BQ announces second Ubuntu phone and plans to build PC-smartphone combo

Against the odds, Canonical and Spanish company BQ are continuing to push Ubuntu for smartphones over Android and iOS. BQ’s second Ubuntu phone is a step up from its inaugural effort, and the two companies are also working on a smartphone that’s also a PC.Earlier this year, BQ started selling the Aquaris E4.5 Ubuntu Edition and will later this month start shipping the Aquaris E5 HD in Europe from its online store for €200 (US$220).The struggles of Samsung’s Tizen, Mozilla’s Firefox OS and Microsoft’s Windows Phone have shown how difficult it’s to compete with the dominant smartphone platforms of Apple and Google, but that doesn’t seem to scare Canonical and BQ.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Dell warms to AMD chips in new laptops, desktops

Dell’s PCs largely use Intel chips, but the company is once again warming to AMD processors for its new Inspiron laptops and desktops.The Inspiron 5000 laptops with 14-inch, 15-inch and 17-inch screens contain AMD’s new A-series chips, code-named Carrizo. The laptops are now shipping worldwide even though the chips aren’t due to be announced until Wednesday.The desktop-replacement laptops start at US$449.99 for the 15-inch model, $599.99 for the 14-inch model, and $699.99 inch for the 17-inch model.Dell once used AMD chips in a range of laptops, but slowly dropped them from product lines as the chip-maker dealt with quality and production problems. Hewlett-Packard has stayed loyal to AMD, but many other PC makers have dropped AMD’s chips over the years for not standing up to Intel’s chips in performance.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The Upload: Your tech news briefing for Tuesday, June 2

New Apple music streaming service expected at WWDCLook for Apple to finally come out with a rival to the Spotify streaming music service at its Worldwide Developers Conference next week, the Wall Street Journal says. Apple will likely offer unlimited on-demand streaming for $10 a month. And in an acknowledgement that the algorithm isn’t always king of finding you what you didn’t know you wanted, it’s expected to add Internet radio channels that are programmed by human DJs.Intel shows first Skylake tablet at ComputexTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Disconnect files EU antitrust complaint against Google after app ban

Disconnect.me, maker of an Android privacy app banned from the Play store, has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commssion accusing Google of abusing its dominant market position.The complaint could add fuel to an ongoing European Union antitrust investigation of Google’s business practices.Google banned the Disconnect Mobile app last year, saying it violated its developer distribution agreement.Disconnect Mobile routes traffic through an encrypted Virtual Private Network (VPN) tunnel, which makes it harder to track users. By installing a special network profile, the app also blocks ads, tracking services and suspected malware sites, both inside apps and in Android’s browser.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel cranks up speed of Thunderbolt 3, builds in support for USB

Intel is giving Apple and other laptop makers a reason to put its Thunderbolt high-speed data ports back in their next ultrathin laptops: Thunderbolt 3.0 ports will use the same Type C connector as USB 3.1—but when connected to other Thunderbolt devices, will run up to four times as fast.Thunderbolt 3 can transfer data at a whopping 40G bps (bits per second), twice as fast as Thunderbolt 2, which was introduced in 2014.Found in Macs and some Windows PCs, Thunderbolt technology connects computers to peripherals such as external storage devices and even graphics cards. Laptops with Thunderbolt 3 ports will be released by the end of the year, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, during a keynote at Computex in Taipei.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Intel shows first Skylake tablet

Intel is drumming up excitement for its upcoming chips code-named Skylake, showing the first tablet based on the architecture during a keynote at the Computex show in Taipei.The tablet had a 4K display that could display images at a resolution of 3840 by 2160 pixels, and was 7.8 millimeters thick.Tablets based on Skylake will be computing powerhouses that will manage high-resolution displays, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager for the PC Client Group at Intel.Skylake will go into tablets, laptops and desktops, including some that are on track to reach the market in the second half this year.Devices based on Skylake could incorporate a number of interesting features, including wireless charging and, in some mobile devices, Thunderbolt 3.0 ports. These will be able transfer data at 40Gbps (bits per second), close to twice the transfer speed of Thunderbolt 2.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Turn Your Training or Presentation into a Story

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know I always prefer knowledge over recipes. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to build that knowledge using the widely available training materials, which often just blast you with a barrage of facts that you’re supposed to memorize and deliver at the certification exam.

How about turning your training into a South Park episode?

Converged Cloud-Class Networking – The Next Frontier

Scale-out cloud-applications continue to be the most disruptive force to traditional network architectures in the data center. They demand an open and uncompromised cloud network, unshackled by monolithic and the prehistoric proprietary networks.

Our customers and partners are reshaping this traditional networking industry. Previously burdened by monolithic software and underperforming hardware, the new evolving bifurcation of computing architectures for modern cloud-based applications has resulted in key trends and drivers for this evolution including:

1. Unstructured data is everywhere. Whether from users, applications or machines, it is growing exponentially with no vertical or industry being spared. One current obstacle to working with large data sets is the use of relational databases and desktop statistics/visualization packages that require massively parallel software running on hundreds, or even thousands of servers.
2. New workloads are changing the notion of separate SANs. This impacts the role of networking and IP storage, where virtual machine mobility sustains multiple gigabits of throughput by default with multicore processors.
3. Cloud intensive applications such as content distribution, and new infrastructure technologies such as containers and Hadoop clusters are pushing the envelope of what is possible with massively parallel transactions. These new large-scale data analytics have given birth to converged Continue reading

USB 3.1 cables will see price drops as manufacturers prepare for demand

With the PC industry starting to adopt USB 3.1 technology, prices for cables that can connect to these products are also expected to rapidly fall, according to manufacturers.In March, Apple was among the first to come out with a laptop built with a single USB 3.1 port that used the Type-C connector.The USB 3.1 standard promises data transfer speeds of 10Gbps (gigabits per second), two times faster than USB 3.0. But given that the technology is still new, prices for USB 3.1 cables with Type-C connectors are hovering between US$24 and $29.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Qualcomm turns to China’s Allwinner to grow in low-cost tablet market

Qualcomm hopes to put its chips in more low-cost Android tablets through a partnership with Chinese chip maker Allwinner.As part of the agreement, Allwinner will push Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 410 and 210 chips with integrated LTE into low-cost Android tablets distributed worldwide. Allwinner mainly distributes Wi-Fi-only chips for tablets under US$200, and its LTE lineup will be filled up by Qualcomm Snapdragon chips.The deal offers an opportunity for Qualcomm to grow in the Chinese market, where the company was hit with problems in recent years. Qualcomm in February paid US$975 million to settle a fine imposed by the Chinese government for monopolistic business practices.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Hola browser extension should be uninstalled, researchers say

Security researchers contend the developer of a popular browser extension has not fixed vulnerabilities they found, and are recommending users should get rid of it.The free extension, from Israel-based Hola, is a peer-to-peer program that routes people’s Internet traffic through other Hola users’ computers. It can let users watch geoblocked content by routing traffic through the authorized region or offer greater anonymity, similar to Tor, when Web browsing. It has been downloaded millions of times.Last week, a group of nine researchers launched a website called ”Adios, Hola!” that describes several flaws affecting the Hola Unblocker Windows client, the extension for Firefox and Chrome, and its Android application.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

PC makers disclose plans to bring Windows 10 to PCs

With Microsoft ready to ship Windows 10 on July 29, PC makers are disclosing their plans to make the OS available to customers in new laptops and desktops or as a free OS upgrade from Windows 7 and 8.1.Dell will ship its first PCs pre-loaded with Windows 10 on July 29, said Raymond Wah, vice president of consumer product marketing at the company, during an interview at Computex on Tuesday.The company wants to roll out laptops and desktops as quickly as possible so back-to-school buyers can get hold of the new OS, Wah said. Microsoft is providing a free upgrade to Windows 10 from Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 for one year, which Dell plans to make a snap through customer support and tutorial videos.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Ellen Pao will appeal ruling in sex discrimination case

Former venture capitalist Ellen Pao intends to file an appeal against a March decision in a sex discrimination lawsuit.A 12-person jury in a court in San Francisco had found that Pao’s lawsuit against former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers failed on all four counts, including the main issue of whether gender had been a consideration in the decision by the venture capital firm not to promote her.The case has captured attention in the U.S. tech industry, where women are a minority. Pao had also charged with discrimination an old and reputed firm, which has invested in some key technology companies in the U.S. The lawsuit has emerged as a symbol of the struggle by women against alleged sexual discrimination in the workplace.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Visualizing software defined network topologies using POX and Gephi

When a researcher uses the Mininet network simulator to create a network of hosts and switches connected to an SDN controller, he or she may wish to be able to see what the simulated network topology looks like.

The POX SDN controller includes a component that will send network topology data to the Gephi data visualization platform, which can the show a graph of nodes and links representing the network topology. In this post, I will show how to set up POX and Gephi so we can see the network topologies created using the topology options in the Mininet command.

While we work through this tutorial we will also see how the POX SDN controller, which does not offer a native Northbound API, can use POX components to provide northbound interfaces.

Prerequisite skills and activities

This tutorial assumes you already have the following. I include links to relevant posts if you need to review any of these requirements.

• You have a basic understanding of Ethernet, IP, and software defined networking.
• You have set up the Mininet 2.2.1 virtual machine on your computer
• You have a basic understanding of how Mininet commands work
• You are familiar with the POX Continue reading

How you might get food delivered through Pinterest

When you search for a recipe on Pinterest, the results soon might include a way to have the ingredients delivered to your door within 45 minutes.That’s not a function built into Pinterest yet, but it could arrive in the future as the company grows its new platform for third-party developers. That platform, announced last month, is designed to let outside developers incorporate their own apps and services into Pinterest’s site to expand how the site can be used.Content on Pinterest is organized into visual bookmarks, or “pins.” Outside partners, such as advertisers, already work with Pinterest to incorporate content like images and product information into their pins. The new developer platform would allow select third parties to integrate services and do it on their own, without Pinterest’s help.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

How you might get food delivered through Pinterest

When you search for a recipe on Pinterest, the results soon might include a way to have the ingredients delivered to your door within 45 minutes.That’s not a function built into Pinterest yet, but it could arrive in the future as the company grows its new platform for third-party developers. That platform, announced last month, is designed to let outside developers incorporate their own apps and services into Pinterest’s site to expand how the site can be used.Content on Pinterest is organized into visual bookmarks, or “pins.” Outside partners, such as advertisers, already work with Pinterest to incorporate content like images and product information into their pins. The new developer platform would allow select third parties to integrate services and do it on their own, without Pinterest’s help.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Understanding TSA Math

PHY Basics: How OFDM Subcarriers Work

Have you ever wondered just "how" OFDM subcarriers are able to be spaced so tightly together without any guard band in-between? Most Wi-Fi textbooks will simply state that the spacing of the subcarriers allows the harmonics to overlap, thus canceling out any interference.

OFDM subcarrier spacing creates "nulls" canceling out inter-carrier interference (ICI) without the need for guard bands or expensive bandpass filters

OFDM divides a given channel into many narrower subcarriers. The spacing is such that the subcarriers are orthogonal, so they won’t interfere with one another despite the lack of guard bands between them. This comes about by having the subcarrier spacing equal to the reciprocal of symbol time. All subcarriers have a complete number of sine wave cycles that upon demodulation will sum to zero. 

This tells us that the spacing of the subcarriers is directly related to the useful symbol time (more specifically, the amount of time the transmitter spends performing IFFT). Because of this relationship, the resulting sinc frequency response curves from each subcarrier create signal nulls in the adjacent subcarrier frequencies thus preventing inter-carrier interference (ICI). OFDM is a form of frequency division multiplexing (FDD), which typically requires guard bands between carriers and specialized hardware Continue reading

SecureCRT and Python

Wunderlist hooks up with Microsoft’s Sunrise calendaring app & the next thing you know…

Microsoft's 2015 acquisition spree shows no sign of abating: The latest scuttlebutt is that the company has snapped up Germany's 6Wunderkinder to-do list app maker.As I documented in April ("What's behind Microsoft's not-so-crazy acquisition spree?"), Microsoft was off to its fastest acquisition pace ever this year with 4 deals confirmed and 1 widely rumored to have been signed (and in fact, Microsoft recently confirmed the buyout of that 5th company, Surface pen maker N-trig).To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here