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VIDEO: Orphan baby elephant rescued from well
Strange X-ray source is the brightest pulsar ever observed
A new observation of the M82 galaxy has turned up a surprise—a previously discovered, incredibly bright object. was pulsing The object, called M82 X-2, is bright enough to be classified as an ultra-luminous X-ray source, or ULX. It sits close to its previously discovered sibling, M82 X-1, near the core of M82. The discovery, which was made by NASA’s NuSTAR (Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, has provided new clues about the nature of that mysterious class of objects.
X-2 turns out to be the brightest pulsar ever discovered—so bright that it challenges current models of how pulsars work.
NuSTAR had initially been pointed toward M82 in the hope of observing a new supernova, and the team of researchers had no idea that they would happen upon this strange behavior in an ULX. To clarify which source was producing the pulsations, the Chandra X-ray Observatory observed the region, successfully separating X-2 from the noise.
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Handful of Virginia police agencies sharing seized phone data
A newly publicized document shows that five local police departments in southeastern Virginia have been secretly and automatically sharing criminal suspects’ telephone metadata and compiling it into a large database for nearly two years.
According to a 2012 memorandum of understanding (MOU) published for the first time Monday by the Center for Investigative Reporting, the police departments from Hampton, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Suffolk all participate in something called the "Hampton Roads Telephone Analysis Sharing Network," or HRTASN.
The Peninsula Narcotics Enforcement Task Force, or PNETF, "will provide administrative and technical assistance to participating agencies in conducting pen register intercepts as described below."
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Judge says EA executives committed “puffery,” not securities fraud
A federal judge has dismissed a proposed securities fraud class action lawsuit connected to Electronic Arts' bungled rollout of the popular Battlefield 4 video game.
EA and several top executives were sued in December and were accused of duping investors with their public statements and concealing issues with the first-person shooter game. The suit claimed executives were painting too rosy of a picture surrounding what ultimately would be Battlefield 4's disastrous debut on various gaming consoles beginning last October, including the next-generation Xbox One.
But US District Judge Susan Illston of San Francisco said their comments about EA and the first-person shooter game were essentially protected corporate speak.
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VIDEO: Protests outside HK leader's house
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Interacting with HTPCs: Adesso Keyboard Options Reviewed
There are many options in the market for users wanting to interact with HTPCs and media streamers. In this short piece, we review the keyboard / trackball / touchpad options from Adesso and look at how they stack up against the Logitech K400 and some of the options from IOGEAR and SIIG that we have reviewed before.
3.12.31: longterm
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Sapphire manufacturer and Apple agree to part ways “amicably”
Today, synthetic sapphire manufacturer GT Advanced Technologies (GTAT) and Apple announced their agreement [PDF] to dissolve their partnership amicably after GTAT filed a surprising bankruptcy claim earlier this month. The proceedings threatened to expose information about Apple's dealings with GTAT, something Apple desperately wanted to hide, as evidenced by court filings from Apple asking that its objection to GTAT's Chapter 11 proceedings be submitted in secret.
Now it seems that GTAT and Apple may be able to keep the terms of their relationship private indefinitely. As The Wall Street Journal reported, “GT Advanced and Apple have agreed to file a revised explanation for GT Advanced’s surprise bankruptcy filing as part of the pact and ultimately erase from the public record the court papers that set out what went wrong in the relationship between the two companies.”
Apple and GTAT had partnered to produce ultra-hard sapphire material, which some rumored would replace Corning Glass as the material for Apple's products' screens. Instead, Apple released its last iPhone 6 and 6 Plus with traditional Corning Glass, reserving sapphire surfaces for camera lenses and TouchID buttons. A few weeks after the most recent iPhone announcements, GTAT filed for bankruptcy in a move that seemed to surprise investors, shareholders, and Apple itself.
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Hands-on with the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, Google’s shot at “premium” flagships
MOUNTAIN VIEW—Today we were invited up to Google Headquarters to get a very brief sneak preview of the Nexus 6 and 9.
While the two devices mark a bit of a departure from Google's past flagships, the strategy of the Nexus line is still the same: the devices were always Google's way of "showing the way forward" for Android OEMs. For this generation, though, the company has moved on from the lower-priced flagships and onto more "premium" devices.
With the higher-end models comes a higher price tag: $649 unlocked for the Nexus 6, and $399 for the Nexus 9. The price of the Nexus 6 has seen the most discussion after the $350 price tag of the Nexus 5, but consider the Nexus 6's closest competitor: the 5.7-inch Note 4 goes for about $840 unlocked.
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VIDEO: The city hoping to be independent state
Windows 10 Technical Preview Gets Its First Update
Microsoft used the Windows Blog today to announce the availability of the first update to the Windows 10 Technical Preview, which was announced just three weeks ago. The new build is 9860, and contains several new features as well as bug fixes.
I have been running Windows 10 since it was released. My initial install was into a Virtual Machine, and after using it as a VM for a while I installed it on my primary PC in order to get a good feel for it. I am still working on my initial thoughts for the new Windows, but, being a technical preview, it has a few bugs that made me switch back to Windows 8.1.
In the blog post, Microsoft lays out the fact that there are bugs and features still missing which will be added later. Some of the interfaces have regressed in style and function as the new interfaces are being finished. While this is generally a normal process for software development, we do not normally get such early access to a pre-release version of Windows, so we are also along for the ride. Windows 8, for example, had a very early developer preview, and then a consumer preview came later which added a lot of additional features and functionality. This round, the features will be added to the current preview for all of the people in the Windows Insider program to get a taste of them.
The first big new feature, which debuted on Windows Phone 8.1, is Action Center. The Windows 10 build is adding this as a notification center, but at the moment is only enabling basic functionality. The quick actions, prominent in Windows Phone, will be coming later. Action Center is now available in the System Tray for easy access. One nice feature is that it will be available to desktop apps as well as Universal Apps. I expect it to also carry the Windows Phone customizations so you can select which apps you want to display in the notification list as well, in the event you have an app that likes to steal the show.
Action Center is not the only feature from Windows Phone to come to Windows 10. Battery Saver is also present in the new build. As with Windows Phone, you can set this to be on which reduces background tasks, or you can have it set to come on automatically when the battery is at a certain percentage. Right now, the latter settings are greyed out.
Yet another Windows Phone feature which helps you keep track of data usage is Data Sense, which is also new to this build. Data Sense keeps track of all wireless network data use, and can keep cellular based connections in check by limiting how much data is available and giving the user a graphical listing of how much data is remaining, as well as which apps are consuming the most packets. Hopefully they add the ability to track wired network traffic as well.
Windows 10 focuses a lot on the keyboard and mouse, so Microsoft has added many new keyboard shortcuts for those that like to keep their hands on their typing device:
- Snapping window: WIN + LEFT or RIGHT (can be used with UP or DOWN to get into quadrants)
- Switch to recent window: ALT + TAB (unchanged) – Hold shows new Task view window view, let go and switches to app.
- Task view: WIN + TAB – New Task view opens up and stays open.
- Create new virtual desktop: WIN + CTRL + D
- Close current virtual desktop: WIN + CTRL + F4
- Switch virtual desktop: WIN + CTRL + LEFT or RIGHT
- Move active app to another monitor: WIN + SHIFT + LEFT or RIGHT
Virtual desktops are also new to Windows 10, and based on user feedback, Microsoft has added an animation to make it easier for a user to know when they are switching destkops. This was one suggestion which was added from over 250,000 pieces of feedback already generated by the preview. Microsoft goes into detail about how the process works and explains why some feedback may take longer to add to the build than others.
Windows 10 build 9860 now offers users earlier access to some of the code. In the PC Settings, you can select which line of Preview Builds you want. Some people will want every update as soon as it is available, whereas others may want to hold off and wait for more of the bugs to be worked out first. Windows 10 is accommodating all of these users in the preview builds by allowing you to choose how fast you get the new code.
Windows 10 is certainly a big departure from Windows 8, and not just in desktop use. Having such early access to the previews, and having Microsoft actively requesting and implementing user feedback is a big change from the Steven Sinofsky (former President of the Windows Division) ways. While the technical preview is generally pretty good, it is not as polished as something like Windows 7 or 8.1, but if you want to check it out, visit preview.windows.com and sign up.
My copy of Windows 10 is updating right now to the new build, and once it is completed I hope to have another post with initial thoughts of the new Windows soon.
Source: Windows Blog
A huge Halo: Master Chief Collection clocks in at 65GB
About a year ago, we had to quickly get used to 50 GB download sizes for console games like PS4 launch title Killzone: Shadow Fall. Game size inflation hasn't exactly stopped since then, as evidenced by word that the upcoming Halo: Master Chief Collection will take up a whopping 65 GB on Xbox One hard drives next month.
Buried in Friday's official "gone gold" announcement was word that the Xbox One's remastered edition of the first four Halo games, which is currently available for pre-loading, would actually be bigger than a standard 50GB Blu-ray disc. Rather than splitting the 65GB across two discs for the retail edition, Microsoft has decided to include 45GB of data in the box and require players to download a 20GB day one "content update" to access "some features and multiplayer content." Players will be able to play the bulk of the single-player content while the 20GB content pack is downloading and installing, Microsoft says.
Why make even retail buyers download so much data? "The game is designed to run as a single, unified product," 343 Industries Franchise Development Director Frank O'Connor explained on gaming forum NeoGAF over the weekend. "Digital is seamless obviously, but we also wanted disc users to have the same experience, without swapping discs. Since the bulk of [the download] is [multiplayer] or MP related, the logic is sound." While it may have been feasible to simply install a single, unified game to the Xbox One hard drive from two discs, O'Connor elaborated that such a solution "simply wasn't practical for this product, this year in this timeline."
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After #GamerGate tweet, Adobe distances itself from Gawker “bullying” [Updated]
On Tuesday, Adobe used its official Twitter account to post a condemnation of Gawker Media over accusations of "bullying." In a confusing move, an Adobe employee tweeted roughly an hour later that the company's original post was "mistaken," but as of press time, the original post in question had yet to be taken down or modified.
(As this back-and-forth involves the latest wave of activity attached to the #GamerGate hashtag, you'll want to study up if you've missed out on the hashtag's rise in recent months.)
On Tuesday morning, a user tweeted at Adobe with #GamerGate hashtags and accusations that Gawker "endorses bullying and hate speech," along with a call for the company to remove its advertising from Gawker's network. The tweet didn't specify where that "endorsement" came from, but another post from that user's Twitter account pointed to tweets made by Valleywag editor Sam Biddle last week, including statements such as "bring back bullying" and "I'm getting a raise because I made gamers cry."
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VIDEO: Obama responds to jealous boyfriend
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Early iPad Air 2 benchmark suggests tri-core CPU, 2GB of RAM
Apple's iPad Air 2 contains a new chip called the A8X, an SoC that's faster than the A7 in the original iPad Air or the iPad Mini 2 and 3 and the A8 in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Apple would only say that the chip's CPU is about 40 percent faster than the A7 and that it has a GPU that's 2.5 times faster.
We haven't gotten our hands on an iPad Air 2 review unit yet, so we haven't been able to test out these claims. A test from Primate Labs' Geekbench Results Browser sheds an interesting light on the subject, though: the result in question shows a three-core processor with 2GB of RAM, double the memory of any previous iOS device. Assuming the scores are accurate, the A8X could outdo the A7 in some tasks by as much as 66 percent.
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Primate Labs' John Poole seems fairly confident in the results' authenticity, telling us that "if [the result is spoofed], it's the best spoof I've ever seen." They do seem suspiciously high to us at this point—Apple's broad percentage claims have generally tracked pretty well with Geekbench scores in the past. If they're accurate, the iPad Air 2 is getting a much bigger generation-to-generation performance boost than the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus did.
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