Point your iPhone's camera anywhere, and Kuler captures the dominant colors from your surroundings, then creates a palette for you to design with.
The release date for
A Massachusetts teen has been jailed for a month on charges of making a bomb threat after posting supposed rap lyrics online that some found threatening following the Boston Marathon bombings.
Although big data tools like Hadoop are based on Google's technology, they've never been as easy to use as Google search. Cloudera -- one of several companies commercializing Hadoop -- wants to change that.
By layering tiny nanospheres onto stretchy fabric, scientists have created a material that changes color when stretched. Called "polymer opal" by the team, the material mimics the multicolored brilliance of an opal gemstone. Now, using ink made from synthetic photonic crystals and a printer that can modulate voltage, the team has figured out how to print shimmering, color-changing patterns onto a stretch of flexible opal.
Would you pay $99 to beat your friends at Tetris?
The razors-by-mail service is experimenting with a new product. It is, in the polite terminology you might find on a drugstore shelf, a personal wipe.
If a judge orders you to decrypt the only existing copy of your alleged confession, are your constitutional rights against compelled self incrimination being violated? That's the provocative question being raised as a Wisconsin man faces a deadline today either to give up his encryption keys or go to jail. The defendant's attorney, Robin Shellow of Milwaukee, said it's "one of the most important constitutional issues of the wired era." Shellow is making a novel argument that the federal magistrate's decryption order is akin to forcing her client to physically build a case for the government. That's because encryption basically transforms files into unreadable text, which is then rebuilt when the proper password is entered, she said. "?Some encryption effects erasure of the encrypted data (so it ceases to exist), in which case decryption constitutes re-creation of the data, rather than simply unlocking still-existing data," Shellow said.
Executives from Apple, Facebook, Zynga, Microsoft, DreamWorks, and Salesforce all told the Obama campaign manager that he shouldn't just view the campaign as a start-up, but hire much of his digital crew from start-ups that were
In the early 1970s, David J. Gross exposed the hidden structure of the atomic nucleus. He helped to reinvent string theory in the 1980s. In 2004, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. And today he struggles mightily to describe the basic forces of nature at the Planck scale (billions of times smaller than a proton), where, string theorists hope, the equations of gravity and quantum mechanics mesh. Simons Science News sat down with Gross for a Q&A about the nature of physics and reality.
The new Whitney logo harbors many of the design studio's aesthetic?hallmarks?sans-serif type, snapped cleanly to a grid?but this time they've added a clever twist.
It turns out the most popular Pinterest pictures have no faces in there. That and five other Pinterest photo secrets have been gleaned from a massive database of user activity.
It takes a while to truly get into Vince Gilligan's show
Spy software sold to government agencies around the world is believed to have been used in an attempt to hack a U.S. woman who has been critical of a powerful Turkish group.
Unlike a lot of summer blockbusters, the movie
Adam Englander is proof you can hack almost anything. He spent our national hacking day building technology capable of reinventing the chicken coop.
Google is the best at a lot of things, but so far shopping is not one of them.
How far would you go to get in the heads of your subjects? For Richard Ross it meant 24 hours in solitary confinement at a juvenile detention center.
The two designers who make up the London-based studio Cohen Van Balen are fully aware of their object?s lack of functionality. In fact, they
With everyone from Audi to Google to Volvo developing autonomous vehicles, the federal government is cautiously getting behind the wheel to regulate how self-driving cars should be operated and legislated. But its recommendations are far from clear-cut, underscoring just how far behind the times Washington is with regard to emerging technology.
Matt Smith, the current incarnation of the BBC's Doctor Who, has announced that he's leaving the show. But just who (ahem) will replace him?
Airbus is one step closer to the first flight of its newest airliner after firing up the engines of the A350-XWB over the weekend.
Every week, Wired takes a look at the latest episode of
Salesforce.com just gained some new talent for its war on Oracle, but it continues to lose some of the original talent behind the cloud service Heroku, its much-ballyhooed competitor to Google App Engine and Microsoft Windows Azure.
If you still don't think that it's possible to travel downwind faster than the wind, Rick Cavallaro has a deal for you: He'll sell you the Blackbird, the land yacht that currently holds the record for traveling downwind at 2.8 times the speed of the wind, and you can try it yourself.
Apple just released its 2013 WWDC app to help attendees navigate the many labs, sessions, and special events at its developer conference this year. With so much furor around the reported flat redesign of iOS, it?s possible this app could hint at what to expect from iOS 7 next week.
Deciding its biggest genetic privacy case of the term, a fractured Supreme Court said today that the states may take DNA samples from anybody arrested for serious crimes. Privacy groups and law enforcement officials were closely watching the case because at least 27 states and the federal government have regulations requiring suspects to give a DNA sample upon some type of arrest, regardless of conviction. In all the states with such laws, the DNA records are cataloged in state and federal crime-fighting databases.
// TASTE THE RAINBOWThe eye-melting brightness of your Wild Berry Pop-Tarts is a product of the $1.5 billion food-?coloring industry. But the global market for synthetic, mostly ?petroleum-based colors has recently been overtaken by the natural stuff. Thank Europe: A 2007 study linked six artificial colors to hyperactivity in children, and by 2011 their use ...
A behind-the-scenes, exclusive look at the making of Fast 6's over-the-top crash ending.
Think "Mogadishu" and you probably picture
Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks that could be related have in the past few days slammed the DNS servers of at least three providers of domain name management and DNS hosting services. DNSimple, easyDNS and TPP Wholesale all reported temporary DNS service outages and degradation on Monday, citing DDoS attacks as the reason. In some cases the attacks started a few days ago and are ongoing. through its website on Monday that eight of its DNS servers experienced “unscheduled service interruption.” . The company managed to mitigate the DDoS attacks that caused service interruptions throughout Monday by taking “the drastic step” of rate-limiting DNS queries, the team said.
Long considered old-school tools with no place in shiny corporate social collaboration suites, to-do software is making a comeback with a new air of cool about it and renewed appreciation from enterprise IT. The reason? It’s now clear that enterprise social networking (ESN) software helps people collaborate on projects, but is not particularly good for assigning and tracking who is responsible for doing what by a specific date. As a result, in the past two years demand has risen for a new type of collaboration software that combines enterprise social features with functions for leaders to plan and supervise projects and for team members to track their tasks—it’s known as social task management (STM). “Yes, there’s definitely a trend there. It’s an emerging category,” said Rob Koplowitz, a Forrester Research analyst.
Intel has made it clear that its fourth-generation Core or “Haswell” processors will power future PCs. But at the low end of the notebook market, the company's branding strategy will be far muddier—and that's bad for Intel, considering it needs to tell consumers exactly what to buy. , Intel said Tuesday, meaning that its Core chips could eventually power tablets, too. But in the meantime, Intel's upcoming “Bay Trail” Atom chips are waiting in the wings—and could offer the performance buyers want at a fraction of the price. This fall, buyers looking to pick up an inexpensive Windows convertible or notebook may have to sort through several processor brands, including Atom, Core, Pentium, and Celeron. And that’s without even factoring in the code names: Bay Trail, Silvermont, and Haswell, among others. Intel may have the right chip at the right price, but because its processor line-up is so crowded, it's in real danger of screwing the whole thing up. good for some Wall Street analysts, who worry that a $60 Atom chip will drag down profit margins at a company used to selling Core chips for hundreds of dollars.
Development platform vendor Verivo Software wants to provide the back end for mobile enterprise apps to make it easier for corporate programmers to add features such as off-line access and authentication. As company CEO Steve Levy puts it, the company wants to be the plumbing that enables enterprise mobile applications. The Akula platform has been designed to help solve what Verivo sees as the biggest challenges in enterprise mobility. “Most enterprise mobile apps are transactional in nature, and integrate deeply with corporate systems such as SAP, accounting systems and proprietary internal databases,” Levy said. An enterprise-ready app needs authentication to ensure that only the employees that are allowed to can access data and go through with transactions. The company has also found that mission critical applications still need to operate when there is no network coverage.
While it's easy to make a thin SSD for low-profile laptops and other mobile computing devices, NAND memory isn't cheap. Designers are constantly faced with a choice between capacity and affordability. While 2.5-inch hard drives are about one-fifth the cost of SSDs,their 7- or 9mm profiles rendered them difficult to implement in ultraportables and other smaller laptops. That's why the Seagate Laptop Ultrathin HDD is big… err news. At 3.3 ounces and just 5mm thick, it provides 500GB of relatively cheap storage ($89 retail) that eases the price/capacity design conundrum.The drive has a SATA 6Gbs interface, but its platter spins at only 5400 rpm, so you shouldn't expect extremely high performance. In our tests, the drive wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 73.8MBps, it read them at 91.1MBps, and it handled our single large 10GB file at 151.4MBps (write) and 100.2MBps (read). That's not bad given the spindle speed, but it's hardly SSD-like—or even 7200 rpm-like. Hands-on with a relatively speedy laptop, our Windows installation felt decently responsive but that has a much to do with Windows advanced caching as the speed of the drive. The Laptop Ultrathin HDD is rated to survive up to a 400G shock while running and 1000Gs when powered down. Those are some pretty hefty ratings. We didn't perform any drop tests, but in my relatively uncaring hands-on with the drive powered up and spinning outside the case, it survived several small shocks.
Dell and Oracle will integrate hardware and software for customers through a strategic partnership, the companies announced on Tuesday. The deal expands the existing partnership between the two companies and will in part be exclusive, said Marius Haas, president of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions business. He announced the partnership in a keynote address at the Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose, California. The companies will work together to deliver Oracle software on Dell x86 server platforms, optimized for those systems, and jointly provide support. The joint offerings will include Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, Oracle Enterprise Manager, as well as Oracle’s database, middleware and applications, Oracle Co-President Mark Hurd said in a video message to the conference. “We test it together, we patch it together, we support it together,” Hurd said. The goal is to free enterprises from integration and maintenance tasks and let IT departments spend more time on internal innovation, Hurd said.
magazine, in what might be an effective cost-saving solution for niche publications. partnership is good for the magazine’s June/July edition, and the content will remain on SkyDrive until the end of the month. has also added some bonus content to the digital repository, including past covers. in an effort to cut costs.
franchise, due out in July, was developed specifically to be compatible with Microsoft mobile devices. has a new story, new design, and new controls. This Windows 8 mobile version is the franchise’s first departure from standard PC gaming. Players can now use touchscreen devices to tap and swipe their way to military domination in addition to classic keyboard and mouse controls. Optimized for the mobile format, the game will support cloud saves and players will be able to sync their games across multiple Windows 8 devices. , which powers the Nokia Lumia, among other Windows 8 phones. is set between the third and fourth games in the franchise, further developing two major characters across 25 action-packed missions. Players can assume the identity of either Sarah Palmer or Spartan Davis and outfit themselves with all of the familiar weapons and vehicles of the Halo landscape. Instead of the traditional first-person shooter perspective, it takes an overhead view of the action.
Salesforce.com’s pending $2.5 billion purchase of marketing software vendor ExactTarget will help it develop a new $1 billion annual revenue stream and set the company on a clear strategic course for the foreseeable future, according to Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. The ExactTarget deal, the largest in Salesforce.com’s history, and is scheduled to close by the end of July. Salesforce.com already had some marketing capabilities, especially for social media ad campaigns and associated analytics, gained through its acquisitions of Buddy Media and Radian6. But it wasn’t enough to play in today’s market, Benioff said during a conference call Tuesday. “We recognized we have to get stronger in critical areas like email as well as marketing automation and lead nurturing,” he said. “We wanted to make one large purchase that brought all of these things together. We can’t keep making these small acquisitions. We needed to do something of consequence. We needed to do something now.”
Do you want a nifty new Windows PC to help you pound out homework, but can’t afford the cost of a touchscreen device? Microsoft has the solution: Bug your friends and family! Microsoft’s bizarre new ChipIn service is designed to help you “crowdsource your new Windows PC for college.” To get the giving off on the right foot, the company’s tossing in a 10 percent discount off the top and preinstalling a copy of Office 365 University. After choosing a discounted device from 15 Windows 8 tablets, hybrids, all-in-ones, and laptops, ChipIn prompts you to sign in to Facebook, and then fill out a full profile with all your personal details. Be careful while you’re selecting a PC. ChipIn’s fine print notes that Windows RT devices—currently limited to the , however, ship with Office Home & Student RT, which will meet your basic productivity needs but lacks the free updates, multi-device license, and online features found in the subscription Office.
It's very fashionable among hackers these days to randomly choose someone's online account and break into it for bragging rights. If you are determined not to become a victim of hacking, then you need to strengthen and overhaul all of your passwords. It's no longer cute or safe to use passwords like "password" or "123," PWGen is a neat little software app that can help you generate passwords in an instant, no thought required.
The U.S. Congress should allow new challenges to patents on processes that are enabled by computers, and lawmakers should make it more difficult for patent-holding firms to gain import injunctions at the U.S. International Trade Commission, the White House has recommended. President Barack Obama on Tuesday called on Congress to take several steps to make it more difficult for so-called patent assertion entities (PAEs) to collect money from alleged infringers of their patents. PAEs, often called patent trolls, are patent-owning companies whose main business model is demanding license fees instead of making products based on their patents. . are also pushing for bills targeting patent trolls.
The next release of the Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), an application for managing software development, has been designed to bring agile development practices to larger, multi-team projects. “The problem of scaling up agile in enterprises is a big one that everyone faces,” said Brian Harry, a Microsoft technical fellow working as the TFS product unit manager. “Over the last ten years, we’ve had this rush of everyone trying to get to agile. I think we’re just hitting the peak of disillusionment, where more organizations have tried to make agile work, but it is difficult to get it to scale to an enterprise. We think that is something we can help with.” developer conference. It will release the full production-ready version by year’s end. The new features will be phased into the Team Foundation Service (a Microsoft hosted version of TFS) over the course of this year. has emerged as a popular approach to software development, one designed to speed the development process with rapid iterations and immediate customer feedback. Agile can pose some challenges, however, with larger enterprise-focused software development projects, Harry noted. “Everyone invents their own way of rolling up these small agile teams in a way to deliver on enterprise-scale problems,” he said.
If you're looking for the newest mobile gear with Intel's brand-spanking new fourth-generation processor included, Sony is bringing its stuff to the table. They have a few new mobile options that update their line of VAIO products with the VAIO Pro and VAIO Duo. Sony is bringing its TV know-how to the VAIO line with its Triluminous color rendering and X-Reality display engine technologies. Both models offer Rapid Wake feature to bring the systems back up to speed quickly after sleeping. And their USB ports can charge a device when the notebooks are in sleep mode or even powered down. There AC adapter has a USB charging port, too. These notebooks will connect to any NFC enabled device by simply tapping it to the VAIO to share data and connecting via Bluetooth.
A low-power Thunderbolt interconnect for smartphones and tablets is in the works, but the wired technology may not thrive if consumers prefer products using the wireless WiGig specification for data transfers. There is a need for faster throughput so smartphones and tablets can connect to high-definition TVs and storage peripherals, said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in an interview on the sidelines of the Computex trade show in Taipei. The Thunderbolt data transfer technology shuttles data at high speeds between host computers and peripherals. Intel’s mobile Thunderbolt interconnect will be a low-power version of its more power-hungry relative used in Macs and PCs, Perlmutter said. He did not provide a time frame on when the technology would be ready. Apple was an early adopter of Thunderbolt, and if introduced, low-power Thunderbolt could be a candidate for use in iPhones and iPads. The mobile devices currently use the proprietary Lightning interconnect for charging and connecting to peripherals.
IBM has signed an agreement to acquire SoftLayer Technologies, as it looks to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure. The company is also forming a services division to back up the push. The financial details of the deal were not announced, but SoftLayer is the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, according to IBM. IBM already has an offering that includes private, public and hybrid cloud platforms. The acquisition of SoftLayer will give it a more complete in-house offering, as enterprises look to keep some applications in the data center, while others are moved to public clouds. SoftLayer has about 21,000 customers and an infrastructure that includes 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, according to IBM. SoftLayer allows enterprises to buy compute power on either dedicated or shared servers.
Informatica has given its virtual data machine technology a proper name and is planning to create versions of it that can run on anything from high-end servers in private data centers to small devices and sensors. Dubbed Vibe, the “VDM engine” concept has been part of Informatica’s data integration platform since the beginning, said Marge Breya, executive vice president and chief marketing officer. It allows users to create data-integration mappings once, and then run them across multiple platforms. Informatica recently ported its VDM to the Hadoop framework for large-scale data processing. The VDM provides an abstraction layer that makes users of Informatica’s PowerCenter application “defacto Hadoop developers,” since they can use their existing skills, according to a statement. But Informatica’s goal with Vibe is to have the VDM technology running in far more places, such as sensors on industrial equipment or smart utility meters, capturing data and sending it to back-end systems for analysis.
The Chinese State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO) on Tuesday signed an agreement to start using the same patent classification system as adopted by the E.U. and U.S. patent authorities in January, the European Patent Office (EPO) announced. With China committing to the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC), now three out of the world’s five big patent offices use the same classification system, said Oswald Schröder, spokesman of the EPO. Korea and Japan have not yet signed on, he said. If those two countries join, 70 to 80 percent of all patent applications worldwide will be in the same classification system, Schröder said. That would make it very easy for interested parties to locate the intellectual property that relates to a specific technology, he added. Companies applying for patents will save money because the process will run more quickly if most patent offices are using the CPC, Schröder said.
The trusty old laptop is being kicked to the curb, with PC makers trying to spice up their offerings by pushing a variety of hybrids, tablets and smaller-screen devices at the Computex trade show in Taipei this week. Asustek Computer, Acer and Dell have all introduced tablets and markedly different laptop designs in an effort to revive their flagging fortunes. Many of the products use Intel’s Atom chip or next-generation Core processor, called Haswell, which was also launched here. Some of the thin-and-light laptops have detachable screens, or displays that can slide or rotate. There’s also an uptick in the number of products being offered with Google’s Android OS, as Windows 8 struggles to find its feet on touch-screen devices.
Samsung TVs will be able to play movies streamed directly from PCs running Intel’s latest processors by the end of this year. Intel and Samsung announced a tie-up on Tuesday under which the chip maker’s Wireless Display technology will be integrated directly into Samsung’s TVs. That will eliminate the need for a separate receiver to play PC content on TVs. Samsung is a big customer win for Intel. Around 10 million TVs from manufacturers including LG, Toshiba and TCL already have Wireless Display integrated, and with Samsung, the number will double by the end of the year, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group.
) software to give administrators more insight into what might be slowing application performance, thanks to the inclusion of new metrics showing the operational health of the host infrastructure. The new technology, called PureStack, allows the dynaTrace Compuware APM software to “connect the infrastructure with the applications,” said John Van Siclen, the general manager of Compuware’s APM. “Imagine a CPU spike happens in some tier in the environment for some reason. With PureStack, you can correlate that CPU spike to the exact set of business transactions affected, and the number and the exact users who were affected,” Van Siclen said. Typically, in order to pinpoint a performance problem with a Web application, an administrator would have to correlate timestamps from different system logs, said Steve Tack, chief technology officer of Compuware APM. PureStack “reduces the amount of time it takes to find the problem,” he said.
Intel wants to match PC battery life with that of tablets through its new dual-core fourth-generation Core processors code-named Haswell. The chip maker announced Tuesday the new dual-core Core processors for tablets, laptops or “2-in-1” ultrabooks with dual laptop-tablet functionality. Intel intends to reduce the chip power draw to as little as 6 watts, paving the way for Haswell devices that could be fanless and offer the longer battery life found in many tablets today in certain use cases. The new dual-core chips, announced at the Computex trade show in Taiwan, follow Intel’s launch of Haswell quad-core laptop and desktops chips earlier this month. Haswell was designed with laptops and tablets in mind, and the reduced power consumption does not hurt performance, said Dan Bingham, marketing manager of Intel’s PC Client Group. Previously, Intel aimed for power draw of 7 watts, and is now looking to lower the number beyond 6 watts, Bingham said.
Google wants more developers to use its App Engine cloud service, and has launched Mobile Backend Starter to make it easier. Running servers on top of a hosted environment to power mobile apps can be a bit of a headache, according to Google. With the introduction of Mobile Backend Starter the company hopes to lower the bar for developers. The package includes a server that stores data using App Engine and a client library for Android that handles the communication between the app and the App Engine cloud. Developers can also add support for Google Cloud Messaging (GCM). To keep users' data secure, Mobile Backend Starter also includes built-in support for Google Authentication, the company said. Features made possible with Mobile Backend Starter allow users to store data in the cloud and access it from anywhere. In addition, data updated on one device is automatically available on all devices via GCM.
Dell has announced new PCs with Intel's latest fourth-generation Core processors code-named Haswell, including a thinner and lighter XPS 12 laptop-tablet hybrid, which will offer up to 9.5 hours of battery life. The thin and light XPS 12 has been redesigned and will come with Intel's Core i5 or i7 chips, depending on the configuration. The laptop's battery life is more than three hours longer than its predecessor, said Cami Collins, XPS product manager at Dell. The laptop's announcement coincides with Intel's launch of Haswell chips at Computex trade show in Taiwan. Intel has claimed that Haswell chips will improve laptop battery life by 50 percent compared to previous Core processors code-named Ivy Bridge, which shipped last year. The XPS 12 offers laptop and tablet functionality thanks to a revolving screen attached to the hinge. The screen can be revolved in a circular motion and placed flat on the keyboard to turn the device into a tablet.
The days of choosing between PC performance and tablet convenience may soon be over. With a notebook running Intel's fourth-generation Core processor, code-named Haswell, consumers may be able to get both. In some ways, the justifications for buying a Haswell notebook sound familiar: The new Core architecture offers better performance while consuming less power, and this leads to better battery life. Intel has told a similar story during previous processor launches. But this time around, instead of boasting about how this generation's notebooks will be better than last generation's notebooks, PC vendors will be directly appealing to consumers defecting to tablets. Their argument: You can have all the long battery life of a tablet without giving up the performance (and versatility) of your Windows PC. than Ivy Bridge, along with 20 times longer standby life. The upshot is that Haswell-based PCs should effectively neutralize a traditional tablet selling point.
may have gotten all the glory at Computex this weekend, but ten years down the line, we may just remember Computex 2013 as the year that Intel’s most portable CPUs were finally embraced by mobile manufacturers. . “If Intel continues on its trajectory, we’re going to look back on [Computex 2013] and say not necessarily that it’s where Intel’s mobile push started, but that it’s where it started to gain traction,” says Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. Let’s take a peek at that traction in action, starting with honest-to-goodness Android tablets with Intel Inside.
Lenovo is in preliminary negotiations to start a joint venture with an unspecified party, the company said on Tuesday, setting off speculation that the company could be looking to bolster its expanding smartphone business. on the Hong Kong stock exchange, after reports emerged that Lenovo was in talks with Japan’s NEC to form a joint venture in the smartphone business. While Lenovo’s statement confirmed the company was interested in a joint venture, it stopped short of naming what the business deal would concern. Lenovo declined to offer further comment. As for NEC’s smartphone business, “We are considering different options for the business but have no official announcement to make,” said NEC spokesman Joseph Jasper in Tokyo.
Intel on Tuesday showed the first smartphone based on its next Atom smartphone chip code-named Merrifield, which will provide better performance and battery life than current Atom chips. The Merrifield chip will offer 50 percent better performance and “much improved” battery life in smartphones compared to predecessor chips, said Tom Kilroy, during a keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taipei. The chip is due to ship to carriers and device makers early next year. Merrifield is aimed at high-performance smartphones, and will succeed the current crop of Atom chips code-named Medfield and Clover Trail+ being used in a handful of devices. Most smartphones today have ARM processors, while Intel chips are in just a handful of devices. Intel hopes Merrifield will give the chip maker an edge in power and performance over ARM in smartphones and tablets. ARM earlier this week claimed its processors were a generation ahead of Intel on performance per watt.