LinkedIn debuts new pages for universities to help HS students

Charles Gantt | Internet & Websites | Aug 19, 2013 3:32 PM CDT

Today, LinkedIn announced that it has launched a new Page for Universities feature that allows post-K-12 educational institutions to have their own featured page similar to the pages companies currently have. LinkedIn is hoping that this new feature will better help high school students choose the right university for them.

The program launched today with over 200 universities participating worldwide. Each university's page displays very important metrics such as where the majority of the institution's alumni work and what careers many of its alumni go into. Universities can set up their respective page for its community similar to how pages on Facebook work. They can then assign page managers who can post announcements and updates to the page for anyone that is following. LinkedIn's Christina Allen officially announced the new Pages for Universities in a blog post that I have copied below (source #2).

A few years ago, my daughter and I took a road trip to visit schools before she made her final decision about college. I was hoping she'd stay in California, but it wasn't looking good. She'd fallen in love with a university 2,500 miles away, and I had to admit it was the best choice if she wanted a great robotics program and an equally good music school.

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Windows 8 gets banned from HWBot amidst faults in its RTC

Charles Gantt | Tweaking & Overclocking | Aug 19, 2013 1:24 PM CDT

Every PC in use today has a small piece of hardware built into the chipset that is known as a real-time-clock. This is a piece of hardware that keeps accurate track of time even when the PC is turned off. This little piece of hardware is used by all benchmarking programs to keep an accurate track of time to determine how well a system performs. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to change things up in the way their software accesses the real-time-clock in Windows 8, and as a result, popular benchmarking results website HWBot has made the decision to ban the operating system from their results.

The issues arise when users attempt to change their clock frequencies in software and not at boot time. By changing the CPU-based clock frequency , the software algorithms that Windows 8 employs to keep track of time are massively skewed, which greatly hinders Windows 8's ability to keep accurate time. YouTube user Massman89 has posted a video that demonstrates this by underclocking the BLCK from 130 MHz to 122MHz. In the video, Windows 8 loses track of time by 18 seconds over a five minute period. If you increase the clock rate by 6 percent, Windows 8 internally gains 18 seconds.

These extra 18 seconds per five minutes means that a benchmark that is set to run for five minutes will actually run for five minutes and 18 seconds, giving the benchmark an extra 18 seconds to render 6 percent more frames or complete 6 percent more floating-point calculations. This skews the benchmark score by around 6 percent. While some may see this as an easily fixable issue, HWBot is taking things quite seriously and has decided to ban Windows 8 results altogether.

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Microsoft announces new boomerang shaped Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard

Charles Gantt | Peripherals | Aug 19, 2013 12:21 PM CDT

As many of us are either gamers or PC enthusiasts, we often overlook the more office / productivity oriented mice and keyboards that are available on the market. Today, Microsoft unveiled two new keyboard and mice combos to its Sculpt line of Ergonomic peripherals. The company designs these new models based on the input from more than 5,300 workers that say they experience discomfort on a daily basis when working with traditional keyboards and mice.

First, we have the boomerang shaped Sculpt Ergonomic Desktop bundle, which features an oddly shaped key layout with a wide split in the middle. Microsoft says this split provides the perfect angle which allows users to rest their hands more naturally on the keyboard. This set also includes a separate wireless number pad and wireless mouse, which has also been redesigned to fit more naturally in the user's hand.

The second offering unveiled today is dubbed the Sculpt Comfort Desktop Bundle and features a more traditional looking keyboard with a curved typing service and flat numerical keypad. A detachable palm rest is present alongside a split spacebar. The mouse included in this set also features a new design that integrates a Windows touch tab that allows users to swipe over this blue button to view or cycle through open applications.

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Google goes offline for 2 minutes, affects 40% of the Internet

Anthony Garreffa | Internet & Websites | Aug 17, 2013 12:04 AM CDT

It looks like Google pressed a wrong button on Friday, most likely in the TGIF celebrations, taking down every single service that the Mountain View-based giant has to offer. This obviously includes Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, and every service in between.

According to analytics firm GoSquared, worldwide Internet traffic dropped by a whopping 40% during those hectic 120 seconds, as you can see in the graph, above. Most companies and website owners were scratching their heads for a few minutes, because when Google goes down, it would be like not being able to breathe oxygen for those two minutes - sheer panic. Google came back online two minutes later, to the relief of, well, everyone.

Google should hopefully come out with a report next week, which should stun, and scare thousands across the world.

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ScienceFriday: NASA ends efforts to repair Kepler Space Telescope

News came in overnight that NASA has decided to call off all efforts dedicated to repairing its crippled Kepler Space Telescope. The 0.95-meter space telescope was launched four years ago with the task of discovering Earth-size planets orbiting nearby stars. The mission has widely been considered a success with hundreds of new planets now catalogued.

A few months back, the telescope's gyroscopic reaction wheels began failing, and this makes precisely aligning the telescope for stable long exposure shots impossible. Kepler resides in such a high orbit that even if we had a servicing robot or still flew space shuttles, we would simply not be able to reach it and as such, NASA has decided to end all efforts attempting to revive the telescope.

With Kepler gone and the Hubble space telescope quickly nearing its end of life, our only hope for outer space imaging sources now relies on the constantly threatened James Web Space Telescope. Unfortunately, it appears that every time our lawmakers start talking budgets, the James Webb is always the first to take the hit. I don't normally do this sort of thing, but if you like the images that the Hubble provides, and think hunting for new earth-like planets is a good thing, then please contact your local congressman and let them know that the James Webb space telescope is a good thing.

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MakerBot and Stratasys complete merger, says "full speed ahead"

Charles Gantt | | Aug 16, 2013 3:04 PM CDT

It was not that long ago that I remember hanging out in the RepRap IRC channel and Forums and chatting about this awesome new DIY 3D printer project so many of us were obsessed with. Of course, I'm talking about the original RepRap model "Darwin." One of the major questions was how do we create the printed parts needed to build it without having a printer on hand.

Everyone seemed to have their solution, including a man named Bre Pettis. He had found this Cartesian robot that could be built using simple iron pipe from hardware stores. Around the same time another man who went by the name Hoken joined the conversation and thus the McWire RepStrap was born. Those two guys that I spent so many hours chatting with in the IRC channel eventually went on to found Makerbot Industries, the company responsible for bringing 3-D printing to mainstream.

Earlier this year, the company announced that it was in the process of being acquired by 3-D printing giant Stratasys, and today they announced that the acquisition is completed. In the deal, Petis and the other shareholders of Makerbot will receive a total of 4.7 million shares of Stratasys stock in exchange for 100 percent of Makerbot's outstanding capital stock.

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Copyright Troll gets caught seeding torrents on The Pirate Bay

Charles Gantt | Business, Financial & Legal | Aug 16, 2013 2:06 PM CDT

It's no secret that copyright and patent trolls are not the most ethical of creatures. In fact, many regard them as little more than the scum of the earth. Today, website Torrentfreak has released a report that shows just how immoral and unethical copyright trolls can be.

The report says that Comcast has confirmed that a Pirate Bay user going by the name "Sharkmp4" has been directly linked to the notorious copyright troll Prenda Law. In a weird turn of events, The Pirate Bay actually helped Comcast expose the copyright troll who is running a honeypot on the popular torrent listing service.

The exposure came after a June report released by Delvan Neville, who works for a company that monitors BitTorrent users, that accused Prenda of running the so-called honeypot. The report says that the law firm was the major seeder of the very files they claim to be protecting. The Pirate Bay jumped in and exposed the IP address that Sharkmp4 was using, which matched up with Prenda's IP address.

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ScienceFriday: NASA says it has no idea where Voyager 1 is in space

Charles Gantt | Science, Space, Health & Robotics | Aug 16, 2013 12:03 PM CDT

It has been 35 years since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft blasted off from terra firma and headed into the final frontier. During this journey, the space probe has visited Saturn, Jupiter, and has even managed to leave our solar system. Well maybe it has left, or maybe it is still here. Not even NASA is sure whether or not Voyager 1 has reached interstellar space.

If you're a space buff like me, I know what you're thinking, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced last year that Voyager 1 has in fact left our solar system and is now streaking through interstellar space. Unfortunately, the original Voyager science team seems to think otherwise.

To toss even more confusion into the mix, both the University of Maryland as well as Boston University both agree that Voyager 1 actually reached interstellar space on July 27, 2012, and for the moment, NASA has agreed to simply disagree and released a statement saying that they simply have no idea where Voyager 1 actually it.

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LSI announces new SHIELD technology, improves SSD NAND endurance

Paul Alcorn | IT/Datacenter & Super Computing | Aug 16, 2013 10:12 AM CDT

The introduction of newer, smaller flash geometries will require sophisticated error correction ability to maximize endurance of the NAND. As NAND matures, it almost seems counter-intuitive that we will lose endurance as NAND shrinks, but economics have a hand in the smaller NAND geometries. In order to provide a more economical and accessible product through shrinks, endurance suffers as a trade-off.

One of LSI's core competencies has always been strong ECC techniques, which originated with their extensive hard drive controller experience. The addition of these new LSI SHIELD error correction technologies shows a sign of some of the mutual benefits from the LSI/SandForce acquisition.

Enabling advanced Low-Density Parity Check (LDPC) allows LSI SandForce to create a stable solution that will mesh well with not only lower endurance MLC and TLC, but will also wring extra endurance out of current generation NAND as well. This is accomplished through a variety of techniques, including an adaptive method of adjusting the level of ECC during the life of the SSD.

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LSI SandForce announces enhanced SSD capacity with DVC

Paul Alcorn | IT/Datacenter & Super Computing | Aug 16, 2013 9:54 AM CDT

At the Flash Memory Summit 2013, LSI SandForce gave us a teaser of one of the new features that will be featured on the next generation of SandForce flash storage processors.

One of the most exciting new developments is the ability to reclaim some of the extra capacity provided from LSI SandForce's DuraWrite engine. With their compression engine, LSI SandForce's flash storage processors actually write less data down to the NAND than what was sent from the host. In current products this delivers excellent increases in both endurance and performance, with the controller effectively utilizing the extra space as bonus overprovisioning.

LSI SandForce has decided to hand some of that excess capacity back to the customer by allowing users to use this 'hidden' extra spare area on the SSD. The new DuraWrite Virtual Capacity (DVC) feature dynamically adjusts the amount of extra capacity available to the user determined by the amount of data compression.

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