Apple May Soon Let You Talk to the Hand

Apple's supply chain has clearly sprung a leak since Steve Jobs' passing: Every few months, it seems, a rumor or report from unnamed sources at this or that supplier makes the rounds. The current rumor is that Apple is hard at work at its next innovation -- and it's not a television set or a smart remote control. Instead, it is a watch.

The crux of the report is this: Intel has teamed up with Apple to build a Bluetooth-enabled iOS watch that sports a 1.5-inch screen from which users can make calls. The news was first reported in the Asian tech press. U.S. publications including Mobilegeek and TheNextWeb translated the reports and unearthed the details.

Apple did not respond to our request to comment for this story.

The Pebble Example

Certainly the demand for smartwatches is there, said Rob Walch, host of Today in iOS, pointing to Pebble's success on Kickstarter earlier this year.
Indeed, Walch expected Apple to announce a smartwatch in September, he told MacNewsWorld. Instead the company rolled out its upgraded iPod nano with a 2.5-inch multitouch screen.
Eventually, Apple will make a play with a smartwatch, he maintained, although the timing is less than clear.
"I guess it is like those people who keep predicting Apple will launch a smart TV. Sooner or later it will -- and if you keep on saying it, you will be eventually right," Walch said.

Something Is in the Works

Apple is clearly at work on something along these lines, Daniel M. Ladik, an associate professor of marketing at Seton Hall University, told MacNewsWorld. Whether it is a smartwatch or an Apple TV -- or possibly both -- remains to be seen, of course.
However, it's likely that the world will know sooner rather than later what Apple has up its sleeve, he said.
"Think about the state of Apple at the moment," continued Ladik. "Eighty-five percent of their sales in the latest quarter are from products they released in the last 12 months. When you think of the total revenue of a company the size of Apple, that has to be a record of some sort."
Also, Apple has changed its normal innovation cycle, he pointed out. The latest iPad arrived with the iPhone 5 in October -- with only six months between update cycles -- and the iPad mini came in November.
"Something new has to be happening in 2013," Ladik said. "There is no other reason to push a new iPad out that fast, as well as release the new mini iPad all within the same four-to-six-week window of iPhone 5."
It could be an Apple TV, but a smartwatch is not out of the question, he added. "Wearable computing is a hot trend, and Apple cannot let Google have all the fun with Google glasses, right?"

Ruminations on Functionality

Perhaps the most interesting question is what kind of functionality this alleged smartwatch would offer. The gadget could be little more than a Bluetooth accessory, displaying essential bits of data such as email or incoming phone calls for the user's quick reference, Walch suggested.
Or it could be a more elaborate play on Apple's part, offered Ladik. Users could speak to a Siri-powered smartwatch to access such content as music, stock information, a calculator and so on. Down the road, Apple could develop a whole new market for mini apps for a watch.
"I'm not sure what the price point will be for an Apple watch," he said, "but it has to be cheaper than what Google is suggesting its glasses might price at."

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NASA Shares Earth's Nighttime Glamour Shots.

NASA released a composite photo of the entire planet Earth, cloudless, at night, which it's calling the "Black Marble." Aside from a source of pretty images, the data set collected will give researchers lots of fodder to study humanity. "It's a breakthrough for us," Erle C. Ellis, associate professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "The nighttime products we have are pretty poor quality compared to this."

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In 1972, we marveled at the beauty of our planet in a photo taken by the crew of Apollo 17 on its way to the moon. Dubbed the "Blue Marble," the iconic image depicted a blue-and-white globe floating in the blackness of space. On Thursday, we were treated to a different view of Island Earth, one with the undeniable stamp of humanity on it.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) unveiled what's being called the "Black Marble" -- high-resolution photos taken of the dark side of the earth. That planet differs from the one captured by the camera of the astronauts because it shows how the human race transforms the earth by illuminating it at night. The NASA-NOAA photo was also more difficult to create than the one snapped by the astronauts. The photo and an accompanying animation are composites from data gathered by a satellite operated by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership over nine days in April and 13 days in October.
The photos are available for viewing and download at NASA's Earth at Night 2012 page.
To get a clear shot of every parcel of land on the planet's surface, the satellite had to circle the earth 312 times and collect 2.5TB of data.

Clouds Get In The Way

Composite photography is used to create a cloud-free view of the Earth, explained Chris Elvidge, a physical scientist at the NOAA who has been studying day-night band data for more than 20 years.
"There are always clouds in any image that you collect over the earth. There are very few areas that are cloud-free," he told TechNewsWorld. "We have a cloud detection algorithm, and we combined that with low-light imaging so over time we can accumulate enough cloud-free images to make a seamless mosaic that is a cloud-free view of the Earth at night," he observed.
Elvidge's group has been working on producing night photos of the Earth since 1994, but the tools used to create this latest batch of night images have allowed the scientists to hugely improve on past efforts with better spatial resolution and dynamic range.
The new instrumentation is so sensitive that it will detect terrain features on nights where there is no moonlight present, Elvidge explained. Because the new tools are an order of magnitude stronger than the old ones, they're detecting terrain illuminated by "sky glow."

Humanity's Footprint

Sky glow is created by a chemical reaction in the upper atmosphere that's faintly visible at night. "Sky glow is much, much dimmer than moonlight," Elvidge said. "How to filter out features lit by sky glow will be one of our biggest challenges as we go forward to improve our products."
The military has been taking photos of the Earth at night for some time now, but this is the first time this quality of data has been available to civilians, according to Steve Miller, a senior research scientist and deputy director at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) at Colorado State University.
Nighttime photos offer a wealth of information unavailable in photos taken during daylight hours.
"What we're seeing here is the human footprint on the nighttime side," he told TechNewsWorld. "We're seeing centers of population. We're seeing how these areas correlate to economic activity, fossil fuel emissions, light pollution and emerging demographics."
In daylilght, "there are only a few things in terms of man-made items that you can bring out," he said. "We can see quite a bit more in terms of human activity at night."

Research Avenues Opened

When NASA releases the data behind the Black Marble photos, it will be a boon for researchers, according to Erle C. Ellis, associate professor for geography and environmental systems at the 00000University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

The United States at night

(click image to enlarge)

"It's a breakthrough for us," he told TechNewsWorld. "The nighttime products we have are pretty poor quality compared to this new one. There's no real way to observe human activity from space. You can only see secondary effects. For example, if a forest disappears, you don't know if someone cut it down or it burned down."
Because the data behind these photos is of a higher quality than has been available in the past, it will be easier to unravel the sources of light in the photos, he added. That will create a mine of riches for researchers.
"You can bet they'll be a lot of research projects built on this," he said.

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All Things Appy: Top 5 Android Shopping Tools.

By Patrick Nelson
TechNewsWorld
12/01/12 5:00 AM PT

Scan barcodes from your groceries and pantry items. Fivefly's Shopping List app then provides a master list with check boxes, and you simply check a box when you've replenished supplies. Simple. TechNewsWorld thinks this checkmark system is superior to apps that make you scan or enter the product label text each time.

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Welcome to All Things Appy -- TechNewsWorld's analysis of the best apps proliferating on our devices today.

Indicative of the superiority of portable geo-friendly apps over Web search and Web browsing is the Shopping genre.
Here are TechNewsWorld's suggestions for the top five store-agnostic free killer tools on the Android platform.
About the Platform
Google's Android OS is a mobile environment geared toward multitouch. Apps can be downloaded from the Google Play store.
From the device's app drawer, click on the Play icon. Then perform a search for the desired app.
No. 1: Barcode Scanner

The Zxing Team's Barcode Scanner boasts 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 installs, according to Google Play. It has an average rating of 4.2 out of a possible five from 305,129 reviewers.

Keep things simple with Barcode Scanner.
Scan the product barcode wandering the aisles and read up on the product via a Google Web search or Google's shopping Web pages.
That's it.
It's super useful when showrooming, in-store browsing, price-matching, or looking for independent reviews and specifications.
Barcode Scanner is No. 1 on our list because it's the fastest way to gather product intelligence, and it provides something previously unattainable.
No. 2: Shopping List

Shopping List from Fivefly is a shopping list manager with 500,000 to 1,000,000 installs, according to the Google Play store. It has a 4.3 average rating out of a possible five from 7,448 reviewers.

Scan barcodes from your groceries and pantry items. Fivefly's Shopping List app then provides a master list with check boxes, and you simply check a box when you've replenished supplies. Simple.
TechNewsWorld thinks this checkmark system is superior to shopping list apps that make you scan or enter the product label text each time.
Shopping List also features sharing and syncing, so family members don't duplicate purchases.
It's No. 2 on our list because it provides syncing and paperless efficiency.
No. 3: Coupons & Shopping -- GeoQponsShopping List

Coupons & Shopping -- GeoQpons is a coupon aggregator from publisher Most Useful Shopping App with 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 installs, according to the Google Play store. It has an average 4.4 rating out of a possible five from 6,655 reviewers.

GeoQpons is a highly comprehensive selection of retail and restaurant coupon links, as well as weekend newspaper-style specials ads. Don't go pounding the sidewalk locally without checking this app.
It contains many of the classic ads and coupons that clutter up our snail mail boxes and newspapers -- but with the advantage of app-driven favorite store alerts, search and geo-functions.
It's No. 3 on our list because this app saves you cash. However, be aware that some of the ads may need printing out.
No. 4: ShopSavvy Barcode Scanner
ShopSavvy Barcode Scanner from publisher ShopSavvy boasts 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 installs according to Google Play. It has an average rating of 4.2 out of a possible five from 89,590 reviewers.

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5 Cool Things You Can Do With PostgreSQL

By Karen Tegan Padir
LinuxInsider
Part of the ECT News Network
10/30/12 5:00 AM PT

One could write thousands of pages about all the features PostgreSQL offers. Instead, let's take a look at five features that are particularly interesting and find out where PostgreSQL sits in relation to other open source and proprietary database systems. PostgreSQL has a lot more to offer than might be immediately obvious.

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PostgreSQL is one of the most versatile, powerful and reliable object-relational database systems available. The enterprise-class open source database is in use by some of the largest companies in the world, handling exceptionally large workloads. But you knew all of that already, so let's talk about a few features in PostgreSQL you probably didn't know about already.
The fact is that PostgreSQL is a sophisticated creature. You have to dive beneath the surface to really understand just what PostgreSQL is actually capable of. We could write a War and Peace-sized compendium of all of PostgreSQL's features, but the comprehensive documentation for PostgreSQL takes care of that to a large extent. Instead, we want to call out five features today that are particularly interesting and show where PostgreSQL sits in relation to other open source and proprietary database systems.

Customize Your Data Types

With many database systems, you're more or less stuck with the data types that the creators of the database envisioned when the database system was created. Not so with PostgreSQL, which features Generalized Search Tree (GiST) indexing. One of the features of GiST is that PostgreSQL users can create custom data types that allow them to decide what to store and how to store it.
This has enabled some substantial projects based on PostgreSQL, such as the OpenFTS full-text search engine and PostGIS. PostGIS provides data types that are used by geographic information systems (GIS).
If your organization needs support for data types that aren't offered "out of the box," then PostgreSQL may provide the solution.

Easy Error Recovery

Mistakes happen, hardware fails, and Murphy's Law sometimes prevails. You want to be able to recover from transactions that were made by mistake or for any other reason. PostgreSQL has the ability to do this through what's called "transactional DDL" (Data Definition Language). DDL is the language that defines, essentially, how you can define and work with your database -- such as creating and dropping tables, altering objects, and so on.
With one exception (adding and dropping databases), all operations are transactional. Using the logs, you can easily recover from even very large changes. You might think that this is true for all databases, but it really isn't.

Querying XML Data

Many organizations are working with a lot of XML data these days. If you are in this position, you should take a look at PostgreSQL's XML features, which allow users to query XML data.
Using PostgreSQL, you can directly query XML data stored in the database and extract elements from the data stored in your database. For example, it's possible to store an XML file created in another application in PostgreSQL, and query just one element from the file rather than pulling the entire file and having to query it outside the database.

Baked-In Streaming Replication

Another compelling feature in PostgreSQL is streaming replication. You might not know this, but PostgreSQL 9.0 and later can continually update standby servers so that they're ready at a moment's notice.
Note that this isn't an extra feature; it's baked into the database as part of PostgreSQL's standard feature set.

12 Authentication Systems Supported

One of the challenges that teams face when deploying any service is making sure that the service supports the type of authentication that's in use. While PostgreSQL may not support every type of authentication imaginable, it certainly comes close. Current PostgreSQL releases support 12 authentication systems.
Whether you're using an all-UNIX environment and LDAP, or putting PostgreSQL in an environment that's primarily Windows with Active Directory, PostgreSQL comes prepared. In addition to LDAP and Kerberos, PostgreSQL also supports GSSAPI, password-based authentication, RADIUS, or even "trust-based" authentication for situations when anyone that can connect to the server is assumed to be allowed to connect (we don't recommend that last one for most usage, though).
As you can see, PostgreSQL has a lot more to offer than might be immediately obvious. Already familiar with these features? Tell us -- what features do you find most interesting in PostgreSQL?

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iPad Mini: The Difference Is in the Details

Feature for feature, the iPad mini mainly bests its rivals in the 7-inch tablet market, but it does so at a price that's 65 percent higher than those competitors.

The mini has a larger display than Amazon's Kindle Fire HD and Google's Nexus 7. Its screen measures 7.9 inches diagonally, while the Fire and Nexus have 7-inch displays.

Apple's tablet is longer than both its competitors and wider than Google's slate, but in the important category of thinness, the mini is a svelte 0.28 inches, compared with 0.41 inches for the Nexus and 0.40 inches for the Fire.

Not only is the mini slimmer than its opposition, but it's lighter, too. It weighs 11.01 ounces, while the Nexus weighs 13.40 ounces and the Fire, 13.93 ounces.

Bigger Display, Lower Resolution

However, both the Fire and Nexus have higher-resolution displays than the mini. The Amazon and Google tablets have screens with resolutions of 1280x800 pixels, while Apple's slate has 1024x768 pixels.
Moreover, the Nexus display has a density of 216 pixels per inch, compared with the mini's 163 ppi. The Fire's also has a polarizing filter and anti-glare technology, which neither of its rivals have.
Both the Fire and the Nexus edge out the mini in the processor speed department. The A5 processor in the mini runs at an estimated 1GHz, while the Nexus has a Nvidia Tegra 3 quad core chip running at 1.3GHz and the Fire has a TI OMAP4 4460 running at 1.2GHz.
Apple offers a wider variety of storage options with its tablet -- 16, 32 and 64 GB -- compared with 16 and 32 GB for the Fire and 8 and 16 GB for the Nexus.

Dueling Cameras

All the 7-inch tablets have long-lasting batteries. The mini will run for 10 hours on a charge; the Nexus, nine hours; and the Fire, 11 hours.
The mini has twice the camera power of its competitors, with a 1.2-megapixel front-facing and 5-megapixel rear-facing camera. The Nexus only has a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera and the Fire an HD front-facing camera.
The Fire, however, beats both its competitors in the sound department. It has dual-driver stereo speakers with Dolby Digital Plus, while the Apple and Google slates have only have mono sound.
A full array of wireless options are available in by the iPad mini -- WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n, cellular and 4G LTE -- while its competitors only support WiFi.

Charging Too Much

One of the biggest differences between the mini and its rivals is its price tag. Its base price is US$329, compared with $199 for basic units of the Fire and Nexus 7.
"It is arguably the best 7-inch product in market," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at theEnderle Group.
"I think it could command as much as a 25 percent premium over other tablets like the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7. The problem is, it is priced 60 percent higher," he told MacNewsWorld.
"I can't justify this premium," he added. "I think this will be a very difficult product to move particularly in a market where cash remains very tight and at a time when folks are buying gifts for others," he added.

Premium Justified

Consumers will be the ultimate judge as to whether Apple is charging too much for the product, maintained Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps.
"In my view, Apple would be leaving money on the table if it met the competitors' price points because consumers have shown that they're willing to pay more for Apple products and the hardware is a higher quality than its competitors'," she told MacNewsWorld.
Apple has shown that the way its products are designed and built attracts customers to it, asserted Ben Bajarin, principal at Creative Strategies. "There is something to the build quality of a product that will be valued by big chunks of the market," he told MacNewsWorld.
In addition, the hundreds of thousands of apps made for the iPad make it a premium product, he argued. "Consumers will be asking themselves, 'Do I want to spend this much less on a device that really isn't the best experience in terms of software volume or am I willing to spend up and get what is arguably the best software experience on a tablet?'" he observed.
Nevertheless, there are those who feel that Apple missed a chance to drive a stake to the heart of its competition when it priced the iPad mini at $329. "For people who haven't bought into Apple, they've left plenty of opportunities for Amazon and the other guys," IDC analyst Bob O'Donnell told MacNewsWorld. "They could have delivered a crushing blow, but they didn't."

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Bogus Apps Litter Android With Malware

Android is one of the most popular mobile operating systems in the world. As a result, it's also one of the most popular mobile operating systems to be targeted by malware writers.

Malware aimed at Google's Android platform increased sixfold during the quarter that ended in September, according to a report released Monday by Trend Micro.

"What had been around 30,000 malicious and potentially dangerous or high-risk Android apps in June increased to almost 175,000 between July and September," Trend Micro reported in its third-quarter Security Roundup.

By far, the most prevalent way to deliver malware to Android handsets is through fake versions of legitimate apps. "What's happening is the bad guys are downloading good applications, like Angry Birds, and republishing them under similar names with trojans and malware in them," Trend Micro CTO Raimund Genes told TechNewsWorld.

Adware Rising

Researchers also found an increase in aggressive Android adware that pushes the boundaries of advertising.
"Most mobile adware are simply a business  model used to pay for an app offered for free or at low costs to users. But we also identified several adware that pose serious privacy-related threats," according to the report
"Apps that access your call history without informing you via an end-user license agreement (EULA) or their user interface (UI) constitute malicious behavior from a security perspective," the report adds.
The report also identifies the top spam-sending countries in the world. Saudi Arabia (21 percent) is at the top of the list, followed by India (18 percent), Turkey and the United States (7 percent), Peru (4 percent) and Brazil (3 percent).
In the future, Africa will become a leading source of spam, Genes predicted. "In certain parts of Africa, you now have reliable bandwidth and high throughput without any laws against spam," he explained.

Door Opened for Breach Lawsuits

Victims of data breaches may find it easier to pursue lawsuits against companies holding their data under a recent decision handed down by a federal court of appeals in Florida.
In the case, Resnick v. AvMed, the court made it harder to summarily dismiss lawsuits seeking damages for consumers victimized by data breaches by lowering the bar for showing a causal link between a data breach and identity theft.
"That's very important because if a data breach class-action lawsuit survives the dismissal stage, it generally means the defendant has to defend the case through at least the class certification stage," Bradley Arant Boult Cummings attorney Michael Pennington told TechNewsWorld.
That increases the pressure on a defendant to settle the case, he maintained. "A class certification hearing in federal court is a very risky proposition for a defendant," he said. "The publicity that attends these types of class actions is not very desirable."
In the Resnick case, two laptops containing confidential information were stolen from AvMed. Fourteen months later, two victims of the theft discovered their identities had been stolen. In the past, courts wouldn't have considered the connection between theft of the laptops and the theft of the identities strong enough to warrant a lawsuit, according to Pennington.
"Simply because AvMed had a data breach really proves nothing about whether the identity thieves got the data they used from AvMed," he argued. "That type of information is available from any number of sources."
However, in its decision, the court found that Resnick had "pled sufficient facts to allow for a plausible inference that AvMed's failures in securing their data resulted in their identities being stolen."
"They have shown a sufficient nexus between the data breach and the identity theft beyond allegations of time and sequence," it added.

Survey Roundup

Some 84 percent of Americans say they obey the rules for creating strong passwords, according to a survey released last week by Eset.
The study also showed that a greater percentage (89 percent) of adults over 55 years old said they used a combination of numbers, letters and symbols when they created their passwords than younger adults (77 percent), those in the 18- to 34-year-old group.
The fact that young adults aren't as security conscious as their older peers is important, according to Eset Security Evangelist Stephen Cobb. "It's significant because these are people in the workforce using computers at work at home exposing themselves unnecessarily to risk," he told TechNewsWorld.
He maintained that one reason workers create poor passwords is they lack security training. A recent Eset survey showed that only 10 percent of the respondents had received such training. "If you've got a workforce where only one out of 10 people is getting any up-to-date security training, then that should raise a red flag," he said.
In other surveys news, eleven, a German e-mail security firm, found that in September alone e-mails containing malware increased 119 percent. It also reported that email containing links to drive-by malware websites increased by a factor of 80 in September and that 9.5 percent of all spam contains such links. Overall, spam volumes dropped in the September quarter, 72 percent to 82.9 percent.
A survey of British consumers released last week by security firm Sophos revealed that 42 percent of devices lost or left in non-secure places had no active security measures on them to protect them. It also found that 20 percent of lost devices contained work mail that could potentially expose confidential corporate information.

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Google's New Chromebook Caters to Cloud Crowd

                                
Google's newest Chromebook is less hefty, both in weight and in price, which may induce people who are on the fence to embrace the joy of cloud computing. The WiFi version can be had for $250, and a 3G model is on the way for $80 more. It comes with up to 100 MB of data per month, courtesy of Verizon.

Google unveiled a new Samsung Chromebook on Thursday, available for pre-order at US$249. The new model is more streamlined and far cheaper than its predecessors.

Samsung Chromebook

It costs $200 less than the Samsung Chrome 550, which was released earlier this year, and $100 less than the Series 5 model, which debuted last year.

The sleek new form factor is compelling, said Craig Stice, senior principal analyst for compute platforms at IHS iSuppli.

"To have a successful product in mobile, it has to be very thin, very light," he told TechNewsWorld. "That is enough to draw attention from other products that are out there."

Cloud Computer

This new machine does appear to be aimed at those wanting a sleek profile as it is just 0.8-inches thick, and weighs in at just 2.5 pounds. It features an 11.6-inch screen that supports a 1366x768 display. While not the highest-resolution screen out there, it reportedly does the job. It includes a webcam and microphone, enabling online video chatting.
It's light on connections with just one USB 3.0 port and one USB 2.0 port, plus an HDMI output and SIM card slot. However, it is primarily a cloud computing device, with Internet access via WiFi. A 3G model is available for preorder from Amazon for $330.
The Chromebook provides 16 GB of local SSD storage, as well as100 GB of cloud-based Google Drive storage, free for two years. The machine is thus clearly designed for life in the cloud.
"It is kind of in its own niche sort of thing," said Stice. "It is really just a Web device. It is an interesting type of product, a light computing device in a nice form factor."
Google did not respond to our request for further details.

Breaking Windows 8

The timing of the announcement is certainly interesting, and it isn't clear if the intent was to steal some thunder from Microsoft in advance of next week's long-anticipated release of Windows 8.
However, "Samsung and Google aren't stealing much thunder here," said Roger Kay, principal analyst of Endpoint Technologies Associates. "The purely Web device is still a thing of the future, and it hasn't made much headway in the marketplace so far. Its day will come when there's something approaching full connectivity."
The new device's reduced price could make that future closer.
"The Chromebooks have tended to lag far behind tablets in consumer interest and uptake [but] that may have been due, at least in part, to the $500-plus pricing of the original Chromebooks," said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.
"The lack of touch-enablement is another likely factor. The new Chromebook's $249 entry price -- plus two years/100GB of Google Drive storage -- should shatter the first barrier," he pointed out.
"More importantly, along with the recent addition of the Nexus 7, Google is the only vendor that has two distinct devices capable of leveraging its notable array of Web-centric applications and services," King told TechNewsWorld. "With the Surface, Microsoft seems to be aiming at delivering a best of both worlds -- touch- and keyboard-enabled -- solution that is clearly aimed at Apple's iPad."
The announcement's timing may mean nothing more than the onset of the annual shopping frenzy.
"We're entering the holiday season," said Stice. "So there are a host of platforms and products that are going to be launched. The fact that this was announced in advance of Windows may have been strategic on Google's part, but there are so many weeks in the fall."

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