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Given the recent revelations about mass data slurping by the NSA, we were relieved to hear that a Chinese company has begun offering a whopping 10TB of free hosting to privacy-conscious punters.After Chinese rivals Baidu and Qihoo 360 served up a terabyte of free cloud storage to punters, rival Tencent this week floated a 10TB giveaway, reports TheNextWeb. The data bonanza requires users download an iOS or Android App, which gives them access to a terabyte of storage. As they use more data, Tencent will extend the amount of storage given away up to a whopping 10 terabytes.This compares with...

From time to time various experts come up with predictions regarding the end of Moore’s law, economical and technological viability to double the number of transistors per chip every two years. Some companies believe that economical efficiencies of Moore’s law are going to drastically decrease on 20nm node. But a DARPA expert believes that the law will lose its feasibility in 2020 – 2022, or at 5nm or 7nm nodes.

ORNL’s Discovery Could Lead to Revolution in Industry The ability to control nanoscale imperfections in superconducting wires results in materials with unparalleled and customized performance, according to a new study from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.Applications for superconducting wires, which carry electricity without resistance when cooled to a critical temperature, include underground transmission cables, transformers and large-scale motors and generators. But these applications require wires to operate under different temperature and magnetic field regimes.A team led by ORNL’s Amit Goyal demonstrated that superconducting wires can be tuned to match different operating conditions by introducing small amounts...

Not all silicon boffinry is in mobile... And IBM refuses to give in to Intel ********************************************************* Article from the Brits...************************************************************************ Putting it all together: What does a complete package look like? If single-thread performance is the most important thing for a piece of work, a core or set of cores will step down the threading automagically and run it with fewer processor threads. The Power8 core, said Stuecheli, has twice as much L1 data cache at 64KB compared to its predecessor (L1 instruction cache remains the same). Data buses from L1 to L2 cache on the die are now twice...

Android 4.3 PAC-man nightlies are now available for your flashing pleasure. That and more are covered by Jordan, as he reviews all the important stories from this weekend. Included in this weekend’s news is an article about adding a countdown timer to your Pebble Smartwatch and the beginner’s guide to building your first Android App. Jordan talks about the other videos released this weekend on XDA Developer TV. XDA Developer TV Producer Jayce released a video talking about developers’ greatest opportunities, and later he released a video talking about how non-developers created a successful app. Pull up a chair and...

Samsung has launched its first 3D V-NAND SSD but hasn't yet released any real performance data, bringing its new product's status into question.3D V-NAND, announced on 7 August, stacks layers of NAND vertically to increase the capacity available in a set footprint. It is a way of getting over the progressively shorter working life and slower performance as NAND lithography reduces from 29-20nm-class cells (2X) to 1X (19nm-10nm) and even beyond that of existing 2D or planar NAND cells. A canned statement from ES Jung, exec veep at Samsung Electronics' semiconductor R&D centre, said: "By applying our 3D V-NAND -...

It's Bezos' world, say the Magic Quadrant cultistsThe disciples of Gartner's Magic Quadrant have sallied forth to reveal the latest findings of their uncaring quadrilateral god – and the results show that Amazon is the one true cloud, followed at a distance by enterprise supplier CSC.The magic quadrant is Gartner's way of ranking technologies, and sees the analyst firm plop companies into four cubes, split by an x axis representing "completeness of vision", and a y axis for "ability to execute". Good technology is up and to the right, bad technology is down and to the left. Strange it may...

It all went a bit pear-shaped later... but it DID stop people switching to OS/2Feature If you want to be reminded that you're getting old, ask a youngster what Windows NT is. Chances are, there'll be blank looks all round. Windows What? Is it, like, a codename for a new version?You can't blame them. There hasn't actually been a proper "Windows NT" release since the late 1990s, so for almost anyone under 30 it's an anachronism. I've checked. For anyone old enough to remember the OS wars of 1990 to 1995, Windows 8, 7, Vista, XP are still "NT", no...

If you're a normal Internet user, you probably think you have the right to access anything that's put before the public. Not any more, at least in America, where the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has been invoked to support a user-specific ban on accessing a Website, and in which the use of a proxy to circumvent a block has been ruled illegal.The decision was issued in a spat between Craigslist and screen-scraper 3Taps. As noted in the judgement, 3Taps was sucking down all of Craigslist's classifieds, offering an API to third parties, and created craiggers.com which the judgement says...

Texas Instruments just put a chip through the heart of Intel’s Thunderbolt folly with their new HD3SS2521 DockPort controller. This little $1.85 chip both vastly simplifies the user experience and shines a harsh light on what Intel can’t do with a closed and 75x more expensive solution. If you haven’t been paying attention, DockPort is the sane and open answer to Intel’s still broken and anti-user Light Peak/Thunderbolt interface. Formerly called Lightning Bolt, DockPort was AMD’s answer to the non-solution that Intel tried to spin Thunderbolt as. Several years in Thunderbolt is achieving some of the features promised at release...

The HDBaseT Alliance has introduced HDBaseT 2.0, which through HomePlay brings the power of HDBaseT to the residential market with plug-and-play ability. HDBaseT 2.0 will “make it simpler and more cost-effective for consumers to turn their entire homes into multimedia entertainment centers.” By D. Craig MacCormack, August 13, 2013 HDBaseT is coming soon to a theater near you - a home theater, that is. The HDBaseT Alliance is launching HomePlay through HDBaseT 2.0, making the latest version of HDBaseT available to manufacturers of both consumer electronics and pro A/V. The move comes about two years after the alliance introduced the...

Microsoft’s New Kinect Is Based on Microsoft’s Own Chip – Report ************** Microsoft Corp. has developed its own custom system-on-chip for its new-generation Kinect device. The application processor is a key to unprecedented precision the sensor can provide and will naturally enable a lot of exclusive capabilities that off-the-shelf solutions just do not feature today. The new Kinect sensor is projected to enable Microsoft offer never-before-seen experiences in the living room.The new Xbox One comes with completely redesigned Kinect sensor that features 1920*1080 RGB camera, new active infrared sensor and enhanced voice controls. The sensors of the second-generation Kinect can...

Going the way of the Dodo A company claims it's close to bringing resistive RAM (RRAM), the tech touted to kill off Flash RAM, to the shops. Crossbar claims it has smashed the technical barriers that have stopped RRAM from becoming a commercial reality. RRAM technology promises 20 times the write performance at a fraction of the power consumption and size of the current best-in-class NAND flash modules. Crossbar adds that its technology can retain data for up to 20 years, compared with the standard one to three years with NAND flash. According to the company it has achieved a "simple and scalable"...

Panasonic was showing off one of the most incredible heatsinks on the market, 10µm ‘thick’ carbon sheets with 95% the conductivity of diamond. If you think that is impressive, the sandwiches they make with it were even more interesting.At first the Pyrolitic (Highly Oriented) Graphite Sheet or PGS looks like a bit of dull grey cloth with no more sheen than an average cheap suit. If you pick it up it feels more like a lint-free screen cleaning cloth, quite soft, a bit slippery, but with none of the weight found in a screen cleaning mat. It really weighs nothing...

The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) has ratified revision 3.2 of the SATA specification. The latest specification includes the SATA Express standard which enables the coexistence of SATA and PCIe storage devices, improves power management, caters for more new SATA form factors and contains optimisations for hybrid SSHD drives. The SATA Express specification was first introduced in January 2013 and the industry consortium that is SATA-IO ratified it as part of revision 3.2 of the SATA spec yesterday.Enabling SATA and PCIe storage solutions to coexist will bring significant benefits to users. The SATA-IO group spells out the benefits thus;...

Sandforce adds a working Shield and DVS to controllersLSI is talking about two new technologies in their Sandforce controllers that deal with space and error correction. One is really simple to explain while the other is a whole lot more complex in implementation and description.The complex technology is an error correction scheme that LSI calls Shield. This is a five layer software LDPC (Low Density Parity Check) scheme among other related error correction, detection, and mitigation technologies that they claim can both prevent many errors and extend the life of low write lifetime flash quite a bit. Shield fits between...

On September 4, South Korean mobile phone maker Samsung Electronics should make official the next device in its popular Galaxy Note series (namely the Galaxy Note III), and some more info on what the handset will pack in terms of hardware specs has emerged. At least two flavors of the device will arrive on the market, featuring model numbers SM-N900 and SM-N9005, with different processors inside, and each targeted at various markets out there. According to a recent article on SamMobile, both Galaxy Note III iterations will arrive on the market with a 5.68-inch Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels)...

After a steep – 33% – decline in unit shipments in the second calendar quarter of the year, Acer Group now wants to shrink its Microsoft Windows-based offerings and expand product lines that utilize operating systems from Google, such as Android or Chrome. The company seems to be serious about the plan as it wants to grow its “non-Windows” business as quick as possible. "We are trying to grow our non-Windows business as soon as possible. Android is very popular in smartphones and dominant in tablets. I also see a new market there for Chromebooks," said Jim Wang, the president...

The MinnowBoard community website reports that Intel is now shipping its MinnowBoard bare-bones PC. It's a bit heftier in price than the Raspberry Pi, costing $199 USD, and can be purchased at Digi-Key, Farnell, Mouser Electronics and Newark. Additional outlets will be added soon. Intel's MinnowBoard sports an Atom E640 SoC clocked at 1 GHz, integrated GMA 600 graphics, 1 GB of DDR2 RAM, and 4 MB of SPI flash for system firmware memory. The I/O portion contains one microSD card slot, one SATA 2 (3 Gb/s) port, two USB host ports, one microUSB-B port, a serial (UART 0)...

Edit One of the biggest retailers in the world is rumored to be making an Android gaming console.Website GameInformer reports that Amazon is readying an Android console for release by year's end. The console will be bundled with its own controller, and Amazon will be making use of the Android apps already available on its Appstore.On Twitter, Kotaku columnist Superannuation isn't a hundred percent sold on this rumor, but writes that Amazon has apparently been hiring game talent to build up the platform's game library. For instance, Superannuation points out that the executive producer for Gears of War 3 and...