The latest version of North Korea's custom Linux distribution, Red Star OS - that one with the OS X style interface - has leaked onto the internet. While the guy who talked about technology in North Korea on the 31C3 conference said he didn't see anybody using Red Star seriously, it's an interesting distro to check out.
While we're making jokes about North Korea, it's easy to forget that regime puts millions of people in concentration camps to starve and murder them.
Set-top boxes and streaming sticks are decent, cost-effective ways to turn the TV you already have into a "smart TV," but Intel has an intriguing new option for those of you who want something a little more versatile. The Intel Compute Stick is a full Bay Trail PC complete with a USB port, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and a micro SD expansion slot, and you'll be able to get them with both Windows 8.1 and Linux.
Fascinating. I want one.
LG and Audi's smartwatch collaboration is the most desirable wearable of CES 2015, and while the carmaker says it's just a prototype, the device offers a tantalizing glimpse of future LG wearables. Or at worst an agonizing look at a beautiful watch we'd love to own.
We tracked down the Audi/LG watch - still officially nameless, by the way - in Las Vegas today, and we can exclusively reveal that it's not running Android Wear as originally believed. In fact, it's packing completely different software based on LG's Open webOS.
...I give up.
The developer dashboard has been updated, and there's some big movement this month. In the post holiday window, KitKat is up a healthy 5.2% and Gingerbread drops another 1.3%. One thing you won't see on the chart is Lollipop. Android 5.0 still hasn't hit the 0.1% threshold to be included in the data, just like last month.
Google Play Services mitigates a lot of the concerns about updates - not that many people seem to understand that - but this is still Android's biggest weakness by a huge margin. Sadly, it's also something Google seems to be doing little about. Also, this.
Two scenarios for the smartwatch market, put forth by Ben Bajarin. Scenario one:
Apple will easily strongly influence the smart watch category in 2015 and 2016. It is hard to argue against Apple’s vertical advantage and tight control of their entire ecosystem. This advantage undoubtedly will give them a dominance in the early stages of a category. If a number of things play out, we can see them command the category for the long term.
And scenario two:
Another possible scenario is the smart watch category shapes up very much like the smart phone category. Apple succeeds at their goal to acquire the top 20% of the market and rake in the majority of the profits. While Android Wear, or another third party licensable smart watch OS, provides the software platform to the vast majority of hardware companies making smart watches.
I'm currently writing my Moto 360 and Android Wear review, and I don't think either of these scenarios will happen. My prediction: the current generation is going nowhere. They are cumbersome, finicky, uncomfortable, and unpleasant to use. They solve a problem that's not really a problem.
While some awesome future technology could change things, the current state of technology is simply not good enough.Intel's big goal last year was to eliminate conflict minerals from its processors and supply chain, and this year it's putting some of its money into something completely different: diversity. During its keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show today, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company plans to spend $300 million over the course of the next five years to improve diversity. That goes for both the underrepresentation of women, as well as minorities in the technology industry, something that's become a hot button topic as technology companies try to diversity their workplaces, and increase the appeal of computer science courses.
As for why this is happening now, Krzanich cited issues faced in gaming and technology over the past year, alluding to Gamergate, which the company became embroiled in following an advertising snafu.
Good move by Intel - and a clear sign the company distances itself sharply from the GamerGate idiots.
bww bitwise works GmbH announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 4.1.1 for OS/2 and eComStation. It is offered as a free download in several languages like English, German, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch and Russian. An important piece of software for users of this operating system.
Dell is back with a brand new XPS 13 this year at the Consumer Electronics Show, and it looks like the best one yet. After gradually improving the screen with a new model last year, 2015's XPS 13 will ship with an even better and truly beautiful 13.3-inch "infinity" display. It has an incredibly tiny 5.2mm bezel on the top and sides. While previous models of the XPS 13 have always had an impressively small bezel, the latest feels truly edge-to-edge, and it's dazzling to look at. Dell hasn't just stopped at thin bezels, though, and the 2015 model now has an optional 3200 x 1800 high-resolution touchscreen display. That’s a massive improvement over the 1366 x 768 resolution we disliked on the original.
Like so many other Windows laptops over the past few years, this one looks amazing, and can easily hold its own versus a MacBook Air. However, this paragraph doesn't do it for me. You can now imagine me furiously scrolling down and skimming the article, hoping to...
Ah, there it is!
Alongside that, Dell has vastly improved the trackpad. I usually hate most Windows laptop trackpads, but I was very surprised with the new XPS 13. It’s using a glass button and a precision trackpad, which is something Microsoft has been encouraging OEMs to implement. Precision trackpads allow Windows 8.1 to directly control the pointer, multi-touch, and gesture support in trackpads, making them feel more like a mini touch-screen with smoother scrolling and better zooming and panning support. Gliding around with the Dell XPS 13 felt very smooth, although we’ll need to review it fully to test exactly how good it is. Either way, you’ll want a precision trackpad on your next laptop.
Now I'm truly intrigued. Touchpads are the last bastion where Apple's laptops truly outshine the competition by a huge margin, and despite years of tiny improvements, Windows laptops rarely even got close. The first laptop that does... Oh boy.
So, what happens to existing Google TV devices now that Android TV is supposedly the future?
Existing Google TV devices and all of the features of these devices will continue to work, and so will the apps you've developed for the Google TV platform. A small subset of Google TV devices will be updated to Android TV, but most Google TV devices won't support the new platform.
No updates? Well, I guess Google wanted to maintain consistency with regular Android.
But wait! Google isn't the only incompetent player in smart TVs.
This is bad. Really. Got the info from LG: "2014 webOS TV models cannot be upgraded to webOS 2.0. Only 2015 TVs will come with webOS 2.0."
Smart TVs suck. Apple, when you're done with that horribly ugly watch of yours, please show them how smart TVs are done.
Helping more and more people around the world get online and stay connected, Microsoft introduces the Nokia 215 and Nokia 215 Dual-SIM.
With a price tag of just $29 before taxes and subsidies, Nokia 215 is our most affordable Internet-ready entry-level phone yet, perfectly suited for first-time mobile phone buyers or as a secondary phone for just about anyone.
I think I'm going to buy one of these, just to see how it holds up. It has most of the services I use on my phone, so I'm wondering if I can take the downgrade while enjoying the crazy awesome battery life.
What makes the Fire Phone a particularly troubling adventure, however, is that Amazon's CEO seemingly lost track of the essential driver of his company's brand. It's understandable that Bezos would want to give Amazon a premium shine, but to focus on a high-end product, instead of the kind of service that has always distinguished the company, proved misguided. "We can't compete head to head with Apple," says a high-level source at Lab126. "There is a branding issue: Apple is premium, while our customers want a great product at a great price."
The Fire Phone failed not only because it was expensive, but also because its standout features were silly gimmicks, and everything else was just nondescript and boring. You can't sell gimmicky, nondescript, and boring for that kind of money.
Panasonic is opting for Firefox OS. Samsung is going for Tizen. LG is bunkering down with web OS. Sharp is going with Android TV, and Philips has stated all of its TVs will use Android TV.
A few questions. One, do we actually want this? Two, where is Microsoft in all this (oh right they dropped the ball)? And three, do we actually want this?
In 2014, many of you - millions, in fact - helped make Chromecast one of the most popular streaming media devices globally. It's been exciting to bring Chromecast from one country to now 27 countries, with more to come in 2015. Chromecast usage per device has increased by 60% since launch due to the growing roster of new apps and features.
And today, we're announcing Google Cast for audio, which embeds the same technology behind Chromecast into speakers, sound bars, and A/V receivers. Just like Chromecast, simply tap the cast button in your favorite music or radio app on Android, iOS, or the web, and select a Google Cast Ready speaker to get the party started.
So, at this point I'm the only one who just uses DLNA to play music and video stored on his workstation from my sound system/TV, right?
Earlier last year WhatsApp announced partnership with Open WhisperSystems to integrate the ratcheting forward secrecy protocol found in their app called TextSecure, into WhatsApp. The protocol is supposed to provide end-to-end encryption between WhatsApp clients. So far it has been implemented only in WhatsApp on Android, with the rest of platforms yet to come. The implementation however has already made it into unofficial WhatsApp libraries which allow developers to use WhatsApp service in their applications, starting with a python-library called yowsup, and the rest will follow. It's worth mentioning that none of those libraries are supported nor approved by WhatsApp, so one has to wonder if WhatsApp is going to take some legal action (again) against them.
I would strongly advise against using any non-WhatsApp approved clients. Users of the unofficial WhatsApp client for Sailfish, Mitakuuluu, got banned from WhatsApp for using an unofficial client, after which Mitakuuluu's developer ceased development. Know what you're getting into!
As part of the CES cavalcade of announcements, after launching Core-M back in September, Intel is formally releasing their next element of the 14 nanometer story: Broadwell-U. As the iterative naming over Haswell-U suggests, Broadwell-U will focus on dual-core 15W and 28W units from Celeron to Core i7 using 12 to 48 Âexecution units for the integrated graphics. A Broadwell-U processor should drop into any existing Haswell-U equivalent design (i3 to i3) due to pin and architecture compatibility, albeit with a firmware update.
As with any node change, the reduction to 14nm affords the usual benefits: more transistors per unit area, lower power consumption for a given design, or the potential to increase performance. Ryan covered the details of Intel's 14nm architecture back as part of the IDF launch, as well as a good deal of the Broadwell architecture itself. The launch today is in essence a specification list with a few extra details, along with potential release dates for Broadwell-U products. The CPUs are already shipping to partners for their designs.
Like the previous item about NVIDIA, yet another excellent AnandTech first look at new processor technology - this time from Intel.
Now in 2015 and with the launch of the Tegra X1, we can finally begin putting the picture together. Erista as it turns out is something of a rapid release product for NVIDIA; what had been plans to produce a 16nm FF part in 2015 became plans to produce a 20nm part, with Erista to be that part. To pull together Erista NVIDIA would go for a quick time-to-market approach in SoC design, pairing up a Maxwell GPU with ARM Cortex A57 & A53 GPUs, to be produced on TSMC's 20nm SoC process.
Apple's hardware today is amazing - it has never been better. But the software quality has taken such a nosedive in the last few years that I'm deeply concerned for its future. I'm typing this on a computer whose existence I didn't even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS riddled with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can't talk anymore.
Apple has completely lost the functional high ground. "It just works" was never completely true, but I don't think the list of qualifiers and asterisks has ever been longer. We now need to treat Apple's OS and application releases with the same extreme skepticism and trepidation that conservative Windows IT departments employ.
It took them a little longer than the rest of us, but even Apple bloggers are starting to see the obvious.
Fast-growing Chinese tech firm Xiaomi Technology Ltd Co booked 74.3 billion yuan ($11.97 billion) in pre-tax sales last year, up 135 percent from 2013, the firm's chief executive Lei Jun said on his official microblog account on Sunday.
Xiaomi sold a total of just over 61 million phones in 2014, up 227 percent from a year earlier, Lei added in a post on his Sina Weibo microblog account.
The post did not give a related profit figure, although a filing last month showed that the firm was grappling with razor thin margins as it rapidly expands. A part of the business made around 347.5 million yuan net profit last year on revenue of 26.6 billion yuan and an operating margin of just 1.8 percent.
Shamelessness sells.
I was born in 1973 in Czechoslovakia. It was a small country in the middle of Europe, unfortunately on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. We had never been a part of Soviet Union (as many think), but we were so-called "Soviet Satellite", side by side with Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.
My hobbies were electronics and - in the middle of 80s - computers. The history of computers behind the Iron Curtain is very interesting, with a lot of unusual moments. For example - communists at first called cybernetics as "bourgeois' pseudoscience" (as well as sociology or semiotics), "used to enslave a mankind by machines". But later on they understood the importance of computers, primarily for science and army. So in 50s the Eastern Bloc started to build its own computers, separately and "in its own way".
Absolutely, positively, fascinating. History is written by the winners, so I'm very happy we're still getting the other side of the story, too.
Given that the ME sits in a position where it can configure the chipset and operate on the PCI bus, there are some serious security implications here I wish I could mitigate. Among them is the ability of the ME to run arbitrary code on the host CPU via option ROMs or presenting a disk-drive to boot from. Also among those abilities is the possibility to perform DMA to access host CPU memory. And another one is the ability to configure and use PCI devices present in the system (such as the ethernet card).
As a consumer, I didn't ask for these features. It'd be great to turn them all off. A hardware switch even. And BIOS settings do have a way to "Disable" the ME. But is it truly disabled? It will still run some code at startup I assume. And given that the Intel ME's security model requires that the host CPU is less privileged than the Intel ME, how can the host CPU really turn it off? One example of how the ME is more privileged is the ability to walk around VT-d configuration when performing memory access, which is possibly something required to make PAVP secure.
Baseband processors, FireWire, Apple's Thunderbolt, IME - you may think your operating system is secure, and even if that were true (it isn't), there's still dozens of little pieces of firmware in every machine you own - from your smartwatch to your car - which are closed off, impenetrable black boxes of crappy, insecure code.
As for who or what 'Rosyna' is - I think she or he is a person the author knows. Took me a little while to figure that one out (I thought it was a computer program at first). Not really relevant to the story at hand, but I figured I'd save you the confusion.
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