Free Republic

Apple unveiled its first smartwatch on Tuesday. The move was hotly anticipated, as Apple enters a competitive and rapidly expanding market. The new watches will be available starting in early 2015, starting at $349. Here's everything else you need to know about the new Apple Watch. 1) It's sleek There's a reason Apple invited fashion bloggers to the event today. The Apple Watch is clearly more than just a wrist computer that does nifty high-tech things; it's meant to be pretty. CEO Tim Cook told the audience Tuesday that Apple thought hard about the watch's look, not just its capabilities....

(Phys.org) —By using voltage-generated stress to switch between two magnetic states, researchers have designed a new non-volatile memory with extremely high energy efficiency—about two orders of magnitude higher than that of the previous most efficient non-volatile memories. The engineers, Ayan K. Biswas, Professor Supriyo Bandyopadhyay, and Professor Jayasimha Atulasimha at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, have published their paper on the proposed non-volatile memory in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters. "We are excited that we have been able to come up with the idea of a strain-switched memory element capable of 180° switching using a simple geometric...

CNBC's Susan Li reports China is building its own operating system to compete with companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft... (short vid at link)

Seagate has hit a new storage milestone with its recently unveiled 8TB hard drive disk, the first of its kind to start shipping. The company calls this an "important step forward", saying its new offering meets the increasing data-heavy demands of our modern cloud-centric world. The new 8TB offering is a 3.5-inch drive, and the maker is hawking it at cloud providers and others revolving around bulk data storage. Said IDC's John Rydning, "Public and private data centers are grappling with efficiently storing massive amounts of unstructured digital content." He points towards the 8TB drive as a solution for addressing...

Drones -- unmanned flying machines -- will soon fill our skies. They conjure up fears, especially among some of my fellow libertarians, of spying and death from above. These fears aren't groundless. President Bush approved the use of armed drones against suspected terrorists overseas, and President Obama vastly increased their use. Drones have killed thousands of people in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, countries against which we have not declared war. Drones keep getting more sophisticated. The Air Force is now developing what it calls MAVs, Micro Air Vehicles, tiny drones that can quietly search for an individual terrorist...

This thumbdrive hacks computers. “BadUSB” exploit makes devices turn “evil” Per FR posting rules, ars technica can not be posted, so a link to the article referring to USB thumbdrives hacking computers is listed instead. Ignore the "source url", it just points back to the FR website. Article here: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/07/this-thumbdrive-hacks-computers-badusb-exploit-makes-devices-turn-evil/

Inside Hoboken’s combined junior-senior high school is a storage closet. Behind the locked door, some mothballed laptop computers are strewn among brown cardboard boxes. Others are stacked one atop another. Dozens more are stored on mobile computer carts, many of them on their last legs. That’s all that remains from a failed experiment to assign every student a laptop at Hoboken Junior Senior High School. It began five years ago with an unexpected windfall of stimulus money from Washington, D.C., and good intentions to help the district’s students, the majority of whom are under or near the poverty line, keep...

Layoffs in the technology sector could reach their highest level in five years, according to a group that tracks employments trends. So far this year, tech employers have announced plans to cut payrolls by 48,402, a 68 percent increase over the 28,883 layoffs announced during the same period in 2013, according to a special report released Monday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the current rate, the 2014 year-end total could be the highest since 2009, when tech-sector job cuts hit 174,629. The highest total on record was 695,581 job cuts in 2001, when the tech bubble in the stock...

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 07/11/2014 08:46 AM | Source | 3 comment(s) ] I'M Intelligent Memory (oh and I'm not kidding with that name), a Hong Kong based fabless DRAM manufacturer, announces availability of the world's first 8 Gigabit (Gb) DDR3 components with a single chip-select, doubling the amount of memory per chip compared to other DDR3 DRAM devices on the market. Based on these new 8 Gb components, I'M is also introducing the first 16 Gigabyte (GB) DDR3 UDIMM and SO-DIMM memory modules with optional ECC error-correction.The JEDEC specification JESD79-3 has always allowed an 8 Gb density for DDR3...

Hi, Norm Matloff here. I’m a professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, and formerly was a statistics professor at that university, but I also write about social issues. As the saying goes, “My life is an open book”–you can read the details of my background in my online bio. I’ve written op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg View, CNN and so on. Bloomberg gathers together its op-eds grouped by author; click here to see mine, and thus get an idea of my interests and views. (SNIP) In this blog, my topics will...

A relic from long before the age of supercomputers, the 169-year-old math strategy called the Jacobi iterative method is widely dismissed today as too slow to be useful. But thanks to a curious, numbers-savvy Johns Hopkins engineering student and his professor, it may soon get a new lease on life. With just a few modern-day tweaks, the researchers say they've made the rarely used Jacobi method work up to 200 times faster. The result, they say, could speed up the performance of computer simulations used in aerospace design, shipbuilding, weather and climate modeling, biomechanics and other engineering tasks. Their paper...

On Friday, the Internal Revenue Service informed Congressional investigators that it could not recover two years of emails from Lois Lerner, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt status department. Lerner has been at the center of the investigation into how and why the IRS applied additional scrutiny to the tax-exempt applications of Tea Party-affiliated organizations.

I have a client that has 2 ISP's, Frontier and Mediacom and is running POS/Credit Card machines through the Frontier service primarily, however Frontier goes out from time to time so they would like to be able to switch to the Mediacom service easily and quickly during those down times. Question, is a dual wan router the best answer to this issue? Thanks for the input.

With the growth of IEDs and other weapons used against unsuspecting soldiers in complex and urban environments, the demand for squad-level reconnaissance capabilities has significantly increased. One possible solution is the use of small, insect-like robots that could collaborate together to form multifunctional, mobile microsystems to enhance situational awareness.Researchers of the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) program of the Army Research Lab are collaborating with industry and academia to develop ground, aerial and control systems for robotics. The collaboration includes researchers from ARL and BAE Systems, as well as several universities. The program focuses on technological and scientific areas...

The Defense Department has decided to retire its 19-year-old retiree pay system written in “antiquated” computer code and replace it with a lower cost, easier to use application based on off-the-shelf technology. The Defense Retiree and Annuitant Pay System, or DRAS, maintains military pay accounts for more than 2.6 million military retirees, former spouses and survivor beneficiaries totaling $40 billion a year. The system was introduced in 1995 and is based on Common Business Oriented Language computer code of the time. DRAS uses “antiquated mainframe technology dating back to 1980 that has exceeded the end of its planned lifecycle,” the...

When tech startups are willing to offer almost anyone -- even a journalist -- shares ahead of an IPO, a burst isn't terribly far behind. I was surprised but not completely flabbergasted by the phone call I received a few weeks ago. A representative of Arista Networks, a networking company I've written about recently, phoned to inform me that the company's chief executive wanted to offer me "friends and family" shares in Arista's upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit, down to the number of shares I'd have the opportunity to purchase at the IPO price. The caller specifically...

In January, the Obama administration put together a "working group" to analyze how huge swaths of Americans' data are being gathered and stored and what sort of privacy issues need to be addressed. The group's report was just released this week. Before you ask: No, it's not about the National Security Agency (NSA) sweeping up huge amounts of metadata from phone and online communications by Americans, even though that’s the big data conversation many Americans want to have right now. Such data gathering is vaguely mentioned in the full report, but primarily the 85-page study (pdf) is about consumer privacy...

The low level griping about law enforcement subpoenas requesting user information and instructing companies to not tell the subjects of the subpoenas has burst into full fledged rebellion. From the Washington Post: "This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered." Now Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have joined...

In a rare move that highlights the severity of the security hole in one of the Web's most popular browsers, the Homeland Security Department's Computer Emergency Readiness Team says to stop using Internet Explorer until Microsoft can fix it. Security firm FireEye said that it is currently being used to attack financial and defense organizations in the US via Internet Explorer 9, 10, and 11. Those versions of the browser run on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, although the exploit is present in Internet Explorer 6 and above.

<p>A Marin County technology executive was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon after he got off his bicycle and beat a motorist unconscious during an alleged act of road rage in Mill Valley, a city police official said.</p>