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Apple refreshes Macs and iOS, unveils iTunes Radio

Monday, June 10th, 2013

By Doug Gross and Heather Kelly

CNNnews

Calling it “the biggest change to iOS since the introduction of the iPhone,” Apple CEO Tim Cook on Monday unveiled an operating system for iPhones and iPads that will radically overhaul how users’ touchscreens look.

The new system, iOS 7, was part of a two-hour presentation that included refreshed MacBook Airs, the announcement of an iTunes Radio streaming-music service and a sneak peek at a new Mac Pro that will be the most powerful computer Apple has ever made.

The keynote marked Apple’s first major product event in nine months. But it was short on blockbuster launches or surprises — no TV, no smartwatch and no upgrades to marquee products like the iPhone and iPad.

Instead, developers assembled for the weeklong skull session got the first look at a major reworking of the mobile operating system that is home to 900,000 apps that have, altogether, made independent developers $10 billion, according to Apple.

The mobile design, overseen for the first time by new iOS boss Jony Ive, includes new typography, redesigned icons and a new color palette.

“I think there is a profound and enduring beauty in simplicity, in clarity, in efficiency,” Ive said in a video introducting iOS 7. “True simplicity is derived from so much more than just the absence of clutter and ornamentation. It’s about bringing order to complexity.”

Immediately noticeable: The pool-table green background on Game Center was gone.

“We just completely ran out of green felt,” joked Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president for software engineering.

In fact, virtually every recognizable app shown in a brief presentation looked considerably different from its iOS 6 counterpart.

Animations float by in the background of the Weather app, while Calendar is now minimalist in black and white.

But it’s not just a redesign. Federighi demoed new features like Control Center, where users will be able to swipe up for music, flashlight and other tools.

Airdrop, Apple’s file-sharing software, comes to mobile with iOS 7, and the Photos app has been upgraded with such features as Instagram-like photo filters and photo albums that can be created by year or location.

Siri, Apple’s voice-activated “digital assistant,” is becoming more diverse. Users will be able to choose a male voice — Siri has been solely a “she” so far — and users can ask it to perform basic tasks like playing a voicemail or turning down the brightness on an iPhone or iPad’s screen.

Coming this fall is iTunes Radio, a free streaming service that sounds a lot like Pandora.

iTunes Radio will include over 200 programmed channels, plus others inspired by music the user already listens to. The service will be ad-supported and will encourage users to buy songs they like from iTunes.

iOS 7 is available to developers in beta on the iPhone today, but the rest of us will have to wait until the fall. It will work only on iPhone 4 or later, iPad 2 and later, the mini and the iPod touch.

Also Monday, Apple introduced revamped MacBook Airs with “all-day battery life” and offered a peek at the most powerful computer the company has ever made.

Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller provided a peek at the new Mac Pro, a desktop that is Apple’s fastest computer. In a teaser video, the new Pro looked like a shiny cylinder and, according to Schiller, will double the performance of the current model, launched three years ago.

“Can’t innovate any more, my ass,” Schiller told the audience in a jab at analysts who have said Apple is being surpassed by companies like Samsung and Google in the rollout of bold new products.

The new Pro will be released this year and will be designed and assembled in the United States, Schiller said

The 11-inch version of the MacBook Air will go from five hours to nine hours of battery life, Schiller said, while the 13-inch version will go from seven hours up to 12. Schiller said the new models will have faster Wi-Fi connections and faster graphic loads.

They began shipping Monday, with the 11-inch Air beginning at $999 and the 13-inch starting at $1,099 (that’s a $100 break on the 13-inch).

In a departure, Apple’s next Mac operating system will not be named after a cat. Instead, the 10th iteration of OS X will be called Mavericks, named for a popular surfing spot in northern California. (Previous version names have included Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard, Tiger, Lion and Cheetah.)

Among the system’s new features will be Maps, previously a mobile-only product, and iBooks, which will let users read books they buy from the App Store on multiple devices.

Other features demoed by Federighi included color-coded tags, a multidisplay setup for more than one screen and integration with Apple TV. He said internal tweaks have been made to make the system faster and to conserve battery life.

The new system will be available in the fall.

In opening the keynote, Cook noted that the company’s online App Store has served up 50 billion downloads in its five years of existence. He said there are 900,000 apps in the store, 375,000 of which were designed for the iPad.

“Just a few hundred from those other guys,” he said, in an apparent swipe at rival tablets that run Google’s Android system and others.

He also said the App Store has 575 million accounts, “more accounts with credit cards than any store on the Internet that we’re aware of.”

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A gun-dumb Brit’s journey into American gun culture

Thursday, June 6th, 2013

By Gavin Cleaver

Westword.com

The AR-15 is lighter than I expected.

It’s an intimidating chunk of rough-hewn black metal and rubber, but it sits softly in my hands. I bring it to my shoulder and, making sure I’m not pointing it at anyone, peer down its sights. I’m not sure what to do, so I start to copy the man next to me, a big bearded guy with his baseball cap turned backward. He’s turning the rifle around, upside down and side to side, to admire what I assume is some facet of the workmanship.

I perform a similar inspection, but I have no idea what I’m looking at. It’s definitely a gun. It appears to mean business. There’s a place where the magazine goes; I recognize that much from the movies. I can see where the bullets come out. After that I’m lost.

People swarm around Backward Hat and me as we perform this ritual inspection, thousands of people on their way from one gun to another, families on day trips, herds of young men in combat shorts that bulge under the weight of concealed carries and gun-company promo materials.

“It’s not so bad, is it? How does it feel?” Fred, my gun Sherpa, has a glint in his eye. He thought we should get the big one out the way, so we’re standing at the Bushmaster display, in the middle of the NRA Annual Conference in Houston.

“The one that the liberals hate,” Fred says, barely concealing his contempt. He’s draped in a freshly pressed suit, face clean-shaven and hair freshly cut. He might work for something called AmmoLand.com, as his press pass announces, but Fred wouldn’t look out of place slickly anchoring a nightly newscast. “They’ve got a real hard-on for this gun. It’s just a gun.”

“I kind of like how it feels in my hand,” I tell him, lying. The gun’s entirely deactivated. It can’t even be switched to “fire” from the safe position. A thin yellow cable prevents anyone from holding the trigger down, and there’s a gaping hole where the magazine should be. But despite all these clearly necessary precautions for displaying a semiautomatic rifle in a place containing tens of thousands of people, my palms are slick with anxiety. I need to leave. Now.

“Put it up to your shoulder when you look down the sights,” Fred says, grinning. “Take your finger off the trigger. That just shows people you’ve never held a gun before.”

The far end of the rifle does fit snugly on my shoulder, but I still can’t get comfortable. The model of gun that was used in the Sandy Hook killings and divided my new country is perched on my shoulder, and I can’t keep my finger off the trigger.

******

It doesn’t seem that long since I moved from Cardiff, Wales, to suburban Dallas, but it’s been two years now — two years of bemusement at tank-sized pickups, non-ironic cowboy hats and differences in language, part of my never-ending quest to clumsily discover every British word that doesn’t apply here. And, of course, there’s the difference in gun culture.

Before that AR-15, the first gun I ever held was an American friend’s handgun, which I quickly handed back, half-paralyzed by some vague but very real fear. Before that — before I moved here for my wife’s job — the closest I’d come to seeing a real gun was those arcade shooters, with their plastic cartoonish guns and their imaginary lasers.

As you may have read on your most liberal friend’s Facebook page, there are basically no guns in the United Kingdom, and basically no gun violence. In 1996, after a school shooting, the U.K. moved to ban or monitor every gun in the country. You can get hunting rifles on a five-year renewable license, but it will require references. There’s a central database of gun owners. The whole place is basically one long Glenn Beck nightmare, right down to our strangely logical name for “soccer.”

Given this backdrop, I was drawn to Houston by the chance to shed some light on Americans’ fondness for guns — more than a third of households have one, although that number is falling — and to talk British to some serious Americans. Plus, as much as guns scare me, I was fairly certain I wouldn’t get shot. “Journalist shot by NRA member” would be tough to spin, even for the guys who spin school shootings.

I arrive at the George R. Brown Convention Center on a Friday afternoon, the air and the mood outside heavy. The center is an industrial-looking monstrosity, outfitted, temporarily I assume, with thirty-foot NRA badges, as if the building itself has been deputized. The closer I get, the more slogan-blaring T-shirts invade my sight lines, some funny (“Reduce noise pollution! Use a silencer!”), some gross (see previous parentheses). Protesters dot the sidewalk. Some are pro-gun folks wielding placards depicting Obama with a crudely stenciled Hitler mustache. The others are anti-gun, largely in pastels for some reason, muttering things incomprehensible toward an uncaring convention center.

I move inside and am hit immediately by a flash of bright yellow bursting from a huddle of noise and movement, heralding something called the Wall of Guns. It’s not a wall. Several gigantic wooden cabinets are filled with everything from camouflage shotguns to revolvers to assault rifles I recognize from Goldeneye (the Nintendo 64 classic, not the film).

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Two-Minute Audio Test of Electro-Voice RE-20 Microphone

Friday, May 24th, 2013

by Michael Dean


Show host,Freedom Feens

A new microphone for the boys of Freedom Feens.

download the test here

Michael W. Dean does initial tests of his new birthday mic, the venerated holy grail of broadcasting, the Electro-Voice RE-20 Microphone (get it HERE new for $449 with free shipping). Dig the wonderful meaty-yet-flat pro-izzle sound! Creamy retro 60s charm! Whee!

Mic was used with a foam windscreen, audio was recorded through Pre-Sonus compressor/pre-amp with a Behringer XENYX X2442USB Premium 24-Input 4/2-Bus Mixer, then normalized in SoundForge.

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No lunar eclipse in your locale? You can watch the moon darken online

Thursday, April 25th, 2013

By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News

NBCnews.com

Looking for a darkening moon? Thursday’s partial lunar eclipse will be particularly subtle, and it won’t be visible at all from North America — but you can still catch the show, such as it is, on the Web.


Looking for a darkening moon? Thursday’s partial lunar eclipse will be particularly subtle, and it won’t be visible at all from North America — but you can still catch the show, such as it is, on the Web.

Lunar eclipses occur when Earth’s shadow blots out part of the full moon’s disk. When the shadow covers the whole disk, the moon takes on an eerie reddish glow. The effect is much less pronounced during a partial eclipse. And NASA’s eclipse expert, Fred Espenak, says Thursday’s eclipse will be “barely partial”: Earth’s umbral shadow will reach less than 1.5 percent across the moon at the most.

That means the partial phase will last just 27 minutes, from 3:54 to 4:21 p.m. ET. That’s the shortest duration for a partial lunar eclipse since 1958. But there’s more to the event than those 27 minutes: Before and after the partial phase, the moon passes through a semi-shaded region of space during what’s known as the eclipse’s penumbral phase. When you add that in, the darkening of the moon lasts more than four hours.

Unfortunately for North Americans who want to watch the subtle spectacle with their own eyes, it’s an inconvenient four hours — lasting from 2:03 to 6:11 p.m. ET, when the sun is in the sky and the moon isn’t. Europeans and Africans, Asians and Australians are in a much better position.

This map shows how much of the eclipse is visible from where:

map
NASA – North America is the only continent that is totally out of the picture for Thursday’s partial lunar eclipse. P1 marks the beginning of the penumbral phase, U1 is the start of the partial phase, U4 is the partial phase’s end, and P4 is the penumbral phase’s end.

Thursday’s event is the only partial lunar eclipse of 2013. Two other moon-darkenings, on May 25 and Oct. 18, only get as far as the penumbral phase. There’ll be solar eclipses in May and November of this year — but if you’re partial to lunar eclipses, this is as good as it gets until next April.

If you’re outside the eclipse zone, or if the skies are cloudy, you can turn to the Web:

– Slooh Space Camera is planning to air free live video from an array of cameras starting at 3 p.m. ET. You can watch the Slooh webcast, or you can download an iPad app and touch the broadcasting icon to watch it on a tablet. Lucie Green, a frequent BBC contributor and solar researcher based at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory, heads up Slooh’s team of commentators. “The broadcast is scheduled for one and a half hours,” Slooh’s president, Patrick Paolucci, told NBC News in an email. “We will have feeds from South Africa, Dubai, India and maybe Cyprus — although some of these may have to drop out due to weather.” Find out more from Slooh’s news release.

- Virtual Telescope Project 2.0 will begin its webcast coverage from Italy at 3:30 p.m. ET and keep the signal up until 4:50 p.m. ET. “This will not be a spectacular event, as the moon will enter only marginally the Earth’s shadow, but it will be well worth a look,” says Gianluca Masi, who manages the Virtual Telescope Project as well as the Bellatrix Astronomical Observatory in Ceccano.

- Indian television may offer other options: For Hindus, a lunar eclipse is a religious occasion known as Chandra Grahan. “Chandra Grahan in India will be most probably live telecast by news channels like NDTV, CNN-IBN, Aaj Tak, Sun News, Times Now, ABP Star News, Zee News, India TV, etc.,” K. Kandaswamy says on his Live Trend blog.

Even if you miss out on the live feeds, it’s a good bet that SpaceWeather.com and Space.com will have pictures of the eclipse afterward. If you snap a nice photo of the darkening moon, please share it with us via NBC News’ FirstPerson photo upload website.

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Shedding Light on Dark Matter

Friday, April 19th, 2013

Barb Adams,

Show host,Amerika Now

Scientists recently announced that a massive particle detector known as the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2, mounted on the International Space Station, may have detected evidence of dark matter.

Dark matter is considered to be the elusive, hidden substance that “holds” the universe together. Although dark matter has thus far been undetected by instruments, it is thought to be nearly six times as prevalent in the universe as ordinary matter, which makes up approximately four percent of our universe. In contrast to ordinary matter, which can be seen easily, dark matter does not emit or interact with light and cannot be detected by telescopes. Scientists know dark matter exists because “something” in the universe is exerting great forces on the things we can see. Dark matter’s presence is detected through its gravitational pull on normal matter.

According to Space.com, “Physicists have suggested that dark matter is made of WIMPs, or weakly interacting massive particles, which almost never interact with normal matter particles. WIMPs are thought to be their own antimatter partner particles, so when two WIMPs meet, they would annihilate each other, as matter and antimatter partners destroy each other on contact.”

The discovery recorded by the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer-2 (AMS-2) consisted of about 400,000 positrons, which are the antimatter partner particles of electrons. Based on physicists’ speculation of what happens when there is a collision between WIMPs, “the energies of these positrons suggest they might have been created when particles of dark matter collided and destroyed each other” according to Space.com.

So are these positrons evidence of dark matter? According to Space.com, “the characteristics of the positrons detected by AMS-2 match predictions for the products of dark-matter collisions…Furthermore, the positrons appear to come from all directions in space, and not a single source in the sky. This finding is also what researchers expected from the products of dark matter, which is thought to permeate the universe.”

Although the positron signal detected could be evidence of dark matter, it could also have come from another source, such as pulsars in our Milky Way Galaxy. Pulsars are highly-magnetized pulsating stars which emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation.

It is hoped that as AMS-2 continues to collect more data, scientists will be able to determine the actual source of the signal. In the meantime, scientists will attempt to detect WIMPs using “underground experiments on Earth such as the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search and XENON Dark Matter Projects” according to Space.com.

The Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (CDMS) “is a series of experiments designed directly to detect particle dark matter in the form of WIMPs. Using an array of semiconductor detectors at millikelvin temperatures, CDMS has set the most sensitive limits to date on the interactions of WIMP dark matter with terrestrial materials.” The original experiment took place in a tunnel under the campus of Stanford University. The current experiment is “located deep underground in the Soudan Mine in northern Minnesota.”

The XENON Dark Matter Project is attempting to detect WIMPs “through their elastic scattering,” and is located underground at LNGS, Italy. At the time of its inception in 2007, Xenon was considered “to be one of the most important experiments in the world by Discover Magazine. So what does this discovery mean and why is dark matter important? Due to the fact that matter and antimatter annihilate one another on contact, one of the big questions in astrophysics has been “where is all the antimatter?” The discovery by AMS-2 may help scientists finally move from inference to actual evidence of the existence of dark matter.

Understanding dark matter is important because dark matter not only gives our universe its structure, it may also determine our universe’s fate. We know our universe is expanding, and that “gravity will ultimately determine the fate of the expansion.” Because gravity is dependent upon the mass of the universe, measurements regarding mass need to include both light and dark matter. Thus, it is important to know just how much dark matter there is in our universe to know our universe’s ultimate fate.

As cosmologist Dr. Michael Turner of The University of Chicago says, “Without dark matter the universe doesn’t work. Without dark matter our galaxy would fly apart.”

Once a cosmic mystery, dark matter may finally be revealed in light of the recent discovery by AMS-2.

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