UK has no idea if it’s selling spyware to evil regimes
The UK government says it isn't exercising any control over the sale of surveillance software nor stopping it from finding its way into the hands of repressive regimes.
At the start of the month, Lord David Alton of Liverpool called on the Coalition to ban the export of espionage software and equipment, and questioned previous sales of UK software to Iran and Yemen.
However, Foreign Office minister Lord David Howell of Guildford has said that there is "no evidence of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom being used for internal repression in the Middle East and North Africa".
In terms of spying software, Lord Howell said, in a written reply, that the government doesn't usually keep an eye on where it was going because it could be used for legitimate purposes. Read more...
Hero dev writes the CODE that COULD SAVE THE WORLD
An asteroid collision with Earth could now be less likely thanks to a software developer who created a computer program capable of tracking NEOs (Near Earth Objects).
Mark Trueblood of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory spotted that such a coding opportunity would be perfect for a student's summer project.
He enlisted Beloit College student, Morgan Rehnberg, who developed the program – dubbed PhAst – last summer alongside Trueblood, Robert Crawford of the Rincon Ranch Observatory and Larry Lebofsky of the Planetary Science Institute.
"An asteroid impact with the Earth can really ruin your day: just consider the dinosaurs," reads a release from the NOAO. Read more...
Dell PowerEdge servers get AMD’s new 16-core chips
Dell on Tuesday said it has upgraded its PowerEdge servers with the just-released 16-core Opteron processors from AMD.
The company has upgraded the four-socket PowerEdge M915 blade server, which will be able to include up to 64 Opteron 6200 chip cores. The new servers will be faster than the M915 with the older 12-core Opteron 6100 chips.
AMD last week announced the availability of its first Opteron 6200 server processors, which carry the most cores available on x86 chips today. The chips, code-named Interlagos, are 25 percent to 30 percent faster than their 12-core predecessors. The new chips are based on the new Bulldozer processor architecture, which is also more power efficient. Read more...
Turkey day deal: Verizon to offer Samsung Illusion for free
The Samsung Illusion smartphone, made from recycled materials, will be offered for free by Verizon Wireless with a two-year contract from Thursday through Monday in an online promotion.
Aside from the five-day promotion, the Illusion will cost $79.99 starting tomorrow online, Verizon said. The device won't be sold in Verizon stores until January, however.
Verizon also announced a slew of other Thanksgiving holiday promotions subject to two-year agreements, including the red Droid Incredible 2 smartphone, which will be in Verizon stores on Friday for free after a $50 rebate. The 4G LTE Revolution by LG will also be offered for $50 online Thursday through Monday.
As for tablets, Verizon is making the 4G LTE-ready Motorola Xoom available from Thursday through Monday for $200 with a two-year agreement and a data plan starting at $30 a month (for 2GB of data). That price brings the Xoom with LTE, normally $500, in line with the new Wi-Fi-only Amazon Kindle Fire at $199. Read more...
HP to put Xeon chips in high-end Integrity servers
Hewlett-Pa
ckard has updated the road map for its high-end Integrity servers to include systems that can accommodate both Xeon- and Itanium-based servers side by side, the company announced Tuesday.
It's a significant move for HP, and one that could help it to deflect the onslaught of criticism against Itanium from server rival Oracle, which insists that Itanium is a platform with no future.
HP's announcement doesn't extend the road map for Itanium, but it might give HP customers the confidence to stick with Integrity servers because they will soon have a choice of processors and therefore some investment protection, said Gartner analyst George Weiss. Read more...
Microsoft slashes upgrade times for Windows 8
Microsoft claimed yesterday that users will be able to complete a Windows 8 upgrade much faster, in some cases in one-tenth the time it took similar-configured PCs to upgrade to Windows 7.
The time savings quickly accumulate the more files are on the to-be-upgraded PC, said Christa St. Pierre, a member of Microsoft's Setup and Deployment team, in a long entry on the company's "Building Windows 8" blog.
According to St. Pierre, a clean install -- where all files and data are wiped from the drive prior to installing Windows 8 -- should wrap up in 21 minutes, 35% less time than the 32 minutes Microsoft said it takes Windows 7 to do the same.
For what Microsoft called a "medium upgrade," one on a PC with 213,000 files and 77 applications, Windows 8 is three times faster, finishing the upgrade in just 42 minutes, versus Windows 7's two hours and 11 minutes. Read more...
The Daily’s Gadget Guide a good effort for shoppers
The Daily’s Gadget Guide was created with technophiles in mind, but even though the iPad app is probably The Daily’s best effort to date, I still found its content fell short of must-have reading material.
Gadget Guide does offer quite a few products — more than 200, in fact — and the price points are varied, which means, yes, in theory, there’s something for everyone. The Daily also hired British illustrator Matthew Lyons to give the app a retro-yet-futuristic spin to the category splash pages. Intermixed with the product pages — and quite a few advertisements — are brief essays by blog Paleofuture’s Matt Novak ruminating on tech that never was. These snippets give Gadget Guide a twist, but I don’t know how much users will really get out of their incorporation. Read more...
Facebook lowers six degrees of separation to four
Are you a Facebook user? According to a study by the social network and the University of Milan, the old six degrees of separation theory doesn't always apply to you anymore. Only three people instead of five separate you and anyone else with a Facebook account, bringing six degrees down to four. And if the person on the other end of the connection is from the same country, the number of people in the chain is reduced by one more. Until now, the theory has withstood the test of time since it was published in 1967 by psychologist Stanley Milgram. Read more...
Electronic contact lens brings humans one step closer to having a HUD
If you have ever seen Terminator 2, you are familiar with the cool cutscenes showing the audience what Arnold is seeing realtime as he scans the area. We don’t know about you, but in our secret geek place that resides in our brains, we have wanted to be able to look upon the world with that kind of information streaming in. It would have been very handy to be able to sight in a kid in the opposing fort during a snowball fight! There are reports today that we’re one step closer to having a live HUD in the form of an electronic contact that recently was tested on rabbits, projecting a pixel on their eyeballs. Read more...
Microsoft offers free bacon outside Amazon and Google HQ
Working for Microsoft or Google is a dream for a lot of people. They pay well, they offer great on site services so you never want to/have to leave, and you’re probably going to end up working on some very cool projects.
The problem is, both companies are vying for employees from the same talent pool. That can make it difficult to find enough new people when trying to expand. Microsoft is dealing with that very problem right now as it attempts to double the size of its Kinect engineering team in Seattle.
To solve the problem, Microsoft has hired an advertising agency by the name of Wexley School for Girls. Their objective is to entice talent from other high profile companies in the Seattle area to jump ship and go work on Kinect. The tactics being used to get the attention of said talent are rather sneaky. Read more...