Almost two-thirds (63 percent) of Twitter and Facebook members surveyed said they got news from those social networks. For Twitter, that's an 11 point increase from 2013, when 52 percent of its members said they got news there. For Facebook it's a 16 point jump since 2013, when 47 percent of its members said they looked to it for news.
"The main takeaway of the study is that even while the overall number of users has not changed much from 2013 to 2015, the portion of the users that are getting news in this space has increased substantially," Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew.
However, the social networks remain a secondary source of news for most of their members. Six out of 10 members (60 percent) told the Pew researchers that the networks were "not a very important way" for them to get their news.
"Only 9 percent of Twitter people and 4 percent of Facebook people say it's the most important way that they get news, which to me implies other sources -- including more traditional sources -- are still viewed as the most important source," Jon Sotsky, director for strategy and assessment at the Knight Foundation.
"People encounter news in this space, as opposed to going there seeking news," Pew's Mitchell pointed out. "They're going to a social network to do something else -- and when they're there, they come across news."

Instant Articles

Just how important a source of news the social networks are varies with age. For example, the researchers found about half of users between the ages of 18 and 34 said that the sites were "the most important" or "an important" way they got news.
"When you consider the group that is migrating toward getting their news on social media -- young people -- you're talking about people that advertisers want the most," John Carroll, a mass communications professor at Boston University.
One reason getting news on social networks is on the rise may be that the nets are putting more news before users' eyes. Facebook, for instance, earlier this year launched Instant Articles, a service that allows media companies to publish stories directly to the Facebook platform instead of linking to outside sites.
For news outlets, Instant Articles can offer a better user experience associated with their content.
"When you look at Instant Articles on Facebook, they come up in a more native user interface. They look more integrated with Facebook, and they come up a lot faster," said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner.

Facebook Addiction

The Instant Articles tool also benefits Facebook, because it keeps members on Facebook rather than someone else's news site.
"Facebook wants to be the Web for all its users," BU's Caroll said. "The more they can house content on the Facebook platform, the better they like it, because they can retain their users longer and mine more data from them."
Traditional media outlets should be wary of becoming dependent on Instant Articles, he cautioned.
"You have the potential of these Instant Articles becoming addictive to publications, for them to rely on the audience they draw, and then Facebook changes things so they're not so favorable to the publications," Carroll explained.

New Horizons traveled more than 3 billion miles over a nine-and-a-half year stretch to reach the Pluto system.
A close-up image of a region near Pluto's equator shows a range of mountains reaching up to 11,000 feet in height (see above). The lack of craters suggests they're relatively new.
"This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar system," said Jeff Moore, geology, geophysics and imaging team leader at NASA's Ames Research Center.
The latest image is a view of Charon, the largest of Pluto's five moons. It shows an interesting feature NASA describes as a "mountain in a moat" -- a depression with a peak in the middle. New Horizons took this shot from a distance of 49,000 miles, about an hour and a half before it made its closest approach to Pluto.
An earlier image of Charon surprised scientists because its apparently unmarked surface raises questions about how it escaped being hit by asteroids and other space debris.
An image of Hydra, the outermost known of Pluto's moons, seems to show it is coated with water ice. New Horizons captured that image when it was approximately 400,000 miles away from the distant moon. Though pixellated, the image reveals important information about Hydra's physical properties, including the size and shape of the moon and other structural details.

New Awakening?

The general U.S. populace seemed to have settled into ho-hum mode, judging by its tepid reactions to previous achievements in space exploration, but NASA seems to have ignited renewed excitement with the New Horizons mission.
"Without a doubt, we're seeing terrific public interest," said Kevin Cook, vice president of marketing and communications at the Space Foundation.

What Else New Horizons Discovered

New Horizons' photos show that Charon has a 600-mile-long swath of cliffs and troughs, which suggest that internal geological processes created widespread fracturing of the moon's crust, including a canyon between four and six miles deep on the moon.
In contrast, the Grand Canyon is only 6,000 feet -- just over a mile -- at its deepest.
Dark surface markings deep in Charon's north polar region have a diffuse boundary, which might indicate a thin deposit or stain on the surface. NASA team members nicknamed the region "Mordor," after the dark land in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

The Mountains of the Moon

The mountains of Pluto probably were formed about 100 million years ago.
That makes them very young, considering the solar system is more than 4.5 billion years old, and suggests the region they're in -- which covers about 1 percent of Pluto's surface -- might still be geologically active now.
However, Pluto can't be heated by gravitational interactions with a much larger planetary body, which is how such mountain ranges usually are formed on icy moons.
That gives rise to questions about just how the mountains were formed, and may cause scientists to rethink what powers geological activity on other icy worlds.

Flying in a Winter Wonderland

The Pluto system is a scientific wonderland, according to Johns Hopkins University. Its Applied Physics Laboratory designed, built and operates the New Horizons spacecraft, and manages the mission for NASA.
For one thing, Charon's diameter is 750 miles, more than half that of Pluto, whereas most satellites are much smaller than their parent planets.
Further, the two bodies orbit about a center of mass that's outside Pluto's surface, known as a "barycenter," so they are considered a double planet. No other double planet exists in our solar system.
Astronomers want to learn how Pluto and its moons were formed, and they want to understand why Pluto and Charon look so different.
Pluto's atmosphere is also of interest. It contains nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane. The Earth's atmosphere contains only one gas, water vapor, while Mars has two -- water vapor and carbon dioxide.
"We are learning of new surface phenomena and confirmation of the exotic reactions that occur in these outer solar system bodies," said Jekan Thanga, an assistant professor at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration.

New Frontiers and NASA Budget Cuts

New Horizons is part of NASA's New Frontiers program -- a series of space explorations to research several of the solar system's planets.
Another New Frontiers program, Juno, consists of a space probe launched in 2011 to explore Jupiter, and OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer), a planned asteroid study and sample-return mission.
Whether the New Frontiers program will encourage more funding for NASA, which repeatedly has been hit by budget cuts under several administrations, is uncertain.

The details are scant, but Angry Birds 2 apparently will be "bigger, badder and birdier," going by a tweet from Rovio.
Rovio hasn't specified if Angry Birds 2 will launch on both Android and iOS, but the company indicated that the game will hit "app stores," plural. Exclusivity could hurt a company that's still searching for it's next massive hit.
The first entry in the Angry Birds series won the hearts of critics, casual and core gamers alike. While times have changed, along with the fortunes of Rovio, the franchise's longevity indicates the sequel may win the support of current fans and even attract more, said Ted Pollak, Jon Peddie Research senior analyst for the games industry.
"Angry Birds' popularity has persisted long enough that it's bordering on becoming an evergreen franchise, "As long as Rovio continues to make quality versions of an historically popular game, success amongst its fan base is likely, and with a good possibility of drawing in new users."
Still, Rovio has been after more than just another base hit, as its revenues have tapered quarter after quarter. It wants a home run.

The Sequel

Not every sequel succumbs to the sophomore curse; Rovio has had 15 games to hone its craft ahead of Angry Birds 2.
Market conditions are right. Mobile revenues were up 20 percent, year over year, in June, and Bethesda's "Fallout Shelter," -- supposedly a marketing tool for Fallout 4 -- just smashed Candy Crush Saga on iOS charts, raking in US$5.1 million in its first two weeks, according to a report from SuperData Research.
While the health of the mobile market offers promise -- it amassed $317 million in June revenues -- Rovio's own figures over the past three years suggest that fans have had their fill of birds cooked 15 ways, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst for the Enderle Group.
Its 16th variation on the original Rovio recipe could struggle.
"Sequels can do better than original games, so there is a chance," Enderle told TechNewsWorld. "Interest in Angry Birds has waned over the years, though, making it unlikely in this case."

Adjusting Its Trajectory

About two years into the release of Apple's first smartphone, Angry Birds launched exclusively for the platform. Rovio raked in about $10 million dollar in revenue in Angry Birds' first year, and by the end of 2010, it had released an Android version of the game.
The company's revenues increased by about 963 percent, once the game was available on both Android and iOS. From there, however, Rovio's revenues have been on a downward trajectory.
Seeking to keep the wind beneath its wings, Rovio began to borrow licenses for popular properties, most notably Star Wars, and moved into merchandising.
Still unhappy with the company's performance, Rovio's board replaced Mikael Hed as CEO at the start of this year. Rovio's 2014 earnings before interest and taxes were down about 73 percent from the previous 12-month period, the company reported in March.
Rovio likely will make it's best case for the Angry Birds franchise when it debuts at the end of this month. Consumers will play judge and jury.

The latest release of iOS also contains two new smart folders. One automatically collects any photos captured with the front-facing camera in an iOS device -- which typically is used for selfies -- and the other aggregates any images used for screen shots.
Other new features in beta three of iOS 9:

• a setting to enhance the quality of streaming over cellular networks;
• display of Siri search results with a down swipe;
• display of more apps per folder on an iPad; and
• the debut of a News app. When the app is launched, you can select a number of content sources. News from those sources will be displayed on a News Screen.

"Apple is not only expanding functionality in iOS, but also adding significant capabilities," said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner.
"While these preview features are't final," he told TechNewsWorld, "it's good to see that Apple continues to advance their platform to give users more robust access to content, such as with improved streaming quality, and security through two-factor authentication."

Apple Polishes Security

Two-factor authentication typically requires the user to acquire a code either by text message, phone call or email when trying to log into an account from a new device.
Apple's new authentication method will be an improvement over it's existing two-factor verification method, which is less than elegant. With the new system, an Apple ID won't be sufficient to log on to an Apple service from a new device or browser. Users also will need to authenticate their identity with a password and six-digit verification code.
For those who have an Apple device that's already been verified and is running the latest versions of Apple's operating systems, the code automatically will be displayed on that screen. If an Apple device isn't close by, the user can receive the code through a text message or phone call.

After a device has been authenticated, the user won't need an authentication code again unless the device data is wiped, passwords are changed, or the device is removed from the user's approved device list.
A browser can be treated like a device; once a browser is authorized to access an account, the user won't need to obtain a code for subsequent log-ins.
Unlike Apple's existing authentication system, the new one is built into iOS 9 and El Capitan. That allowed Apple to streamline the process and perhaps entice more people to use the security measure.
The new system also gets rid of the 14-character code deployed by the existing scheme, which was difficult to remember for most users, but did come in handy if a password was forgotten and access to an account needed to be regained.

Surprises to Come?

New features for the iPad show that while many tablet makers have embraced the idea of slates as primarily content consumption devices, Apple continues to press the idea that its tablets are content-creation machines.
Features such as multitasking and split-screen view on an iPad Air 2 are all "developments that relate to the use of the iPad as a full-featured computing device," noted Charles Golvin, chief analyst at Abelian Research.
"As is often the case with Apple, many of the features they introduce as 'new' are, in actuality, closing or overcoming gaps between Apple's and competitors's current products," he added.
"In these releases, I would point to the natural language search in Spotlight, the proactivity that Google Now introduced, and the long-missing transit option in Maps that Nokia Here premiered several years ago," Golvin told TechNewsWorld.
"Still missing from Maps," he said, "is the cycling option that Google has offered for some time."
Whenever Apple releases a new beta of its operating systems, the code often is scrutinized for clues to features in future hardware products.

In actuality, both vehicles responded as they were supposed to, the companies said in response to the media brouhaha.
The incident occurred on Tuesday when John Absemeier, director of Delphi Automotive's Silicon Valley lab, was a passenger in his company's Audi Q5 as it drove along San Antonio Road. The Delphi autonomous car began to change lanes when a Google self-driving Lexus SUV began to move into the same lane.
The Delphi-controlled Audi Q5 responded quickly once it detected that the lane was no longer open, and it terminated the lane change until the road ahead was clear. This type of vehicular conflict is common among human-driven cars and often results in fender benders or more serious accidents; however, in the case of Tuesday's incident, the vehicles responded appropriately to the situation, and an accident was avoided.

Much Ado About Nothing

That's not the way the incident has been reported in a slew of articles published Friday.
Many suggest that the "near collision" raises concerns about the safety of autonomous vehicle technology, and some fret over the fact that Google's self-driving vehicles soon will be tooling down the streets of Silicon Valley.
However, both companies involved in the episode insist this is a case of media hype and little else.
"Any accounts that the cars 'almost collided' simply aren't correct," said Google spokesperson Courtney Hohne.
"This was an everyday driving scenario that both cars handled as they should have," she told TechNewsWorld.
"In this case, it was a lane change maneuver where both cars began their execution at the same time," added Delphi Automotive spokesperson Kristen L. Kinley.
"The vehicles did not come within a lane width of each other, and the Google car did not 'cut us off,'" Kinley told TechNewsWorld. "Both vehicles did exactly what they were supposed to do."

Expected Response

Rather than an example of what can go wrong with self-driving cars, Tuesday's occurrence demonstrates how self-driving cars can avoid accidents by reacting quickly to avoid common human errors, both companies said.
The Delphi car "leverages complex software algorithms to assess its situation -- much like a human driver would -- to avoid going into a lane if another car decides to move over at the same time," said Delphi's Kinley.
"Timing a merge or making a lane change is a common scenario a human driver would encounter, and one where experience and intuition plays a major role -- such as speed up or slow down to find an opening," she pointed out.
"This is unlike automated vehicles which need to work through a decision via a highly complex network of technology and data processing to calculate the correct move," Kinley explained. "Our car did exactly what it was supposed to. Our car saw the Google car move into the same lane as our car was planning to move into, but upon detecting that the lane was no longer open, it decided to terminate the move and wait until it was clear again."

Overreactions Abound

The "story" behind the fact that an accident was avoided is simply that the self-driving technology performed as expected.
"The subject has so much news value that anything that gets attention is written up," Egil Juliussen, director of research and principal analyst at IHS Automotive Technology, told TechNewsWorld.
"If a driver controlling the vehicle had started the same lane change, it could have easily resulted in an accident -- and that is not an uncommon occurrence with human drivers," noted Jeremy Carlson, senior analyst for autonomous driving at IHS.
"What we are seeing is that there is so much interest in what is going on with self-driving cars that anything that is close to news is going to get blown up," he told TechNewsWorld. "The media has taken this out of context."

Real-World Situations

Autonomous cars likely will be subject to many more years of testing before they become widespread, and those watching from the sidelines should expect more "incidents" down the road.
"This is the objective of road testing," said Praveen Chandrasekar, automotive and transportation research manager at Frost & Sullivan.

Google has released blueprints for VR headsets made of cardboard and encouraged third parties to bring their best designs to market. Several are available for purchase with a "Works with Google Cardboard" badge, meaning they're compatible with Cardboard apps.

Users with some arts-and-crafts chops can create their own. The idea is simple, according to Clay Bavor, vice president of product management at Google. After constructing the simple cardboard headset, users simply slot their smartphones into the contraptions -- and voila: They get a VR experience for about US$20.
"Cardboard is about making it possible for anyone to check out virtual reality experiences with their smartphone," Bavor told TechNewsWorld. "Combined with the Cardboard SDKs, we want to make it possible for anyone to develop new VR apps or add to their existing apps."

Going Pro

A number of dedicated VR headsets have been priced around $400.
Oculus VR would like to offer its virtual reality headset and a gaming PC bundled for an "all-in" price of about US$1,500, which is meant to be a bargain.
Along with making a case to justify the equipment price tags, developers of VR hardware have been faced with the challenge of ensuring there's enough content to attract early adopters.

During I/O 2015, Google revealed how it intends to generate a trove of VR content for Cardboard and make money doing so.
Google has partnered with action camera manufacturer GoPro to develop Jump, a 16-camera rig that could put VR production well within reach of indie filmmakers.
"We thought it'd be good if someone who really knows how to build a great camera could help us out building our Jump 16-camera rigs," Bavor said. "So we called our friends at GoPro."
The 16 cameras function as one unit, allowing content creators to capture stereoscopic VR that delivers 360-degree videos with depth of field. The Jump rig's video resolution puts out about as many pixels as five 4K TVs, according to Google.
Google already owns a platform that may be perfect for the task of storing and streaming all of that video content -- YouTube. With its support for Jump videos, said to be coming soon, Google could see a bump in ad revenue.

Virtually Here

Virtual reality is coming, whatever the price. There will be 5-10 million VR headsets in the wild by next year, predicted Beck Besecker, CEO of Marxent.
While Google is offering the masses a taste of VR, a large number of consumers will want the very best of the tech, he told TechNewsWorld. Cardboard may offer an interesting use case for realtor showcases and other virtual tourism, but it may serve primarily to pique the desire for a better experience.
"I think [Cardboard] will help with the general popularity of VR," Besecker said, "but I think the folks that are really going to gravitate to VR are going to want a high-quality experience -- and gamers, specifically, won't mind paying for it."
It's long been held that gamers will drive the nascent market forward, but VR visionaries are looking to the second, third and fourth waves of virtual experience to capitalize on the technology's expansion.

Windows 10 is a well-meaning effort by Microsoft to mollify Windows 8 haters and coax Windows 7 loyalists to upgrade — all while stubbornly sticking to its goal of a single OS for every possible platform. And by framing the problem that way, Microsoft has given itself a nearly impossible task.
To the company’s credit, each new build lurches closer to being usable, although with new bugs every time, it is difficult to evaluate how smooth the final release version will be. Best case: It may earn the grudging acceptance of Windows 7 users who refuse to move to Windows 8. And part of that acceptance will come not from sudden enthusiasm for a new way of interacting with the desktop, but from a desire to take advantage of the clear core benefits Windows 10 provides in performance, security, administration, and memory usage over Windows 7 and even Windows 8.
So why is it so hard to convince users to move to a brand-new, free, feature-packed, more efficient OS? Apple does it all the time. Simply put, because Microsoft didn’t build Windows 8 or Windows 10 for Windows users. It built them to further its own business strategy of using the power of the once-ubiquitous Windows platform to extend its dominance into the rapidly growing mobile space. The result is an OS whose features are now flipping and flopping with each new build — as Microsoft tries to fix problems of its own creation.

Imagine how good a desktop OS Windows 10 could have been

What if instead, after realizing what a terrible mistake Windows 8 was, Microsoft had made the truly brave decision to come clean and change its strategy? If Windows 10 had been designed from the beginning to be the best possible desktop OS, and the thousands of developer years spent trying to make it everything to everyone were instead spent providing services and applications for the mobile OS platforms people actually want? If in tandem Microsoft was willing to let go of its sub-3% market share in mobile, it could also have spent the cash it used to buy Nokia to build out its cross-platform services offerings instead. We could have had a really excellent desktop OS — worth paying for — and great integration with the leading mobile platforms.
Certainly Microsoft has woken up to providing competitive versions of its applications on Android and iOS. But imagine how much further along it would have been if it had put real work into the effort starting years ago. Perhaps we wouldn’t have to use third-party utilities to sync our information between Google and Outlook, for example. Or OneNote might have supported syncing on Android during the first several years it was available, instead of only recently. Pick any Microsoft desktop technology you access from your iOS or Android device and you can come up with a list of features that would make it much more useful.

It’s not like there isn’t anything to fix in Windows

Anyone who thinks Microsoft didn’t focus on desktop users as it evolved Windows 8 and 10 because its desktop OS has “no need for improvement” hasn’t spent enough time wrestling with the inscrutable hex error codes from Windows Update, or debugging driver version mismatches, or finding information they’re sure is somewhere on their disk. While Windows 10 isn’t final, judging by the builds so far, all of those problems are still there. Even support for high-resolution displays is still spotty. Windows 10 adds some new Zoom options, but there is still no serious scalable-font solution that works across the full range of possible displays.
As a good example of how this alternate direction would have worked, let’s look at the Control Panel. No one doubts that it is an old, crufty system for managing a computer. A desktop-focused OS project would have overhauled it completely while preserving its functionality. Instead, Microsoft seems determined to replace it in bits and pieces with new “touch-friendly” settings that aren’t much more intuitive, and that become even more frustrating when you need to go back to the old system for pieces that are still missing. Windows 10 is supposed to address this problem, but we’re less than two months from shipment and Settings are still far from being either intuitive or finished.
Tablet mode and Continuum are also inventions seeking to solve a problem Microsoft has invented for itself. For the few of us who actually own and use a Surface Tablet mode, it’s sort of a good thing. (I love that I can both taken written notes and run Outlook on my SP3, but with the addition of desktop apps to Android, I’m not sure how many others will see the need to spend that kind of money for basic productivity.) It’s good because it is better than Windows 8, where often the touch keyboard wouldn’t pop up when needed, and icons could be hard to finger.
It’s still only sort of good, though, because it’s confusing and forces the user to have one more thing to think about. Somehow iPads and Android tablets seem to easily survive the addition of a keyboard without the need for an entire special OS mode. Like many of the other new features in Windows 10, it seems like a “throw it against the wall and hope it sticks” attempt to solve a user pain point — not a from-the-ground-up technology architected to support the broad range of devices that can now run Windows.

Windows 10 internals are actually pretty impressive

There is a lot to like about Windows 10 — in addition to having the best kernel Windows has ever had. Edge (aka Spartan) is promising (although it too is only a prototype version, and certainly could have been shipped separately). Cortana might be useful, but is so limited and buggy in the current builds that it is hard to tell. If it doesn’t get sorted out by July, Microsoft risks taking yet another step backwards in desktop search functionality, which would be a shame. Virtual desktops are a nice feature, although hardly groundbreaking.
The included apps are certainly way ahead of the ones Microsoft shipped with Windows 8, but Microsoft has had many excellent desktop apps over the years — including the now-dead Windows Media Center, LiveWriter, and MovieMaker. It is the company’s own fault that it feels the need to start over time and again. On the tablet side, if Microsoft is serious about usability, it should be providing a better touch keyboard — one that includes swipe-through typing, for example. I also wish the company had finally fixed Windows Update. Mobile users won’t put up with the way it works now — they are spoiled by seamless OTAs from Apple and even many Android vendors.
Perhaps the ultimate warning sign about Windows 10 for me is that for many, its positioning is summed up as being “no worse than the six-year-old Windows 7, while adding support for tablets and phones.” That sounds pretty silly, but maybe not far from the truth. I run a Windows 7 desktop for some of my business-critical applications right next to a couple of Windows 8.1 machines and a couple of Windows 10 machines. I don’t really feel any less productive when I’m on the Windows 7 machine, and I can’t imagine that I’ll upgrade it to Windows 10 and risk something breaking.
Tablets are certainly a different story. I’ve already put Windows 10 on almost all my Windows tablets, and suspect most of the small number of Windows tablet users will also. Unfortunately for Microsoft, Windows tablets are a relatively small market, and may never become mainstream.
Laptops are the most interesting case. While each version of Windows adds new power management features, that may not be enough to get laptop users to upgrade. For example, Microsoft keeps changing the WiFi settings interface, and for many of us, the new version is lame compared to the more powerful one that preceded it. Engineering laptops still ship primarily with Windows 7, and I don’t see anything about Windows 10 changing that. Mainstream laptops will get dragged along onto Windows 10 because of the Microsoft marketing machine, but I don’t know how many current laptop users will bother to take advantage of the free upgrade. No doubt that is part of why Microsoft is inflicting its Windows 10 adware on the already confusing Windows Update process.

After more than a decade of research, scientists at Stanford University have created a working computer based on the physical movement of water droplets. It’s a breakthrough in physical computing that gets at the most basic definition of a computer: any programmable device that can carry about logical (mathematical) operations. By combining cutting-edge theory in fluid dynamics with very-much-not-cutting-edge theory in computing, the team was able to create a synchronous computer based entirely on the physics of water.
As you might imagine, a computer based on the physical movement of water is much, much slower than a conventional computer based on the movement of electrons — but that’s beside the point. Nobody expects a new, super-fast liquid CPU, but by applying the principles of computing to the manipulation of matter, lead researcher Manu Prakash and his graduate students hope they can computationally revolutionize other areas of science.

Prakash is actually a bioengineer — his main goal with the project is to create a platform for robust, super-quick chemical testing. Their technique can direct potentially millions of droplets around a chip, simultaneously, and each of these can be loaded with a different chemical for testing. A well-designed chip could make months of complex chemical experimentation into minutes — once the chip has been designed and built, the experiment designed, and the samples made and loaded onto the chip itself.
The system works based on the continual flipping of an applied magnetic field. The chips, which are at present about half the size of a postage stamp, are embedded with tiny iron bars that are easily magnetized; arranging these bars in “Pac-Man-like” mazes provides discreet channels for the droplets to follow. Each droplet is infused with magnetic nanoparticles that make the water responsive to an applied magnetic field, so by flipping the polarity of these bars the team can decide which path each droplet will take through the bar-maze.
The system only works as a general-purpose computer because it is “synchronous,” meaning that it keeps the various operations marching to the same beat — the researchers say they could potentially control millions of droplets at once, with a scaled version of the same technology. In a conventional computer, each of these beats is called a clock cycle — in a water-drop computer, this beat is controlled by the flipping magnetic field. In both cases, the central timing mechanism makes sure that even thousands of different paths and interactions all proceed according to the same schedule, and can thus work together toward computational goals.
Some of the very earliest computers, like the UNIVAC I, had computer memory based on liquid mercury — in essence, the idea of representing computer data with physical matter is not new. What is new is the idea that the physical structure of the chip could be used to direct the movement of matter in a robust, pre-programmed way. In a best-case-scenario, this sort of paradigm shift in the approach to experimental chemistry could cause the sort of exponential efficiency increase electronic computers allowed in regular mathematics.
One big push in the quest truly next-generation medicine is so-called “organ on a chip” technology, which would allow scientists to test the effects of drugs and other substances on certain organs by running those substances through small, high-throughput stand-ins for whole organs of interest. With the ability to quickly and systematically test the interactions of thousands of different substances, that idea might someday plausibly reach the point of “individual on a chip.”
In the more foreseeable future, water-drop computing is a fascinating realization of something that was always theoretically known: computing is a fundamentally physical process (until quantum computing comes of age, I suppose), and as such can be expressed in the medium of physical matter. It’s far less efficient that way — but efficiency isn’t the only goal worth pursuing.

The 55-inch and 84-inch interactive displays marry white boards with presentations, voice with video, speakers with addressees, Android with iOS, and Windows 10 with conference rooms. The Surface Hubs will go on sale July 1, and on Sept. 1, they'll start shipping out of a Microsoft facility about 200 miles south of the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters.
They're priced at US$6,999 for the 55-inch model and $19,999 for the 84-inch version.
The Surface Hubs were first shown to the world during a Windows 10 event back in January, but it appears the majority of onlookers' eyes were glued to Microsoft's augmented reality headset, the HoloLens, or searching out familiar elements in the new operating system.
Microsoft has been developing and manufacturing the Surface Hubs at a satellite campus a few miles outside of Portland, in Wilsonville, Oregon. All components except the screens were developed and produced at the facility, and Microsoft owns the company that produces the multitouch display technology for the Hubs.
The Surface Hubs are full-featured Windows 10 devices. The larger Hub features a 4K display, while the 55-inch variants output 1080p video.

Modernizing the Meeting

Meetings increasingly are dispersed, noted Brian Eskridge, a senior manager at Microsoft. About half of all corporate meetings include at least one remote participant.
"Surface Hub is designed to be engaging for everyone in a meeting," Eskridge told TechNewsWorld. "Remote participants that are dialing in have a great view of the conference room or ad hoc meeting space where the Surface Hub is located, and participants in the room have a great view of those remote participants."
That's all thanks to the dual 1080p cameras, inspired by Xbox's Kinect, that are built into the flanks of Surface Hubs, he pointed out.
The cameras "provide a full range of view for both people that are standing close to the Surface Hub, potentially whiteboarding on it, and for those who may be sitting at a conference table several meters away from the Surface Hub," said Eskridge.
As a full-fledged Windows 10 system "with all-in-one compute power," the Surface Hub is meant to be a workhorse in conference rooms, he added.
Businesses increasingly have been making decisions based on insights gleaned from data served up in real time, Eskridge pointed out, and it's that access to real-time data in an interactive experience that separates the Surface Hub from other displays on the market.
Real-time data access "ultimately enables a platform for amazing large screen applications that are powered by Windows 10 as a platform, but then extend out into a variety of industry verticals that may need business-specific or line-of-business applications," he explained.

At Home at the Hub

BYOD, or bring your own device, is now less a phenomenon and more the status quo, and the Surface Hub opens its arms to devices running on all major platforms. Hub users with Android, iOS or OS X devices can receive the same treatment that users of Windows or Windows Phone devices enjoy.
"Suddenly, you have a meeting room with that's live and active 10 hours a day," said Eskridge. "You have multiple individuals coming in and interacting with Surface Hub, and those people are bringing in their own devices and they're having great experiences on those other devices with our cross-platform applications like Office, or Skype for Business, or OneNote."
The Surface Hub is "incredibly impactful," and it's a worthy endeavor for Microsoft, which strives to empower individuals and groups alike, he added.

A Node in the Net

Microsoft last year started marching to the mantra "mobile first, cloud first." The development and release of touch-sensitive, big screen devices may appear to be a departure from that two-pronged strategy of mobility and cloud connectedness, but it is, in fact, integral to it.
"We're creating best-in-class experiences with our hardware that extend to our productivity software and services," Eskridge said.
Microsoft's mobile and cloud ambitions are trained on improving people's work lives and then following them home via their tablets and Windows Phone handsets.
The Surface Hub could serve as a new inroad into the workflows of enterprises, suggested Eric M. Jackson, CEO of CapLinked.
"Microsoft sees two trends that are threatening the longstanding dominance that Windows and Office have had with enterprises: Software as a service is rapidly expanding into the enterprise; and the number of non-Windows devices that people use for work is growing," he told TechNewsWorld.
Along with injecting itself into another area of enterprise workflows, the Surface Hub could inspire Microsoft's developer community as well, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
"The fact that the Surface Hub will also support common Windows applications and frameworks -- in contrast to the original Surface's less open environment -- means that many in Microsoft's developer community should be inspired to write applications for it," he told TechNewsWorld.

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

The Surface Hub and other hardware, such as the latest Surface Pro, indicate that Microsoft has a new attitude, and its OEM partners should be on notice that the company will produce hardware when they won't, King said.
"I believe that under CEO Satya Nadella, the company is moving aggressively to meaningfully highlight the capabilities of its core technology assets, far more so than when Steve Ballmer was leading the charge," he remarked. "At that point, numerous projects were left unfinished, or dropped after they faced initial challenges."

HGST (Formerly Hitachi’s hard drive division) has been talking about its helium storage devices for several years and the firm is finally ready to ship the new drives for enterprise deployments. The Ultrastar Archive Ha¹⁰ isn’t just filled with helium — it also uses new Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to write data to the disk. While this allows for unprecedented areal density, there are some caveats that make the drive ill-suited to conventional consumer applications. It’s an offshoot of the earlier-launched He⁶, which uses helium, but not SMR.
First, a word on SMR itself. SMR is the latest advance in recording technnology designed to ensure that consumers and businesses have enough storage space for… erm, office documents. It’s my personal opinion that hard drive manufacturers don’t get nearly enough credit for the work they’ve done to expand storage capacities. Imagine if Ford rolled out a new 2016 Escort capable of holding the population of China in a smaller footprint than its 1981 model year, and you’ve got some idea of just how drastically hard drives have advanced in the intervening decades.

Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, and conventional HDD scaling (even assisted by perpendicular recording) is hitting a wall. Areal density becomes difficult to scale using conventional methods because it’s no longer possible to focus a sufficiently powerful magnetic field on a single bit of the drive. Shingled magnetic recording boosts drive density not by scaling the areal density to ever-higher levels, but by laying tracks across each other, in shingled fashion.

The advantage of laying the tracks down in this fashion is that you pack data more closely together. The disadvantage is that rewriting tracks will damage the data on subsequent tracks. The only way to prevent this is to read the entire data block, modify the necessary section, and then re-write the rest of the track. This can lead to huge write amplification — if a 4KB update needs to be performed to a 64MB area of track, then the entire 64MB has to be read into RAM and laid back down with the modified 4K section. To reduce the impact of this write amplification, the drives are divided into bands — contiguous blocks of data that are treated as a unit.
It’s important to avoid random reads and writes as much as possible when using SMR, however, which is why HGST is marketing these drives as “cool” to “cold” storage — meaning data that’s written very few times and accessed only on occasion. If the drive is being regularly written and re-written, the performance penalties will quickly become severe. The HGST drives also require extensive modification and drive software in order to operate properly.

Hitachi has an open-source project, libzbc, that can be integrated into Linux to implement support for its now Ha¹⁰ drives. Absent such support, the drives can’t function — these aren’t your typical plug-and-play hard drives.
Right now, it’s hard to see where SMR drives will fit into future consumer products. Tech Report, erm, reports that the rated performance on the new hardware is just 157MB/s sequential read and 68MB/s sequential write. Meanwhile, adding the helium capabilities to drive up storage densities will add its own significant costs. All drive technologies require a launch period before they start to hit attractive prices, but pushing the envelope on HDD storage through noble gases and particular recording methods with some noted drawbacks seems an ill fit for the larger consumer market. It’s worth noting that SMR isn’t the only game in town for pushing the envelope on hard drive capacity — another technology, Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording, or HAMR, is currently expected to reach market by 2016 or 2017.

It has a new error handling model that works with Apple SDKs and NSError. Two new features in Objective-C -- nullability annotations and generics -- make Swift 2 work better with Apple SDKs.
"Generating higher-quality code is the central problem in software engineering, and anything that helps developers do that will help," said Al Hilwa, a program director at IDC.
Swift is "a modern language where memory management is internalized," he told LinuxInsider. "Having features that further reduce errors and allow writing of cleaner, more readable code is always welcome."

Hot New Stuff

The most important new features in Swift 2 include increased performance and improved optimization, as well as a new exception-based error handling system that features "throw," "try" and "catch" keywords, like Java and other languages, noted Bill Weinberg, senior director of open source strategy at Black Duck Software.
Others are use of the "#Available" keyword to discover properties of the underlying OS, easier transition across OSes and versions, and new platform-optimized SDKs -- primarily for current Apple devs.
A Linux port is slated to appear later this year. Key attributes devs should look out for, according to Weinberg, include choice of IDE, if any; support for Android; completeness of the port compared to Swift's native implementation under OS X and iOS; and volume of platform-specific code.

FOSSing Swift

Apple will release Swift 2 to open source under an OSI-approved permissive license. It will contribute ports for OS X, iOS and Linux at launch, and source code will include the Swift compiler and standard library.
Using the permissive license "would make Swift friendly to many commercial entities, but could also make it easier to fork the project and the language," Black Duck's Weinberg told LinuxInsider. "Community voices are already singing the praises of Apple's move."

Swift is among the top 25 programming languages, and open-sourcing it "will reduce friction to adoption by ushering the language into other platforms," Weinberg said.
Linux "is a logical target" for Swift, because "it's the platform of choice for new development, and where other next-generation languages were born, and where they're percolating today," Weinberg noted, in addition to being "a close sister operating system to OS X."
How open-sourcing Swift will impact the nascent Phoenix project, an attempt to implement the Swift spec as open source without the benefit of Apple's purview, remains to be seen.

Chrome developers have announced that an upcoming version of Chrome will prevent video ads from automatically playing when a website loads. The new feature has already been pushed out to beta builds and can be manually enabled by opening Chrome’s content settings and adjusting the plugin content options. This push comes as part of an overall effort to improve Chrome’s performance on modern laptops.
Last year, Chrome was dinged by the discovery that the browser would set the CPU clock interval as low as 1ms, waking the chip far more often than is necessary in order to improve responsiveness, but at the cost of battery life. That issue was apparently fixed by a browser update earlier this year, but Google has evidently been looking for other ways to improve laptop power consumption. Auto-playing flash video, of course, isn’t just a battery life issue — it’s extremely annoying to have multiple tabs start playing their own audio streams automatically.
This new feature doesn’t prevent the ad from loading, it just doesn’t play the ad unless the user manually chooses to do. The feature is controlled from within Chrome’s preferences, as shown below:

Google didn’t say that it was blocking ads, specifically, instead claiming to block content that isn’t “central to the webpage.” The implication, however, is that this is a shot across the bow of Flash advertising. One could also argue, cynically, that this is an attempt to push users towards alternative advertising platforms and text-based ads. Block ads that rely on flash video players, and you encourage the entire advertising ecosystem to switch over and start building ads that run on HTML5 or even Google’s own VP9 codecs. I’d argue that this is likely the point of the feature.
It’ll be particularly interesting to see how this interfaces with Facebook’s platform. As of last fall, the social network titan was using a mixture of HTML5 and Flash for serving up its auto-play videos. It’s not clear if FB has completely switched over or not, but if desktop users are still being fed the Flash version, Chrome might kill auto-play entirely (as a non-necessary feature) or speed Facebook’s transition to an all-HTML5 network.
Regardless of the reasons for the change, consumers who use Chrome can benefit from ad-blocking, though the degree to which this benefits you will obviously depend on how many websites you frequent with auto-playing ads.