Pretend your awful stock car system doesn't exist with Apple's casted interface.
If you buy a car today, it will probably come with some kind of touchscreen computer onboard. These are basically embedded tablet computers that run some kind of operating system, but rather than coming from Apple, Google, or Microsoft, the software comes from car manufacturers and their suppliers. Car companies don't have a ton of experience when it comes to software, so the integrated computers generally aren't designed very well. They also never have the app ecosystem we've come to expect from smartphones and tablets, so it's no surprise that many people still prefer using their smartphones over the in-car option.
Traditional software companies are getting a foothold in cars, though. We already reviewed Android Auto, and recently we got to spend some time with Apple's CarPlay. CarPlay seeks to combine the benefits of the in-car system—namely the big, bright touchscreen—with the design, apps, and functionality of iOS. Plug an iPhone into a supported vehicle and the stock infotainment system will go away while the iPhone beams an iOS-style interface to the car screen. From our time with CarPlay, this system appears built from the ground up for computing on the go, with an easy-to-use, safety-focused UI, a heavy emphasis on voice commands, and a sliver of the huge iOS app ecosystem. continued…
first published week of: 01/25/2016
Microsoft’s retirement of the Windows Media Center software is one of the many things about the system that has caused some Windows 10 users aggravation. If you do not feel like searching the web for do-it-yourself solutions that may (or may not) restore the Windows Media Center program to working order on a Windows 10 machine, you can find a few alternative applications.
If you are keeping your existing PC and internal television tuner card when upgrading to Windows 10, the open-source MediaPortal program might be able to take over the TV viewing and recording functions formerly handled by Windows Media Center. The software works with most major brands of TV tuner cards. NextPVR is another program that can record live television from the TV tuner hardware connected to your PC. Both MediaPortal and NextPVR are free and supported by donations.
If you do not already have a TV tuner card in the computer or want hardware that connects to the PC externally, several companies make tuner boxes to pull in those over-the-air broadcast signals. The prices for some external tuner boxes may be higher than a standard internal TV tuner card, but many bring along their own apps so you can also stream live TV to your mobile devices. Many external tuners also work with Macs. continued…
first published week of: 03/14/2016
Passive Wi-Fi consumes 1/10,000th the power of conventional wireless networks
A team of computer scientists and electrical engineers from the University of Washington has developed an extremely power-efficient version of Wi-Fi wireless networking technology that consumes 10,000 times less power than the current Wi-Fi components, allowing Wi-Fi networking to be built into a much wider range of devices. The team will present a paper (PDF) with the results of their research into what they have dubbed Passive Wi-Fi at the upcoming USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation in March.
Passive Wi-Fi is, as the name suggests, partially passive—it takes in radio wave energy from an outside source and reflects that signal with its data added to it. Vamsi Talla, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student and co-author of the research, explained, "All the networking, heavy-lifting and power-consuming pieces are done by the one plugged-in device. The passive devices are only reflecting to generate the Wi-Fi packets, which is a really energy-efficient way to communicate."
The technology works much in the way Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips (and, more infamously, retroreflector bugs like the ones used by the Soviet Union to bug the US Embassy in Moscow) do—using a technique called backscatter communication. continued…
first published week of: 02/29/2016
Salesforce named Amazon Web Services as its preferred public cloud provider for services like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and App Cloud, expanding an existing partnership to provide the backend for the software–as–a–service provider.
AWS already hosts several Salesforce services like Heroku, SalesforceIQ and the recently announced IoT Cloud. This latest deal will help Salesforce to expand internationally without having to build its own data centers to comply with local data sovereignty laws.
That’s important as Salesforce tries to pick up more customers in countries that have strict requirements about where data is stored. Salesforce isn’t the only company to turn to AWS in this capacity: Dropbox will store data with AWS in Germany starting later this year. continued…
first published week of: 05/30/2016
Samsung has begun shipping its 15.36TB monster of a solid state drive, which it first unveiled at the 2015 Flash Memory Summit. This release comes amid predictions that SSDs could outsell hard disk drives by 2017, despite reports of high failure rates.
The PM1633a, as the SSD is called, is based on a 12Gb/second Serial Attached SCSI interface. The 2.5-inch form factor allows storage managers to fit twice as many of the drives into a standard 19-inch 2U rack.
The drive boasts 512 of Samsung's 256Gb V-NAND memory chips to achieve its massive storage capacity. "Utilizing Samsung's 3rd generation, 256-gigabit V-NAND technology which stacks cell-arrays in 48 layers, the PM1633a line-up provides significant performance and reliability upgrades from its predecessor, the PM1633, which used Samsung's 2nd generation, 32-layer, 128Gb V-NAND memory," the press release said. continued…
first published week of: 03/07/2016
DOJ: "The Silk Road model presents a new threat to public safety and health."
The second-highest administrator on Silk Road 2, the copycat site that followed the shuttered underground drug website Silk Road, was sentenced Friday to eight years in prison—the same term that government prosecutors asked the judge to impose. The sentencing came months after Brian Farrell, known online as "DoctorClu," pleaded guilty to one count of distribution of heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine. Such crimes carry a minimum sentence of five years in prison.
Federal agents searched Farrell’s home on January 2, 2015 after they got information that he was closely involved in SR2. There, they "seized three handguns, various computer media, various prescription medications, drug paraphernalia, 20 silver bullion bars valued at $3,900.00, and approximately $35,000 in US currency." In addition to the prison sentence, the cash and silver bullion will be forfeited to the government.
In a 2015 press release, the Department of Justice said that SR2 had generated approximately $8 million per month since it began in November 2013. In the sentencing memorandum, prosecutors noted that this case exemplifies "general deterrence." continued…
first published week of: 06/06/2016
Global spending on tech will be more or less flat this year and not much better through 2020
The days of go-go, double-digit growth for tech are long gone and do not appear to be on the way back anytime soon. Even though businesses are moving to the cloud and adopting new technology to stay competitive, global IT spending will be more or less flat this year and growth will remain sluggish through 2020, according to Gartner.
The market research firm is forecasting worldwide IT spending to total US$3.49 trillion this year, a 0.5 percent decline from 2015. That's down from a forecast of 0.5 percent growth the company made last quarter. The change in the forecast is mainly the result of the dollar's growing strength against other currencies.
In constant currency terms, taking out the effects of the rising dollar, IT spending will rise 1.6 percent this year, noted John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. That's a slowdown from 2015, when global IT spending was up 2.4 percent in constant dollars over 2014, he said.
Things won't be getting better over the next few years, he noted. In constant currency terms, Garter predicts global IT spending growth to be 2 percent to 3 percent from 2017 to 2020. continued…
first published week of: 04/11/2016
The Japanese company will pay $212 million for Altair Semiconductor in Israel.
Sony has reached an agreement to acquire chip company Altair Semiconductor in Israel for US$212 million in a bid to strengthen its offering for the Internet of Things market.
Altair is a developer of modem chip technology and software relating to the LTE (Long Term Evolution) 4G cellular standard for mobile phones and data terminals, which Sony aims to combine with its sensing technologies such as GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) and image sensors to develop new cellular-connected, sensing devices.
Sony expects LTE, which is already used in data communication for mobile phones, to play a key role in IoT as more and more small devices or “things” are expected to be equipped with cellular chipsets and access network services that take advantage of cloud computing. continued…
first published week of: 02/08/2016
It's not April 1. Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft's Cloud and Enterprise Group, announced today that next year Microsoft will be releasing a version of SQL Server that runs on Linux. A private preview is available today that includes the core relational database features of SQL Server 2016.
The announcement implies two things. Either there is a large number of Linux-using corporations out there that are desperate for SQL Server's feature set (as opposed to open source databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, or MaxDB, or the proprietary ones such as IBM's DB2 and, of course, Oracle's Oracle), or there is a large number of SQL Server-using organizations out there that are keen to ditch the cost of their Windows licenses but happy to continue to pay for their SQL Server licenses. Neither seems obvious to us. continued…
first published week of: 03/14/2016
While there are many battery back-up iPhone cases out there, they all tend to add significant weight and thickness to your otherwise sleek smartphone. The Air Case, now at the start of a so-far successful Indiegogo campaign, aims to change that by packing some decent juice into a case that's really no bigger than a standard protective wrapper you might put on your phone anyway.
The Air Case measures just 3.8 mm (.15 inches) thick. For comparison, even the slimmest battery case from popular manufacturer Mophie, measures 14.5 mm thick (.57 inches). Of course, the Mophie case is actually available for purchase from a reputable vendor, while the Air Case is a fundraising project on Indiegogo, so just be aware of this fact if you're considering pledging. The Air Case manufacturers also promises plenty of juice, saying that it will be able to pack a 2,400-mAh battery into the super-slim design, which is a little less than the 2,800-mAh battery found in their competitor's case. continued…
first published week of: 04/18/2016