With the launch of the overclockable Pentium G3258 processor, some motherboard manufacturers have been scrambling to get a cheaper product to market to be the centre point of a Pentium based build. We covered ASRock’s Z97 Anniversary launch and have an upcoming review of an $110 MSI motherboard aimed at the same market, but today ECS is announcing its Z97-PK (PK = Pentium K ?, even though Intel call it the Pentium AE). The main stand out feature of the motherboard is the ‘One Key OC’, which claims to boost the G3258 from 3.2 GHz to 4.7 GHz.

This an impressive claim, given the motherboard relies on a 2-3-phase power implementation with no power delivery heatsink – I would assume that ECS has performed enough testing on enough CPUs to make sure the 4.7 GHz value covers the majority of G3258 dies. Even though ECS lists a ‘One Key OC’ for this functionality, there is no actual physical button on board (like with MSI’s OC Genie), which makes me believe that this is either a software or a BIOS implementation. Ultimately I would have preferred a physical button due to the low number of home users who actually enter the BIOS or install the bundled software.

The motherboard is in the mATX form factor, offering a single PCIe 3.0 x16 slot for graphics with a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot from the chipset. This means there is no SLI support but Crossfire is available at a reduced bandwidth for the second card. Like other lower cost motherboards there are six SATA 6 Gbps ports, with this layout affording two at right angles to the motherboard and four coming out of the PCB. There are only four USB 3.0 ports, with two of these coming from an internal header. Also of note is the DRAM slots which are not equidistant from each other; this could reduce signalling margins for overclocked memory unless ECS have engineered the board to compensate. That being said, the webpage only lists DDR3-1600 memory support.

Audio and networking is provided by Realtek, and integrated video outputs come via the VGA, DVI-D and HDMI outputs. This is interesting when comparing to the Z97 Guard-Pro, which uses VGA, DVI-D and DisplayPort instead to allow tri-monitor setups. Also on the motherboard for legacy connectors are a COM header, an LPT header and a TPM header.

The ECS Z97-PK might not win any aesthetic awards, but ECS usually aims at the super low pricing bracket which might pique some interest in mass production builds. We are awaiting information about release dates and pricing, although ECS is claiming that this motherboard and the G3258 in a bundle would cost less than an i5 processor by itself. The only downside with that comparison is that as our review and analysis showed, the i5 performs significantly better than an overclocked G3258 in multi-threaded tasks and multi-GPU gaming.

Source: ECS

Update: ECS has let me know that this motherboard should be available at the end of September, for a combo price with a G3258 for $100. The CPU alone is $70, making this motherboard $30 in the deal.  To be honest, for budget builds, that is a quite good price.

AMD wants to be a "one-stop shop" for PC components, though RAM and SSDs are all totally standard commodity parts that rarely have compatibility trouble. AMD

PC builders mostly think of CPUs and GPUs when they think of AMD, but today the company announced that it's getting into the SSD business. AMD will be partnering with Toshiba-owned OCZ to launch three Radeon R7-branded solid-state drives in 120GB, 240GB, and 480GB capacities. The drives use OCZ's Barefoot 3 controller and Toshiba's A19nm NAND chips, have four-year warranties, and include 3.5-inch drive adapters for desktops and disk cloning software from Acronis to aid with data migration. Additional information and specifications are laid out in the slides below.

AMD

The Radeon drives share many characteristics with other OCZ SSDs.

3 more images in gallery

The drives start at $99 for the 120GB model, well south of the $1-per-GB line, and the competitive SSD landscape usually pushes prices down a bit from the MSRP (the 240GB and 480GB models go for $164 and $299, respectively). However, AMD's drives will face strong competition from other entrenched competitors. Looking at Amazon shows well-regarded Samsung drives below that price point ($89 for a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO), and prices of older drives from value players like Kingston go even lower ($55 for a 120GB SSDNow V300 drive, $95 for a 240GB model). That's before you consider newer value-focused drives like the Crucial MX100, recently dubbed the best SSD for most people by the Wirecutter, or OCZ's own ARC 100, which uses the same controller and NAND as the Radeon drives, although it has a shorter warranty and lower transfer speeds.

Like the AMD-branded RAM the company introduced a few years back, there's nothing particularly special about these SSDs. They use controllers from an established company and share most of their specifications with other unbranded drives in OCZ's product lineup. OCZ said that the drive uses "a very different firmware that was engineered specifically for this drive," though it's not clear what differences buyers can actually expect to notice.

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Back in 2011, AMD made a rather unexpected move and expanded its Radeon brand to include memory in addition to graphics cards. With today's announcement AMD is adding another member to its Radeon family by releasing Radeon R7 Series SSDs. Similar to AMD memory, AMD is not actually designing or manufacturing the SSDs as the product design and manufacturing is handled by OCZ. In fact, all the customer support is also handled by OCZ, so aside from the AMD logo AMD is not really involved in the product.

Partnering with OCZ makes sense because OCZ's focus with the Barefoot 3 platform has always been gamers and enthusiasts and that is the target group for AMD's R7 SSDs as well. OCZ is a now owned by Toshiba, so OCZ has direct access to NAND with guaranteed supply, whereas fabless OEMs (e.g. Kingston) could face supply issues that might harm AMD. Here's the quick overview, which of course will be essentially the same as certain existing Barefoot 3 products.

AMD Radeon R7 Series SSD Specifications Capacity 120GB 240GB 480GB Controller OCZ Barefoot 3 M00 NAND Toshiba A19nm MLC Sequential Read 550MB/s 550MB/s 550MB/s Sequential Write 470MB/s 530MB/s 530MB/s 4KB Random Read 85K IOPS 95K IOPS 100K IOPS 4KB Random Write 90K IOPS 90K IOPS 90K IOPS Steady-State 4KB Random Write 12K IOPS 20K IOPS 23K IOPS Idle Power 0.6W 0.6W 0.6W Max Power 2.7W 2.7W 2.7W Encryption AES-256 Endurance 30GB/day for 4 years Warranty Four years MSRP $100 $164 $299

The R7 is based on OCZ's own Barefoot 3 controller and it is the same higher clocked M00 version (397MHz) as in the Vector 150. The new ARC 100 and Vertex 460 use the M10 version, which runs at 352MHz instead of 397MHz but is otherwise the same silicon. Performance wise the R7 SSD is very close to Vector 150 with slightly lower random write performance, although random read performance is marginally better in turn.

The biggest difference between the two is endurance as the Vector 150 is rated at 50GB per day for five years (91TB total) while the R7 is rated at 30GB per day for four years (43TB total). The firmware in the R7 is tailored for AMD, although I was told that the customizations are mainly wear-leveling related to increase endurance over the Vertex 460, so there should not be any surprises in performance. The NAND is also different as the R7 utilizes Toshiba's A19nm MLC, but OCZ should be making the switch to A19nm across its whole client SSD lineup soon to cut costs. 

The motivation behind AMD's move is identical to the reason AMD entered the memory market. AMD wants to provide users an "AMD-only" experience by offering as many of the components as possible. Another argument AMD had is that providing more AMD branded products makes it easier for novice PC builders to pick the parts because the buyer does not have to go through the trouble of deciding between dozens of products and making sure the parts are compatible with each other. In addition to providing an easier purchase experience, AMD can also use the R7 SSDs in bundles and promotions, which is definitely more lucrative than using third party components. 

Of course, the ultimate reason behind the move is that SSDs are becoming a mainstream product, and they provide another revenue source for AMD. AMD has not been doing that great financially lately and having an extra low risk revenue source is definitely welcome, even though client SSDs are not exactly a high profit market anymore. Then again, AMD is not investing much into SSDs since development and manufacturing is done by OCZ, so even if Radeon R7 SSD sales end up being low, AMD has no long-term investment to protect. The announced pricing is generally in line with what we're seeing for the existing OCZ Vector 150 products, though mail-in rebates can actually drop the Vector 150 below Radeon R7 SSD levels.

All in all, the R7 will not provide much from a technological standpoint since it uses the same platform we have tested several times, but it will be interesting to see how AMD bundles the R7 with other AMD products. AMD now has an opportunity to provide even more extensive bundles (CPU/APU, GPU, RAM and SSD); all that's left is for AMD to begin offering Radeon branded motherboards, power supplies, and cases to provide the ultimate AMD-only experience. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but AMD is trying an aggressive bundling strategy to increase their desktop CPU sales.

We have samples of the Radeon R7 SSD on the way, so stay tuned for the full review!

The Roku TVs announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January will finally make their way into stores in the next few weeks, according to releases from TCL and Hisense Monday. The TVs range in size from 32 to 55 inches and are close in price to their dumb-TV counterparts with an operating system that's meant to be an antidote to the average TV interface.

The Roku setup of content "channels" like Netflix, YouTube, and Rdio, as well as the customizable home screen, remain largely unchanged in the new sets. Since the TVs have to handle other inputs, the interface also treats other connected devices (a cable set-top box or a console, for instance) as selectable "channels" on the home screen. If the connected devices are powered on, the TV can show a live preview of what is currently playing within the selected channel box.

The Roku TVs will be packaged with a Roku-style remote, which eliminates most of the interface-tweaking buttons found on a standard TV remote. Instead, there are directional buttons that handle menus, which are curated so that the most commonly tweaked settings get the best placement, according to Roku's research. If users dig deeper, they can find the more granular display settings and other features that TV remotes usually let viewers access with a button press.

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Gordon Smith, president and CEO of the National Association of Broadcasters and a former US senator from Oregon. Center for the Study of Ethics

On Monday the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) filed a petition asking a federal court to object to the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) rules for an upcoming auction of TV airwaves to cellular providers. Although lawsuits challenging FCC actions are relatively common, if the court sides with the NAB, the 2015 spectrum auction could be delayed, and promises of improvements to cellular networks could prove illusory.

The auction, which was mandated by Congress two years ago, is the first of its kind, and it has TV broadcasters bristling. The FCC has been asking TV stations to give up their airwaves in exchange for a cut of the auction proceeds, at which point participating stations can either go out of business or “channel share,” an arrangement where two stations occupy the same airwaves. Still, vigorous lobbying on behalf of the broadcast industry ensured that all participation in the auction would be voluntary.

In the NAB's lawsuit today, the industry group said that it was unhappy with the protections the FCC had put in place for those TV stations that chose not to participate in the auction. In 2012, Congress ordered that after participating TV stations had relinquished their rights to their airwaves, the commission would reorder the spectrum, being careful to preserve the remaining broadcasters' coverage areas as much as possible. At the time of the congressional order, the FCC had relied on a specific methodology to determine a broadcaster's coverage area, but in June of this year, the FCC switched to another methodology, which the NAB says is unacceptable.

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ARM (and its partners) were arguably one of the major causes of the present day smartphone revolution. While AMD and Intel focused on using Moore’s Law to drive higher and higher performing CPUs, ARM and its partners used the same physics to drive integration and lower power. The result was ultimately the ARM11 and Cortex A-series CPU cores that began the revolution and continue to power many smartphones today. With hopes of history repeating itself, ARM is just as focused on building an even smaller, even lower power family of CPU cores under the Cortex M brand.

We’ve talked about ARM’s three major families of CPU cores before: Cortex A (applications processors), Cortex R (real-time processors) and Cortex M (embedded/microcontrollers). Although Cortex A is what we mostly talk about, Cortex M is becoming increasingly important as compute is added to more types of devices.

Wearables are an obvious fit for Cortex M, yet the initial launch of Android Wear devices bucked the trend and implemented Cortex A based SoCs. A big part of that is likely due to the fact that the initial market for an Android Wear device is limited, and thus a custom designed SoC is tough to justify from a financial standpoint (not to mention the hardware requirements of running Android outpace what a Cortex M can offer). Looking a bit earlier in wearable history and you’ll find a good number of Cortex M based designs including the FitBit Force and the Pebble Steel. I figured it’s time to put the Cortex M’s architecture, performance and die area in perspective.

We’re very much in the early days of the evolution of Cortex M. The family itself has five very small members: M0, M0+, M1, M3 and M4. For the purposes of this article we’ll be focusing on everything but Cortex M1. The M1 is quite similar to the M0 but focuses more on FPGA designs.

Before we get too far down the architecture rabbit hole it’s important to provide some perspective. At a tech day earlier this year, ARM presented this data showing Cortex M die area:

By comparison, a 40nm Cortex A9 core would be roughly around 2.5mm^2 range or a single core. ARM originally claimed the Cortex A7 would be around 1/3 - 1/2 of the area of a Cortex A8, and the Cortex A9 is roughly equivalent to the Cortex A8 in terms of die area, putting a Cortex A7 at 0.83mm^2 - 1.25mm^2. In any case, with Cortex M we’re talking about an order of magnitude smaller CPU core sizes.

The Cortex M0 in particular is small enough that SoC designers may end up sprinkling in multiple M0 cores in case they need the functionality later on. With the Cortex M0+ we’re talking about less than a hundredth of a square millimeter in die area, even the tightest budgets can afford a few of these cores.

In fact, entire SoCs based on Cortex M CPU cores can be the size of a single Cortex A core. ARM provided this shot of a Freescale Cortex M0+ design in the dimple of a golf ball:

ARM wouldn’t provide me with comparative power metrics for Cortex M vs. Cortex A series parts, but we do have a general idea about performance:

Estimated Core Performance   ARM Cortex M0/M0+ ARM Cortex M3/M4 ARM11 ARM Cortex A7 ARM Cortex A9 Qualcomm Krait 200 DMIPS/MHz 0.84/0.94 1.25 1.25 1.9 2.5 3.3

In terms of DMIPS/MHz, Cortex M parts can actually approach some pretty decent numbers. A Cortex M4 can offer similar DMIPS/MHz to an ARM11 (an admittedly poor indicator of overall performance). The real performance differences come into play when you look at shipping frequencies, as well as the type of memory interface built around the CPU. Cortex M designs tend to be largely SRAM and NAND based, with no actual DRAM. You'll note that the M3/M4 per clock performance is identical, that's because the bulk of what the M4 adds is in the form of other hardware instructions not measured by Dhrystone performance.

Instruction set compatibility varies depending on the Cortex M model we’re talking about. The M0 and M0+ both implement ARM’s v6-M instruction profile, while the M3 and M4 support ARM’s v7-M. As you go up the family in terms of performance you get access to more instructions (M3 adds hardware divide, M4 adds DSP and FP instructions):

Each Cortex M chip offers a superset of the previous model’s instructions. So a Cortex M3 should theoretically be able to execute code for a Cortex M0+ (but not necessarily vice versa).

You also get support for more interrupts the higher up you go on the Cortex M ladder. The Cortex M0/M0+ designs support up to 32 interrupts, but if you move up to the M3/M4 you get up to 240.

All Cortex M processors have 32-bit memory addressability and the exact same memory map across all designs. ARM’s goal with these chips is to make moving up between designs as painless as possible.

While we’ve spent the past few years moving to out-of-order designs in smartphone CPUs, the entire Cortex M family is made up of very simple, in-order architectures. The pipelines themselves are similarly simplified:

Cortex M0, M3 and M4 all feature 3-stage in-order pipelines, while the M0+ shaves off a stage of the design. In the 3-stage designs there’s an instruction fetch, instruction decode and a single instruction execute stage. In the event the decoder encounters a branch instruction, there’s a speculative instruction fetch that grabs the instruction at the branch target. This way regardless of whether or not the branch is taken, the next instruction is waiting with at most a 1 cycle delay.

These aren’t superscalar designs, there’s only a 1-wide path for instruction flow down the pipeline and not many execution units to exploit. The Cortex M3 and M4 add some more sophisticated units (hardware integer divide in M3, MAC and limited SIMD in M4), but by and large these are simple cores for simple needs.

The range of operating frequencies for these cores is relatively low. ARM typically expects to see Cortex M designs in the 20 - 150MHz range, but the cores are capable of scaling as high as 800MHz (or more) depending on process node. There’s a corresponding increase in power consumption as well, which is why we normally see lower clocked Cortex M designs.

Similar to the Cortex A and R lines, the Cortex M family has a roadmap ahead of it. ARM recently announced a new CPU design center in Taiwan, where Cortex M based cores will be designed. I view the Cortex M line today quite similarly to the early days of the Cortex A family. There’s likely room for a higher performing option in between Cortex M4 and Cortex A7. If/when we get such a thing I feel like we may see the CPU building block necessary for higher performance wearable computing.

Carolla doing his podcast, earlier this month. Adam Carolla

After more than a year of litigation, podcaster and comedian Adam Carolla has reached a cease-fire with the well-known "patent troll" claiming to hold a patent that covers podcasting.

Carolla was sued for patent infringement in January 2013. He responded by fighting back, raising almost $500,000 in a crowd-funded campaign. The parties had a trial set for next month in East Texas.

Personal Audio LLC, the patent company, also sued TV networks CBS, NBC, and Fox over some of their Internet video-on-demand offerings, since it believes its patent covers some types of Internet "episodic content." The TV companies are continuing to litigate.

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Sprint announced new family plans today that provide 20GB of shared data for $100, calling it "double the high-speed data at a lower price than AT&T and Verizon Wireless."

New pricing options have been expected since last week when newly appointed Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure told employees that "When you have a great network, you don’t have to compete on price," according to Light Reading. But, "when your network is behind, unfortunately you have to compete on value and price."

AT&T and Verizon have the fastest and most reliable cellular networks in the US, according to a nationwide test conducted in late 2013. Sprint's network was the slowest among the four major carriers, but it ranked third in reliability, ahead of T-Mobile.

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Ewan McIntosh

As the protests in Ferguson, Missouri over police fatally shooting 19-year-old Mike Brown have raged through the past several nights, more than a few people have noticed how relatively quiet Facebook news feeds have been on the matter. While #Ferguson is a trending hashtag, Zeynep Tufekci pointed out at Medium that news about the violence was, as best, slow to percolate through her own feed, despite people posting liberally about it.

While I've been seeing the same political trending tags, my feed is mundane as usual: a couple is expecting a baby. A recreational softball team won a league championship. A few broader feel-good posts about actor Chris Pratt’s ice-bucket challenge to raise awareness and money for ALS, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge, another friend’s ice-bucket challenge… in fact, way more about ice bucket challenges than Ferguson or any other news-making event. In my news feed organized by top stories over the last day, I get one post about Ferguson. If I set it to organize by "most recent," there are five posts in the last five hours.

Zach Seward of Quartz noted, also anecdotally, that Facebook seems more likely to show videos of of people dumping cold water on their heads in high summer than police officers shooting tear gas at protesters and members of the media. And rightfully so in Facebook’s warped version of reality: people on Facebook may not be so interested in seeing the latter. At least, not if Facebook can’t show them the right angle. But Facebook’s algorithmic approach and the involvement of content sources is starting to come together such that it may soon be able to do exactly that.

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A red giant star really is quite gigantic compared to our Sun. NASA

Radioactive decay is a powerful tool. The predictable decay of radioactive isotopes can be used for far more than just dating old rocks. Scientists have used radioactive isotopes to determine the age of the Earth and the age of the Solar System itself. Now, a team of scientists has used radioactive dating to study the pre-history of the Solar System more accurately than before, in the process reconciling data that had seemed to be contradictory.

The contradiction came in the form of data from two different isotopes. The radioactive elements iodine-129 and hafnium-182 are found throughout meteoroids in the Solar System. The abundance of those elements, in relation to the abundance of their non-radioactive counterparts, should give estimates of the time when those elements were produced. The problem is that the date calculated from the iodine (~72 million years prior to the Sun’s formation) does not match the date from the hafnium (~15 million years). Since the two elements should have been produced in the same event (typically a supernova), this was quite a problem.

Both these isotopes are produced via a neutron-capture process. Under certain conditions, an atomic nucleus can pick up a loose neutron. While it remains the same element, it ends up being a different isotope with a different atomic weight. There are two known types of neutron-capture processes: the s-process and the r-process.

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HTTP Shaming's ethos is even on a fridge. Tony Webster, HTTP Shaming

The amount of personal data traveling to and from the Internet has exploded, yet many applications and services continue to put user information at risk by not encrypting data sent over wireless networks. Software engineer Tony Webster has a classic solution—shame. 

Webster decided to see if a little public humiliation could convince companies to better secure their customers' information. On Saturday, the consultant created a website, HTTP Shaming, and began posting cases of insecure communications, calling out businesses that send their customers' personal information to the Internet without encrypting it first.

One high-profile example includes well-liked travel-information firm TripIt. TripIt allows users to bring together information on their tickets, flight times, and itinerary and then sync it with other devices and share the information with friends and co-workers. Information shared with calendar applications, however, is not encrypted, Webster says, leaving it open to eavesdropping on public networks. Among the details that could be plucked from the air by anyone on the same wireless network: a user's full name, phone number, e-mail address, the last four digits of a credit card number, and emergency contact information. An attacker could even change or cancel the victim's flight, he says.

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Two Russian cosmonauts set off on a spacewalk from the International Space Station (ISS) to launch a nano-satellite.

The world is still waiting for the year of Linux on the desktop, but in 2003 it looked as if that goal was within reach. Back then, the city of Munich announced plans to switch from Microsoft technology to Linux on 14,000 PCs belonging to the city's municipal government. While the scheme suffered delays, it was completed in December 2013. There's only been one small problem: users aren't happy with the software, and the government isn't happy with the price.

The switch was motivated by a desire to reduce licensing costs and end the city's dependence on a single company. City of Munich PCs were running Windows NT 4, and the end of support for that operating system meant that it was going to incur significant licensing costs to upgrade. In response, the plan was to migrate to OpenOffice and Debian Linux. Later, the plan was updated to use LibreOffice and Ubuntu.

German media is reporting that the city is now considering a switch back to Microsoft in response to these complaints. The city is putting together an independent expert group to look at the problem, and if that group recommends using Microsoft software, Deputy Mayor Josef Schmid of the CSU party says that a switch back isn't impossible.

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Anyone paying vague attention to the PC games market has long known that it's a space dominated by downloadable titles. Still, it's a bit astounding to hear a report estimating that a full 92 percent of PC game sales in 2013 came from digital downloads, as DFC Intelligence recently told British tech site PCR.

That may sound high, even to people who haven't bought a PC game on a disc for years, but it lines up with other numbers reported throughout the industry. Last year, Payday 2 publisher Starbreeze announced that 80 percent of its 1.58 million first-month sales came from downloads, for instance. And let's not forget the scores of PC games that are totally ignoring retail sales for 100 percent downloadable releases these days, from Dota 2 to Day Z.

Download-dominated PC gaming is a newer phenomenon than some gamers might realize. As recently as 2010, analyst firm NPD was estimating that downloads made up only 48 percent of all PC game sales.

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Tim Redpath

Delaware has become the first state in the US to enact a law that ensures families’ rights to access the digital assets of loved ones during incapacitation or after death.

Last week, Gov. Jack Markell signed House Bill (HB) 345, “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act,” which gives heirs and executors the same authority to take legal control of a digital account or device, just as they would take control of a physical asset or document.

Earlier this year, the Uniform Law Commission, a non-profit group that lobbies to enact model legislations across all jurisdictions in the United States, adopted its Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act (UFADAA). Delaware is the first state to take the UFADAA and turn it into a bona fide law.

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Rightscorp

Internet copyright enforcer Rightscorp has told investors some revelatory details about its strategy in its second-quarter earnings call, as reported by TorrentFreak.

Rightscorp was founded to be a kind of RIAA-lite, getting online pirates to pay record companies and other rights-holders without the need to resort to high-stakes litigation. Instead, it creates e-mail notices demanding $20 per song from users it deems "repeat infringers" and insists that ISPs forward those notices.

The company is growing fast, but is still way, way in the red. Last year it earned $324,000 in revenue, while spending more than $2.1 million to run its operations. This year it's earning more revenue: $440,414 in the first six months of the year. However, operating costs during the same period have already hit $1.8 million.

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Mayo Clinic Gene Expression Core Gene expression is the process by which the DNA of genes is used to produce proteins that perform essential roles as enzymes, hormones, antibodies, and more. However, this complex process is not fully understood because it varies dramatically due to environmental factors, developmental stages, and diseases. We’d like a better understanding of gene expression, but finding a system that allows it to be studied free of extraneous influences has been difficult.

Researchers may have overcome this obstacle with the development of a biochip that contains an array of artificial “cells” that enable the precise study of how gene expression changes with time. This system could be used to investigate how different cells change their activity as development proceeds or in response to environmental changes.

The biochip was constructed by assembling bundles of DNA on the surface of circular silicon compartments (50 μm radius and 1-3 μm height). Thin capillaries were used to connect DNA compartments to a channel that provided nutrients and energy. Researchers were able to observe stable gene expression and expression patterns that changed over time by tracking the presence of green fluorescent protein (GFP) expressed from the DNA.

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The @peoriamayor Twitter account.

The Illinois city that arrested a local man for parodying its mayor on Twitter said Monday that the prankster's detainment wasn't "unreasonable."

The arrest of Jonathan Daniel by Peoria authorities in April made national headlines, and the 29-year-old cook sued in federal court, claiming civil rights violations.

In its first response to the lawsuit, the city of Peoria's and Mayor Jim Ardis' attorney told Ars that the mayor and city officials believed Daniel was breaching an Illinois law making it illegal to impersonate a public official. The mayor's attorney said city officials got a judge to issue warrants from Twitter and Comcast to track down Daniel. In short, they were just following the law.

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Levi's Stadium crowd on August 17, 2014. Jim Bahn

The San Francisco 49ers' massive Wi-Fi network delivered to its first NFL crowd yesterday when the home team took on the Denver Broncos in a preseason game at the just-opened Levi's Stadium.

Mobile Sports Report Editor Paul Kapustka tested the network in person during the game and detailed his findings extensively.

"In its first 'real' test with an almost-full house on Sunday the Levi’s Wi-Fi and cellular networks seemed to work well throughout the game, delivering solid speed test results from almost every part of the new 68,500-seat facility," Kapustka wrote. In an outside concourse, Kapustka got speeds of 57.92Mbps down and 41Mbps up. He still got more than 20Mbps in both directions inside near the concession stands, while Mbps dropped to the teens in the seats, still plenty fast enough to qualify as broadband.

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Droid Life

Over the weekend, Best Buy posted the product page for the Moto 360 a bit early, revealing specs and pricing for Motorola's long-awaited smartwatch. The most noteworthy part of the listing is the price, a surprisingly low $249. That's only slightly more than the less-fashionable square watches from Samsung ($199) and LG ($229).

Best Buy showed specs that claim the device is equipped with 802.11N Wi-Fi hardware, which a tiny watch battery surely can't handle. Because smartwatches use smartphone SoCs, most have a Wi-Fi hardware that's kept switched off, so unless Motorola has worked some serious battery magic, we doubt the 360's will be active.

The other surprise is the mention of a Texas Instruments SoC. The company had worked with Motorola before on devices like the Droid, but it decided to quit making smartphone chips after the high-end smartphone market was dominated by Qualcomm. If the Best Buy listing is right, that decision apparently left the door open for low-powered devices like smartwatches.

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