Tuesday, June 30, 2015

IT News Head Lines (HardOCP) 7/1/2015





PowerColor PCS+ R9 380
There is a review of the PowerColor PCS+ R9 380 posted at LanOC today that is certainly worth checking out. Here's a quote from the full review to get you started:

So today I'm going to check out the card from PowerColor and see what they have going on and along with that we can see if having the additional frame buffer is worth it in our benchmark suite. With these cards not exactly being focused towards higher resolution gameplay I'm not sure if we will see too much at 1080p but given the 1440p numbers we saw before I bet we see some improvement there!

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In Wake Of Hack, No Federal Background Checks
It's a good thing those pesky little things called federal background checks aren't important.

Three weeks after U.S. authorities determined foreign hackers may have stolen sensitive government records tied to tens of millions of people, the Office of Personnel Management has now shut down a system tied to the breach, essentially bringing to a halt background checks for new federal employees, contractors and others.

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Microsoft Hands Display Ads To AOL, Maps To Uber
It looks as though Microsoft has offloaded some of its money losing operations to AOL and Uber.

Under a 10-year deal struck with AOL, now a unit of Verizon Communications Inc, AOL will sell display ads on MSN, Outlook.com, Xbox, Skype and in some apps in major countries. As part of the deal, Bing will become the search engine behind web searches on AOL starting next year. Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of its deal with Uber, saying only that it would no longer collect mapping imagery itself.

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MIT Invents Automatic Bug Repair
Wouldn't it have been great if the developers of the PC version of Batman: Arkham Knight had access to something like this.

MIT researchers presented a new system that repairs dangerous software bugs by automatically importing functionality from other, more secure applications. Remarkably, the system, dubbed CodePhage, doesn't require access to the source code of the applications whose functionality it's borrowing. Instead, it analyzes the applications' execution and characterizes the types of security checks they perform. As a consequence, it can import checks from applications written in programming languages other than the one in which the program it's repairing was written.

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Threat From AI Not Just Hollywood Fantasy
Holy hell, did some scientist from the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University just say we could all end up "entombed in concrete coffins on heroin drips?"

"When machines become smarter than humans, we'll be handing them the steering wheel." Furthermore, an instruction such as "keep humans safe and happy", could be translated by the remorseless digital logic of a machine as "entomb everyone in concrete coffins on heroin drips".

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Supreme Court Declines To Hear Google Appeal In Oracle Case
The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken (sorta). Technically they just refused to hear the case but the end result is the same.

Oracle Corp won a major legal victory on Monday in a closely watched copyright case involving the company's Java programming language as the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Google Inc's appeal. The decision upholds a ruling that allows Oracle to seek licensing fees for the use of some of the Java language. Google had said it should be able to use Java without paying a fee.

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PayPal Made Changes To Its Robocalling Policy
Apparently PayPal didn't like it when the FCC said its robocalling policy might be illegal so the company has made changes its user agreement.

To clear up any confusion, we will be modifying the terms of Section 1.10 of our User Agreement. The new language is intended to make it clear that PayPal primarily uses autodialed or prerecorded calls and texts to:
Help detect, investigate and protect our customers from fraud
Provide notices to our customers regarding their accounts or account activity
Collect a debt owed to us
In addition the new Sections (1.10(a) and 1.10(b)) will make it clear that:
We will not use autodialed or prerecorded calls or texts to contact our customers for marketing purposes without prior express written consent
Customers can continue to enjoy our products and services without needing to consent to receive autodialed or prerecorded calls or texts
We respect our customers' communications preferences and recognize that their consent is required for certain autodialed and prerecorded calls and texts. Customers may revoke consent to receive these communications by contacting PayPal customer support and informing us of their preferences.

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LEDs And Lasers Dunked In Liquid Nitrogen
Why would you dunk LEDs and lasers into liquid nitrogen? Because SCIENCE!



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Bitcoin Is Unsustainable
Attention everyone! Your attention please! Bitcoin is unsustainable. This guy says so.

Unfortunately for Bitcoin, if user adoption spikes, so will price—and so must power consumption. Bitcoin mining leads to an arms race among miners to grab a slice of the fixed rewards doled out by the network, Stolfi said. The higher the financial rewards, the more miners will invest in powerful equipment to keep up with the competition. The Bitcoin protocol will continue to increase the difficulty of the cryptopuzzles to keep rewards constant, continuing the arms race until the last block is mined.

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XFX R9 290X Black OC Edition CrossFire Video Card Review
Today we review two XFX R9 290X Black OC Edition video cards in CrossFire to see what quality 4K gaming we can achieve. We will be comparing this to a SLI GeForce GTX 970 configuration, in hopes of clearly defining the better overall value in this high-end gaming category. All for $699.98 after $60 MIR.

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Top Gun 2 Will Be About Drones
Sure, taking an 80's hit movie, bringing back it's original star and throwing technology all over the place might work, but hasn't the "pilot competes against drones and wins" storyline been done to death already?

The long-mooted sequel to 80s blockbuster Top Gun will explore the culture clash between old school aviation and the new generation of unmanned drones, according to the film's producer. Cruise confirmed his enduring interest last year, telling Sky News: "If we can get over some stumbling blocks it will be fun to do."

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Uber France CEO Taken Into Custody
With all the protesting going on over there, something tells me this guy wasn't taken into custody for his own safety.

After days of violent protests and defiance on the part of Uber's French management, two of the company's employees were taken into custody for "illicit activity" today. Uber France CEO Thibaut Simphal and Uber European GM Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty were arrested for running the company's ride-sharing service illegally.

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Available Tags:Microsoft , Google , Oracle , PayPal , XFX , CEO

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