Google offer a growing number of in-house developed apps for their Android smartphone platform and they know that we, as users, expect a solid experience. We mentioned the improvements that came to the recent update of Google Goggles and now it’s Maps’ turn, for the second time this month.
Google Maps version 5.5 rather than adding features, improves on its existing repertoire. For a start ‘check in’ and ‘rate and review’ buttons have appeared on any Places pages you might pull up. This basically gives you better integration of Latitude and its location logging, alongside quick review access, for when you want to make or break ‘that place you were just at’.
Other amendments include the ability to more easily change your work and home locations for when you want to track how much time you’ve spent at either from your location history. Finally (assuming you’re in one of the 440-odd cities covered by the application), Maps’ transit station pages have undergone a redesign to include upcoming scheduled departure times from various platforms and connecting lines information.
Download Google Maps 5.5 for Android here to try out the new check-in and rating buttons, update your Latitude Location History home/work address, check out a transit station in a nearby city, or just make sure you have the latest version of Google Maps for Android. This update requires an Android OS 1.6+ device anywhere Google Maps is currently available. Learn more in our help center.
Apple’s acting CEO Tim Cook is on a visit in South Korea right now and some industry sources claim he has a really intriguing business there. According to the rumors, Cook is there to talk with Samsung about supplying AMOLEDs for their iGadgets.
Older rumors said Apple would be launching a new iPad (whether it’ll be an upgraded iPad 2 or entirely new iPad 3) later this year and those might as well use AMOLED screens.
It will be really good to see an iGadget, especially the iPad 3, with an AMOLED screen though currently Samsung don’t even have a tablet of their own with such a display and their latest AMOLED plant is not churning the precious screens at a sustainable rate.
Apple is already a major customer of Samsung for other electronic parts, but it is also suing them over some patent infringement, Samsung is suing Apple too, and now if the display negotiations are real – the whole thing could become a huge legal mess, worth billions of dollars. I guess we can do nothing but wait and see how the things turn out.
Just this morning we reported on the rather jovial atmosphere at Google's big mobile payment announcement -- well, it looks like PayPal's prepared to bring an end to the celebration. According to Bloomberg, PayPal filed a suit against Google today in a California Superior Court, alleging that former PayPal executive, and one of this morning's MCs, Osama Bedier misappropriated the company's trade secrets. The suit further fingered Stephanie Tilenius, also formerly with PayPal, of violating the terms of her contract in recruiting Bedier. Though we've yet to get our hands on any clear details about which trade secrets PayPal's pointing to, we'd say the timing speaks volumes.
Netflix just got itself a little update in the Android Market. First and foremost, new phones are officially supported, with the LG Revolution, Motorola Droid and Casio G'zOne Commando getting access. That brings the total number of supported devices eight, including the Droid Incredible, Nexus One, EVO 4G, T-Mobile G2 and Samsung Nexus S.
There also are a few bugfixes, including:
Fixed application failure on startup when phone's embedded storage space is almost full.
Removed check that prevented attempt to playback on unsupported devices.
And we've noticed that the volume's not as low as it used to be, so that's nice, too. If you've got one of the supported phones, get your download on in the Android Market. We've got links after the break.
Microsoft Windows chief Steve Sinofsky will show Microsoft's upcoming tablet software at the AllThingsDigital D:9 conference next week, according to sources who spoke to Bloomberg (no link because its on the Bloomberg terminal).
We speculated that Sinofsky would show the tablet version of Windows 8 when his appearance was announced earlier this week, but Bloomberg has confirmed it with three separate sources, the report says.
The demo will show Windows 8 tablets running on hardware with an Nvidia Tegra chip. Microsoft OEM chief Steve Guggenheimer will also show similar demos at a show in Taiwan next week.
Microsoft has previously said that Windows is being ported to the ARM processors used in most smartphones and tablets and some screenshots of what look to be a new touch interface have leaked, but this will be the first official set of demos.
Earlier this week, Steve Ballmer said that Windows 8 would come out next year, but the company backtracked from that statement.
New Bandwidth Management Techniques Boost Operating Efficiency In Multi-Core Chips
For Immediate Release
Release Date: 05.25.2011
Filed under Releases
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed two new techniques to help maximize the performance of multi-core computer chips by allowing them to retrieve data more efficiently, which boosts chip performance by 10 to 40 percent.
To do this, the new techniques allow multi-core chips to deal with two things more efficiently: allocating bandwidth and "prefetching" data.
Multi-core chips are supposed to make our computers run faster. Each core on a chip is its own central processing unit, or computer brain. However, there are things that can slow these cores. For example, each core needs to retrieve data from memory that is not stored on its chip. There is a limited pathway – or bandwidth – these cores can use to retrieve that off-chip data. As chips have incorporated more and more cores, the bandwidth has become increasingly congested – slowing down system performance.
One of the ways to expedite core performance is called prefetching. Each chip has its own small memory component, called a cache. In prefetching, the cache predicts what data a core will need in the future and retrieves that data from off-chip memory before the core needs it. Ideally, this improves the core's performance. But, if the cache's prediction is inaccurate, it unnecessarily clogs the bandwidth while retrieving the wrong data. This actually slows the chip's overall performance.
"The first technique relies on criteria we developed to determine how much bandwidth should be allotted to each core on a chip," says Dr. Yan Solihin, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research. Some cores require more off-chip data than others. The researchers use easily-collected data from the hardware counters on each chip to determine which cores need more bandwidth. "By better distributing the bandwidth to the appropriate cores, the criteria are able to maximize system performance," Solihin says.
"The second technique relies on a set of criteria we developed for determining when prefetching will boost performance and should be utilized," Solihin says, "as well as when prefetching would slow things down and should be avoided." These criteria also use data from each chip's hardware counters. The prefetching criteria would allow manufacturers to make multi-core chips that operate more efficiently, because each of the individual cores would automatically turn prefetching on or off as needed.
Utilizing both sets of criteria, the researchers were able to boost multi-core chip performance by 40 percent, compared to multi-core chips that do not prefetch data, and by 10 percent over multi-core chips that always prefetch data.
The paper, "Studying the Impact of Hardware Prefetching and Bandwidth Partitioning in Chip-Multiprocessors," will be presented June 9 at the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems (SIGMETRICS) in San Jose, Calif. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Fang Liu, a former Ph.D. student at NC State. The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.
NC State's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is part of the university's College of Engineering.
-shipman-
Note to Editors: The study abstract follows.
"Studying the Impact of Hardware Prefetching and Bandwidth Partitioning in Chip-Multiprocessors"
Authors: Fang Liu and Yan Solihin, North Carolina State University
Presented: June 9, 2011, at the International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems, San Jose, Calif.
Abstract: Modern high performance microprocessors widely employ hardware prefetching to hide long memory access latency. While useful, hardware prefetching tends to aggravate the bandwidth wall, a problem where system performance is increasingly limited by the availability of off-chip pin bandwidth in Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs). In this paper, we propose an analytical model-based study to investigate how hardware prefetching and memory bandwidth partitioning impact CMP system performance and how they interact. The model includes a composite prefetching metric that can help determine under which conditions prefetching can improve system performance, a bandwidth partitioning model that takes into account prefetching effects, and a derivation of the weighted speedup-optimum bandwidth partition sizes for different cores. Through model-driven case studies, we find several interesting observations that can be valuable for future CMP system design and optimization. We also explore simulation-based empirical evaluation to validate the observations and show that maximum system performance can be achieved by selective prefetching, guided by the composite prefetching metric, coupled with dynamic bandwidth partitioning.
The e-reader market just got a lot more crowded this week with the launch of the touch-enabled Nook and Kobo eReader Touch Edition. Will either device be able to take down the Amazon's industry defining Kindle? We've broken down the specs on the two new readers, the Kindle, and Sony's comparable Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-350SC) to find out which device will come out on top. There's a lot of overlap features between the different readers, like infrared touchscreens and Pearl E Ink displays. All of those important details and more in the chart after the break. Check it out, because you obviously like reading things.
Barnes & Noble Nook WiFi
Kobo eReader Touch Edition
Amazon Kindle (2010)
Sony Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-350SC)
Price
$139
$129
$139/$189*
$179
Release Date
Pre-order now, ships June 10
Pre-order now, in-store early June
August 2010
September 2010
Storage
2GB
1GB
4GB
2GB
Card Slot
microSD
microSD
N/A
N/A
Processor
800MHz TI
OMAP 3
800MHz Freescale i.MX508
532MHz Freescale i.MX353
Sony has not disclosed
Weight
7.48 oz
7.05 oz
8.5 oz / 8.7 oz
5.64 oz
Dimensions
6.5 x 5 x 0.47 inches
6.5 x 4.5 x 0.4 inches
7.5 x 4.8 x 0.3 inches
5.7 x 4.1 x 0.33 inches
Screen
6-inch Pearl E Ink with zForce infrared touch
6-inch Pearl E Ink with zForce infrared touch
6-inch Pearl E Ink
5-inch, Pearl E Ink, Neonode infrared technology
Advertised Battery Life
Two months
Two weeks
Two months
Two weeks
WiFi/3G
WiFi
WiFi
WiFi/3G
N/A
Keyboard
On-screen
On-screen
Physical
On-screen
Button(s)
1
1
38
5
Formats
EPUB, PDF
EPUB, PDF
AZW, AZW1, TXT, MOBI, PRC, AA, AAX, PDF
EPUB, PDF, RTF, TXT, BBeB DRM
*Amazon recently announced a $164 ad-supported version, as well.
This is a snapshot of the sample Youtube 3D videos in Nvidia
Q: What is YouTube with 3D Vision?
A: We are announcing that high-quality, stereoscopic 3D Vision viewing capabilities are now available on YouTube. This means that the more than 6,000 3D videos already on YouTube today (http://www.YouTube.com/3D) can be viewed in full-color and high-definition using an NVIDIA 3D Vision PC or notebook with the Firefox browser version 4.0, or later.
We are also announcing that we are showcasing the top YouTube stereoscopic 3D videos on our 3D web community site at http://www.3DVisionLive.com/YT3D
Q: What equipment is required to view YouTube videos in stereoscopic 3D on my PC?
A: You will need the following equipment:
• NVIDIA GeForce GPU-equipped PC or notebook
• NVIDIA GeForce driver Release 275 or later
• A 3D Vision Ready monitor, notebook, projector, or DLP HDTV
• NVIDIA 3D Vision emitter and glasses when using a PC monitor or notebook display
• Firefox version 4.0 or later (with HTML 5 streaming)
• Or NVIDIA 3DTV Play software (for viewing 3D YouTube videos on an HDMI 1.4 3D TV)
• Windows 7 only
Q: Will all existing YouTube 3D videos be enabled in stereoscopic 3D?
A: The majority of existing YouTube 3D videos are expected to be enabled beginning on May 25, with the remainder to follow. However, videos that include advertising overlays will not be supported at this time. Also, playback of 3D videos that are posted on a YouTube channel page will not be supported at this time, as HTML5 streaming is not yet available on YouTube channels. To view these videos, click on the “Try 3D on the main YouTube video page” button when it appears.
Q: How do I upload my 3D Videos to YouTube?
A: Detailed instructions can be found here: http://www.google.co...n&answer=157640
please note that it is required to upload an already framepacked video and we think best to do it in side/side, left image first, and with horizontally scaled (squished). this instance would require a tag of "yt3d:enable=LR"
Q: Will this solution auto-convert 2D YouTube videos to 3D?
A: No. Only videos that are shot and uploaded in to YouTube’s 3D channel with 2 distinct images – one for each eye – will be viewable in stereoscopic 3D using 3D Vision.
Q: Can I view YouTube videos with 3D Vision using other browsers, e.g., Internet Explorer, Chrome?
A: Firefox is currently the only browser offering HTML5 and our 3D Vision technology to enable viewing of YouTube videos in stereoscopic 3D today. The other browsers will add support in the months ahead.
Q: Can users who embed the YouTube player on other sites also view stereo 3D with 3D Vision?
A: Yes, as a site operator it’s easy to set up your site to serve YouTube based stereoscopic 3D video by embedding it as you would any other video. However, please note that the video must be an HTML5 video for viewing with NVIDIA stereoscopic 3D Vision. In addition, the user will still have to select the NVIDIA HTML5 stereo view from the YouTube 3D Mode Page.
Q: Will I be able to watch YouTube videos in stereoscopic 3D on my an HDMI 1.4 3D TV using 3DTV Play?
A: Yes. Just like other 3D content, you can enjoy all of your 3D Vision PC content on a compatible 3D HDTV with NVIDIA’s 3DTV Play software. However, you will use the glasses that ship with the TV, rather than 3D Vision glasses. For more information on 3DTV Play please visit www.nvidia.com/3dtv.
Q: is SLI supported?
A: No, not at this time. please disable SLI to get this to work
Q: Other comments
Driver side
1. Win7 only with Aero theme enabled, and not Vista
2. On some PC's the NV control panel may be set to the wrong Windowed mode option. Ensure the dropdown labeled: “select when the display is in 3D mode” is set to “only while 3D programs run”
3. HDMI resolution set to 720p60 or 1080p24 (3DTV Play)
4. No SLI support
5. Windowed mode options do not show up on DELL and are set to OFF (this is fixed in our whql driver release 275 UDA)
YouTube-related side
1. MUST select HTML5 version in www.YouTube.com/select_3d_mode
2. No ads and channel support – there will be a popup saying HTML5 is unavailable
3. Try this video to debug http://www.YouTube.c...h?v=FpSR2xUc-CI , right click – it should say “About HTML5”
4. Aspect Ratio incorrect for some video uploads – REQUIRES horizontal scaling before upload http://www.google.co...y?answer=157640
Some crack reporting from an NBC affiliate news station has revealed a little foible in Best Buy's cellphone upgrade checking utility. If you punch in your Sprint mobile number and ZIP code, you get taken to a screen showing all the other numbers on your account as well. This applies only when yours is the main number on the account, mind you, but the issue is in the obviously lax approach to securing data you might care to keep private -- Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile customers have to pass a security check first. Of course, the actual risks resulting from someone being able to find other numbers associated with your cellular account are so small as to verge on the benign ("somebody can use that... for something", as the KXAN report sagely advises), though that hardly excuses Best Buy from being sloppy with Sprint subscribers. They're human too, you know!
Sony announced drool-worthy S Series 13.3” VAIO laptops that boast impressive performance and battery life (up to 16 hours for some configurations). The laptops weigh around 1.7kg and pack more processing power than your average desktop computers, depending on how you customize it.
Prices range from a little under $1000 to you’d-better-not-ask.
The Sony VAIO S Series start with Core i5 @ 2.3GHz (2.9GHz Turbo Boost), but you can pick a Core i7 dual-core CPU @ 2.7GHz (3.4GHz Turbo Boost) as well. Then there’s the AMD Radeon 6470M with 512MB VRAM (for the i5 CPUs) or the Radeon 6630M with 1GB VRAM (for the i7).
And if you’ve got the cash, you can skip over the lowly HDDs and go for the ultimate, bank-breaking 1TB SSD storage in the form of 2x512GB SSDs in RAID 0 configuration. The kind of performance you’ll get out of that makes my mouth water and my office PC weep. My wallet too – the 1TB SSD option costs more than anything else in the laptop itself put together.
The 13.3-inch screen is either 1366×768 (for the cheaper S Series options) or 1600×900 for the higher end models.
The S Series laptops are under 2.5 cm thick and boast magnesium and aluminum materials. The weight is a very respectable 1.72kg.
Using an optional sheet battery (costs $150) will push battery life to 16 hours if get an SSD configuration. The extra battery can be charged separately and can be ingeniously plugged into the laptop without having to shut it down first.
We got various reports from around the world that Skype connectivity is not operating normally. We’ve seen a similar outage not too long ago, we hope this time it won’t be as bad as the last time.
Timing couldn’t be worse, I guess, as it’s been just over two weeks since Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion and this is definitely not a good start for Microsoft’s rule.
It’s still unclear what’s the reason behind the problem – it might be a planned attack against Skype itself or just a problem with their data centers. At the moment of writing, the Skype official website is down as well.
I hope Skype will deal with this quickly and won’t lose its entire world network once again.
Skype has a solution for bringing tech savvy users back online. It requires deleting the shared.xml file, instructions for which are available for Windows 7, XP and Mac OS X (so yes, Apple computers have been bitten by the same bug too). A simpler fix is said to be in the works as well.
There's a pretty widespread outage of Skype going on right this minute, judging by the explosion of tweets relating to it. It's not universal, as we've been able to log in and use the internet communicator for both text and video chat, but something's definitely gone wrong. So far, we've noticed our OS X machines are ticking along just fine, but our Windows computers are not. Importantly, we had to upgrade one of our Windows desktops to "break" Skype, which indicates it could be a fault contained in the latest version, but then again, it could have simply been just a case of terrible timing. The iPhone and Android apps look to be unaffected, but skype.com is down and out. Skype is on the case right now and will have more details for us "soon."
It may look like nothing more than a random piece of seaside trash, but that ugly little creature you're staring at is actually known as Aquapod -- an amphibious robot that crawls around by falling over itself. Literally. Developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota's Center for Distributed Robotics, Aquapod uses two carbon fiber arms and a servo motor system to somersault itself around, like an inebriated horseshoe crab. It's certainly not the swiftest of bots, but this guy's durable enough to move across rough terrains and, per its nickname, is completely waterproof and in full control of its buoyancy. Creators Andrew Carlson and Nikos Papanikolopoulos say their $2,000 brainchild could one day be used to monitor fish populations and conduct underwater experiments -- or to simply scare the bejesus out of beach-going children. Video after the break.
Aquapod might not be the fastest robot ever, but it has no trouble tumbling over slippery surfaces, through sand, and towards skeptical ducks. The offset arms help to give it more degrees of freedom to escape from vegetation and other obstacles, trading a little bit of efficiency for increased robustness.
The general intent is for Aquapod to be used in water monitoring or aquatic sensor deployment, where bunches of them can team up to float down rivers, sinking and floating and deploying sensors and taking measurements as they go. It would even be possible to stick one underneath an iced-over lake to monitor fish populations during the winter, where the robot could move around by "inverse tumbling" on the underside of the ice while upside-down.
Next up will be to work in solar power along with autonomous control for long-duration research. Even without any of that stuff the robot is still a very promising platform, though, since it's estimated to cost only about $2,000 to build.
Aquapod was presented in an ICRA paper entitled "Aquapod: Prototype Design of an Amphibious Tumbling Robot," by Andrew Carlson and Nikos Papanikolopoulos from the Center for Distributed Robotics at the University of Minnesota.
Today at Wireless Japan KDDI introduced the “New Haptic Smartphone” prototype based on Kyocera technology and display. While we all know what haptic feedback bring to a smartphone nowadays we all have to agree that this pretty much sucks as it is and does not leave up to our expectation, so Kyocera decided to bring something rather different here and unveils at Wireless Japan their first prototype on KDDI’s booth with their multiple Layer Haptic screen.
Like the shutter button of a Camera, you will have the possibility to “feel” several layers when you are now pressing your smartphone screen, giving you are real sensation of how much pressure you are apply to your smartphone screen.
If the demonstration model on KDDI’s booth only showed a screen featuring two haptic layers, Kyocera however confirmed us that this technology is capable to offer up to seven layers on all over the screen surface.
If KDDI did not really gave us a time frame on how soon we will see such products on the market, Kyocera however confirmed us that, this technology will be available in the near future on a Smartphone near you!.
Yahoo is the latest in a line of would-be champions to try to topple king Gmail from its perch atop the email mountain. The company's newest Mail Beta (no relation to Gmail Beta) was introduced last October, but now its overhauled UI and fresh features are available to all. With the change comes quicker load times, stronger spam filtration, and it lets you send and receive Facebook updates and tweets. It also automatically turns picture and video links into thumbnail previews and handles up to 100MB attachments. These fancy new features are certainly a step in the right direction (even if the purple paintjob isn't), but time will tell if it'll rule the webmail world.
The virtual goods economy of massively multiplayer online games may be thriving, but it's also stimulating an undesirable side-effect: exploitation. A former detainee at a prison in Heilongjiang province, China, has told the Guardian about how he was habitually forced into playing MMOs like World of Warcraft for the collection of loot, which the prison guards would then resell online for as much as ¥6,000 ($924) per day. Such totals would be the product of up to 300 inmates working 12-hour daily shifts, though predictably they saw none of the profits themselves. The unnamed source was at a "re-education through labor" camp where the usual toil would involve actual, rather than virtual, mining. The profitability of the online market has seemingly inspired prison bosses to move with the times, however, with business being so brisk that the computers "were never turned off." A Chinese government edict from 2009 is supposed to have introduced a requirement that online currencies only be traded by licensed entities, but it's believed that the practice of using prisoners in this fashion continues unabated.
ZTE has been hitting the headlines a lot lately. After surprising everyone by entering the top-five manufacturer list, it was listed yesterday as one of the Windows Phone 7 partners by Microsoft in their Mango launch event. Today they announced that they are already working on a Mango based handset and it will be launched in Q3 in Europe.
Q1 2011 saw ZTE rank as the fifth largest handset manufacturer after Nokia, Samsung, LG and Apple and shipped close to 60 million handsets last year and plan to ship 80 million this year. They shipped close to 3 million Android handsets last year and expect to quadruple that number this year. Now they will be racing manufacturers such as Nokia in getting their own Mango based handsets first out in the market.
Verizon is seriously diversifying its portfolio today with the official in-store launch of four new smartphones. Three of them roll up in Android gear, though they all have major selling points beyond Google's software. LG's Revolution is the sole LTE-capable handset of the bunch, bringing with it a 4.3-inch screen and pre-installed Netflix for $250. The Droid X2 undercuts it on price, at $200, but doubles the core count with its Tegra 2 processor and ramps up resolution to qHD (960 x 540). Gaming aficionados can spend the same amount on the Xperia Play from Sony Ericsson, which offers a slideout gamepad and unique PlayStation Certified status. Bringing up the rear is HTC's well-traveled Trophy, a 3.8-inch Windows Phone that accepts it's a little late to the party and therefore slices $50 off its asking price, with a $150 levy before the obligatory two-year contract. What say you -- buy, try, or keep waiting?
The gaming scene on Android is becoming better by the day but so far most of the titles are ports of iOS versions. However, this new upcoming game will be an Android exclusive and will leverage the capabilities of the latest dual-core chipsets as well as the upcoming quad-core solutions.
SHADOWGUN is a third-person tactical combat game developed by MADFINGER Games, the same people who created Samurai II: Vengeance. The game will be optimized for the current dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processors as well as the upcoming quad-core Tegra (Kal-El) processors and there will be a separate version for each.
Here’s a short description of the game straight from the horse’s mouth:
Authored with the Unity development platform, SHADOWGUN combines tactical combat with third person harrowing action, ushering in a new visual standard for handheld gaming. SHADOWGUN puts players into the role of John Slade, a professional bounty hunter in the year 2350. Slade’s mission: hunt down Dr. Edgar Simon, renowned geneticist and former employee of the trans-galactic corporation Toltech Enterprises. Players must lead “shadowgun” John Slade as he infiltrates Dr. Simon’s mountain fortress and fights his personal army of mutants, cyborgs, and genetically-enhanced humanoids. Using state-of-the-art weaponry, ships, and the assistance of S.A.R.A.—Slade’s personal android assistant. The story is written by award winning author Micah Nathan who has joined the MadFinger team as executive creative consultant for SHADOWGUN.
No release date has been mentioned yet. The game will be available for smartphones as well as tablets that run on NVIDIA Tegra platform and will be available on the Tegra Zone and the Android Market.
Other amendments include the ability to more easily change your work and home locations for when you want to track how much time you’ve spent at either from your location history. Finally (assuming you’re in one of the 440-odd cities covered by the application), Maps’ transit station pages have undergone a redesign to include upcoming scheduled departure times from various platforms and connecting lines information.
