Bill Gates admits CTRL-ALT-DEL was mistake, as was dropping out of Harvard
Mark Hachman @markhachman
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates acknowledged that the “CTRL-ALT-DEL” means of logging into your Windows PC was a mistake, although done with the best of intentions.
Gates, interviewed at Harvard University last week, said that the awkward three-finger combination was actually implemented for security purposes.
“Basically because when you turn your computer on, you’re going to see some screens and eventually type your password in, you want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signalling to a very low level of the software—actually hard-coded in the hardware—that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect,” Gates said. “Instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like your login screen and listens to your password and is able to do that.
“So we could have had a single button, but the guy that wanted to do the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button, and so we programmed at a low level... it was a mistake.” Gates also said that it was able to take the IBM character set and do some “interesting things” with it.
Of course, the three-key combination—still a part of Windows through Windows 8—has become part of Windows lore, much in the same way that that the “open Apple” key, for example, was well known among Apple users.
The hour-long interview touched on a number of topics, including Gates’ early days at Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which Gates formed with his wife, Melinda, after stepping down as Microsoft’s chief executive in 2000. Gates has recently appeared more publicly—appearing at a Microsoft academic forum, for example—to answer questions about Google and other topics.
Gates was asked, in retrospect, if he actually needed to drop out of Harvard and form the venture that eventually became Microsoft. Gates responded by noting that at the time, software was something that hardware companies did as an aside, because they were forced to. “In fact, though we felt like we had to do it [launch Microsoft] that day, an extra year or two wouldn’t have made a difference,” Gates said. He also jokingly took credit for persuading Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to drop out as well.
On never attending classes in his original major, mathematics: “I’m probably not going to be the best at this... so I decided I would be the guy who never attended any class he signed up for. So within my first month, I figured out that was my unique positioning. I hoped that the 80 other people [in his class] wouldn’t steal that positioning. It turned out that no one else imitated me.”
On pulling away from Microsoft: “Certainly in my twenties Microsoft was everything, every minute, every sense of I’m doing good work. I knew everybody’s license plate, I could tell you when they drove into the parking lot, when they left, so it was kinda extreme... You’re going from that to having a wife, having kids, having vacations. That felt really good, really appropriate.”
Unfortunately, Gates did not acknowledge Clippy as a mistake.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Sunday, September 22, 2013
3D printing in the kitchen gives new meaning to fast food
3D printing in the kitchen gives new meaning to fast food
Lucas Mearian, Computerworld @lucasmearian
Pablos Holman sees a day not too far off when our diets will be tailored to our metabolisms, adding a few bits of broccoli, a smattering of beets, and some meat—all extruded from a 3D printer in an appetizing form to please our palates.
Holman is a futurist and inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, Washington, where he and others work on futuristic projects like printable food. He was not alone in speaking on the topic at the Inside 3D Printing Conference last week.
The design on the cake was made with a printer.
Avi Reichentall, CEO of 3D Systems, one of the largest consumer printer companies, has already been able to configure his machines to create a variety of sugary goods, including cakes and candy. The sweets were on display with ornate designs.
Reichentall said consumers can expect his company to build a machine that will take a place next to the coffee maker on a kitchen counter, but instead of a caffeine shot, it will offer a sugar rush.
"We are working on a chocolate printer. I want a chocolate printer in my kitchen. I want it to be as cool as a Keurig coffee maker," Reichentall said. "We now have 3D printed sugar. We're going to bring to pastry chefs and confectionaries and bakers a whole range of new sugar printing capabilities.
"This is coming to a marketplace near you very soon," he said.
As if to juxtapose confectionary 3D printers, Holman is working on creating machines that can take freeze-dried food and hydrate it as it is being extruded through nozzles to create an eye-pleasing meal.
Tech gets tasty
The 3D food printing technology isn't Intellectual Ventures' first foray into food preparation. The lab was the proving ground for the best selling cookbook Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which put a technologist's spin on contemporary cooking.
The lab used ultrahigh-pressure homogenizers, freeze-dryers, centrifuges, rotary evaporators, and ultrasonic baths to determine how food reacted at the molecular level to cooking.
In a similar scientific fashion, Holman said, the lab could create printers with toner-type cartridges that hold pulverized freeze-dried foods. Water could be added to the food in the extruding process, along with miniscule amounts of healthy options, such as green vegetables, with more appetizing foods to make meals more nutritious. The printers would then extrude the foods in shapes and colors replicating the meals we typically eat today—from steaks to hot dogs to rice.
Holman said his efforts are "at the dot-matrix stage," as printing was in the early 1980s. "I can print out smoothies and Cliff Bars."
Many forms of confections could be produced through 3D printing.
Eliminate waste
Another important reason to turn to 3D printed foods is to address the wildly inefficient way that developed countries, especially the U.S., handle the food they produce.
For example, Americans must drive to a store, buy their groceries, store it in cupboards, refrigerators and freezers, and yet, most consumers end up throwing out about 40 percent of the food they buy.
"Every grocery store throws out 2000 pounds of expired food a week," he said. "We're good at figuring out how to make enough food and make it efficiently. Where we're not efficient is in the last mile between the store and your mouth.
"So now, I'm imagining, what if I had a machine with three buttons on it: 'What I ate yesterday'; 'what Beyoncé likes'; and 'I'm feeling lucky'," Holman said.
By pressing a button, the 3D printer, using a precise printer head, would put down just a pixel of food at a time, hydrating it with a needle, cooking it with a laser and repeating the process for every pixel until an entire meal is on the plate.
3D-printed food could also offer a method of tracking with pinpoint precision the effects any given food has on an individual. Because the amount of each food is measured precisely, the printer could record nutrient data, and a person's health in reaction to food could be studied over a lifetime.
Printed food could even include your daily dose of medicine.
"This meal is customized for you. It avoids allergens and injects your pharmaceuticals," he said. "It knows about what you've eaten before. We've correlated your diet's health effects for the first time in history. It makes a meal that understands who you are."
Holman said researchers closely track what astronauts consume and correlate what they've eaten with their health. "There's someone following them around with a clipboard recording everything they eat, " he said. "We need to do that for everybody."
Lucas Mearian, Computerworld @lucasmearian
Pablos Holman sees a day not too far off when our diets will be tailored to our metabolisms, adding a few bits of broccoli, a smattering of beets, and some meat—all extruded from a 3D printer in an appetizing form to please our palates.
Holman is a futurist and inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, Washington, where he and others work on futuristic projects like printable food. He was not alone in speaking on the topic at the Inside 3D Printing Conference last week.
The design on the cake was made with a printer.
Avi Reichentall, CEO of 3D Systems, one of the largest consumer printer companies, has already been able to configure his machines to create a variety of sugary goods, including cakes and candy. The sweets were on display with ornate designs.
Reichentall said consumers can expect his company to build a machine that will take a place next to the coffee maker on a kitchen counter, but instead of a caffeine shot, it will offer a sugar rush.
"We are working on a chocolate printer. I want a chocolate printer in my kitchen. I want it to be as cool as a Keurig coffee maker," Reichentall said. "We now have 3D printed sugar. We're going to bring to pastry chefs and confectionaries and bakers a whole range of new sugar printing capabilities.
"This is coming to a marketplace near you very soon," he said.
As if to juxtapose confectionary 3D printers, Holman is working on creating machines that can take freeze-dried food and hydrate it as it is being extruded through nozzles to create an eye-pleasing meal.
Tech gets tasty
The 3D food printing technology isn't Intellectual Ventures' first foray into food preparation. The lab was the proving ground for the best selling cookbook Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, which put a technologist's spin on contemporary cooking.
The lab used ultrahigh-pressure homogenizers, freeze-dryers, centrifuges, rotary evaporators, and ultrasonic baths to determine how food reacted at the molecular level to cooking.
In a similar scientific fashion, Holman said, the lab could create printers with toner-type cartridges that hold pulverized freeze-dried foods. Water could be added to the food in the extruding process, along with miniscule amounts of healthy options, such as green vegetables, with more appetizing foods to make meals more nutritious. The printers would then extrude the foods in shapes and colors replicating the meals we typically eat today—from steaks to hot dogs to rice.
Holman said his efforts are "at the dot-matrix stage," as printing was in the early 1980s. "I can print out smoothies and Cliff Bars."
Many forms of confections could be produced through 3D printing.
Eliminate waste
Another important reason to turn to 3D printed foods is to address the wildly inefficient way that developed countries, especially the U.S., handle the food they produce.
For example, Americans must drive to a store, buy their groceries, store it in cupboards, refrigerators and freezers, and yet, most consumers end up throwing out about 40 percent of the food they buy.
"Every grocery store throws out 2000 pounds of expired food a week," he said. "We're good at figuring out how to make enough food and make it efficiently. Where we're not efficient is in the last mile between the store and your mouth.
"So now, I'm imagining, what if I had a machine with three buttons on it: 'What I ate yesterday'; 'what Beyoncé likes'; and 'I'm feeling lucky'," Holman said.
By pressing a button, the 3D printer, using a precise printer head, would put down just a pixel of food at a time, hydrating it with a needle, cooking it with a laser and repeating the process for every pixel until an entire meal is on the plate.
3D-printed food could also offer a method of tracking with pinpoint precision the effects any given food has on an individual. Because the amount of each food is measured precisely, the printer could record nutrient data, and a person's health in reaction to food could be studied over a lifetime.
Printed food could even include your daily dose of medicine.
"This meal is customized for you. It avoids allergens and injects your pharmaceuticals," he said. "It knows about what you've eaten before. We've correlated your diet's health effects for the first time in history. It makes a meal that understands who you are."
Holman said researchers closely track what astronauts consume and correlate what they've eaten with their health. "There's someone following them around with a clipboard recording everything they eat, " he said. "We need to do that for everybody."
PC security, NSA-style: 7 tips from the spymasters
PC security, NSA-style: 7 tips from the spymasters
Paul Mah @paulmah
Was it really just a few months ago that your biggest computer-privacy concern was making sure your employer didn’t find the college photo of you sucking on a beer bong on your Facebook page? That seems cute now. With the recent revelations that the National Security Agency may have been involved in everything from spying on U.S. residents to cracking online encryption to collecting global financial data, computer privacy has taken on all the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a John le Carré novel.
If you’re like most users, you take your privacy seriously. So we went right to the experts—the NSA itself—and pored over the agency’s security tips and recommendations for its Department of Defense and intelligence-community customers. From there, we identified seven measures that both consumers and small businesses can easily implement to protect themselves from hackers and cybercriminals—and perhaps even from the NSA.
Enable automatic software updates
It isn’t the coolest counterintelligence technique, but good security starts with the basics, and nothing is more basic than making sure that your operating system is up-to-date. So it’s no surprise that the NSA recommends enabling automatic updates in Windows.
Doing so is easy enough: First, simply navigate to System and Security from the Windows Control Panel. Click Turn automatic update on and off, and select Install updates automatically.
Encrypt your hard drive
Recommended in the NSA’s rundown of security highlights in Windows 7 (PDF), BitLocker encryption is built into the Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows 7, as well as the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows 8. When enabled, BitLocker encrypts all of the data kept on a storage volume, and it continues working in the background to protect the contents of a Windows PC from unauthorized access.
BitLocker is an excellent first line of defense that takes just a few clicks to enable. However, if you’re concerned that the full-disk encryption technology may have been compromised by a backdoor deal with the NSA (there is no evidence of that, so far), you can find plenty of alternative methods to encrypt your data.
Tape over the webcam
Integrated webcams are great for video chats, but they’re also excellent tools for hackers to spy on users. And you would never know that you were being watched: Although the webcam indicator light is supposed to switch on when the camera activates, hackers have found ways to disable the light in certain laptop models.
According to the NSA, a simple, low-tech solution is to tape over your webcam—with black tape, naturally. If you’re worried that the sticky residue might damage the webcam, use tape to secure a small piece of paper over the lens.
Disable the built-in microphone
Sound
Disable your laptop’s built-in microphone to ensure that your private conversations stay private.
Just as your machine’s webcam can give hackers a window into your private world, your laptop’s built-in microphone—typically enabled by default—can fall prey to remote hijacking and allow snoops to eavesdrop on all conversations in its vicinity.
To ensure that no one can listen in on your home or office, launch the Sound applet from the Control Panel. Click the Recording tab, select your laptop’s built-in microphone, and disable it.
Of course, taking this step doesn’t prevent a malicious hacker who has already compromised your laptop from reenabling it. If you’re really paranoid, you can disable the built-in microphone permanently simply by poking it with the business end of a needle or paper clip. The espionage game has its casualties.
Disable unnecessary network services
Although it’s impossible to lock out hackers completely, you don’t have to make their task any easier. Start by disabling network-related protocols and services that you don’t use, as attackers and snoops could exploit them to access your files and devices. For small businesses, such services will likely include IPv6, Bluetooth wireless, or even Wi-Fi, if you’re primarily using deskbound laptops connected via ethernet. And if you don’t share file and printer resources on your PC, be sure to disable sharing for additional security—a step that Microsoft recommends, as well.
Harden your account settings
Spend a few minutes tweaking your Windows account settings. Few security measures offer so much protection for so little effort. A good first step is to disable any guest accounts that are present, ensuring that a password is set for each account, and disabling automatic login.
If you use sleep mode, adjust your PC’s settings to require a password on waking up.
Next, enable a screensaver and set it to start with a reasonably short inactivity timeout of between 1 and 5 minutes. To do so, right-click the desktop, select Personalize from the menu, and click Screen Saver. Make sure to select the On resume, display logon screen checkbox. Obviously, you will need to have a password configured first for this step to work.
Finally, require that users reenter their system password if the PC has been inactive. Configure this option by clicking Power Options in the Control Panel and selecting Require a password on wakeup in the left column.
Don’t read email on an admin account
Web surfing on a user account with administrative rights is kind of like walking through a bad neighborhood with your house keys in one hand, your Social Security card in the other, and your ATM PIN written on your forehead. You’re offering up all kinds of sensitive personal information to eager takers.
Because of that risk, the usual advice is to avoid surfing the Web on an admin account to limit the damage if a zero-day exploit happens to compromise your account. Given the growing number of attacks launched via email messages, it’s a good idea to extend this precaution to your inbox by reading new email messages only on a nonadministrator account. This practice won’t protect you from phishing attempts that try to trick you into giving up your password, though, so be sure to stay on your guard against fake email messages, too.
While adhering to these tips will go a long way toward shielding you and your data from prying eyes, to secure your PC further be sure to check out our tips to avoid the most devious security traps, Prism surveillance, and watchers on the Web. We can’t promise that following these measures will make you spyproof, but you will certainly sleep better. Just remember to keep one eye open.
Paul Mah @paulmah
Was it really just a few months ago that your biggest computer-privacy concern was making sure your employer didn’t find the college photo of you sucking on a beer bong on your Facebook page? That seems cute now. With the recent revelations that the National Security Agency may have been involved in everything from spying on U.S. residents to cracking online encryption to collecting global financial data, computer privacy has taken on all the cloak-and-dagger intrigue of a John le Carré novel.
If you’re like most users, you take your privacy seriously. So we went right to the experts—the NSA itself—and pored over the agency’s security tips and recommendations for its Department of Defense and intelligence-community customers. From there, we identified seven measures that both consumers and small businesses can easily implement to protect themselves from hackers and cybercriminals—and perhaps even from the NSA.
Enable automatic software updates
It isn’t the coolest counterintelligence technique, but good security starts with the basics, and nothing is more basic than making sure that your operating system is up-to-date. So it’s no surprise that the NSA recommends enabling automatic updates in Windows.
Doing so is easy enough: First, simply navigate to System and Security from the Windows Control Panel. Click Turn automatic update on and off, and select Install updates automatically.
Encrypt your hard drive
Recommended in the NSA’s rundown of security highlights in Windows 7 (PDF), BitLocker encryption is built into the Enterprise and Ultimate versions of Windows 7, as well as the Pro and Enterprise versions of Windows 8. When enabled, BitLocker encrypts all of the data kept on a storage volume, and it continues working in the background to protect the contents of a Windows PC from unauthorized access.
BitLocker is an excellent first line of defense that takes just a few clicks to enable. However, if you’re concerned that the full-disk encryption technology may have been compromised by a backdoor deal with the NSA (there is no evidence of that, so far), you can find plenty of alternative methods to encrypt your data.
Tape over the webcam
Integrated webcams are great for video chats, but they’re also excellent tools for hackers to spy on users. And you would never know that you were being watched: Although the webcam indicator light is supposed to switch on when the camera activates, hackers have found ways to disable the light in certain laptop models.
According to the NSA, a simple, low-tech solution is to tape over your webcam—with black tape, naturally. If you’re worried that the sticky residue might damage the webcam, use tape to secure a small piece of paper over the lens.
Disable the built-in microphone
Sound
Disable your laptop’s built-in microphone to ensure that your private conversations stay private.
Just as your machine’s webcam can give hackers a window into your private world, your laptop’s built-in microphone—typically enabled by default—can fall prey to remote hijacking and allow snoops to eavesdrop on all conversations in its vicinity.
To ensure that no one can listen in on your home or office, launch the Sound applet from the Control Panel. Click the Recording tab, select your laptop’s built-in microphone, and disable it.
Of course, taking this step doesn’t prevent a malicious hacker who has already compromised your laptop from reenabling it. If you’re really paranoid, you can disable the built-in microphone permanently simply by poking it with the business end of a needle or paper clip. The espionage game has its casualties.
Disable unnecessary network services
Although it’s impossible to lock out hackers completely, you don’t have to make their task any easier. Start by disabling network-related protocols and services that you don’t use, as attackers and snoops could exploit them to access your files and devices. For small businesses, such services will likely include IPv6, Bluetooth wireless, or even Wi-Fi, if you’re primarily using deskbound laptops connected via ethernet. And if you don’t share file and printer resources on your PC, be sure to disable sharing for additional security—a step that Microsoft recommends, as well.
Harden your account settings
Spend a few minutes tweaking your Windows account settings. Few security measures offer so much protection for so little effort. A good first step is to disable any guest accounts that are present, ensuring that a password is set for each account, and disabling automatic login.
If you use sleep mode, adjust your PC’s settings to require a password on waking up.
Next, enable a screensaver and set it to start with a reasonably short inactivity timeout of between 1 and 5 minutes. To do so, right-click the desktop, select Personalize from the menu, and click Screen Saver. Make sure to select the On resume, display logon screen checkbox. Obviously, you will need to have a password configured first for this step to work.
Finally, require that users reenter their system password if the PC has been inactive. Configure this option by clicking Power Options in the Control Panel and selecting Require a password on wakeup in the left column.
Don’t read email on an admin account
Web surfing on a user account with administrative rights is kind of like walking through a bad neighborhood with your house keys in one hand, your Social Security card in the other, and your ATM PIN written on your forehead. You’re offering up all kinds of sensitive personal information to eager takers.
Because of that risk, the usual advice is to avoid surfing the Web on an admin account to limit the damage if a zero-day exploit happens to compromise your account. Given the growing number of attacks launched via email messages, it’s a good idea to extend this precaution to your inbox by reading new email messages only on a nonadministrator account. This practice won’t protect you from phishing attempts that try to trick you into giving up your password, though, so be sure to stay on your guard against fake email messages, too.
While adhering to these tips will go a long way toward shielding you and your data from prying eyes, to secure your PC further be sure to check out our tips to avoid the most devious security traps, Prism surveillance, and watchers on the Web. We can’t promise that following these measures will make you spyproof, but you will certainly sleep better. Just remember to keep one eye open.
Dog training Shock Collar|PST-211 Electronic training shock collar for 2dogs
PST-211 2 in 1 Dog training shock collar description
http://petsuppliesnew.com/pst-211-remote-training-dog-shock-collar Dog training Shock Collar|PST-211 Electronic training shock collar for 2dogs
1. A solid 350 meters/400 Yards of range;
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 10 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable ultrasound;
5. CE Approved.
6. 2-dog systems allows you to train 2 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 5-60 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 10 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable ultrasound;
5. CE Approved.
6. 2-dog systems allows you to train 2 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 5-60 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
PST-211 dog traning collar has real range of 400 yards , 10 adjustable levels of vibration and ultrasound and progressive shock to make you find a suitable levels to control your dogs.
PST-211 is a electric remote traning collar for dogs. PST-211 dog traning collar can be used for control dog bark digging, jumping, running away, chewing and any other habits.
The PST-211 collar receiver is waterproof so you have no worries when your dogs play with water or get wet in the rain.
PST-211 remote control shock collars for dogs FAQ
Is the shock correction safe ?
It is safe when used according to the instructions. It is an unpleasant sensation for the animal, but completely harmless. Always interact with your dog during training by giving verbal cues, reinforcements and praise to ensure the most effective training with this product.
Is there an age or size limit for the PST-211 Dog Training System?
Your dog should be old enough to learn basic commands such as “sit” or “stay” which, depending on the dog, is typically about 6 months old. Sick or feeble dogs should never use this system.
Can I use the training collar to eliminate aggressive behaviour?
No, training collars are not recommended for aggressive dogs. Please contact your local professional trainers for advices.
Is the receiver waterproof?
Yes. The collar receiver is heavy duty and completely waterproof and submersible, specially designed to be worn outdoors day after day without problems.
Big Small Dog Training Remote Collars|Electronic 3 Dogs Training Vibrating Collar Anti-bark AT-216
Big Small Dog Training Remote Collars|Electronic 3 Dogs Training Vibrating Collar Anti-bark AT-216
All at-216 models is here: http://petsuppliesnew.com/psa-216-remote-training-dog-shock-collar
AT-216 2 in 1 Dog training shock collar description
1. A solid 350 meters/400 Yards of range;
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 7 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable beep;
5. CE Approved.
6. 3-dog systems allows you to train 3 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 15-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 7 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable beep;
5. CE Approved.
6. 3-dog systems allows you to train 3 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 15-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
AT-216 dog traning collar has real range of 400 yards , 10 adjustable levels of vibration and ultrasound and progressive shock to make you find a suitable levels to control your dogs. AT-216 is a electric remote traning collar for dogs. AT-216 dog traning collar can be used for control dog bark digging, jumping, running away, chewing and any other habits. The AT-216 collar receiver is waterproof so you have no worries when your dogs play with water or get wet in the rain.
Models For AT-216 Series, 4 Choice
AT-216-350W (Water-resistant receiver, 350M range)
AT-216-350S (Submer sible receiver, 350M range)
AT-216-550W (Water-resistant receiver, 550M range)
AT-216-550S (Submer sible receiver, 550M range)
AT-216 remote control shock collars for dogs FAQ
Is the shock correction safe ?
It is safe when used according to the instructions. It is an unpleasant sensation for the animal, but completely harmless. Always interact with your dog during training by giving verbal cues, reinforcements and praise to ensure the most effective training with this product.
Is there an age or size limit for the AT-216 Dog Training System?
Your dog should be old enough to learn basic commands such as “sit” or “stay” which, depending on the dog, is typically about 6 months old. Sick or feeble dogs should never use this system.
Can I use the training collar to eliminate aggressive behaviour?
No, training collars are not recommended for aggressive dogs. Please contact your local professional trainers for advice.
Is the receiver waterproof?
Yes. The collar receiver is heavy duty and completely waterproof and submersible, specially designed to be worn outdoors day after day without problems.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Revamped Asus PadFone Infinity hybrid packs a more potent one-device punch
Revamped Asus PadFone Infinity hybrid packs a more potent one-device punch
Jared Newman @onejarednewman
It's only been seven months since Asus announced the Padfone Infinity, but a new version of the phone-tablet mash-up is already on the way.
Just like the previous model, the new Padfone Infinity is two devices in one. The 5-inch Android smartphone slides into a 10-inch tablet through a dock on the tablet's back side, with the phone providing all the power for the larger screen.
The new Padfone Infinity packs a 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, versus the 1.7 GHz Snapdragon 600 chip on the original Infinity. Qualcomm has said that the Snapdragon 800 is more power efficient than the Snapdragon 600 while providing faster performance, though Asus hasn't given specifics on battery life for the new Padfone Infinity.
Asus is also cutting down the built-in storage options on the Padfone Infinity, from 32 GB and 64 GB to just 16 GB and 32 GB. To make up for this, Asus has added a microSD card slot to the phone, so users can add a lot more storage on the cheap.
Other specs remain unchanged, Engadget reports. The phone has a 5-inch, 1080p display, 2 GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, NFC, Bluetoooth 4.0, and a 2,400 mAh battery. Asus is shipping the Padfone Infinity with Android 4.2.2, along with some of its own software tweaks such as simpler menus and icons, but the original Infinity should get these software updates as well.
Unfortunately for modular computing fans, Asus has no plans for include a keyboard and trackpad dock, like the one that was available with the original Padfone in 2012. “This was removed due to feedback we had from the original PadFone,” Asus wrote on its Facebook page. “While the concept was good it was too bulky for everyday use hence the removal of the keyboard.”
Engadget reports that the new Padfone Infinity will cost about $640 for the phone alone, plus about $240 for the tablet dock. Keep in mind, however, that not a single U.S. wireless carrier has sold any previous version of the Padfone, ever. It's hard to see how a beefier processor and microSD card slot will change that.
Asus has previously said that it plans to launch a PadFone product in the United States, but not until 2014. For now, the PadFone Infinity remains an interesting tech concept that you can't get stateside.
Jared Newman @onejarednewman
It's only been seven months since Asus announced the Padfone Infinity, but a new version of the phone-tablet mash-up is already on the way.
Just like the previous model, the new Padfone Infinity is two devices in one. The 5-inch Android smartphone slides into a 10-inch tablet through a dock on the tablet's back side, with the phone providing all the power for the larger screen.
The new Padfone Infinity packs a 2.2 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor, versus the 1.7 GHz Snapdragon 600 chip on the original Infinity. Qualcomm has said that the Snapdragon 800 is more power efficient than the Snapdragon 600 while providing faster performance, though Asus hasn't given specifics on battery life for the new Padfone Infinity.
Asus is also cutting down the built-in storage options on the Padfone Infinity, from 32 GB and 64 GB to just 16 GB and 32 GB. To make up for this, Asus has added a microSD card slot to the phone, so users can add a lot more storage on the cheap.
Other specs remain unchanged, Engadget reports. The phone has a 5-inch, 1080p display, 2 GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel rear camera, a 2-megapixel front camera, NFC, Bluetoooth 4.0, and a 2,400 mAh battery. Asus is shipping the Padfone Infinity with Android 4.2.2, along with some of its own software tweaks such as simpler menus and icons, but the original Infinity should get these software updates as well.
Unfortunately for modular computing fans, Asus has no plans for include a keyboard and trackpad dock, like the one that was available with the original Padfone in 2012. “This was removed due to feedback we had from the original PadFone,” Asus wrote on its Facebook page. “While the concept was good it was too bulky for everyday use hence the removal of the keyboard.”
Engadget reports that the new Padfone Infinity will cost about $640 for the phone alone, plus about $240 for the tablet dock. Keep in mind, however, that not a single U.S. wireless carrier has sold any previous version of the Padfone, ever. It's hard to see how a beefier processor and microSD card slot will change that.
Asus has previously said that it plans to launch a PadFone product in the United States, but not until 2014. For now, the PadFone Infinity remains an interesting tech concept that you can't get stateside.
How to build the perfect high-end, high-tech home gym
How to build the perfect high-end, high-tech home gym
Rich Mogull @rmogull
On the list of things you truly need (clean air, water, food, shelter), a gym membership falls pretty far down the line. “Oh, sure,” you may reply, “That’s easy for you to say. It’s just sooo easy to work out at home instead.” And to that my reply is going to be: a) You can put that can of sarcasm right back on the shelf where you found it; and b) It actually is easy to work out at home. Or, at least, it can be.
This is not your living room gym.
Nearly every modern commercial gym is built around the core elements of a cardio area, a weights zone, and a group fitness room. Paying more for your membership adds some amenities such as a pool or three, a yoga room, and live TV on every treadmill, but when you get down to it, there are a million ways to raise your heart rate and lift heavy things—and not all of them require you to shell out $75 or more a month.
Thanks to advances in technology, there has never been a better time to replicate, and improve on, the gym experience at home. We’ll show you how to build the perfect high-tech home gym that’s affordable, space conscious, and—most importantly—easy to use.
Pick a room, any room
Okay, I lied—not any room. Your first step is to pick a room, closet, back patio, or garage space for your gym. Think about what type of activity you’re likely to be doing and what kind of space you have to work with. If you practice yoga, for example, you may prefer a room with hardwood floors. Regardless, you don’t need a ton of space, but make sure you have enough room for any equipment you might need—and enough room to do Tae Bo without smashing a curio cabinet or ceiling light.
Also worth considering: Where are the electrical outlets in the room? Will other furniture or equipment get in the way on a regular basis? Don’t feel you need to cram everything into a single room, either. We keep our treadmill in the bedroom, while nearly everything else goes into a multipurpose room or spare closet.
An Apple TV and/or a Chromecast will help build that home gym
Next? Well, fill that room with a high-def TV connected to either an Apple TV (which can stream from tons of iOS apps), a Chromecast (the cheap option), or a Roku 3 (which has tons of channels and a cool headphone-enabled Wi-Fi remote). An HDTV will keep you motivated, stave off boredom, and help your posture during your workout—since you won’t be staring down, neck cranked, at a small screen.
Treadmills
Fitness centers typically feature rows of relatively standard (and fairly pricey) cardio equipment—treadmills, stationary bikes, elliptical trainers, stair climbers, and rowing machines, all lined up and gleaming. That’s overkill for most people, so we suggest starting with a treadmill and/or a bike trainer, which offer the most technology-integration options and have minimal space requirements.
You can find plenty of durable, high-end treadmills full of extensive technology, but you’ll pay a premium. With a little creativity, you can keep yourself in the $1000 to $1500 range and still meet your workout needs.
The Sole Fitness F80 is a workhorse.
• A workhorse treadmill like the Sole Fitness F63 or F80 is best for serious runners. They include great running decks, powerful motors, and incline options, but have minimal integrated technology—and that’s just fine, because you can add all the technology you need with our suggestions below.
• A technology treadmill like those from NordicTrack and ProForm add iFit connectivity, and even color touchscreens. iFit is an online service that links your treadmill to the Web for tracking and downloading workouts, and synchronizing with your tablet, phone, or computer. You can even run along a Google Maps path, and your treadmill will adjust the incline to map your route.
With treadmills, you get what you pay for. Technology treadmills are best for walkers or low-volume runners since they sacrifice the running deck and horsepower to add gadgets. Alternatively, if you’re flush you could shell out for something like a LifeFitness commercial-grade treadmill and get the best of both worlds.
The Wahoo Fitness Key attached to an iPhone.
Once you’ve got the treadmill taken care of, turn to your tablet or smartphone to beat any display you will ever see in a gym. Use the iFit Running app (iOS, $2) or the Wahoo Fitness Key (which may require a port adapter) along with an ANT+ enabled heart-rate strap and/or a foot pod to measure your metrics. (ANT+ technology is used by a variety of fit-tech hardware and is supported by a ton of apps. See our series on the best fitness technology to see more info on sensors and running apps.)
iFit connects directly to your treadmill to get your real speed and incline, while the Wahoo Fitness Key connects to an ANT+ foot pod to get speed and cadence measurements. They replace the GPS tracking we’ve all come to know and love in our outdoor workouts, allowing us to know exactly how far and fast we are going during our indoor workouts. iFit and Wahoo can send data to external devices, so you aren’t constrained to the little readouts on your treadmill, and you can upload the sessions online and combine that data with the info from your outdoor training sessions.
Amp things up with a video-training app such as Kinomap Fitness or Virtual Active. They use Digifit technology to track your pace using the camera on your iOS device and then coordinate that data with streaming video of real runs. DigiFit estimates your speed by tracking you with your device’s front-facing camera. While it isn’t very accurate in terms of your actual pace, it does a good job of understanding when you speed up and slow down, and it can use this info to alter the pace of the scenery passing you by in videos for a more realistic experience.
Meanwhile, Kinomap offers ANT+ sensor support, hundreds of professional and user-created videos all synchronized to real GPS data, and extensive data displays (with a $10 a month subscription). Virtual Active videos are exceptionally high quality, but lack any data display.
Stationary bike
Bike trainers essentially turn your cycle into a stationary bike so that you can pedal it indoors. They take up minimal space and offer a ton of technology options—plus, nearly any bike can work with a trainer (even your beach cruiser), so a secondhand cycle should be good enough.
A Wahoo Kickr road trainer.
Road cyclists should look at the Wahoo Kickr which links to your phone, tablet, or computer via Bluetooth for precise resistance control. The Kickr does, however, require a road bike due to the gearing. Myself, I use a Kurt Kinetic trainer with the inRide power sensor, which connects over Bluetooth but can’t control the resistance—instead, you control the power by changing gears.
InRide uses a magnet and sensor to measure the rotation of your trainer’s resistance wheel and send it to your phone or computer over Bluetooth Low Energy. Since the Kurt Kinetic has a predictable resistance, this speed correlates directly into power to measure the direct force coming out of your legs. Power is a far better tool for measuring workouts than heart rate or wheel speed since it is a true measurement of how hard you are working, regardless of variables like tire pressure, wind resistance, or incline.
Either the Kurt Kinetic or the inRide trainer will work with Kinomap Trainer, the cycling-focused bigger sibling of Kinomap Fitness, and will prompt you (or adjust the resistance) to match the power to your road video, which you can stream to your TV. For $10 a month, TrainerRoad on your Mac or PC ditches the GPS video but offers hundreds of detailed workouts, some synchronized with popular training videos (for real pain, check out the Sufferfest series).
The Kinomap Trainer takes you for a ride.
Training videos can help stave off boredom and, in some case, replicate your real running and racing routes to help you train and prepare. Some even provide real-time feedback or instructional advice so you can improve your form, perform drills, or learn general tips. Some training systems even allow you to compete in real time against friends or strangers on the Internet, just as with multiplayer videogames.
If this sounds like a perfect way to kick up your workouts, just open a browser window to Netflix and then launch TrainerRoad and position it on the bottom of the screen. Now you can manage all your workout data while catching up on the latest episodes of Doctor Who. If you have a Mac, you can use AirPlay to mirror your display to an Apple TV—the bigger screen on your HDTV makes it easier to read TrainerRoad’s data while moving, and a TV may be easier to position for better running or riding posture.
Strength training
No, we aren’t going to suggest you go buy Wi-Fi-enabled free weights...mostly because they don’t exist yet. Incorporating weights into your high-tech gym is a boon because they provide a great workout in a limited space. Resistance bands, adjustable dumbbells, a pull-up bar, and some suspension straps offer endless resistance-training options and all fit on a closet shelf.
iMuscle 2 provides plenty of details on workouts and physiology.
When it comes to tracking your progress or enhancing your weight training, tablet- or phone-based fitness apps are the best way to go (desktop apps are harder to use during a workout). Not only do they provide endless suggestions, but many also have embedded timers and can track your sets and reps. Full Fitness, iMuscle 2, and Fitness Buddy offer a great variety (with different platform options). You can also use any lifting tracking app to record your progress while you play a fitness video on your TV.
Group Fitness
The reason gyms work for so many people is that it’s a lot easier to push yourself harder when you’re situated next to that ripped dude in spin class. A great way to re-create the group fitness experience at home is to add a fitness component to your game console—for example, Wii users can grab a Wii Fit board, and Xbox fans can load up on Kinect fitness games. These options lead you through organized workouts, and the Kinect tracks your movement to keep you in proper form.
Nike+ Kinect Training in action.
For Kinect, Nike+ Kinect Training is the general workout game to beat, closely followed by miCoach by Adidas and Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012. Or try something more specific like Zumba Fitness Rush, or the more game-like Kinect Sports.
If yoga is your sport, unroll that mat and launch a yoga app such as Yoga Studio, All-in Yoga, or Pocket Yoga for endless options, mood music included. If you want to get really fancy, add some Philips Hue color-changing lights to emulate the yoga studio vibe.
For a post-workout massage, try a TriggerPoint Performance roller and hit the company’s website for creative ways of inducing pain but speeding recovery. TriggerPoint provides myofascial release, which is a semi-geeky form of self-massage. It’s not exactly high-tech, but the technique is being shown to really help with post-workout and injury recovery.
What a Wello training session looks like.
If you’re not much of a gamer, then consider Wello, a personal training service that allows you to work out with a group—or one-on-one with a personal trainer—over your laptop for a small fee. Now you can get a group exercise experience anywhere and anytime.
Rich Mogull @rmogull
On the list of things you truly need (clean air, water, food, shelter), a gym membership falls pretty far down the line. “Oh, sure,” you may reply, “That’s easy for you to say. It’s just sooo easy to work out at home instead.” And to that my reply is going to be: a) You can put that can of sarcasm right back on the shelf where you found it; and b) It actually is easy to work out at home. Or, at least, it can be.
This is not your living room gym.
Nearly every modern commercial gym is built around the core elements of a cardio area, a weights zone, and a group fitness room. Paying more for your membership adds some amenities such as a pool or three, a yoga room, and live TV on every treadmill, but when you get down to it, there are a million ways to raise your heart rate and lift heavy things—and not all of them require you to shell out $75 or more a month.
Thanks to advances in technology, there has never been a better time to replicate, and improve on, the gym experience at home. We’ll show you how to build the perfect high-tech home gym that’s affordable, space conscious, and—most importantly—easy to use.
Pick a room, any room
Okay, I lied—not any room. Your first step is to pick a room, closet, back patio, or garage space for your gym. Think about what type of activity you’re likely to be doing and what kind of space you have to work with. If you practice yoga, for example, you may prefer a room with hardwood floors. Regardless, you don’t need a ton of space, but make sure you have enough room for any equipment you might need—and enough room to do Tae Bo without smashing a curio cabinet or ceiling light.
Also worth considering: Where are the electrical outlets in the room? Will other furniture or equipment get in the way on a regular basis? Don’t feel you need to cram everything into a single room, either. We keep our treadmill in the bedroom, while nearly everything else goes into a multipurpose room or spare closet.
An Apple TV and/or a Chromecast will help build that home gym
Next? Well, fill that room with a high-def TV connected to either an Apple TV (which can stream from tons of iOS apps), a Chromecast (the cheap option), or a Roku 3 (which has tons of channels and a cool headphone-enabled Wi-Fi remote). An HDTV will keep you motivated, stave off boredom, and help your posture during your workout—since you won’t be staring down, neck cranked, at a small screen.
Treadmills
Fitness centers typically feature rows of relatively standard (and fairly pricey) cardio equipment—treadmills, stationary bikes, elliptical trainers, stair climbers, and rowing machines, all lined up and gleaming. That’s overkill for most people, so we suggest starting with a treadmill and/or a bike trainer, which offer the most technology-integration options and have minimal space requirements.
You can find plenty of durable, high-end treadmills full of extensive technology, but you’ll pay a premium. With a little creativity, you can keep yourself in the $1000 to $1500 range and still meet your workout needs.
The Sole Fitness F80 is a workhorse.
• A workhorse treadmill like the Sole Fitness F63 or F80 is best for serious runners. They include great running decks, powerful motors, and incline options, but have minimal integrated technology—and that’s just fine, because you can add all the technology you need with our suggestions below.
• A technology treadmill like those from NordicTrack and ProForm add iFit connectivity, and even color touchscreens. iFit is an online service that links your treadmill to the Web for tracking and downloading workouts, and synchronizing with your tablet, phone, or computer. You can even run along a Google Maps path, and your treadmill will adjust the incline to map your route.
With treadmills, you get what you pay for. Technology treadmills are best for walkers or low-volume runners since they sacrifice the running deck and horsepower to add gadgets. Alternatively, if you’re flush you could shell out for something like a LifeFitness commercial-grade treadmill and get the best of both worlds.
The Wahoo Fitness Key attached to an iPhone.
Once you’ve got the treadmill taken care of, turn to your tablet or smartphone to beat any display you will ever see in a gym. Use the iFit Running app (iOS, $2) or the Wahoo Fitness Key (which may require a port adapter) along with an ANT+ enabled heart-rate strap and/or a foot pod to measure your metrics. (ANT+ technology is used by a variety of fit-tech hardware and is supported by a ton of apps. See our series on the best fitness technology to see more info on sensors and running apps.)
iFit connects directly to your treadmill to get your real speed and incline, while the Wahoo Fitness Key connects to an ANT+ foot pod to get speed and cadence measurements. They replace the GPS tracking we’ve all come to know and love in our outdoor workouts, allowing us to know exactly how far and fast we are going during our indoor workouts. iFit and Wahoo can send data to external devices, so you aren’t constrained to the little readouts on your treadmill, and you can upload the sessions online and combine that data with the info from your outdoor training sessions.
Amp things up with a video-training app such as Kinomap Fitness or Virtual Active. They use Digifit technology to track your pace using the camera on your iOS device and then coordinate that data with streaming video of real runs. DigiFit estimates your speed by tracking you with your device’s front-facing camera. While it isn’t very accurate in terms of your actual pace, it does a good job of understanding when you speed up and slow down, and it can use this info to alter the pace of the scenery passing you by in videos for a more realistic experience.
Meanwhile, Kinomap offers ANT+ sensor support, hundreds of professional and user-created videos all synchronized to real GPS data, and extensive data displays (with a $10 a month subscription). Virtual Active videos are exceptionally high quality, but lack any data display.
Stationary bike
Bike trainers essentially turn your cycle into a stationary bike so that you can pedal it indoors. They take up minimal space and offer a ton of technology options—plus, nearly any bike can work with a trainer (even your beach cruiser), so a secondhand cycle should be good enough.
A Wahoo Kickr road trainer.
Road cyclists should look at the Wahoo Kickr which links to your phone, tablet, or computer via Bluetooth for precise resistance control. The Kickr does, however, require a road bike due to the gearing. Myself, I use a Kurt Kinetic trainer with the inRide power sensor, which connects over Bluetooth but can’t control the resistance—instead, you control the power by changing gears.
InRide uses a magnet and sensor to measure the rotation of your trainer’s resistance wheel and send it to your phone or computer over Bluetooth Low Energy. Since the Kurt Kinetic has a predictable resistance, this speed correlates directly into power to measure the direct force coming out of your legs. Power is a far better tool for measuring workouts than heart rate or wheel speed since it is a true measurement of how hard you are working, regardless of variables like tire pressure, wind resistance, or incline.
Either the Kurt Kinetic or the inRide trainer will work with Kinomap Trainer, the cycling-focused bigger sibling of Kinomap Fitness, and will prompt you (or adjust the resistance) to match the power to your road video, which you can stream to your TV. For $10 a month, TrainerRoad on your Mac or PC ditches the GPS video but offers hundreds of detailed workouts, some synchronized with popular training videos (for real pain, check out the Sufferfest series).
The Kinomap Trainer takes you for a ride.
Training videos can help stave off boredom and, in some case, replicate your real running and racing routes to help you train and prepare. Some even provide real-time feedback or instructional advice so you can improve your form, perform drills, or learn general tips. Some training systems even allow you to compete in real time against friends or strangers on the Internet, just as with multiplayer videogames.
If this sounds like a perfect way to kick up your workouts, just open a browser window to Netflix and then launch TrainerRoad and position it on the bottom of the screen. Now you can manage all your workout data while catching up on the latest episodes of Doctor Who. If you have a Mac, you can use AirPlay to mirror your display to an Apple TV—the bigger screen on your HDTV makes it easier to read TrainerRoad’s data while moving, and a TV may be easier to position for better running or riding posture.
Strength training
No, we aren’t going to suggest you go buy Wi-Fi-enabled free weights...mostly because they don’t exist yet. Incorporating weights into your high-tech gym is a boon because they provide a great workout in a limited space. Resistance bands, adjustable dumbbells, a pull-up bar, and some suspension straps offer endless resistance-training options and all fit on a closet shelf.
iMuscle 2 provides plenty of details on workouts and physiology.
When it comes to tracking your progress or enhancing your weight training, tablet- or phone-based fitness apps are the best way to go (desktop apps are harder to use during a workout). Not only do they provide endless suggestions, but many also have embedded timers and can track your sets and reps. Full Fitness, iMuscle 2, and Fitness Buddy offer a great variety (with different platform options). You can also use any lifting tracking app to record your progress while you play a fitness video on your TV.
Group Fitness
The reason gyms work for so many people is that it’s a lot easier to push yourself harder when you’re situated next to that ripped dude in spin class. A great way to re-create the group fitness experience at home is to add a fitness component to your game console—for example, Wii users can grab a Wii Fit board, and Xbox fans can load up on Kinect fitness games. These options lead you through organized workouts, and the Kinect tracks your movement to keep you in proper form.
Nike+ Kinect Training in action.
For Kinect, Nike+ Kinect Training is the general workout game to beat, closely followed by miCoach by Adidas and Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012. Or try something more specific like Zumba Fitness Rush, or the more game-like Kinect Sports.
If yoga is your sport, unroll that mat and launch a yoga app such as Yoga Studio, All-in Yoga, or Pocket Yoga for endless options, mood music included. If you want to get really fancy, add some Philips Hue color-changing lights to emulate the yoga studio vibe.
For a post-workout massage, try a TriggerPoint Performance roller and hit the company’s website for creative ways of inducing pain but speeding recovery. TriggerPoint provides myofascial release, which is a semi-geeky form of self-massage. It’s not exactly high-tech, but the technique is being shown to really help with post-workout and injury recovery.
What a Wello training session looks like.
If you’re not much of a gamer, then consider Wello, a personal training service that allows you to work out with a group—or one-on-one with a personal trainer—over your laptop for a small fee. Now you can get a group exercise experience anywhere and anytime.
Speech recognition, the new PC power tool
Speech recognition, the new PC power tool
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal @geeklil
The Siri effect is spreading. Starting this fall, Nuance, a company that makes advanced speech recognition and transcription software, will bundle its Dragon Assistant, a Siri-like, vocal sidekick, with select Intel-powered Ultrabooks and All-in-One desktops.
Dragon Assistant could change how people use speech recognition in everyday computing. Even if you’re a good typist, speech recognition can enhance your productivity by letting you handle everything from basic commands to emails without touching the keyboard.
My husband was an early and unexpected convert. In 2010, he had surgery on his left shoulder and was unable to use his left hand for a couple of months. His company bought him a copy of Dragon Dictate. He liked it so much that he still uses it today, long after his shoulder healed. He says it makes him faster and more productive (and he already types, on average, 130 words per minute), and it’s also easier for him to work in non-traditional environments, such as in the car or outside by the pool.
Everyone worries about the training time—and there is some of that—but it varies from product to product. Choosing the right program will ensure that the benefits are worth the investment. These tips will help you get the most out of Nuance’s speech recognition programs, whether you’re using the traditional desktop program, the mobile app, or the new, Ultrabook-bundled Dragon Assistant.
Dealing with Dragon
PC users have four Dragon products available. Dragon Home ($75) is for basic users—people who are looking to write emails, school papers, and grocery lists, and use basic voice commands to control their computer. The $150 Dragon Premium adds support for working in spreadsheets and presentations, while the $600 Dragon Professional adds advanced custom commands and transcription tools. The $800 Dragon Legal includes everything in Dragon Professional, along with preloaded legal terms and the ability to automatically format legal citations.
Haswell tabletPCWORLD (US)
Intel’s reference design for the sort of Haswell-based Ultrabooks now shipping with Dragon Assistant built in, as shown at CES 2013.
Nuance’s newest offering, Dragon Assistant, works more like Nuance’s mobile apps, like Dragon Mobile Assistant for Android and Dragon Dictation for iOS—it’s a verbal gofer, rather than a dictation app. According to Sarah Gaeta, vice president and general manager of the Dragon Desktop department at Nuance, anything beyond very quick email replies is better done with Nuance’s more advanced products.
How to train your Dragon
According to Gaeta, there’s no substitute for spending some quality time training your Dragon program of choice. Unlike Siri, Dragon software is designed to “learn” your voice as you use it, so it can better respond to your commands and dictation. The more you use Dragon, the more accurately it recognizes your accent, how you pronounce different vowels, the cadence of your speech, and any vocal quirks. Dragon stores that information in your personal profile, and it can store profiles on multiple people so they can all use Dragon on one computer.
Set up your own profile in Dragon and use it for a few hours so the software can learn your unique speech patterns and vocal mannerisms.
Take a few hours to use it as much as possible: dictating short emails, practicing voice commands, or even just speaking to the program like you would to another human being. According to Gaeta, Dragon Assistant requires about 30 minutes, while initially training Dragon Dictate or Dragon NaturallySpeaking might take two to three hours.
It’s best to do this initial training in a quiet room, so Dragon can learn your voice and, more importantly, learn what isn’t your voice. Once you train your Dragon, you’ll be able to dictate to your PC in a noisy coffee shop, and it will pick up only the words you say, ignoring the loud, oversharing couple behind.
Speak slowly and clearly
If you want Dragon to understand you, speak slowly and enunciate clearly. “This sounds like common sense, but it’s not,” Gaeta says. “It’s crazy; we put someone in a room with a microphone and they feel like they’re performing. They get nervous and speak way too quickly.”
Dragon software will walk you through a few simple tutorials that will train you to speak slower and more clearly, which will improve your productivity when using Dragon products (as well as your real-life conversation skills.)
Learning to speak slowly and enunciate is more challenging than it sounds. There’s a reason that people take public speaking lessons, and while I wouldn’t recommend doing that just for the sake of improving your productivity, a few great, free speech tutorials on YouTube will help you spiff up your speech patterns. Speaking clearly also makes a difference with Dragon Assistant.
Speak in full sentences
Working with speech recognition software is ultimately faster than typing, but it won’t feel that way at first. When you’re typing, you’re probably not thinking through entire sentences before you type them. There’s no reason for you to have a properly formulated sentence in your head when you start writing—you have plenty of time to perfect it while you type.
If Dragon fails to accurately determine which word you meant to write, you can use the built-in voice commands to correct the error and Dragon will learn from the mistake.
You can’t just say one word at a time as you speak a sentence, though—whether to a real person or to Dragon software. Dragon uses context to determine which words you’re saying, so it needs full sentences to be able to distinguish whether you mean you’re or your, or they’re, their, or there.
Luckily, you have some help: In the desktop clients (Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Dragon Dictate for Mac), you can use the keyboard alongside the voice dictation. You do have to be aware of when you’re using the keyboard, though, because basic commands (such as “scratch that” to erase the words you just said) won’t work for typed text.
Use Dragon for the right tasks
The traditional Dragon programs are most useful for email, or email-like tasks, because spoken English is so different from written English—many things that can be said cannot be written, and vice versa. For example, it’s acceptable to say, “I got this from the restaurant we ate at last night,” but you’d have to write “I got this from the restaurant at which we ate last night.” Likewise, writing “My brother, an athletic director, lives in Tokyo,” looks better than if you said conversationally, “My brother’s an athletic director who lives in Tokyo.”
SOFTPEDIA
Dragon Professional includes a streamlined transcription module that’s built for writing long-form articles and essays.
Because spoken and written English are so different, native speakers will find that Dragon is better suited to writing that mimics spoken language. So you’ll be able to fly through tasks such as note-taking and emails, but you’ll find it much more difficult to dictate formal or creative writing. Both Dragon Professional and Dragon Legal include a transcription agent module that makes recording and revising such writing much easier.
Dragon Assistant is useful for more basic tasks, such as Web searches, social network status updates, and writing short, quick emails. Like Siri, Dragon Assistant accepts natural-language prompts. For example, you can say “What’s the weather like today?” instead of “Weather in San Jose on September 10.” Nuance’s other Dragon programs don’t yet accept natural-language prompts—you’ll have to learn their built-in commands—but Gaeta says it’s coming soon.
Hack your typing
Even the speediest typist can benefit from Dragon software by learning to use it in situations when accessing a full QWERTY keyboard is impractical. I type about 125 words per minute when I’m at my desk, but when my hands are otherwise occupied—eating, getting ready for work—or when I’m in a bumpy car ride or similar situation that makes typing difficult, it’s nice to know that I can still get some work done.
Just remember that Dragon is a tool, not a crutch; Nuance may be trying to build software that loves you, but it’s not going to do your homework for you (yet). Proofread and double-check all Dragon-dictated documents before sending them out.
Sarah Jacobsson Purewal @geeklil
The Siri effect is spreading. Starting this fall, Nuance, a company that makes advanced speech recognition and transcription software, will bundle its Dragon Assistant, a Siri-like, vocal sidekick, with select Intel-powered Ultrabooks and All-in-One desktops.
Dragon Assistant could change how people use speech recognition in everyday computing. Even if you’re a good typist, speech recognition can enhance your productivity by letting you handle everything from basic commands to emails without touching the keyboard.
My husband was an early and unexpected convert. In 2010, he had surgery on his left shoulder and was unable to use his left hand for a couple of months. His company bought him a copy of Dragon Dictate. He liked it so much that he still uses it today, long after his shoulder healed. He says it makes him faster and more productive (and he already types, on average, 130 words per minute), and it’s also easier for him to work in non-traditional environments, such as in the car or outside by the pool.
Everyone worries about the training time—and there is some of that—but it varies from product to product. Choosing the right program will ensure that the benefits are worth the investment. These tips will help you get the most out of Nuance’s speech recognition programs, whether you’re using the traditional desktop program, the mobile app, or the new, Ultrabook-bundled Dragon Assistant.
Dealing with Dragon
PC users have four Dragon products available. Dragon Home ($75) is for basic users—people who are looking to write emails, school papers, and grocery lists, and use basic voice commands to control their computer. The $150 Dragon Premium adds support for working in spreadsheets and presentations, while the $600 Dragon Professional adds advanced custom commands and transcription tools. The $800 Dragon Legal includes everything in Dragon Professional, along with preloaded legal terms and the ability to automatically format legal citations.
Haswell tabletPCWORLD (US)
Intel’s reference design for the sort of Haswell-based Ultrabooks now shipping with Dragon Assistant built in, as shown at CES 2013.
Nuance’s newest offering, Dragon Assistant, works more like Nuance’s mobile apps, like Dragon Mobile Assistant for Android and Dragon Dictation for iOS—it’s a verbal gofer, rather than a dictation app. According to Sarah Gaeta, vice president and general manager of the Dragon Desktop department at Nuance, anything beyond very quick email replies is better done with Nuance’s more advanced products.
How to train your Dragon
According to Gaeta, there’s no substitute for spending some quality time training your Dragon program of choice. Unlike Siri, Dragon software is designed to “learn” your voice as you use it, so it can better respond to your commands and dictation. The more you use Dragon, the more accurately it recognizes your accent, how you pronounce different vowels, the cadence of your speech, and any vocal quirks. Dragon stores that information in your personal profile, and it can store profiles on multiple people so they can all use Dragon on one computer.
Set up your own profile in Dragon and use it for a few hours so the software can learn your unique speech patterns and vocal mannerisms.
Take a few hours to use it as much as possible: dictating short emails, practicing voice commands, or even just speaking to the program like you would to another human being. According to Gaeta, Dragon Assistant requires about 30 minutes, while initially training Dragon Dictate or Dragon NaturallySpeaking might take two to three hours.
It’s best to do this initial training in a quiet room, so Dragon can learn your voice and, more importantly, learn what isn’t your voice. Once you train your Dragon, you’ll be able to dictate to your PC in a noisy coffee shop, and it will pick up only the words you say, ignoring the loud, oversharing couple behind.
Speak slowly and clearly
If you want Dragon to understand you, speak slowly and enunciate clearly. “This sounds like common sense, but it’s not,” Gaeta says. “It’s crazy; we put someone in a room with a microphone and they feel like they’re performing. They get nervous and speak way too quickly.”
Dragon software will walk you through a few simple tutorials that will train you to speak slower and more clearly, which will improve your productivity when using Dragon products (as well as your real-life conversation skills.)
Learning to speak slowly and enunciate is more challenging than it sounds. There’s a reason that people take public speaking lessons, and while I wouldn’t recommend doing that just for the sake of improving your productivity, a few great, free speech tutorials on YouTube will help you spiff up your speech patterns. Speaking clearly also makes a difference with Dragon Assistant.
Speak in full sentences
Working with speech recognition software is ultimately faster than typing, but it won’t feel that way at first. When you’re typing, you’re probably not thinking through entire sentences before you type them. There’s no reason for you to have a properly formulated sentence in your head when you start writing—you have plenty of time to perfect it while you type.
If Dragon fails to accurately determine which word you meant to write, you can use the built-in voice commands to correct the error and Dragon will learn from the mistake.
You can’t just say one word at a time as you speak a sentence, though—whether to a real person or to Dragon software. Dragon uses context to determine which words you’re saying, so it needs full sentences to be able to distinguish whether you mean you’re or your, or they’re, their, or there.
Luckily, you have some help: In the desktop clients (Dragon NaturallySpeaking and Dragon Dictate for Mac), you can use the keyboard alongside the voice dictation. You do have to be aware of when you’re using the keyboard, though, because basic commands (such as “scratch that” to erase the words you just said) won’t work for typed text.
Use Dragon for the right tasks
The traditional Dragon programs are most useful for email, or email-like tasks, because spoken English is so different from written English—many things that can be said cannot be written, and vice versa. For example, it’s acceptable to say, “I got this from the restaurant we ate at last night,” but you’d have to write “I got this from the restaurant at which we ate last night.” Likewise, writing “My brother, an athletic director, lives in Tokyo,” looks better than if you said conversationally, “My brother’s an athletic director who lives in Tokyo.”
SOFTPEDIA
Dragon Professional includes a streamlined transcription module that’s built for writing long-form articles and essays.
Because spoken and written English are so different, native speakers will find that Dragon is better suited to writing that mimics spoken language. So you’ll be able to fly through tasks such as note-taking and emails, but you’ll find it much more difficult to dictate formal or creative writing. Both Dragon Professional and Dragon Legal include a transcription agent module that makes recording and revising such writing much easier.
Dragon Assistant is useful for more basic tasks, such as Web searches, social network status updates, and writing short, quick emails. Like Siri, Dragon Assistant accepts natural-language prompts. For example, you can say “What’s the weather like today?” instead of “Weather in San Jose on September 10.” Nuance’s other Dragon programs don’t yet accept natural-language prompts—you’ll have to learn their built-in commands—but Gaeta says it’s coming soon.
Hack your typing
Even the speediest typist can benefit from Dragon software by learning to use it in situations when accessing a full QWERTY keyboard is impractical. I type about 125 words per minute when I’m at my desk, but when my hands are otherwise occupied—eating, getting ready for work—or when I’m in a bumpy car ride or similar situation that makes typing difficult, it’s nice to know that I can still get some work done.
Just remember that Dragon is a tool, not a crutch; Nuance may be trying to build software that loves you, but it’s not going to do your homework for you (yet). Proofread and double-check all Dragon-dictated documents before sending them out.
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Monday, September 16, 2013
Linux gets a boost from mobile
Linux gets a boost from mobile
Joab Jackson @Joab_Jackson
Although not originally designed for telephones or tablets, the Linux kernel is now getting more contributions than ever from mobile and portable device vendors, whose input is driving a heretofore unseen rate of development for the open source project.
“You see this tremendous acceleration of code happening due to an incredibly broad device enablement,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, referring to how makers of tablets, smartphones, wearable computers and sensor devices are all using the kernel.
“Nobody is making anything these days without Linux, unless your name is Microsoft, Apple, or BlackBerry,” Zemlin said.
Collectively, the mobile-focused Linaro, Samsung and Texas Instruments increased their collective contributions to the kernel in the past year, to 11 percent of all contributions, up from 4.4 percent the year before according to Linux Foundation’s latest yearly report on who contributes to the Linux kernel.
Google, historically a strong contributor, also provided significantly more changes to Linux this year as well, thanks in part to the Google’s Android operating system, which uses the kernel.
The report “Who Writes Linux” details who works on the Linux kernel, which the Linux Foundation calls the largest collaborative project in the history of computing.
The report covers development focused on the work done between Linux 3.3, released in March 2012, and 3.10, finished in June. More than 1,100 developers from 225 companies contributed to the kernel in this time period.
Linux is developed on a community model, in which developers and companies voluntarily contribute changes to the kernel, still overseen by its creator Linux Torvalds. Linux itself is not an operating system, though can be used as a the core of one.
The rate of contributions is increasing, according to the foundation. On average, 7.14 changes are now made to the kernel each hour, or about 171 changes every day.
Zemlin attributes this acceleration of growth to the growing diversity of hardware devices that are being developed, from tablets to smart sensors. Manufacturers are using Linux as the basis of their own software, rather than developing a operating system kernel from scratch. In turn, many will contribute their own enhancements and corrections to the kernel, in order not to have to maintain their own version of Linux.
Red Hat, Intel, Texas Instruments, Linaro, Suse, IBM, Samsung and Google were the top contributors to the kernel is this time period, determined by the number of their contributions. Microsoft, which previously appeared on the list of top contributors thanks to its work on preparing Linux for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization environment, has dropped from the list entirely this year.
The Foundation released the paper on Monday, in conjunction with the annual LinuxCon conference, being held this week in New Orleans.
Joab Jackson @Joab_Jackson
Although not originally designed for telephones or tablets, the Linux kernel is now getting more contributions than ever from mobile and portable device vendors, whose input is driving a heretofore unseen rate of development for the open source project.
“You see this tremendous acceleration of code happening due to an incredibly broad device enablement,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, referring to how makers of tablets, smartphones, wearable computers and sensor devices are all using the kernel.
“Nobody is making anything these days without Linux, unless your name is Microsoft, Apple, or BlackBerry,” Zemlin said.
Collectively, the mobile-focused Linaro, Samsung and Texas Instruments increased their collective contributions to the kernel in the past year, to 11 percent of all contributions, up from 4.4 percent the year before according to Linux Foundation’s latest yearly report on who contributes to the Linux kernel.
Google, historically a strong contributor, also provided significantly more changes to Linux this year as well, thanks in part to the Google’s Android operating system, which uses the kernel.
The report “Who Writes Linux” details who works on the Linux kernel, which the Linux Foundation calls the largest collaborative project in the history of computing.
The report covers development focused on the work done between Linux 3.3, released in March 2012, and 3.10, finished in June. More than 1,100 developers from 225 companies contributed to the kernel in this time period.
Linux is developed on a community model, in which developers and companies voluntarily contribute changes to the kernel, still overseen by its creator Linux Torvalds. Linux itself is not an operating system, though can be used as a the core of one.
The rate of contributions is increasing, according to the foundation. On average, 7.14 changes are now made to the kernel each hour, or about 171 changes every day.
Zemlin attributes this acceleration of growth to the growing diversity of hardware devices that are being developed, from tablets to smart sensors. Manufacturers are using Linux as the basis of their own software, rather than developing a operating system kernel from scratch. In turn, many will contribute their own enhancements and corrections to the kernel, in order not to have to maintain their own version of Linux.
Red Hat, Intel, Texas Instruments, Linaro, Suse, IBM, Samsung and Google were the top contributors to the kernel is this time period, determined by the number of their contributions. Microsoft, which previously appeared on the list of top contributors thanks to its work on preparing Linux for Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization environment, has dropped from the list entirely this year.
The Foundation released the paper on Monday, in conjunction with the annual LinuxCon conference, being held this week in New Orleans.
Google buys Bump for smoother file sharing
Google buys Bump for smoother file sharing
Jared Newman @onejarednewman
Android, Chrome, and maybe even the iPhone could get a jolt in the file sharing department with Google's acquisition of Bump, which was announced Monday.
Bump's mobile apps and website allow users to wirelessly transfer files, photos, and contact information between any two devices. With the app open, users can simply bump two phones or tablets together, or press one device against the space bar on a PC keyboard after navigating to the Bump website.
Instead of relying on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or NFC, Bump simply sends files to a server in the cloud, and uses an algorithm to pair with the second device, which downloads the files. It seems that Google was interested in this simplified approach to sharing information.
“We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms,” Bump CEO and co-founder David Lieb wrote in a blog post. “So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief that the application of computing to difficult problems can fundamentally change the way that we interact with one another and the world.”
Is the end nigh for NFC?
Google has tried to build easier file transfers into Android using NFC with a feature called Android Beam, but this approach has several drawbacks. To begin with, it requires both devices to have NFC, which rules out most laptops, desktops, and Apple's iPhone. Even when both devices are equipped with NFC, users must have it turned on—not a given—and must precisely align their two phones to initiate the transfer. It's a hassle.
Meanwhile, Apple is promising seamless file transfers with AirDrop, the company's own method of sending files over Wi-Fi. AirDrop came to Mac in 2011 and will soon be available in iOS 7. The time is right for Google to acknowledge NFC's failings and come up with a smarter way to wirelessly transfer files. It's not hard to imagine Bump providing the backbone for cross-platform file sharing not just for Android and Chrome, but also for iOS devices.
Bump also offers another app called Flock that lets people combine photos from multiple devices into shared photo albums, using location and other metadata to automatically sort each photo. This feature could be a good fit for Google+, which already offers event-based photo sharing.
For now, Bump and Flock are sticking around as standalone apps. How long this will last is unclear, as Lieb wrote to “stay tuned for future updates.”
Jared Newman @onejarednewman
Android, Chrome, and maybe even the iPhone could get a jolt in the file sharing department with Google's acquisition of Bump, which was announced Monday.
Bump's mobile apps and website allow users to wirelessly transfer files, photos, and contact information between any two devices. With the app open, users can simply bump two phones or tablets together, or press one device against the space bar on a PC keyboard after navigating to the Bump website.
Instead of relying on Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or NFC, Bump simply sends files to a server in the cloud, and uses an algorithm to pair with the second device, which downloads the files. It seems that Google was interested in this simplified approach to sharing information.
“We strive to create experiences that feel like magic, enabled behind the scene with innovations in math, data processing, and algorithms,” Bump CEO and co-founder David Lieb wrote in a blog post. “So we couldn’t be more thrilled to join Google, a company that shares our belief that the application of computing to difficult problems can fundamentally change the way that we interact with one another and the world.”
Is the end nigh for NFC?
Google has tried to build easier file transfers into Android using NFC with a feature called Android Beam, but this approach has several drawbacks. To begin with, it requires both devices to have NFC, which rules out most laptops, desktops, and Apple's iPhone. Even when both devices are equipped with NFC, users must have it turned on—not a given—and must precisely align their two phones to initiate the transfer. It's a hassle.
Meanwhile, Apple is promising seamless file transfers with AirDrop, the company's own method of sending files over Wi-Fi. AirDrop came to Mac in 2011 and will soon be available in iOS 7. The time is right for Google to acknowledge NFC's failings and come up with a smarter way to wirelessly transfer files. It's not hard to imagine Bump providing the backbone for cross-platform file sharing not just for Android and Chrome, but also for iOS devices.
Bump also offers another app called Flock that lets people combine photos from multiple devices into shared photo albums, using location and other metadata to automatically sort each photo. This feature could be a good fit for Google+, which already offers event-based photo sharing.
For now, Bump and Flock are sticking around as standalone apps. How long this will last is unclear, as Lieb wrote to “stay tuned for future updates.”
How to protect your PC against devious security traps
How to protect your PC against devious security traps
Brad Chacos @BradChacos
Securing your PC against the malicious wilds of the Web isn’t as simple as just keeping your antivirus software of choice up-to-date. In fact, the pervasiveness of security software has forced the bad guys to turn to increasingly clever tricks in their quest to “pwn” your PC.
But fear not! Those sneaky tricks are most effective if victims are unaware of the danger. And today, dear reader, I’m going to show you how to avoid the most devious PC security traps, because in this case knowing is more than half the battle.
Phishing
Let’s start with the devious attack you’re most likely to encounter during your day-to-day computing.
Phishing websites mimic the look of another site in an attempt to lure you into entering your personal and account information. Although phishing websites take all forms, attackers especially like to spoof banks and social networks. Phishing attacks typically threaten from two angles: mistyped website URLs and email messages that pretend to be from legitimate sources.
One simple tell gives away a phishing site: The URL doesn’t match the URL of the website you think it is. If Facebokk.com, Faceb00k.com, or Facenook.com asks for your Facebook login, run away screaming. (Or at least do the digital equivalent.) I can’t stress this enough: Give the URL of any website that asks you to log in a close examination before you pass out your password.
Beyond that, most social media and banking websites use HTTPS encryption by default. If the site that you’re on doesn’t have the lock icon next to its URL in your browser, that’s a good sign that something is afoot.
The big three browsers—Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox—all include safe-browsing warning systems that clue you in to suspected phishing and malware sites, while browser plug-ins such as Web of Trust and McAfee’s Site Advisor can provide an extra layer of protection.
Scammers and hackers love email. All too often, tales of hacked Twitter accounts and Web servers can be traced back to the same origin: “A member of the team opened a malicious email message.”
Okay, that’s not quite true. In most cases, merely opening a piece of email won’t send your world crashing down. You have to click a malicious link or open a tainted email attachment. The solution? Be wary of clicking emailed links, and don’t open attachments without ensuring their cleanliness first.
That goes doubly so for email purporting to be from banking sites, PayPal, social media, or any other site to which you need to log in; often such messages are phishing attempts. (Yes, the bad guys can fake email addresses.) Instead, open your browser and navigate to the site in question directly. Email providers and programs often flag suspicious email, but their detection systems aren’t bulletproof.
Many premium antivirus tools automatically scan email attachments for malware, but you still want to download attachments and scan them manually before opening them, just to be safe.
Though not all malicious email messages originate from foreign lands and contain spelling and grammar mistakes, many do. If you receive an error-ridden missive claiming to come from an official source, be on guard.
Fake update or error warnings
By now you’re likely aware of adware, the annoying form of malware that inundates you with a flood of ads or scary messages that promise to disappear for a fee. You can eradicate such nuisances with antivirus tools, but that isn’t the case for a similar strain of invaders that try to coax you into installing malware while you surf the Net.
These shifty sites and ads pop up boxes disguised as permission requests to update your browser, or claim that you need to download the latest version of the software to run a feature on the page. Clicking any button—often, even the Decline button—gives the attacker authority to run code on your machine, or brings you to a fake download page to install malware disguised as Flash or QuickTime or whatever. Pwned.
Side-stepping these landmines is fairly simple: If a website prompts you to update your software, manually surf to that software’s website and look for updates there, rather than clicking the update pop-up. Don’t click any buttons on the pop-ups, either; close the tab or window completely, or reload the page after you’ve installed the update via official channels.
Other drive-by downloads
Such fake updates and malicious “warnings” are part of a larger trend toward “drive-by downloads,” or attacks designed to infect your computer stealthily by exploiting vulnerabilities in software.
Again, the basics for avoiding such attacks are fairly simple. Keep security and antivirus software active on your machine—but just as important, make sure that your PC and its other applications are current. Stay on top of Windows Update (Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Update), or just set it to install new updates automatically. Use Secunia PSI to automate updates for the rest of your programs: This superb software works in the background to look for new patches, applying updates automatically if possible, or prompting you to install them manually otherwise.
If you want to reduce the chances of running into fake update/error requests, you could use a plug-in such as NoScript to block JavaScript in your browser. Doing so breaks many feature-rich aspects of the Web, but you can whitelist sites you trust. Disabling the oft-targeted Java reduces your risk, too. I uninstalled Java and other popular, frequently attacked programs recently, and discovered it wasn’t a headache whatsoever.
Also consider activating Internet Explorer’s ActiveX Filtering, which blocks all ActiveX content by default. ActiveX is a frequent attack vector for hackers. To turn on the filtering in IE 9 and IE 10, open the Tools menu, hover over the Safety submenu, and click ActiveX Filtering when the Safety options appear.
The aforementioned Web of Trust and Site Advisor plug-ins can raise a flag when you’re on a known attack site, but drive-by downloads have appeared in malicious ads on legitimate websites in the past. Stay patched and stay protected.
Zero-day attacks
Zero-day attacks exploit newly discovered, unpatched vulnerabilities to compromise your system. You can’t do much about these other than following the tips above. The truly paranoid could lock down all the various security options in their browsers—setting Internet Explorer’s security level to High, for example—but to be honest, that’s probably overkill.
If you’re worried about cutting-edge malware, consider running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free periodically, or whenever something raises suspicion. It’s designed specifically to identify zero-day attacks, but it doesn’t try to block more common exploits, so you’ll want to use Malwarebytes to supplement your regular antimalware protection.
OMG hax
Direct attacks by port-sniffing hackers aren’t really common, but you can nevertheless protect against such tactics by enabling some sort of firewall. The Windows Firewall tool included in Windows (Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Firewall) works just fine—but it scans only for malicious intrusions.
If you want to keep an eye out for suspicious data flowing forth from your machine—a sign of possible malware infection—then you’ll want a firewall that also sniffs for outbound threats, though such firewalls require a bit more effort to set up properly. ZoneAlarm Free Firewall and Comodo Firewall (32-bit or 64-bit) are two stellar free options; most premium security suites also feature robust firewalls.
More ways to protect your PC
While these tips and tricks greatly decrease the chances of your PC catching a bug, strong security doesn’t end with behavior changes. Check out PCWorld’s security how-to section for scads of in-depth protection tutorials. Want to lock down your laptop for the road, learn how to protect your PC against Prism surveillance, or find some tools for the paranoid? Those items are just the tip of the knowledge iceberg.
Brad Chacos @BradChacos
Securing your PC against the malicious wilds of the Web isn’t as simple as just keeping your antivirus software of choice up-to-date. In fact, the pervasiveness of security software has forced the bad guys to turn to increasingly clever tricks in their quest to “pwn” your PC.
But fear not! Those sneaky tricks are most effective if victims are unaware of the danger. And today, dear reader, I’m going to show you how to avoid the most devious PC security traps, because in this case knowing is more than half the battle.
Phishing
Let’s start with the devious attack you’re most likely to encounter during your day-to-day computing.
Phishing websites mimic the look of another site in an attempt to lure you into entering your personal and account information. Although phishing websites take all forms, attackers especially like to spoof banks and social networks. Phishing attacks typically threaten from two angles: mistyped website URLs and email messages that pretend to be from legitimate sources.
One simple tell gives away a phishing site: The URL doesn’t match the URL of the website you think it is. If Facebokk.com, Faceb00k.com, or Facenook.com asks for your Facebook login, run away screaming. (Or at least do the digital equivalent.) I can’t stress this enough: Give the URL of any website that asks you to log in a close examination before you pass out your password.
Beyond that, most social media and banking websites use HTTPS encryption by default. If the site that you’re on doesn’t have the lock icon next to its URL in your browser, that’s a good sign that something is afoot.
The big three browsers—Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox—all include safe-browsing warning systems that clue you in to suspected phishing and malware sites, while browser plug-ins such as Web of Trust and McAfee’s Site Advisor can provide an extra layer of protection.
Scammers and hackers love email. All too often, tales of hacked Twitter accounts and Web servers can be traced back to the same origin: “A member of the team opened a malicious email message.”
Okay, that’s not quite true. In most cases, merely opening a piece of email won’t send your world crashing down. You have to click a malicious link or open a tainted email attachment. The solution? Be wary of clicking emailed links, and don’t open attachments without ensuring their cleanliness first.
That goes doubly so for email purporting to be from banking sites, PayPal, social media, or any other site to which you need to log in; often such messages are phishing attempts. (Yes, the bad guys can fake email addresses.) Instead, open your browser and navigate to the site in question directly. Email providers and programs often flag suspicious email, but their detection systems aren’t bulletproof.
Many premium antivirus tools automatically scan email attachments for malware, but you still want to download attachments and scan them manually before opening them, just to be safe.
Though not all malicious email messages originate from foreign lands and contain spelling and grammar mistakes, many do. If you receive an error-ridden missive claiming to come from an official source, be on guard.
Fake update or error warnings
By now you’re likely aware of adware, the annoying form of malware that inundates you with a flood of ads or scary messages that promise to disappear for a fee. You can eradicate such nuisances with antivirus tools, but that isn’t the case for a similar strain of invaders that try to coax you into installing malware while you surf the Net.
These shifty sites and ads pop up boxes disguised as permission requests to update your browser, or claim that you need to download the latest version of the software to run a feature on the page. Clicking any button—often, even the Decline button—gives the attacker authority to run code on your machine, or brings you to a fake download page to install malware disguised as Flash or QuickTime or whatever. Pwned.
Side-stepping these landmines is fairly simple: If a website prompts you to update your software, manually surf to that software’s website and look for updates there, rather than clicking the update pop-up. Don’t click any buttons on the pop-ups, either; close the tab or window completely, or reload the page after you’ve installed the update via official channels.
Other drive-by downloads
Such fake updates and malicious “warnings” are part of a larger trend toward “drive-by downloads,” or attacks designed to infect your computer stealthily by exploiting vulnerabilities in software.
Again, the basics for avoiding such attacks are fairly simple. Keep security and antivirus software active on your machine—but just as important, make sure that your PC and its other applications are current. Stay on top of Windows Update (Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Update), or just set it to install new updates automatically. Use Secunia PSI to automate updates for the rest of your programs: This superb software works in the background to look for new patches, applying updates automatically if possible, or prompting you to install them manually otherwise.
If you want to reduce the chances of running into fake update/error requests, you could use a plug-in such as NoScript to block JavaScript in your browser. Doing so breaks many feature-rich aspects of the Web, but you can whitelist sites you trust. Disabling the oft-targeted Java reduces your risk, too. I uninstalled Java and other popular, frequently attacked programs recently, and discovered it wasn’t a headache whatsoever.
Also consider activating Internet Explorer’s ActiveX Filtering, which blocks all ActiveX content by default. ActiveX is a frequent attack vector for hackers. To turn on the filtering in IE 9 and IE 10, open the Tools menu, hover over the Safety submenu, and click ActiveX Filtering when the Safety options appear.
The aforementioned Web of Trust and Site Advisor plug-ins can raise a flag when you’re on a known attack site, but drive-by downloads have appeared in malicious ads on legitimate websites in the past. Stay patched and stay protected.
Zero-day attacks
Zero-day attacks exploit newly discovered, unpatched vulnerabilities to compromise your system. You can’t do much about these other than following the tips above. The truly paranoid could lock down all the various security options in their browsers—setting Internet Explorer’s security level to High, for example—but to be honest, that’s probably overkill.
If you’re worried about cutting-edge malware, consider running Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free periodically, or whenever something raises suspicion. It’s designed specifically to identify zero-day attacks, but it doesn’t try to block more common exploits, so you’ll want to use Malwarebytes to supplement your regular antimalware protection.
OMG hax
Direct attacks by port-sniffing hackers aren’t really common, but you can nevertheless protect against such tactics by enabling some sort of firewall. The Windows Firewall tool included in Windows (Control Panel > System and Security > Windows Firewall) works just fine—but it scans only for malicious intrusions.
If you want to keep an eye out for suspicious data flowing forth from your machine—a sign of possible malware infection—then you’ll want a firewall that also sniffs for outbound threats, though such firewalls require a bit more effort to set up properly. ZoneAlarm Free Firewall and Comodo Firewall (32-bit or 64-bit) are two stellar free options; most premium security suites also feature robust firewalls.
More ways to protect your PC
While these tips and tricks greatly decrease the chances of your PC catching a bug, strong security doesn’t end with behavior changes. Check out PCWorld’s security how-to section for scads of in-depth protection tutorials. Want to lock down your laptop for the road, learn how to protect your PC against Prism surveillance, or find some tools for the paranoid? Those items are just the tip of the knowledge iceberg.
Dog training Shock Collar|PSA-216 Electronic training shock collar for 2dogs
Dog training Shock Collar|PSA-216 Electronic training shock collar for 2dogs
http://petsuppliesnew.com/psa-216-remote-training-dog-shock-collar
PSA-216 2 in 1 Dog training shock collar description
1. A solid 350 meters/400 Yards of range;
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 7 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable beep;
5. CE Approved.
6. 3-dog systems allows you to train 3 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 15-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
PSA-216 dog traning collar has real range of 400 yards , 10 adjustable levels of vibration and ultrasound and progressive shock to make you find a suitable levels to control your dogs.
PSA-216 is a electric remote traning collar for dogs. PSA-216 dog traning collar can be used for control dog bark digging, jumping, running away, chewing and any other habits.
The PSA-216 collar receiver is waterproof so you have no worries when your dogs play with water or get wet in the rain.
PSA-216 remote control shock collars for dogs FAQ
Is the shock correction safe ?
It is safe when used according to the instructions. It is an unpleasant sensation for the animal, but completely harmless. Always interact with your dog during training by giving verbal cues, reinforcements and praise to ensure the most effective training with this product.
Is there an age or size limit for the PSA-216 Dog Training System?
Your dog should be old enough to learn basic commands such as “sit” or “stay” which, depending on the dog, is typically about 6 months old. Sick or feeble dogs should never use this system.
Can I use the training collar to eliminate aggressive behaviour?
No, training collars are not recommended for aggressive dogs. Please contact your local professional trainers for advice.
Is the receiver waterproof?
Yes. The collar receiver is heavy duty and completely waterproof and submersible, specially designed to be worn outdoors day after day without problems.
Via: http://petsuppliesnew.com
http://petsuppliesnew.com/psa-216-remote-training-dog-shock-collar
PSA-216 2 in 1 Dog training shock collar description
1. A solid 350 meters/400 Yards of range;
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 7 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable beep;
5. CE Approved.
6. 3-dog systems allows you to train 3 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 15-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
PSA-216 dog traning collar has real range of 400 yards , 10 adjustable levels of vibration and ultrasound and progressive shock to make you find a suitable levels to control your dogs.
PSA-216 is a electric remote traning collar for dogs. PSA-216 dog traning collar can be used for control dog bark digging, jumping, running away, chewing and any other habits.
The PSA-216 collar receiver is waterproof so you have no worries when your dogs play with water or get wet in the rain.
PSA-216 remote control shock collars for dogs FAQ
Is the shock correction safe ?
It is safe when used according to the instructions. It is an unpleasant sensation for the animal, but completely harmless. Always interact with your dog during training by giving verbal cues, reinforcements and praise to ensure the most effective training with this product.
Is there an age or size limit for the PSA-216 Dog Training System?
Your dog should be old enough to learn basic commands such as “sit” or “stay” which, depending on the dog, is typically about 6 months old. Sick or feeble dogs should never use this system.
Can I use the training collar to eliminate aggressive behaviour?
No, training collars are not recommended for aggressive dogs. Please contact your local professional trainers for advice.
Is the receiver waterproof?
Yes. The collar receiver is heavy duty and completely waterproof and submersible, specially designed to be worn outdoors day after day without problems.
Via: http://petsuppliesnew.com
Rightmove triples forecast for UK house price rises
Rightmove triples forecast for UK house price rises
By Jessica Winch
Pressure is building on the Government to address fears that a debt-fuelled housing bubble is emerging after Rightmove, a leading UK property website tripled its growth forecast for home prices this year.
Rightmove started the year forecasting that average national asking prices would rise by 2pc over 2013. The property website, which advertises more than 800,000 properties nationwide, now believes prices are set to increase by 6pc, having previously raised its outlook to 4pc in July.
The data reinforce a sense of recovery in the housing market, but will add to growing concerns that a bubble could be forming.
A number of leading figures, including Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, have warned that the rapid increase in the value of property poses a potential risk to the economic recovery, calling into question the Government's plan to extend its Help to Buy initiative.
But the Government is adamant that the housing market is a long way from overheating, and plans to continue with its policy of providing support for first-time buyers.
Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, rebutted concerns in a television interview over the weekend, saying that both the Government and the Bank of England have the means to prevent a property bubble from emerging as a real risk.
Rightmove's updated forecasts follow calls from the influential trade body for estate agents and surveyors, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), which last week urged the Bank of England to limit house price growth to 5pc a year to stop households taking on excessive debt for fear of missing out on a price boom.
The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee will meet on Wednesday, when it will reportedly discuss the issue of a housing bubble and what action it could take.
Asking prices in London are up 8.2pc on a year ago, according to Rightmove, while in the West Midlands they have increased by 6.8pc, in the South East by 5.6pc and in Wales by 3.8pc annually.
The only two regions in England and Wales not to see an annual increase in prices in September were the North, where prices were flat, and Yorkshire and Humberside, which saw a 1.3pc fall. East Anglia saw the smallest annual increase, at 0.8pc.
Prices rose by 1.3pc year-on-year in the South West, by 1.7pc in the North West and by 2.9pc in the East Midlands.
But the property website said that asking prices fell by 1.5pc in September to £245,495 on average, following a 1.8pc drop in August due to a "summer holiday slowdown".
Prices are still 4.5pc higher than this time last year and have increased by £16,000 so far in 2013.
Rightmove director Miles Shipside said some buyers with decent deposits would try to buy a property before Help to Buy, which provides government guarantees for mortgages offered to buyers with small deposits, increases competition from next year.
"As a result, we forecast the national average increase in new seller pricing for the whole of 2013 to be in the region of 6pc, partly driven by the strength of southern markets but increasingly contributed to by the more buoyant areas of the North," he said.
A separate report from the Building Societies Association (BSA) has found that more than 60pc of people now believe house prices will rise in the coming year, the highest proportion since it began collecting the data in 2008.
By Jessica Winch
Pressure is building on the Government to address fears that a debt-fuelled housing bubble is emerging after Rightmove, a leading UK property website tripled its growth forecast for home prices this year.
Rightmove started the year forecasting that average national asking prices would rise by 2pc over 2013. The property website, which advertises more than 800,000 properties nationwide, now believes prices are set to increase by 6pc, having previously raised its outlook to 4pc in July.
The data reinforce a sense of recovery in the housing market, but will add to growing concerns that a bubble could be forming.
A number of leading figures, including Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, have warned that the rapid increase in the value of property poses a potential risk to the economic recovery, calling into question the Government's plan to extend its Help to Buy initiative.
But the Government is adamant that the housing market is a long way from overheating, and plans to continue with its policy of providing support for first-time buyers.
Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, rebutted concerns in a television interview over the weekend, saying that both the Government and the Bank of England have the means to prevent a property bubble from emerging as a real risk.
Rightmove's updated forecasts follow calls from the influential trade body for estate agents and surveyors, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (Rics), which last week urged the Bank of England to limit house price growth to 5pc a year to stop households taking on excessive debt for fear of missing out on a price boom.
The Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee will meet on Wednesday, when it will reportedly discuss the issue of a housing bubble and what action it could take.
Asking prices in London are up 8.2pc on a year ago, according to Rightmove, while in the West Midlands they have increased by 6.8pc, in the South East by 5.6pc and in Wales by 3.8pc annually.
The only two regions in England and Wales not to see an annual increase in prices in September were the North, where prices were flat, and Yorkshire and Humberside, which saw a 1.3pc fall. East Anglia saw the smallest annual increase, at 0.8pc.
Prices rose by 1.3pc year-on-year in the South West, by 1.7pc in the North West and by 2.9pc in the East Midlands.
But the property website said that asking prices fell by 1.5pc in September to £245,495 on average, following a 1.8pc drop in August due to a "summer holiday slowdown".
Prices are still 4.5pc higher than this time last year and have increased by £16,000 so far in 2013.
Rightmove director Miles Shipside said some buyers with decent deposits would try to buy a property before Help to Buy, which provides government guarantees for mortgages offered to buyers with small deposits, increases competition from next year.
"As a result, we forecast the national average increase in new seller pricing for the whole of 2013 to be in the region of 6pc, partly driven by the strength of southern markets but increasingly contributed to by the more buoyant areas of the North," he said.
A separate report from the Building Societies Association (BSA) has found that more than 60pc of people now believe house prices will rise in the coming year, the highest proportion since it began collecting the data in 2008.
Sunday, September 15, 2013
NSA chief shared only part of the story at Black Hat
NSA chief shared only part of the story at Black Hat
Tim Greene @Tim_Greene
When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander addressed the Black Hat conference earlier this year, he painted a rosy picture of how well the agency controls access to its phone record database, but he never brought up cases when those controls broke down, unauthorized access was made, and data was shared among analysts who shouldn't have seen it.
Documents just released by the government say that far from being a well-oiled machine Alexander described to the security conference last month, the so-called business-record metadata gathering program was repeatedly misused, data about activity on certain phone lines was accessed without appropriate authorization and that no single person at the NSA understood the technicalities of the system architecture.
Not only that, the NSA misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about its misuse of the data, according to FISC documents from 2009.
Black Hat message
At Black Hat, Alexander described the measures taken to ensure that call-detail records gathered by the NSA and stockpiled in a database for five years at a time as well guarded and queried only if there is "reasonable actionable suspicion" that a specific phone number was linked to foreign terrorists.
"The database is like a lockbox," Alexander said at the time. "The controls that go on this database are greater than any data repository in government, and the oversight is the same."
The database consists of date and time of calls, calling number or IP address, called number or IP address, duration of calls or length of emails and the origin of the metadata information. The NSA vacuums up this data from service providers on all calls and taps into it only under controlled circumstances or at least that's how it is supposed to work.
FISA court contradicts
But in 2009 the NSA list of phone numbers being checked consisted mostly of numbers that had not met the reasonable actionable suspicion standard, according to a March 2, 2009 order by FISC Judge Reggie B. Walton.
One problem was that for years, nobody at the NSA understood the system in its entirety. "In fact," Walton wrote, "the government acknowledges that, as of August 2006, "there was no single person who had a complete understanding of the BR FISA system architecture.""
One of the NSA's excuses was that it thought the reasonable actionable suspicion rule applied only to data residing in certain NSA databases, not to data rolling in from service providers about calls being made day-to-day. "That interpretation of the Court's Orders strains credulity," Walton wrote. If that interpretation were accurate, it would mean the rule was merely optional, he wrote.
The NSA further argued that this misuse of the database wasn't surprising because that's how data gathered from other sources is handled. That means the root problem was not that there was a misunderstanding between the NSA and the court, but that the NSA decided on its own that the court-approved rules didn't apply, Walton wrote.
In contrast, at Black Hat Alexander said NSA analysts faithfully follow the court's rules about whether phone numbers can be run through the database. "They have to prove that that meets a standard set by the court that this has that counterterrorism nexus with Al Qaeda related groups," he said. "Then and only then is that number added to a list that can be queried."
Claims challenged
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose freedom of information requests forced the release of the court documents, interprets the NSA actions as scouring the database to discover reasonable articulable suspicion about certain phone numbers.
"The NSA decided, independently, that it could run searches on the database to develop the basis for the reasonable articulable suspicion. Hence, the NSA was conducting suspicionless searches for information to obtain the court-required basis to search for that information," the EFF's Kurt Opsahl blogs.
Walton again jumped all over the NSA for distributing query results to 136 NSA analysts who weren't properly trained, according to a September 25, 2009 order. That incident was reported September 21, 2009 and a similar incident was reported two days later by the same Department of Justice attorney.
"The Court is deeply troubled by the incidents described above, which have occurred only a few weeks following the completion of an "end to end review" by the government of NSA's procedures and processes for handling the [business record] metadata, and its submission of a report intended to assure the Court that NSA had addressed and corrected the issues giving rise to the history of serious and widespread compliance problems in this matter and had taken the necessary steps to ensure compliance with the Court's orders going forward," Walton wrote.
Here is Alexander's spin on the end-to-end review as presented at Black Hat: "In 2009 in our discussions with the president when he first came onboard we talked to him about these programs and the issue was how do we know the compliance is there and what more could we do. We stood up working with the committees in Congress a directorate of compliance. This directorate of compliance is headed by legal professionals and information specialists that can look at everything that we do in these programs and ensure they comport with the court orders. But we also have oversight from the director of national intelligence, general counsel and IG from the defense department, from the Department of Justice, from the White House, from Congress—the intel committees—and from the courts. ... Our people have to take courses and pass exams to use this data."
What Alexander said at Black Hat doesn't accurately represent what happened in 2009. It may be a faithful portrayal of how the system works today, but there's no way to tell. "[D]eclassifying 2009 data is helpful, but casts no real light on current activities of the NSA and related agencies," says Dave Jevans, CTO and founder of Marble Security, an enterprise mobile security provider. "This is still a mystery, and is likely to remain so for quite some time."
Tim Greene @Tim_Greene
When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander addressed the Black Hat conference earlier this year, he painted a rosy picture of how well the agency controls access to its phone record database, but he never brought up cases when those controls broke down, unauthorized access was made, and data was shared among analysts who shouldn't have seen it.
Documents just released by the government say that far from being a well-oiled machine Alexander described to the security conference last month, the so-called business-record metadata gathering program was repeatedly misused, data about activity on certain phone lines was accessed without appropriate authorization and that no single person at the NSA understood the technicalities of the system architecture.
Not only that, the NSA misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court about its misuse of the data, according to FISC documents from 2009.
Black Hat message
At Black Hat, Alexander described the measures taken to ensure that call-detail records gathered by the NSA and stockpiled in a database for five years at a time as well guarded and queried only if there is "reasonable actionable suspicion" that a specific phone number was linked to foreign terrorists.
"The database is like a lockbox," Alexander said at the time. "The controls that go on this database are greater than any data repository in government, and the oversight is the same."
The database consists of date and time of calls, calling number or IP address, called number or IP address, duration of calls or length of emails and the origin of the metadata information. The NSA vacuums up this data from service providers on all calls and taps into it only under controlled circumstances or at least that's how it is supposed to work.
FISA court contradicts
But in 2009 the NSA list of phone numbers being checked consisted mostly of numbers that had not met the reasonable actionable suspicion standard, according to a March 2, 2009 order by FISC Judge Reggie B. Walton.
One problem was that for years, nobody at the NSA understood the system in its entirety. "In fact," Walton wrote, "the government acknowledges that, as of August 2006, "there was no single person who had a complete understanding of the BR FISA system architecture.""
One of the NSA's excuses was that it thought the reasonable actionable suspicion rule applied only to data residing in certain NSA databases, not to data rolling in from service providers about calls being made day-to-day. "That interpretation of the Court's Orders strains credulity," Walton wrote. If that interpretation were accurate, it would mean the rule was merely optional, he wrote.
The NSA further argued that this misuse of the database wasn't surprising because that's how data gathered from other sources is handled. That means the root problem was not that there was a misunderstanding between the NSA and the court, but that the NSA decided on its own that the court-approved rules didn't apply, Walton wrote.
In contrast, at Black Hat Alexander said NSA analysts faithfully follow the court's rules about whether phone numbers can be run through the database. "They have to prove that that meets a standard set by the court that this has that counterterrorism nexus with Al Qaeda related groups," he said. "Then and only then is that number added to a list that can be queried."
Claims challenged
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose freedom of information requests forced the release of the court documents, interprets the NSA actions as scouring the database to discover reasonable articulable suspicion about certain phone numbers.
"The NSA decided, independently, that it could run searches on the database to develop the basis for the reasonable articulable suspicion. Hence, the NSA was conducting suspicionless searches for information to obtain the court-required basis to search for that information," the EFF's Kurt Opsahl blogs.
Walton again jumped all over the NSA for distributing query results to 136 NSA analysts who weren't properly trained, according to a September 25, 2009 order. That incident was reported September 21, 2009 and a similar incident was reported two days later by the same Department of Justice attorney.
"The Court is deeply troubled by the incidents described above, which have occurred only a few weeks following the completion of an "end to end review" by the government of NSA's procedures and processes for handling the [business record] metadata, and its submission of a report intended to assure the Court that NSA had addressed and corrected the issues giving rise to the history of serious and widespread compliance problems in this matter and had taken the necessary steps to ensure compliance with the Court's orders going forward," Walton wrote.
Here is Alexander's spin on the end-to-end review as presented at Black Hat: "In 2009 in our discussions with the president when he first came onboard we talked to him about these programs and the issue was how do we know the compliance is there and what more could we do. We stood up working with the committees in Congress a directorate of compliance. This directorate of compliance is headed by legal professionals and information specialists that can look at everything that we do in these programs and ensure they comport with the court orders. But we also have oversight from the director of national intelligence, general counsel and IG from the defense department, from the Department of Justice, from the White House, from Congress—the intel committees—and from the courts. ... Our people have to take courses and pass exams to use this data."
What Alexander said at Black Hat doesn't accurately represent what happened in 2009. It may be a faithful portrayal of how the system works today, but there's no way to tell. "[D]eclassifying 2009 data is helpful, but casts no real light on current activities of the NSA and related agencies," says Dave Jevans, CTO and founder of Marble Security, an enterprise mobile security provider. "This is still a mystery, and is likely to remain so for quite some time."
The 7 key lessons of IDF
The 7 key lessons of IDF
By: Mark Hachman@markhachman
Let's face it: Intel's track record of anticipating trends in computing is, in a word, lousy.
Intel didn't truly embrace low-power computing until Transmeta forced its hand. The company has repeatedly squandered opportunities in the phone by fumbling its StrongARM processor, and Intel's internal graphics program has struggled to keep its head above water until recently.
Recent trends imply nothing has changed: One could argue that former chief executive Paul Otellini was shown the door because of an inability to, once again, capitalize on mobile-specifically, the tsunami of tablets toting ARM silicon inside.
But, as analyst Jon Peddie noted, Intel does one thing right: It sees mistakes, and it fixes them, dragging its customer industries along with them. In May, Intel shifted its corporate motto to "Look Inside," implying that Intel technology might be found unexpectedly in products beyond the PC. Now, Intel is busy driving the PC forward, but also hedging its bets with any number of non-traditional devices. The common thread? Those devices must compute, communicate, and consume less power than before.
So what does that imply? Seven trends that are changing the computing industry: the lessons of this week's Intel Developer Forum.
1. Desktops are dinosaurs
Gigabyte NUC
A Gigabyte NUC.
It's a bit premature to declare the desktop dead. But the roaring minitowers of years past have been pushed upward into the rarefied air of the gaming PC. Instead, the desktop has evolved into one of two things: a docking station for a notebook, or an ultra-small-form-factor "desktop" device that's actually portable.
Scattered throughout Intel's technology showcase were what Intel rather awkwardly calls NUC's, or New Units of Computing. Just 4 inches by 4 inches by 1.5 inches high, the latest version of these tiny boxes can actually house Intel's latest "Haswell" processor -which in turn has enough graphics horsepower inside its "Iris" graphics accelerator to run some pretty sophisticated modern games. While it seems silly to consider anything but a notebook for a low-cost PC these days, the NUC certainly looks like a strong candidate for the last gasp of the mainstream desktop.
Intel's 14-nm "Broadwell" Core chip, due at the end of the year (and in PCs in 2014) should enable truly fanless designs, Intel executives said. That has implications for the NUC, as well as the...
2. Two-in-ones: the new Ultrabook
Two-in-one
In years past, Intel and Microsoft both pitched new ideas and new directions for the industry to adopt. Several, to their credit, were merely ahead of the curve, such as the SPOT watch and the original Tablet PC. One of the ideas that truly failed was 2008's Mobile Internet Device (MID), an ugly combination of a small touchscreen, Linux, and an SSD.
But Intel's ideas to combine touchscreens and portability helped pave the way for the Ultrabook, the 2011 Intel concept that has evolved into the "Harris Beach" design that now straddles dozens of Ultrabook designs using Intel's latest "Haswell" Core processor.
Now, Intel has taken that a step further with a new category of "hybrid," "convertible," or "two-in-one" devices, all describing the same product: a detachable tablet that can be docked to a keyboard for stability and extra battery life. Two-in-ones will use Intel's "Bay Trail" Atom chip, which offers both dramatically improved battery life as well as increased performance, eliminating the sluggishness that characterized the previous "Clover Trail" notebooks. In the tablet configuration, these new designs offer the thinness that we've come to associate with tablets, as opposed to the relative chunkiness of Microsoft's Surface.
The bottom line: So far, this looks like the next step in the evolution of the mainstream Windows notebook.
3. But Atom isn't low-power enough
Behold the Quark, Intel's latest bid for a low-power CPU for the Internet of Things.
And the Core begat Atom, which begat Quark...simply put, Intel realized that even optimized for low power, the Core could only go so far to address the emerging market for all-day computing. Thus, Intel designed the Atom-which arguably went a bit too far in establishing a low-power foothold, with not enough performance.
Now Intel has reached the same crossroads: the Atom is simply too big and bulky for the Internet of Things, and a new architecture was needed: Quark. Chatter among the press and analyst corps says the Quark architecture is some sort of cut-down Silvermont chip, the technology underlying Bay Trail, the Merrifield chip for phones, and the Rangeley networking processor.
Quark is one-fifth the size of the Atom and will operate at one-tenth the power. Those numbers are vague enough that we can't intuit much. But the power goals and the fact they're synthesizable says that they're an attack on ARM, whose embedded chips seem to have an inside track on the Internet of Things. Intel's facing an uphill battle, of the likes it fought with AMD: using the brute force of its advanced manufacturing capabilities as a broadaxe to wield against the nimble rapiers of the ARM licensee legions.
4. Natural-user interfaces are a blessing in disguise
Intel NUI
Intel's natural-user interface work could provide its chips with a wealth of data.
Turns out that the real world is a complicated place, filled with unknown objects and unfamiliar people, all interacting in complex and seemingly unpredictable ways. That poses an enormous and lucrative problem for any number of companies, from interpreting speech and gestures, to finding directions, to altering recommendations based on the proximity of friends. As the hardware interface between the virtual and real world, Intel is well positioned to suck in petabytes of data that can be analyzed by third-party software and services-all running on Intel hardware, of course. And what it can't do with its own CPUs and graphics chips can be done with new lines of optimized silicon that Intel is specifically creating.
5. Can you hear me now? Guess not
Another day, another mention of the Lenovo K900.
IDC (a division of the International Data Group, which owns PCWorld) said Wednesday that smartphone sales were expected to top 1.01 billion devices in 2013, over 65 percent of the "connected device" market that includes desktop PCs, notebooks, tablets, phones, and other devices. By 2017, smartphones will make up 70.5 percent of the space. And yet Intel had nothing to say about the phone, except to reiterate its design win inside the Lenovo K900 and its efforts in the LTE space.
Yes, Intel could be prepping for a dedicated "Merrifield" launch for the phone market in the near future, but it needs to get on the ball. Intel still isn't a player in the phone market, and it looks like this won't change soon.
6. Wintel is a convenient fiction
HP Chromebook 14
The HP Chromebook 14, based on an Intel "Haswell" processor.
Microsoft and Intel have shared power within the personal computer for the better part of a generation; historically, Intel would introduce a new, more powerful computer, and Microsoft's software would bring it to its knees. That's changed. Only games require a high-end CPU and discrete graphics card, and that means that Microsoft has turned to the tablet and even phones for its OS and productivity software.
With Bay Trail, Intel chips can now power Android and Windows alike. And Intel continues to support the Google-powered Chromebook with its fourth-generation "Haswell" desktop chips. Intel's hearty embrace of Google has been met with Microsoft's adoption of ARM in phones and notebooks, like ex-lovers trying to one-up the other.
7. Moore's Law is Intel's ultra combo
Intel die and a penny
Quite frankly, there is little Intel feels it cannot solve by manufacturing muscle alone. Each year, like clockwork, Intel ushers in either a new processor revision or a new manufacturing node. And the tick-tock model continues apace: "Broadwell," the name of Intel's 14-nm shift, will launch before the end of the year, chief executive Brian Krzanich said at IDF. That means Intel's traditional PC chips in the notebook, desktop, and server space will see their operating power cut, to the tune of 30 percent or more. That's an easy way to keep the PC train rolling.
The PC industry-Intel included-has had its existential moment. Intel committed to a new direction: mobile, mobile, mobile. IDF simply told the world what Intel's competitors figured out several years ago.
By: Mark Hachman@markhachman
Let's face it: Intel's track record of anticipating trends in computing is, in a word, lousy.
Intel didn't truly embrace low-power computing until Transmeta forced its hand. The company has repeatedly squandered opportunities in the phone by fumbling its StrongARM processor, and Intel's internal graphics program has struggled to keep its head above water until recently.
Recent trends imply nothing has changed: One could argue that former chief executive Paul Otellini was shown the door because of an inability to, once again, capitalize on mobile-specifically, the tsunami of tablets toting ARM silicon inside.
But, as analyst Jon Peddie noted, Intel does one thing right: It sees mistakes, and it fixes them, dragging its customer industries along with them. In May, Intel shifted its corporate motto to "Look Inside," implying that Intel technology might be found unexpectedly in products beyond the PC. Now, Intel is busy driving the PC forward, but also hedging its bets with any number of non-traditional devices. The common thread? Those devices must compute, communicate, and consume less power than before.
So what does that imply? Seven trends that are changing the computing industry: the lessons of this week's Intel Developer Forum.
1. Desktops are dinosaurs
Gigabyte NUC
A Gigabyte NUC.
It's a bit premature to declare the desktop dead. But the roaring minitowers of years past have been pushed upward into the rarefied air of the gaming PC. Instead, the desktop has evolved into one of two things: a docking station for a notebook, or an ultra-small-form-factor "desktop" device that's actually portable.
Scattered throughout Intel's technology showcase were what Intel rather awkwardly calls NUC's, or New Units of Computing. Just 4 inches by 4 inches by 1.5 inches high, the latest version of these tiny boxes can actually house Intel's latest "Haswell" processor -which in turn has enough graphics horsepower inside its "Iris" graphics accelerator to run some pretty sophisticated modern games. While it seems silly to consider anything but a notebook for a low-cost PC these days, the NUC certainly looks like a strong candidate for the last gasp of the mainstream desktop.
Intel's 14-nm "Broadwell" Core chip, due at the end of the year (and in PCs in 2014) should enable truly fanless designs, Intel executives said. That has implications for the NUC, as well as the...
2. Two-in-ones: the new Ultrabook
Two-in-one
In years past, Intel and Microsoft both pitched new ideas and new directions for the industry to adopt. Several, to their credit, were merely ahead of the curve, such as the SPOT watch and the original Tablet PC. One of the ideas that truly failed was 2008's Mobile Internet Device (MID), an ugly combination of a small touchscreen, Linux, and an SSD.
But Intel's ideas to combine touchscreens and portability helped pave the way for the Ultrabook, the 2011 Intel concept that has evolved into the "Harris Beach" design that now straddles dozens of Ultrabook designs using Intel's latest "Haswell" Core processor.
Now, Intel has taken that a step further with a new category of "hybrid," "convertible," or "two-in-one" devices, all describing the same product: a detachable tablet that can be docked to a keyboard for stability and extra battery life. Two-in-ones will use Intel's "Bay Trail" Atom chip, which offers both dramatically improved battery life as well as increased performance, eliminating the sluggishness that characterized the previous "Clover Trail" notebooks. In the tablet configuration, these new designs offer the thinness that we've come to associate with tablets, as opposed to the relative chunkiness of Microsoft's Surface.
The bottom line: So far, this looks like the next step in the evolution of the mainstream Windows notebook.
3. But Atom isn't low-power enough
Behold the Quark, Intel's latest bid for a low-power CPU for the Internet of Things.
And the Core begat Atom, which begat Quark...simply put, Intel realized that even optimized for low power, the Core could only go so far to address the emerging market for all-day computing. Thus, Intel designed the Atom-which arguably went a bit too far in establishing a low-power foothold, with not enough performance.
Now Intel has reached the same crossroads: the Atom is simply too big and bulky for the Internet of Things, and a new architecture was needed: Quark. Chatter among the press and analyst corps says the Quark architecture is some sort of cut-down Silvermont chip, the technology underlying Bay Trail, the Merrifield chip for phones, and the Rangeley networking processor.
Quark is one-fifth the size of the Atom and will operate at one-tenth the power. Those numbers are vague enough that we can't intuit much. But the power goals and the fact they're synthesizable says that they're an attack on ARM, whose embedded chips seem to have an inside track on the Internet of Things. Intel's facing an uphill battle, of the likes it fought with AMD: using the brute force of its advanced manufacturing capabilities as a broadaxe to wield against the nimble rapiers of the ARM licensee legions.
4. Natural-user interfaces are a blessing in disguise
Intel NUI
Intel's natural-user interface work could provide its chips with a wealth of data.
Turns out that the real world is a complicated place, filled with unknown objects and unfamiliar people, all interacting in complex and seemingly unpredictable ways. That poses an enormous and lucrative problem for any number of companies, from interpreting speech and gestures, to finding directions, to altering recommendations based on the proximity of friends. As the hardware interface between the virtual and real world, Intel is well positioned to suck in petabytes of data that can be analyzed by third-party software and services-all running on Intel hardware, of course. And what it can't do with its own CPUs and graphics chips can be done with new lines of optimized silicon that Intel is specifically creating.
5. Can you hear me now? Guess not
Another day, another mention of the Lenovo K900.
IDC (a division of the International Data Group, which owns PCWorld) said Wednesday that smartphone sales were expected to top 1.01 billion devices in 2013, over 65 percent of the "connected device" market that includes desktop PCs, notebooks, tablets, phones, and other devices. By 2017, smartphones will make up 70.5 percent of the space. And yet Intel had nothing to say about the phone, except to reiterate its design win inside the Lenovo K900 and its efforts in the LTE space.
Yes, Intel could be prepping for a dedicated "Merrifield" launch for the phone market in the near future, but it needs to get on the ball. Intel still isn't a player in the phone market, and it looks like this won't change soon.
6. Wintel is a convenient fiction
HP Chromebook 14
The HP Chromebook 14, based on an Intel "Haswell" processor.
Microsoft and Intel have shared power within the personal computer for the better part of a generation; historically, Intel would introduce a new, more powerful computer, and Microsoft's software would bring it to its knees. That's changed. Only games require a high-end CPU and discrete graphics card, and that means that Microsoft has turned to the tablet and even phones for its OS and productivity software.
With Bay Trail, Intel chips can now power Android and Windows alike. And Intel continues to support the Google-powered Chromebook with its fourth-generation "Haswell" desktop chips. Intel's hearty embrace of Google has been met with Microsoft's adoption of ARM in phones and notebooks, like ex-lovers trying to one-up the other.
7. Moore's Law is Intel's ultra combo
Intel die and a penny
Quite frankly, there is little Intel feels it cannot solve by manufacturing muscle alone. Each year, like clockwork, Intel ushers in either a new processor revision or a new manufacturing node. And the tick-tock model continues apace: "Broadwell," the name of Intel's 14-nm shift, will launch before the end of the year, chief executive Brian Krzanich said at IDF. That means Intel's traditional PC chips in the notebook, desktop, and server space will see their operating power cut, to the tune of 30 percent or more. That's an easy way to keep the PC train rolling.
The PC industry-Intel included-has had its existential moment. Intel committed to a new direction: mobile, mobile, mobile. IDF simply told the world what Intel's competitors figured out several years ago.
Friday, September 13, 2013
这女的腰真软
Leilani Franco is in the new Guinness World Records 2014 Book for three records as a contortionist. "She's accomplished the most full body revolutions maintaining a chest stand in one minute (25), performed the fastest human backbend walk (20 meters in 10.05 sec), and traveled the fastest 20 meters in a contortion roll (17.47 sec)."
Thursday, September 12, 2013
Remote Dog training Shock Collar|PSA-219 anti-bark control shock collar for dogs
Remote Dog training Shock Collar|PSA-219 anti-bark control shock collar for dogs
PSA-219 Remote Dog training shock collar description
1. A solid 1000 Yards of range;
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 18 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable ultrasound; 7 Separate or Combination Choices.
5. CE Approved.
6. 2-dog systems allows you to train 2 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 40-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty. 8. Auto anti-bark. Can let the device do the barking control when the dogs left alone.
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 18 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable ultrasound; 7 Separate or Combination Choices.
5. CE Approved.
6. 2-dog systems allows you to train 2 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 40-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty. 8. Auto anti-bark. Can let the device do the barking control when the dogs left alone.
PSA-219 dog anti-bark collar has real range of 1000 yards especially with auto anti-bark feature, 18 adjustable levels of vibration and ultrasound and progressive shock to make you find a suitable levels to control your dogs.
PSA-219 is a electric remote traning collar for dogs. PSA-219 dog traning collar can be used for control dog bark digging, jumping, running away, chewing and any other habits.
The PSA-219 anti-bark collar receiver is waterproof so you have no worries when your dogs play with water or get wet in the rain.
PSA-219 remote bark control shock collars for dogs FAQ
Is the shock correction safe ?
It is safe when used according to the instructions. It is an unpleasant sensation for the animal, but completely harmless. Always interact with your dog during training by giving verbal cues, reinforcements and praise to ensure the most effective training with this product.
Is there an age or size limit for the PSA-219 Dog Training System?
Your dog should be old enough to learn basic commands such as “sit” or “stay” which, depending on the dog, is typically about 6 months old. Sick or feeble dogs should never use this system.
Can I use the training collar to eliminate aggressive behaviour?
No, training collars are not recommended for aggressive dogs. Please contact your local professional trainers for advices.
Is the receiver waterproof?
Yes. The collar receiver is heavy duty and completely waterproof and submersible, specially designed to be worn outdoors day after day without problems.
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Remote Dog training Shock Collar|PSA-218 anti-bark control shock collar for dogs
Remote Dog training Shock Collar|PSA-218 anti-bark control shock collar for dogs
PSA-218 Remote Dog training shock collar description
1. A solid 600 Yards of range;
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 9 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable ultrasound; 7 Separate or Combination Choices.
5. CE Approved.
6. 2-dog systems allows you to train 2 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 40-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
8. Auto anti-bark. Can let the device do the barking control when the dogs left alone.
2. Genuinely 100% waterproof dog collar receiver;
3. Rechargeable collar receiver with replaceable batteries
4. 9 Levels of progressive shock + adjustable vibration + adjustable ultrasound; 7 Separate or Combination Choices.
5. CE Approved.
6. 2-dog systems allows you to train 2 dogs with 1 transmitter.
7. Suitable for 40-150 pounds dogs. 1 year warranty.
8. Auto anti-bark. Can let the device do the barking control when the dogs left alone.
PSA-218 dog anti-bark collar has real range of 1000 yards especially with auto anti-bark feature, 18 adjustable levels of vibration and ultrasound and progressive shock to make you find a suitable levels to control your dogs. Newly added with Compound Corrections Transfer Button (when press this button, the collar will beep, vibrate and then shock in a default programmed method.
PSA-218 is a electric remote traning collar for dogs. PSA-218 dog traning collar can be used for control dog bark digging, jumping, running away, chewing and any other habits.
The PSA-218 anti-bark collar receiver is waterproof so you have no worries when your dogs play with water or get wet in the rain.
PSA-218 remote bark control shock collars for dogs FAQ
Is the shock correction safe ?
It is safe when used according to the instructions. It is an unpleasant sensation for the animal, but completely harmless. Always interact with your dog during training by giving verbal cues, reinforcements and praise to ensure the most effective training with this product.
Is there an age or size limit for the PSA-218 Dog Training System?
Your dog should be old enough to learn basic commands such as “sit” or “stay” which, depending on the dog, is typically about 6 months old. Sick or feeble dogs should never use this system.
Can I use the training collar to eliminate aggressive behaviour?
No, training collars are not recommended for aggressive dogs. Please contact your local professional trainers for advices.
Is the receiver waterproof?
Yes. The collar receiver is heavy duty and completely waterproof and submersible, specially designed to be worn outdoors day after day without problems.
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