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  • Layar brings augmented reality and a QR code scanner to Google Glass

    Layar resurfaces with a new app and somewhat greater cred. I feel somewhat greater cred due to choice of platform. Google Glass is the right platform for real Augmented Reality (AR) and much better suited for continuous use. I remember all the demos of smartphones with Layar, and not to say it was underwhelming, but it was all floating “balloons” you needed to tap to see the embedded text. It wasn’t quite the Terminator like interface with full info overlays, but fields of candy colored bubbles begging you to ‘click here’ to “see more”.

    Kevin C. Tofel's avatarGigaom

    Google(s goog) Glass got an unofficial augmented reality app on Thursday as Layar introduced its immersive platform to the wearable device. The beta software has to be downloaded directly from Layar’s website and installed manually to Glass. Once that’s done, however, you can simply say “OK Glass, scan this” to see information from print magazines, local real estate or even movie trailers.

    layar on glass

    I’ve already installed the software on Glass and it works as advertised if you can find supported content. The app ties into Layar’s augmented reality platform, which is currently used for interactive ads and geo-layers when out and about. Since I’m in the home office, I tried scanning some ads from my latest issue of Runner’s World but it appears that magazine doesn’t have a partnership with Layar.

    I did have success by looking at a movie poster for The Hobbit on my laptop’s display: Layar correctly…

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  • AnandTech | Testing SATA Express And Why We Need Faster SSDs

    PCIe- und PCI-Slots im Vergleich
    PCIe- und PCI-Slots im Vergleich (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    Even a PCIe 2.0 x2 link offers about a 40% increase in maximum throughput over SATA 6Gbps. Like most interfaces, PCIe 2.0 isn’t 100% efficient and based on our internal tests the bandwidth efficiency is around 78-79%, so in the real world you should expect to get ~780MB/s out of a PCIe 2.0 x2 link, but remember that SATA 6Gbps isn’t 100% either (around 515MB/s is the typical maximum we see). The currently available PCIe SSD controller designs are all 2.0 based but we should start to see some PCIe 3.0 drives next year. We don’t have efficiency numbers for 3.0 yet but I would expect to see nearly twice the bandwidth of 2.0, making +1GB/s a norm.

    via AnandTech | Testing SATA Express And Why We Need Faster SSDs.

    As I’ve watched the SSD market slowly grow and bloom it does seem as though the rate at which big changes occur has slowed. The SATA controllers on the drives themselves were kicked up a notch as the transition from SATA-1 to SATA-2 gave us consistent 500MB/sec read/write speeds. And that has stayed stable forever due to the inherent limit of SATA-2. I had been watching very closely developments in PCIe based SSDs but the prices were  always artificially high due to the market for these devices being data centers. Proof positive of this is Fusion-io catered mostly to two big purchasers of their product, Facebook and Apple. Subsequently their prices always put them in the enterprise level $15K for one PCIe slot device (at any size/density of storage).

    Apple has come to the rescue in every sense of the word by adopting PCIe SSDs as the base level SSD for their portable computers. Starting last Summer 2013 Apple started released Mac Book Pro laptops with PCIe SSDs and then eventually started designing them into the Mac Book Air as well. The last step was to fully adopt it in their desktop Mac Pro (which has been slow to hit the market). The performance of the PCIe SSD in the Mac Pro as compared to any other shipping computer is the highest for a consumer level product. As the Mac gains some market share for all computers being shipped, Mac buyers are gaining more speed from their SSD as well.

    So what further plans are in the works for the REST of the industry? Well SATA-express seems to be a way forward for the 90% of the market still buying Windows PCs. And it’s a new standard being put forth by the SATA-IO standards committee. With any luck the enthusiast market motherboard manufacturers will adopt it as fast as it passes the committees, and we’ll see an Anandtech or Tom’s Hardware guide review doing a real benchmark and analysis of how well it matches up against the previous generation hardware.

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  • Microsoft Office for iPad to be unveiled on March 27

    I know there’s a lot of anti-Microsoft sentiment in the Apple/Mac community. But for mobile device owners (ipod touch, iPhone, iPad, etc.) having this might mean giving up a laptop or desktop depending on their needs. Office for iPad could become the killer app for the larger screened tablets.

    vrzonesg's avatarTech News for Geeks

    Microsoft Office for iPad will feature similar functionality as Office for the iPhone, with users requiring an Office 365 account for document creation.

    Satya Nadella is holding an event for the press on March 27 in San Francisco in which he is slated to discuss the details of Microsoft’s “m…

    Read more: http://vr-zone.com/articles/microsoft-office-ipad-unveiled-march-27/74313.html

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  • Link to specific points in YouTube videos

    You don’t have to sit through a 19 minute YouTube video to get to the 3 minutes you really want to see. Just link to the correct start point and save yourself and all of your friends and readership a lot of time.

    shaunlewis1's avatarURMC Learn

    Sometimes when sharing YouTube videos, we only want people to focus on a certain point in the video, not the entire video.

    To link to a specific point in a YouTube video, take the video link:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WcUqxcWMes

    At the end, add &t=1m3s   (Replacing 1 with any numeric value for minutes and replacing 3 with any numeric value for seconds.)

    So, in this example, we would have this:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WcUqxcWMes&t=1m3s

    The video now starts at the 1 minute and 3 second mark.

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  • Feedly + OneNote helps you better organize your world

    I am a big fan of OneNote which was just released for Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) today. Kudos to Microsoft for trying to get the word out and to get people to try it out. I don’t hate Evernote. I’m just an early adopter of OneNote on TabletPC going back to 2005. More competition raises all the boats. And knowing this might be a premium feature, will make me seriously consider getting Feedly Pro now. Kudos to Feedly for continuously developing their product and and making it better than the old Google Reader I used to use. Feedly, you got the right idea, keep on gettin’ it!

  • The technical aspects of privacy – O’Reilly Radar

    Image representing Edward Snowden as depicted ...
    Image via CrunchBase

    The first of three public workshops kicked off a conversation with the federal government on data privacy in the US.

    by Andy Oram | @praxagora

    via The technical aspects of privacy – O’Reilly Radar.

    Interesting topic covering a wide range of issues. I’m so happy MIT sees fit to host a set of workshops on this and keep the pressure up. But as Andy Oram writes, the whole discussion at MIT was circumscribed by the notion that privacy as such doesn’t exist (an old axiom from ex-CEO of Sun Microsystems, Scott McNealy).

    No one at that MIT meeting tried to advocate for users managing their own privacy. Andy Oram mentions Vendor Relationship Management movement (thanks to Doc Searls and his Clue-Train Manifesto) as one mechanism for individuals to pick and choose what info and what degree the info is shared out. People remain willfully clueless or ignorant of VRM as an option when it comes to privacy. The shades and granularity of VRM are far more nuanced than the bifurcated/binary debate of Privacy over Security. and it’s sad this held true for the MIT meet-up as well.

    Jon Podesta’s call-in to the conference mentioned an existing set of rules for electronic data privacy, data back to the early 1970s and the fear that mainframe computers “knew too much” about private citizens known as Fair Information Practices:  http://epic.org/privacy/consumer/code_fair_info.html (Thanks to Electronic Privacy Information Center for hosting this page). These issues seem to always exist but in different forms at earlier times. These are not new, they are old. But each time there’s  a debate, we start all over like it hasn’t ever existed and it has never been addressed. If the Fair Information Practices rules are law, then all the case history and precedents set by those cases STILL apply to NSA and government surveillance.

    I did learn one new term from reading about the conference at MIT, Differential Security. Apparently it’s very timely and some research work is being done in this category. Mostly it applies to datasets and other similar big data that needs to be analyzed but without uniquely identifying an individual in the dataset. You want to find out efficacy of a drug, without spilling the beans that someone has a “prior condition”. That’s the sum effect of implementing differential privacy. You get the query out of the dataset, but you never once know all the fields of the people that make up that query. That sounds like a step in the right direction and should honestly apply to Phone and Internet company records as well. Just because you collect the data, doesn’t mean you should be able to free-wheel through it and do whatever you want. If you’re mining, you should only get the net result of the query rather than snoop through all the fields for each individual. That to me is the true meaning of differential security.

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  • Virtual Reality | Oculus Rift – Consumer Reports

    Oculus Intel
    Oculus Intel (Photo credit: .michael.newman.)

    Imagine being able to immerse yourself in another world, without the limitations of a TV or movie screen. Virtual reality has been a dream for years, but judging by current trends, it may not be just a dream for much longer.

    via Virtual Reality | Oculus Rift – Consumer Reports.

    I won’t claim that when a technology gets written up in Consumer Reports it has “jumped the shark”, no. Instead I would rather give Consumer Reports kudos for keeping tabs on others writing up and lauding the Oculus Rift VR headset. The specifications of this device continue to improve even before it is hitting the market. Hopes are still high for the prices to be reasonable (really it needs to cost no more than a bottom of the line iPad if there’s any hope of it taking off). Whether the price meets everyone’s expectations is very dependent on the sources for the materials going into the headset, and the single most expensive item are the displays.

    OLED (Organic LED) has been used in mobile phones to great effect, the displays use less power and have somewhat brighter color than backlit LCD panels. But they cost more, and the bigger the display the higher the cost. The developers of Oculus Rift have now pressed the cost maybe a little higher by choosing to go with a very high refresh rate and low latency for the OLED screens in the headset. This came after first wave of user feedback indicating too much lag and subsequent headaches due to the screen not keeping up with head movements (this is a classical downfall of most VR headsets no matter the display technology). However Oculus Rift has continued to work on the lag in the current generation head set and by all accounts it’s nearly ready for public consumption. It’s true, they might have fixed the lag issue and most beta testers to date are complimenting the changes in the hardware. This might be the device that launches a thousand 3D headsets.

    As 3D goes, the market and appeal may be very limited, that historically has been the case. Whether it was used in academia for data visualization or in the military for simulation, 3D Virtual Reality was an expensive niche catering to people with lots of money to spend. Because Oculus Rift was targeted at a lower price range, but with fantastic performance visually speaking who knows what market may follow it’s actual release. So as everyone is whipped up into a frenzy over the final release of the Oculus Rift VR Headset, keep an eye out for this. It’s going to be hot item in limited supply for a while I would bet. And yes, I do think I would love to try one out myself, not just for gaming purposes but for any of the as yet unseen applications it might have (like the next Windows OS or Mac OS?)

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  • SanDisk Crams 128GB on microSD Card: A World First

    English: A 512 MB Kingston microSD card next t...
    English: A 512 MB Kingston microSD card next to a Patriot SD adapter (left) and miniSD adapter (middle). (no original description) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

    This week during Mobile World Congress 2014, SanDisk introduced the world’s highest capacity microSDXC memory card, weighing a hefty 128 GB. That’s a huge leap in storage compared to the 128 MB microSD card launched 10 years ago.

    via SanDisk Crams 128GB on microSD Card: A World First.

    Amazing to think how small the form factor and how large the storage size has gotten with microSD format memory cards. I remember the introduction of SDXC cards and the jump from 32GB to 64GB flash SD sized cards. It didn’t take long after that before the SDXC format shrunk down to microSD format. Given the size and the options to expand the memory on certain devices (noticeably Apple is absent from this group), the size of the memory card is going to allow a lot longer timeline for the storage of pictures, music and video on our handheld devices. Prior to this, you would have needed a much larger m2 or mSATA storage card to achieve this level of capacity. You would have needed to have a tablet or a netbook to plug-in those larger memory cards.

    Now you can have 128GB at your disposal just by dropping $200 at Amazon. Once you’ve installed it on your Samsung Galaxy you’ve got what would be a complete upgrade to a much more expensive phone (especially if it was an iPhone). I also think a SDXC microSD card would lend itself for moving a large amount of data in a device like one of these hollowed out nickels: http://www.amazon.com/2gb-MicroSD-Bundle-Mint-Nickel/dp/B0036VLT28

    My interest in this would be taking a cell phone overseas and going through U.S. Customs and Immigration where it’s been shown in the past they will hold onto devices for further screening. If I knew I could keep 128GB of storage hidden in a metal coin that passed through the baggage X-ray without issue, I would feel a greater sense of security. A card this size is practically as big as the current hard drive on my home computer and work laptops. It’s really a fundamental change in the portability of a large quantity of personal data outside the series of tubes called the Interwebs. Knowing that stash could be kept away from prying eyes or casual security of hosting providers would certainly give me more peace of mind.

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  • Review: Corning’s 33-foot Optical Thunderbolt cable allows you to move your Thunderbolt devices (or Mac) far away from your desk

    I’m so happy this finally is making it to the market. The promise of Thunderbolt in the early days was that it was going to be faster than any other connector on the market. Now at long last we have the optical flavor of Thunderbolt slowly painfully making it out of development and out to manufacturing. Here now is a review of an optical Thunderbolt cable from Corning.

  • AMD Launches First ARM-based Server CPU | EE Times

    Image representing AMD as depicted in CrunchBase
    Image via CrunchBase

    In addition, AMD is planning to contribute to the Open Compute Project with a new micro-server design that utilizes the Opteron A-series, along with other architecture specifications for motherboards that Facebook helped developed called “Group Hug,” an agnostic server board design that can support traditional x86 processors, as well as ARM chips.

    via AMD Launches First ARM-based Server CPU | EE Times.

    Kudos to Facebook as they still continue support for the Open Compute project which they spearheaded some years back to encourage more widespread expertise and knowledge of large scale data centers. This new charge is to allow a pick-and-choose, best of breed kind of design whereby a CPU is not a fixed quantity but can be chosen or changed like a hard drive or RAM module. And with the motherboard firmware remaining more or less consistent regardless of the CPU chosen. This would allow mass customization based solely on the best CPU for a given job (HTTP, DNS, Compute, Storage, etc). And the spare capacity might be allowed to erode a little so that any general CPU could be somewhat more aggressively scheduled while some of it’s former, less efficient services could be migrated to more specialist mobile CPUs on another cluster. Each CPU doing the set of protocols, services it inherently does best. This flies further in the face of always choosing general compute style CPUs and letting the software do most of the heavy lifting once the programming is completed.

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