Intel has acquired educational software developer Kno to add to its Education division.
Speaking in the company blog, Intel Sales and Marketing Group VP John Galvin explained that in a world where kids are being bombarded by technology, Intel Education has a mission to support the rollout of technology in the classroom.
Galvin said, “The Kno platform provides administrators and teachers with the tools they need to easily assign, manage and monitor their digital learning content and assessments.”
This acquisition brings Intel’s global digital content library to over 225,000 [higher education] and K-12 titles from 74 education publishers. “We’re looking forward to combining our expertise with Kno’s rich content so that together, we can help teachers create classroom environments and personalized learning experiences that lead to student success,” Galvin added.
Intel Education has been working for the past decade with over 10 million teachers that it has assisted to integrate technology with education.
In the UK alone there have been tremendous strides in educational software over the past 30 years, dating back to the government pledge to provide a computer in every school, which led to the creation of the BBC Microcomputer designed specifically for that purpose.
Today, not only is ICT a dedicated lesson in its own right, but it forms one of the key skills that educators are expected to incorporate into all lesson plans, putting it on a par with English and Maths, showing just how far we’ve come from making Venn diagrams with ascii art.
Intel launched its Bay Trail-M ultra low voltage processors for netbooks and mobile devices over the weekend. According to CPU World the new mobile CPUs, branded this time as Celeron and Pentium, can manage twice the CPU performance, and up to three times faster graphics.
They do all that while using the same amount of juice as their “Cedar Trail” predecessors. Most chips have higher clock speeds than N2805, N2810 and N2910 SKUs and come with Burst Performance technology. They can operate at a higher maximum operating temperature which makes them easier to cool. Finally, in addition to 4 N28xx/N29xx Celerons Intel also released Pentium N2920.
Then there are new dual-core Bay Trail-M microprocessors like the Celeron N2806, N2815 and N2820 which can operate at frequencies from 1.6 GHz to 2.13 GHz, when going downhill had the wind is behind them. They also have the maximum burst speed ranging from 2 GHz to 2.39 GHz. The processors come with 1 MB L2 cache, Ivy Bridge graphics clocked at 311 MHz and up to 756 MHz, and support for DDR3L-1066 memory. The N2806 has 4.5 Watt TDP while the N2815 and N2820 have 7.5 Watt TDP. All of the Celeron N28xx processors are priced at $132.
Two new quad-core microprocessors are Celeron N2920 and Pentium N3520. The CPUs have 2 MB L2 cache, and run at 1.86 GHz and 2.17 GHz respectively, with burst frequencies reaching 2 GHz and 2.42 GHz. Both parts integrate Ivy Bridge graphics, that can be clocked as high as 854 MHz. The Celeron can deal with DDR3L-1066 memory, and the Pentium supports 1333 MHz memory data rate. They fit into 7.5 Watt power envelope. The official prices of Celeron N2920 and Pentium N3520 are $132 and $180.
November 25, 2013 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
Samsung and Intel announced on Tuesday that the open source Tizen operating system now has 36 partners, including eBay, Trend Micro and Panasonic.
The full list of new partners was announced at the Tizen Developer Summit, and includes a mix of firms from different sectors. Among the 36 backers are eBay, Nokia’s Here mapping service, Konami, McAfee, Panasonic, Sharp and The Weather Channel, giving us some insights as to what software applications are likely to appear on the Linux based operating system.
Trevor Cornwell, founder and CEO of Appbackr, one of Tizen’s newly added partners, said that his firm found the operating system appealing due to its open nature, perhaps hinting that it is more open than Google’s Android mobile operating system.
He said, “The Tizen OS promises to be the most open and comprehensive software platform available for those companies wishing to target the consumers of connected devices.
“The Association’s commitment to support HTML5 applications, combined with their vision that extends beyond the smartphone and tablet ecosystem to a wider array of other connected device segments, makes it attractive to all types of companies. We look forward to collaborating with the Tizen Association to ensure that all stakeholders can contribute to the development of a platform for this growing market opportunity.”
It’s still unclear when Samsung’s first Tizen powered smartphone will make it to market, but online speculation suggests we’ll be seeing the firm’s debut Android challenging smartphone at some point in 2014.
Further speculation suggests that Samsung’s first Tizen phone will be an updated version of the Galaxy S4, possibly to reduce its reliance on Android.
The tradition continues. Our sources are confirming that Nvidia’s Logan SoC, possibly called Tegra 5, doesn’t come with an integrated LTE modem. Just like Apple, Nvidia makes a big fast chip with impressive Kepler based GPU, but it won’t put a an icera LTE solution inside the same chip.
Icera i500 is Tegra 5 compatible and it has AT&T certification. As the launch draws near, it should become compatible with other US and international LTE carriers like Verizon and T-mobile.
This should not be a big issue for Nvidia’s target market, manufacturers will have to choose two chips instead of one, a clear competitive disadvantage compared to future Qualcomm chips with Adreno 400 graphics and updated CPU cores, expected in early 2014.
During Nvidia’s recent conference call, CEO Jen Hsun Huang said devices based on the new Tegra 4i with integrated LTE should be announced in Q1 and ship no later than Q2. Jensen also mentioned that people are going to be “delighted by the OEM that it comes from” which is probably his way of of announcing some big brand design wins, but he also emphasised that the designs will be global rather than US. For US success you need CDMA Jensen said, but as far as we know Verizon is the only company using it.
Since Apple can pull of two chip designs from day one, we can only assume that two chip approach won’t cost much battery life compared to single chip design that has LTE on board (Snapdragon 600 and 800 ed. ). However, Nvidia is likely going to be making bets on its Kepler based GPU, expected to be the fastest graphics core ever integrated in a mobile SoC that will rock tablets and some phones around the world. The fact that Logan is likely to pack very powerful graphics sans on-die LTE makes it a bit more interesting for tablets than phones, which is exactly what we saw with the Tegra 4.
We expect to see Tegra 5 devices announced at CES 2014 so early January and with some luck we might see them shipping very early in 2014.
Most popular for its low-cost laptops, Acer doesn’t really inspire thoughts of premium products. But building high-end hardware could be the Taiwanese vendor’s best chance as it looks for a way to rescue its struggling business.
With consumers flocking to tablets and smartphones, Acer’s once-thriving PC business has been left in the dust. Quarterly financial losses have become routine at the company and its PC shipments declined more sharply in the past year than at any other major vendor, according to IDC.
The grim situation forced CEO J.T. Wang to resign from his post last Tuesday. Acer will also cut 7 percent of its global workforce and has assembled an advisory committee to come up with a new strategy, the company announced.
Bright spots are hard to find. The Wintel model that propelled Acer for years and helped it become the second-largest PC vendor in 2009 has been falling apart amid the demand for mobile gadgets. And Windows 8 and Intel’s Ultrabook strategy have failed to resuscitate the market.
It hasn’t helped that Acer is so reliant on sales to consumers, said IDC analyst Bryan Ma. The entire PC industry has been hurt by tablets, but Dell and Hewlett-Packard have at least managed to find cover selling PCs to businesses, which are still buying them. And Lenovo has capitalized on its position in China, now the world’s largest PC market.
“Acer didn’t really have the commercial PC business to protect themselves. That’s why they were hit harder,” Ma said.
Acer — whether to its benefit or detriment — has instead gained a reputation for low-priced PCs. Even in tablets it has tried to undercut rivals — its Iconia W4, an 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet, starts at US$329.99, while its Iconia B Android tablet goes for $129.99. The low prices have helped keep the company on consumers’ radar, but at the expense of profits.
One option for Acer is to build a brand as a higher-end PC player. It took a step in that direction last year with the Aspire S7, a Windows laptop with a slender, aluminum chassis that sells for $1,200 and up. That product and its successors have had some success for the company, with sales of 2,000 to 3,000 units per month, said James Wang, an analyst with research firm Canalys.
“I think Acer has started to learn they are able to sell some expensive products,” he said.
Selling higher-end PCs could help stop the bleeding in Acer’s finances, but with the overall PC market still shrinking it’s unlikely to help it expand in any meaningful way. “You can’t really expect vendors in desktops and notebooks to find growth,” Wang said. “You win in the market by not falling in shipments.”
Kaspersky has claimed that the infamous Stuxnet computer worm “badly infected” the internal network of an unnamed Russian nuclear plant after it caused chaos in Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Speaking at a keynote presentation given at the Canberra Press Club 2013, Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky said a staffer at the unnamed nuclear plant informed him of the infection.
“[The staffer said] their nuclear plant network which was disconnected from the internet was badly infected by Stuxnet,” Kaspersky said.
“So unfortunately these people who were responsible for offensive technologies, they recognise cyber weapons as an opportunity.”
Stuxnet was discovered to have spread throughout industrial software and equipment in 2010 and is believed to have been created by the United States and Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. According to Kaspersky’s source, the malware was carried into the Russian nuclear plant and installed on a physically separated “air-gapped” network.
Kaspersky also made a rather outlandish joke during his speech, saying that all data is subject to theft. “All the data is stolen,” Kaspersky said. “At least twice.”
“If the claim of the Russian nuclear plant infection is true, then it’s easy to imagine how this “collateral damage” could have turned into a very serious incident indeed, with obvious diplomatic repercussions,” said security expert Graham Cluley.
“There is no way to independently verify the claim, of course. But it is a fact that Stuxnet managed to infect many computer systems outside of its intended target in Iran,” Cluley added. “Indeed, the very fact that it spread out of control, was what lead to its discovery by security firms.”
Earlier this year, Symantec claimed that the Stuxnet computer worm could date back further than 2010 and was more widespread than originally believed.
Symantec’s report called “The Missing Link” found a build of the Stuxnet attack tool, dubbed Stuxnet 0.5, which it said dated back to 2005 and used different techniques to sabotage industrial facilities.
November 19, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Scientists have discovered a way to power future robots using an unusual source — urine.
Researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol and the University of Bristol collaborated to build a system that will enable robots to function without batteries or being plugged into an electrical outlet.
Based on the functioning of the human heart, the system is designed to pump urine into the robot’s “engine room,” converting the waste into electricity and enabling the robot to function completely on its own.
Scientists are hoping the system, which can hold 24.5 ml of urine, could be used to power future generations of robots, or what they’re calling EcoBots.
“In the city environment, they could re-charge using urine from urinals in public lavatories,” said Peter Walters, a researcher with the University of the West of England. “In rural environments, liquid waste effluent could be collected from farms.”
In the past 10 years, researchers have built four generations of EcoBots, each able to use microorganisms to digest the waste material and generate electricity from it, the university said.
Along with using human and animal urine, the robotic system also can create power by using rotten fruit and vegetables, dead flies, waste water and sludge.
Ioannis Ieropoulos, a scientist with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, explained that the microorganisms work inside microbial fuel cells where they metabolize the organics, converting them into carbon dioxide and electricity.
Like the human heart, the robotic system works by using artificial muscles that compress a soft area in the center of the device, forcing fluid to be expelled through an outlet and delivered to the fuel cells. The artificial muscles then relax and go through the process again for the next cycle.
“The artificial heartbeat is mechanically simpler than a conventional electric motor-driven pump by virtue of the fact that it employs artificial muscle fibers to create the pumping action, rather than an electric motor, which is by comparison a more complex mechanical assembly,” Walter said.
November 18, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
A computer security firm has discovered data it says belongs to some 152 million Adobe Systems Inc user accounts, suggesting that a breach reported a month ago is much larger than Adobe has so far disclosed and is one of the largest on record.
LastPass, a password security firm, said that it has found email addresses, encrypted passwords and password hints stored in clear text from Adobe user accounts on an underground website frequented by cyber criminals.
Adobe said last week that attackers had stolen data on more than 38 million customer accounts, on top of the theft of information on nearly 3 million accounts that it disclosed nearly a month earlier.
The maker of Photoshop and Acrobat software confirmed that LastPass had found records stolen from its data center, but downplayed the significance of the security firm’s findings.
While the new findings from LastPass indicate that the Adobe breach is far bigger than previously known, company spokeswoman Heather Edell said it was not accurate to say 152 million customer accounts had been compromised because the database attacked was a backup system about to be decommissioned.
She said the records include some 25 million records containing invalid email addresses, 18 million with invalid passwords. She added that “a large percentage” of the accounts were fictitious, having been set up for one-time use so that their creators could get free software or other perks.
She also said that the company is continuing to work with law enforcement and outside investigators to determine the cost and scope of the breach, which resulted in the theft of customer data as well as source code to several software titles.
The company has notified some 38 million active Adobe ID users and is now contacting holders of inactive accounts, she said.
Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the non-profit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, said information in an inactive database is often useful to criminals.
He said they might use it to engage in “phishing” scams or attempt to figure out passwords using the hints provided for some of the accounts in the database. In some cases, people whose data was exposed might not be aware of it because they have not accessed the out-of-date accounts, he said.
“Potentially it’s the website you’ve forgotten about that poses the greater risk,” he said. “What if somebody set up an account with Adobe ten years ago and forgot about it and they use the same password there that they use on other sites?”
Google has expanded malware blocking in an early development build of Chrome to sniff out a wider range of threats than the browser already recognizes.
Chrome’s current “Canary” build — the label for very-early versions of the browser, earlier than even Chrome’s Dev channel — will post a warning at the bottom of the window when it detects an attempted download of malicious code.
Features added to the Canary build usually, although not always, eventually make it into the Dev channel — the roughest-edged of the three distributed to users — and from there into the Beta and Stable channels. Google did not spell out a timetable for the expanded malware blocking.
Chrome has included malware blocking for more than two years, since version 12 launched in June 2011, and the functionality was extended in February 2012with Chrome 17.
Chrome is now at version 30.
Canary’s blocking, however, is more aggressive on two fronts: It is more assertive in its alerts and detects more malware forms, including threats that pose as legitimate software and monkey with the browser’s settings.
“Content.exe is malicious, and Chrome has blocked it,” the message in Canary reads. The sole visible option is to click the “Dismiss” button, which makes the warning vanish. The only additional option, and that only after another click, is to “Learn more,” which leads to yet another warning.
In Canary, there is no way for the user to contradict the malware blocking.
That’s different than in the current Stable build of Chrome, which relies on a message that says, “This file is malicious. Are you sure you want to continue?” and gives the user a choice between tossing the downloaded file or saving it anyway.
As it has for some time, Chrome will show such warnings on select file extensions, primarily “.exe,” which in Windows denotes an executable file, and “.msi,” an installation package for Windows applications. Canary’s expansion, said Google, also warns when the user tries to download some less obvious threats, including payloads masquerading as legitimate software — it cited screen savers and video plug-ins in a blog posting — that hijack browser settings to silently change the home page or insert ads into websites to monetize the malware.
Google’s malware blocking is part of its Safe Browsing API (application programming interface) and service, which Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox all access to warn customers of potentially dangerous websites before they reach them.
In Chrome’s case, the malware warning stems not only from the Safe Browsing “blacklist” of dodgy websites, but according to NSS Labs, a security software testing company, also from the Content Agnostic Malware Protection (CAMP) technology that Google has baked into its implementation of Safe Browsing.
Qualcomm’s Adreno 330 GPU will be replaced by new Adreno 400-series parts and naturally the new generation will be faster than the one that sits inside the Snapdragon 800.
Our sources are telling us that Adreno 400 is expected with the new version of Snapdragon that is set to debut in early 2014. Traditionally Qualcomm uses CES to showcase its new chips and CES 2014 starts on January 7th, so it sounds like the right time for it.
The only key detail that we learned about Adreno 400 is that despite a significant increase in GPU performance the chip won’t have a compute part and it doesn’t support OpenCL. Many will see this as a handicap, but to be honest we see limited uses for OpenCL in mobile chips, at least for now.
Nvidia’s Logan comes with Open CL 1.1 as well as Open GL 4.4 support. Adreno 330 can push 3.6 Gigapixels a second making it one of the fastest GPUs in mobile market, capable of going head to head with the Tegra 4. Adreno 400 naturally ends up faster.
Then again we expect that Logan Tegra 5 has what it takes to dominate the mobile GPU market in 2014. Let’s not forget about PowerVR 6-series parts, ARM’s recently announced Mali 700-series or Vivante’s upcoming mobile GPU designs, either.
Unlike the AMD-Nvidia duopoly in the PC GPU market, right now there are five players vying for the top spot in the mobile space and things are bound to get interesting.
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