If there’s anything Cal Henderson knows about, it’s scaling technology to keep up with extremely rapid growth. As cofounder and CTO of Slack, maker of the Among his challenges: Scaling both technical capacity and culture while hiring 60 engineers in 12 months and expanding the technical infrastructure to accommodate the demands of a user base that grew to 750,000 daily active users in a single year.
Here are the five—well, make that seven—new apps and games you need to check out this week.
Responding to allegations from anonymous ex-employees, security firm Kaspersky Lab has denied planting misleading information in its public virus reports as a way to foil competitors. “Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing,” reads an email statement from the company. “Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false.” On Friday, the Reuters news service
Samsung has figured out how to supersize solid state storage with a whopping 16TB SSD. At that size, Samsung has taken the lead for world’s largest storage drive, even compared to hard disk storage. Last year, Seagate and Western Digital released
The Galaxy Note 5’s best feature, besides its phablet size, is its hide-away stylus, the S Pen. It’s just a precise as a mouse pointer, and though it might seem like a throwback to older technology, it’s actually one of the best features of Samsung’s new smartphone. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the best features of the new S Pen. Writing with a stylus on screen is already sort of weird, but not so with the S Pen. It offers a smooth writing experience and it feels just just as balanced as a regular pen. Its clicky top is also spring-loaded, so you can easily pull it out of the bottom of the device. Air Command still features quick shortcuts to the suite of apps made for the S Pen, but now you can add a few of your own app shortcuts to the dock. This will be particularly helpful when you download third-party apps that take advantage of the S Pen stylus.
Ditto has the dubious distinction of being the first tech product that I’ve ever lost as an adult. While this is sort of embarrassing to admit, I don’t think it’s entirely my fault. Ditto is a $40 thumb-sized device that you clip onto your clothing or stick in your pocket, and gives off a little buzz when you get an important notification. Ditto is supposed to be simple and unobtrusive, but it was so successful in those regards that I didn’t notice its absence for days. And at that point, finding it was a lost cause. Fortunately for this review, I was able to get a good handle on Ditto's benefits before I lost it—but the news isn't good: After two weeks of weeks of extended use, I can conclude that Ditto doesn't do anything for me. Its capabilities are currently far too limited, and full-blown smartwatches are finally getting good enough that an ultra-minimalist wearable like Ditto isn’t as appealing
Apple and Intel are both making progress in their efforts to hire more women and minorities, according to figures released by the companies this week. In the first six months of the year, more than 43 percent of Intel’s hires in the U.S. were women and minorities, up from 32 percent at the end of 2014, the company reported in its first At 43 percent, Intel said it was surpassing the 40 percent diversity hiring goal it set for itself for the full year. Apple, meanwhile, boosted its hiring of women by 65 percent globally over the past year, to 11,000, the company said in its
Your smartphone is even better than your mother at humiliating you in public.
Ever since Windows 10 rolled out on July 29, we’ve offered an endless stream of Windows 10 tips on this column and Unless something big comes up that is really useful or cool, we’ll be taking a Windows 10 break here on Hassle Free PC, and going back to offering tips that nearly any Windows user can take advantage of. Don’t worry, Windows 10 coverage is still ongoing for the rest of the site. For this column, however, here’s one more hurrah into the world of Windows 10 with some minor tweaks that can make a big difference on how you use your system and change its looks.
Ruark is the latest high-end speaker manufacturer to apply its advanced design prowess to the mass market. The company is targeting the high end of the market to be sure, but $500 is a reasonable price to pay for speakers of this quality. They managed to outshine the similarly priced USB audio support gives you the opportunity to bypass your computer’s noisy circuitry and keep the audio signal in the digital domain, by sending it over a USB cable to a DAC inside the speaker. The Ruark has only a 3.5mm analog audio input and relies on your computer to perform the conversion. You can overcome that shortcoming by using an outboard DAC, or you can use Bluetooth to send audio from your source to the speaker. Both alternatives impinge on the MR1’s price/performance ratio—on the price side of that equation if you don’t already have an outboard DAC, and on the performance side if you resort to the convenience of Bluetooth.
