Hasta La Gadget!

With many stores opening Thanksgiving evening, this year you won’t even have to digest your turkey before you put on your elbow pads and line up outside your favorite big box store. But to make body checking your fellow shoppers worthwhile, you’ll need a plan. You don’t want to spend 12 hours wearing adult diapers to avoid losing a place in line, only to find out that the camera you snatched takes terrible pictures and costs $20 less on the web. More »

A vast bridge of superheated gas, spanning 10 million light years and linking two clusters consisting of thousands of galaxies, has been identified by star-gazing scientists, tangled remnants of the universe’s infancy. The discovery was made by the European Space Agency team wielding the Planck space telescope, part of the mission to explore the most ancient light in the cosmos and better understand the origins of the universe and what it contains.

“In the early Universe, filaments of gaseous matter pervaded the cosmos in a giant web, with clusters eventually forming in the densest nodes” the ESA said in a statement about the discovery. “Much of this tenuous, filamentary gas remains undetected, but astronomers expect that it could most likely be found between interacting galaxy clusters, where the filaments are compressed and heated up, making them easier to spot.”

Evidence of a hot gas bridge was first identified by XMM-Newton, an X-ray telescope also operated by the ESA. That was confirmed by the Planck data, and crunching information from the two allowed scientists to figure out the temperature of the gases involved.

In fact, the huge strand of inter-cluster gas is believed to be approximately 80 million degrees Celsius, and made up of “the elusive filaments of the cosmic web mixed with gas originating from the clusters.” Further analysis of this and other such bridges will be required to confirm that, however.

The identification of the bridge – which spans clusters Abell 399 and Abell 401, each of which is made up of hundreds of individual galaxies – is the first to use the so-called Sunyaev–Zel’dovich (SZ) effect to reach a positive conclusion. That technique takes advantage of the fact that Cosmic Microwave Background light – the ancient light the Planck telescope is designed to track – is modified as it passes through the hot gases in a very particular way.

Planck space telescope spots 80m-degree cosmos-spanning gas bridge is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Apple is aggressively ramping up its iPhone 5 supply chain in order to make sure that customers looking for the smartphone can get their hands on it easily and quickly come the holidays, according to stock checks and supply analysis conducted by Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster (via Fortune).

The analyst and his team conducted nightly checks of supplies at 100 Apple Stores in the U.S., and found that stock levels have improved significantly during the past 10 days, with availability of AT&T and Verizon climbing fast, and Sprint also remaining consistent after having risen previously.

Apple also recently moved the availability of its iPhone 5 models via its online store to two weeks, a slight but significant improvement from the 2-3 weeks it has been promising since earlier in November. Based on current availability trends, Piper Jaffray estimates that Apple will have same-day stock of iPhone 5s in most stores within two weeks, Munster concludes in the note he issued to investors Wednesday.

The last few years have been tremendously successful for Apple in terms of holiday iPhone sales, culminating in banner years in 2010 and 2011 thanks to the new fall release schedule for iPhones, which used to go on sale beginning in June. For Apple to continue to capitalize on holiday shopper appetite for its latest smartphone, the company needed to address supply bottlenecks and reported issues with manufacturing partners in order to make sure that customers shopping for the iPhone 5 could find it in stores and online. Supply chain optimization is one of CEO Tim Cook’s specialties, and it seems like the efforts he and his company have taken so far will indeed help make sure everyone who wants to give an iPhone 5 as a gift this year should be able to.

The US government has “categorically refuted” accusations that it hacked computers used by the French presidency, after a magazine claimed a US team used malware and social engineering to access confidential data. The hack, which reportedly took place during the May elections, saw a staff member of then-president Nicolas Sarkozy fooled into clicking a fake Elysée presidential office webpage, L’Express claims. That supposedly allowed the US team to harvest that employee’s login details.

With those credentials, it’s suggested, the real Elysée site was infected with a specially created worm. That – apparently similar to the Flame malware that has made headlines in recent months, and which is believed to be the handiwork of the US and Israeli governments – was used to extract “sensitive information.”

Sarkozy is said to have escaped any hacking, solely because the former president himself did not have a PC. Instead, data was taken from other high-ranking officials, including the French secretary general and chief of staff.

A team of French investigators painstakingly traced back through the malware’s route, and concluded that it was the handiwork of the US. Official lips are sealed as to the full results of that investigation, but an anonymous security forces insider suggests that the US may simply have been wanting to ensure that France was still a solid ally during a time of political upheaval.

“You can be on good terms with a “friendly country” and will, at the same time ensure its continued support, especially in a period of political transition” the insider said.

Unsurprisingly, the US has moved quickly to deny the allegations, The Verge reports, with the local embassy issuing the following statement:

“We categorically refute allegations from unidentified sources, published in L’Express, that the United States government has participated in a cyberattack against France. France is one of our best allies. Our cooperation is remarkable in the areas of intelligence, law enforcement, and cyberdefense. It has never been as good and essential to our common fight against the threat of extremism” US Embassy in Paris

US denies hacking French government is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Three months after we spied the Archos FamilyPad on the FCC, it’s finally making its debut just in time for the holiday shopping season. As its name suggests, the 13.3-inch tablet is designed for a whole family to gather around — though we doubt it would be very comfortable if your family has more than four people. With 10x multitouch support, Archos claims families can use it to watch movies, keep organized, share pictures and play digital board games; the company even pre-installed a few of the latter to get your family started. The FamilyPad doesn’t have the best of specs, with a 1,280×800 HD display, 8GB flash memory, a microSD card slot, a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 CPU, HDMI output and a front and rear camera that are 2-megapixels each. It does run Ice Cream Sandwich and would offer “a variety of email accounts for each family member.” Those in the UK can purchase it for £274.99 ($438) when it’s available in December, while US residents might have to wait a little longer. Maybe you can give your kids some ChildPads to play on their own instead; they might appreciate it more than enforced togetherness.

Continue reading Archos’ £275 13.3-inch FamilyPad designed to encourage family time

Filed under: Tablets

Comments