Santa has a young assistant this yr to assistant him deliver gifts to good children about the world, allotting to the latest Apple TV ad. Ahead he comes slinking down your chimney, Santa makes utilisation of Siri, the iPhone 4S voice-controlled helper to find your address and local brave weather at his pitch items on Xmas Eve.
“Go slow on the cookies,” says a substance in the ad from Mrs. Claus, read aloud to Santa by Siri on his iPhone 4S. When he asks how his daytime looks like, Siri reports he has 3.7 billion appointments to construct it to, rounding up Santa’s employment of the iPhone 4S in the Apple TV ad (embedded below).
Although the iPhone does not induce a mention in the ad, it’s earn Apple is expecting the iPhone 4S to exist a very popular gift this year. The iPhone 4S has nearly no intention changes over the previous model, thus Apple is pushing Siri equally the chief selling channelise for the young phone, a feature exclusive to the device.
Google’s Zeitgeist crunched billions of searches in 2011 to discover the nearly popular and fastest-rising hunt terms. The consequence of the 11th annual survey is the online equivalent of climbing into a time machine.
Web celeb Rebecca Blackamoor was the fastest-rising query with singer Adele, reality principal Ryan Dunn and Casey Anthony following quickly behind. Google+ nabbed the No. 2 spot.
But eventide equally Hurricane Irene struck the U.S. and earthquakes shook Christchurch, New Zealand, and Japan, zippo took a collation out of Google’s Zeitgeist like Apple (as GigaOm pointed out).
Three Apple queries appear in the list of the summit 10 fastest-rising searches, including Apple’s iPhone 5 (which even has still to construct an appearance), the iPad 2 (which did build an appearance and is burning up holiday sales) and the serviceman who helped build it all possible: Steve Jobs, who peaked equally a hunt0000 term in Oct when he died.
Apple makes other appearances equally well. The briskly selling iPhone 4S, for instance, is second-fastest in the consumer electronics category (the iPad2 and the iPad3 besides ranked). Just it was bested by Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
Sure to get a big bump in Google searches today: Google Zeitgeist.
A few years back, Intel prognosticated that NVIDIA‘s CUDA technology was destined to exist a “footnote” in computing history. Since that time, Jen-Hsun Huang’s low point virtual automobile (LLVM) has more than proven its worth in several supercomputers, and directly NVIDIA has released the CUDA author code to further ranch the parallel computing gospel. This movement opens up the LLVM to be employed with more programming languages and processors (x86 or otherwise) than ever before, which the company hopes will spur maturation of “next-generation higher performance computing platforms.” Academics and taken developers may cause their hands on the code by registering with NVIDIA at the source below, thus brain on down and cause begun — petaflop parallel processing supercomputers don’t make themselves, you know.
Sammy’s tab, flowing Google’s Ice Cream Sandwich, would receive an 11.6-inch display that is “barely” larger than a 10.1-inch purpose due to a redesigned bezel, allotting to a account at BGR.
But virtually importantly, it would usage an eye-popping 2560×1600 result display, laying it in the same league equally Apple’s upcoming iPad 3, which is expected to athletics a Retina display.
Needless to say, that makes for a radically different product. Not that different, say, than travelling from a laptop with a 1366×768 screen to one boasting 1680×1050 resolution. And if Samsung gets to market first, that would be a unique competitive advantage, the describe of the Apple brand notwithstanding.
Samsung has been quite transparent near its plans, actually. In a press release finally month, the Korean society said that its next-generation 2GHz Exynos processor is designed specifically to drive high-resolution tablet displays.
“The Exynos 5250 is designed specifically for high-end tablets…In particular, the Exynos 5250 intent was architected to drive up to an manufacture leading 2560×1600 (WQXGA) display,” Samsung said. And Samsung, by the way, likewise makes those high-rez displays, too.
What is a tablet and who needs one anyway? Are tablets a fad and will they presently fade into irrelevance like Netbooks? Will tablets substitute traditional PCs? Is there a tablet market or but an iPad market? I discover there and other questions raised from manufacture executives as considerably as many in the media on a regular basis. There are a range of opinions all over the post on this bully tablet debate and I hope to add some view to the conversation below.
This Market is Selfsame Early
My firm’s analysis of the market suggests that the overall tablet manufacture is growing at a rapid pace. We estimate just over 50 million tablets will exist sold in calendar 2011 and about 100 million in 2012. We, at Creative Strategies, Inc., think that the majority of those will exist iPads and there are some key reasons why.
The first may be attributed to the early market momentum of the iPad. When we feeling historically at how productions make adopted, history generally favors the market leader. As products mature and consumers are experiencing ownership with a new product category, they broadly pass with the safe bet, and decent forthwith that’s the iPad. The iPad is by far the best general purpose tablet on the market and at the bit it commands the near consumer mindshare when considering a tablet purchase.
However, the tablet is a maturing category. This is a very important channelise to understand. Although technology products overall are being adopted more speedily in mature markets, the products themselves yet off through their own maturity process. Tablets are no exception, which is why many consumers will feel back at these early days and believe of the iPad as the first tablet computer.
But a new wrinkle in the debate that’s arrived to light lately relates to the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble Corner Tablet. Both of these products have been reviewed in reckon of the iPad, which is the wrong approach. In reality, the Kindle Flame and Nook Tablets are interesting to the market because they’re not trying to compete with the iPad. Rather, both have a more specific exercise lawsuit approach. What I base by this, is that the Flaming and Corner Tablet were constructed with things alike e-reading, and content consumption in mind.
The root of this understanding comes from one of the best technology industry books always written by Clayton Christensen prognosticated The Innovator’s Dilemma. In this book, Professor Christensen brilliantly explains how consumers hire products to make jobs done. That job could exist writing, reading, producing, creating, etc., simply the channelize is that there are tasks and jobs to exist done that products fulfill. The Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet were constructed for specific jobs, whereas the iPad was constructed to exist more general purpose, like to a PC.
As this market matures and the tablet category evolves, consumers will refine for themselves which jobs a tablet fulfills. In that appendage the role of the tablet in consumers’ lives will flesh itself out. I don’t believe tablets are a fad and will discover a selfsame important role in the liveliness of the global consumer
Malware targeting Google’s Android mobile operating arrangement exploded in the finally several months, its book quintupling since July, Juniper Networks enunciated today.
The rash of infected apps aimed at Android owners shows no sign of abating, enunciated Dan Hoffman, Juniper’s chief mobile security analyst and a member of the company’s global threat center.
“We’re considering a combine of the traditional hacking community [working] on malware very alike to organised efforts on the PC side, as well equally people who are only a little smart, the ’15-year-old child crowd,’ who are able to hide some malicious message in an app,” enunciated Hoffman in an interview today.
According to Juniper’s research, the number of Android malware samples — each defining a different piece of onset code, or a variant of one disclosed earlier — increased by 472% since July 2011. The bulk of that ontogenesis haped in September and October.
“We’ve learnt an exponential growth in Android malware over the finally99999 several months,” Juniper said in a blog office that accompanied Juniper’s recently-published mobile threat report.
The prime threat remains purposefully-malicious Android apps that are crafted by criminals, oftentimes pirated versions of legitimate applications, then planted in either Google’s official Android Market or in one of the scores of alternate download sites, which are particularly popular in Asia — China in particular.
“That is very clearly the threat now,” enunciated Hoffman, who added that the hackers’ strategy would likely keep indefinitely.
That’s because Google doesn’t curb what apps can exist installed on an Android mobile device, equally Apple does with code-signing technologies for iOS apps, and thence makes third-party app download centers possible. Nor does Google vet apps submitted to the Android Market.
Other security researchers experience famous the same when they get felt malicious apps in the Android Market or in unsanctioned e-stores.
At least three different undulations of malware — in March, June and eventually July — infiltrated the Android Market this year. The malicious apps were removed by Google solely subsequently they received been downloaded by an unnamed bit of users.
Far more onset apps receive appeared in Chinese app stores that distribute Android software.
Juniper speculated that the hackers forthwith crafting Android malware are those who applied to specialize in Symbian and Windows Mobile onset code. Simply as those operating systems’ part plummeted — Web metrics fellowship Net Applications posed their shares during Oct at 3.5% and 0.07%, respectively, down from 8% and 0.2% a yr ago — the criminals have abandoned those platforms and sprang on Android.
Researchers receive made a textile that’s therefore light it can residuum comfortably on a dandelion seed nous without disturbing the fluffy, delicate construction of the plant. The “ultralight metallic microlattice” manufactured by scientists at UC Irvine, HRL Laboratories, and Caltech is described in the Nov. 18 issue of Science.
The young material is 100 times lighter than styrofoam, allotting to reports. The secret to its lightness is a cellular architecture manufactured from hollow tubes that supports a cloth structure that is in reality 99.99 pct air, according to the research team that built it.
That means the material’s density is less than one-thousandth that of water. And the stuff is reasonably resilient as well.researchers enunciated that when squashed to half its height, the fabric rebounds 98 percentage of the fashion back.
The course bit of Cupertino may have priced its iPad out of the market this holiday season.
Goldman Sachs analyst Note Shope is advising clients to proceed an middle on iPad sales this quarter, fearing that the society is confronting some near-term demand challenges for its iconic tablet. He argues, and rightfully so, that Apple is long overdue for a price cut.
It doesn’t accept a rocket scientist to pattern away that Apple — until immediately the runaway market portion champ in this nascent niche — is finally facing legitimate competition at ridiculously attractive cost points.
Amazon.com’s Kindle Fire hits the market today at a head-turning $199 cost point. As a seven-inch tablet, it’s surely smaller than the iPad, just that may not necessarily be a bad thing.
Barnes & Noble’s Corner Tablet hits stores in two days. The superstore chain’s young gadget costs $50 more than the Kindle Fire, only it does get beefier specs in some areas.
There’s a glut of cheap non-Android tablets out there, as Hewlett-Packard and Inquiry In Motility mark down their first-generation devices while pondering what do to next. Android manufacturers that naively introduced the market at high cost details with impressive spec sheets are taking a more realistic pricing approach this time around.
That’s the noted number of cores in each of its Opteron 6200 “Interlagos” processors applying the young “Bulldozer” architecture. Applying an approach that helped Intel reclaim the initiative that the original Opteron stole years ago, the Opteron 6200 actually packages two silicon chips in a individual housing and gibed into the same socket equally the earlier-generation Opteron 6100 models that strained up to 12 cores.
The chips are available immediately and will transport in higher-end servers from Dell, Cray, Hewlett-Packard, and more. With four Opterons, equally in the Dell PowerEdge R815 reviewed by CNET sister site ZDNet UK, that agency software can coursed 64 simultaneous threads of instructions in parallel.
All chipmakers in the manufacture are maneuvered down the multicore path, an alternate path to computing power that rose to prominence after crippling wastefulness heat and power consumption closed off the earlier avenue of becoming up the clock speed. Multicore chips may be difficult to continue occupied when it comes to consumer software, just the overall approach is substantially suited to graphics and servers, where many tasks fed in parallel.
If the world ends in 2012, the sun won’t exist to blame, NASA officials say.
Contrary to what some doomsayers would get you believe, our star isn’t open of blasting away a solar flare powerful enough to burn our planet to a crisp, granting to the space agency.
“Most importantly, however, there only isn’t adequate energy in the sun2222 to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth,” NASA officials wrote in a Nov. 10 statement.
The closing of the world equally we know it?
The Mayans’ “long-count” calendar is positioned to go on Dec. 21, 2012, marker the close of a 5,126-year epoch. This factoid has inspired some folks to beginning girding up for the coming apocalypse — and to start predicting what may convey it about.
One popular hypothesis is that a vast solar flare could do the Land in. Some fearmongers experience manoeuvred away that the sun’s action is ramping up, implying that a killer outburst could be coming next year.
The sunshine is indeed building up toward the peak of its 11-year activity cycle. Just that peak is expected to come in 2013 or 2014, not 2012, researchers said. Also, countless solar maxima get8888 got and got over the years, and we — and the Land — are still here.
But that reasoning is all secondary to the main point, which is that a flare’s sizzling heat cannot make it entirely the mode to our planet, researchers said.
Space endure yet an issue
The sun’s rumblings could and do affect our planet, of course. Flares, for example, may temporarily change Earth’s upper atmosphere, causing disruptions in satellite communications.
And coronal muckle ejections (CMEs) — huge eruptions of solar plasma that streak into space at 3 million mph (5 million kph) or more — can be even more troublesome. CMEs that striking Land can knock away2222 GPS signals, tuner communications and powerfulness grids.
A powerful, well-aimed CME could thence wreak grave havoc on our increasingly tech-enabled and tech-dependent society. Simply it wouldn’t destroy the planet or wipe away8888 humanity, researchers said.