Friday, March 09, 2012

Thunderbolt is everywhere, now let's make it faster with PCI-Express 3.0

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/09/thunderbolt-could-get-faster-with-pci-express-3/

Things are different on Planet Intel. Over there, Thunderbolt drives and peripherals are as cheap and abundant as artificial intelligences in a Culture novel, so the population's attention has already turned to what comes next. Some are prepared to wait for a promised 50Gbps optical interconnect by 2015, but an impatient few are trying to make Thunderbolt exploit the new PCI-Express 3.0 standard for more immediate thrills. PCWorld claims the latest form of PCI-Express found in Sandy Bridge E, Ivy Bridge and Xeon E5 chipsets could make 10Gbps Thunderbolt run "significantly faster", thanks to a 60 percent speed boost over PCIe 2.0. Maybe they're right, but back on this planet we're still 33 percent of the way through transferring The Best of Leo Sayer to our USB 2.0-equipped Xperia S.

Thunderbolt is everywhere, now let's make it faster with PCI-Express 3.0 originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Mar 2012 06:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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FujiFilm's $1,700 X100 Black Edition now shipping, limited to 10K units worldwide

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/09/fujifilms-1-700-x100-black-edition-now-shipping-limited-to-10/

We somehow missed this retro-styled gem at back at CES, but no matter -- Fujifilm's X100 Black Premium Edition is now shipping and available for purchase. This is exactly the same 12.3-megapixel camera that's been pleasing photographers for nearly a year, albeit in a darker, single-tone finish that's limited to a run of 10,000 units worldwide. Priced at $1,700, the black X100 is 500 more bones than the standard-issue variant and features the same 23mm fixed lens, but it comes with a lens hood, leather case, clear lens filter and an adapter ring; all of which are all painted to match. We'd say this blacked-out shooter gives the NEX-7 a run for its money in the dapper looks department, but you can decide for yourself at the source link below. Full press release past the break.

Continue reading FujiFilm's $1,700 X100 Black Edition now shipping, limited to 10K units worldwide

FujiFilm's $1,700 X100 Black Edition now shipping, limited to 10K units worldwide originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Mar 2012 08:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Orange's Santa Clara Medfield phone gets benchmarked, well, the browser does

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/03/09/oranges-santa-clara-medfield-phone-gets-benchmarked/

Santa Clara Vellamo
Wondering how those Medfield handsets stack up to their ARM-powered competition? Well, we can't promise a full suite of benchmarks just yet, but we do have a peek at a pair of browser-centric tests. The German Caschys Blog managed to get a hold of Orange's upcoming Santa Clara device at CeBit and ran Qualcomm's Vellamo and Rightware's BrowserMark on the Atom handset. In both metrics the Z2460 more than holds its own, scoring an 89,180 on the web-based BrowserMark -- putting it just ahead of the iPhone 4S which clocks in at 87,801, but well behind the Galaxy Nexus' 98,272. Things look just as promising on the slightly more hardware-intensive Vellamo where it trounced the latest Nexus and was hot on the heels of the Xiaomi Mi-One Plus and Transformer Prime. Of course, neither of these tests really tax the CPU or measure 3D graphics performance. We're not even sure what the clock speed on chip inside the handset is. We were originally led to believe 1.6GHz, though, Caschy is reporting the model he manhandled was running at just 1.4GHz. Then, there's perhaps the biggest question of all -- battery life. For that, we'll just have to wait and see.

Orange's Santa Clara Medfield phone gets benchmarked, well, the browser does originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 09 Mar 2012 09:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Download Any MP3 from SoundCloud with This Bookmarklet [Music]

Source: http://lifehacker.com/5891635/download-any-mp3-from-soundcloud-with-this-bookmarklet

Download Any MP3 from SoundCloud with This BookmarkletMusic-hosting service SoundCloud makes it easy to share your voice, music, or any other audio with a few clicks. It's great, but sometimes you're desperate to actually download and save a track from SoundCloud. This handy bookmarklet, courtesy of github user pheuter, adds a Download MP3 link to any track on SoundCloud.

To install the bookmarklet, first drag and drop the link below to your browser's bookmark toolbar:

SoundCloud Download

Right-click the bookmark and select Edit (Chrome) or Properties (Firefox). Copy and paste the text below into the URL field (Chrome) or Location field (Firefox):

 javascript:(function(b){var a=b.createElement("a");a.innerText="Download MP3";a.href="http://media.soundcloud.com/stream/"+b.querySelector("#main-content-inner img[class=waveform]").src.match(/\.com\/(.+)\_/)[1];a.download=b.querySelector("em").innerText+".mp3";b.querySelector(".primary").appendChild(a);a.style.marginLeft="10px";a.style.color="red";a.style.fontWeight=700})(document); 

Click Save and your SoundCloud bookmarklet is ready to roll. Next time you'd like to download any piece of audio from SoundCloud but downloading isn't enabled, just click your handy bookmarklet and a red Download MP3 link will magically appear in the player. Don't abuse it, and everyone wins.

Bookmarklet that generates download link for a Soundcloud upload | github

(Apologies for the extra bookmarklet installation steps beyond just dragging and dropping—our publishing platform mungs up the code in bookmarklet links.)

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Whoever Wrote the Duqu Trojan's Framework Wrote It in an Unknown Programming Language [Hacking]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5891789/whoever-wrote-the-duqu-framework-wrote-it-with-an-unknown-programming-language

Whoever Wrote the Duqu Trojan's Framework Wrote It in an Unknown Programming LanguageThe Duqu Trojan is one nasty piece of code, rivaled in sophistication only by its relative, the Stuxnet Worm. A new analysis of the Trojan, however, has revealed just how advanced it really is.

Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab performed the analysis and discovered that portions of the the suspiciously-named Payload DLL file were written in an unknown programming language. What's more, these sections, dubbed the Duqu Framework, were responsible for operating the program's Command and Control functions that allow it to receive further instructions once it's infiltrated a system.

The rest of the program is written and compiled in C++, but not the Duqu Framework. It "is definitely object-oriented," wrote Igor Soumenkov but certainly not anything the analysts had ever seen before.

This discovery only further fuels speculation that both Duqu and Stuxnet are the results of a very advanced, very well-funded organization's or, more likely, nation's efforts. As Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab, speculated,

With the extremely high level of customization and exclusivity that the programming language was created with, it is also possible that it was made not only to prevent external parties from understanding the cyber-espionage operation and the interactions with the C&Cs, but also to keep it separate from other internal Duqu teams who were responsible for writing the additional parts of the malicious program.

Duqu first surfaced last September after the Stuxnet attacks against Iranian nuclear development facilities. Duqu too appeared to target state interests in Iran as well as multiple industrial control systems. [Secure List via CBR]

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