Damage following the tsunami from the April 2014 earthquake. Juan González-Carrasco (Universidad Catolica del Norte, Chile)

Sometimes it seems like the Internet holds as many ridiculous claims about predicting earthquakes as it does cat memes. While it’s very clear that neither seismologists nor anyone else can fully predict earthquakes, that doesn’t mean the scientists know nothing.

The basic process behind an earthquake is pretty simple. Friction between two blocks of rock trying to slide past each other along a fault holds them in place until the sliding force is too great, and then BOOM!—an earthquake. We can measure that sliding very precisely, so as the strain on the fault mounts, we know an earthquake will happen; it’s just a question of when. And the greater the strain that has accumulated since the last earthquake, the larger the potential magnitude of the next one.

Along a long subduction zone, where an oceanic plate slides beneath a continental plate, faults slip one section at a time. Sections that haven’t slipped in a while but sit between sites of recent major earthquakes are known as “seismic gaps.” Those sections are likely to host the next major earthquake in the region.

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Virtualization has been around since the 1960s, but it has emerged as a hot topic over the last decade or so. Despite the rising popularity, its applications have been mostly restricted to enterprise use. Hardware-assisted virtualization features (AMD-V, VT-x and VT-d, for example) have been slowly making their way into the lower end x86 parts, thereby enabling low-cost virtualization platforms. QNAP is, to our knowledge, the only NAS vendor to offer a virtualization platform (using the Virtualization Station package for QTS) with some of their units. Read on to find out how it works and the impact it has on regular performance.

EVGA recently sent us their new Torq X10, a gaming mouse that also marks EVGA's first foray into the gaming peripheral market. On paper, it boasts excellent features and specifications. We are going to find out if it can live up to the high expectations of both the company and the consumers in this review.

Continuing with our Flash Memory Summit coverage, HGST announced their FlashMAX III enterprise SSD, which is the first fruit of HGST's Virident acquistion and continues Virident's FlashMAX brand. The FlashMAX III will come in half-height, half-length form factor and will be available in capacities of 1100GB, 1650GB and 2200GB. The controller is an FPGA-based 32-channel design with a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface, but there is no NVMe support since the FlashMAX III builds on the same architecture as the previous generation FlashMAX II. 

HGST FlashMAX III Specifications Capacity 1100GB 1650GB 2200GB Form Factor Half-Height, Half-Length (HH-HL) Interface PCIe 3.0 x8 Controller 32-channel FPGA based NAND Micron 20nm 64Gbit MLC Sequential Read 2.7GB/s 2.0GB/s 2.7GB/s Sequential Write 1.4GB/s 1.0GB/s 1.4GB/s 4KB Random Read 549K IOPS 409K IOPS 531K IOPS 4KB Random Write 53K IOPS 30K IOPS 59K IOPS 4KB 70/30 Random Read/Write 195K IOPS 145K IOPS 200K IOPS Write Latency < 30 µsec Max Power 25 watts Endurance 2 DWPD Warranty Five years

The maximum throughput seems a bit low for a design that uses up eight PCIe 3.0 lanes since 2.7GB/s should be achievable with just four PCIe 3.0 lanes. Obviously performance scaling is not that simple but for example Samsung's XS1715 (which we will be reviewing soon!) is rated at up to 3.0GB/s while only consuming four PCIe 3.0 lanes. Using less PCIe lanes allows for more drives to be delpoyed as the amount of PCIe lanes is always rather limited.

The 1650GB model is even slower due to the fact that it utilizes less NAND channels because it is a middle capacity. Basically, the 1100GB and 2200GB models have the same number of NAND packages, with the 2200GB model having twice as much NAND per package; the 1650GB model uses the higher capacity packages but doesn't fully populate the board. HGST told us that they are just testing the water to see if there is demand for something in between 1100GB and 2200GB.

The FlashMAX III also supports Virident Flash-management with Adaptive Shceduling (vFAS), which is a fancy name for Virident's storage driver. vFAS presents the FlashMAX as a single volume block device to the OS, meaning that no additional storage protocols or controllers are needed, whereas some drives just use a RAID controller or need software RAID solutions to be configured into an array. Additionally vFAS handles NAND management by doing wear-leveling, garbage collection, data path protection, NAND-level parity, ECC, and more. 

The FlashMAX III is currently being qualified by select OEMs and will ship later in this quarter. 

We are running a bit late with our Flash Memory Summit coverage as I did not get back from the US until last Friday, but I still wanted to cover the most interesting tidbits of the show. ULLtraDIMM (Ultra Low Latency DIMM) was initially launched by SMART Storage a year ago but SanDisk acquired the company shortly after, which made ULLtraDIMM a part of SanDisk's product portfolio.

The ULLtraDIMM was developed in partnership with Diablo Technologies and it is an enterprise SSD that connects to the DDR3 interface instead of the traditional SATA/SAS and PCIe interfaces. IBM was the first to partner with the two to ship the ULLtraDIMM in servers, but at this year's show SanDisk announced that Supermicro will be joining as the second partner to use ULLtraDIMM SSDs. More specifically Supermicro will be shipping ULLtraDIMM in its Green SuperServer and SuperStorage platforms and availability is scheduled for Q4 this year. 

SanDisk ULLtraDIMM Specifications Capacities 200GB & 400GB Controller 2x Marvell 88SS9187 NAND SanDisk 19nm MLC Sequential Read 1,000MB/s Sequential Write 760MB/s 4KB Random Read 150K IOPS 4KB Random Write 65K IOPS Read Latency 150 µsec Write Latency < 5 µsec Endurance 10/25 DWPD (random/sequential) Warranty Five years

We have not covered the ULLtraDIMM before, so I figured I would provide a quick overview of the product as well. Hardware wise the ULLtraDIMM consists of two Marvell 88SS9187 SATA 6Gbps controllers, which are configured in an array using a custom chip with a Diablo Technologies label, which I presume is also the secret behind DDR3 compatibility. ULLtraDIMM supports F.R.A.M.E. (Flexible Redundant Array of Memory Elements) that utilizes parity to protect against page/block/die level failures, which is SanDisk's answer to SandForce's RAISE and Micron's RAIN. Power loss protection is supported as well and is provided by an array of capacitors. 

The benefit of using a DDR3 interface instead of SATA/SAS or PCIe is lower latency because the SSDs sit closer to the CPU. The memory interface has also been designed with parallelism in mind and can thus take greater advantage of multiple drives without sacrificing performance or latency. SanDisk claims write latency of less then five microseconds, which is lower than what even PCIe SSDs offer (e.g. Intel SSD DC P3700 is rated at 20µs).

Unfortunately there are no third party benchmarks for the ULLtraDIMM (update: there actually are benchmarks) so it is hard to say how it really stacks up against PCIe SSDs, but the concept is definitely intriguing. In the end, NAND flash is memory and putting it on the DDR3 interface is logical, even though NAND is not as fast as DRAM. NVMe is designed to make PCIe more flash friendly but there are still some intensive workloads that should benefit from the lower latency of the DDR3 interface. Hopefully we will be able to get a review sample soon, so we can put ULLtraDIMM through our own tests and see how it really compares with the competition.

The two brightest planets, Jupiter and Venus, are currently aligned in the sky, forming a spectacular "double star" in their closest conjunction since 2000.

Last week we posted our Browser Face-Off: Battery Life Explored 2014, where the battery run down times of Firefox 31, IE11 Desktop, IE11 Modern, Chrome 36, and Chrome 37 beta were tested on Windows. We used GUI automation to open browsers, tabs, and visit websites to simulate a real user in a light reading pattern. The article answered a lot of questions about popular browser battery life on Windows, but it raised additional questions as well.

Chrome 36 tested with the best battery life, but was the only browser that did not render correctly at 3200x1800 due to lack of HiDPI support. In the Chrome 37 beta, HiDPI support improved rendering but also took a 25% dive in battery life tying it for last place. However, the Chrome 37 beta includes more changes than just HiDPI support (along with some debugging code), so was the battery life penalty from the now-native 3200x1800 rendering or was it something else? After a few more days of testing at 1600x900 with 100% DPI scaling, we can narrow in on an answer.

When both Chrome 36 and Chrome 37 beta natively render at 1600x900 there is less than 3% difference in battery life. Two tests of each browser were performed and the results averaged. The variation between runs was only 1%. Looking at our previous numbers of Chome 36 and 37 beta on the HiDPI setting of 3200x1800 and 200% scaling, the situation is entirely different.

I've added an asterisk here (and clarified the same text on the original article) to indicate Chrome 36 isn't actually rendering at 3200x1800, but rather at 1600x900 and relying on Windows DPI Virtualization to scale up to 3200x1800.

Looking at the numbers, there's some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Chrome 37's new features likely won't hurt the battery life of current users. If you are using Chrome now, you are probably not using a HiDPI display due to the existing blurry rendering. For these users, the pending Chrome 37 upgrade has no significant impact on battery life. The bad news is that if you have been avoiding Chrome due to its HiDPI rending issues, Chrome 37 resolves those issues but also appears to provide worse battery efficiency compared to Internet Explorer. On our XPS 15 that equated to about an hour less of mobility.

Given that this is the first version of Chrome to properly support HiDPI, it's entirely possible – even likely – that there are many opportunities to further optimize the algorithms and hopefully return battery life at least close to Chome 36 levels. A slight dip in battery life is expected as it takes more work to render a 3200x1800 image compared to a 1600x900 image, but a 20% drop seems rather extreme. We'll have to see what future updates bring, but hopefully by noting the discrepancy it will encourage developers to better tune performance.

Finally, the KDE project has released KDE Plasma 5, a major new version of the venerable K Desktop Environment.

Plasma 5 arrives in the middle of an ongoing debate about the future of the Linux desktop. On one hand there are the brand new desktop paradigms represented by GNOME and Unity. Both break from the traditional desktop model in significant ways, and both attempt to create interfaces that will work on the desktop and the much-anticipated, tablet-based future (which may or may not ever arrive).

Linux desktops like KDE, XFCE, LXDE, Mate, and even Cinnamon are the other side of the fence. None has re-invented itself too much. They continue to offer users a traditional desktop experience, which is not to say these projects aren't growing and refining. All of them continue to turn out incremental releases that fine tune what is a well-proven desktop model.

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We've all had this first-world problem, but USB is still leagues better than what came before. Sheepfilms

Like all technology, USB has evolved over time. Despite being a “Universal” Serial Bus, in its 18-or-so years on the market it has spawned multiple versions with different connection speeds and many, many types of cables.

The USB Implementers Forum, the group of companies that oversees the standard, is fully cognizant of this problem, which it wants to solve with a new type of cable dubbed Type-C. This plug is designed to replace USB Type-A and Type-B ports of all sizes on phones, tablets, computers, and other peripherals. Type-C will support the new, faster USB 3.1 spec with room to grow beyond that as bandwidth increases.

It's possible that in a few years, USB Type-C will have become the norm, totally replacing the tangled nest of different cables that we all have balled up in our desk drawers. For now, it’s just another excuse to pass around that dog-eared XKCD comic about the proliferation of standards. While we wait to see whether Type-C will save us from cable hell or just contribute to it, let’s take a quick look at where USB has been over the years, what competing standards it has fought against, and what technologies it will continue to grapple with in the future.

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On Friday, Microsoft recommended uninstalling a recent security update following reports that it caused Blue Screens of Death.

ComputerWorld reports that the patch—MS 14-045—was first announced on August 12 before it received further attention on Friday. The patch intended to fix three issues including one in the Windows kernel. But soon after it was initially released, a Microsoft support forum thread sprung up with tales of "Stop 0x50 errors," aka blue screens. (ComputerWorld notes the thread has surpassed 50,000 views within the week.)

Microsoft's updated information page for the patch includes an official, relatively detail-free explanation:

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Yousuf Fahimuddin

The former chief executive officer of Redflex, a major red light camera (RLC) vendor, has been indicted on federal corruption charges stemming from a contract with the City of Chicago.

On Wednesday, in addition to former CEO Karen Finley, government prosecutors also indicted John Bills, former managing deputy commissioner at the Department of Transportation, and Bills’ friend Martin O’Malley, who was hired as a contractor by Redflex.

According to the indictment, O’Malley himself was paid $2 million for his services as a contractor, effectively making him one of the company’s highest paid workers. Much of that money was then funneled to Bills, who used it for personal gain. Via Redflex employees, Bills also acquired a Mercedes and a condominium in Arizona. In December 2013, Ars reported on red light cameras nationwide, and in particular, Redflex's four cameras in the central California town of Modesto.

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The new Nomiku is circulating chilled water to cool down the bubbly. Temperature is listed in Celsius. Megan Geuss

Nomiku, a small company founded by culinarily-inclined couple Lisa and Abe Fetterman, launched a Kickstarter this week to raise money for their second retail-ready sous-vide machine. The new machine, which will have a Wi-Fi connection and the ability to integrate with a companion app, was funded in under 12 hours. That’s impressive for a Kickstarter, but even more impressive considering how relatively obscure sous-vide still is outside of fine-dining and high-tech circles.

Sous-vide is a method of cooking food in a vacuum-sealed bag in precisely temperature-controlled water. Preparation usually requires a very long cook time, but it allows food to cook at a much lower temperature, which many people find makes meat more tender and vegetables better-flavored because they’re all cooked evenly throughout. Although the method was discovered hundreds of years ago, it has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the last decade thanks to “the scientific cooking movement,” as the New York Times called it in 2005: “Cryovacking, which is more often called sous vide (French for ''under vacuum''), is poised to change the way restaurant chefs cook—and like the Wolf stove and the immersion blender, it will probably trickle down to the home kitchen someday.”

If Nomiku and its gaggle of competitors have their way, “someday” is today. The original Nomiku, which went on sale last year, was one of the first sous-vide appliances that was affordable to regular households at $300. Today, competing companies Anova and Sansaire both have sous-vide cookers that look similar design-wise and cost about $100 less than Nomiku’s first-generation sous-vide appliance, which you can find on Amazon. A company called Mellow is also taking pre-orders for a device that is Wi-Fi connected, but it comes with its own tub, which is either a turn-off for people with smaller kitchens or a huge boon for people who do have the space and want something that looks more elegant. (Our senior reviews editor Lee Hutchinson just put his name on the list for a Mellow—look for a sous-vide cook-off later in the year!)

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The 2014 Pokémon World Championships are happening this weekend, and the finals are underway right now on Twitch.

The Junior division championship already took place, with Kota Yamamoto (Japan) securing victory in game three when his Aegislash and Zapdos took down London Swan's (US) Rotom. (Yamamoto's brother Shota won the same division back in 2010.) The Senior division is now happening with the Master division to follow. Every finals is a best of three match, where players compete in Double Battles using Pokémon X/Y on any device from the Nintendo 3DS family (Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo 3DS XL, or Nintendo 2DS). If you're newish to the game, play-by-play announcers are on hand to analyze the action. So far, they've noted things like Garchomp being the most popular selection in the field and the resurgence of Red/Blue Pokémon overall (particularly a Lapdos in play for the Senior division match).

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On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and state authorities in Missouri reached an agreement that members of the public and journalists are within their rights to record on-duty police officers. Protests in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, MO have continued throughout the weekend, sparked by the police shooting Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager.

The outrage was flamed by the authorities' tone-deaf response in the first few days of the protests, when police wearing riot gear used tear gas and military-style vehicles to force protesters to disperse. During that time, several protesters were told to cease videotaping police activity and arrests were made including Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery and Huffington Post reporter Ryan Reilly.

Politico was given a copy of the agreement by the ACLU. The news site reports, “The St. Louis county government, the city of Ferguson, and the superintendent of the Missouri State Highway Patrol all acknowledged in a Friday agreement that both members of the media and the public at large are permitted to record events so long as they are not interfering with the duties of the police.”

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The larval form of the midge (left) and the adult. Denlinger Lab, Ohio State

When the term "extremophiles" gets thrown around, it's usually in reference to single-celled organisms that thrive in high salt or near-boiling water. But there are a few animals that also manage to make do in rather extreme conditions.

Perhaps the top example is a wingless midge that goes by Belgica antarctica. As its name implies, it's native to the frozen continent—in fact, it's the only insect that's native. (A few others have more recently introduced themselves from South America in recent years, and cockroaches undoubtedly ride in shipments to research bases.) Now, to try to help understand how anything can survive in such inhospitable conditions, researchers sequenced the genome of the midge and discovered it's gotten rid of a lot of the DNA that's frequently termed junk.

The researchers describe just how difficult the insect's living conditions are in detail: "The larvae, encased in ice for most of the year, require two years to complete their development and then pupate and emerge as adults at the beginning of their third austral summer. The [wingless] adults crawl over surfaces of rocks and other substrates, mate, lay eggs and die within 7–10 days after emergence."

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Cheuk-Man Kong

I consider myself pretty lucky, overall, for how rarely I've broken my phone in the number of times it has flown out of my hands three, four, or even five feet in the air. These are times I've misjudged a throw onto a bed or couch and had it bounce off onto the floor; times I thought I had it perfectly balanced on that uneven surface; times I thought my grip was firm and true only for that grip to give out unexpectedly; and times I went to reach for it but didn't so much reach for it as Falcon-punch it off the surface where it rested. My phone seems to spend almost as much time in the air or on the ground, face down, in a quantum superposition of shattered and intact, as it does safely in my hands.

One recent and unusually fun Tuesday, in my happy-hour two-drink overconfidence, I attempted a bold maneuver. I put my phone back in my crowded purse. Rather than pulling it off, the phone went rogue and flew out of my hands, landing on its bottom-right corner on the pavement. A spiderweb of cracks spread across the screen. I'd done it again.

Cracked screens are a little-studied phenomenon in smartphone ownership, presumably because researchers have much better things to do. One survey from 2013 by a "mobile insurance" company with an obvious vested interest in reminding everyone how fragile their phones are suggested that as many as 23 percent of iPhone owners (of the 2,471 surveyed) have cracked their screens.

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Pascal

An online platform that helps people with bipolar disorder self-administer therapy has proven to be successful in a small trial, with 92 percent of participants saying they found the content positive.

Nicholas Todd, a psychologist in clinical training at the NHS Trust, has developed the site as part of a project he's running called Living with Bipolar.

In it, he asked 122 people to use a sort of e-learning environment that uses audiovisual models and worksheets, incorporating parts of cognitive behavioral therapy and psycho-education known to be effective in bipolar patients. There's also a peer support forum, which is moderated by a member of Todd's research team, and motivational e-mails were periodically sent to those on the trial.

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TomBrazil/AtariAge

Even with the minor arcade resurgence going on these days, the prolonged decline of the American arcade means that there's a whole generation of people who have had little opportunity to play any of the thousands of coin-operated games in their native cabinets. Even those who remember the ‘70s and ‘80s golden age of arcades probably only had the opportunity to sample a relative handful of games that were available at their local haunts.

For people who want to preserve this disappearing bit of gaming history, or experience cabinets they never had access to, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator (MAME) is a godsend. It is one of the most ambitious emulation projects ever, encompassing tens of thousands of games with highly varied hardware, programming, and controls. Legal issues aside, MAME ensures that future generations will at least be able to play and study these games without having to track down an aging cabinet or circuit board.

But as comprehensive as MAME is, there are a number of arcade games that remain unplayable (or functionally unplayable) without access to the original arcade hardware. That fact came into stark relief this week with the news that developer Mitchell Corporation was finally selling the rights to its back catalog. That back-catalog includes obscure 2002 shooter game Gamshara, which has never been successfully emulated or ported to a home console, meaning few people have ever played it.

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Germany’s foreign intelligence agency recorded the phone conversations of Secretary of State John Kerry and former secretary Hillary Clinton, according to German news outlets. The recordings were apparently accidental.

One of the phone conversations may have been deleted soon after it was recorded, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. The publication credited the information to unnamed sources. One of Kerry’s phone calls was reportedly recorded last year when he was the Middle East.

A phone call made to Clinton in 2012 was also apparently recorded. German public broadcaster ARD and Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported on Clinton’s recording on Friday.

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Stack Exchange

This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

Radu Murzea asks:

First, some context (stuff that most of you know anyway):

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