After a weekend of rumors spurred on by a Wall Street Journal report, HP has confirmed this morning that the company intends to split in half next year. The process will see each half become its own independent company, allowing for what amounts to HP’s enterprise and consumer divisions to go their separate ways. By doing so, HP is looking to allow each half to focus on one subset of HP’s overall business, allowing for more focused execution and growth while cutting the bonds that HP believes have made them slow to move in the past.

The split will see HP’s core businesses assigned into one of two companies. HP Inc. the closest of the two companies to an immediate successor to the current HP, will take HP’s PC and printing businesses, along with HP’s other consumer/mobile businesses such as the company’s Chromebooks and tablets. Internally these products are already organized under HP’s Printing and Personal Systems business, so in some senses this is merely moving a business that was its own division into its own company entirely. This split off will also see the current EVP of the Printing and Personal Systems business, Dion Weisler, promoted to CEO of the new HP Inc. Finally, HP Inc. will also be retaining the current HP branding.

Meanwhile the rest of HP’s businesses – servers, networking, storage, software, financial services, and other services– will all be split off together to form the new Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. As alluded to by the name, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will be focused on HP’s enterprise businesses, where divisions such as the company’s networking business are potential rapid growth markets for HP. HP’s current CEO, Meg Whitman, will be transitioning over to CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

HP’s separation in turn is largely borne out of the fact that HP isn’t deriving much of an advantage of keeping all of their businesses under one roof together. HP believes that having the companies split off will mean that each company is better focused on its respective market without the heavy overhead of trying to manage all of these businesses as a single company. In other words, each half will be more flexible/agile than the combined whole. Practically speaking HP has seemed conflicted between consumer and enterprise for some number of years now, and while it’s possible to do both things at once it’s anything but easy. So in lieu of a better reason to have a single company, HP seems content to let each half of the company go their own ways.

What’s interesting is that despite how much bigger Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would seem at first due to its mix of enterprise products, it’s only marginally larger than HP Inc. Based on HP’s most recent revenue, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would be slightly more profitable than HP Inc. on roughly the same revenue, but from a financial basis at least this isn’t a clear case of ejecting the weaker company. That said, HP does seem more bullish on the growth opportunities for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise than HP Inc. (the latter will pay dividends, for example), which offers some additional rationale for why HP would want to split the company. In any case even split both companies will be quite large, clearing over $50B/year in revenue and putting them in the Fortune 50.

Ultimately HP expects the transaction to be completed by the end of the company’s fiscal year 2015 (Oct. 31, 2015), assuming regulatory approval and no other challenges. This split comes as the latest step as part of the company’s larger 5 year turnaround plan, which if successful HP will be nearing the end of.

Finally, in light of this split it’s interesting to reflect on the state of HP after such a long period of acquisitions and mergers by the company. Over the years HP has acquired a large number of formerly high profile companies, including Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Compaq, VoodooPC, Palm, 3Com, and Electronic Data Systems (EDS) as part of a larger effort to build up what has become the megalith that they are now taking apart. The combined companies are still larger than the individual companies HP has acquired over the years, but between the previous spin-off of Agilent (HP’s former instruments & equipment business) and now the split into HP Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, the individual companies are no longer the sort of mixed business conglomerates that HP has been for the last two decades.

Sometimes it feels odd to review the cheaper elements of the motherboard market. The more expensive models have more to play with, whereas the sub $160 market for Z97 comes down to the choice of an individual controller or two. Here is where brand loyalty and styling seem to matter more than absolute feature set. To make matters worse for MSI, one of the other manufacturers is also branding their motherboards with ‘Gaming X’, making it harder to forge that nomenclature as a brand. Today we are looking at the MSI Z97 Gaming 5 at $160, which at the time of writing was sold out on Newegg.

Dmitry Lyakhov via Flickr

Adhesives that can form bonds underwater would be useful for many biomedical applications, yet few synthetic adhesives exist today. In the last decade, researchers have begun to look to the sea to investigate the organisms—mussels, barnacles, algae, and others—that naturally secrete durable underwater adhesives. Recently, scientists have successfully developed adhesives that are able to mimic their biological counterparts.

There are two natural protein systems that have been widely investigated thus far. One uses a chemical called 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA) that links proteins together—we’ll call this the sticky part. The other relies on an amyloid structure, a flat assembly of proteins that tends to form dense fibers. In this work, investigators aimed to combine the sticky bit and the fibers to produce a next generation of bio-inspired adhesives. (They tested two sticky proteins—Mfp3 and Mfp5, which mimic DOPA-based mussel adhesive proteins—and the amyloid protein, CsgA.)

The authors used computer modeling to check whether the sticky parts could be merged with the fibrous one. They found that neither protein disrupted the other—it was possible to create a single molecule that combined both of their binding properties. Simulations also showed that these hybrid proteins spontaneously formed fibers, which suggests that this dual system could in fact be used to form adhesive materials. These fibers were held together by stacking of the amyloid core and adhesion from the sticky domains.

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Redbox Instant, Verizon's attempt to compete against Netflix, is being closed after a two-year existence marked by criminal activity and a failure to attract customers.

"Redbox Instant by Verizon... will be shut down on Tuesday, October 7, 2014, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time," customers were told in a notice on the service's website.

The Verizon/Redbox joint venture never caught on, but things took a turn for the worse this year. "Redbox Instant has a problem that may just break its neck: The video service disabled sign-ups for new users because of criminal activity three months ago and has yet to open up the gates again," GigaOm reported on Sept. 29. Redbox customers' payment information wasn't leaked, but criminals had been using Redbox Instant's website "to verify credit card numbers they illegally obtained elsewhere."

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Cyrus Farivar

This week, I downloaded a new iPhone app, Path Talk, and I texted actual questions to local businesses near where I live in Oakland, California. In some cases I got answers back within minutes, but most took longer, even over an hour. Nevertheless, it was almost like magic.

Without interrupting my work day, I learned some crucial information about my favorite East Oakland taco truck (Tacos Sinaloa): "Can I place an order by phone?"

"Hi! Unfortunately, you would have to come to our restaurant in person since we do not take orders over the phone. Sorry about that. Have a nice day!"

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The Wall Street Journal is reporting that HP will break up into two separate companies. According to the report, the company appears ready to split into separate "Consumer" and "Enterprise" companies, with PCs and printers ending up in one company and corporate hardware and services operations going to the other. The Journal says HP plans to announce the move "as early as Monday."

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is basically the plan that was proposed in 2011 when HP's CEO was Léo Apotheker. HP intended to get rid of the "Personal Systems Group" (PSG), the division that makes PCs, and focus on the enterprise. Shareholders didn't like the plan though. So after Apotheker was fired and the current CEO Meg Whitman took over, she decided to keep the PC division. At the time, Whitman said, “It’s clear after our analysis that keeping PSG within HP is right for customers and partners, right for shareholders, and right for employees. HP is committed to PSG, and together we are stronger.” Whiteman reorganized the unit, combining the low-profit PC division with the more profitable printer group.

After a few years, it looks like the old plan is mostly back, and the PC group will be spun off into a separate company and take the printer group with it. WSJ says Whiteman will be the chairman of Consumer HP and CEO of Enterprise HP. The current lead independent director, Patricia Russo, will be chairman of Enterprise HP, and Dion Weisler will move from an executive in the PC/printer group to become the new company's CEO.

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Aurich Lawson

Markdown is a Perl script that converts plain text into Web-ready HTML; it's also a shorthand syntax for writing HTML tags without needing to write the actual HTML. Markdown has been around for a decade now, but it hasn't seen an update in all that time—nearly unheard of for a piece of software. In that light, the fact that Markdown continues to work at all is somewhat amazing.

Regrettably, "works" and "works well" are not the same thing. Markdown, despite its longevity, has bugs. But here, the software has an advantage. As free and open source (FOSS) software, licensed under a BSD-style license, anyone can fork Markdown and fix those bugs.

Recently, a group of developers set out to fix some of those bugs, creating what they call a "standard" version of Markdown. From a pure code standpoint, the results are great. Yet there was no surplus of gratitude. Instead, the "standard" group found itself at the center of a much larger and very contentious debate, one that's ultimately about who we want in control of the tools we use.

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The smartwatch product category is still just getting off the ground, and right now they aren't the most useful things on the planet. There is a ton of power packed into them, though, and the main problem is essentially limited software. In that regard, how about running a full desktop OS on your wrist?

Corbin Davenport has been torturing his Android Wear-powered Samsung Gear Live by making it run all manner of things it shouldn't ever be asked to run. Thanks to the Android DOS emulator aDosBox, he's even gotten Windows 95 to boot up, which you can see in the above video. Sadly, it's not running perfectly. Thanks to a lack of emulator configuration, Windows 95 keeps running out of memory and apps just crash. The Gear has a whopping 512MB of RAM, but the emulator just doesn't let Windows address it all.

It's not just Windows that Davenport has gotten running on the Gear Live. He also has video of the Android version of Doom (of course) and Minecraft PE. The 1.65 inch screen makes everything pretty unusable, but it's all in good fun. If you want to see more microscopic programs running on a smartwatch, don't forget our attempts with the original Galaxy Gear—we got Candy Crush and a full Android Launcher up and running on these little things.

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Hawaii's Puʻu ʻŌʻō eruption. And you thought Iceland got all the good volcano names. USGS

The Earth seems to have been smoking a lot recently. Volcanoes are currently erupting in Iceland, Hawaii, Indonesia, and Mexico. Others, in the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, erupted recently but seem to have calmed down. And then there was the fatal eruption in Japan. Many of these have threatened homes and forced evacuations. But among their less-endangered spectators, these eruptions may have raised a question: Is there such a thing as a season for volcanic eruptions?

Surprisingly, this may be a possibility. While volcano “seasons” aren't anything like the four we're familiar with, scientists have started to discern intriguing patterns in their activity.

Eruptions caused by a shortened day

The four seasons are caused by the Earth’s axis of rotation tilting towards and away from the Sun. But our planet undergoes another, less well-known change, one that affects it in a more subtle way—perhaps even volcanically.

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Neha Bhatnagar reports from a demonstration in Nairobi, as protests are held in over a hundred cities across the world calling for an end to the trade of ivory and rhino horns.

An internal front view of the vending machine, with the battery, circuitry, and top dial. USPTO

In the late 1800s, we still didn't know a great deal about electricity. One scientist was still attempting to figure out how electric shocks kill things in 1895, and found that when he delivered a 240-milliamp shock to dogs, their hearts were very damaged (for comparison, a taser puts out about 3 milliamps). In 1903, Thomas Edison was trying to prove alternating current was dangerous by electrocuting animals. But before these instances of using electricity for death, one inventor thought people would be interested in using quick jolts to improve health, like the green juice of his day.

"When electricity was in its infancy, the power was believed to have a beneficial effect on health. Why not vend a small measure of electricity by coin operation?" wrote Paul Braithwaite in his book, Arcades and Slot Machines. Braithwaite was describing an existing patented design: a coin-operated vending machine that would deliver an electrical shock to the customer in exchange for money.

The patent for a "coin operated electrical apparatus" was originally filed by Norman W. Russ and granted in England in 1886. Russ followed up with patents for his invention in France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, which granted it on May 15, 1888.

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I needed a bit of food, but do i find this red stuff rewarding? University of Florida

Scott Waddell, at Oxford's Centre for Neural Circuits and Behavior, is interested in Big Ideas like memory and motivation—and not necessarily in thirsty flies. But in trying to understand the former, he has spent a lot of time studying the latter.

Reward systems depend on both obtaining a resource and learning to appreciate it. Drinking water is rewarding to thirsty animals, but only because the act of drinking impacts the nervous system and controls water-seeking behavior. How it manages to do so has been largely unexplored.

In the case of flies, thirst completely rewires behavior. Water-sated flies avoid water; only those that have been deprived for at least six hours gravitate towards it. Waddell's group demonstrated that a specific subset of dopamine-using neurons are required for thirst to induce flies to value water, and that this valuation depends on the flies' sensing of water vapor.

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Stack Exchange

here asks:

I'm trying to determine the technical details of why software produced using programming languages for certain operating systems only work with them.

It is my understanding that binaries are specific to certain processors due to the processor specific machine language they understand and the differing instruction sets between different processors. But where does the operating system specificity come from? I used to assume it was APIs provided by the OS but then I saw this diagram in a book.

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ComputerCOP Supercut
A county sheriff from Limestone, Alabama is sticking by his department's endorsement of ComputerCOP, a shady piece of software given to parents to monitor their kids online. Other law enforcement agencies, it appears, have followed that example.

Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an investigation into software called ComputerCOP which approximately 245 agencies in more than 35 states, plus the US Marshals, have been distributing to parents to use to monitor their children. The software is essentially spyware, and many versions come with a keylogger, which in some cases transmits unencrypted keystrokes to a server.

In addition to ComputerCOP's security issues, the EFF discovered misleading marketing materials that wrongly claimed endorsements from the US Department of the Treasury and the ACLU. “Law enforcement agencies have purchased a poor product, slapped their trusted emblems on it, and passed it on to everyday people. It’s time for those law enforcement agencies to take away ComputerCOP’s badge,” Dave Maass of the EFF wrote in an article that was republished on Ars on Wednesday.

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A Tava sandstone dike standing free of the surrounding rock, which eroded away here. C. Siddoway

Igneous rocks are rebels. Sedimentary rocks follow straight-forward rules—they are deposited in horizontal layers, with the oldest sediments on the bottom. Igneous rocks can do what they want. Molten rock can eat away at other rocks below ground, opening up a cozy space to cool and solidify. It can also come flying—or oozing—out of a volcano, quickly crystallizing on the surface. Or it may squirt through crevices like fractures or boundaries between sedimentary layers, inserting itself as a sheet in any number of orientations. Where these walls of igneous rock cut across rock layers, they are called “dikes.”

Every now and then, when conditions are just right, sediments get to play this game, too. When they’re over-pressurized, water-soaked sands can sometimes get injected into fractures to form “clastic dikes”. Most often, these clastic dikes invade sediments or sedimentary rocks. Only very, very rarely, does sand get to turn the tables on those igneous hooligans, forming dikes of sandstone within igneous rocks.

In Colorado’s Front Range, near Colorado Springs, you can find that strange inversion. Along the Ute Pass Fault, the Tava sandstone forms dikes and similar formations within the billion-year-old Pikes Peak Granite, as well as some even older crystalline rocks to the south. Sheets of sandstone up to six meters thick cut through the rocks, which would confuse the heck out of any young geology students an instructor was mean enough to bring out there.

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The front (left) and back (right) of RocketSkates, motorized chariots for your feet. Andrew Cunningham

Some words just make other words seem cooler. Add "rocket" to just about anything—car, backpack, toast—and suddenly you've made those words way more interesting. Rocket car! Rocket backpack! Rocket toast!

That was my thinking when I decided to try out RocketSkates, an upcoming product from Acton that cleared $550,000 in Kickstarter funding over the summer. While they aren't actually propelled by rockets, the motorized and battery-powered skates will scoot you along at speeds of about 12 miles per hour, and creator Peter Treadway has high hopes that they'll compete with skateboards, bikes, regular skates, and plain old feet as a form of urban transit. We met with Treadway earlier this week to talk about the skates and to take them for a test run.

RocketSkates began as a school project that Treadway began working on while he was getting his master's degree in industrial design. For him, "wearable transportation" was a natural way to combine his "love of cars and love of fashion." During the prototyping phase, he even delayed his own graduation so he could retain his access to the school's facilities.

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New research published by the Natural History Museum has shown that it is possible to culture cells from butterfly wings to produce iridescent colours in the laboratory.

Microsoft sued Samsung in August, alleging that the Korean firm had failed to make payments that were contractually owed. At the time, the documents were sealed, obscuring the value of the payments. Today, those documents were unsealed, revealing the full scale of the suit.

In September 2011, the two companies entered a seven-year cross-licensing agreement for mobile-related patents. The payments for the first year were made without fuss. In August 2013, Samsung told Microsoft that it had assessed the value of the royalties owed for the second year as over $1 billion. Payment of this fee was due in October, but Microsoft says that no payment was received until late November 2013. Redmond's complaint says that Samsung owes more than $6.9 million in interest fees for the late payment (per the terms of the original licensing agreement).

What changed between August and October? In September 2013, Microsoft announced that it was buying Nokia's Devices division. The software giant asserts that Samsung is both claiming that Nokia's devices are not covered by the cross-licensing deal—and hence violating Samsung's own patents—and that the Nokia purchase voids the licensing agreement in its entirety.

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A search run by the iWorm malware against Reddit yielded lists of compromised servers making up the botnet's command and control network. Dr.WEB

The Russian antivirus vendor Dr. Web has reported the spread of a new botnet that exclusively targets Apple computers running Mac OS X. According to a survey of traffic conducted by researchers at Dr. Web, over 17,000 Macs worldwide are part of the Mac.BackDoor.iWorm botnet—and almost a quarter of them are in the US. One of the most curious aspects of the botnet is that it uses a search of Reddit posts to a Minecraft server list subreddit to retrieve IP addresses for its command and control (CnC) network. That subreddit now appears to have been expunged of CnC data, and the account that posted the data appears to be shut down.

The Dr. Web report doesn’t say how Mac.BackDoor.iWorm is being distributed to victims of the malware. But its “dropper” program installs the malware into the Library directory within the affected user’s account home folder, disguised as an Application Support directory for “JavaW." The dropper then generates an OS X .plist file to automatically launch the bot whenever the system is started.

The bot malware itself looks for somewhere in the user’s Library folder to store a configuration file, then connects to Reddit’s search page. It uses an MD5 hash algorithm to encode the current date, and uses the first 8 bytes of that value to search Reddit’s “minecraftserverlist” subreddit’—where most of the legitimate posts are over a year old.

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alex

It was just about a month ago when the Justice Department kicked to the curb the attorneys representing the alleged Silk Road mastermind. The government said there wasn't a National Security Agency "bogeyman" needed to discover the illicit drug site's servers as the defense lawyers alleged.

Instead, the authorities said poor programming by defendant Ross Ulbricht allowed the FBI to easily discover the Icelandic servers because of a leak in the site's login CAPTCHA.

"Ulbricht conjures up a bogeyman – the National Security Agency (“NSA”) – which Ulbricht suspects, without any proof whatsoever, was responsible for locating the Silk Road server, in a manner that he simply assumes somehow violated the Fourth Amendment," Serrin Turner, the assistant US attorney in New York, had written in a September court filing.

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