Intel CEO talks Apple, water-cooled PCs, carbon nanotubes

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich used to build his own PCs. He said he built one of the first water-cooled PCs, which he overclocked to beyond 4GHz.

(Credit: Intel)

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich responded to questions about Apple, building his own PCs, and future tech at Intel in a Reddit AMA on Wednesday.

On Apple: "We've always had a very close relationship with Apple, and it continues to grow closer. Sure [it's] grown close over the years especially since...they started to use our technology in their systems."

Along these lines -- though Krzanich didn't address it -- market researcher IC Insights posted a research note earlier in the month suggesting that Intel should cut a deal with Apple for its idle Fab 42 plant in Chandler, Ariz.

On building his own PC: "I used to build my own PCs and actually had one of the first water-cooled overclocked [PCs] around. I ran it at over 4GHz, and this was back in 2001, but alas I do not have the time for that fun anymore."

On new devices: Currently I am using...a wristwatch that tracks your biometrics like heart rate, pace steps. It's interesting. I change regularly so I can understand the experience and what would make me want the device to be a part of my life."

On tablets: "We sold ~12 million tablets last year and our target is 40 million plus this year."

Note that Moore's Law states that the number of transistors doubles approximately every two years.On the end of Moore's Law: "In my 30 years I think I have seen the forecasted end of Moore's Law at least 5 or 6 times, so I tend to be a skeptic when people say it will end. At any one point we can typically see about 10 years out with pretty good clarity in the 3 to 5 years and much less clarity 5 to 10 years. But so far in that 10-year horizon we don't see anything that says it will end in that time frame."

On missing mobile: "We wanted the world of computing to stop at PCs, and the world, as it never does, didn't stop innovating. The new CEO of Microsoft, Satya [Nadella], said it well the other day. Our industry does not respect tradition, it respects innovation. I think he was 100 percent right and it's why we missed the mobile move."

On where the personal device is headed: "There is an overall trend in computing that has been going on for 30+ years that computing is becoming smaller, lighter, more portable, and more and more connected. Think about it. It went from mainframes to desktops to laptops to tablets and phones. It won't stop there. Everyone who thinks it will stop is wrong. It just keeps going down that curve driven by Moore's Law."

On the future of chips: Graphene, "carbon nanotubes [and] other 3-5 materials will become very important to semiconductors over the next few years. they will allow us to lower leakage and power, while reducing geometries."

Meg Whitman: Traditional PCs drive growth, not just tablets

HP Spectre 13 with touch display: HP CEO Meg Whitman said commercial notebook sales grew double digits year-over-year.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

Hewlett-Packard executives had a lot of positive things to say about PCs in the company's earnings conference call on Thursday. And CEO Meg Whitman said she's seeing renewed interest in traditional PCs over tablets in business.

"There is some momentum in a long overdue PC refresh. What I think commercial customers are understanding from their employees, while they may want a tablet, they actually also need more traditional compute devices to do their real work," Whitman said during the company's earnings conference call for the first quarter of 2014. In the quarter, HP delivered better than expected results.

Whitman isn't completely discounting tablets by any means. For example, she cited the new Slate 7 VoiceTab and Slate 6 "phablet" as promising new products in India.

Another factor driving the growth of traditional PCs in business is the transition from Windows XP. She said that there is a "bit of a tailwind on the migration from XP."

"Overall, the PC market contraction is slowing and we see signs of stabilization," according to Whitman.

Whitman added that the "commercial segment," aka business PCs, was particularly strong, with revenue grew 4 percent over the prior year.

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Revenue in personal systems was $8.5 billion, up 3.6 percent year over year. And commercial notebooks "grew double digits" over the prior year period, said Catherine Lesjak, HP's chief financial officer.

Total unit shipments grew 6 percent year over year, with growth in both consumer and commercial segments, Lesjak said

BigRep 3D printer can print whole pieces of furniture

(Credit: BigRep)

The problem with many 3D printers designed for consumer use is that the print bed is usually quite small. This is fine for small objects, such as, say, utensils, ornaments, toys, and parts, but anything a little bigger is going to require multiple prints and assembly.

But we're about to see the entry of a new kind of printer. The open-source BigRep One allows for a build volume of 1,147 by 1,000 by 1,188 millimeters (45x39x47 inches) -- large enough to print full-scale objects.

(Credit: BigRep)

The printer itself, constructed with an aluminum frame, has a print resolution of 100 microns (0.1 millimeters). It can print in a variety of materials, including the usual plastics and nylons, as well as Laywood, a mix of wood fibers and polymers for a wood finish, and Laybrick, a sandstone-like filament, using the fused-deposition modeling (FDM) technique.

The printer can also have CNC components built in for milling, if you so require.

The BigRep One was developed by Berlin-based artist Lukas Oehmigen and Marcel Tasler, and has just seen its debut at the 3D PrintShow in New York. It will start shipping to customers in March/April with a suggested price of $39,000, but you can contact BigRep through its Web siteto get a quote.

Snakes invade casino? Ask the social-media lie detector

(Credit: CNET)

Remember when a shark swam through the streets of New Jersey during Hurricane Sandy? Actually, it didn't. But wouldn't it have been handy to have been able to check the veracity of those Garden State shark reports without going through the office of Gov. Chris Christie?

An international group of researchers funded by the EU is working on a lie detector for social media that could make it easier to separate online truth from lies and the lying liars who tell them (apologies to Al Franken).

Named Pheme after a Greek mythological figure who "pried into the affairs of mortals and gods, then repeated what she learned, starting off at first with just a dull whisper, but repeating it louder each time, until everyone knew," the system will collate a variety of data to assess in real time how likely it really is that a baby mermaid was just born in the Philippines or snakes invaded a Pennsylvania casino.

Pheme will, for example, gauge the authority of sources such as news outlets, individual journalists, alleged experts, potential eyewitnesses, and automated bots. It will take into account the histories of social-media accounts to help spot those that have spread false rumors. And it will search for sources that corroborate or deny a given piece of information and plot how conversations about the topic evolve on social networks.

The Pheme results will be displayed in a visual dashboard that should at least give some sense, if not a definitive ruling, of where a rumor falls on the pure-poppycock-to-totally-true scale.The results will thus focus on the quality of the information, unlike similar analytics tools that focus more on language. Software out of Israel, for instance, scours online text for words, phrases, and even metaphors thatmight indicate depression.

"We can already handle many of the challenges involved [on the Internet], such as the sheer volume of information in social networks, the speed at which it appears and the variety of forms, from tweets, to videos, pictures and blog posts," Kalina Bontcheva, a researcher from the University of Sheffield's Department of Computer Science, said in a statement. "But it's currently not possible to automatically analyze, in real time, whether a piece of information is true or false and this is what we've now set out to achieve."

Not all rumors created equal
According to the University of Sheffield, Pheme will classify online rumors into four types: speculation -- such as whether interest rates might rise; controversy -- as over the MMR vaccine; misinformation, where something untrue is spread unwittingly; and disinformation, where falsehoods are disseminated with malicious intent.

There are definitely categories missing here, like April Fools' Day falsehoods and "Star Wars" casting rumors. But of course not all online rumors are light entertainment or the harmless sort of speculation that long precedes any iPhone or Samsung Galaxy launch. Sometimes rumors can have a real impact, as with fake announcements of people's deaths and doctored storm-related images that can seriously scare an already-jumpy city.

Pheme will cost an estimated 3.5 million British pounds (around $5.8 million) and evolve over the course of three years, being tested during that time both by the online arm of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, and the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. There, researchers plan to investigate online discourse about recreational drugs, mental-health concerns, and teenage self-harm and how those discussions translate to patients' real-life behavior.

In addition to Sheffield and King's College London, other universities participating in Pheme include Saarland in Germany, Modul University Vienna, and the UK's University of Warwick, where a professor worked with the London School of Economics and The Guardian's interactive team to manually analyze the spread of rumors on Twitter during the 2011 London riots.

Meanwhile, while you're waiting for Pheme to appear, there's always Snopes -- and common sense.

This image, which purported to show Hurricane Sandy menacing New York, is actually a composite of a picture of a tornado storm cell in Nebraska and one of the Statue of Liberty, according to Snopes.com.

Hand-stitched 'Star Wars': Tapestry of a galaxy far, far away

The beloved space tale of Jedi masters battling the Empire is retold through cross-stitch in this epic "Star Wars" tapestry by artist Aled Lewis.

(Credit: Aled Lewis)

If you watch the "Star Wars" movies enough, you can retell the epic story of Jedi, Sith Lords, droids, tauntans, wampas, Wookiees, Yoda, and the Death Star without too much effort. Now try to re-create every memorable scene stitch by stitch on a 30-foot tapestry.

Artist Aled Lewis did just that for six months. Creating each scene first on his laptop, he then transferred it in pixel format onto cloth and cross-stitched every detail. The art titled "The Coruscant Tapestry" is hand-stitched cotton thread on 30 feet of continuous length, 7-stitch-per-inch Klostern fabric. Stiffened with a thin batting and hemmed with a custom-made printed pixel star fabric on rear.

The tapestry depicting memorable moments from the "Star Wars" movies -- from "A New Hope" all the way to "Revenge of the Sith" -- is in a similar style to that of The Bayeux Tapestry, which also tells the tale of warriors and heroes, most notably the events that led to the Norman conquest of England.

The awe-inspiring artwork is for sale at $20,000 and is on display at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles.

Artist Aled Lewis even translated quotes from each movie into the fictional "Star Wars" language of Aurebesh on the border of the tapestry.

(Credit: Aled Lewis)

Shocking: Justin Bieber Reportedly Had Cookie Jars Full Of Weed!!!

Justin Bieber may have to enrol into rehab as his mansion reportedly was stuffed with drugs and paraphernalia when cops rolled up to serve a search warrant last week.

Two large cookie jars loaded with marijuana along with four or five empty codeine bottles were found at his residence. The police raided the pop star’s home in connection to an egg-throwing incident.

“It’s pretty widely known the kid smokes weed.  We’re not doing some big sting on Justin Bieber. We didn’t go opening containers and pulling out drawers. This was about the egging.” Lt. David Thompson, the lead detective on the case, informed post the raid.

Justin, was under investigation for allegedly hurling raw eggs at his next-door neighbor Jeffrey Schwartz‘s house two weeks ago. Jeffrey had quickly called the police and had claimed that Bieber threw at least twenty eggs at his residence, causing damage to his plaster and stained wood exterior.

Sources also claim Justin has a separate room in his mansion dedicated to marijuana smoking. When deputies arrived, many of Justin’s friends fled to that location and flushed the drugs down the toilet.

Those close to Justin claim that he has a serious drug problem and would need to be checked into rehab. One cannot verify this report, but this update certainly isn’t doing much to make us believe otherwise.

However Justin’s friend and occasional housemate, Xavier Smith (Lil Z) was arrested for drug possession because cops found a white powder he claimed to be his.

Cops originally thought they found Smith in possession of cocaine but later changed their tune, saying they most likely found Ecstasy and Xanax.

As Smith waited for someone to shell out his $20,000 bail, he picked up an additional felony vandalism charge for damaging a phone on the wall in his holding area. According to the authorities his bail was then jacked up another $50,000.

Smith bailed out of jail and claimed it was all over

RIP Claudio Abbado: End Of A Musical Era

Former Musical Director of La Scala Opera House in Milan for nearly twenty years, Italian Conductor Claudio Abbado, passed away at his residence in Bologna after a long illness at the age of eighty.  La Scala announced the conductor’s death on January 20, 2103.

Claudio, who was appointed senator for life in Italy last year, had cancelled several recent performances and appearances due to ill health.

“The death of Claudio Abbado leaves a huge hole in the world of classical music.  He was one of the most important conductors of his generation.” said Radio 3 controller Roger Wright.

Mark Wilkinson, President of Record label Deutsche Grammophon, said: “The world has lost one of the most inspiring musicians of our era, a man who put himself entirely at the service of the music he conducted and, in doing so, made listeners feel that they were hearing it properly for the very first time.”

Claudio made his first recording for Deutsche Grammophon in 1967, and his last in 2013.

Claudio Abbado was born into a musical family in Milan in 1933 and trained at the Milan Conservatoire before studying under Hans Swarowsky in Vienna.

His career began at La Scala in 1960 and he went on to become musical director of the famous opera house until 1986, before his work with Vienna’s state opera and the Berlin Philharmonic.

In the year 1997, Claudio won a Grammy Award in the best instrumental soloist performance (with orchestra) category and in 2012, he was voted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame and awarded the conductor prize at the Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) Music Awards.

He also conducted the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) between 1979 and 1988. He was also the musical director of Vienna’s Staatsoper from 1986 to 1991 and a guest conductor at theChicago Symphony Orchestra.

In a career that spanned more than four decades, Abbado won admiration from musicians and audiences all over the world for his masterful interpretations and diverse repertoire