Intel's benchmark comparisons come in the form of a slideshow, and they show the Intel CPU winning in most cases. The benchmarks include SYSmark, MobileMark, WebXPRT and 16 video game titles.

The choice of benchmarks appears aimed at "a realistic day-in-a-life" according to one slide and a "better indicator of mainstream PC experience" according to another. SYSMark runs actual applications like Microsoft Office programs, and both MobileMark and WebXPRT perform some typical computer tasks.

Then, Intel claimed "on par or better" performance in a variety of video games, with the Ryzen processor only winning out in Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation and Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Intel claimed Final Fantasy XV, Far Cry 5, CS:GO, PUBG, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, among other games, for itself.

• Check out the match-up: AMD vs. Intel
• Get the details on Intel's Coffee Lake Refresh
• See Intel's new Ice Lake CPUs

Missing or obscuring the point

While what Intel is claiming in its slides may well be the case, there's plenty of information absent, and some important considerations left unmentioned.

For instance, in the video game benchmarks, Intel claims on par or better performance, but doesn't indicate which of the games were only on par, thereby giving itself a victory for what may only be a draw. It's also worth noting that many of the games it lists are older, like Grand Theft Auto V, CounterStrike: GO, and Crysis 3.

Another important consideration is system configuration. We don't see a slide showing the exact configuration of the Ryzen machine, and while Intel likely built similar machines, Ryzen CPU performance can vary significantly depending on the RAM installed.

Then there's the big elephant in the room: use case. Intel emphasizes realistic use cases, but fails to acknowledge the Intel Core i7-9700K and Ryzen 9 3700X aren't CPUs for typical computer users who just want to browse the web and crank out spreadsheets. They are high-performance components meant for folks with serious computing needs. Benchmarks like Cinebench show just how much raw performance people can get out of a machine, and core counts can really come in handy when it comes to creative workloads.

There are extras for Ryzen 9 3900X to consider as well, like PCIe 4.0 support, an included cooler, and the possibility that future games and programs will offer improved support for more cores and threads as chip makers like AMD and Intel continue to boost those numbers.

Intel may be posting a win for itself here, but we're still standing by our ranking of the best CPUs, which sees the Ryzen 9 3900X squarely at the top.

• See our Intel Core i9-9900K review

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On Tuesday, EVGA sent out a graphic to press stating that it does not deliver graphics cards with tweaked clockspeeds to reviewers. “With EVGA,” the company said. “What you see is what you get.”

The whole controversy started on Thursday of last week. TechPowerUp reported that both Asus and MSI sent the hardware-focused site graphics cards set to run slightly faster than what you’d get from a retail store.

The hope, obviously, was that Asus and MSI would see better reviews for their products and get an edge over the competition.

The companies also had an excuse for the tweaked clock speeds, since customers could easily get the same speeds the reviewers were seeing. All they had to do was flip a setting in the special software that comes with each new graphics card. MSI has a software package called MSI Gaming, while Asus offers GPU Tweak II.

These graphics cards come with three basic clock settings that users can easily manipulate: gaming mode, OC (“overclock”) mode, and silent mode. The first is the standard retail setting that most of us see when we open those glorious boxes housing a new gateway to gaming joy.

Silent mode runs the slowest of the three since it puts the card at reference clock speeds. OC mode, meanwhile, squeezes a little more performance out of the card. TechPowerUp said it received cards set to OC mode, meaning they given review samples set to a profile that offers more performance than what buyers actually receive in stores.

Soon after that initial report, PC Perspective agreed this was a bad practice on the part of the companies. But PC Perspective also pointed out that the difference in speeds might result in about a one percent performance improvement overall. (What did you expect for a quick, one-click tweak?)

Nevertheless, TechPowerUp argues that even a small performance gain provides an unfair advantage. That small boost could, in fact, be the deciding factor for gamers looking to squeeze every ounce of performance they can from a specific graphics card.

Asus confirmed to PC Perspective that it does send its cards to reviewers in OC Mode in order to showcase the card’s maximum performance.

Why this matters: Technically, both companies can say the cards sent to reviewers and to retail stores are the same since they only tweak a factory setting. The marginal improvement in clock speed is also easily obtained by consumers if they enable the right profile for their card. Nevertheless, companies shouldn’t send reviewers a product that doesn’t match what consumers get, right down to the factory settings. That’s especially important for graphics cards reviews where many readers skip right to the benchmarks to compare numbers.

Source: http://www.itnews.com/article/3086303/hardware/

Alongside a large number of Windows security updates issued Tuesday, Microsoft also released build 1602 of the Office apps to corporate Office 365 subscribers who hew to the "Deferred Channel" track.

Deferred Channel is the slower of the two main release tracks Microsoft established for Office 365. (Until February, it was called "Current Branch for Business" to match the name of a slow release track for Windows 10.) Unlike the faster "Current Channel" (CC), which boasts monthly updates to the Office 2016 applications -- Word, Outlook, Excel and the like -- Deferred Channel (DC) only provides updates every four months.

Consumers who subscribe to Office 365 Personal or Office 365 Home are on the CC track; they don't get a choice. IT administrators managing commercial Office 365 plans, such as Business Premium, E3 and E5, may select either CC or DC for some or all users.

The slower pace of DC is designed to give organizations time to test the updates before deployment, and essentially sets those on the CC track as testers for DC customers. Microsoft follows the same practice with Windows 10, using consumers as a large test group to identify, and fix, flaws or compatibility issues, before the operating system's major upgrades reach the more important corporate customers.

So far, Microsoft has issued two DC updates: One in February 2016, the second this month. The two were labeled 1509 and 1602, respectively. Build 1509 was the original release of the Office 2016 client applications, which, as its nomenclature indicated, was the original launch code shipped in September 2015 to consumers and companies on the Current Channel track.

Office 365's applications are on an every-four-months schedule for DC, with updates slated to release in February, June and October of each year. The cadence is important for customers to remember because Microsoft has set rules for Office 365 subscribers who adopt DC. They may skip an update, but no more than one, sticking with an individual Office 2016 feature set for no longer than eight months.

For example, those running 1509 -- again, the original versions of the Office 365 apps -- since February must apply 1602 or later by October. If they do not, the apps will no longer receive security patches and other fixes.

"The existing Office 365 ProPlus version (1509) within the Deferred Channel will continue to be serviced for an additional four months," Amesh Mansukhani, a senior program manager on the Office engineering team, said in a post to a company blogTuesday.

In October, the DC will receive the 1605 update, the same one issued to CC customers this week.

The rolling release tempo for Office 365's Deferred Channel allows corporate customers to pass on one update. In this opening scenario, where DC users have been on 1509 since February, they will be allowed to skip 1602, but not both 1602and 1605. In October, they may upgrade to either 1602 or 1605. The former falls off the support list in February 2017, while the latter will be "serviced" -- to use Mansukhani's term -- until June 2017.

Yes, it can be confusing.

This story, "Microsoft starts clock ticking on Office 2016's first upgrade" was originally published by Computerworld.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com/

CEO Tim Cook called iOS 10, coming this fall, "gigantic" and "the mother of all releases."

Among the new offerings in the upcoming version of iOS are more features in Messaging, all new designs for News, Music and Photos, and increased opportunities for developers to integrate their apps with Siri, Maps and Messages.

"Long term, the most interesting thing is the fact that Apple opened up Siri and Messaging and Maps to developers to add to those services," said conference attendee Bob O'Donnell, chief analyst at Technalysis Research.

"It reflects the way the world is moving. It's moving away from standalone apps and into integration with services," he told TechNewsWorld. "Apple is acknowledging that by opening these things up for other developers to provide add-on functionality for these services."

The new iOS enhances the user experience at the lock screen and home screen with rich notifications, as well as interaction with apps through the expanded use of 3D touch.

QuickType received an upgrade in the new iOS.

"We're bringing Siri intelligence to the keyboard," Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president for software engineering, told the audience at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

QuickType has incorporated deep learning to produce more intelligent results and to react proactively to information on a screen, he explained. If someone sends you a message asking where you are, for instance, you may be prompted to send a map.

The photo app in the new iOS is more robust with the addition of facial recognition, as well as scene and object identification.

Advanced search techniques support a "memories" feature that automatically will scan your photos to create a montage and video of a past event.

The Maps app in the new iOS, which Apple has opened to developers, will be more proactive. It not only will allow you to see traffic patterns ahead, but also will suggest alternative routes if it sees you're heading into a traffic jam.

Both the News and Music apps are redesigned in the new iOS, and a new Home app is included in the portfolio of native apps. Home acts as a hub for controlling all home accessories -- garage door, security camera, light dimmers and such.

The new iOS adds voice mail transcription to its Phone app and numerous new features to Apple's messaging app, including rich links, easier insertion of photos and video into messages, and larger emojis. Messages also will display highlighted text that can be clicked for quick insertion of emojis.

"Apple has added a ton of features for people who like to live in their messaging platforms, said conference attendee Patrick Moorhead. principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy.

"That's particularly true in China, where they get into WeChat and they never want to leave," he told TechNewsWorld.

In addition to previewing the new iOS, Apple revealed changes in WatchOS, tvOS and its desktop operating system, renamed "MacOS."

The new WatchOS improves the Apple Watch's performance and makes navigation and access to apps easier.

"If the experience is as good as they showed on stage today, Apple could start selling a lot more watches," Moorhead said.

Apple announced a number of channel additions to the new tvOS and a new single sign-on feature that eliminates the need to enter user credentials every time you access a service through Apple TV. It also announced an app that allows an iPhone to be used like an Apple TV remote, including access to Siri.

The new MacOS Sierra provides access to both Siri and Apple Pay. It includes picture-in-picture video, a desktop everywhere feature for accessing a Mac's desktop across devices, and a universal clipboard that allows items to be cut and pasted across devices.

"One of Apple's main goals in this year's WWDC keynote was to open developers' eyes to opportunities beyond the iPhone," said conference attendee Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

"That's a critical issue, since faltering sales for smartphones -- including Apple's -- have got to be a prime concern among Apple developers," he told TechNewsWorld.

"So we saw the company announce the integration of key phone technologies, like Siri and Apple Pay, in Mac desktops and laptops. That could spark new opportunities for developers," King noted.

"Many of the other announcements -- the iOS updates, design fixes for Apple Music and Apple TV, and promises of software fixes that will make the Apple Watch more responsive -- were more in the line of necessary and often badly needed housekeeping," he said. "The main takeaway from the keynote is that Apple recognizes the value developers bring to the company's business, and will do all it can to keep them happy and profitable."

Source: http://www.technewsworld.com/

In its first day of trading on Friday, shares of SecureWorks, a digital security company, have been hovering near the $14 price it set the night before. The stock opened on the Nasdaq market at $13.89.

SecureWorks raised $112 million, selling eight million shares. It had been marketing nine million shares within the range of $15.50 to $17.50, indicating that demand was weaker than expected.

The lackluster demand is not that surprising.

For one thing, SecureWorks has little in common with so-called unicorns — those private, venture-backed start-ups with valuations above $1 billion that have been avoiding the public markets. SecureWorks is 17 years old, based in Georgia and owned by Dell.

And the ways in which SecureWorks does resemble some unicorns — top-line revenue growth, a history of losses and an enterprise-software business model — are not the most encouraging for investors.

Recent trading among already public security stocks did not help SecureWorks’ deal.

Shares of FireEye and Rapid7 declined in recent weeks as SecureWorks was meeting with potential buyers of its stock. Investors look to companies similar to the one going public when trying to determine what price they might be willing to pay for the I.P.O. When the so-called comparables slip, it can be a bad sign for the debutant.

For Dell, pricing below the range was not necessarily bad news. The computer maker, which has agreed to acquire EMC in the largest technology deal ever, is not selling shares in the offering.

Dell will own 86 percent of SecureWorks after the offering, and it is hoping the share price will rise in the public market. Dell will also control more than 98 percent of the voting power through a separate class of shares.

The I.P.O. price yields a valuation of $1.1 billion, which is almost double the roughly $600 million Dell paid for the company in 2011, according to Triton Research, which provides information on private companies.

SecureWorks said it might use the proceeds from the offering to develop new solutions or enhance current ones, and fund capital expenditures. Those funds may be necessary as competition in the security world increases.

The company said in the filing that it expected “pricing pressures within the information security market to intensify as a result of action by our larger competitors to reduce the prices of their security monitoring, detection and prevention products and managed security services.”

Still, the company has drawn quite a bit of revenue from its 4,200 customers. SecureWorks reported $339.5 million in total revenue for the year through Jan. 29, a 30 percent increase from the same period last year. SecureWorks had $72.4 million in losses for the year, almost twice as much as the same period in 2015.

Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase are managing the offering.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/

This research breakthrough provides fast and easy storage to capture the exponential growth of data from mobile devices and the Internet of Things.

Applications

IBM scientists envision standalone PCM as well as hybrid applications, which combine PCM and flash storage together, with PCM as an extremely fast cache. For example, a mobile phone's operating system could be stored in PCM, enabling the phone to launch in a few seconds. In the enterprise space, entire databases could be stored in PCM for blazing fast query processing for time-critical online applications, such as financial transactions.

Machine learning algorithms using large datasets will also see a speed boost by reducing the latency overhead when reading the data between iterations.

How PCM Works

PCM materials exhibit two stable states, the amorphous (without a clearly defined structure) and crystalline (with structure) phases, of low and high electrical conductivity, respectively.

To store a '0' or a '1', known as bits, on a PCM cell, a high or medium electrical current is applied to the material. A '0' can be programmed to be written in the amorphous phase or a '1' in the crystalline phase, or vice versa. Then to read the bit back, a low voltage is applied. This is how re-writable Blue-ray Discs store videos.

Previously scientists at IBM and other institutes have successfully demonstrated the ability to store 1 bit per cell in PCM, but today at the IEEE International Memory Workshop in Paris, IBM scientists are presenting, for the first time, successfully storing 3 bits per cell in a 64k-cell array at elevated temperatures and after 1 million endurance cycles.

"Phase change memory is the first instantiation of a universal memory with properties of both DRAM and flash, thus answering one of the grand challenges of our industry," said Dr. Haris Pozidis, an author of the paper and the manager of non-volatile memory research at IBM Research - Zurich. "Reaching three bits per cell is a significant milestone because at this density the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash."

To achieve multi-bit storage IBM scientists have developed two innovative enabling technologies: a set of drift-immune cell-state metrics and drift-tolerant coding and detection schemes.

More specifically, the new cell-state metrics measure a physical property of the PCM cell that remains stable over time, and are thus insensitive to drift, which affects the stability of the cell's electrical conductivity with time. To provide additional robustness of the stored data in a cell over ambient temperature fluctuations a novel coding and detection scheme is employed. This scheme adaptively modifies the level thresholds that are used to detect the cell's stored data so that they follow variations due to temperature change. As a result, the cell state can be read reliably over long time periods after the memory is programmed, thus offering non-volatility.

"Combined these advancements address the key challenges of multi-bit PCM, including drift, variability, temperature sensitivity and endurance cycling," said Dr. Evangelos Eleftheriou, IBM Fellow.

The experimental multi-bit PCM chip used by IBM scientists is connected to a standard integrated circuit board. The chip consists of a 2 × 2 Mcell array with a 4- bank interleaved architecture. The memory array size is 2 × 1000 μm × 800 μm. The PCM cells are based on doped-chalcogenide alloy and were integrated into the prototype chip serving as a characterization vehicle in 90 nm CMOS baseline technology.

Source: http://phys.org/technology-news/

Redmond's newest operating system hit the 200 million milestone on January 4, and if you go back a little further to October 6 last year, that was when the company announced Windows 10 had reached the 110 million mark.

So from October to January, a period of three months, 90 million people adopted the OS, and from January to May, in other words four months, 100 million people have taken the plunge.

A quick bit of rough napkin maths reveals that the average pace of adoption has thus slowed a little, from around 30 million people per month at the tail end of 2015, to 25 million people per month this year.

However, there's every chance it will speed up again, as the end of July deadline for a free upgrade from Windows 7/8.1 looms. That will force the hand of those who have been sitting on the fence, or just plain haven't been bothered to deal with the hassle of making the move, as they need to click the upgrade button soon or potentially end up paying for the OS at a later date.

And indeed with its blog post announcement of the 300 million milestone, Microsoft took the opportunity to remind folks that "time is running out" on the freebie offer, and those who don't upgrade before or on July 29 will have to pay $119 (around £82) for Windows 10 Home.

Whether Windows users need a reminder is just a tad debatable though, given the amount of badgering those on Windows 7/8.1 have been on the receiving end of since the launch of the newest version of Windows.

Microsoft also shared a number of fun facts – well, facts, anyway – and stats gleaned from Windows 10 users (another ripe source of controversy).

These include the fact that Cortana on Windows 10 has now answered over 6 billion queries, and over 63 billion minutes were spent surfing with Microsoft Edge in March, which represents a 50% growth in usage time since the last quarter.

Windows 10 users are also playing more games than ever, Microsoft notes, with over 9 billion hours of gameplay having been racked up since the OS was launched (with DX12 support, of course).

Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/

A mediator between particles of light: An organic molecule mediates the interaction between a control and a probe beam, which are indicated by the magenta or the green spheres in the foreground. Here the energy of the two light beams changes when they leave the molecule. This is represented symbolically by the yellow and the blue sphere in this illustration.

Researchers show that a single molecule allows a beam of light with a few photons to be controlled – a step towards the photonic computer.

The Jedi knights of the Star Wars saga are engaged in an impossible fight. This does not result from the superiority of the enemy empire, but from physics because laser swords cannot be used for fighting like metallic blades: beams of light don’t feel each other. Until now, for a light beam to perceive another one, it has required a large chunk of material as intermediary, and very intense light. A team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light has demonstrated for the first time a mediation process with only a single organic molecule and just a handful of photons. The researchers influence and switch another light beam with these particles of light. This basic experiment not only promises a place in physics textbooks, but it may also help in the development of nano-optical transistors for a photonic computer.

Currently, the future of the computer industry is unclear. Semiconductor components like the transistor cannot be miniaturized indefinitely and run at ever-higher speeds. One possibility for developing more compact and powerful computers could result from processing information with photons instead of electrons. That is a major objective of photonics. However, there is a fundamental problem in the attempt to develop a purely optical transistor: “Light cannot simply be switched by other light in the way that electric current is switched with current in a conventional transistor”, explains Vahid Sandoghdar, Director of the Nano-optics Division at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light and Alexander von Humboldt Professor of the Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen-Nürnberg. How shy particles of light are becomes obvious when one crosses the beams of two torches or two lasers. What happens is: nothing. “A medium is required to mediate the light-light interaction”

A control beam alters the optical properties of the molecule

Now Vahid Sandoghar’s team has succeeded in controlling light with a single organic molecule and just a handful of photons. To this effect, the researchers first cooled molecules which they had embedded in a solid matrix to minus 272 degrees Celsius. With the help of modern microscopy and spectroscopy techniques, they made two carefully focused laser beams overlap on a single molecule: a so-called control beam and a probe beam, which should be switched. “The control beam has the task of changing the optical properties of the molecule so that it becomes transparent for the second one, the probe beam”, explains Andreas Maser, who performed the experiments as part of his doctoral thesis.

Previously, powerful laser beams and macroscopic materials were needed to switch light with light, as this process relies on an interaction which physicists call non-linear. In such non-linear interactions the optical properties of a material also depend on the light intensity and not just on the intrinsic material. In addition, non-linear interactions are much weaker than the normal linear interaction. This results from the reduced ability of the electrons in the molecule to follow the electric field vibrations of the light waves at different frequencies.

Just a single photon should be able to switch the molecule

Now, the Erlangen-based researchers were able to switch the probe beam with just a few light particles, as they conducted their experiment at a temperature close to absolute zero. “At very low temperatures the interaction cross-section of the molecule becomes a multiple of its geometrical size”, explains Benjamin Gmeiner, who also played a key role in the experiments. So the molecule becomes something like an illusionary giant, with the result that almost every photon of the control beam can interact with the molecule. “Therefore, just a few photons from the laser beam are enough to alter the optical properties of the molecule.” The researchers are even convinced that the control pulse can be weakened still further. “In principle, a single photon should be enough to alter the fate of a second photon”, says Vahid Sandoghdar.

The researchers will now continue to work on controlling a light signal with individual photons. Simultaneously, the team in Erlangen is focusing rather on the practical side of things: the researchers would like to embed the molecule as a nano-optical transistor in a photonic wave-guide structure that should serve to wire up many molecules as is common in electrical circuitry. This would be an important step towards the future perspective of processing information in a photonic computer.

Source: http://scitechdaily.com/

That's the verdict of the U.K.'s Advertising Standards Authority, which on Wednesday gave ISPs six months to clean up their act before it introduces new rules on how they can promote their services.

The monthly cost of broadband Internet access bundled with fixed-line telephone service ought to be simple enough to determine.

However, after viewing a typical ad, only 23 percent of people could correctly identify the cost in a study by the ASA and the U.K.'s communications regulator, Ofcom.

By presenting the cost of broadband service and line rental separately, and giving undue prominence to limited time introductory offers, contract length and one-off costs, ISPs are able to disguise the true cos of their service.

It's not just a problem in the U.K., either: ISPs in France too display introductory prices that are only valid for six or twelve months, and often only a third or less of the price once the offer expires. They bury the duration of the offer and the full price in much smaller type, or even hide it altogether in online presentations, requiring suspicious customers to click or mouseover to reveal it.

The ASA-Ofcom study found that 22 percent of participants still couldn't work out the total cost of service per month even after being prompted to review the ad, and 81 percent were unable to calculate the lifetime cost of a broadband contract.

From Oct. 31, the ASA will require advertisers to show all-inclusive up-front and monthly costs, without separating out line rental. It also wants them to give greater prominence to the minimum contract length, the cost after initial discounts expire, and any up-front costs that might eat into the headline discounts.

Unfortunately for broadband customers, advertisers risk little if they flout the ASA's rules. The strongest penalty it can impose is to require that the offending ad be withdrawn, making enforcement a giant game of Whac-a-Mole as advertisers can push out a different creative and start again.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/news/?start=15

Native ad blocking is available both as a browser for Windows PCs and the Opera Mini browser for Android. Blocking ads not only speeds up the overall browsing experience, according to Opera, but can also eliminate a significant chunk of data that must be downloaded by smartphone users to view a Web page.

An Opera spokesman said users could expect roughly the same performance from the stable version as they'd experienced in the developer build, with pages loading up to 90 percent faster than with ads enabled. Opera also went a step further, claiming that building native blocking into Opera made the browser about 45 percent faster than the stable version of Google's Chrome browser with AdBlock Plus (a third-party ad blocker) integrated. 

“Our goal is to provide the fastest and the smoothest online experience for our users,” Krystian Kolondra, the senior vice president in charge of engineering for Opera, said previously. “While working on that, we have discovered that a lot more time is spent on handling ads and trackers than we thought earlier.”

Why this matters: In many ways, ad-blocking browsers like Opera represent the Napster of online journalism: a convenient, efficient way to load web pages unencumbered by the scripts, tracking pixels, and banner ads that can result in a bumpy experience. With the demise of print subscriptions, however, publishers will inevitably turn to other means of raising revenue—including preventing a web page from being loaded if a user has an ad blocker enabled. It ain't over yet.

In Opera Mini for Android, ads can be turned off by tapping the O menu, then toggling ads either on or off. Opera said Opera Mini will allows ads to be blocked in both the high- and extreme-saving modes.

Likewise, ads can be turned off in the desktop version of Opera either from the Settings menu, or else from a popup that should appear when the first page is loaded. "Whitelisting" a site can be performed by clicking the shield icon, which turns ad blocking or or off. As in the developer build, you'll be able to see how many ads you've blocked per page, and even load the page with ads turned on and off in a side-by-side comparison.

The new build also adds two unrelated features that are worth checking out. The desktop version of Opera includes a video pop-out feature, which shunts a playing video to the side of your screen. Opera Mini also adds a feature to add web pages to your home screen, Opera said. 

In last year's tests, Opera already delivered the fastest Web browsing experience available, roughly equivalent to Google's Chrome. Now, with ad blocking turned on, Opera could very well surge to the front of the pack.

Source: http://www.pcworld.com/news

But the potential growth in the uptake of the cloud is being hampered by a major issue: people simply don't trust it.

"Trust management is a top obstacle in cloud computing, and it's a challenging area of research," says the University's Professor Michael Sheng, ARC Future Fellow in the School of Computer Science.

"There are many reasons why people lack faith in the cloud – there's little to no transparency, often you don't know who provides the service, and it's difficult at times for users to know whether certain cloud-based applications or sites are malicious or genuine," he says.

For the past few years, Professor Sheng and his students have been developing a system known as Cloud Armor. Cloud Armor is aimed at showing which cloud sites, applications or providers are more trustworthy than others, offering a score out of 100.

Professor Sheng says: "The basic concept behind this is like the website Rotten Tomatoes, which is widely used by people to review and rank films. But what happens when people are not being entirely honest in their views?

"How do we cut through comments that are designed as a malicious and systematic attack against a product, and also those that are well-executed self-promotion? To be able to give consumers an accurate understanding of trustworthiness, we need to be able to sort through this false feedback."

To do that, Cloud Armor relies on a "credibility model". An in-house-designed crawler engine scans all of the comments made on the internet about any aspect of the cloud, and the credibility model works out what feedback is credible and what isn't – such as certain statements that are repeated over and over, indicating potential false feedback.

"We've tested this with and without our credibility model – without the model, some cloud applications receive a maximum score of 100; but with the model, that score might only get to 50 or 60," Professor Sheng says.

"We're very proud of the work we've done on Cloud Armor. We've presented it at a number of top-tier conferences and several prestigious journals and already it's attracting a lot of attention from the international community.

"I hope that through the use of a tool like this, it will help to create a culture of transparency in the cloud, and ultimately become more trustworthy to users," he says.

Source: http://phys.org/technology-news/computer-sciences/

There's a big barrier to the widespread use of this technology, though:Virtual reality often makes people sick.

Virtual-reality sickness isn't a new problem. It's been known as long as test pilots, test drivers and potential astronauts have been practicing their skills in mock vehicles, though it was called simulator sickness in those cases. Not unlike motion sickness or seasickness, VR sickness has its roots in the mismatch between the visual and vestibular systems, said Jorge Serrador, a professor of pharmacology, physiology and neuroscience at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School.

Imagine standing below decks in a boat on choppy seas. The entire cabin is moving, so your eyes tell you you're standing still. But you feel the movement — up, down, pitching side to side. You start to feel clammy. Your head aches. You go pale and reach for a trash basket to retch into.

The problem starts in the vestibular system, a series of fluid-filled canals and chambers in the inner ear. This system includes three semicircular canals, all lined with hair cells, so named for their hair-like projections into the liquid-filled channels. As the head moves, so too does the fluid in the canals, which in turn stimulates the hair cells. Because each canal is situated differently, each sends information on a different type of motion to the brain: up/down, side to side and degree of tilt.

Connected to the semicircular canals is the utricle, a sac containing fluid and tiny calcium carbonate particles called otoliths. When the head moves, so too do the otoliths, sending the brain signals about horizontal movement. Next door, a chamber called the saccule uses a similar setup to detect vertical acceleration.

This system typically works in tandem with the visual system and with the proprioceptive system, integrating sight and sensations from the muscles and joints to tell the brain where the body is in space. A virtual-reality environment hammers a wedge between these systems.

Unlike seasickness or car sickness, virtual-reality sickness doesn't require motion at all. It was first reported in 1957 in a helicopter-training simulator, according to a 1995 U.S. Army Research Institute report on the topic. One 1989 study found that as many as 40 percent of military pilots experienced some sickness during simulator training — an alarming number, according to the Army report, because military pilots are probably less likely than the general population to have problems with "motion" sickness.

Because of simulator sickness, early simulator developers started to add motion to their models, creating plane simulators that actually pitched, rolled and moved up and down a bit. But sickness still occurs, according to the Army report, because the computer visualization and the simulator motion might not line up completely. Small lags between simulator visuals and motion remain a problem today, Serrador said.

"You go into a simulator and [the movements] don't match exactly the same as they do in the real world," he said. "And all the sudden, what you'll find is you just don't feel right."

Typically, the bigger the mismatch, the worse the sickness. In one 2003 study published in the journal Neuroscience Letters, Japanese researchers put people in a virtual-reality simulator and had them turn and move their heads. In some conditions, the VR screen would turn and twist twice as much as the person's actual head movement. Unsurprisingly, the people in those conditions reported feeling a lot sicker than those in conditions where the movement and the visual cues matched up.

No one really knows why vestibular and visual mismatches lead to feelings of nausea. One theory dating back to 1977 suggests that the body mistakes the confusion over the conflicting signals as a sign that it's ingested something toxic (since toxins can cause neurological confusion). To be on the safe side, it throws up. But there's little direct evidence for this theory.

People have different levels of susceptibility to virtual-reality sickness, and they can also adapt to situations that initially turn them green around the gills. The Navy, for example, uses a swivel chair called the Barany chair to desensitize pilots to motion sickness. Over time, the brain figures out which cues to pay attention to and which to ignore, Serrador said. At some point, even the act of putting on a virtual reality headset will trigger the brain to go into a sort of virtual-reality mode, he said. 

"There's lots and lots of data that show that your brain will use the context cues around it to prepare itself," Serrador said.  

Virtual-reality developers are working to combat the nauseating side effects of their products. Oculus Rift, for example, boasts a souped-up refresh rate that helps prevent visual lags as the user navigates the virtual world. And Purdue University researchers invented a surprisingly simple fix: They stuck a cartoon nose (which they call the "nasum virtualis") in the visual display of a virtual-reality game. Their results, presented in March 2015 at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, showed that this fixed point helped people cope with virtual-reality sickness. In a slow-paced game in which players explored a Tuscan villa, the nose enabled users to go 94.2 seconds longer, on average, without feeling sick. People lasted 2 seconds longer in an almost intolerably nauseating roller-coaster game. The nose seems to give the brain a reference point to hang on to, said study researcher David Whittinghill, a professor of computer graphics technology at Purdue.

"Our suspicion is that you have this stable object that your body is accustomed to tuning out, but it's still there and your sensory system knows it," Whittinghill said in a statement.

But now, a discreet new device, small enough to fit into a pocket or purse, could make eating out an easier and safer experience for gluten-sensitive people.

Manufactured by San Francisco-based startup 6SensorLabs, the portable gluten-testing device, called Nima, can test food for the presence of gluten, providing results within minutes and reducing people's food anxiety. The device could also provide greater social freedom, making meals more enjoyable, said 6SensorLabs co-founder and chief technology officer Scott Sundvor.

"A lot of people who have food issues get very stressed when they're eating out, and they avoid eating out altogether," Sundvor told Live Science. "Our product will really enable them to start going out again and start being more open in social settings."

An estimated one in 133 Americans, or about 1 percent of the population, is affected by celiac disease, an inherited autoimmune disease in which eating gluten can cause severe damage to the small intestine, according to the organization Beyond Celiac. There are currently no treatments or cures for celiac disease — except eating a diet without any gluten, which is a protein found in wheat, rye and barley.

Using the Nima device, individuals can make sure their food is gluten-free by placing a tiny piece of their meal inside a disposable capsule, twisting the cap shut and inserting the capsule into the Nima's main sensor unit. Within 2 to 3 minutes, Nima will let users know if the food is safe to eat by displaying a smiley face on the screen if there is no gluten, or a frown if the result is positive for the protein, the company said.

The device can test a range of foods, from soups and sauces to more solid items like baked and fried goods, Sundvor said. Using a combination of a chemical and mechanical process, the Nima grinds down any chunky bits, dissolving the food in a proprietary blend of enzymes and antibodies that zero in on any gluten in the mix. And Sundvor said those antibodies can detect levels of gluten as low as 20 parts per million, the FDA limit for the maximum level of gluten considered acceptable in foods that are labeled gluten-free.

But the Nima itself is not an FDA-approved device. It is not intended for medical or diagnostic use, the company said. Instead, the Nima is marketed as a tool for getting more information about food when eating out, Sundvor said.

"We're selling this as a device that can give another layer of data," Sundvor told Live Science. "This isn’t something that will help people treat their disease or diagnose gluten-sensitivity, and that's why we don't need FDA approval for the device."

The Nima offers a portable alternative to current clunky, time-consuming food-testing kits on the market, Sundvor said. The device is 99.5 percent accurate, he said. That number is based on about 2,000 tests comparing the Nima's sensitivity to gluten in various foods to that of other consumer gluten tests currently on the market.

Nima's results have also been validated by two different external labs: Bia Diagnostics and BioAssay Systems. And Sundvor said his company is making sure to get the device tested even more thoroughly by a third party before making the sensor available to the public later this year.

There are still some challenges, though. Most importantly, the Nima can't guarantee that an entire meal will be free of gluten, because the tests only the portion of the meal that users place in their device, Sundvor said. If there is gluten in the salad dressing on the side of a meal, for example, and not in the crusted Parmesan chicken, the device could give a false negative if the chicken is the only part of the meal tested.

The Nima avoids cross-contamination inside the device itself by using disposable capsules. This design also allows for potential expansion into capsules for other allergies later on, with the development of dairy and peanut allergy-testing capsules already underway, Sundvor said.

Currently, users can pre-order a starter kit online, which consists of the main Nima sensor unit and three capsules, selling for $199. Refill packs of 12 capsules each will also be available on a subscription basis for $47.95 during the pre-sale. Once the device is available, in mid-2016, the company will also have a Nima app, in which users can log results and share their experiences at different restaurants, testing different foods, Sundvor said.

"This is going to have a really big impact on people," he added. "It will bring more transparency to food in general and help people with their dietary issues."

Source: http://www.livescience.com/technology/

We live in an attention economy. Every Website, game, video, TV show, meme and social media post demands your attention. But success in this world is based in large part on your ability to direct your attention to productive tasks.

Author Cal Newport calls "Deep Work" the secret to achieving great things.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that ambient background noise—the kind you'll encounter at a local coffee shop—measurably boosts creativity and productivity.

And this idea definitely resonates with me. As a writer, I concentrate for a living. But as I'm crafting words in my head, I find the cognitive load vastly higher if two people in the room are having a conversation or if someone is talking on the phone. I also get distracted from annoying sounds outside—for example, a neighbor's dog spends much of the day barking.

The solution for me always has been to play some kind of white noise or ambient music—some sound that's constant and pleasant and puts annoying sounds in the background. Or I to go work in a coffee shop, where I always work better than I do in an office, even a quiet one.

The same goes for sleeping. I can sleep well when it's quiet. But as a digital nomad, I sometimes live in cities where the sounds of car horns and sirens and yelling can keep me up at night. Sometimes live in the country. I recently lived in Cuba, for example, and in a couple of AirBnB apartments outside of Havana, it felt like the roosters were going out of their way to prevent me from sleeping past 4 a.m.

And again, white noise saved the day—or the dawn, in this case—which I often play from an iPad app and helps me sleep when it's noisy.

But the whole white noise industry, from white-noise machines to white-noise apps, is about to get disrupted by something far better: Let's call it augmented hearing.

Of Course, There's an App for That

The past few years have seen the emergence of a smattering of cloud-based white noise sites that simulate coffee shops. Sites such as Coffitivity and Hipstersound let you not only choose the ambient sounds of a coffee shop, but also specific locations such as Brazil or Paris. A site called Coding gives you the sounds of a room full of developers writing code. There are many others.

These sites are nice. But they're basically just recorded and looped sounds. The new world of augmented hearing will replace canned sounds with the digital processing of actual sounds.

A free new app called Hear - advanced listening for iOS launched this week from Reality Jockey Ltd. The app offers augmented hearing in seven customizable varieties.

You use it with your existing headphones or earbuds. I use it with my noise-canceling Bose headphones for maximum effect.

Most of the Hear modes are gimmicky parlor tricks that accidentally simulate horror movie soundtracks or even drug experiences, according to tech blogs quoted on the Hear page. For example, the trippiest, most psychedelic mode is called "Office." It transforms every actual sound into a mesmerizing nightmarish drone sound and offsets it in time.

A mode called "Happy" is by far the most bizarre. It takes ambient sounds and repeats them in echoes of higher and lower pitch.

The "Talk" mode partially auto-tunes human speech. So if you're talking to somebody, their sentences become harmonized into song.

But other modes are actually useful and interesting—especially what they promise for the future of "augmented hearing."

One of my favorites is called "Auto Volume," which silences ambient noise but turns up and clarifies human speech. It's great for working around the house where you want to concentrate, but also want to be available to interact with family members.

The "Sleep" and "Relax" modes give you good old-fashioned white noise, but also integrates actual sounds into the track. This is a powerful trick. Canned white noise generators ignore or drown out actual noises in the environment.

The "Sleep," "Relax," and a few other modes capture and integrate some ambient sounds, turning them into part of the white noise. The effect is a more fluid and, for lack of a better term, "believable" white noise.

"Super hearing" simply cranks up the volume, enabling you to hear that fly on the other side of the room as if it was right next to your ear.

Note that it's possible for the "Super hearing" mode to be abused. One could easily imagine the strategic placement of a smartphone within microphone range of a private conversation while running this app in "Super hearing" mode, with a snoop listening via a Bluetooth headset that has no microphone. Add this to the privacy risks associated with smartphones.

Each of the modes has several sliders for precisely customizing sounds. The sliders have strange names and do unexpected things. For example, the customizable sliders for the "Office" mode are "Detach," "Time Scramble," "Unhumanize" and "Volume." You can't predict the effect without trial and error.

The Hear app is a tiny glimpse into a future where we'll be able to pick and choose as well as process noises in our environment to customize exactly what we want to hear. It also presages the use of processed sound to simulate drug experiences, relieve boredom or enhance mood.

The Future of Noise

The way all augmented hearing works is that microphones capture actual sounds in the environment. Then a computer chip processes those sounds before sending audio to the human ear.

Software is able to tease out, identify, separate and individually process different kinds of sound. This can be done with an app, such as the Hear app. But it also might happen in customized hardware.

A new generation of earbuds connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth. You then use a complementary app to control what you hear and what you don't.

The earbuds will give you hands-free calls and music. But they also process and enable the customization of the noise in the environment.

Early products in this space have names including Nuheara IQbuds, Doppler Here and Bragi Dash.

We've all been in a crowded, noisy room and tried to have a conversation. Wouldn't it be great to silence the din of chatter and music and boost the sound of the other person's talking?

Or, conversely, let's say you're listening to a great musician on stage, but the people around you are chattering away. Wouldn't it be great to silence those people and amplify the music? One product in this space, the Doppler Here, actually has a "reduce baby" feature that filters out the sound of a baby crying so you can't hear it. That would be pretty handy during those overseas and red-eye flights, when you need to sleep.

Science has demonstrated that the right kind of sound can enhance creativity and productivity. Intuition tells us that blocking certain sounds can enhance mood by filtering out annoying sounds. I wonder what other mental benefits can be produced with the right kind of noise processing?

Undoubtedly, everyone will want the ability to exert control over the sounds one hears.

This revolution in selective hearing is coming to us in multiple formats. It will be built into phones, earbuds, headphones and more.

And when the custom tailoring of sound is a normal consumer electronics feature—when sounds can be boosted, enhanced for speech and more—hearing aids will become obsolete. Duplicating the functionality of hearing aids will be simply one of the options in one's augmented hearing app of choice.

I would even go so far as to predict that, like people who wear hearing aids, most consumers will get in the habit of wearing augmented hearing hardware in their ears during all their waking hours.

As is often the case, the biggest constraint on this technology is battery power, which is never enough. Despite that limitation, I think we'll see over the next five years the total mainstreaming of augmented hearing.

Technology will let us hear whatever we want to hear, and filter out the rest.

Source: http://www.eweek.com/mobile/were-entering-the-era-of-augmented-hearing-and-white-noise.html

The latest example of this investment is a grant to an assistant professor at theRochester Institute of Technology who believes it’s possible to achieve significant energy efficiency improvements in data centers by eliminating physical interconnects both within and between servers.

Amlan Ganguly, a faculty member at RIT’s Kate Gleason College of Engineering, has been publishing research papers on wireless and photonic communication mechanisms within circuits for several years now. His next project is to scale that approach beyond the chip, to enable wireless interconnection between components of a server and between servers in a data center. The nearly $600,000 grant from theNational Science Foundation will fund those effort over the next five years.

“We want to revolutionize that mechanism of communication within servers with wireless interconnects,” Ganguly said in a statement. “The crux of the approach is to replace the legacy internet type of connections with the novel wireless technology which we project to be significantly more power efficient than the current state of the art.”

He described the project as “high-risk,” citing significant challenges with interconnecting what could be tens to hundreds of servers with the same wireless frequency. There’s a lot of crosstalk, or interference, which makes it challenging to create an effective way to manage that communication.

This is not the first time the NSF has funded a research project Ganguly has been involved in. At least one project where he was the lead investigator and three others where he participated in a non-principal role have received grants from the foundation over the last seven years. Most of them were projects that researched wireless on-chip communications.

Source: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/wireless-interconnects-promise-big-data-center-efficiency-wins?utm_source=internal-link&utm_medium=foot-link&utm_campaign=previous