iPhone 6s release may come as early as August

While the first few iterations of the iPhone were all released during the summer months, the iPhone 4s completely turned Apple's iPhone release schedule on its head. Due to various production problems that resulted in delays, the iPhone 4s was released in October of 2011. Since then, Apple has adjusted its iPhone release schedule accordingly, with each new iPhone models now debuting during the fall.But now we're hearing word that Apple's next-gen iPhone, prematurely dubbed the iPhone 6s, might be released sometime in August. According to a recent report in GforGames, which typically has a decent track record with respect to Apple rumors, rumblings from Apple's supply chain suggests that Apple doesn't anticipate any yield issues with its next-gen iPhone and may revert back to a summer launch schedule.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Watch intense trailer for new Steve Jobs movie starring Michael Fassbender

The first trailer for the new "Steve Jobs" movie starring Michael Fassbender as Jobs and Seth Rogen as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has hit the web, and it's pretty intense even though it's all dialogue.The film is slated to arrive in U.S. theaters on Oct. 9, four years after Jobs died.Apple enthusiasts are hoping the film, which was originally going to be directed by David Fincher and star Christian Bale, will be a major upgrade over the Ashton Kutcher "Jobs" movie from 2013.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Asus packs 64GB of storage in $299 ZenFone 2

Asus isn’t a household name in the U.S. when it comes to smartphones, but it is trying to make a strong statement with the Zenfone 2, which packs more storage than similarly-priced competitors.The Zenfone 2, which has a 5.5-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, starts at $199. It will begin shipping on Tuesday with Google’s Android 5.0 OS.A model with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage goes for $299, while the $199 model has 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage. The smartphone is shipping as an unlocked device, meaning it will work with multiple carriers.It has an Intel 64-bit Atom Z3580 processor code-named Moorefield and a PowerVR G6430 graphics processor, which is capable of handling 1080p video rendering.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Survey finds most US residents want changes to Patriot Act surveillance

U.S. residents have major problems with government surveillance, and six in 10 want to see the records collection provisions of the Patriot Act modified before Congress extends it, according to a survey commissioned by a civil rights group.Just 34 percent of survey respondents said they’d like to see the Patriot Act preserved as a way to keep the U.S. safe from terrorists, according to the survey commissioned by the American Civil Liberties Union. Sixty percent either strongly or somewhat agreed with a statement saying Congress should modify the Patriot Act to “limit government surveillance and protect Americans’ privacy.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Appeals court rules Samsung won’t have to pay $930M in Apple patent case

Samsung will not have to pay all of the US$930 million in damages that Apple was awarded in 2012, a U.S. appeals court ruled Monday.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C., agreed with a California federal jury that Samsung violated Apple design and utility patents related to the iPhone. However, the appeals court reversed the jury’s finding that Samsung infringed on Apple’s trade dress, or the overall look and packaging of a product.Thus, the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, where the case was originally tried, must recalculate the portion of the settlement dealing with trade dress.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

What Do Spinal Tap and OpenStack Have in Common?

They both go to 11!

 

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Kilo is the eleventh major OpenStack release, with enhancements across the board and new features like Ironic for bare metal service provisioning. SMB to large-scale clouds with OpenStack are being deployed in droves with a self-service portal to spin up virtual and now bare metal workloads while automatically provisioning all the requisite compute, storage and networking resources.  Yet, network service provisioning remains to be cumbersome, brittle and closed.

OpenStack and Cumulus Linux share a common philosophy, design and operational framework. Compute and storage (with Cinder and Swift) leverage standard infrastructure, so why use black boxes from Cisco and Arista, especially when the systems are merchant silicon reference designs. Cumulus Linux is unencumbered Linux without proprietary APIs and protocols, with the flexibility to run on your platform of choice.  Build and runtime operations are identical from bootstrapping infrastructure with PXE or ONIE to lifecycle management with config management and patching. Clouds have become the new frontier not only for orchestration platforms like OpenStack but for tools, processes and organizations. Converged administration with battle-tested automation platforms (such as Puppet, Chef or Ansible) or monitoring (with Nagios or collectd) enable admins to rise to critical tasks such Continue reading

It’s Google and Facebook’s web, we just surf in it

It's not exactly news that Facebook and (especially) Google dominate a large portion of what happens online. Add in a few other major players—Apple, Amazon, Microsoft maybe, you know them all—and the supposedly wide-open internet increasingly seems like the private playground and captive market.Google's "buy" button? Two unrelated events last week brought that reality home for me. First, and most importantly, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google is planning to add a "buy" button to its ubiquitous search results pages. Google hasn't confirmed the report, and the Journal says the buttons will appear only on a small percentage of mobile devices (not desktop Web browsers), at least at first. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple’s Tim Cook tells GW grads: Ignore the cynics, change the world like Steve Jobs did

Apple CEO Tim Cook delivered the commencement address to the George Washington University Class of 2015 on Sunday, May 17. He reflected on negative and positive influences in his life, from Gov. George Wallace to President Jimmy Carter to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, urged students to find their direction and to make a difference in the world. Here's the transcript from his talk as well as the video, which is below. Hello GW.Thank you very much President Knapp for that kind intro. Alex, trustees, faculty and deans of the university, my fellow honorees, and especially you the class of 2015. Yes.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple buys GPS startup Coherent to beef up mapping technology

Apple, which has been working hard to bolster its mapping technology since ditching Google Maps in 2012, has acquired Coherent Navigation, a startup offering a high-accuracy GPS navigation service.Coherent’s navigation system is used in the Iridium satellite network, according to the LinkedIn profile of Paul Lego, who was CEO of the company before going to work for Apple. Coherent, which was founded in 2008 and is based in the San Francisco area, counts the U.S. government as a customer and had been aiming its technology at the mining, construction, energy and agriculture industries. Coherent had fewer than 10 employees, according to its LinkedIn page, which states that the company “has ceased operations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple buys GPS startup Coherent to beef up mapping technology

Apple, which has been working hard to bolster its mapping technology since ditching Google Maps in 2012, has acquired Coherent Navigation, a startup offering a high-accuracy GPS navigation service.Coherent’s navigation system is used in the Iridium satellite network, according to the LinkedIn profile of Paul Lego, who was CEO of the company before going to work for Apple. Coherent, which was founded in 2008 and is based in the San Francisco area, counts the U.S. government as a customer and had been aiming its technology at the mining, construction, energy and agriculture industries. Coherent had fewer than 10 employees, according to its LinkedIn page, which states that the company “has ceased operations.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

In desperation, many ransomware victims plead with attackers

The shamelessness of ransomware pushers knows no bounds. After encrypting people’s files and then holding them to ransom, they portray themselves as service providers offering technical support and discounts to their “customers.”Researchers from FireEye recently collected messages from a Web site set up by the creators of a ransomware program called TeslaCrypt to interact with their victims. The messages offer a rare glimpse into the mindset of these cybercriminals and the distress they cause.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The LG G4: Three things right, three things wrong

This week the G4 smartphone from LG Electronics starts shipping outside its home country, with arrivals in the U.S. and Europe expected in a couple of weeks. While the smartphone has a great screen and camera, it doesn’t get everything right.What works:Screen: Even though the G4’s screen has the same size and resolution as the one on the G3 (at 5.5 inches and 1440 by 2560 pixels) it’s noticeably better. LG has improved its performance in several regards, including brightness and color reproduction, making it one of the best screens ever. All those pixels put higher demands on the processor, GPU and battery, but it’s nonetheless worth it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

The LG G4: Three things right, three things wrong

This week the G4 smartphone from LG Electronics starts shipping outside its home country, with arrivals in the U.S. and Europe expected in a couple of weeks. While the smartphone has a great screen and camera, it doesn’t get everything right. What works: Screen: Even though the G4’s screen has the same size and resolution as the one on the G3 (at 5.5 inches and 1440 by 2560 pixels) it’s noticeably better. LG has improved its performance in several regards, including brightness and color reproduction, making it one of the best screens ever. All those pixels put higher demands on the processor, GPU and battery, but it’s nonetheless worth it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft study claims technology shortens our attention span

In a report that may not surprise anyone, a new study from Microsoft reveals that our attention spans are at an all-time low, and the culprit, not surprisingly, is the ubiquity of technology which now touches every corner of our lives 24/7.Indeed, you can thank the iPhone for ushering in the smartphone era and creating a world where most of us remain tethered to our devices, lest we miss a text message or the latest sports scores.According to Microsoft's study, which was conducted via EEG scans, the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013. To put that data into context, the average attention span of a goldfish is about 9 seconds, according to the study.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Solar power road surface actually works

Remember that road surface being tested in the Netherlands that acted as a giant solar panel converting solar energy into electricity? Well, guess what? It actually worked.Six months into the test, the engineers say they've generated 3,000kwH of power from the 70-meter bike path test track. That's enough power to run a one-person household for a year, and more than expected of the project, according to SolaRoad, the company behind the experiment.Energy-neutral mobility Data centers are heavy users of electricity, and SolaRoad's better-than-expected electricity generation will be interesting news for those designing data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

VeloCloud’s SD-WAN puts packet steering on steroids to optimize performance

This column is available in a weekly newsletter called IT Best Practices.  Click here to subscribe.  Many vendors are racing to compete in the burgeoning software-defined WAN space. Each competitor has its own strategy of how to implement the network overlay that makes the network connections, provides virtualized services and steers applications. It all comes down to what the SD-WAN vendor wants to help its customers achieve.VeloCloud has an entry in this race, and the company has two goals: to simplify the way companies set up their branches within their wide area network, and to improve the performance of the WAN. There are several specific problem areas VeloCloud is setting out to address.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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