Technologies

Mother’s Day is coming up, and online retailers are gearing up for its arrival with some tech deals. Currently, the Microsoft Store is selling the Asus Transformer Mini T102HA-C4-GR for $250. This two-in-one convertible PC has a detachable keyboard, allowing you to use it as either a Windows 10 tablet or a laptop. When we looked at this 2-in-1 in December, it delivered a pretty good experience overall, with great battery life but lower-end performance. That's in part due to the 1.44GHz Intel “Cherry Trail” Atom x5-Z8350 processor, which goes easier on power consumption but is one of Intel's slower CPUs. That may not sound exciting, but it works very well for basic tasks. If all you need to do is editing documents, web surfing, and online video, you should be just fine. This notebook comes equipped with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of eMMC onboard flash storage, 64-bit Windows 10 Home, and a 10.1-inch, 1280x800 touchscreen. For ports, you get just one USB 3.0 and a micro HDMI, ...

Business users get access to their own version of the Windows 10 beta program this week. On Friday, Microsoft unveiled the Windows Insider Program for Business, alongside its first post-Creators Update Windows 10 beta. The program will let business users sign up for beta updates with their Azure Active Directory credentials, rather than a personal Microsoft account. The new feature is designed to provide IT professionals with a path for giving Microsoft business-specific feedback on Windows 10 features. That, in turn, should help business users shape feature development. Creating a business Insider Program is Microsoft’s response to IT pros’ requests for a connection with the Windows development team. Windows 10 got off to a rocky start with some systems administrators who weren’t thrilled by Microsoft’s policy of only providing cumulative updates to the operating system rather than letting administrators pick and choose which patches to apply. In a support document, the comp...

The next computer revolution may rely not on a binary number system, but one that can store millions of pieces of information in the minuscule attributes of molecules, such as orientation, size and color. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense charged with dreaming up futuristic new technologies for the military, is developing a new "Molecular Informatics" program to do exactly that. The long-term goal? Harness chemistry's natural variation to crank through massive amounts of data processing and storage, creating minuscule molecular machines. "Chemistry offers a rich set of properties that we may be able to harness for rapid, scalable information storage and processing," Anne Fischer, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said in a statement. "Millions of molecules exist, and each molecule has a unique three-dimensional atomic structure as well as variables such as shape, si...

If you watch a lot of YouTube videos (which, let's face it, you do), and you don't have a YouTube Red account, you've almost certainly encountered a 30-second advertisement you can't skip. Fortunately, those long, unskippable advertisements will soon be a thing of the past. As The Drum reports, YouTube is doing away with 30-second unskippable ads in 2018. But the Google-owned video site has no plans to ditch its 20-second and 6-second unskippable ad formats. "We're committed to providing a better ads experience for users online," a Google spokesperson told PCMag in an email. "As part of that, we've decided to stop supporting 30-second unskippable ads as of 2018 and focus instead on formats that work well for both users and advertisers." YouTube didn't go into detail about its rationale, but the move has to do with people's shortening attention spans, according to The Drum. People are more likely to abandon a video when forced...

Intel CEO Brian Krzanich met with top investors and stockholders this week, on the same day that Intel held its Technology and Manufacturing Day (which we reported on here). ExtremeTech has received a tape-recording of that meeting and the contents will shock you: According to Krzanich, there’s an industry-wide conspiracy to slow CPU clock speeds and architectural advances to a crawl, while IBM, Intel, Qualcomm, ARM, Samsung, and a dozen other companies all rake in enormous profits. “We actually got the idea from Craig Barrett,” said Krzanich, referring to Intel’s CEO from 1998 – 2005. “Back in the late 1990s, the Pentium 4 was controversial because it dramatically increased clock speeds without delivering a corresponding performance improvement. The technical press labeled it a ‘marchitecture,’ and complained that customers weren’t actually getting the performance they thought they were entitled to.” “What we later realized,” Krzanich continued, “Was that we didn’t actually ha...

Last week, Intel announced its new Optane drives meant for server and HPC configurations. Today, the company is announcing its PC client version. The new drives will ship in 16GB and 32GB capacities. They’re mostly intended to serve as cache drives for mechanical hard disks, as opposed to being primary storage for an OS or games. Intel is making some impressive claims about Optane’s ability to accelerate performance in desktop workloads for all types of users. But it’s not clear how much Optane’s performance actually differs from an SSD cache drive. It’s been a few years since we wrote about cache drives, but you often see these configurations in midrange laptops to boost performance without costing the OEM very much costing consumers more money. An SSD cache drive is designed to cache the most commonly accessed data based on its analysis of the most common drive workloads and capabilities. Back in 2012, we did a comparison of Intel’s SRT cache program versus Nvelo’s caching...