Computers

An astral diamond exploit derailed the entire Neverwinter economy yesterday.

Our man in Silicon Valley spent his Saturday af6ternnon taking in Maker Faire and here's a glimpse of some of the makers, robots, LEDs and whatnot he saw there.View the full article HERE.

Taiwan has long been recognized for its contributions to microelectronics, but its research labs are now working on pressing social issues.View the full article HERE.

Mobile network builder Nokia Siemens Networks unveiled tools to optimize video performance on mobile devices on Monday, just in time for the CTIA Wireless trade show that begins Tuesday in Las Vegas.The new capabilities come out of Liquid Broadband, a portfolio of network performance technologies that NSN announced in February at Mobile World Congress. That lineup includes Liquid Applications for boosting app performance, plus other tools.Amid all the effort going into small cells, more spectrum and other ways to boost total available wireless capacity, mobile vendors are also crafting tools for using that capacity more intelligently. Around the same time Liquid Broadband debuted, NSN rival Cisco Systems introduced Quantum, a software architecture that can analyze real-time data about the network to improve performance, among other things.NSN wants to help carriers satisfy their subscribers with smooth video streaming, which may pose a challenge when many users on the same base station want to watch. The company says its new capabilities can reduce video stalling by 90 percent while also cutting demand for capacity by 25 percent.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

That's $1,500 down the drain if the specs are never found.

A German site alleges that it caught a glimpse of the PS4 price on the Sony India website.

Ready for an unconventional upgrade? How about this: You can turn an old, pokey external hard drive into a blazingly fast one with about 10 minutes of your time and $15 of your money. See, most modern computers have at least one USB 3.0 port. You can plug an older, USB 2.0 drive into one, but you won't get the faster throughput afforded by the newer technology. Thankfully, you don't need to get a new drive just to enjoy speedier file transfers; you just need a new drive enclosure. You can buy one for around $15, give or take $5, and from there it's a fairly simply matter to transplant your old drive. Just unscrew the old enclosure, remove whatever screws are holding the drive in place, then separate the drive. Now install it in the new enclosure using the provided instructions (if you even need them; it's a pretty self-explanatory procedure). To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Yahoo may have made Flickr awesome again by giving every user a massive terabyte of storage space today, but in its excitement to get the launch out the door, Yahoo forgot to switch off its legacy monthly upload limit.Despite its new FAQ page stating that users can upload photos up to 200MB in size to the photo sharing service, customers keen to back up their photo library discovered that the 300MB monthly upload limit is still in place.As some more mathematically inclined Flickr users were quick to point out, that 300MB restriction would mean it would take 277 years to fill 1TB of space online.A glitch in the systemThere was every indication that the upload limit wasn't a nefarious ploy from Yahoo to limit uploads to the new Flickr.For a start, users who hit the limit were greeted with a message to sign up to Flickr's now retired Pro plans.There's also the common sense approach that asks why Yahoo would offer the 1TB of storage if nobody would ever be able to fill it in their lifetimes?Fortunately, Javascript engineer at Flickr Stephen Woods took to Twitter to let complaining customers know that it was just a bug.Can't keep everyone happyBut despite initial uploading issues, it seems that many legacy Pro users are less than content by the new structure for Flickr.While free Flickr customers are now getting many of the benefits older users had to pay for, Pro customers are now being faced with double the cost to go ad-free.Yahoo has a program in place for these customers to continue paying the current rate for Pro membership, but is also offering refunds on a pro-rata basis for those customers whose needs are now met by the free service.

IBM’s Watson computer has taken on a new job — that of customer service agent — as Big Blue puts its Jeopardy-playing computer into a new role. This will also be the first time IBM delivers Watson completely as a service, instead of as a highly customized software product for select customers in the medical and financial services field. But as Watson expands its role it may invite more comparisons to Siri, Apple’s natural language processing assistant. Tuesday at the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Nashville, Tenn., IBM plans to launch the Watson Engagement Advisor, aimed at helping consumer brands better recommend products to customers and provide better customer service at scale. Yes, that’s right. This is a technology that can diagnose cancer will be used to help sell people more products. Why we need Watson-level AI for customer service today. Still, customer service is a legitimate and complicated problem, especially in an era where social media meets our desire for a personalized and instant response to any inquiry or service issue. Firms have to engage with customers via phone calls, tweets, Yelp, Facebook posts and for all I know, angry letters. And many of those customers using new media don’t want to wait for a response. Companies that can offer good service quickly in a variety of mediums have an advantage. And Watson would allow them to do this at scale. Imagine offering Ritz Carlton service at Holiday Inn prices. Brands who buy the Engagement Advisor software will get access to a much smarter virtual agent that can sift through massive amounts of information to respond to users’ questions quickly. As someone who was totally schooled at Jeopardy by Watson, I cannot emphasize enough how fast it is. The IBM release notes that the Engagement Advisor software is designed to help existing customer service personnel answer questions quickly or it can be deployed via the brand’s mobile site where customers can interact with Watson directly. As IBM’s release says, “In one simple click, the solution’s “Ask Watson” feature will quickly address customers’ questions, offer advice to guide their purchase decisions, and troubleshoot their problems.” It’s possible this will remind users of Siri, Apple’s chatty personal assistant on the iPhone and iPad. However, instead of being deployed on a device, Watson is embedded on a brand web site. It can greet customers by name, however and offer to help them via a chat window on the company site or via a mobile push alert, that will appeal to people who want to tweet or text their customer care questions without having to stay focused on a single web page. In the ideal case Watson will have access to customer records plus the data stores it was trained on, and will be able to use both in giving a customer a recommendation or help. The business of Watson is a big one Instead of naming customers directly IBM writes that brands including ANZ, Celcom, IHS, Nielsen and Royal Bank of Canada are, “exploring how the Watson Engagement Advisor can help them engage with their customers.” This may be phrased this way because the initial pilot projects involving Watson require a lot of training of the computer before it becomes valuable. During Watson’s “apprenticeship period,” IBM in some cases hasn’t charged clients, or charges them lower rates. But it’s no secret that Watson is a big business bet for IBM. At last year’s Structure conference, Dan Cerutti, IBM’s VP of Watson Commercialization, explained IBM’s ambitions for Watson, including delivering the machine as a service over more and more devices. IBM sees Watson as a new type of computing and plans to build out new business models to support it, as Cerutti detailed in our chat almost a year ago. Along the way Watson not only impresses with its ability to filter through reams of data

Amazon Web Services can now claim a rare blessing among cloud providers: it has earned the FedRAMP accreditation that certifies that it has met a variety of security standards. That certification, which covers AWS GovCloud as well as Amazon’s other U.S. regions, should make it easier for state, local and government agencies to put workloads on Amazon’s public cloud infrastructure without having to jump through so many hoops. Amazon Web Services VP Adam Selipsky. FedRAMP, which stands for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, “is a U.S. government-wide standardized approach to security assessment, authorization and monitoring,” said Adam Selipsky, VP of AWS. If a service gets certified by FedRAMP for use by one agency, it will be easier for other government organizations to adopt it as well, he said. In government parlance, Amazon now has a three-year “Authority to Operate,” or ATO. That certifies that a range of government data can be stored or processed on Amazon infrastructure. Companies seeking FedRAMP certification typically work with a sponsor agency, which in Amazon’s case was the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS has used AWS to run for the Centers of Disease Control’s BioSense program for tracking health problems in the U.S. and for the National Database for Autism Research.  FedRAMP blessing greases the skids for more government use AWS now has both a FISMA (Federal Information Security Management Act) Moderate and a FedRAMP Moderate ranking.The latter designation means that ”sensitive data” can be stored and managed on AWS infrastructure. “This is a journey, a sliding scale. Sensitive data is a term of art used in government. Even more top secret categories of data require additional certifications,” Selipsky said. To date, exactly one cloud provider — Autonomic Resources, a small North Carolina company — had earned the FedRAMP seal of approval from the General Services Administration. Now AWS is in the mix, but the two companies won’t have the arena to themselves for very long. Up to 15 providers are expected to clear FedRAMP hurdles this year with double that number expected to do so in 2014 when FedRAMP certification becomes mandatory, according to Federal Computer Week, AWS is the kingpin in public cloud infrastructure where it’s had a 6 year head start. But now enterprise-focused rivals — VMware will announce its AWS response on Tuesday, HP and Rackspace have rolled out their own public clouds. An early FedRAMP certification which should make government IT types feel better about deploying work on AWS, may well be another early-mover advantage. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels may well talk about the importance of public sector workloads when he speaks at GigaOM Structure next month in San Francisco. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyondQuality of the cloud: best practices for ISVsThe fourth quarter of 2012 in cloud