CarPlay, Apple’s in-car iOS integration product, has shown up in flashy demos at various trade shows this year, but it will take a while before we see it on the roads, according to Lucas Mearian at Computerworld. Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Honda are all believed to be pushing back plans to include CarPlay in some of their new models until 2015.

Apple’s influence on the automotive industry may have been unintentional at first, but the arrival of the iPod created an infotainment paradigm shift. iPod owners wanted their MP3 players to connect to their cars. Less than a decade later and even the cheapest rental car now comes with a plethora of USB ports and wireless options for piping one’s tunes through the car’s speakers. CarPlay is an evolution of this approach, moving the display from the mobile device to the car’s center stack, as well as integrating Siri into the infotainment system.

An Apple-created solution, (potentially) free of the kludginess that often comes with third-party systems may help sell cars to the 42 percent of American smartphone users who have iOS, but equally might do little to attract their Android-using counterparts, who outnumber them 5 to 4 domestically and by quite a considerable margin worldwide.

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CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});

Space Quest wasn’t the first computer game my dad bought for us to play. As a child of the mid-1980s with an IBM PC, I had a whole rapidly exploding industry of games spread out before me, and the first game he brought home from the store (the same store where I'd someday work!) was Oo-topos, the third of Polarware’s Comprehend series of illustrated text adventures. Space Quest came a bit later, after I was already a pro at thinking my way through convoluted parser-based puzzles.

But even if it wasn’t the first one, Space Quest was probably the most important game my dad brought home from the store, because Space Quest was my introduction to Sierra On-line. And Sierra was responsible for some of the most amazing experiences available to gamers in the '80s and '90s. When I think back on my kid years, the memories of growing up are intertwined with memories of Space Quest and Quest for Glory and, yes, Leisure Suit Larry.

I even remember the smell of the weird yellow invisible ink markers that Sierra packaged with their game hintbooks—oh yes, in those long-ago days, there was no World Wide Web to turn to for game hints. If you got stuck, you called the Sierra hint line (which, if memory serves, was a 900 number), or you went back to the local Babbage's and dropped $10 on an official Sierra hintbook. The answers were all printed in invisible ink, and you scribbled with their provided highlighter-like marker over the books' pages to reveal the answers. Later Sierra games used special blue ink and a red tinted gel filter strip to hide the answers, similar to the "tech stats" on the back of Generation 1 Transformers boxes.

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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.

solidsnake asks:

I'm a beginner Web developer (one year of experience). A couple of weeks after graduating, I got offered a job to build a web application for a company whose owner is not much of a tech guy. He recruited me to avoid theft of his idea, the high cost of development charged by a service company, and to have someone young he can trust onboard to maintain the project for the long run (I came to these conclusions by myself long after being hired).

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Nassau County of New York is forgiving thousands of speeding tickets issued this summer from malfunctioning speed cameras, totaling about $2.4 million in fines.

The Long Island county executive, Edward Mangano, said cameras from Arizona-based American Traffic Solutions near six schools were unreliable and issued tickets even when school was not in session. Traffic speeds are reduced dramatically during school hours.

"I don't have a high confidence level that the cameras were operating at statutory levels," Mangano told Newsday Friday. "So we are declaring amnesty with all tickets issued this summer."

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Scarecrow Video

SEATTLE—On a sunny August weeknight, Matt Lynch, a clerk at longtime Seattle rental store Scarecrow Video, grabbed a cup of ice from the shop’s relatively new coffee counter. Cutely named VHS-presso, the counter was one of the shop’s many efforts in recent years to spur interest, attract more renters, and get people to walk into a video store once again.

There’s also the shop’s screening room, opened just over a year ago to host cult and niche movie nights by way of a giant screen, a smattering of speakers, and some comfy chairs. Lynch, among the shop floor’s elder statesmen at 12 years of experience, pulled one of those chairs out to sit and chew on ice while marveling at the room’s walls. The shelves are full of classic VHS tapes. The store prides itself on its vast VHS collection, totaling over 15,000 tapes at this point. But neither that fact, nor the shop’s recent additions, resulted in more rentals or sales as of late.

Lynch looked at Ars’ digital recorder and commented on “the angle” that most magazines and blogs have run with when talking about video rental shops like Scarecrow Video: “’This [industry] is dead, these people are struggling to save it.’” He bit down on ice to punctuate that expectation. “That’s not what I want to see here.”

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This BlackBerry keyboard clone has a celebrity in legal trouble. Typo Products

In a court order on Thursday, a Northern California District Court judge ruled that BlackBerry can pursue a contempt of court charge against Typo, a company co-founded by American Idol host Ryan Seacrest and CEO Laurence Hallier, which sells a small physical keyboard that attaches to an iPhone.

BlackBerry initially sued Typo in January, claiming that Typo's keyboards look almost exactly like its own. Indeed, Seacrest told CNN in an interview that the Typo “came to fruition” because he wanted to put what he liked about the BlackBerry into an iPhone.

In March, the judge agreed with BlackBerry and granted the embattled cell phone and software maker a preliminary injunction that banned Typo from selling its $99 keyboard. But according to the judge's order on Thursday, BlackBerry alleged that Typo has been violating that injunction by providing replacement keyboards under its warranty program, by selling its keyboards to foreign retailers, and by cutting a deal with SMI Investments after the judge ruled in favor of an injunction but before the injunction went into effect. This time the judge again sided with BlackBerry, giving the company permission to gather evidence showing that Typo acted in contempt of court.

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Brook Dain

Earlier this month, a Canadian jetliner spotted a drone flying at 4,000 feet approximately 10 miles east of Los Angeles International Airport.

According to the Los Angeles Times, which reported the incident Thursday, a pilot asked air traffic controllers if the drone seen on Aug. 4 was a police drone.

It wasn't the only recent drone sighing in L.A. On Aug. 14, Los Angeles Police Department employees reported seeing a drone hovering near the 10th floor of the northwest side of the police headquarters in downtown Los Angeles. According to the Times, a few people took pictures before the drone moved on to hovering above City Hall, across the street.

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Flickr user Tranjilla

In 1972, long before eBay or Amazon, students from Stanford University in California and MIT in Massachusetts conducted the first ever e-commerce transaction. Using the "Arpa-net" account at their artificial intelligence lab, the Stanford students sold their counterparts a small amount of marijuana. Ever since, the 'Net has turned over a steady but small trade in illicit narcotics. But last year approximately 20 per cent of UK drug users scored online. The majority of them went to one place: the darknet markets.

You can't access darknet markets using a normal browser. They sit on an encrypted part of internet called "Tor Hidden Services," where URLs are a string of meaningless numbers and letters that end in .onion, and are accessed using a special browser called "Tor". Tor's clever traffic encryption system makes it very difficult for the police to know where these sites—and the people who use them—are located. It's a natural place for an uncensored drugs marketplace, as it is for whistleblower websites and political dissidents, which also use the same techniques to keep their visitors hidden.

The most infamous of these darknet markets was called the Silk Road. In October 2013, following a lengthy investigation, the Silk Road was closed down (the trial of 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, who the FBI allege ran the site, is ongoing—Ulbricht denies all charges). But as soon as it was knocked offline, copycat sites were launched by anonymous operators to fill the gap. In November 2013 there were a small handful of these marketplaces: there are now around 30. Pandora, Outlaw Market, 1776 Market Place—and most of them are doing a decent trade. Between January and April 2014, "Silk Road 2.0"—set up within a month of the original being busted—processed well over 100,000 sales. But the most shocking thing about these sites is not how many there are, but how they are changing the drugs industry. They work exceptionally well.

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Entertainment Software Association

The Entertainment Software Association, best known for its video game rating system, issued its annual "sales, demographic, and usage data" report on Thursday, chock full of statistics about console, PC, and mobile gaming. The numbers are all worth poring over, but this year's report highlights a particular demographic explosion: adult women, whose gaming ranks now more than double the long-sought-after demographic of boys under the age of 18.

According to the ESA's measure of 2013 sales, women ages 18 and over now constitute 36 percent of all measured gamers, compared to boys under the age of 18, who represent 17 percent of the total population. This measure shows a further increase from last year's count of 31 percent to 19 percent (and that 2013 measure only counted boys 17 and younger, meaning the total boost may be even bigger this year).

While males still hold the total gamer-population lead at 52 percent, that is a drop from last year's count of 55 percent, and the survey's count of "frequent game purchasers" found that men and women split that category neatly in half. The report also notes a giant boost in women gamers over the age of 50, a group that grew 32 percent in 2013.

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Habey’s main focus in the PC market is towards industrial computers, with Ganesh having reviewed the BIS-6590 and BIS-6922 fanless systems last year. Industrial oriented components by their nature require sufficient design for 24/7 operation, sometimes in niche environments. To that extent Habey has released the MITX-6771, a Bay Trail based thin mini-ITX motherboard equipped with the Celeron J1900 SoC for the main purpose of providing an drop-in upgrade path for Intel DN2800MT users in the embedded sector. This means that the connectivity/IO of this new motherboard is designed to match the DN2800MT, with Habey adding a couple of extra features.

Habey MITX-6771 left, Intel DN2800MT right

Using the 10W J1900 (quad core, 2.42 GHz) and a sufficient heatsink allows Habey to continue its fanless range, but due to the thin mini-ITX standard, motherboard design starts to get creative. The motherboard supports two DDR3L SODIMM modules for up to 8 GB of DRAM, and storage comes via an mSATA slot and a SATA 3 Gbps port. The mini-PCIe slot supports SIM card adaptors (such as this one suggested by Habey) to be used with the onboard SIM reader, with a further PCIe 2.0 x1 slot for non-thin mini-ITX environments. Network connectivity is either via the SIM card or the Realtek NIC.

The board has VGA and HDMI video outputs on the rear IO, with an LVDS header next to the CPU heatsink. The four USB 2.0 ports on the rear are combined with a USB 2.0 header and a USB 3.0 header. There is also an LPT header, two COM headers and audio is provided by a Realtek ALC662. OEM options include ALC892 audio, an additional SATA port or a second gigabit Ethernet port (in exchange for two of the rear USB ports).

The main aim for this sort of product is digital signage, industrial automation, medical, connected appliances and point-of-sale type systems, although Habey is keen to point out that media streaming is also a focus. Despite the limited one-year warranty, Habey is offering a Long Life Cycle Support package, although we are currently enquiring as to what this entails.

Users might note the lack of an ATX power connector on board, namely because power is either derived from the DC-IN jack on the rear IO or a 2-pin ATX connector just behind the DC-In. Inside the box is a SATA to two-pin ATX cable.

Habey retails some of their products on Newegg rather than going through them direct, and the MITX-6771 comes in at $150. This is near double what the consumer motherboards cost, although there are no consumer motherboards with SIM card (and thus 3G/4G) functionality or are a direct drop-in for the DN2800MT, rear IO and all.

Source: Habey

Gallery: Habey Releases MITX-6771, J1900 Thin Mini-ITX with Long Life Cycle Support

Today Apple has started a replacement program for certain iPhone 5 devices experiencing significantly reduced battery life. The company is stating that the affected devices were sold between the months of September 2012 and January 2013. Users with devices purchased within that timeframe who are experiencing issues are advised to check their serial number with Apple's new support page to see if they are eligible for a free battery replacement. Apple is also offering refunds to users with affected devices who paid for a battery replacement prior to the service program being launched.

The replacement process for affected users will begin on August 22 in the United States and China, and on August 29 in the rest of the world. Apple recommends that users backup their iPhone to iTunes or iCloud and then wipe all user data prior to having their battery serviced. More information, as well as the service to check your device's serial number, can be found in the source link below.

Jacqui Cheng

If you purchased the iPhone 5 early in its life and your battery seems to need charging more often than usual, pay attention: Apple has just announced an iPhone 5 battery replacement program for phones that "may suddenly experience shorter battery life or need to be charged more frequently." The affected phones were all sold in the first few months of the iPhone 5's life, between September of 2012 and January of 2013.

Apple's program page, linked above, will tell you if your phone is eligible based on its serial number, which can be found in iOS' Settings app under the "About" subheading. Affected users will need to take their phone to an Apple service provider, an Apple Retail Store, or make arrangements with Apple's phone support technicians. Before taking your phone in for repair, Apple recommends that you back your data up using iCloud or iTunes, turn off the Find My iPhone service, and reset the phone to its factory default settings.

The program launches today in the US and China, and it will be available in other countries on August 29. It will be available for two years after your purchase date or until March 1 of 2015, "whichever provides longer coverage."

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Arturo de Albornoz

HBO could pocket up to $600 million more a year if the network figures out how to put its content online, according to a report from Barclays Capital released Thursday. The analysis lays out a couple of different ways that HBO could sell its programming online without slighting its cable-provider partners.

The report's author, Kannan Venkateshwar, lays out two options. In the first, HBO would sell subscriptions to "windowed" content that would be available six months to a year after it first aired, but at $11 per month versus the $15 cable price. The other option would be to sell digital subscriptions that give immediate access to its shows, but charge an even higher price for the privilege—about $18.

Venkateshwar estimates that the lower-priced package would cannibalize regular subscribers a bit, but between 4.4 and 6.6 million homes would be interested in the $11 per month option. He pegs the $18 per month customers as a smaller base, between 300,000 and 800,000 homes. If HBO offered both these options together, Venkateshwar estimates that the total take would be around $600 million annually. For comparison, HBO's earnings for 2013 were $1.7 billion.

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

The San Francisco 49ers' heralded Wi-Fi network served its first NFL crowd in a preseason game on Sunday, and the team has now released statistics showing that it was able to serve lots of data to lots of fans, just as intended.

"We offloaded 2.13 terabytes during the event," 49ers VP of Technology Dan Williams told Mobile Sports Report. The newly built Levi's Stadium has 68,500 seats and more than a third of attendees used the Wi-Fi network simultaneously.

"We peaked at 24,775 (roughly 38 percent of attendance) concurrent connections with an average of 16,862 (roughly 25 percent of attendance)," Williams said.

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AMD sent us word that tomorrow they will be hosting a Livecast celebrating 30 years of graphics and gaming innovation. Thirty years is a long time, and certainly we have a lot of readers that weren't even around when AMD had its beginnings. Except we're not really talking about the foundation of AMD; they had their start in 1969. It appears this is more a celebration of their graphics division, formerly ATI, which was founded in… August, 1985.

AMD is apparently looking at a year-long celebration of the company formerly known as ATI, Radeon graphics, and gaming. While they're being a bit coy about the exact contents of the Livecast, we do know that there will be three game developers participating along with a live overclocking event. If we're lucky, maybe AMD even has a secret product announcement, but if so they haven't provided any details. And while we can now look forward to a year of celebrating AMD graphics and most likely a final end-of-the-year party come next August, why not start out with a brief look at where AMD/ATI started and where they are now?

Source: Wikimedia Evan-Amos

I'm old enough that I may have been an owner of one of ATI's first products, as I began my addiction career as a technology enthusiast way back in the hoary days of the Commodore 64. While the C64 initially started shipping a few years earlier, Commodore was one of ATI's first customers and they were largely responsible for an infusion of money that kept ATI going in the early days.

By 1987, ATI began moving into the world of PC graphics with their "Wonder" brand of chips and cards, starting with 8-bit PC/XT-based board supporting monochrome or 4-color CGA. Over the next several years ATI would move to EGA (640x350 and provided an astounding 16 colors) and VGA (16-bit ISA and 256 colors). If you wanted a state-of-the-art video card like the ATI VGA Wonder in 1988, you were looking at $500 for the 256K model or $700 for the 512K edition. But all of this is really old stuff; where things start to become interesting is in the early 90s with the launch and growing popularity of Windows 3.0.

Source: Wikimedia Misterzeropage

ATI's Mach 8 was their first true graphics processor from the company. It was able to offload 2D graphics functions from the CPU and render them independently, and at the time it was one of the few video cards that could do this. Sporting 512K-1MB of memory, it was still an ISA card (or it was available in MCA if you happened to own an IBM PS/2).

Two years later the Mach 32 came out, the first 32-bit capable chip with support for ISA, EISA, MCA, VLB, and PCI slots. Mach 32 shipped with either 1MB or 2MB DRAM/VRAM and added high-color (15-bit/16-bit) and later True Color (the 24-bit color that we're still mostly using today) to the mix, along with a 64-bit memory interface. And two years after came the Mach 64, which brought support for up to 8MB of DRAM, VRAM, or the new SGRAM. Later variants of the Mach 64 also started including 3D capabilities (and were rebranded as Rage, see below), and we're still not even in the "modern" era of graphics chips yet!

Rage Fury MAXX

Next in line was the Rage series of graphics chips, and this was the first line of graphics chips built with 3D acceleration as one of the key features. We could talk about competing products from 3dfx, NVIDIA, Virge, S3, etc. here, but let's just stick with ATI. The Rage line appropriately began with the 3D Rage I in 1996, and it was mostly an enhancement of the Mach64 design with added on 3D support. The 3D Rage II was another Mach64 derived design, with up to twice the performance of the 3D Rage. The Rage II also found its way into some Macintosh systems, and while it was initially a PCI part, the Rage IIc later added AGP support.

That part was followed by the Rage Pro, which is when graphics chips first started handling geometry processing (circa 1998 with DirectX 6.0 if you're keeping track), and you could get the Pro cards with up to 16MB of memory. There were also low-cost variations of the Rage Pro in the Rage LT, LT Pro, and XL models, and the Rage XL may hold the distinction of being one of the longest-used graphics chips in history, as I know even in 2005 or thereabouts there were many servers still shipping with that chip on the motherboard providing graphics output. In 1998 ATI released the Rage 128 with AGP 2X support (the enhanced Rage 128 Pro added AGP 4X support among other things a year later), and up to 32MB RAM. The Rage 128 Ultra even supported 64MB in its top configuration, but that wasn't the crowning achievement of the Rage series. No, the biggest achievement for Rage was with the Rage Fury MAXX, ATI's first GPU to support alternate frame rendering to provide up to twice the performance.

Radeon 9700 Pro

And last but not least we finally enter the modern era of ATI/AMD video cards with the Radeon line. Things start to get pretty dense in terms of releases at this point, so we'll mostly gloss over things and just hit the highlights. The first iteration Radeon brought support for DirectX 7 features, the biggest being hardware support for transform and lighting calculations – basically a way of offloading additional geometry calculations. The second generation Radeon chips (sold under the Radeon 8000 and lower number 9000 models) added DirectX 8 support, the first appearance of programmable pixel and vertex shaders in GPUs.

Perhaps the best of the Radeon breed goes to the R300 line, with the Radeon 9600/9700/9800 series cards delivering DirectX 9.0 support and, more importantly, holding onto a clear performance lead over their chief competitor NVIDIA for nearly two solid years! It's a bit crazy to realize that we're now into our tenth (or eleventh, depending on how you want to count) generation of Radeon GPUs, and while the overall performance crown is often hotly debated, one thing is clear: games and graphics hardware wouldn't be where it is today without the input of AMD's graphics division!

That's a great way to finish things off, and tomorrow I suspect AMD will have much more to say on the subject of the changing landscape of computer graphics over the past 30 years. It's been a wild ride, and when I think back to the early days of computer games and then look at modern titles, it's pretty amazing. It's also interesting to note that people often complain about spending $200 or $300 on a reasonably high performance GPU, when the reality is that the top performing video cards have often cost several hundred dollars – I remember buying an early 1MB True Color card for $200 back in the day, and that was nowhere near the top of the line offering. The amount of compute performance we can now buy for under $500 is awesome, and I can only imagine what the advances of another 30 years will bring us. So, congratulations to AMD on 30 years of graphics innovation, and here's to 30 more years!

Proposed launch facility site. Federal Aviation Administration

More details emerged this week about the deal that lured California-based SpaceX into choosing southern Texas as the site of its commercial space launch facility. According to a short write-up by the Brownsville Herald, SpaceX representatives have an agreement in hand that would exempt the facility, located in Cameron County, from paying county taxes for ten years.

Additionally, the Herald says that SpaceX will also accept $13 million in state funds from Texas’ Spaceport Development Trust Fund (along with $2.3 million in additional monies from the Texas Enterprise Fund), which will help offset the $85 million that SpaceX expects to spend developing the site.

The final details of the agreement won’t be released to the public until SpaceX formally signs off, which Cameron County officials expect will be some time next week.

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PNAS

Materials scientists may have many clever tricks up their sleeves, but with a several-billion-year head start, evolution has already beaten them to the creation of some amazing materials. One of the most astonishing natural systems is the skin of cephalopods such as squid, octopus, and cuttlefish. These animals can sense their background and control tiny structures that can radically change their skin color in a matter of seconds, allowing amazing feats of camouflage.

Now, an international consortium of researchers has decided that if you can't beat nature, you can at least copy it. The researchers have developed a flexible structure that can sense ambient conditions and adjust its color to match them. At the moment, it only works in black and white, but it's a start.

The color-shifting structures in the skin of cephalopods, termed chromatophores, rely on three layers to rapidly alter coloration. The top is a pigmented structure with muscles that allow it to expand and contract, altering the amount of light of different wavelengths that get absorbed. Below that is a reflective layer, which can also be actively altered by the nervous system. Below that is a passive white pigment that reflects incidental light. By varying the behavior of the two overlying layers, the animals are able to radically alter their visual appearance.

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final gather / flickr

In June, the US Supreme Court decided the Alice v. CLS Bank case, tweaking patent law in a way that suggests a lot more patents should be thrown out as overly abstract.

Samsung hoped that case would allow it to knock out two patents that Apple had successfully used against it in the long-running patent war between the two smartphone leaders. Last month, Samsung lawyers filed papers arguing that Apple's patents on universal search and "swipe-to-unlock" are exactly the type of basic ideas that the US Supreme Court wants to see rejected.

US District Judge Lucy Koh has now ruled that Samsung won't get a last-minute Alice reprieve. In a short five-page order (PDF), Koh found that Samsung didn't raise any defenses from the area of patent law that Alice relates to, Section 101, and it can't do so now.

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401(k) 2012

Comcast’s proposed $45.2-billion acquisition of Time Warner Cable has been criticized by angry customers, consumer advocacy groups, and even some members of Congress.

But Comcast has plenty of support, too, much of it from politicians and organizations that benefit from its political and charitable donations. With the deadline to submit initial comments on the merger to the Federal Communications Commission set to expire Monday, a number of elected officials and charities have urged the FCC to think favorably of Comcast during its merger review.

Charities supporting the acquisition include the Greater Washington Urban League, the Urban League of Broward County in Florida, the Boys and Girls Club of Rockford, Illinois, and the United Way of Tucson in Arizona. "Comcast has dedicated itself to advancing organizations like ours through financial support and partnerships," the Greater Washington Urban League wrote.

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Almost two weeks ago in Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown. The incident kicked off protests in the racially divided town, and Wilson has been in hiding since the shooting.

Four days ago, a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to support Wilson was launched, and as of Friday afternoon it had brought 5,901 donations totaling $234,990. However, money wasn’t the only thing people were giving to the crowdfunding campaign: the campaign page quickly found itself drowning in hateful, racist commentary.

"We are NOT gonna let that racist bastard Sharpton and his kind railroad you into prison," said a $50 donor under the name Mark Milazzo. "Wake up White America!"

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