Tracking Data Use And Choosing The Right Smartphone Plan
How conscious are you of your data use? Do you limit your data usage to keep costs down/avoid overcharges, or are you lucky enough to be on an "unlimited" plan?
I recommend checking data use at the end of your billing cycle several times a year. After you upgrade to a zippy new phone, also check your data patterns after the first three months of use. The first month with a new phone will probably be the honeymoon phase, with data gorging likely, but data use should settle in the following months.
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Researchers Create Strong And Lightweight New Metal
A team at UCLA has managed to fuse magnesium with silicon carbide to create a new metal that may prove useful in the manufacture of planes to mobile electronics.
Magnesium, at just two-thirds the density of aluminum, is the lightest structural metal. Silicon carbide is an ultra-hard ceramic commonly used in industrial cutting blades. The researchers' technique of infusing a large number of silicon carbide particles smaller than 100 nanometers into magnesium added significant strength, stiffness, plasticity and durability under high temperatures.
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Rare Revealed: The Making of Perfect Dark
Did you think Rare outdid Goldeneye with Perfect Dark?
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Researchers Propose Using Patterns And Icons For Passwords
I'm not sure how these new password systems will catch on when part of the problem is that people want authentication to be nearly instant, based on the awfully simple passwords out there.
…the user would enter their username and draw the pattern lock, with the next screen containing a series of 16 images, among which are two of their selected images, six associated distractors and eight random decoys. Correctly identifying the two images would lead to the generated eight-digit random code located on the top or left edges of the login panel which the user would then need to type in to gain access to their information.
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The Trouble With Online Customer Reviews
How often does a review influence your decision to purchase something? Sometimes I wish there were no reviews at all, since one negative review has the power to steer me away.
Andrews typifies the love-hate relationship American consumers have with customer reviews, which -- for better and worse -- have come to define the online shopping experience. People count on them to find the perfect Christmas gift on Amazon.com Inc. and the best burger joint on Yelp Inc. Yet they hate navigating through anonymous reviews -- including suspiciously over-the-top rants and raves -- in search of meaningful insights.
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Americans With Broadband Plateaued, Most Rely On Smartphones For Internet
Would you be able to tolerate having your smartphone as the only means to go online?
In general, when given a choice, people prefer to use their smartphone for getting in touch with family or friends but, for watching video, they prefer a device with a larger screen that uses a home broadband connection. At the same time, many "smartphone-only" users say that the reason they do not have broadband at home is because their smartphone lets them do all they need to do online, underscoring the device's utility for those without a home high-speed subscription.
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Star Wars Fans And Video Game Geeks More Likely To Be Narcissists
The results from a "Geek Culture Engagement Scale" and "Geek Identity Scale" have found that we are neurotic and possibly suffer from non-clinical depression.
Subjects are scored on a scale of one to five, depending on how often they take part in activities such as live action role playing games, Dungeons and Dragons, cosplaying, puppetry, robotics - and enjoying things such as video games and Star Wars.
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HAMR Hard Disk Drives Set To Arrive In 2018
Here comes yet another hopeful estimate as to when we may finally get HAMR in our hands.
Numerous demonstrations of HAMR-based HDDs in action prove that the technology actually works. Over the years, producers of hard drives, platters and recording heads have revealed various possible timeframes for commercial availability of drives with HAMR technology. Their predictions were not accurate. At present, there are still reliability issues with the technology, according to Seagate. In the recent months both Seagate and Showa Denko indicated that HAMR drives would be delayed again.
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Valve Says "No Unauthorized Actions" Were Enabled On Improperly Viewed Steam Accounts
For those who managed to miss this, it's yet another reminder that no company is immune to careless security mistakes and that you should be vigilant with what kind of stored information you entrust to any entity.
"Steam is back up and running without any known issues," we were told via email. "As a result of a configuration change earlier today, a caching issue allowed some users to randomly see pages generated for other users for a period of less than an hour. This issue has since been resolved. We believe no unauthorized actions were allowed on accounts beyond the viewing of cached page information and no additional action is required by users."
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Netgear Shows Customers How To Share Pirated Movies
Well, it is screener season.
For those who haven't spotted the faux pas, what we're looking at in the above image is Netgear explaining how its users can send a pirate rip of the Michael Bay movie 'Pain and Gain' across a network. Possibly making matters worse is the fact that the movie appears to have been acquired from RARBG, one of the world's most popular torrent sites. Presuming that the file was on a Netgear computer when the tutorial was made, one doesn't have to be particularly imaginative to work out how it got there.
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Bing Keeps Growing As Google Declines YOY
If the data mentioned in this article is accurate, Bing is the only search engine that hasn't stagnated.
Reaching 20 percent in the search business was clearly an important achievement for Microsoft, but at the same time, Google also lost ground in the last few months. While it had flat performance in the last couple of months, Google is now at 63.9 percent, down from no less than 67 percent a year ago, and there's no doubt that Microsoft is also partly responsible for this decline.
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Google Plans New, Smarter Messaging App
If Hangouts and Messenger weren't enough, Google plans to release yet another messaging app—one that will take and process your queries.
Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., plans to integrate chatbots, software programs that answer questions inside a messaging app, the people familiar with the matter said. Users will be able to text friends or a chatbot, which will scour the Web and other sources for information to answer a question, those people said. It is unclear when Google will launch the service, or what it will be called. Also in doubt is whether the new approach will be more successful than the company's prior efforts.
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Processor That Uses Light For Ultrafast Communications
Engineers have managed to figure out how to bring photonics into a computer chip, which shows performance "about 10 to 50 times greater" than microprocessors currently on the market.
The researchers packed two processor cores with more than 70 million transistors and 850 photonic components onto a 3-by-6-millimeter chip. They fabricated the microprocessor in a foundry that mass-produces high-performance computer chips, proving that their design can be easily and quickly scaled up for commercial production.
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[H]ard|OCP [H]oliday Week in Reviews
Today is Friday and you know what that means...IT'S CHRISTMAS! It is also time once again for the [H]ard|OCP Week in Reviews! For anyone that might have missed them, we like to take a quick look back on the hardware evaluations and articles we posted earlier in the week. We kicked off the short [H]oliday week with our evaluation of the Corsair Carbide Series 600Q inverted ATX case. We wrapped up the week with our ASUS R9 390 STRIX DirectCU III video card review.
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Portal - Carol Of The Turrets
Merry, merry, merry, merry science! Thanks to DukenukemX for the heads up.
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