If you have an under-powered PC but need the horsepower to see high-definition video or edit intense graphics, AMD has your back. AMD's new FirePro S7150 and S7150 x2 GPUs, which sit in servers, can deliver "virtualized GPUs" to client devices and remote desktops. A virtual GPU mimics the functionality of a GPU on local hardware, and users can run graphics, engineering or even VR applications on virtual desktops. The virtual GPUs on remote desktops can do everything regular GPUs can do on a computer, AMD claims. The processing load of virtual GPUs is handled by the FirePros in servers. Virtual desktops are becoming popular in businesses that are looking to reduce spending on PCs and secure data in centralized servers. Some examples include architectural firms, which are using CAD/CAM on remote desktops, and hospitals, which use it for medical imaging.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, racked up $3.6 billion in losses last year through investments in "big bets" such as self-driving cars and Internet balloons. The company was known to be spending heavily on these items but revealed actual figures for the first time Monday when it broke out results separately for its core Google business and for big-bet investments, which it also calls moonshots. The losses for those items were much higher in 2015 than in 2014, when they totaled $1.9 billion. And they brought in just $448 million in revenue last year. Still, Alphabet says it stands to reap rich rewards in the long term if any of those big bets pays off. They also include its investments in smart thermostat company Nest, Google Fiber, and medical science, including efforts to build a smart contact lens that measures glucose levels.
Sony spinoff Vaio Corp. is expected to launch a phone based on Windows 10 Mobile this week, following Vaio representatives did not respond to requests for comment by press time, although Mynavi.jp published a photo which named both Acer and Vaio—as well as Mouse Computer, freetel, ThirdWave, and NuAns—as Windows 10 Mobile partners dating back to last October.
Soon, turning off the heat and lights before leaving your house could be as simple as turning a key in a Bluetooth-equipped lock. This scenario may be possible with the latest Bluetooth wireless technology, which could start appearing in products next year. With the improvements, devices will be able to communicate directly over a longer range and at faster speeds than with current technology. The range and speed of Bluetooth will continue to increase in coming years as the markets for home automation and IoT grow, said Mark Powell, executive director at standards-setting organization Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). The upcoming Bluetooth protocol -- which will be released in the second half this year -- will quadruple the wireless range and double the speed of the current technology. Bluetooth-SIG members involved usually develop chips in parallel, but it takes a few months until they start appearing in devices, Powell said.
You're on every do-not-call list and you've tried opting out, but still the telemarketers keep pestering you. What's a consumer to do? Just ask the Jolly Roger Telephone Company. That's what Roger Anderson did, though in his case it was a matter of creating the company first. In a nutshell, Jolly Roger Telephone offers a bot that's designed to waste as much of a telemarketer's time as possible by making the caller think there's a live human reacting to their spiel. In fact, it's just a software robot equipped with clever algorithms to string them along for as long as it can.
Samsung is again following the lead of Apple, this time in building ad-blocking capabilities into its mobile browser.
Some people have spent thousands upon thousands of dollars for the privilege of playing From
In March, Microsoft said it would use its Bing technology to Microsoft’s Bing predicts that Trump will win the Republican primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada relatively easily, topping Ted Cruz in all four states. Hillary Clinton is expected to win three out of the first four Democratic primaries—Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada—losing New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders.
Google’s Chrome browser will soon get a slightly new look, but users of the latest stable release needn’t wait. As spotted by The Next Web, Chrome now offers several optional tweaks in line with To enable the changes, visit the chrome://flags menu and select “Material” from the drop-down for the following items: “Material design in the browser’s top chrome,” “Enable material UI for PDF,” and “Enable Material Design downloads.” Additionally, users may preview a new Material Design settings menu by visiting chrome://md-settings.
Samsung has announced we’ll get our first official look at the Galaxy S7 at However, you don’t have to wait to find out what the phones will look like, if VentureBeat’s Evan Blass is to believed with his
Windows 10’s user share jumped in January by its second-largest one-month increase since its launch, data from analytics vendor Net Applications showed today. At the mid-point of its first year, Windows 10 powered approximately 196 million systems, according to The jump in
There’s nothing more frustrating than dealing with
Microsoft Research has a new concept that could bring data centers powering cloud services closer to roughly half of the world’s population. All it requires is a custom submarine capsule designed to go five years at a time without a visit from a technician. The company’s R&D department recently went public with Microsoft already completed its first successful mission last year. Between August and November of 2015, the company deployed its first prototype vessel, the Leona Philpot, which was named after a character connected to the
We’ve seen Windows 95 running on The
When users first try virtual assistants (like Siri, Google Now, Cortana, M or Alexa), they’re struck by the idea that they’re talking to a computer, rather than a person. That much sounds obvious. In reality, however, the responses from virtual assistants are far more human than most people assume. In fact, every response is carefully crafted by a person or a team of people. What you get as a response to your question or request to a virtual assistant isn’t what a real-live person said. It’s what a team of people believe a real-live human being could or should say. Some replies are constructed from prerecorded words and phrases—the sentences are pieced together by software to answer some arbitrary question—and others are written as full sentences or paragraphs. Let’s take a look behind the scenes and see how this works.
A study from Harvard released Monday largely refutes claims that wider use of encryption in software products will hamper investigations into terrorism and crime. "Law enforcement or intelligence agencies may start to seek orders compelling Samsung, Google, Mattel, Nest or vendors of other networked devices to push an update or flip a digital switch to intercept the ambient communications of a target," it said. "These are real products now."
Operating systems need to update regularly to fix bugs and close security holes. So if Windows 10 isn’t successfully updating, you’ve got a serious problem. Even worse, the failure to update itself might be a symptom of a malware infection. A quick note: I had to deal with this situation myself recently, but I didn’t think to grab images off the screen at the time. So some of the images below are faked. Try these fixes until one of them works:
Samsung’s smartphone problem can be summed up by a single phrase slipped into last year’s fourth quarter earnings This isn’t just a Samsung problem. Apple is also feeling the pressure—in his earnings call last week,
Search for many popular extensions on the Chrome Web Store and you’ll see misleading and potentially malicious apps first. Google’s Chrome Web Store always lists apps before extensions, and hucksters have taken advantage of this to trick unsuspecting users into installing fake apps instead of the extensions they’re searching for. This needs to stop. It’s easy to demonstrate this problem. Let’s say you want to install a Chrome extension. You open Chrome’s menu, point to
