Tuesday, November 5, 2013

TechEye

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Chinese site gets paws on GeForce GTX 780 Ti

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 03:24 AM PST

A Chinese website has gotten its paws on images and benchmarks of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 780 Ti.

Chiphell  shows that the GTX 780 Ti will be based on the same PCB as the GTX 780 and GTX Titan.

It looks like the card has a GK110 chip with 2880 CUDA-cores. The graphics card has a 384-bits memory interface and 3GB of GDDR5. Clock frequencies of 876MHz which can be boosted to 928 MHz for the core and 7GHz for the memory are specified.

If this is correct, the GeForce GTX 780 Ti is marginally faster than Nvidia's GTX Titan and AMD's R9 290X.

The benchmarks were run on a system featuring an Intel Core i7-4970X processor, clocked at 4.5 GHz and combined with 16 GB of DDR3 memory with a 2933 MHz clock frequency. The motherboard was an ASUS' Rampage IV Black Edition and storage was provided by two Plextor M8P SSDs in RAID-0.

The benchmark scores have the GTX 780 Ti is slightly faster than the GTX Titan and comparable in speed to the dual-GPU GTX 690. If these benchmarks are reliable, the GTX Titan will be taken to Berlin woods and quietly shot in the back of the head. 

Rogers claims al Qaeda tipped off by Snowden

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 03:16 AM PST

Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, claims that al Qaeda has changed the way it communicates in the light of Edward Snowden's leaks.

Talking to CBS's Face the Nation, Rogers said if Snowden disclosed classified information that has allowed three different terrorist organisations, affiliates of al Qaeda to change the way it communicates.

Rogers was evidently referring to an intelligence analysis of the impact of Snowden's leaks

The former contractor leaked to the press, as well as foreign governments, various National Security Agency files, as well as descriptions of the agency's surveillance programmes.

Intelligence officials have so far differed in their assessments of the damage done by Snowden, with respect to the fight against al Qaeda.

Matthew Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, thinks al Qaeda has been adapting to the revelations.

Others think that the release of sensitive communications between al Qaeda emir Ayman al Zawahri and his subordinates in early August has done more damage.

While it is suspected that Al Qaeda has been tracking the leaks of classified information very closely, it must be thinking a lot of it is old news. The terror group has changed the way it behaved after Osama bin Laden's lair was raided.

Thousands of formerly classified American intelligence reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan were found in in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Either way it looks like Rogers is trying to turn public opinion against Snowden by pulling out an old bug-bear. . So far, Snowden leaks have not really covered al Qaeda and mostly deal with the NSA snooping on its own citizens and allies. 

Tesco starts face scanning

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 02:55 AM PST

Tesco is installing facial recognition technology to display targeted video advertising on screens at its petrol stations.

Dubbed OptimEyes the system recognises facial characteristics that discover a customer's gender and age in order to show relevant video adverts while they are waiting to pay for their petrol.

There is nothing new about the technology. Pilots of bill boards which could tell what gender you were carried out in London years ago, to an underwhelming response.

Simon Sugar, chief executive of Amscreen, the firm which sells the technology, admitted to The Grocer that the technology has improved and is more like something out of Minority Report.

Needless to say the roll out has miffed some privacy groups, with Big Brother Watch's Nick Pickles telling the Guardian that OptimEyes creates a "huge consent issue".

People needed to be told that if they walk into a supermarket, or a doctor's surgery or a law firm, that the CCTV camera in the corner is trying to find out who they are, he said.

As far as the Information Commissioner's Office is concerned, such equipment would have to be clearly marked and explained as a customer enters the shop. A similar rule already exists for CCTV cameras.

What will enable Tesco to run its scheme is that it is hardly Minority Report yet. The software only scans your face, to guess what sex you are, it is hardly able to tell who you are and pull up a list of products it might think you would like.

Otherwise all a service station is going to get are adverts for petrol, Kit-Kats, Twixes and cigarettes  and you do not really need facial recognition software to tell you that.

Blackberry can't sell its way out of jam

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 02:48 AM PST

Troubled mobile phone seller Blackberry has worked out that it can't sell its way out of its jam.

The phone maker, formerly known as RIM, abandoned its plan to sell itself and said its CEO Thorsten Heins is stepping down.

On the back of the news, shares fell 16 percent as investors feared that the outfit was running out of ideas.

BlackBerry said it will abandon a sale and will raise $1 billion by issuing convertible notes to a group of long-term investors including its largest shareholder, Fairfax Financial Holdings.

Fairfax was the only one who seriously wanted to buy the company, for $4.7 billion.

Analysts told Reuters that the company was back to its downward spiral. The company has $1 billion more cash that buys them time but the drumbeat of negativity is likely to continue.

BlackBerry named John Chen, credited with turning around Sybase Inc in the late 1990s, as its interim CEO and executive chairman. Sybase, an enterprise software company, was eventually acquired by SAP AG in 2010.

No one has explained why Heins had to go. Chen said that he has no interest in shutting BlackBerry's loss-making handset business and believed he could turn it around.

Techbubble fud is ready to burst

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 02:47 AM PST

While we have not noticed it, Business Insider  claims that the tech industry is booming and is waiting with its fingers in its ears waiting for a bubble to burst.

To be fair to Business Insider there are some similarities to the last time the dot.com industry bubble burst, in 1999, taking with it most of the IT industry.

The stock market is at an all-time high. Tech start-ups with no revenue have billion-dollar valuations and Interest rates are effectively at zero percent.

Business Insider claims that since everyone has their money in tech shares, these are all hopelessly inflated. The sharemarket goes in waves and we are due for a downturn.

But where Business Insider is wacky is that it seems to believe that the tech industry is doing rather well. The article believes that developers are all in work and making a fortune out of their work.

In fact, anyone would tell you that is simply not the case. Unlike 1999 where all you needed to do was run a dot.com to make any money at all, the tech industry is still depressed and most companies are restructuring. The biggest companies are actually suffering, only Google is doing particularly well. Even Apple is not making the huge amounts of cash that it collected in the past.

Microsoft, IBM, HP, Cisco and Oracle need for the rest of the economy to pick up to see serious money arrive. That will not happen until businesses start buying PCs and servers again.

While tech companies, led by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, are lobbying Congress to relax immigration rules so they can hire more foreign talent because they believe domestic talent is too scarce and too expensive. However, that does not mean that there is a lot of talent out there still sitting on the dole.

Rather than suggesting that the tech industry is in a bubble, there appears to be a soft state of companies emerging. Business Insider mentions  start-ups which are worth billions but are to make a profit. Twitter would be an example.

Other companies it cites, such as Supercell, the game company, just raised $1.5 billion in new funding at a valuation of $3 billion, are exceptions rather than the rule. Supercell has real revenue, $178 million in Q1 alone, but the rest of the game industry is not doing so well.

What Business Insider is seeing is a soft state where some companies are doing extremely well, while others are frantically restructuring. It is possible that some of the new comers will do badly, but it is equally possible that some of them will do well.

As far as the industry is concerned, it is still too depressed to worry about any bubbles bursting yet.

Where we might see problems is in the Internet advertising world generally. It is a complete mess and getting messier with Facebook running around trying to sell advertising. Advertising companies have no idea how to run Internet advertising campaigns and content makers which were dependent on them knowing their arse from their elbow are disappearing fast through lack of advertising.

Business Insider is concerned that while serious investors are beginning to suspect a tech bubble has formed, and that a crash is coming, this is more Chicken Little type warnings which might scare smaller investors.

The technology industry is in the worst state since we started reporting in the 1990s and has still not recovered from the long recession. It is far too early to worry about tech-bubbles bursting yet. 

Intel hopes for a netbook zombie apocalypse

Posted: 05 Nov 2013 12:33 AM PST

Five years ago the market was abuzz with talk of cheap netbooks based on Intel’s Atom processors and AMD’s upcoming low-end APUs. Then Steve Jobs took to the stage with the first iPad in tow and the rest is history – netbooks died out faster than any PC form factor in recent history.

However, the basic concept never really went away. Although Intel lost interest in doing cheap netbooks and ultraportables (if it ever had any interest to begin with), AMD stepped up with a couple of cheap APUs. Intel netbooks were killed off, but slightly bigger 11.6-designs are still around, based on AMD and Intel silicon. Google also joined the fun with Chromebooks and they are taking off slowly. 

Netbooks weren’t a bad idea, but neither Intel nor Microsoft seemed too interested in actually coming up with good platforms. There were too many hardware limitations and netbooks never offered anything really new or revolutionary – they were just small, underpowered notebooks. 

Now we’re seeing an interesting trend. Redmond botched the Windows RT rollout and Windows 8 never caught on as a tablet OS. Intel on the other hand is rolling out new Bay Trail chips, with a lot more muscle than Atoms of yesteryear, but with much higher efficiency. Intel is now talking up 2-in-1 designs and other form factors that practically look like the natural extension of netbook evolution.

Asus recently launched a Windows 8.1 tablet with a keyboard dock for just $349. It’s the first such machine - a Windows 8.1 tablet on the cheap, with a proper keyboard to boot, but it’s by no means the last one. New designs from big PC players are on the way and they are bound to be cheap. Several companies have already rolled out 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablets and $299 seems to be the sweet spot, so these hybrid designs should end up priced anywhere from $349 to $449 – cheaper than an iPad, but more expensive than cheap Android tablets. 

Chromebooks are an interesting development, too. Although they lack the x86 legacy appeal of cheap Bay Trail gear, they appear to be selling quite well. Acer, HP and Samsung already have a few designs each and they are going for $249 to $399 – somewhat cheaper than what a full size Bay Trail tablet should cost. Lenovo recently launched the IdeaPad 10, a cheap Android netbook, although we’re not sure it has much mainstream appeal. Gateway launched a 10.1-inch Windows 8 netbook for $329 and the new Asus F102 is also a 10-inch netbook with a €299 price tag, with an AMD APU running the show.

So what’s going on here? 

Well, touchscreens are dirt cheap and so are 10-inch panels, yet Windows 8.1 is becoming a viable OS for cheap ultraportables and tablets, thanks to Intel’s Bay Trail and AMD Jaguar parts. Although netbooks are dead, quasi-netbooks are starting to make sense again, especially for players who did not roll out Chromebooks of their own. Convertible tablets like the Asus T100TA seem to offer the best of both worlds – an ultraportable Windows 8.1 notebook that’s also a tablet on the cheap. It all makes us wonder what would have been had Intel and Microsoft taken netbooks seriously five years ago.
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