Category: Uncategorised

Enlarge / From top to bottom, the Elite Slice main unit, the optical drive, audio module, and VESA mounting plate. (credit: HP)

HP has announced today two new desktop PCs both with some unusual form factors in what it calls the "desktop reinvention." While laptops and all-in-ones have a long history of novel designs and advanced engineering, the traditional desktop has tended to be a rather less exciting category. Some systems have shrunk, to take advantage of the increasing integration and decreasing power requirements that modern processors boast, but the plain old mini-tower PC, still a corporate staple, has had little thought or attention given to its design over the years.

The HP Elite Slice is a corporate oriented machine designed to be modular, taking advantage of USB Type-C for power and I/O. The base unit houses the actual PC in a unit measuring 6.5 inches square, and 1.4 inches tall. This houses all the major PC components—processor up to a 35W Core i7-6700T, RAM up to 32GB, storage up to 512GB NVMe, gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac Wi-Fi—and a handful of ports. There's a USB Type-C for power, a second USB Type-C that also supports DisplayPort alternate modes, two USB Type-A, one DisplayPort, and one HDMI. Optionally, the side of the unit can sport a fingerprint reader.

The top cover of the main unit is modular, though not end-user changeable. As well as a plain cover, the main unit can have a wireless charging cover, so you can recharge your phone just by setting it on top of your PC, or what HP calls the "collaboration cover," which contains a set of buttons (start/end call, volume up/down, and so on) for controlling a software phone such as Skype for Business.

Enlarge

Microsoft's Courier was supposed to be an electronic journal or diary, a piece of hardware purpose-built for applications like OneNote. Two screens with a hinge between them, it opened and closed like a book, supporting both touch and stylus input on both its screens. Lenovo's new Yoga Book looks like a riff on the Courier combined with the company's successful range of 360 degree hinge Yoga-branded laptops.

Like a Yoga machine, it's a more or less clamshell form factor that can be opened right up to turn it into a tablet of sorts. Like Courier, it's got book-like styling with both halves approximately the same size for a symmetrical look. And like the Courier, it's designed for mixed touch and pen input. But it has a twist. A normal laptop has a screen and a keyboard. Courier has a screen and another screen. The Yoga Book does neither of these things; it has a conventional touch screen paired with a special touch input surface designed for a stylus, dubbed the Create Pad.

Using the Real Pen to paint. (credit: Lenovo)

Press a button and the Create Pad turns into a backlit keyboard using haptic feedback to simulate the feedback you'd get from a regular keyboard. In this mode, it has shades of Microsoft's Touch Covers, but the Yoga Book's concept is more versatile—the touch surface isn't just a keyboard—and probably more comfortable, thanks to that feedback. The removal of the physical keys makes this half of the Yoga Book thinner; it also makes it into a drawing surface. Hide the virtual keys and it becomes a stylus workspace for the Yoga Book's battery-free Real Pen, with 2,048 pressure levels and angle detection. Clip a piece of paper to the Create Pad and put some ink into the Real Pen and you can draw with, well, a real pen and real ink, while everything you do gets immediately digitized by the device.

Enlarge

The world has seen the most unsettling attack yet resulting from the so-called Rowhammer exploit, which flips individual bits in computer memory. It's a technique that's so surgical and controlled that it allows one machine to effectively steal the cryptographic keys of another machine hosted in the same cloud environment.

Until now, Rowhammer has been a somewhat clumsy and unpredictable attack tool because it was hard to control exactly where data-corrupting bit flips happened. While previous research demonstrated that it could be used to elevate user privileges and break security sandboxes, most people studying Rowhammer said there was little immediate danger of it being exploited maliciously to hijack the security of computers that use vulnerable chips. The odds of crucial data being stored in a susceptible memory location made such hacks largely a matter of chance that was stacked against the attacker. In effect, Rowhammer was more a glitch than an exploit.

Now, computer scientists have developed a significantly more refined Rowhammer technique they call Flip Feng Shui. It manipulates deduplication operations that many cloud hosts use to save memory resources by sharing identical chunks of data used by two or more virtual machines. Just as traditional Feng Shui aims to create alignment or harmony in a home or office, Flip Feng Shui can massage physical memory in a way that causes crypto keys and other sensitive data to be stored in locations known to be susceptible to Rowhammer.

When we imagine the world of the Cretaceous period, millions of years before the Chicxulub meteorite smashed into the Gulf of Mexico, usually we think of gigantic animals. Dinosaurs smashed through the forests, and giant flying reptiles called pterosaurs ruled the skies with their 10-meter wingspans. But a new discovery of a small pterosaur, with a wingspan of only about a meter, has overturned this popular idea.

This unnamed pterosaur, likely related to the much larger azhdarchid pterosaurs of the same period, is described in a paper published in Royal Society Open Science. Two fragments of its skeleton were discovered on Hornby Island, British Columbia, providing just enough material for scientists to verify that it was not simply an adolescent version of a larger animal. Based on the telltale shape of its vertebrae, the researchers are convinced it's not a bird, but they don't have enough remains to say for certain where this new species would fit into the evolutionary tree. Study lead Elizabeth Martin-Silverstone told Nature, "It’s quite different from other animals we’ve studied. There hasn’t really been evidence before of small pterosaurs at this time period." This finding is a surprise, because many paleontologists believed that pterosaurs evolved to be larger and larger as the Cretaceous wore on.

These small pterosaurs probably lived alongside the first birds. This revelation overturns one hypothesis about why the pterosaurs died out, which is that birds out-competed the small pterosaurs—leaving only the big pterosaurs, who went extinct in the aftermath of the same bolide impact that wiped out the large, non-winged dinosaurs. If birds and small pterosaurs co-existed for millions of years, it seems unlikely that the story was as simple as birds out-competing them.