While we don't usually cover SD cards, SanDisk's announcement of 512GB Extreme PRO SD card caught my eye today. There are currently only a couple of 256GB SD cards available and most OEMs have not been able to go above 128GB, so the Extreme PRO is the highest capacity SD card in the world, which really speaks for SanDisk's NAND and packaging expertise. 

SanDisk Extreme PRO SDXC UHS-I Memory Card Specifications Capacities 128GB, 256GB & 512GB Read Speed Up to 95MB/s Write Speed Up to 90MB/s Warranty Lifetime Limited

The Extreme PRO comes in SDXC format and utilizes UHS-I interface, which is good for up to 104MB/s. As you can see in the table above, the Extreme PRO comes very close to saturating the interface and it carries UHS Speed Class 3 rating, meaning that it is suitable for capturing 4K video. The largest market for the new Extreme PRO SD cards is obviously video professionals because as we transition to 4K video, the need for storage increases substantially, which in turn opens market for larger SD cards.

While SanDisk didn't release any details of the internals, it's pretty safe to assume that the 512GB Extreme PRO consists of 32 x 128Gbit (16GB) dies. The photo above is from SanDisk's 2014 Investor Day presentation where the company claimed that it has the technology for a 32-die SDXC card and with the Extreme PRO the technology has made it into the retail. Since SanDisk/Toshiba doesn't have a 256Gbit NAND die (nobody has one in mass production yet), the only way to achieve 512GB is through a 32-die stack. SanDisk hasn't specified whether the NAND is MLC or TLC, but given that it is a high-end product I'm guessing it is MLC based. 

EDIT: As some of you mentioned in the comments, it seems to be two 16-die stacks instead of a single 32-die stack. SD cards definitely have the room for two die stacks and the photo also shows two 16-die stacks instead of a single 32-die stack. Either way it is impressive since nothing else comes close to the capacity SanDisk offers.

All capacities are available now and the MSRP for the 512GB model is $800, which is certainly high since 512GB SSDs retail for close to $200. However, the Extreme PRO is the only SD card that is available in such a high capacity, so I would say the premium is justified. Stacking more dies on top of each other will always have a negative impact on yield as the wires have to be longer and there are more wires to connect, so the room for errors increases and thus the manufacturing cost goes up as well. 

The new Android version of Hangouts is very green. Ron Amadeo

Google Hangouts, Google's IM client and the replacement for Google Talk, has gotten a massive set of updates, which are slowly trickling out to users. The biggest news of the bunch is Google Voice integration, which lets Google Voice users send and receive text and phone calls through the Hangouts app. There's also a new Android app with a very green redesign and the ability to make VoIP calls from the app.

The Android app is significantly easier to understand than the old one. Contacts are in one tab, conversations are in another, and the last tab hosts the VoIP dialer. There's a normal navigation drawer that lets you jump to the settings and other lesser-used parts of the app. There's also a new Hangouts Dialer app in the Play Store, which gives users an easy way to add a direct link to the VoIP dialer to their home screen. The bad news is that there are now two dialers apps for Android.

The updated app is very green, but it doesn't yet follow Google's Material Design guidelines. This means that while it just got a redesign, it will have to be redesigned again sometime this year to match Android L.

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Red and orange bones represent either the original Egyptian find or the new skeleton. Yellow bones come from other animals. Only the blue and green bones had to be inferred based on other species. Model by Tyler Keillor, Lauren Conroy, and Erin Fitzgerald, Ibrahim et al., Science/AAAS

The predatory dinosaur Spinosaurus aegyptiacus isn't famous, but it might have been. Discovered in Egypt in 1912, it had all the ingredients to make for a childhood favorite: enormous size, sharp teeth, and a huge, enigmatic sail running down its back. But the study of Spinosaurus suffered a serious interruption when the only bones of the creature happened to be underneath the payload of a British bomber targeting Munich.

Now, roughly 70 years later, Spinosaurus is back thanks to some additional samples discovered in Morocco. These, combined with images of the original skeleton and a handful of scattered bones found in the intervening years, appear to indicate the creature was a rarity for dinosaurs. It was adapted to an aquatic lifestyle and probably used its jaws and claws to snare fish.

The new skeletal remains include parts of the head, the spinal column, limbs, and extensive remains of the tail. It was found in a fossil bed called Kem Kem, which preserves the remains of a freshwater river system including various fish and sharks. The authors created a 3-D scan of the individual bones and, by filling in the gaps with bones scaled up or down from other samples or close relatives, created a complete model of the animal's skeleton. In total, the animal appears to have been 15 meters (nearly 50 feet) long, which would make it larger than any known Tyrannosaurus skeleton.

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Saile Angilau. YouTube Citing security concerns, a Utah federal judge is refusing to release courthouse surveillance footage that captured a US marshal killing a defendant during a gang-related trial.

The tape's existence, first reported by The Salt Lake Tribune Wednesday, came to public light five months after federal authorities who watched the tape cleared the marshal of wrong doing. The unidentified marshal shot defendant Saile Angilau four times as Angilau rushed a witness testifying against him during his racketeering jury trial.

The decision to keep the video under wraps by Chief Judge Ted Stewart comes amid a growing chorus of people across the nation calling for more video footage of police activity.In the wake of the August 9 shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, politicians and the public want to outfit police forces with pager-sized surveillance cams on officers' vests that record everything the officers are seeing.

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Qualcomm's first 64-bit chip lineup is complete. Qualcomm

Most of Qualcomm's recent chip announcements have revolved around 64-bit designs, including the midrange Snapdragon 410, the higher-end Snapdragon 610 and 615, and the top-tier Snapdragon 808 and 810. Not all smartphones need 64-bit support or the new ARMv8 instruction set, though, and for those handsets Qualcomm will soon begin offering the new entry-level Snapdragon 210. This SoC is intended for low-end phones like the Moto E and those being released under the Android One banner.

The old Snapdragon 200 used either dual- or quad-core CPUs based on the ARM Cortex A7 architecture, Adreno 203 or 302 GPUs, and 3G modems. The 210 leaves the CPU architecture alone (you can get "up to" a 1.1GHz quad-core part, though dual-core parts will probably be offered as well), but it upgrades the GPU to an Adreno 304 and gives you up to 150Mbps LTE with carrier aggregation. Qualcomm's "RF360" frontend will help the SoC support more LTE bands, reducing the number of models a company would have to build to support multiple markets.

The GPU will likely be a little bit faster than the outgoing Adreno 302, but its main draw is hardware encoding and decoding for 1080p video. The final upgrade over the Snapdragon 200 is support for 533MHz LPDDR3 memory, which should provide a marginal speed increase over the 333MHz LPDDR2 from the older chips. LPDDR2 is still supported by the 210, though, so it will be up to your phone maker to use the faster memory. 2.4GHz 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.1, NFC, support for 720p displays and 8MP cameras, and optional Quick Charge 2.0 support round out the spec list.

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Simon Forsyth

BitTorrent, Inc. CEO Eric Klinker doesn't want Internet service providers to charge Web services for prioritized access to consumers—"fast lanes" as described in the debate over proposed network neutrality regulations.

Instead, Klinker is (satirically) suggesting the opposite: that ISPs should pay companies and users to remain in a "slow lane."

With fast lanes, money would flow "from your favorite websites to the ISPs, the very same companies you already pay to deliver Internet service to your home," he wrote in a blog post scheduled to go live at this link at 1:30pm ET. "In this model, the ISPs get paid twice, both to provide their service and regulate heavy-use companies, like Netflix."

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Shoot again. And again. And again. I hope you brought a lot of bullets.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});It's been a little while since we've reported on a new pinball at Ars; almost exactly a year ago we covered the release of Star Trek. Now Stern Pinball, one of the last bastions of physical pinball manufacturing, has announced its latest title, themed after AMC's The Walking Dead, which is of course based on the highly popular black and white comic created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore.

The Emmy-award-winning show has a large following—people can't seem to get enough of zombies these days—and Stern hasn't disappointed in dishing out walkers and gore for the fans. If you're a pinhead who's been waiting for a new horror-themed pin for what feels like ages for your personal game room, your local arcade, or barcade (should you be so lucky—if you're not sure, check Pinball Map), then you're going to be in heaven (or hell as the case may be). It's been a long time since so much blood was scattered on a playfield. We approve!

The Walking Dead pin is designed by John Borg and programmed by Lyman Sheats Jr. (with an assist from Stern programmers Tanio Klyce and Mike Kyzivat). Lyman and Borg are the same team that brought you games like Tron Legacy and Metallica, both excellent, so hope is high for lightning to strike a third time on this one. Lyman is known for deep rule sets with a lot of approaches to strategy, and he typically incorporates well-balanced scoring suitable for tournament play. We'd expect to see this game show up in PAPA tournaments shortly after release.

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Swatch's Paparazzi.

6 more images in gallery

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One of the perceived problems with today's crop of smartwatches is that in addition to being overpriced, battery hungry, and of limited utility, none of them are standalone devices. Today's smartwatch is merely a smartphone accessory, a proxy for the larger gadget's notifications and alerts.

But there was a time when the smartwatch was an independent, standalone device. As is so often the case in the history of computing, these early, pioneering smartwatches were powered by Microsoft technology.

CN.dart.call("xrailTop", {sz:"300x250", kws:["top"], collapse: true});In the early 2000s, Microsoft envisaged a range of smart devices, from watches to coffee makers, all imbued with Smart Personal Object Technology (SPOT)—a kind of Internet of Things without using the actual Internet. Instead of the current mix of 3G/4G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth that today's smartwatches use to communicate with the world, SPOT devices used good old-fashioned FM radio.

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Google

A few months ago at Google I/O, Google demoed Android apps running on Chrome OS. Today, Google is making that demo a reality by launching "App Runtime for Chrome (Beta)."

Google is not opening the floodgates and loading a full Play Store with every Chromebook; instead, it is manually bringing over certain apps. "Over the coming months, we’ll be working with a select group of Android developers to add more of your favorite apps so you’ll have a more seamless experience across your Android phone and Chromebook," the company said in its announcement.

For now, the feature is launching with four compatible apps: Duolingo, Evernote, Sight Words, and Vine. One app not mentioned was Flipboard, which was demoed at I/O.

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A few months ago Mozilla released its WebIDE project to make the browser a complete environment not just for consuming Web apps but for developing and deploying them as well. At the time, though, WebIDE had a gap: Web applications generally have to run in a range of browsers, and WebIDE only worked with Firefox and Firefox OS.

With a new add-on released today, WebIDE is going cross platform. The catchily named "Firefox Developer Tool Adaptor" lets Firefox connect to Chrome (both on the desktop and on Android) and Safari (on iOS) remotely, enabling developers to use the Firefox development environment to debug apps running on those other browsers.

Specifically, Web devs will be able to use Firefox's JavaScript debugger, DOM inspector, and CSS editor with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Each browser has its own remote debugging protocol, and the add-on translates from those "foreign" protocols back to Firefox's own built-in remote debugging protocol.

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Nintendo's years-long slow drip of information regarding the next Super Smash Bros. game seems to be coming to a close. With the 3DS version of the game set to hit Japanese stores on September 14 (and the US on October 3), a couple of intrepid Twitch streamers have apparently managed to get their hands on early copies, and these gamers have been broadcasting gameplay from modified 3DS systems on Twitch all morning (so far without earning takedown requests from Nintendo).

In addition to the 38 characters already officially confirmed by Nintendo, the streams have already unlocked playable versions of:

• Duck Hunt (Dog and duck fighting together)
• Bowser Jr. (with alternate outfits for the Koopalings!)
• Wario
• Ganondorf
• Ness
• Falco
• Mr. Game and Watch
• Dr. Mario
• Jigglypuff
• Dark Pit

The specific lineup of new characters we've seen goes a long way toward confirming the leaked roster screenshots that showed up last month. R.O.B. also appeared in that earlier leak, but it has yet to appear in the streams. It's also entirely possible that still-unknown characters will be shown off as the streams continue (there's certainly space on the already crowded character selection screen).

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The grand accomplishments of our genomic age—which are reliant to a large extent on unheralded, bleary-eyed graduate students staring at seemingly infinite bytes of data on their screens for hours on end—might never have come to pass were it not for the copious amounts of coffee fueling said students. So it's only fitting that some of them have now analyzed the genome of the coffee plant itself.

An international team of researchers spanning both coffee growing and coffee consuming regions of the globe sequenced Coffea canephora, one of the parent strains of the heavily cultivated C. arabica. They found that the plant has extra copies of genes called N-methyltransferases (NMTs), which encode a class of enzymes that mediates the late steps in caffeine biosynthesis.

Coffee has a total of 23 NMT genes, which arose primarily via a series of gene duplication events. The collection of duplicated genes is distinct from the ones found in tea and cacao, two other caffeine-producing plants that are more closely related to each other. That suggests that these two lineages evolved the ability to give humans a jolt separately.

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Netflix is hiring "Chaos Engineers" to launch assaults on its network and verify that Netflix's systems can recover from failure without degrading customer experience.

In a blog post last night titled "Introducing Chaos Engineering," Netflix "Chaos Commander" Bruce Wong wrote, "We are constantly testing our ability to survive 'once in a blue moon' failures. In a sign of our commitment to this very philosophy, we want to double down on chaos aka failure-injection. We strive to mirror the failure modes that are possible in our production environment and simulate these under controlled circumstances. Our engineers are expected to write services that can withstand failures and gracefully degrade whenever necessary. By continuing to run these simulations, we are able to evaluate and improve such vulnerabilities in our ecosystem."

Toward that end, Wong wrote that Netflix is "hiring additional Chaos Engineers." The jobs don't appear to be on Netflix's job site yet, but a short description was posted on Twitter by Netflix's Dan Woods last week:

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At Computex earlier this year, Intel had talked about 4K panels becoming more affordable (monitors around $400). The 4K All-in-Ones using those panels were on display at IDF. We grabbed a few photographs and they are linked in the gallery below.

Gallery: IDF 2014: 4K AIOs

The PLS panels have great viewing angles. Importantly, they also support full 60 Hz refresh rates even at the maximum resolution (UHD). Consumers worried about the usage of TN panels and lower refresh rates to hit the advertised price point have nothing to fear. Since Intel is pushing this effort, it makes sense that they first concentrate on the All-in-One (AIO) market which helps them sell their CPUs. The AIO models should go on sale soon, and Intel expects that Samsung will push these 23.6" panels into monitors very soon. The AIO models that were on display were high-end configurations with i7 processors and expected to come in around $1000, but cheaper models with less powerful CPUs are also on the way. [ Update: The systems on display are highly customizable Thin Mini-ITX-based AIOs. The 4K AIOs are anticipated to begin at prices of $999, but the systems on display (as configured with a 4th Gen Intel Core i7-4770S and Intel SSDs) were closer to the $1500 mark. In particular, the system in the gallery above is a Mitac M980, which will be available as a whitebox system to distributors and other OEMs]

If you’re one of the millions who started taking one of those Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offered by the likes of Stanford and MIT, only to abandon it after hours of watching video-taped lectures, reading static course materials, and marginally helpful online discussions, you’ve gotten a taste of what’s being inflicted on the current generation of students. That’s a bug that Versal, a company launched by Gregor Freund—the former CEO and chief technology officer of security software company Check Point Software—is trying to fix.

While MOOCs and other e-learning platforms have made it cheaper to reach large numbers of students with course content, they haven’t necessarily made it any better than sitting (or falling asleep in) a lecture hall. Versal aims to make online learning more interactive in the face of this. The company has launched an open JavaScript-based interface and a Web-based developer tool to allow programmers and teachers to create their own interactive elements for courses to more fully engage students.

Versal is “targeted at a broader audience than MOOCs,” Freud told Ars. “Existing systems are far too limiting. MOOCs are fine for people who go Stanford and have perfect recall.”

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Smartphone sizes, from tiny to ludicrous. Click to embiggen! At 100 percent, the devices here should be pretty close to actual size on most monitors. Aurich Lawson

It’s nearing the end of the year, and that means new iPhones are afoot. Apple has stuck to a September or October release date for its latest smartphones since 2011, and the most noteworthy thing about this year’s Apple harvest is that the iPhones are bigger—like, almost Galaxy Note-style bigger, at the top end.

From 2007 to late 2012, iPhones all had a single display size: 3.5 inches. The exterior and interior were revised a number of times, but the screen size remained constant for a plethora of reasons (not the least of which was to ensure app compatibility and consistency across the line). Android handset manufacturers, on the other hand, latched onto display size as a product differentiator, both from Apple and from each other. This resulted in a cornucopia of varying screen sizes in the Android world, up to and including the comically huge Samsung Galaxy Mega, which isn’t so much a phone as it is a stunted tablet that you hold up to your face and talk into.

And it’s not just Android devices that are aiming big, either. Devices like the Lumia 1520 allow Windows Phone fans to rip the stitching in their pockets along with the Android crowd. Even with the majority of Windows Phone devices being manufactured by Nokia, screen size is still an easy thing to use to make different models stand out.

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Today, the USB-IF brought me in to see the long-awaited USB Type C cables. We've written about this before, but for those that aren't familiar with this new USB spec, the USB Type C cable and USB 3.1 spec are designed with the future in mind. As a result, there are a lot of new features to talk about. We'll start with the USB 3.1 spec before we get into the Type C connector.

With USB 3.1, we see a few key improvements. Peak throughput goes to 10 Gbps from 5 Gbps, which translates to a peak of 1.25 GB/sec. In a demo of an early controller with two SSDs attached to the system I saw peak throughput of 833 MB/sec. As a side note, I also saw a demo of wireless USB connectivity from smartphone to laptop and laptop to smartphone, which was definitely pretty cool. Getting back to the USB 3.1 spec, USB Power Delivery 2.0 (PD) makes it possible for USB to supply up to 100 watts, and coexists with the BC 1.2 spec that is used in USB power adapters to charge phones so a single port would be able to provide power for both systems. In addition, USB PD 2.0 allows for power to go both ways without changing the direction of the cable, so a laptop would be able to send and receive power from the same port. Finally, USB Type-C extensions mean that it's possible to do all kinds of interesting applications over USB ports, such as sending audio and video data. It's even possible for a USB Type C port to send PCI-E data through the connection for use cases such as a two in one convertible tablet.

This opens up the possibility for a dock scenario where a single cable to the monitor can charge a laptop and also mirror the laptop's display onto the external monitor, and the external monitor would also be able to serve as a USB hub for a keyboard, mouse, headsets, flash drives, and other USB peripherals. While the laptop charging aspect and integrated USB hub in display wasn't demonstrated in the prototype I saw, everything else was fully working as shown in the photo above.

I was also able to get some photos of the cable and receptacle. Unfortunately it took flash to really show the detail in the connector but it definitely will be a great standard for all kinds of applications. While I'm sure that there will be differences in the final product, the reversible plug works just like expected and could be quickly inserted from behind the back. The USB-IF believes that this standard will show up in products shipping in 2015. It does seem that the connector is a bit less compact than microUSB, but the benefits outweigh this increase in size.

Flickr user Charles Strebor

To what degree do genes determine how intelligent we are? It's a question with a lot of social implications, given the potential for people to get lumped into categories based on their inheritance—or for them to make a self-fulfilling prophecy out of it.

But so far, at least, science hasn't been able to find much of a direct link between genetic variants and intelligence. When scientists have focused on specific genes involved in the nervous system's growth and function, they've found a few hints of associations, but those haven't held up in large population studies. Large population studies that scanned the entire genome have also come up empty.

Now, we may have a good idea why. A massive and thorough genetic study has looked into the question and, despite all the effort involved, has only come up with three genes, none of which have a very large effect on cognitive abilities.

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For those that do will not settle for anything less than the best, Corsair has their gigantic AX1500i power supply. This is their new 1500W flagship behemoth, and it's also one of the first 80 Plus Titanium certified units worldwide. It has a massive list of features, including Corsair Link compatibility. However, could it possibly be worth the absurd $449.99 retail price? Read on to find out.

At WWDC this year, Apple announced iCloud Drive to compete with the cloud storage offerings of other companies. Previous to this, iCloud did not offer the file and folder sync capabilities of other cloud storage competitors, and Apple is hoping iCloud Drive will be the answer. It is a very competitive market right now though, with some pretty major price cuts by the major players this year including Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google.

Apple has now announced the full pricing structure for iCloud Drive which is more competitive than before. Just a few months ago, Apple only offered up to 50 GB in iCloud, and charged $100 USD per year for it. Google Drive at the time offered 100 GB for only $24 USD per year, so clearly some price adjustments needed to be done.

Apple iCloud Comparison   iCloud iCloud Drive Free Storage 5 GB 5 GB Lowest Tier (USD/year) 10 GB / $20 20 GB / $12 Second Tier (USD/year) 20 GB / $40 200 GB / $48 Third Tier (USD/year) 50 GB / $100 500 GB / $120 Fourth Tier (USD/year) N/A 1 TB / $240 Lowest Cost/GB $2 / GB $0.24 / GB

With the new prices, Apple is offering quite a bit of choice as far as storage tiers, and with a 20 GB option for only $0.99 per month, and Apple now offers tiers up to 1 TB which is in line with many competitors. Unfortunately they have not touched the free tier, which stays at 5 GB.

These new prices are much better per gigabyte than previously offered, with the 200 GB tier exactly the same price per gigabyte as both OneDrive and Google Drive, however none of the other tiers really come close. For $0.99/month, you can get 20 GB on iCloud Drive, but for only $2/month you can get 100 GB on both OneDrive and Google Drive. The higher tiers get even more out of sync, with Apple asking $240 for 1 TB of storage, but Microsoft offers 1 TB of storage and a full version of Office for $70 per year, or 5 x 1 TB and 5 installs of Office for $100 per year. Google comes in at 1 TB for $120 per year, and DropBox just lowered their pricing with 1 TB per year for $100.

It would seem Apple is hoping that users of its products will be willing to pay more for iCloud Drive to keep the experience all within the Apple ecosystem, and it might not be the wrong move. They have shown in the past that their customers are willing to spend more for the Apple products than competitors can accomplish, and Apple has traditionally not competed much on price so this may work out well for them, but it must be said, all of the consumer cloud offerings do support the Mac already, and several are available and popular on iOS as well, so it may be difficult to come to the game this late with a higher price than the competition.