is attempting, once again, to make up with its customers after another network outage. Last night, Telstra's network suffered from congestion as customers' handsets attempted to reconnect after being bumped off the network. The outage began around 5pm AEDT on Thursday, and was experienced across the country, with smartphones stuck on "SOS only" or "no service", unable to connect to either data or voice services. Telstra CEO Andy Penn wrote on Friday morning the company would offer a day of free data for its customers on April 3. "We are still investigating how the service disruption occurred, but our early findings show we had a problem that triggered a significant number of customers to be disconnected from the network, and as they were all automatically reconnecting at the same time, this caused congestion," he said. "We will be offering all of our mobile customers another free day of data as a way of making this right. This will be on Sunday 3 April 2016. Customers do not need to do anything to receive the free data. " Telstra last had a free data day on February 14, following its national network outage on February 9. The blame for that incident was pinned on "embarrassing human error" when the correct procedure was not followed after one of the telco's 10 mobile nodes was taken down. "Normally, we could take down three or four of those nodes and do work on them, fix them up, and it would have no impact, but on this occasion the correct procedure was unfortunately not followed, and the flow-on consequences you can see," Telstra COO Kate McKenzie said at the time. In the wake of this new outage, Penn said Telstra would conduct a review of its network engineering. "While this is unrelated to a network outage last month, the congestion caused by people reconnecting to the network was similar," he said. "Following the last event we started a major process and engineering review of the network, which includes global network experts, to understand how it occurred. "We will add the lessons learned from this incident to that review. "

2016-03-17 22:12 Chris Duckett zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

62 At Last, EMC Finally Joining the All-Flash, All-the-Time Fraternity As promised a few weeks ago, EMC re-architected its VMAX enterprise and VNX mid-range legacy storage product lines with all flash. EMC says the new VMAX and VNX mid-range and high end lines now feature “all flash, all the time” to keep up with the times. My only reaction, “What took them so long?” Storage is a competitive business, as everyone in the industry knows. Despite being a leader in enterprise storage, EMC suffers from a fragmented architectural approach across market tiers. That’s because its product lines were assembled from a list of acquisitions not only in flash but older technologies as well. EMC’s VMAX and VNX systems were developed to work with traditional hard disk drives but then were later retrofitted for SSDs. In announcing the move, EMC’s executive said the revamped systems will include substantial technological improvements to take full advantage of new flash technologies. Now that’s all well and good. But I question how successful they’ll be in transitioning from the older technologies to the new. And, I question how much more disruption they’re creating for their customers, by going to all flash. Will there be a forklift replacement for the new products now that they’ve been introduced to the market? In other words, even if customers want to stay with EMC, do the upgraded products represent a wholesale replacement from previous lines to new ones? In introducing all flash, has EMC considered the migration path, and how this fits into the bigger picture? And how this will impact the customer? My suspicions are there will be an impact, and a big one. Migration is going to pose a set of challenges for EMC and its customers going forward, if it hasn’t already. The first big challenge is one of fragmentation. Let’s say you’re an EMC customer and you want to grow from a mid-tier to a higher-end environment. What happens after the re-architecting is completed? Will you be able to make that transition? If you’re ready to move up into that high- end environment, will you have to go with a new system? This is in stark contrast to HPE 3PAR Storage, which has successfully evolved into the era of the all flash domain. This makes for easier data transitions and migrations, and doesn’t undermine user training, which brings us to the next challenge. When new products come to market, retraining for existing customers is usually required. Retraining amounts to change, and change, of course, is difficult to deal with. Customers especially don’t like change after they’ve spent years developing expertise and familiarity with their current storage systems. This is especially true as they aim to grow their environment from one level to the next with the least disruption, which brings me to the third challenge facing EMC. As existing customers grow into new, higher end environments, again I ask, “Will they have to move to a new system? Customers may now ask themselves what other options they can consider. In contrast,we offer one system with a single system-defined design, whether we’re dealing with spinning disks, flash, or a combination of the two. I can’t emphasize enough that our approach to all flash storage is in sharp contrast to what EMC is trying to do. Our strategy for primary storage is part of a simple and clean approach to storage in general, not just all-flash. We only have two design points, one that is system-defined, based on the HPE 3PAR platform (whether disks, all flash, or a combination of the two) and the other that is software-defined, based on the HPE StoreVirtual platform. It is the same approach and the same techniques across system-defined and software-defined, with no need for the customer to deal with several different architectural approaches and training. This makes us unique. And the market appears to agree because HPE is the only major storage vendor to grow YoY market share over the last nine quarters, while others have declined steadily. In making the announcement about re-architecting their two storage product lines earlier this year, EMC’s Chairman and CEO said, “Flash is one of the megatrends that’s changing the infrastructure business forever.” To that comment, I’d say, “Welcome to the all flash fraternity, EMC.” This from someone who has been a member for some time. In the meantime, while EMC has re-architected—and now trying to catch up, we’re here to help anyone caught in the confusion. Want to learn more about our all-flash 3PAR StoreServ Storage systems designed to accelerate business and simplify IT? You can read Vish Mulchand's blog on the importance of all flash vendors with multiple plan Bs, but no Plan A here . And you can catch the most recent blog in this series, "If I Were in the Driver’s Seat at EMC" written by Jorge Maestre here . You can also get more information about HPE 3PAR StoreServ all flash .

2016-03-17 17:19 Neeraj Gokhale www.computerworld.com

63 GDC 2016: Cloudhead Games Reveals Inspiration for Call of the Starseed [VIDEO] We had a chance to sit down for a spell with Mike Wilson from Cloudhead Games to discuss Call of the Starseed, the first episode of The Gallery, a built-for VR exploration and puzzle solving game. The game's description on Steam says it's inspired by dark 80s fantasy films. Which ones specifically? Mike told Maximum PC that movies like Goonies and The Labyrinth helped to shape the company's vision for The Gallery. Our own Jimmy Thang spent some time playing the game and can attest to there being a definite 1980s and 1990s fantasy/sci-fi vibe. If you can remember that far back, you might also recall a title called Myst. It was one of the first games to come out on CD back when floppy drives were more common. Jimmy said he felt like Call of the Starseed also had a sort of Myst vibe for VR. Turns out that wasn't by accident. "Myst was definitely an inspiration for us. We've all played it and loved it growing up. We all felt that the immersion level of Myst back in the day was what made it special and we fell that virtual reality needs that, it needs an experience where you can just get lost in a new place that has a very distinct feeling," Wilson said. Call of the Starseed is the first of four episodes. Depending on how much you choose to explore and take in the environment, you can expect between 2 to 3.5 hours of game play. Check out the full interview for more on Call of the Starseed and The Gallery. Follow Paul on Google+ , Twitter , and Facebook

2016-03-17 17:13 Paul Lilly www.maximumpc.com

64 How to face swap: How to create a face swap picture in Snapchat PLUS face swap alternatives A new phenomenon is flooding the web and it's both disturbing and fascinating at the same time. That phenomenon is face swap, which has made its way into Snapchat in the form of a new lens. Here's how to face swap in Snapchat and share your face swap with friends on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere. First things first, if you're completely new to Snapchat our complete guide to using Snapchat might be more useful, as it takes you through every element of the app. Here, we're just talking about face swap. If face swap is all you're after, keep reading! You'll first need to launch Snapchat (if you don't already have it you can download it from the iOS App Store or Google Play Store ), and make sure you're on the camera screen. Now, swap the camera so it's facing you. You should be able to see your lovely face on screen. Now, tap and hold your face until you see a sort of mesh form over your face. That's Snapchat mapping your face, and it's how the lenses look so realistic (and creepy). You'll can now swipe through the lens options that appear at the bottom of the screen. The face swap is a yellow icon with two smiley faces inside. You should see two smiley faces appear on the main portion of the screen now. Grab a friend or family member that you want to swap faces with, and align both of your faces with the icons on screen until they are both yellow. We've found that it's most successful if you remove your glasses, and if you're facing the camera directly. Working? Snapchat uses the map of your face to adjust the other persons face to fit yours, and that means that when you talk it'll be their face that moves on your body… get it? It's horrifying and bizarre, but totally fascinating and it'll have you laughing uncontrollably in no time (like Lewis and Christina were below). But you'll want to capture that image to share with your friends. Tap the circle at the bottom with the face swap icon to capture the image, and if you want to save it to your phone's photo library you'll need to tap the icon in the bottom left corner that looks like a downwards arrow. You can also send it to your Snapchat friends as you normally would. With that image saved in your photo library, you can share it anywhere, whether that's via email, on Facebook, on Twitter or elsewhere. While using Snapchat to face swap is fun, not everybody uses the popular messaging app and thus doesn’t have access to the feature. Some Snapchat users are also reporting that the face swap filter is no longer available in-app, although it seems to be still available for most users at this stage. Don’t be disheartened though, as the ability to swap faces with friends and family isn’t a feature unique to Snapchat, and is available on many other apps. The most popular app that currently offers face swapping abilities is MSQRD, which made headlines earlier this month when it was bought out by Facebook less than three months after launching. The app, available for free on both iOS and Android devices offers not only face swapping abilities, but other effects similar to those used by Snapchat. The selection includes one particular effect that’ll make you look like Donald Trump (the horror!), and much like Snapchat, these effects will change from time to time to keep things interesting. It works in a similar way to Snapchat’s face swap feature, recognising your face and automatically applying the various effects when selected. If MSQRD isn’t an appealing option to you then, for iOS users at least, Face Swap Live (and it’s free variant) is another good option. Face Swap Live offers similar functionality to both Snapchat and MSQRD while bringing something slightly different to the table. In addition to being able to take/record face swap selfies and apply a number of (no doubt hilarious) filters to your face, Face Swap Live also offers the ability to superimpose your face onto a photo. This means that you could even add your face to a photo of Donald Trump (with worrying results) or pretend to be a baby – your imagination is the limit. Unfortunately, there isn’t an Android variant available at the time of writing, but it is currently in development and those interested can sign up to be notified when it launches on the Face Swap Live website . You might also like: 10 Snapchat tips and tricks How to screenshot on Snapchat without them knowing How to use Facebook Reactions 11 Facebook Messenger tips

2016-03-17 15:59 Ashleigh Allsopp www.pcadvisor.co.uk

65 Oscar Isaac gets apocalyptic in a brand new X-Men trailer How hyped up are you for the X-Men Apocalypse movie? The hype dial just got turned up a little higher ahead of the film's May release with a brand new trailer and plenty of new footage for fans to pour over. The usual big names from the prequel trilogy, including James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence and Michael Fassbender, are joined by newcomer Oscar Isaac as the eponymous Apocalypse. His name's a bit of a giveaway as to his ultimate aim. This is the last in the X-Men prequel trilogy, following on from 2011's First Class and 2014's Days of Future Past. Given how far Jennifer Lawrence's star has risen in that time, it's no surprise to see her take centre stage here as Mystique. As seems to be mandatory in modern-day trailers, there's a slowed-down, spaced-out version of a modern pop song thrown in for good measure. Put the trailer on loop and you can count down the days until the movie's release on May 27. Article continues below

2016-03-17 15:31 By David feedproxy.google.com

66 This portable ultrasound will beam images straight to your phone Have you ever looked at your phone and thought "this device is a pretty phenomenal illustration of man's mastery over nature… but I really wish I could use it to see inside the uteri of pregnant women"? Then good news, as a new medical gadget from Clarius could solve this most urgent of problems. The company has managed to miniaturise the ultrasounds scanner and turn it into a handheld device capable of beaming images back to iPhone and Android devices. According to Phone Arena , the thinking is that the device could enable doctors in remote areas to scan people without the need for a trip to a hospital. This could mean that easy procedures like a nerve block or a guided injection could be performed instantly. Clarius says that it wants the accompanying app to be as easy to use as your phone's Camera. Though sadly there is no details on whether you'll be able to export snaps of your kidney stones straight to Instagram. The company has yet to announce pricing or a release date - and as a medical device it will need the approval of America's Food & Drugs Administration first too. But the expectation is that it will work out much cheaper than a traditional ultrasound machine, which usually costs around $25,000 and that several of these could be bought for that price. Article continues below

2016-03-17 15:18 By James feedproxy.google.com

67 Oracle Q3 takeaways: Ellison unfazed by Microsoft moves Oracle's third-quarter results are in, and once again it's time to dig into the numbers and extract key takeways from the vendor's often entertaining earnings conference call s. Here's a look at the highlights: Enterprise Apps: The Next Generation Enterprise applications power the heart of business productivity, but they are traditionally difficult to implement, upgrade, and innovate. We look at how the next generation of enterprise apps could change the game. Oracle gained 942 new SaaS customers in the quarter, with more than half for products under the Fusion banner. The number of new SaaS ERP customers grew over Q2, with 334 compared to 311, and Oracle's SaaS ERP installed base is "well over" 1,800 customers, according to CEO Mark Hurd. Perhaps more telling is that Oracle had 783 SaaS customer expansions during Q3, something Hurd called "an all-time high. " Oracle now has an installed base for SaaS of 11,000 customers. "For customers it is clear that adoption on the HCM side of Oracle's cloud products is in full swing and we see similar indicators for the ERP and CRM products," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "The question is no longer if, but how long you want to continue running Oracle products on-premises, without an active evaluation strategy for moving to the cloud--looking at Oracle's products first and then as needed for alternatives. " Oracle CTO and executive chairman Larry Ellison had some interesting remarks about the company's database business on the call: Ellison seemed unfazed by a question about Microsoft's recent move to port SQL Server to Linux--merely calling it "interesting"--and an accompanying license migration offer to Oracle database customers: What he didn't acknowledge was that Microsoft and others will likely work hard in coming months and years to make database migrations easier and easier, particularly in the cloud. New on-premise software license revenue in the quarter was $1.7 billion, a 15 percent drop year over year. CEO Safra Catz termed the change as natural given customers turning to cloud products. Meanwhile, however, maintenance revenue was unchanged at $4.7 billion. "Attach and renewal rates are running at their usual high level," Catz said on the call. This result could speak to a couple of other possibilities. For one, Oracle may be successfully fending off competition from third-party maintenance providers such as Rimini Street. Secondly, audits and true-ups could be helping replace any support revenue lost by customers who don't renew.

2016-03-17 15:12 Chris Kanaracus zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

68 Here's how to get your iPhone or iPad ready for iOS 9.3 Apple is expected to announce the release of iOS 9.3 at next week's event, which means that you have a few days to get your hardware ready for the upgrade. Here's what you need to do to make sure that things go smoothly for you. First things first - will you get iOS 9.3? Here is a complete list of the devices that are supported by iOS 9.3: Before you do anything major such as upgrading your device you need to make sure that you have a backup just in case things don't go smoothly. You can either back up your data to iCloud, or if you don't have enough space you can take the old-school road and connect your iPhone or iPad to a PC and do the backup through iTunes. Details on how to carry out a backup can be found here. If you want to do an encrypted backup, information on how to do that can be found here. Chances are good that your iPhone or iPad has accumulated a lot of detritus over the months and years, so what better time to get rid of it than now. While iOS 9.x releases don't need as much free space to install as earlier releases, getting rid of apps that you no longer use - or perhaps have never used - makes good sense. If you've not updated your apps in a while then this is a good time to do so because a lot of the apps will have been updated to make them compatible with iOS 9. Another thing you can do is to upload your photos to the cloud. CNET has an excellent rundown of some of the free services that you can use for this. Following the upgrade you'll need to enter your iCloud password in order to be able to reconnect to all your data and photos. If you don't have this close to hand - remember, having it on the device you're upgrading isn't all that convenient - then this might be a good time to do that. Also, if your iTunes backup is encrypted, then remember that you'll need that password if something goes wrong! Don't upgrade until there is a confirmed jailbreak for iOS 9.3. If your iPhone or iPad is critical to your daily life, you might want to give it a few days before upgrading to see in case any show-stopping bugs appear. I've been running the public betas for some time now and not come across anything, but you never know what might sneak in at the last minute. If you're an IT admin then you need to be prepared for people to upgrade the moment iOS 9.3 is released. While most apps and mobile device management software should work fine, it's worth spending a little time making sure. If you come across issues, remember to get the message out for people to hold off upgrading as soon as possible, and definitely before iOS 9.3 is released.

2016-03-17 15:08 Adrian Kingsley zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

69 Reality Check: Virtual reality isn't a real market. Yet VR and AR: The Business Reality Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality are going to be useful for far more than just gaming. At Forrester, we believe that VR will find its place in the pantheon of important computing platforms, eventually reshaping the way workers work, enterprises interact with customers, and consumers perform a variety of tasks. In other words, it's going to be a real market... at some point. Too many clients think that VR is a platform that they simply must address in 2016. We think that's premature. Even in the era of hyperadoption , VR must overcome key obstacles to gain mass market status: For true digital predators, VR experiments can be conducted on the cheap, starting with B2B2C scenarios in which you provide the device to your customer in a retail setting. But for most of you, please don't panic and over-invest. You've got a few years before VR becomes a top-tier priority.

2016-03-17 15:00 Forrester Research zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

70 Hands on: LG G5 review Update: The LG G5, not to be forgotten, is in our hands in prototype form. We updated our first impressions of the Android phone, but the full review awaits. The LG G5 is a massive change from the manufacturer – doing away with the confusing leather in favor of a full metal body, yet keeping fan-favorite features like a removable battery and microSD card. That's a big deal, because Samsung disappointed a vocal minority a year ago when it ditched its swappable battery and expandable storage hallmarks in the Galaxy S6 . Okay, the LG G5 isn't as ornate as Samsung's glass-and-metal-fused phone, or Apple's aluminum iPhone 6S , but it's a step in the right direction after the leather-and-plastic-backed LG G4 . Watch our LG G5 Special preview walkthrough video: Not only does it include perks for power users, the South Korean company changed the way we access the battery, inventing a cartridge-like input so you don't have to remove the back cover. This 'magic slot' is located in the bottom frame of the phone and doubles as an accessory port. Add-ons so far include a battery grip with physical camera controls and a Hi-Fi audio module. You can slide out the battery from the bottom chin You don't really need either of these accessories to enjoy the camera and audio, though. LG G5 has a dual-camera setup on the back, with one lens that provides extra-wide photos. The front is highlighted by an always-on, 5.3-inch display. It never goes to sleep, with the time, date and notification icons always visible when the phone is off. There are lots of parts to the LG G5 – so does it all add up to a best phones contender when the newly launched Samsung Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 Edge have topped our best phones list? Let's explore, as the official release date is almost upon us. The upgrade to a metal design didn't require ditching the microSD card slot either. It's part of the nanoSIM tray The LG G5 looks and feels completely different from last year's phone, and that's thanks to the metal body that rightfully kicks the plastic to the curb. It's aluminum body is fairly unremarkable, though not completely seamless. That's part of the modular fun I'll explain in a second. It's metal, not plastic or leather This isn't just a metal finish, either, like the metallic-painted LG G4 variant that was plastic through and through. The all-metal phone body feels smooth, although a bit hollower than an iPhone or Huawei. However, unlike Apple's handset, the LG G5 won't be notorious for antenna lines. It doesn't have any of those unsightly bands, instead relying on Micro-Dizing to cover up antenna slits. This allowed me to focus on the colors, and it comes in four shades: Silver, Titan, Pink and Gold. There's nothing too outrageous here in terms of new colors. LG G5 plays it straight. This is the pale pink LG G5, one of four color choices In fact, this is an LG that phone plays it so straight that it no longer curves like the LG G4 or its even curvier cousin, the LG G Flex 2 from last year. It still feels easy to hold in one hand. Downsized from 5.5 inches to 5.3 inches and roughly the same amount of bezel on the sides, the LG G5 feels light at 159g and easy to hold in one hand. It measures 149.4 x 73.9 x 7.7mm. It fits in one hand without much of a stretch I can reach apps across the entire display without resorting to using two hands, which ties into LG's goal of making the phone all about ease of use and something to recommend to mom and dad. LG G5's volume rocker has shifted to the left side of the frame, ending the company's opinion- dividing practice of having buttons flank the power button on back. Here's where the new volume rocker is located: on the sides, not the back While I got used to that quirky rear-facing volume rocker and clean edges, LG's signature feature was a flaw to many. I'm indifferent about the new side volume rocker. It's no better or worse. The still-back-facing power button doubles as a fingerprint sensor, and it's definitely better than what LG had experimented with on the LG V10 , even if it's still too small. There's a fingerprint sensor in the G series, and it's a big improvement over the LG V10 trial Like the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P , it can light up the phone and unlock the screen without you having to press the button down. It's not a two-step process, as it was on the press-in-and-hold- hold-hold LG V10. What I don't like as much is the headphone jack and speaker placement. Headphones plug into the top, unless you have the 32-bit Hi-Fi DAC module. It adds a second headphone jack to the bottom. Odd. Worse, the speaker is on the bottom. I was really hoping that the LG G5 would upgrade us to a pair of front-facing speakers for stereo sound without resorting to headphones. Not this time around. LG has redesigned its bottom port, however. It uses a USB-C connection, which means all of your micro USB cables are useless. The advantage? It's reversible, unlike all other USB forms. That's a huge win for anyone taking advantage of that always-on display and plugging in their phone in the dark. Just be prepared to carry around both cables, as micro USB is probably going to be used by every other gadget and accessory you own for the next few years. The LG G5 doesn't try to squeeze more pixels into its 5.3-inch display, and that's something I'm actually happy to see. Quad HD resolutions are the ceiling that no one needs to break. Still a Quad HD resolution, but the upgrade is fully realized when the screen is off Lighting up the phone screen reveals there's little difference here. The smaller size increases the pixels per inch to about 554ppi, but everything else looks similar, including the brightness. LG has, instead, upgraded its IPS LCD to include always-on display functionality, something you won't see until the phone is asleep. It keeps most of the screen dark, but leaves minimal information there, like the time, date and notification icons. The Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge tout a similar feature using Super AMOLED displays, but Samsung's always-on information is a little bigger, brighter and can include the battery life and a faded background. Here you can see the time, date and notification icons when the phone is asleep All of this is useful because, when not wearing a smartwatch, I check my phone at least 100 times a day for the time and various notifications. LG says people do this closer to 150 times a day. Whatever your number is, an always-on display puts the essentials at your fingerprints without you having to wake the phone and its power-hungry processor. The display has a curved glass at the top The Moto X Style display does something similar, but the LG G5 pulls it off without the need for hand-waving gestures to trigger a bunch of IR sensors. It's the true meaning of always-on. LG says the battery only drains an extra 0.8% an hour with its new second screen, and that seems like a great trade off at first blush. But that adds up to be 19.2% over a full 24 hours. It may not be worth keeping this feature if you don't have a smartphone-glancing obsession. The LG G5 specs have a shot at keeping up with the Samsung Galaxy S7 thanks to the fact that it uses Qualcomm's latest processor and 4GB RAM, a must-have for an Android flagship handset in 2016. It comes with Android 6.0.1 out of the box There's a Snapdragon 820 processor pumping at the heart of this new LG phone, and that really contrasts with the LG G4 when it comes to raw horsepower. A year ago, the company purposely held back on the troubled Snapdragon 810 processor by using the steadier Snapdragon 808 chip. Samsung ate its lunch (and everyone else's, too). It's a snappy performer, but we're waiting for the final version to test it It's now a more level playing field between the two South Korean phone giants, at least in the US where Samsung uses the same Qualcomm chip. The advantage for LG is that it includes a microSD card slot - with adoptable storage. That expands its standard 32GB configuration, the same as the LG G4, to a theoretical 2TB, though someone has to actually make a microSD card in that XXL size first. All of the basics are here, too LG's user interface gets a splash of paint, but it's not a total overhaul. Icons appear to be a little more rounded and the quick settings menu isn't so drab. It's all combined with Android 6.0 Marshmallow , which should prove useful for its battery-saving tricks more than anything else. Basic messaging app Scrolling through menus on the LG G5 felt smooth and incredibly snappy, even with all of my apps loaded onto the device. I'm just wary of the fact that LG got rid of the app drawer. My entire home screen exploded with apps when I loaded everything on there. Like an iPhone, it's all on the main home screen with folders being your only relief to the clutter. It's simpler, but not. Explosion! The app drawer is gone, so all of your apps appear on the homepage. Get cracking on folders We don't have LG G5 benchmarks just yet since this is a prototype, but when we test out the phone for its final review, we'll be sure to add them and compare them to the Samsung Galaxy S7. The thing I like about LG and its smartphones is that it always seems to take chances with new technology, and that inventiveness is fully realized in LG G5 dual rear camera. The dual rear camera is another unique LG camera concept It uses both a 16MP and 8MP camera, and while the smaller 8MP number makes that second camera automatically seem inferior, it's my actually favorite due to its use of a wide-angle lens. At a dramatic 135 degrees, the camera actually sees more than the human eye of about 120 to 124 degrees. It's field of view is able to capture everything you see and more. That means the large iconic building, tower or beach behind you in vacation photos can be captured without your stranger-photographer having to back up to a seemingly infinite degree. You could resort to a panoramic photo, but that's more time-consuming and I wouldn't trust anyone else but me to smoothly pan with my new phone. I want to get myself, my loved ones and everything else in the shot, and this is a cleaner way of doing it. Snapping away on the beach, I was able to capture the entire horizon from end to end, not just a small segment of the sand. There's a little bit of fisheye, but it looked good, even if its practicality is limited to a few scenarios. What is missing is a selfie camera that does the same, and I found even more useful in the LG V10. It really impressed me with its wide angle front-facing camera, it's not here. LG G5 standard front-facing camera LG V10 wide selfie camera LG V10 non-wide selfie camera I can almost always do just that when using a rear-facing camera, or resort to a panoramic if I'm not in it, but I can't back up on a selfie photo. My arm is only so long, and no, Samsung's software-stitched wide selfie mode almost always turn out blurry. It's not a real solution. I want the best of both worlds, and this one falls short of providing that. Launching with an entire posse, the LG G5 already has accessories that are supposed to take the phone to the next level. I like the ideas of each, but unconvinced since they're not built in. The LG Cam Plus replaces the phone's metal chin with a rubberized camera grip that juts out the back. It has physical shutter button, a dial to zoom in and out and a 1,200mAh battery. It was a bit more satisfying to have the autofocus by half shutter key, but it's not really enough to make me want run out and upgrade my LG G5 with a strange camera grip bump. The same can be said about the Hi-Fi Plus. It's a portable Hi-Fi digital-to-audio converter that's small, but still extends the size of the phone by replacing the metal chin. Tuned by Bang & Olufsen, LG has cornered the market on 32-bit Hi-Fi DAC in the mobile world. It did a nice job of this on the LG V10, but its bigger phablet had the perk built-in, not as an accessory. These "friends" as LG called them, make the LG G5 smaller in size, but I'm skeptical that I'm going to go out and buy them - or not lose them - and want to use them on a regular basis. The LG G5 battery life is still a big question mark given its newly confirmed capacity. It's just 2,800mAh, down from the 3,000mAh battery of the LG G4 last year. You can take out the battery with a little work Battery size doesn't always mean anything. It has the much more energy efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 chip and better software. Android 6.0 Marshmallow should also help. The biggest benefit may be the fact that the LG G5 battery pack can be swapped out for a fresh one at any time. It's easy enough to change out, but the good news is it takes some fingernail work to properly slide-out battery button that's flush with the left side of the phone. You're not going to accidentally hit this thing willy nilly, won't worry. We'll be sure to run extensive battery tests on the final LG G5 and take note of how it performs while not using it to see if Android 6.0 Marshmallow has an impact on this handset. Is it music to our ears? The final verdict awaits The LG G5 has a plain look, side-mounted volume buttons, a fingerprint sensor and a 5.3-inch display, making it like the metal version of the Nexus 5X with an extra tenth of an inch. That's okay, because LG also built the Nexus 5X and it was a great phone for its price, and the two phones only look similar on the outside. Inside, the LG G5 specs provide a significant upgrade, with a wide angle second camera on back, always-on display on front and the promise of modular accessories that slide up through the middle. The microSD card slot and removable battery remain, while the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and 4GB of RAM touts significant speed boosts. The Samsung's new phones launched first, but LG has enough to give everyone some pause before using Android Pay on the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge.

LG G5 release date, news and features feedproxy.google.com 2016-03-17 14:47 Not yet feedproxy.google.com

71 iPhone 7 Plus UK release date, specs & features rumours: Apple's next iPhone could feature dual-cameras and wireless charging The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus are only five months old, but rumours are already flooding in about Apple's next iPhones, presumably called the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus. We're expecting big things from the new phones including the possibility of dual-cameras and wireless charging. But while it's now been confirmed that Apple is holding an iPhone event on 21 March, we predict the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus will arrive in September of 2016. Read on to find out all of the latest iPhone 7 Plus rumours, including iPhone 7 Plus UK release date speculation and potential new features. (If you do want to keep tabs on what Apple will launch during its March 21 event, head over to one of our iPhone 5se , iPad Air 3 or Apple Watch 2 articles where we not only round up the rumours on those new devices, but tell you how to watch Apple's March event and, on the day, run a live blog with commentary of product launches as they happen.) You might also like: Best smartphones 2016 and Best new phones you should be excited about . The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus were unveiled on 9 September 2015 and were released shortly after, and prior to that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus also launched on 9 September in 2014, so it's quite possible that the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will launch on 9 September 2016. The only flaw in that theory is that the 9 September will fall on a Friday in 2016, and Apple tends to host its events on Tuesdays or Wednesdays, so a more likely suggestion would be 6 September or 13 September. We're expecting Apple to keep the pricing for its iPhones the same when it launches new models next year. For the past two iPhone releases, Apple has kept pricing the same, which would mean the iPhone 7 Plus will be priced at £619 for the 16GB model, £699 for the 64GB model and £789 for the 128GB model. There's also rumours that the iPhone 7 Plus might feature a 256GB SanDisk NAND flash chip, which might mean we could be getting more storage for less; where the 16GB model might be scrapped and the base price of £619 might be for the 64GB variant. Apple's iPhone cycle tends to follow a 'tick' and 'tock' sort of model, with the tick being the main iPhone update such as the iPhone 6, which generally looks quite different from the previous model, and then the secondary iPhone update such as the iPhone 6s, which looks almost identical to the iPhone 6 but has some big spec changes. That's why we think the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will look quite different from the current iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus design. We think it'll still come in Silver, Gold, Space Grey and Rose Gold colour options, but we might see some other changes when it comes to the overall look and feel of the phone. Apple could well decide to bump the screen size up from 5.5in on the iPhone 6s Plus to 5.7in on the iPhone 7 Plus, with the smaller model bumping up from 4.7in to 5in, but rather than increasing the overall size of the phone itself, we expect Apple will aim to increase the screen- to-body ratio. This could be achieved by an edge-to-edge screen, perhaps, something that's been rumoured to be in the works at Apple for a while now and Apple has actually patented. Apple called the technology "Sidewall displays" and describes how parts of the display would be on the side of the phone a lot like the Galaxy Note Edge, S6 Edge and S6 Edge Plus. The iPhone 7 Plus may also be thinner thanks to a new headphone jack that's rumoured to be coming with the next iPhone. According to Apple Insider, Apple has patented a new, slimmer headphone jack technology called D Jack, which has a diameter of just 2mm to allow the iPhone to be thinner overall. This could also allow the iPhone 7 Plus to feature a dual speaker design. The iPhone 7 Plus could be waterproof, too, as Apple has recently patented waterproofing technology that doesn't compromise design. Instead, it coats all of the important components inside the phone to make it waterproof without requiring outer armour. The iPhone 6s Plus saw the introduction of an impressive new 12Mp iSight camera, up from 8Mp in the previous model. We think that the 12Mp camera will remain in the iPhone 7 Plus, as it's already an impressive snapper for a smartphone. However, it has been rumoured that the iPhone 7 Plus will feature dual-cameras , based on tech acquired in 2015 from LinX Imaging. If true, we'll be able to expect improved noise reduction, indoor photos, low-light photos and 3D depth mapping. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo told MacRumors he thinks both single- and dual-camera versions of the phone are in development, and that a 2-3x optical zoom function is likely to feature in the iPhone 7 Plus. Pictured below is an image render from Feld & Volk, a premium iPhone modification company. Where we really want Apple to improve the iPhone is in its screen resolution. At present, Apple's iPhone 6s Plus offers 401ppi, but with rivals such as Samsung and LG offering smartphones with Quad- and Ultra-HD screens with pixel densities well above 500ppi, Apple needs to up its game. We've already got the 3D Touch functionality in the iPhone 6s, which has opened up a whole new way of interacting with the iPhone, but it's possible that the display could become a Touch ID display too, which could sense your fingerprint and securely unlock the phone wherever you touch on a screen and therefore remove the need for the Home button. It's very likely that the processor will be improved, too, with a new A10 processor and M10 motion co-processor likely to make an appearance, and we could see a bump up from 2GB RAM to 3GB, although that seems less plausible as the iPhone 6 and earlier all had 1GB. There are some rumours stemming from Bloomberg that suggest the next iPhone will feature wireless charging, yet the truth is this is much more likely to come in 2017 with the iPhone 7s Plus. According to the site, " Apple is exploring cutting-edge technologies that would allow iPhones and iPads to be powered from further away than the charging mats used with current smartphones. " As for software, iOS 10 is expected, and this'll be shown off at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2016 and could give us some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus clues.

Apple Watch 2 UK release date, feature and specification rumours: How to watch Apple Watch event live stream on March 21 pcadvisor.co.uk 2016-03-17 14:47 Jim Martin www.pcadvisor.co.uk

72 Razer prices Core external GPU housing The Razer Core external graphics card housing has a price and a release date, but the Thunderbolt 3-powered device doesn't come cheap. Razer has announced pricing for its Core external graphics card enclosure, designed to add almost any PCI Express GPU board to a small-form-factor or laptop machine via Thunderbolt 3, ahead of its launch this April. Part of a new range of external graphics card enclosures taking advantage of Thunderbolt 3's integrated PCI Express connectivity and 40Gb/s throughput, the Razer Core is designed to bring high-performance graphics to any Thunderbolt 3- equipped laptop or small-form-factor machine that would otherwise be unable to house a full- size PCI Express graphics card - including Intel's freshly-announced Skull Canyon gaming NUC and Razer's own Blade and Blade Stealth gaming laptops. To further increase its appeal, the housing also doubles as a port expander giving a connected system four USB 3.0 ports and a gigabit Ethernet port. There are, naturally, restrictions on just what sort of card you can shove into the housing. The power supply is rated only to 375W thermal design profile (TDP) graphics cards, while the maximum length is 310mm. A mesh inlet at the side, however, means that most card designs won't have to worry about overheating: fresh air is pulled in directly to the card's fans, where in a normal case the card would be fed already-heated air from within the chassis. The Razer Core is due to launch on the 15th of April, and the company has confirmed pricing: pre-orders begin at $499.99 (around £345 excluding taxes) for the housing alone, with no pre- installed graphics card, with the price dropping by $100 if you purchase the Core at the same time as a compatible Razer laptop.

2016-03-17 13:41 Published on feedproxy.google.com

73 Huawei tops global list of patent applications Huawei Technologies filed the most number of patent applications in 2015, topping the global list for the second consecutive year and ahead of others such as Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sony, and HP. According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Huawei applied for 3,898 patents last year, up by 456 from 2014. Qualcomm, which filed 2,442 patent applications, ranked second on the list , followed by ZTE's 2,155 applications, Samsung's 1,683, and Mitsubishi Electric rounded up the top five with 1,593 applications. Patents filed under the United Nations agency's PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system provide successful applicants rights protection in 148 countries. Last year, the number of PTC applications climbed 1.7 percent to 218,000, marking a new annual record, according to WIPO. US again contributed the highest number, retaining the pole position for 38 years with 57,385 patent applications, though, this was 6.7 percent lower than the previous year. While US led the charge here, China-based organisations fuelled much of the overall growth in 2015, the UN agency said. Japan filed the second-highest number of PCT filings at 44,235, followed by China at 29,846. With these two Asian markets, as well as South Korea, the main growth drivers, Asia more than doubled its contribution to PCT applications since 2005 and currently accounted for 43 percent of global applications. "Global intellectual property applications, like those for patents, trademarks and industrial designs provide a good indication of the incidence and location of innovation," said WIPO's director-general Francis Gurry. "We see through this indicator that, while the United States of America maintains its premier position, the geography of innovation continues to shift and to evolve, with Asia, and in particular Japan, China, and the Republic of Korea, forming the predominant geographical cluster. " Telecommunications vendors led the list of PCT filers in 2015, the agency said, adding that the computer technology and digital communications sectors also clocked the largest numbers of patent filings, each surpassing 16,000 applications. At 16,385 published applications or 8.2 percent of overall filings, computer technology contributed the largest share of PCT applications, followed by digital communications at 8 percent, electronic machinery at 7.3 percent, and medical technology at 6.3 percent. Hewlett-Packard Development Company was the largest patent filer in the computer technology sector, followed by Huawei and Qualcomm. Huawei also topped its sector in digital communication, followed by ZTE and Qualcomm. Japan's Mitsubishi, Panasonic Intellectual Property Management, and Toyota Jidosha made the top three list in electronic machinery.

2016-03-17 13:26 Eileen Yu zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

74 You can now find IBM Watson in Formula One racing pits IBM and Honda have inked a deal for IBM Watson technology and analytics to be used in the automaker's Formula One (F1) cars and pits to improve performance and racing decisions in real-time. Announced on Thursday , the partnership permits Honda to implement over 160 sensors in F1 cars powered by IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The sensors will pull data ranging from driver timing to fuel flow rates and engine performance to give racing crews the chance to improve their strategies for following races -- but more importantly, drivers will have access to this data as they are on the track. IBM says they will be able to make "real-time racing decisions based on this data," such as pit stops and adjusting their speed. A power unit in Honda's F1 hybrid engine. Formula One racing has changed over the years. Gone are the days of no-holds-barred racing and fuel-based pit stop fires -- now, F1 is based on fuel conservation, strategy, and car mechanics including power units and tyre changes. Whether or not fans find the F1 sport as exciting as before is arguable -- but some of the regulations, such as restrictions on fuel use, were designed to make the sport appear more eco- friendly (but let's not get into the different tyre use rules). However, now F1 is less about racing for your life and more about car design and aerodynamics, companies such as IBM can slot in and provide solutions to harness the data and analytics these teams now crucially need -- when a tenth of a second can make all the different in racing points and season sponsorship. McLaren Honda, based in the UK and running with drivers Fernando Alonso and Jenson Button, is implementing IBM's Watson IoT technology though its cars' hybrid engines (required by regulators since 2014). These engines use "power units" which check fuel levels, fuel conservation and monitor cars for signs of mechanical issues. Honda's R&D team want extra data, and will use the technology to give its team and drivers temperature, pressure and power level readings, which can be used not only by the driver on the circuit but for analysis after the race. "For example, anytime the driver uses the brakes, the heat given off from friction can be captured and saved to the battery, similar to the hybrid vehicles Honda sells to consumers," the automaker says. "Or, the system will capture heat from the exhaust and save it as more energy in the battery as well. Then, the system can give the driver more power when he needs it, such as when passing another racer. " As the race goes on, this data is streamed to the cloud and shared with pit crews equipped with tablets. The information is also shared with researchers at Honda R&D for adjustments in temperature, pressure and power -- which could make all the different in the race itself. Harriet Green, general manager of Watson IoT, Commerce & Education at IBM commented: In February , IBM secured two new European clients based in Finland for fresh IoT projects.

2016-03-17 13:21 Charlie Osborne zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

75 QuickBooks Self-Employed now offers automatic mileage tracking Intuit is adding a new feature to its QuickBooks online product for independent contractors. The cloud accounting software provider said users of QuickBooks Self-Employed can now access automatic mileage tracking. The feature is tied to the platform's mobile app. Once activated, the user's smartphone tracks how many miles are driven and automatically logs the total on to their QuickBooks Self-Employed account. After each trip, users can see what deductions they've earned. Mileage tracking is a handy feature for many self- employed workers, but especially those in the delivery and driving space. By Intuit's estimates, every 1,000 miles driven can produce up to $500 in deductions. But the IRS needs to see all trips, both business and personal, which makes for a tedious logging process. Intuit first launched the self-employed iteration of QuickBooks in January 2015, touting the platform for its tax-specific knowhow for freelancers and contract workers -- or what it calls the on-demand economy. The platform can be used to connect financial accounts, track deductions and calculate taxes, in addition to organizing comingled business and personal finances. So far the platform has been a huge success for Intuit. In its most recent earnings report , Intuit said QuickBooks Self-Employed subscription swelled more than 42 percent, from 35,000 to 50,000. A year ago Intuit inked deals with TaskRabbit, Fiverr, Uber, Lyft and UpCounsel to provide discounted QuickBooks Self-Employed to those platforms' contract workers. Today the company added eBay, FlexJobs, Incorporate.com, Kelly Services, Moonlighting and NAHREP to its list of partner companies.

2016-03-17 13:15 Natalie Gagliordi zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

76 Encrypted email service ProtonMail comes out of beta, unveils iOS and Android apps More than 10,000 people per day are signing up for encrypted email app ProtonMail. Encrypted email company ProtonMail is dropping the beta tag and launching free iOS and Android apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play store. After launching in 2014 in what it describes as "the post-Snowden environment", ProtonMail said it was hit with "overwhelming demand" after signups exceeded 10,000 per day. Since then, ProtonMail has been an invitation-only service but even so has over one million users on its closed beta, including businesses, journalists, activists, and private individuals. The company offers an end-to-end encrypted email service which it said makes it "practically impossible" for governments, or the company itself, to gain access to user messages. Why are we still talking about backdoors in encryption? No, really FBI's director says he's not a "maniac" about encryption. The experts disagree. Since the Snowden revelations about the pervasive use of online surveillance by governments , demand for encrypted communications has rocketed. Many popular services now use some type of encryption, and the use of end-to-end encryption -- which means only the sender and recipient can read a message -- is also growing. This growth has led police and intelligence agencies to warn that they are struggling to intercept communications by criminals and terrorists: privacy campaigners argue that states are already infringing too much on the privacy of individuals and that encryption is a vital way of preventing further erosion. It is into this complicated mix that ProtonMail is coming out of beta, firmly on the side of the privacy advocates. "Strong encryption and privacy are a social and economic necessity. Not only does this technology protect activists and dissidents, it is also key to securing the world's digital infrastructure," ProtonMail co-founder Andy Yen said. "This is why all things considered, strong encryption is absolutely necessary for the greater good. " The encryption and privacy debate has been rumbling on for some time now but recently has heated up with the FBI clashing with Apple over whether the company must unlock an iPhone used in the San Bernadino shootings. ProtonMail said in light of "recent challenges against encryption and privacy" it has decided to open the service for public registration, so anyone who wants an encrypted email account can obtain one immediately. "The best way to ensure that encryption and privacy rights are not encroached upon is to get the tools into the hands of the public as soon as possible and widely distributing them," Yen said. "This way, we put the choice in the hands of the consumer, and not government regulators. " The company, founded by a group of scientists who met at CERN and MIT, is based in Switzerland. Its service launched in beta in May 2014. The initial funding for the company crowdfunding campaign raised $550,000. Its client-side code is open source and reviewed by its community. The growth of ProtonMail reflects another problem facing governments that want to limit the use of encrypted communications. While legislation such as the UK's Investigatory Powers Bill will allow them to require local communications companies to remove the encryption they have applied, they will struggle to demand the same of companies based in other countries.

2016-03-17 13:06 Steve Ranger zdnet.com.feedsportal.com

77 77 Lessons learned from AlphaGo After much chatter and speculation from fans, today Google posted an analysis describing AlphaGo’s victory victory and what was learned in South Korea. The AlphaGo AI project by Google’s DeepMind defeated Go champion Lee Sedol four games out of five. Demis Hassabis, CEO and cofounder of DeepMind, wrote that AlphaGo is capable of making value judgments that would be difficult for a human. “We’ve learned two important things from this experience. First, this test bodes well for AI’s potential in solving other problems,” he wrote. “AlphaGo has the ability to look ‘globally’ across a board—and find solutions that humans either have been trained not to play or would not consider. This has huge potential for using AlphaGo-like technology to find solutions that humans don’t necessarily see in other areas. “Second, while the match has been widely billed as ‘man vs. machine,’ AlphaGo is really a human achievement. Lee Sedol and the AlphaGo team both pushed each other toward new ideas, opportunities and solutions—and in the long run that’s something we all stand to benefit from.” The rest of the official blog post on AlphaGo by Hassabis is available here .

2016-03-17 12:57 Alex Handy sdtimes.com

78 Tigo Tanzania launches innovative nano lending scheme to its Mobile Money customers Tigo Tanzania has today announced that it will launch an easy to access nano lending product to its stable of mobile financial services. This new product will not require collateral and offers immediate access to small loans to Tigo Pesa users. Tigo Head of Mobile Financial Services, Ruan Sawnepoel, said in a statement to the press today that for the first time the nano loans product, called Tigo Nivushe will allow Tigo Pesa customers to build their own credit history and being open to any Tigo Pesa customer turns the typical lending models upside down. No security is required or taken and the loan product has been designed to be transparent and foster responsible lending. Explaining the product’s flexibility, Swanepoel said Tigo Nivushe offers different lending periods with variable administrative costs based on the length of tenure. The loans – with an average of Tsh 10,000 (US$ 5) – are processed in real-time and funds transferred within minutes. As customers build up their credit history they are able to borrow higher amounts with lower administration fees. Loans are delivered directly to the mobile wallet so customers can immediately use the funds to pay bills, transfer to others, or cash out at the thousands of agents across the country, he noted. “Tigo Nivushe has been designed to encourage responsible lending. Previous mobile behaviour is used to determine suitable limits for loans and customers will only be able to have one loan at a time. Protection against life shocks is included as everyone will be automatically insured for the loan amount against death or permanent disability. Most importantly, as the product is fee based no interest can be accumulated in the event of default and acquiring a loan will not affect mobile or Tigo Pesa accounts in any way, “ Swanepoel said. The head of Mobile Financial Services further said: “We are thrilled today to be launching Tigo Nivushe. It is an essential product for driving financial inclusion, which is critical to Tanzania’s continued economic growth and success. These quite small loans can make all the difference and are crucial for building credit history and obtaining credit in the future.” Disruptive E-money services, delivered through mobile phones have already changed the lives of millions of people. With this new responsible lending product, Tigo wants to change the way people think about lending, according to Ruan.

2016-03-17 12:23 Ephraim Batambuze pctechmag.com

79 Alphabet plans analytics platform to help cities solve traffic problems Sidewalks Labs, a unit of Alphabet, is teaming up with the U. S. Department of Transportation to build a data and analytics platform that promises to help cities understand where people go and how they get there. The goal is to help better design transportation infrastructure to suit a city's needs. The system will help cities identify congestion and areas that are underserved by public transportation, enabling planners to come up with a better citywide plan that uses current and new forms of transportation, like ridesharing, Sidewalk says. That's getting more important as commute times and distances grow longer. "To overcome these challenges, cities must find ways to foster the emergence of technologies that have the potential to transform transportation and people's lives," said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx. The system will draw on data containing billions of miles of trips from Google's Urban Mobility project. The new platform will be developed with seven cities that are finalists in the DOT's Smart City Challenge project and will eventually be installed in the winning city.

2016-03-17 12:06 Martyn Williams www.itnews.com

80 Samsung Gear 2 Smartwatch Gets De Grisogono Flash Flashy and attention-grabbing smartwatches aren't exactly a new trend -- think Apple's $10,000 18-karat rose gold Watch Edition -- but Samsung is finally entering the high-end smartwatch market following a partnership with watchmaker de Grisogono. The aptly named de Grisogono Gear S2 smartwatch , which is expected to become available this summer, but doesn't yet carry an official price tag, is sculpted in gold and precious jewels. It features Samsung's Gear S2 technology. The diamond-set gold bezel turns around the dial, allowing users to access the Gear S2's library of applications and features, including notifications and activity logs. The 1.2-inch, Circular Super AMOLED display boasts 302 pixels per inch (ppi). The device has 4GB of internal memory and 512MB of RAM, as well as wi-fi, Bluetooth, and near-field communication (NFC) connectivity options. It can also be charged wirelessly. The luxury pedigree of the Swiss jeweler is evident in the 100 black and white diamonds, and in a bracelet studded with de Grisogono's signature galuchat -- a type of rawhide consisting of rough untanned skin. Watch faces include one with a two-hand dial with dual-time display, complete with a day/night indicator at 3 o'clock, a day-date display at 6 o'clock, and a small seconds counter at 9 o'clock. There's also a two-hand dial with a central seconds counter, a power-reserve indicator at 4 o'clock, and a moon phase display at 8 o'clock. The limited-edition smartwatch will be available for purchase through Samsung's and de Grisogono's retail channels following its debut at Baselworld 2016 , a marketplace and trendsetting show for the world's watch and jewelry industry that kicked off March 17. While a price hasn't yet been released, de Grisogono's men's watches seem to fall between $5,000 and $10,000 on average, putting the figure in competitive range with the Apple Watch Edition. Are you prepared for a new world of enterprise mobility? Attend the Wireless & Mobility Track at Interop Las Vegas, May 2-6. Register now! Samsung will have stiff competition for attention at Baselworld this year, since Movado Group announced the expansion of its collaboration with H. to bring smartwatch technology to its brand portfolio, including Coach, Hugo Boss, Lacoste, Juicy Couture, Tommy Hilfiger, and Scuderia Ferrari. Other legacy luxury watchmakers are already gearing up production on their popular smartwatch models. TAG Heuer , part of the LVMH Group, is planning on ramping up production of the Connected, its first smartwatch, just a month after the product became available in December. The $1,500 smartwatch features an Intel dual-core processor with a max clock rate of 1.6GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 410mAh battery, and a 1.5-inch full circular LCD display. Compatible with Android and iOS smartphones, the watch also features an IP67 splash-proof rating, Bluetooth 4.1, Touch on Display supporting multiple finger recognition, and a scratch- resistant sapphire crystal. Among the other brands competing for upper-crust wrists are Breitling's Exospace B55 Connected , which uses Bluetooth LE to connect to a smartphone, allowing users to add functions such as setting a second time zone, alarms, and reminder vibrations. The Exospace B55 Connected debuted at last year's Baselworld event. It currently sells for around $9,500.

2016-03-17 12:05 Nathan Eddy www.informationweek.com

Total 80 articles. Created at 2016-03-18 12:01