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Computing

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  Chinese government bans use of Apple products in deepening US conflict August 6, 2014 at 1:41 pm

  A recent ban on Apple products in government procurements is the latest Chinese trade decision designed to put pressure on both the US government and US companies.
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  Windows 8.1 Update 2, due next week, shows Microsoft is finally ready to compete with its faster-moving competitors August 6, 2014 at 10:17 am

  With surprisingly little ceremony at all, Microsoft has announced that the next major update for Windows 8.1 is coming next week on August 12 — except calling it a ‘major update’ is a wee bit of an overstatement. In fact, despite rumors that we’d be seeing a significant ‘Update 2′ in August, Microsoft says that’s definitely not the case. In short, if you were hoping for something exciting from the second Windows 8.1 update, you will be sorely disappointed — unless you’ve been avidly awaiting some touchpad tweaks, anyway.
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  Hitachi’s new phase-change SSD is orders of magnitude faster than any NAND flash drive on the market August 6, 2014 at 9:02 am

  HGST is demonstrating a new type of phase change memory array that’s orders of magnitude faster than NAND — so fast, they had to redesign PCI-Express to make the protocol work.
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  Could Microsoft upgrade the Xbox One’s hardware to fix the PS4 performance gap? August 5, 2014 at 12:05 pm

  As you are well aware, there is a sizable gap between the hardware specifications of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. But who says this will always be the case? It’s not unusual for a console to be tweaked or upgraded multiple times throughout its lifetime as new (cheaper) hardware becomes available. Because both consoles use fairly standard PC hardware, could Sony or Microsoft upgrade their consoles to close (or widen) the current performance gap?
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  Synology NAS devices targeted by hackers, demand Bitcoin ransom to decrypt files August 5, 2014 at 10:34 am

  Synology is back in the spotlight for NAS trouble — this time its devices are being ransomed for Bitcoin. The company has promised an update as soon as it has details; we’ve got information on how to protect yourself til then.
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  Why Apple won’t dump Intel x86 for its own ARM chips in MacBooks and the Mac Pro August 5, 2014 at 9:32 am

  Could Apple be prepping a near-term switch to an A7 class product for its future hardware needs? It’s not impossible — but we doubt it.
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  Google scans your Gmail inbox for child porn to help catch criminals, but don’t worry about loss of privacy (yet) August 5, 2014 at 8:02 am

  Last week, a man in Texas was arrested by the police for sending child porn to a friend email. This isn’t something we’d usually report on, except in this case the man was arrested due to a direct tip-off from Google, which caught the child porn moving across its Gmail servers and dutifully alerted the police. This raises a rather thorny question: How did Google scan the man’s inbox for child porn? And more importantly, does this mean Google is scanning everyone’s inbox for child porn and other illegal materials?
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  The case of the vanishing mobile GPU (and what budget gamers should do about it) August 4, 2014 at 11:33 am

  It’s become increasingly difficult to buy a laptop with a discrete GPU — we investigate the options and the significant difference between AMD and Intel systems.
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  Asus Poseidon GTX 780 review: Hybrid air/water cooling takes down the R9 295X2 August 4, 2014 at 9:45 am

  Asus’ new hybrid Poseidon GPU can run on air or water — your choice — and when overclocked, it can take on AMD’s best. Not bad for the GTX 780 core.
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  Elon Musk warns us that human-level AI is ‘potentially more dangerous than nukes’ August 4, 2014 at 8:39 am

  Elon Musk, the mastermind behind SpaceX and Tesla, believes that artificial intelligence is “potentially more dangerous than nukes,” imploring all of humankind “to be super careful with AI,” unless we want the ultimate fate of humanity to closely resemble Judgment Day from Terminator. Personally I think Musk is being a little hyperbolic — after all, we’ve survived more than 60 years of the threat of thermonuclear mutually assured destruction — but still, it’s worth considering Musk’s words in greater detail.