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Submission + - No, Google Isn't Going To Kill Its Nexus Devices (readwrite.com)

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: Yes, Google is still planning Android Silver, an expensive and expansive plan to sell high-end phones made by Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony to its specifications in carrier stores. But it is not going to kill off its Nexus line, as has been reported for months. Who says? Dave Burke, Google's head of Android engineering: 'People have been commenting about Nexus because there is something else and they think that means the end of Nexus. That is the totally wrong conclusion to make.'

Submission + - Before Beats: A Walk Through Apple's Digital Music History, 1977 to 2014 (readwrite.com)

Submitted by Dan Rowinski
Dan Rowinski writes: "By 1986, however, the Apple II had evolved into the 16-bit Apple IIgs (the “gs" stands for “graphics and sound”), a precociously audio-savvy machine featuring a wavetable music synthesizer—a first for personal computing at the time. The Apple IIgs commanded a loyal following all the way through 1992, when the Macintosh line took the Apple II’s baton."

Submission + - The Most Feasible Way to Colonize Space May Be to Print Humans on Other Planets

Submitted by Jason Koebler
Jason Koebler writes: Adam Steltzner, the lead engineer on the NASA JPL's Curiosity rover mission, believes that to send humans to distant planets, we may need to do one of two things: look for ways to game space-time—traveling through wormholes and whatnot—or rethink the fundamental idea of "ourselves."
"Our best bet for space exploration could be printing humans, organically, on another planet," said Steltzner.

Submission + - SpaceX to unveil manned Dragon Capsule. (universetoday.com)

Submitted by camperdave
camperdave writes: SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is set to unveil the Dragon V2 at a media event from Hawthorne, California, tonight at 7 pm. Pacific. The ‘Dragon V2’ is an upgraded, man rated version of the unmanned spaceship that has made several successful cargo trips to the International Space Station. The new craft will carry a mix of cargo and up to a seven crewmembers to the ISS. According to Musk, this is "Actual flight design hardware of crew Dragon, not a mockup,"

Following the space shuttle’s forced retirement in 2011, US astronauts have been totally dependent on the Russian Soyuz capsules for ferry rides to orbit and back. The crisis in Ukraine, which has resulted in some US economic sanctions imposed against Russia, also has the potential to threaten US access to the ISS as the Russian government considers reciprocal sanctions of its own.

“Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on with @NASA.” Musk tweeted.

SpaceX is one of three commercial space companies competing for funding from NASA's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability program.

Anyone wishing to watch the unveiling can join the webcast at www.spacex.com/webcast at 7:00pm Pacific, 10:00pm Eastern.

Submission + - Try Programming This (Simulated) Quantum Computer (readwrite.com) 1

Submitted by electronic convict
electronic convict writes: Quantum computers (excepting—maybe—systems from D-Wave) remain largely inaccessible to most people who'd like to start thinking about how to actually use them. That's a big issue, since programming qubit based systems may be very different from coding on digital (binary) computers.

With that in mind, some Google engineers have put together an interesting quantum-computer simulator for general use. They describe their Quantum Computing Playground this way:

'Quantum Computing Playground is a browser-based WebGL Chrome Experiment. It features a GPU-accelerated quantum computer with a simple IDE interface, and its own scripting language with debugging and 3D quantum state visualization features. Quantum Computing Playground can efficiently simulate quantum registers up to 22 qubits, run Grover's and Shor's algorithms, and has a variety of quantum gates built into the scripting language itself.'

Coders, sound off: Does this give us a real glimpse at the future of computing?

Submission + - Botched Executions Put Lethal Injections Under New Scrutiny (acs.org)

Submitted by carmendrahl
carmendrahl writes: Lethal injections are typically regarded as far more humane methods for execution compared to predecessors such as hanging and firing squads.

But the truth about the procedure's humane-ness is unclear. Major medical associations have declared involvement of their member physicians in executions to be unethical, so that means that relatively inexperienced people administer the injections. Mounting supply challenges for the lethal drug cocktails involved are forcing execution teams to change procedures on the fly. This and other problems have contributed to recent crises in Oklahoma and Missouri.

As a new story and interactive graphic explains, states are turning to a number of compound cocktails to get around the supply problems.

Submission + - Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes (gigaom.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Addressing the recent controversy over Netflix paying ISPs directly for better data transfer speeds, Google's Director of Network Engineering explains how their Fiber server handles peering. He says, 'Bringing fiber all the way to your home is only one piece of the puzzle. We also partner with content providers (like YouTube, Netflix, and Akamai) to make the rest of your video’s journey shorter and faster. (This doesn't involve any deals to prioritize their video ‘packets’ over others or otherwise discriminate among Internet traffic — we don't do that.) Like other Internet providers, Google Fiber provides the ‘last-mile’ Internet connection to your home. Meanwhile, content providers spend a lot of money (many billions of dollars) building their own networks to transport their content all the way to those ‘last-mile’ connections. In that process, the content may run into bottlenecks — if the connections between the content provider and our network are slow or congested, that will slow down your access to content, no matter how fast your connection is. So that your video doesn't get caught up in this possible congestion, we invite content providers to hook up their networks directly to ours. This is called ‘peering,’ and it gives you a more direct connection to the content that you want.'

Submission + - With Surface Pro, Microsoft Is Trying To Recreate The PC Market (readwrite.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: An opinion piece at ReadWriteWeb makes an interesting suggestion: Microsoft's efforts in the tablet market aren't aimed at competing with the iPad or any of the Android tablets, but rather inventing a new facet of the PC market — one Microsoft alone is targeting. Quoting: 'Microsoft wants everyone to think the Surface Pro 3 is a tablet, but its pricing gives the game away. Microsoft wants to recreate the lucrative PC market that made the company billions of dollars by repackaging a PC into tablet clothing and then hammering away at the Surface product line until everybody believes that PCs never really went anywhere, they just got a touchscreen and a cellular connection.' This is also supported by the lack of a smaller Surface tablet, which many analysts were predicting before this week's press conference. Microsoft is clearly not pursuing the tablet-for-everyone approach, but instead focusing on users who want productivity out of their mobile computing device. The Surface Pros are expensive, but Microsoft is hoping people will balance that cost against the cost of a work laptop plus a personal tablet.

Submission + - Red Hat May Be Stacking The Deck Against Its OpenStack Rivals (readwrite.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: OpenStack makes its money primarily by offering service to corporate customers that run their businesses on Red Hat's version of the Linux operating system. But it stepped into an open-source buzzsaw earlier this week when an internal Red Hat document surfaced that suggested the company is trying to block its Linux customers from using competing (i.e., non-Red Hat) versions of OpenStack. Exactly what Red Hat is up to isn't fully clear. Its rivals worry that it's disadvantaging other OpenStack providers by tying support of its Linux systems to use of Red Hat's OpenStack implementation. But it's also still possible, if increasingly unlikely, that Red Hat is simply making clear that it won't support rival OpenStack setups—saying, in effect, that its customers are free to do what they want, but that Red Hat won't help out if those OpenStack deployments go awry.

Submission + - AMD Preparing To Give Intel A Run For Its Money (itworld.com) 1

Submitted by jfruh
jfruh writes: AMD has never been able to match Intel for profits or scale, but a decade ago it was in front on innovation — the first to 1GHz, the first to 64-bit, the first to dual core. A lack of capital has kept the company barely holding on with cheap mid-range chips since; but now AMD is flush with cash from its profitable business with gaming consoles, and is preparing an ambitious new architecture for 2016, one that's distinct from the x86/ARM hybrid already announced.

Submission + - Let's Face Facts: Mobile Wallets Are Doomed (readwrite.com)

Submitted by redletterdave
redletterdave writes: The other shoe has dropped for Square. The once-hyped mobile payments company is killing off its Wallet payments app and replacing it with a new app called Order, which will allow users to order food and beverages ahead of time at their favorite cafes and restaurants. For entrepreneurs, the concept of a mobile wallet seems so logical that the payments industry looks like it's ripe for disruption. If everybody is always carrying around a powerful computer in their pockets, it's natural to consider loading payment information onto that secure device as an alternative to cash or plastic cards. The problem comes when this logical entrepreneurial spirit merges with an industry segment that is classically illogical. The payments system in the United States is a mess of entrenched interests, fragmented business opportunities, old infrastructure (like point-of-sale systems), back room handshakes and cut throat competition. This behavior is not going to change any time soon, which means mobile wallets like Square are going to continue to struggle—at least until a more legitimate, easy-to-use and cost-effective solution comes along.

Submission + - The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Marguerite Reardon writes at Cnet that within a week of Google's declaration last spring that it planned to build a fiber network in the city of Austin, AT&T announced its own Austin fiber network and in less than a year's time, AT&T and local cable operator Grande Communications have beaten Google to market with their own ultra-high speed services using newly built fiber networks. AT&T maintains it has been planning this fiber upgrade for a long time, and that Google's announcement didn't affect the timing of its network but Rondella Hawkins, the telecommunications and regulatory affairs officer for the city of Austin, said she had never heard about AT&T's plans before Google's news came out. Hawkins was part of the original committee that put together Austin's application to become the first Google Fiber city. "Our application for Google would have been a good tip-off to the incumbents that we were eager as a community to get fiber built," says Hawkins. "But we never heard from them. Until Google announced that it was going to deploy a fiber network in Austin, I was unaware of AT&T's plans to roll out gigabit fiber to the home." Grande Communications' CEO Matt Murphy admits that without Google in the market, his company wouldn't have moved so aggressively on offering gigabit speeds. It also wouldn't be offering its service at the modest price of $65 a month, considering that the average broadband download speed sold in the US is between 20Mbps and 25Mbps for about $45 to $50 a month.

It's not surprising, then, that in every city in AT&T's 22-state footprint where Google is considering deploying fiber, AT&T also plans to bring GigaPower. That's a total of 14 markets, including Austin, the Triangle region of North Carolina, and Atlanta, home to AT&T's mobility division. While AT&T refuses to acknowledge that its gigabit fiber plans are answering the competitive challenge posed by Google Fiber, others say that Kansas City may have been a wake-up call. "I think all the providers have learned some valuable lessons from Google's Kansas City deployment," says Julie Huls, president and CEO of the Austin Technology Council. "What Google did instead was say, 'We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,'" says Blair Levin. "And that's what's so disruptive about it."

Submission + - Single gene can boost IQ by six points (economist.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: People are living longer, which is good. But old age often brings a decline in mental faculties and many researchers are looking for ways to slow or halt such decline. One group doing so is led by Dena Dubal of the University of California, San Francisco, and Lennart Mucke of the Gladstone Institutes, also in San Francisco. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke have been studying the role in ageing of klotho, a protein encoded by a gene called KL. A particular version of this gene, KL-VS, promotes longevity. One way it does so is by reducing age-related heart disease. Dr Dubal and Dr Mucke wondered if it might have similar powers over age-related cognitive decline.
What they found was startling. KL-VS did not curb decline, but it did boost cognitive faculties regardless of a person’s age by the equivalent of about six IQ points. If this result, just published in Cell Reports, is confirmed, KL-VS will be the most important genetic agent of non-pathological variation in intelligence yet discovered.

Submission + - Can New Car Tech Allow Us to Drive Without Looking at the Road?

Submitted by cartechboy
cartechboy writes: Most pilots will tell you that night time flying is all about controlling the plane using instrumentation vs actually navigating by eye. The same may be true one day for cars with increasingly tech-driven navigation features — and Hyundai is building some marketing around a demo of its safety system tech that takes us in that direction. Hyundai has a trained stunt driver drive their 2015 Genesis sedan at high speeds with its windows totally blacked out. The car is laden with several safety features, including backup cameras, lane assist, automatic emergency braking and cross-vehicle detection. The bottom-line, shown in some highly-produced video is that the test driver handles staying in a lane and stopping in time using only nav systems inside the car. Its not yet worthy of Al Pacino in 'Scent of a Woman' (you still need sight) but interesting to consider where this leads as it develops.

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