iPad 3 is old news: 7.85-inch model due in Q3, says report

Enough about the iPad 3 already. The first iPad to come in a smaller size is due for production in the third quarter, an Asia-based report says.
Apple is likely to begin production of a 7.85-inch iPad in the third quarter of this year, Taipei-based DigiTimes said, citing sources, in a story dated Thursday.

And the price? It could go as low as $249-$299, the report said.

Before Apple goes that low, though, an 8GB iPad 2 priced below $400 is expected on March 7, when the company also announces the iPad 3.
The 7.85-inch iPad report confirms a string of past reports and word from CNET's own sources. In October of last year, sources who speak with display manufacturers in Asia told CNET that chatter about an iPad-mini was picking up.
That said, the idea of a smaller iPad confounds some Apple observers, particularly when no one less than Steve Jobs dissed the idea.
But times change. Amazon has shown that a 7-inchtablet can strike a chord with consumers. Moreover, the 7.85-inch iPad is expected to have the same 1,024x768 resolution of the iPad 2, meaning that no changes need to be made to apps to accommodate the smaller screen.

 

One Out of Five mobile Apps Found "Too Difficult to Use"

Bangalore: Companies face many adversities in Mobile App development projects including huge budget, overrunning of deadlines, patent problems and finally, when it is done, one out of every five apps are found “too difficult to run”, by the business who commission the project.

The survey conducted by research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Antenna Software also found that 45 percent of the respondents, including IT business leaders in U.S. and U.K., were not too happy with the speed at which projects land in the market and 42 percent was not satisfied with the final costs. 21 percent found the application “too difficult to use,” after all the efforts.

The survey revealed that despite all these, one third of total companies are set to reveal four or more mobile projects within a time period of 12 to 18 months.

The investment in the field is going to double within the next 18 months as an average business plans to invest $ 932,000 in Mobile app compared to the total investment till now which is around $425,000.

MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip

MIT Genius Stuffs 100 Processors Into Single Chip

Forget dual-core and quad-core processors: A semiconductor company promises to pack 100 cores into a processor that can be used in applications that require hefty computing punch, like video conferencing, wireless base stations and networking. By comparison, Intel’s latest chips are expected to have just eight cores.
With a revolutionary new chip architecture and programming tool set, Anant Agarwal of Tilera embedded the processing power of hundreds of cores on a single chip. Tilera’s technology addresses the three biggest challenges in today’s semiconductor market, offering a processor that is high-performance, power-efficient, and easy to program.
“This is a general-purpose chip that can run off-the-shelf programs almost unmodified,” says Anant Agarwal, chief technical officer of Tilera, the company that is making the 100-core chip. “And we can do that while offering at least four times the compute performance of an Intel Nehalem-Ex, while burning a third of the power as a Nehalem.”
Agarwal directs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s vaunted Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL. The lab is housed in the university’s Stata Center, a Dr. Seussian hodgepodge of forms and angles that nicely reflects the unhindered-by-reality visionary research that goes on inside.
Tilera’s revolutionary architecture provides superior performance because it eliminates the on-chip bus interconnect, a centralized intersection that information must flow through between processor cores or between cores and the memory and I/O. As manufacturers have added more cores to chips, the bus (or ring) has created an information traffic jam because all data from these additional cores must travel through a single one-dimensional path.
Tilera’s architecture eliminates the dependence on a bus, and instead puts a non-blocking, cut-through switch on each processor core, which connects it to a two dimensional on-chip mesh network called iMesh™ (Intelligent Mesh). This combination of the switch and a processor is called a ’tile’. The iMesh provides each tile with more than a terabit/sec of interconnect bandwidth, creating a more efficient distributed architecture and eliminating on-chip data congestion. Multiple parallel meshes are used in order to separate different transaction types and provide more deterministic interconnect throughput.

Apple vs. Facebook: Why users are the losers

 

(Credit: Apple)

commentary At first glance, it looks like Apple really loves Twitter. The reality, however, is that it hates Facebook.
It sure seems that way, at least.
Apple's distaste for Facebook became apparent with last week's preview release to developers of Mountain Lion, the newest version of Apple's OS for computers. The OS includes a slew of new apps (Game Center, Reminders, Notes) and new features (Gatekeeper, Notification Center). What it doesn't include is Facebook integration--a baked-in connection to Facebook that would make it easier for Apple users to share more on the world's largest social network.
Instead, Apple again chose to anoint Twitter as its social media service of choice. When Mountain Lion becomes available to consumers this summer, users will be able to tweet directly from Apple's suite of Mountain Lion apps, much likeiPhone users can thanks to the iOS Twitter integration. This is another big win for Twitter, which received a 25 percent boost in new users last fall when Apple's latest iOS was released.
Why did Apple bless Twitter and shun Facebook? The answer lies in the rocky relationship between the two companies, something that--at least publicly--began after Apple yanked Facebook support out of its Ping music social network at the last minute. The late Steve Jobs claimed that Facebook demanded "onerous terms" for Facebook integration into Ping, so Apple balked. (Whether that was smart, given Ping's lackluster performance, is a subject for another day.)
The rift turned into a chasm after the HP TouchPad debacle. In early 2011, Facebook agreed to launch its firsttablet app exclusively for theiPad. HP had a different plan, however. HP intended to release a Facebook app for the TouchPad first--something that, not surprisingly, didn't please Jobs.

The new sharing features in Mountain Lion.

(Credit: Apple)

Facebook tried to stop the TouchPad app and salvage the situation, but the damage was done. Ever since then, Apple's high-profile allegiance has been with Twitter--not Facebook--for its social media partnerships, and Twitter ended up the unlikely victor in this clash of tech titans.
Unfortunately, the real losers in this battle are those of us who use Facebook and Apple products. Customers are the ones deprived of incredibly useful features--all because these two companies can't strike a deal.
There's no reason that iOS and OS X can't and shouldn't support both Facebook and Twitter. Looking back at additions like deep Facebook integration in the latest iPhoto and forward to rumors about the next iOS update bringing Facebook sharing into the mix, it looks like that could end up being the case. The problem, as is often the case in business, boils down to bruised egos. Apple isn't very forgiving, even in the post-Jobs era.While neither side necessarily needs the other, Facebook has a lot more to gain from repairing the relationship than Apple does. Facebook needs to prod its users to share and post more so that it can serve more ads to them; that, after all, is its business model. Deeper Facebook integration in iOS and OS X would do just that by making it simple and quick for people to do more on Facebook.
The help Facebook would get would likely be bigger than Twitter's, based on Facebook's size alone. Apple, on the other hand, isn't likely to receive any meaningful jump in sales by adding Facebook to iOS and deepening ties in OS X. It just doesn't need Facebook.
Facebook on the other hand, should be pushing to fix the damage and get its social network tightly intertwined with Apple's devices at a time where mobile is where the big growth is. I hope Zuck and his team find a way to fix the damage and get its social network onto iOS and OS X. It would certainly help Facebook's mission "to make the world more open and connected."

Hackers nip at LA police canine group

Group claims to have found objectionable photos of children in officer's e-mails after breaking into police Web site and stealing passwords and other data.

This Twitter account released details on the latest police-related data breach.

Hackers today released names, addresses and phone numbers of more than 100 officers whose information was pilfered from the Web site of the Los Angeles County Police Canine Association.
LACPCA President Tony Vairo confirmed to CNET that the group's site was hacked and said that the FBI had notified him of the breach. He said he could not comment further.
The hackers also claimed to have found what they described as a couple of objectionable photos of children in the private e-mails of a police officer whose account they were able to access because he purportedly used the same password as he did on the LACPCA site. The hackers said they were reporting the e-mail content to the appropriate organizations protecting children from online exploitation. The officer accused by the group did not immediately return an e-mail seeking comment.
The hackers did not identify themselves but referred to the "cabin," and the Twitter account of the hacker group CabinCrew publicized the data leak in a post this morning.
"Over the past three weeks, we in the cabin have been targeting law enforcement sites across the United States, be it for injustices they have allowed through ignorance or naivety, taken part in, or to point out the fact that their insecurity failed to protect the safety of those they took an oath to serve," the hacker statement on the Pastebin site said.
"In this venture," the statement continued, "we have obtained the names and addresses of over 1000 officers, over fifteen thousand police warrants, hundreds of thousands of court summons, over forty thousand social security numbers of citizens proving the police lack of care for the security of the citizens, anonymous tips of criminal informants pertaining to narcotics, criminal informant information and thousands of online police reports."
Hackers, typically under the banner of "Anonymous," have been targeting big corporations, repressive regimes that are thwarting pro-democracy movements, and government officials and law enforcement agencies in the U.S. since last year.

 

Google's HUD glasses expected to go on sale this year

 

Web giant's much-rumored high-tech glasses that function much like anAndroid-based smartphone will be available within months, The New York Times reports.

The HUD Google Glasses will reportedly have the capability to use Google Maps.

(Credit: Google)

More rumblings about Google's Heads-Up Display Glasses materializing sometime in the near future were heard today. According to The New York Times, the public will be able to buy these high-tech glasses by the end of the year and they will cost somewhere between $250 and $600.
Rumors that the HUD Google Glasses were in the works have been brewing for the past couple of months. After accounts that Google was finishing up the prototype in December, tech news site 9to5Google reported that a tipster actually saw the glasses.
The prototype apparently resembles Oakley's Thump glasses but functions much more like a smartphone than reading spectacles. According to 9to5Google, the glasses will be Android-based and have the capability to tap into Google's cloud-based location services and detail users' surroundings. This information will then appears as an augmented reality computer display.
The navigation system is used by head-tilting to scroll and click on features such as a small built-in camera with a flash and I/O for voice input and output. The glasses will also reportedly come equipped with CPU/RAM/storage hardware.
The New York Times reports that the HUD glasses will also have a 3G or 4G data connection and motion and GPS sensors. They will also use Google's software products, such as Google Latitude, Google Goggles, and Google Maps.

"Everyone I spoke with who was familiar with the project repeatedly said that Google was not thinking about potential business models with the new glasses," wrote The New York Times reporter Nick Bilton. "Instead, they said, Google sees the project as an experiment that anyone will be able to join."
Google did not return request for comment on this article.

 

The Future of Your pc's hardware

The Future of Your PC's Hardware

Memristor: A Groundbreaking New Circuit
Photograph: Courtesy of HPSince the dawn of electronics, we've had only three types of circuit components--resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley researcher Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.
What is it? As its name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today's flash memory.
Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today's PCs.
Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.
When is it coming? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's up to the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) will likely appear first; HP's goal is to offer them by 2012. Beyond that, memristors will likely replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. As for memristor-based analog computers, that step may take 20-plus years.
32-Core CPUs From Intel and AMD
Photograph: Courtesy of IntelIf your CPU has only a single core, it's officially a dinosaur. In fact, quad-core computing is now commonplace; you can even get laptop computers with four cores today. But we're really just at the beginning of the core wars: Leadership in the CPU market will soon be decided by who has the most cores, not who has the fastest clock speed.
What is it? With the gigahertz race largely abandoned, both AMD and Intel are trying to pack more cores onto a die in order to continue to improve processing power and aid with multitasking operations. Miniaturizing chips further will be key to fitting these cores and other components into a limited space. Intel will roll out 32-nanometer processors (down from today's 45nm chips) in 2009.
When is it coming? Intel has been very good about sticking to its road map. A six-core CPU based on the Itanium design should be out imminently, when Intel then shifts focus to a brand-new architecture called Nehalem, to be marketed as Core i7. Core i7 will feature up to eight cores, with eight-core systems available in 2009 or 2010. (And an eight-core AMD project called Montreal is reportedly on tap for 2009.)
After that, the timeline gets fuzzy. Intel reportedly canceled a 32-core project called Keifer, slated for 2010, possibly because of its complexity (the company won't confirm this, though). That many cores requires a new way of dealing with memory; apparently you can't have 32 brains pulling out of one central pool of RAM. But we still expect cores to proliferate when the kinks are ironed out: 16 cores by 2011 or 2012 is plausible (when transistors are predicted to drop again in size to 22nm), with 32 cores by 2013 or 2014 easily within reach. Intel says "hundreds" of cores may come even farther down the line.