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While the investing community this morning is focused squarely on the very disappointing iPhone 5 relaunch and the lack of a cemented China Mobile deal, which has resulted in a $20 billion loss in market cap in early trading for the second most widely held hedge fund stock, a thing that we find more curious in the aftermath of the latest revalations of an implicit, if not explicitly voluntary, joint venture between Apple and the US government and specifically its NSA uberspies, is just how much of Apple's product suite is derived thanks to developments by the US government....

Samsung unveiled its highly anticipated digital wristwatch Wednesday, beating Apple to what could become this year's must-have holiday gift item. So-called smartwatches, which can perform tasks such as displaying email and Twitter messages on a device worn around the wrist, have been around for several years but have failed so far to inspire great interest among ordinary consumers. But with smartphone behemoths Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc. joining the fray—and Google pushing its Google Glass gadget—experts see a chance of wearable computers breaking into the mainstream. That is, if consumers can get used to talking to their watch, secret...

How to fight 21st century financial crime with 19th century tools A US House of Representatives committee is investigating whether federal securities regulators are using last century's tools to review corporations' books. House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa penned a stiff missive to Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White asking for an explanation of why the regulator has been so slow to embrace the use of eXtensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL. White has been wanting more funds to hire additional staff but apparently is less interested in moving to XBRL. Issa pointed out that interactive data in financial...

Wearable technology seems to be a hot topic these days. Most of the major technology players have some form of wearable device in the works. Samsung is calling its product line, Galaxy Gear, which they say will encourage “a smarter life.” The hope is that Internet technology will move from being something that is some-what independent of us to something that is literally woven into our daily existence. From your shoes to your shirt, stove to your toilet, the future may be found in connecting every part of our lives. This is sometimes referred to as the “Internet of Things.”...

Seagate First to Utilize Next-Gen SMR Tech for Hard DrivesSeagate Technology, a leading maker of hard disk drives and storage solutions, has announced it has shipped over one million drives using shingled magnetic recording (SMR). SMR is the next generation in storage technology and is critical for continued improvement in areal density to support global growth in cloud and mobile usage. The SMR generation of storage technology is expected to power gains of up to 25%. “With nearly 7 billion inhabitants on earth we are creating an astounding 2.7 Zettabytes of data a year and as such are rapidly approaching...

Military planes as well AMD just said that the huge Airbus A380 uses AMD embedded chips, as well as some military planes. Arun Iyengar, General Manager of Embedded Solutions Group, mentioned that AMD has been used in submarines, rescue vehicles as well as some other markets that you don’t really expect it to be. This is a market that likes to buy these chips for a number of years and expect support for least 7 years for these parts to be available. AMD embedded is in the heads up display market and it’s interesting to mention that the next generation...

Hierofalcon A57, up to 8 cores As expected, AMD’s first ARM based product won’t go after phones and tablets. Arun Iyengar, General Manager of Embedded Solutions Group, AMD, has just announced the company’s first ARM product codenamed Hierofalcon.It is based on up to eight ARM 64-bit A57 cores and it is a 28nm chip. It is mainly targeting the network and communications market rather than anything else.The product comes with 10Gb network support, ECC support, PCI gen 3 and ARM trusted zone. It comes in second half of 2014 and since there is still plenty of growth potential in the...

Deep analytical talent: Where are they now? Analyzing large data sets—so called big data—will become a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus as long as the right policies and enablers are in place. Research by MGI and McKinsey's Business Technology Office examines the state of digital data and documents the significant value that can potentially be unlocked. However, companies and policy makers must tackle significant hurdles to fully capture big data's potential - including a shortage of skilled analysts and managers.

Intel Corp. on Wednesday for the first time demonstrated a Rack Scale Architecture-based system with high-speed Intel Silicon Photonics components including a new MXC connector and ClearCurve optical fiber developed in collaboration with Corning, enabling data transfers speeds up to 1.6Tb/s at distances up to 300 meters for greater rack density. Maximum datacenter efficiency requires innovation at the silicon, system and rack level. Intel's RSA design helps industry partners to re-architect datacenters for modularity of components (storage, CPU, memory, network) at the rack level. It provides the ability to provision or logically compose resources based on application specific workload requirements....

There are literally hundreds of Linux desktop distributions. Here's how to find one that's right for you. On a regular basis I use five different Linux different distributions. Over the decades, I've used pretty every much every major Linux distribution out there... and I haven't even touched more than 10% of all available Linux distributions. If I, who've made something of a career of tracking Linux, can't keep up with all the distros how can you? Honestly, you can't. No one can. So how can you find the right Linux for you? This handy, dandy guide will help. But before...

Samsung Begins Mass Production of DDR4 MemorySamsung is taking the cue from ‘Field of Dreams’: If you build it, they will come. Samsung is beginning to ramp up its production of DDR4 for enterprise servers without clear cut demand for the DDR4 standard. A successor to the DDR3 (Double Data Rate 3), DDR4 memories are expected to offer higher performance, reliability and lower power consumption than its predecessor. Comments

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...