Pixel Trickery Helps Create a Brighter Screen

The iPad's bright and beautiful screen comes with a cost: a battery that makes up most of the tablet's weight. A new display technology designed for tablets uses a quarter of the power consumed by most screens while improving the range of colors and the resolution.

The technology, developed by Samsung and its affiliate, Nouvoyance, uses a novel pixel design that lets more of the backlight shine through. It combines this with algorithmic tricks that dynamically dim the backlight based on the image on the screen.

"People want at least 10 hours of battery life on their tablet," as well as screens that have more color and higher resolution, says Joel Pollack, executive vice president of Nouvoyance.

A standard LCD display uses a pixel architecture called RBG stripe, in which each pixel is made of red, blue, and green subpixels that filter color from a white backlight. The process is extremely inefficient?more than 90 percent of the backlight luminescence is wasted.

Normally, to increase the resolution, the number of pixels needs to increase, as does the number of transistors used to control those pixels. The problem is that the transistors block part of the pixel. Some smaller displays are built with a new process that lets transistors shrink and still supply the amount of current needed to drive a display, but it's difficult to scale this up to larger displays like those in tablets and TVs. Normally, as the resolution goes up, says Pollack, "the amount of area that light comes through shrinks."

Nouvoyance's pixel design, called PenTile, lets more light through in a couple of ways. First, the red, blue, and green subpixels are larger than those in traditional displays. Second, one out of every four subpixels is clear. This means the backlight can use less power and shine brighter.

"Almost no light is absorbed [by the clear pixels], which gives you tremendous advantages for any content that has some component of white," says Pollack. "And if you start looking at things, almost everything has white to it." 

Fewer subpixels would usually mean a lower resolution. But the PenTile display uses individual sub-pixels to trick the eye into perceiving the same resolution while using about one-third as many subpixels as an RGB stripe panel.

There are already 75 different products on the market using PenTile displays, mostly active-maxtrix organic light-emitting diode (Amoled) displays for phones and cameras. "Current manufacturing technology for depositing the organic materials limits the actual pixel density," explains Paul Semenza, senior analyst at research firm Display Search. "So by using PenTile, some of the Amoled displays for smart phones have been able to achieve a higher 'effective' resolution."

The PenTile display also uses image processing algorithms to determine the brightness of a scene, automatically dimming the backlight for darker images. A prototype was shown off at the Society for Information Display conference last month in Los Angeles.

"The combination of lower power/higher resolution could be important for tablets," says Semenza, "given the fact that they are battery powered with large displays, and given the expected shift to higher resolutions."

But he says manufacturers may yet find ways to use high-resolution transistor arrays, such as those found in smaller screens like the iPhone 4's Retina display, which "has set a high bar for performance on mobile devices," Semenza says.

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Tracking Down Twitter's Best Rumor Spreaders

Sometimes it's easy to know which messages will spread through Twitter like wildfire. Just ask Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-New York), who faces pressure to resign after unwittingly sending an intimate photo of himself to thousands of followers.

Researchers at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems are testing a search engine that identifies which posts on a given topic are likely to spread by studying the network of connections between users.

The system, called Trumor, identifies people who are well-positioned to spread information, and uses this to weight the value of different posts on a given topic. Information usually spreads between users as they "retweet" posts. To find influential Twitter users whose posts will likely be retweeted, the researchers examined the network of tweets and retweets around topics such as tennis, soccer, and the BET Awards. Early results suggest the technique could provide an effective way to find posts that will spread broadly through the network.

Automatically identifying influential Twitter users could be useful to advertisers, who could use it to spread information about products more effectively.

Determining influence on Twitter isn't as simple as seeing how many followers a user has. What matters most is that followers pay attention to posts and discuss them, and that this discussion spreads beyond the user who started it. The researchers have been exploring better ways to measure a person's influence, and Trumor grew out of this work.

The team began by studying networks of retweets on Twitter. They grouped retweets by topic and looked at how they spread through the network. The researchers considered users to be connected in the network if one retweeted a message from the other?simply following each other wasn't enough.

Once they had those networks, a clear pattern emerged, says Tauhid Zaman, a PhD candidate at MIT's Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems who was involved with the work. For each topic, they found "superstars"?highly connected individuals whose posts spread widely. The influence of these people was far greater than that of others within their network.

In many cases,  it would be useful to be able to identify these users before an event takes place. For example, an advertiser might want to talk with someone before the BET Awards to get out information about a product during the event.

The researchers tested several methods of doing this, such as looking at the number of connections a user had, or how close they were to others on the network. They found that they could identify them using a method called "rumor centrality," which measures how well-placed a person is to spread information. The technique measures how many paths a user has for spreading information.

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Apple updates iBooks with narration, performance boost

Apple has today updated iBooks for iPhone and iPad to version 1.3, adding narration features and a performance boost.

The new ?read-aloud? feature is intended to help children to read, according to Apple?s patch notes, and works with selected children?s books. Unlike the Amazon Kindle, which uses text-to-speech narration, iBooks read-aloud supports only human-recorded voice tracks.

By the sounds of things, it?s much like the read-aloud books available in brick and mortar stores, which uses pre-recorded voices to read sections of text to your child as they point an electronic pen at the words.

iBooks 1.3 also adds automatic audio and video play in enhanced books, makes iBooks more responsive when loading large books, and fixes a bug that was displaying pages twice.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/06/08/apple-updates-ibooks-with-narration-performance-boost/

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Hardware 24 - A Computex-Free Zone

Hardware 24 - A Computex-Free Zone

Posted on 1st Jun 2011 at 15:37 by bit-tech Staff with 4 comments

Paul is joined by Harry and Clive to talk about the latest in the world of PC hardware. This was before Paul jetted off to Computex 2011, so we're debating everything from Nvidia?s naming scheme to Intel?s latest chipset.

For example, why has Nvidia called its latest GPU the GeForce GTX 560? Surely that?s just confusing, what with the GeForce GTX 560 Ti? Also, what?s with the non-standard clock speeds for the GTX 560? The Zotac GeForce GTX 560 1GB Amp! is within the reference range of frequencies and yet it's faster than a stock-speed GTX 560 Ti 1GB, despite its supposedly lesser rank in Nvidia?s range.

We also moan about how this makes our jobs a lot harder, as it?s difficult to recommend one GPU over another without getting into some very techy discussion. Even we struggled to stay interested as we delved into GPU architectures, the merits of having more resources versus higher frequencies and which card is right for certain sizes of monitor. Sheesh. Maybe in future we?ll just avoid the issue and continue to recommend the MSI N560GTX-Ti Twin Frozr II/OC.

We also talk about Intel?s latest Z68 chipset. The hybrid graphics via Lucid Virtu isn?t great at the moment, but Smart Response is better.

Harry also likes the look of Intel?s 3D Tri-gate transistors, claiming that ?they will bring the rain? to AMD? in the face.? Also, here?s a much better explanation of Moore?s Law than we could manage.

Please leave any questions here, or email us at podcast@custompc.co.uk.

As ever, the bit-tech podcast features music by Brad Sucks, and was recorded on Shure microphones. You can download the podcast direct, listen in-browser or subscribe through iTunes using the links below. Also, be sure to let us know your thoughts about the discussion in the forums.

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Google releases stable version of Chrome 12

Google has released version 12 of its browser. The update brings hundreds of bug fixes as well as many features that have been available on the Chrome beta and dev channels to users interested in using Chrome's latest builds. Chrome 12 also addresses 14 security vulnerabilities in the WebKit-based browser (a relatively low number compared to previous releases): five rated as High, six rated as Medium, and three rated as Low.

The new Chrome version adds features such as hardware accelerated 3D CSS, new Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious files, and the ability to delete Flash cookies from inside Chrome (previously only manageable using an online settings application on Adobe's website). Google has also integrated Sync into the new settings pages, improved screen reader support, and added a new warning when hitting Command-Q on the Mac. You can now launch apps by name from the Omnibox but on the other hand, the search giant has removed Google Gears.

The latest stable build (12.0.742.91) is available now for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Those who currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function under the About Google Chrome menu item.

The release is light on new features because Google is not concerned about using version numbers to mark a significant development milestone. The search giant has promised to push out a new stable build every six weeks. Chrome 11 was actually released six weeks ago; Google is back on time with Chrome 12 after it slipped behind in its schedule for Chrome 11. Users don't mind these frequent releases: the browser is already used by 1 in 8 users.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44143-google-releases-stable-version-of-chrome-12.html

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Chicks vs. Kittens iPhone Review

Chicks vs. Kittens iPhone Review

Posted on 7th Jun 2011 at 07:53 by David Hing with 1 comments

In Gaming Digits' Chicks vs. Kittens you?re charged with ensuring the safety of a mother bird defending her nest against a hoard of poultry-hungry kittens. This is achieved by hatching chicks and weaponising your offspring against the feline invaders. As you do.

Games for iOS live and die by their personality, though, not whether their premises make sense, and Chicks vs. Kittens has plenty of personality. Your ammunition flaps around happily while it waits to drop onto enemies, while the climbing kittens are more lovable than sneezing baby pandas, with animations that are clear and crisp even when they?re blown up to iPad size.

As far as the controls and gameplay go, Chicks vs. Kittens is a simple reaction test with a little bit of tower defence strategy thrown in to boot. The influence of the latter is manifested in the way you equip your chicks to perform different roles through the use of hats. Hats can be used to increase the strength of chicks, to upgrade your leaf-based economy or to change the way they attack kittens. Variations are constantly added throughout the game.


However, while Gaming Digits has gone to some lengths to layer a sense of strategy into the game, there?s no escaping the fact that Chicks vs. Kittens is a casual game at its root. It quickly becomes tedious if you play it for any length of time, even though it?s initially very fun. The longer you play, the more the constant introduction of new hats and ideas starts to feel like feature creep, rather than legitimate expansions to the scope of the game.

The level design is also rather minimalist. Every level is similar, with backgrounds only swapping out in every few levels, and only minor differences separating them otherwise. Some trees, for example, don?t shed the leaves you need to grow your economy, meaning you have to shake your iDevice to get them loose ? one of Game Digits? nicer ideas. Other levels vary the wind or speed at which leaves drop, which varies the pace, but does little to actually affect the game at large. The controls are intuitive, though, and the game-speed is occasionally enough to plumb you into a Zen state of tapping ? one which can only be spoiled by an errant finger.


However, there are a few bugs that plague the game, which undermines the slickness of the controls and animations, and ultimately prevented us from finishing all 60 levels. The biggest problem involved levels that just don?t seem to end, despite the halt of advancing kittens. These bugs are likely to be ironed out in the next update, but for now it?s hard to overlook errors such as these.

Verdict: Chicks vs. Kittens is a pleasant distraction if you need to kill time on the bus everyday; it's a fun game with a casual core at its heart. However, its charm isn?t enough to recommend it when there are bugs that mar the experience to this degree and plentiful similar titles on the AppStore.

Chicks vs. Kittens is available from the Apple AppStore for 59p or 99c.

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Install iOS 5 beta today, sans developer account

Can't wait until this fall to get your mitts on iOS 5? Nor could Mert Erdir, a young developer who's shared instructions on installing the iOS 5 beta without a dev account. Although the process is simple, it relies on an (presumably unintentional) exploit in the activation screen and it's not without drawbacks. For instance, you'll lose cellular connectivity on an iPhone, so this is best suited to an iPod or Wi-Fi-bound iPad. We also recommend making a backup and realize that you proceed at your own risk.

Start by downloading the iOS 5 IPSW file and the iTunes 10.5 beta -- JailbreakZone hosts both. Install iTunes and attach your device to your system. Select your iOS device in iTunes and click "Check for Update" while holding Shift (PC) or Option (Mac). Browse to the IPSW file you downloaded and confirm that you want to initiate the update. Some users say "Check for Update" gives them an error, but "Restore" works (again, hold Shift or Option when you click the button to bring up a file browser).

Once completed, you'll be prompted with an activation screen. Triple click the home button to enable the Voice Over feature, then triple click the home button again to get an Emergency Call button. Click Emergency Call and when it's switching, swipe down the screen with three fingers. The Notification Center should appear. Click on the Weather app, then click the home button again and you should be presented with a mostly functional copy of iOS 5 (be sure to disable Voice Over in the settings).

Announced yesterday during Apple's WWDC keynote, iOS 5 supposedly carries more than 200 new features, including a revamped Android-esque notification system, an iOS-exclusive messaging platform, wireless updates and syncing, an iBooks-like app that handles magazine subscriptions, and Safari Reader, which display Web articles in a clean format. There are also tweaks to the Camera, Mail, Game Center, Weather, and FaceTime apps, a new iPad music app, and new multi-touch gestures.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44145-install-ios-5-beta-today-sans-developer-account.html

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Google releases stable version of Chrome 12

Google has released version 12 of its browser. The update brings hundreds of bug fixes as well as many features that have been available on the Chrome beta and dev channels to users interested in using Chrome's latest builds. Chrome 12 also addresses 14 security vulnerabilities in the WebKit-based browser (a relatively low number compared to previous releases): five rated as High, six rated as Medium, and three rated as Low.

The new Chrome version adds features such as hardware accelerated 3D CSS, new Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious files, and the ability to delete Flash cookies from inside Chrome (previously only manageable using an online settings application on Adobe's website). Google has also integrated Sync into the new settings pages, improved screen reader support, and added a new warning when hitting Command-Q on the Mac. You can now launch apps by name from the Omnibox but on the other hand, the search giant has removed Google Gears.

The latest stable build (12.0.742.91) is available now for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Those who currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function under the About Google Chrome menu item.

The release is light on new features because Google is not concerned about using version numbers to mark a significant development milestone. The search giant has promised to push out a new stable build every six weeks. Chrome 11 was actually released six weeks ago; Google is back on time with Chrome 12 after it slipped behind in its schedule for Chrome 11. Users don't mind these frequent releases: the browser is already used by 1 in 8 users.

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Source: http://www.techspot.com/news/44143-google-releases-stable-version-of-chrome-12.html

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Startup's Battery Could Provide Cheaper Grid Storage

A startup called Primus Power has received $11 million in venture capital to help it build the first full-scale version of a new, low-cost flow battery. The company earlier received $18 million via multiple government grants. Its battery is designed to help stabilize the power grid, making electricity cheaper, and making it easier for utilities to integrate intermittent renewable power sources like wind and solar.

Primus Power is trying to overcome one of the fundamental problems that have plagued flow batteries. The technology, in theory, at least, could be one of the cheapest forms of grid storage, since it requires inexpensive and abundant materials. But in practice, flow batteries have been very expensive, in part because they're large and have to be custom-built on site. Primus is hoping get around this with a new design that can be mass-produced in factories.

The need for such batteries has been growing as utilities anticipate increases in demand that could overload the power grid. Also, many states, most notably California, require the use of large amounts of renewable energy, but because such forms of energy are intermittent, it's difficult for utilities to maintain the match between supply and demand needed to prevent blackouts.

Batteries could even out the spikes in supply and demand by rapidly charging or delivering power to the grid, preventing blackouts and reducing the need for new power lines. But they've been too expensive for widespread use. In almost all cases, it's cheaper to build new power lines or to use natural gas power plants to make up for changes in power output from solar and wind plants. While Primus Power's technology is still too expensive to solve all of the energy storage problems on the grid, it will have many uses.

With flow batteries, a mixture of electrolyte and energy storage materials are stored in massive tanks?some as large as 10 meters high and 20 meters wide?and then pumped into a device where current is generated. Because flow batteries use cheap materials such as water-based electrolytes and energy storage materials made of abundant materials such as iron and zinc, the initial high costs could come down once enough of them are built, says Haresh Kamath, a senior project manager for energy storage at the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit research organization supported by the electricity industry. But so far, the high cost of initial demonstration projects has stifled investment.

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CloudFlare: A website security product accidentally makes sites 60% faster

I remember sitting in the front row of TechCrunch: Disrupt when CloudFlare was giving its pitch. At the time I commented to some other people around about how the service was answering a lot of questions, but probably wasn?t consumer-focused enough to win the competition. I was right, as Qwiki emerged as the winner but as time has moved on CloudFlare has managed to change the world of websites?and maybe even more than that.

In short, CloudFlare is a security product. Available for free to any website that wants to hop on board, there are also more in-depth packages that start at $20 per month which provide a myriad of services. When my email had an invitation to sit and talk with CEO Matthew Prince, I thought it would be interesting to see where the company has come in the 9 months since last September.

To start, we need to look at the history. CloudFlare comes from a product called Project Honey Pot that was initially launched at Paul Graham?s MIT Spam Conference. Prince was a self-described ?recovering lawyer? with a background in computer science. Project Honey Pot was launched with the goal of helping to track down all of the fraud and abuse that was happening on the Internet, spam included.

In 2007 the Department of Homeland Security reached out to Prince, essentially asking him if he had any idea what technology that he owned. Honey Pot had grown to be used by over 100,000 web administrators and millions of sits, all sending back amazing data about how spammers, hackers and fraud happened online. In short, CloudFlare wasn?t at all about speed, but rather about security. Each site that fed into Project Honey Pot only served to make it more accurate and smarter.

With a seed investment in CloudFlare, Prince was told that that the idea was great, but niche. The problem, he was told, was that going through CloudFlare?s Honey Pot would add latency. With that in mind, the team went to work trying to solve the problem. The goal was parity. The team didn?t want to make sites faster, they just wanted CloudFlare to run without interfering with page load times.

But then something unexpected happened when CloudFlare launched to the public in March of 2010.

?It was like clockwork. Three days after they?d sign up people would find that their sites were loading 30 to 40 percent faster.?

What the team had found was that, in tweaking CloudFlare?s operation at every line of code in order to get it to run at parity, they had actually found a way to make websites load faster, essentially turning CloudFlare into an accidental CDN.

?I don?t think that we?d have gone this route, if we knew what we were getting into. CloudFlare is a testament to what happens when you take the combined knowledge of huge Silicon Valley businesspeople and then provide a service that you can offer to anyone.?

But the bigger story is what CloudFlare has done since finding out about its happy accident. ?We?re essentially building an operating system for the Internet,? proclaims Prince. ?We can modify HTML as it?s flowing through the system, opening up a whole new set of services that we can offer.? The modification refers back to a test that was run in order to protect email addresses from spam.

?We challenged an engineer on our staff to sniff a packet of data to see if there was an email address inside of it. Then we wanted to know if we could replace it with a bit of JavaScript and bring it back so that it couldn?t be harvested.?

The end result? A virtual elimination of spam related to scraped email addresses, and it all happens with a 5-10 millisecond transfer time. From that revelation of being able to provide a whole new set of services, more innovation was born.

Prince touts CloudFlare?s ability to have 1-click integration with a number of services. Instead of having to put a line of code into every page on your site, CloudFlare can deploy things like Uservoice or Google Analytics to every page with a single button. The team went to 20 different Internet apps providers and immediately signed up 20, including services such as Apture, Pingdom, TRUSTe and typekit.

What?s more, that 30-40% increase that people used to see is now in the range of at least 50-60% as the team continues to find ways to make CloudFlare faster, while still offering security at the forefront.

What I?ve noticed about CloudFlare is a seemingly rabid commitment to its customers via interaction on Twitter. This is apparently no accident. In fact, Prince tells me that everyone on the team gets a copy of every single customer service inquiry and it?s not uncommon for members to be in the office at 4am solving a problem.

When the Amazon EC2 outage in April of 2011 brought down millions of sites across the Internet, CloudFlare was able to keep static pages from its customers alive. ?We?re not a hosting provider,? says Prince, ?but we can make sure that at least that static content stays online.?

How many pages? At present, CloudFlare serves enough content that if it were its own website it would be the 10th largest on the Internet. Growing from 5 datacenters at launch to a current crop of 12, it generates over 2 million log lines of code every minute. To put one more figure out there, 12% of the people on the Internet have passed through CloudFlare?s servers in the 8 months that the company has been serving content.

So what?s next? Prince says that the biggest thing is CloudFlare?s new Rocketloader product. As the Internet gains more widgets, each of them requires another connection to an external site. Rocketloader is a product that allows all of those Twitter, Facebook and other widgets to be served via a single connection providing 30-40% faster response times, on top of the existing increases from CloudFlare itself.

Pre-vetted code on CloudFlare?s marketplace for the 1-click installs have taken off, as well. ?That 1-click install really resonates,? notes Prince. ?Performance hits are a concern for users, and most people won?t bother with things that even require a single line of code to be inserted into a page.?

So the work continues. Prince feels that in order to make security better, you need security on every site on the Internet. While this could be an explanation for CloudFlare?s free product offering, it?s also a testament to his passion. ?We?re hiring like crazy. We want the kind of people who look at  a problem saying ?make the entire Internet faster? and decide that it sounds like fun.?

We?ll be keeping an eye on CloudFlare and you should be too. The site?s blog has some great tips for new users and we?re looking forward to what we?ll see from the company moving forward.

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Source: http://thenextweb.com/industry/2011/06/07/cloudflare-a-website-security-product-accidentally-makes-sites-60-faster/

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