Rick and Sully Talk the new Video Game- Tennis Champs for iOS

"Limpert Tech" went a little overtime last week on Friday, so I bring this bonus coverage...

In Studio With Sully

I get to talk with Rich Sullivan every Friday on 640 am WGST with the "Limpert Tech" tech segment.

We always do it via phone, but this week I popped into the studio to show off some new laptops and do the segment with Sully.

Have a listen:

My Appearance on WGST's "The Sully Show" 5/23/14 Talking Tech Topics and More

Always fun to join Sully on WGST each week to talk the latest tech topics and whatever else comes up.

 Have a listen and have a safe Memorial Day weekend:

listen to ‘The Sully Show May 23, 2014’ on Audioboo

Microsoft introduces the Surface Pro 3

On Tuesday, Microsoft debuted the new Surface Pro 3. The tablet was faster, thinner and lighter than previous Surface Pro models, and the larger 12-inch screen made for comfortable reading and viewing. In a PC market desperate for innovation, the Surface Pro 3 stands big among the hybrid laptop-tablet models from other device makers.

The 800-gram tablet felt lighter in the hand than the predecessor Surface Pro 2 despite the larger screen. But I preferred using the tablet placed on a table, giving it more of a PC feel.
Customers “wanted screens that were sized so they could work on it all day,” explained Brian Eskridge, senior manager for Surface computing at Microsoft. “It’s a tablet when you need it and a laptop when you want it,” he told me.

The $799 model includes an Intel Core i3 processor and 64GB of storage, and $1,949 will buy you a Core i7 processor and a 512GB solid-state drive. The tablet will be available starting May 21 in Microsoft retail stores and Best Buy, and in more U.S. and Canadian stores starting June 20.

The model in my hand had a 2.5GHz Core i5-4300 CPU based on the Haswell microarchitecture, 256GB of storage and 8GB of DDR3 DRAM. The tablet booted in seconds and loaded applications faster than my current laptop with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor. The touchscreen was more responsive than the Surface Pro 2, which is less sensitive to pressure.

Microsoft claims the tablet offers battery life of up to nine hours. Other features include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, two 5-megapixel back and front cameras, a USB 3.0 port, a mini-DisplayPort slot and a microSD card reader. An optional docking station expands the port options to include Gigabit ethernet, display connectors and USB ports.
One big missing feature is LTE or any form of mobile broadband connectivity.
 


Google Maps adds elevation info

"Google Maps has introduced a new feature, useful for humans. Find out which hills will cause brake/heart failure before you take that last bike ride."
he feature is accessed simply by clicking on the bicycle icon in the map's info box after you input two locations as starting and ending points for Directions. You'll then be presented with a graph of the elevation changes over the course of the route, along with the highest and lowest elevations and the total elevation changes, up and down.

The new feature is apparently only activated when there's an appreciable elevation change along the route.  Works in various locales where there are hills around the Metro Atlanta area.

Google's Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets

"Google's driverless cars have now combined to drive more than 700,000 miles on public roads without receiving one citation, The Atlantic reported this week. While this raises a lot of questions about who is responsible to pay for a ticket issued to a speeding autonomous car – current California law would have the person in the driver's seat responsible, while Google has said the company that designed the car should pay the fine – it also hints at a future where local and state governments will have to operate without a substantial source of revenue.

Approximately 41 million people receive speeding tickets in the U.S. every year, paying out more than $6.2 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Highway Patrol published at StatisticBrain.com. That translates to an estimated $300,000 in speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer every year. State and local governments often lean on this source of income when they hit financial trouble. A study released in 2009 examined data over a 13-year period in North Carolina, finding a 'statistically significant correlation between a drop in local government revenue one year, and more traffic tickets the next year,' Popular Science reported.

For US Customers, Text Access To 911 Slowly Rolls Out - but comes to Georgia

After it was long rumored and discussed about, the ability to text 911 in case of emergency is slowly rolling out in the United States to subscribers of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. For the time being, the service is available in areas of Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. According to the FCC, the service will gradually roll out to more areas and by the end of this year, virtually anyone with a cellphone and enough service will be able to make use of it. Which means that all carriers will support it.

The Indian Prime Minister's Office Just Threw Away 1.24 Million Twitter Followers

Since January 2012, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the outgoing prime minister of India, has regaled the 1.24 million followers of the prime minister's official account on Twitter with blurry photographs, links to turgid Press Information Bureau releases and festive tidings. Tuesday, in one of the final acts of the outgoing government, the prime minister's office changed the name of its Twitter account from @PMOIndia to @PMOIndiaArchive and put it in cold storage.

My Appearance on WGST's "The Sully Show" 5/16/14 Talking Tech Topics and More

Here's what we talked about when I joined Sully this week on 640 am WGST

listen to ‘The Sully Show May 16, 2014’ on Audioboo

Rick attended the Twilio/Google Roashow in Atlanta this week,  The show's focus was on customer service  what do customers have to look forward to?

* Rumor - Apple to buy Beats Electronics
What does this add to Apple?  Not sure. Makes Dr. Dre and the folks at Beats even more wealthy of it happens


That Undersea Train from China to the U.S. - You mentioned this last week...

"China is planning to build a train line that would, in theory, connect Beijing to the United States. According to a report in the Beijing Times, citing an expert at the Chinese Academy of Engineering, Chinese officials are considering a route that would start in the country's northeast, thread through eastern Siberia and cross the Bering Strait via a 125-mile long underwater tunnel into Alaska."

Physician Operates On Server, Costs His Hospital $4.8 Million

A physician at Columbia University Medical Center (CU) attempted to "deactivate" a personally owned computer from a hospital network segment that contained sensitive patient health information, creating an inadvertent data leak that is going to cost the hospital $4.8 million to settle with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The error left patient status, vital signs, laboratory results, medication information, and other sensitive data on about 6,800 individuals accessible to all via the Web. The breach was discovered after the hospital received a complaint from an individual who discovered personal health information about his deceased partner on the Web. An investigation by the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR) found that neither Columbia University nor New York Presbyterian Hospital, who operated the network jointly, had implemented adequate security protections, or undertook a risk analysis or audit to identify the location of sensitive patient health information on the joint network. "For more than three years, we have been cooperating with HHS by voluntarily providing information about the incident in question," say the hospitals. "We also have continually strengthened our safeguards to enhance our information systems and processes, and will continue to do so under the terms of the agreement with HHS." HHS has also extracted settlements from several other healthcare entities over the past two years as it beefs up the effort to crack down on HIPAA violations. In April, it reached a $2 million settlement with with Concentra Health Services and QCA Health Plan. Both organizations reported losing laptops containing unencrypted patient data."


DOJ Requests More Power To Hack Remote Computers

"The U.S. Department of Justice says it needs greater authority to hack remote computers in the course of an investigation. The agency reasons that criminal operations involving computers are become more complicated, and argues that its own capabilities need to scale up to match them. An ACLU attorney said, 'By expanding federal law enforcement's power to secretly exploit "zero-day"' vulnerabilities in software and Internet platforms, the proposal threatens to weaken Internet security for all of us.' This is particularly relevant in the wake of Heartbleed — it's been unclear whether the U.S. government knew about it before everyone else did. This request suggests that the DOJ, at least, did not abuse it — but it sure looks like they would've wanted to.

My Appearance on WGST's "The Sully Show" 5/9/14 Talking Tech Topics and More

I join Sully for our weekly chat on 640 WGST and "The Sully Show" to talk a little on my travels to the Outer Banks of North Carolina and the Wright Brothers Memorial.  Then we dive into the tech topics of the week.

Have a listen:

listen to ‘The Sully Show May 9, 2014’ on Audioboo

Show Notes:

Rick was on a media trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina this week and visited Kitty Hawk to see the National Park and site of the Wright Bros. forst flight...very cool experience

See more at: www.OuterBanks.org

Current tech topics

Sony Re-invents the cassette tape

While we were throwing old cassette tapes away as trash, Sony has reinvented the device to store a massive amount of data, and massive is sized here at 185TB. That’s pretty huge, what with 60 million songs easily accommodating in it (Movie buffs, replace songs with almost 3,700 Blu-Ray movies. There you go!) But thankfully it’s not that tedious plastic tape that we used to rewind impatiently using our finger. Sony’s world-record setting magnetic tape technology has made it possible to hold 185tb of data on a single cartridge (roughly 148GB data per inch of tape), and this is a figure that heavily buries the standing record of 35Tb set in 2010 by Fuji.

IBM  helped develop this cassette tape.

Sony in its press release, stated that it’s looking to commercialize this technology, as well as continue bettering it.

Streaming Games Coming to Comcast

- You will be able to order games like your order movies

Electronic Arts and Comcast are close to finalizing a deal that would bring EA-published games to Comcast's X1 TV operating system through cloud-powered streaming. Five separate sources told Reuters that this was the case.
According to Reuters, Comcast and EA have tested such a streaming service for more than two years. Games from the Madden, FIFA, Monopoly, and Plants vs. Zombies franchises were called out as those being available for streaming. The report goes on to say that you'll be able to use a tablet you already own as a controller to play the games, suggesting the games on offer will be smaller, mobile games rather than bigger, console-level titles. The list of available games is reportedly still being hashed out.
Sources told Reuters that Comcast will focus on casual and family games first, before later considering FPS and action games. It will all come down to user preference, the report says.

Comcast has more than 22 million customers in the United States, which would (potentially) make the company a major player in the home gaming space if the deal goes through. An EA representative declined to comment when approached by GameSpot, while we've yet to hear back from a Comcast representative about this reported deal.


Three Chinese Telecom companies will join up to form a huge Monopoly in China

$10 billion company may fix the mobile problems in China

The three largest telcos will spin off part of their business into a jointly owned tower firm to coordinate tower facilities construction in China.
The new firm is developed by the three largest telcos – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Telecom – to further improve the level of joint construction and sharing of telecom infrastructure, Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), confirmed the rumor on its website on Wednesday.
The jointly-owned firm will be "responsible for coordinating the construction of communication tower facilities" in China, MIIT noted on the website, without providing further information.
According to a follow-up Tencent news report on Friday, the new firm which is likely to be named as "National Tower Company", will become giant in size as its registered capital will reach 10 billion yuan (US$1.6 billion), and it will positioned on the "same level" with the three parent operators.
It will carry out tower, site and pipeline constructions and maintenances for the three Chinese operators, and collect rent from them in accordance with the lease contracts.
The move comes after Chinese telecom operators have been chasing to invest in 4G network developments when the country approved the first batch of licenses in late 2013.
The approach is likely to resolve pipes and towers sharing issues by eliminating unnecessary repetitious infrastructural developments among the three state-owned operators.

Microsoft issues another, yet another patch for Internet Explorer

*Update:  Last Thursday, Microsoft released an update to address the zero day vulnerability recently disclosed in all versions of Internet Explorer. Windows XP is listed as among the affected platforms, in spite of its support period ending weeks ago.
Adrienne Hall, General Manager, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing stated "[T]he security of our products is something we take incredibly seriously. When we saw the first reports about this vulnerability we decided to fix it, fix it fast, and fix it for all our customers."
Users with Automatic Updates enabled do not have to do anything, although running Windows Update will apply the fix immediately.


New app for warning us about severe weather 

Cost $9.99  iOS or Android

MyWARN is an app that delivers critical National Weather Service severe weather risks, watches and warnings to your smartphone based on your location.

**** How It Works ****
MyWARN constantly monitors the latest tornado, severe thunderstorm and flash flood watches and warnings from the National Weather Service. It uses the location services in your device to notify you immediately when an alert is issued for where you are.
**** FEATURES ****
* Only Alerts For Where You Are: Legacy warning systems, like sirens and NOAA Weatheradio, issue warnings for entire counties. But National Weather Service warnings are drawn very precisely. MyWARN only notifies you when you are in the precise alert area.
* Only the Alerts You Want: MyWARN lets you filter out alerts that you don’t want.
* Always On: MyWARN sits silently in memory waiting for a match from the MyWARN servers.
* AlertsInMotion: MyWARN notifies you when you drive into or out of an alert, no matter where you are in the United States.
* Early Heads Up: MyWARN alerts you hours in advance by notifying you when severe weather is forecast for your location by the experts at the Storm Prediction Center.