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Submission + - IBM Plus Apple: It's All About The Apps

Submitted by snydeq
snydeq writes: For IBM, much of the success of the joint IBM-Apple partnership that turned the industry on its ear yesterday hinges on the applications, writes InfoWorld's Eric Knorr. But you won't find the fruit of this labor in the App Store. 'The IBM MobileFirst initiative for iOS is very much in line with the IBM tradition of leading with professional services and providing custom application development. Plus, several recent IBM acquisitions are essential to MobileFirst, including Cloudant, Fiberlink, SoftLayer, and Worklight.' According to IBM Enterprise Mobile VP Phil Buckellew, IBM is initially targeting banking, insurance, telco, retail, government, travel, transportation, and health care, and has assembled its own catalog of "starter apps" that should accelerate development by providing 60 to 80 percent of the capabilities and can be customized to particular use cases. 'For each one of these apps,' says Buckellew, 'we have a litmus test: It has to address an industry pain point, and it needs to be powered by analytics.' But the biggest challenge, Knorr writes, could be the 'huge knot to unravel in controlling data access' when you put enterprise applications and analytics on a host of mobile devices.

Submission + - DARPA initiates reusable, aircraft-like spaceship development (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Looking to build a hypersonic transport would be the heart of less expensive satellite launch system, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) said it awarded three contracts to being work on the spacecraft. DARPA said Boeing (working with Blue Origin) Masten Space Systems (working with XCOR Aerospace) and Northrop Grumman Corporation (working with Virgin Galactic) would begin phase 1 work on the agency’s Experimental Spaceplane (XS-1) program that aims to design, build, and demonstrate a reusable Mach 10 aircraft capable of carrying and deploying an upper stage that can place 3,000- 5,000 lb. satellite into low earth orbit (LEO) at a target cost of less than $5M per launch.

Submission + - AMD FirePro W9100 16GB Workstation GPU Put To The Test

Submitted by Dputiger
Dputiger writes: It has been almost two years since AMD launched the FirePro W9000 and kicked off a heated battle in the workstation GPU wars with NVIDIA. AMD recently released the powerful FirePro W9100, however, a new card based on the same Hawaii-class GPU as the desktop R9 290X, but aimed at the professional workstation market. The W9100’s GPU features 2,816 stream processors, and the card boasts 320GB/s of memory bandwidth, and six mini-DisplayPorts, all of which support DP1.2 and 4K output. The W9100 carries more RAM than any other AMD GPU as well, a whopping 16GB of GDDR5 on a single card. Even NVIDIA's top-end Quadro K6000 tops out at 12GB, which means AMD sits in a class by itself in this area. In terms of performance, this review shows that the FirePro W9100 doesn’t always outshine its competition, but its price/performance ratio keep it firmly in the running. But if AMD continues to improve its product mix and overall software support, it should close the gap even more in the pro GPU market in the next 18-24 months.

Submission + - The quest to restore your faith in humanity (technologizer.com)

Submitted by harrymcc
harrymcc writes: In the era of clickbait, journalists like to make absurd promises in headlines in hopes of helping them go viral--and one of the most powerful, widely-made, silliest claims is that a listicle, photo, or video will "restore your faith in humanity." Over at Technologizer, I've written a history of the meme (which has been booming for the past two years, although I found a precursor in a razor ad from 1930).

Submission + - Want To Ensure Your Personal Android Data Is Truly Wiped? Turn On Encryption (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: We've been around the block enough times to know that outside of shredding a storage medium, all data is recoverable. It's just matter of time, money, and effort. However, it was still sobering to find out exactly how much data security firm Avast was able to recover from Android devices it purchased from eBay, which included everything from naked selfies to even a completed loan application. Does this mean we shouldn't ever sell the old handset? Luckily, the answer is no. Avast's self-serving study was to promote its Anti-Theft app available on Google Play. The free app comes with a wipe feature that overwrites all files, thereby making them invisible to casual recovery methods. That's one approach. There's another solution that's incredibly easy and doesn't require downloading and installing anything. Before you sell your Android phone on eBay, Craigslist, or wherever, enable encryption and wait for it to encrypt the on board storage. After that, perform a wipe and reset as normal, which will obliterate the encryption key and ensure the data on your device can't be read. This may not work on certain devices, which will ask you to decrypt data before wiping but most should follow this convention just fine.

Submission + - Chinese State Media Declares iPhone A Threat To National Security (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: When NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden came forth last year with US government spying secrets, it didn't take long to realize that some of the information revealed could bring on serious repercussions — not just for the US government, but also for US-based companies. The latest to feel the hit? None other than Apple, and in a region the company has been working hard to increase market share: China. China, via state media, has today declared that Apple's iPhone is a threat to national security — all because of its thorough tracking capabilities. It has the ability to keep track of user locations, and to the country, this could potentially reveal "state secrets" somehow. It's being noted that the iPhone will continue to track the user to some extent even if the overall feature is disabled. China's iPhone ousting comes hot on the heels of Russia's industry and trade deeming AMD and Intel processors to be untrustworthy. The nation will instead be building its own ARM-based "Baikal" processor.

Submission + - Ode To Sound Blaster: Are Discrete Audio Cards Still Worth The Investment? (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Back in the day (which is a scientific measurement for anyone who used to walk to school during snowstorms, uphill, both ways), integrated audio solutions had trouble earning respect. Many enthusiasts considered a sound card an essential piece to the PC building puzzle. It's been 25 years since the first Sound Blaster card was introduced, a pretty remarkable feat considering the diminished reliance on discrete audio in PCs, in general. These days, the Sound Blaster ZxR is Creative's flagship audio solution for PC power users. It boasts a signal-to-noise (SNR) of 124dB that Creative claims is 89.1 times better than your motherboard's integrated audio solution. It also features a built-in headphone amplifier, beamforming microphone, a multi-core Sound Core3D audio processor, and various proprietary audio technologies. While gaming there is no significant performance impact or benefit when going from onboard audio to the Sound Blaster ZxR. However, the Sound Blaster ZxR produced higher-quality in-game sound effects and it also produces noticeably superior audio in music and movies, provided your speakers can keep up.

Submission + - DARPA social media research stirs a murky, controversial pot (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: DARPA’s two-year old program to better understand and perhaps ultimately influence social media has begun to bear fruit but some of that harvest is raising a stink. DARPA said when rolling out its Social Media in Strategic Communication (SMISC) program was to develop a social networks science that will develop automated and semiautomated operator support tools and techniques for the systematic and methodical use of social media at data scale and in a timely fashion. But in building that science the agency says it has funded myriad social media/Twitter research (including a study that looked at Lady Gaga’s Twitter following—a model of social media popularity, DARPA stated) as well as a look into Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Kickstarter.

Submission + - Gamestop's Brilliant Idea: Require Preorders To Unlock Custom Game Content (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the great universal truths of modern gaming is that preorders suck. The term refers to the practice of ordering a title at some point before it actually ships in order to get access to a variety of minor outfit tweaks, a few starting weapons, or boosts to early game play. Today, some publishers take this practice to truly ridiculous levels; the recent game Watch Dogs has no fewer than nine pre-order options. GameStop, perhaps sensing that there's pressure building against the model, wants to turn the dial up to 11 — and create preorder-locked, GameStop-specific content. According to financial analyst Colin Sebastian, "[GameStop] indicates that software publishers are more enthusiastic about partnering with it. For example, by offering exclusive content on each major game release and longer term, future models may include GameStop offering exclusive gameplay." GameStop is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment. The company has captured a greater share of the Xbox One and PS4 market than it held at this point in the console cycle last time around and it's clearly looking to increase the attractiveness of its own business. That's fine but this kind of arbitrary lopping off of content to boost sales at particular shops simply isn't going to sit well with most gamers.

Submission + - Scammers want to wreck your business, vacation travel (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: es I suppose it is what it is, but sadly you can’t travel on business or vacation and let your electronic guard down. The Federal Trade Commission recently published a few scams it was warning travelers to be on the lookout for including: The late night front desk call...

Submission + - Watch Dogs Graphics And Game Play: PC vs. Xbox One With, Surprising Results (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer, at least for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic and taxing PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, HotHardware decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. What was found may surprise you. Depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One (and possibly the PS4 though that wasn't compared) might be the better option. There's no question that the PC can look better, even before you factor in the mods that have been released to date, but unless you've spent $300 or more on a fairly recent GPU, you're not going to be able to run the game at sufficiently high detail to benefit from the enhanced image quality and resolution. If you have a Radeon HD 7950 / R9 280 or an NVIDIA card with greater than 4GB of RAM or a GeForce GTX 780 / 780 Ti, you can happily watch Watch Dogs make hash out of the Xbox One — but statistically, only a minority of gamers have this sort of high-end hardware.

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