Month: August 2016

Video recorded by Andrew Cunningham and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

One of the Android Nougat update’s biggest additions for tablets and large-screened phones is its new split-screen multitasking mode. Samsung has supported its own version of this feature for years, and Apple added it to newer iPads in the iOS 9 update, but official Google support for it should make it usable on just about anything that runs Nougat.

Google hasn’t changed anything about the implementation since we first took a look at the feature in the earliest Nougat beta—that article and the video above lay out the basics of what it’s capable of and what it’s like to use. Now that I’ve had some time to play with the near-final version of the feature on a Nexus 9, I can say that the biggest pain point (as long as you have a fast phone or tablet) is going to be third-party app support.

(credit: deveion acker)

Calling it "highly invasive" and "ineffective," more than two dozen rights groups urged the US Department of Homeland Security on Monday to scrap a proposal asking the millions of tourists entering the country each year to reveal their "online presence" such as social media identities. The government announced in June that it wanted to implement the plan to give the DHS "clarity and visibility to possible nefarious activity and connections."

A coalition of 28 groups are not in favor. "This program would invade individual privacy and imperil freedom of expression while being ineffective and prohibitively expensive to implement and maintain," the organizations, lead by the Center for Democracy & Technology,  wrote the government.

The plan adds a line to the paper form and the online Electronic System for Travel Authorization (ESTA) application that US-bound visitors must fill out if they don't have a visa and plan on staying for up to 90 days for vacation, business, or other affairs. The agency says travelers coming to the US under the Visa Waiver Program won't be forced to disclose their social media handles. The authorities said it was "optional." However, as we all know, leaving it blank could raise red flags.

(credit: Ron Amadeo)

You may have a chance to spend less than $800 on one of Samsung's premium smartphones soon. A report from Reuters suggests that Samsung may start a refurbishment program as early as next year to sell returned Galaxy smartphones to consumers at lower prices.

While the news hasn't been confirmed yet, Reuters cites "a person with direct knowledge of the matter." Aside from news of the program in general, details about the program are unknown. It can be assumed that a program reselling gently used Galaxy smartphones would sell them for less than the handset's original price, but we don't how much of a discount customers might get, nor do we know which handsets will be included or where Samsung may implement the program.

According to Reuters, Samsung is trying to keep riding the train of recent high earnings after restructuring its mobile product line. It's reported that the company wants to "keep operating margins above 10 percent" while maximizing cost efficiency. Reuters also suggests that reselling high-end handsets at reduced prices could help the company's profits in India, where most people cannot afford to spend $800 on a smartphone.

Enlarge (credit: Athanasios Kasampalis)

The Linux operating system kernel is 25 years old this month. It was August 25, 1991 when Linus Torvalds posted his famous message announcing the project, claiming that Linux was "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu."

But now, Linux is far bigger and more professional than Torvalds could have imagined. Linux powers huge portions of the Internet's infrastructure, corporate data centers, websites, stock exchanges, the world's most widely used smartphone operating system, and nearly all of the world's fastest supercomputers. The successes easily outweigh Linux's failure to unseat Microsoft and Apple on PCs, but Linux has still managed to get on tens of millions of desktops and laptops and even runs on Windows.

As its importance has grown, development of Linux has steadily shifted from unpaid volunteers to professional developers. The 25th anniversary version of the Linux Kernel Development Report, released by the Linux Foundation today, notes that "the volume of contributions from unpaid developers has been in slow decline for many years. It was 14.6 percent in the 2012 version of this paper, 13.6 percent in 2013, and 11.8 percent in 2014; over the period covered by this report, it has fallen to 7.7 percent. There are many possible reasons for this decline, but, arguably, the most plausible of those is quite simple: Kernel developers are in short supply, so anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers."

Enlarge (credit: Deepsonic)

The rise and fall of the digital compact cassette remains a salutary lesson for tech titans—it shows how you can get nearly everything right, and yet still fail badly. Like Britpop, whose 1993-1996 heyday parallels DCC’s short life, the format rose with much hype, a few boasts, and a cheeky advert or two...

...only to fall due to a perfect storm of marketing machinations, tight-fisted PRs, and shiny new rivals.

In one way at least, DCC was a very brave move—in the preceding decade, Dutch conglomerate Philips had successfully launched the billion-selling CD format, plus CD-ROMs, and the beginning of CD-I. Of course, all this had been done in conjunction with Japanese Sony. Yet for its digital cassette venture Philips abruptly decided to abandon Sony and entered a completely new alliance with an up-and-coming Japanese firm: the Kadoma-based Matsushita (the Japanese giant that is now known as Panasonic).

In the US, carbon emissions connected with consumer purchases are twice as high as those related to home energy use and personal travel. Unfortunately, it’s challenging for consumers to get information about these emissions, even when they want to make environmentally friendly choices. A recent study in PNAS uses a series of tech interface experiments to assess whether carbon offset information will influence consumer behavior, finding that manufacturers can improve consumer satisfaction and reduce their environmental impact by providing consumers with environmentally friendly options.

These researchers were interested in techniques that make environmentally friendly choices easy for consumers to identify and whether those affect consumer choices. The choices were tested in the context of shipping options, ridesharing services, and online video streaming.

The first two experiments looked at Amazon Prime shipping. One of the benefits of Amazon Prime membership is free two-day shipping, so many consumers automatically select this even if they do not need their items within two days. To incentivize the selection of slower shipping, Amazon offers Prime customers a $1 credit if they select a no-rush shipping option instead.

Enlarge / It may look similar to the original Analogue Nt, but on the inside, it's completely different.

Last year, the $500+ Analogue Nt sold itself as a high-end, no-compromise alternative to the hordes of "famiclones" and emulator-based aftermarket systems that can play classic NES cartridges. Among Nt's selling points (for a certain class of accuracy-obsessed NES fan): it uses Nintendo's actual CPU and PPU chips, sourced from original Japanese Famicom systems. These chips ensure complete fidelity and compatibility with all existing NES games.

For the follow-up Analogue Nt Mini, announced this morning, the company has done away with those Famicom insides. The new system will instead use a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to directly simulate the workings of those NES chips. This decision comes with its own pros on cons.

In the pro column, the Nt Mini will cost less than the $579 asking price for the original Nt (including the HDMI upgrade). The new smaller unit costs just $449, a price that includes a wireless bluetooth NES controller (and receiver) from partner 8bitdo. The Mini will also be able to output in HDMI as well as the older composite, component, and S-Video standards used by most old tube TVs. This should be welcome news to fans of scanlines and the Zapper alike (on the original Nt, upgrading to HDMI meant doing away with other outputs). The Nt Mini also weighs in about 20 percent smaller and 34 percent lighter than its predecessor.