Google’s voice assistant is named after Majel Barrett-Rodenberry, the voice of the Federation Computer from Star Trek, and is an expansion of Voice Actions.

Once Siri came out, it didn’t take long for Android developers to come up with ‘Iris,’ an Android version of the voice-activated personal assistant. However, it seems Google might have an official answer to Siri, and it may be available before the end of the year.

According to Android and Me, Google is currently working on a more advanced version of Google Voice Actions, called Majel. Majel will apparently eliminate the restriction that requires current Voice Actions users to use a more instructional tone when issuing commands. Instead of telling the personal assistant to ‘send text to…’ or ‘navigate to…,’ Android and Me reports that Majel will understand queries and actions presented in a more natural language.

Unfortunately, the site does not detail a source for this information. However, it does point to an interview that Google’s Matias Duarte did with SlashGear back in October, which provides additional evidence. Speaking to SlashGear, Duarte mentioned a Star Trek-type personal assistant that differs from Siri in that it’s not an artificial personality.

“Our approach is different,” he said, referring to Apple’s endeavor to recreate an artificial personality with Siri. “The metaphor I like to take is – if it’s Star Wars, you have these robot personalities like C-3PO who runs around and he tries to do stuff for you, messes up and makes jokes, he’s kind of a comic relief guy,” he explained.

“Our approach is more like Star Trek, right, starship Enterprise; every piece of computing surface, everything is voice-aware. It’s not that there’s a personality, it doesn’t have a name, it’s just “Computer.” And you can talk to it and you can touch it, you can interact with it at the same time as you talk with it. It’s just another way to interface with the computer.”

Android and Me says that Majel will be limited to search actions when it is first released. Though an end-of-year launch is looking a tad unlikely, what with there only being 17 days left in 2011, it’s possible we could see this early next year. Stay tuned for updates …

SOURCE via Android and Me

There’s speculation that Microsoft may be merging the code of Windows Phone 8 “Apollo” and Windows 8 next year. This rumor falls into the “One Modular OS To Rule Them All” theory that we’ve heard for some time, an idea that Microsoft’s Windows 8 would ultimately encompass the PC, the tablet, the Xbox and the smartphone.

Recent speculation behind the code merge partially stems from an announcement made by CEO Steve Ballmer on Monday that Windows Phone division president Andy Lees would take the reign of a “time-critical opportunity focused on driving maximum impact in 2012″ with Windows Phone and Windows 8.

“We have tremendous potential with Windows Phone and Windows 8, and this move sets us up to really deliver against that potential,” Ballmer said without adding any further details.

Terry Myerson, who worked with Lees on Windows Phone 7 and 7.5, will take over as head of Windows Phone, Ballmer said. Lees himself signed on with Microsoft back in 1990, and before that served as corporate vice-president of Microsoft’s server and tools marketing and solutions group. He moved over to mobiles as part of the entertainment and devices group restructuring in 2010.

Hal Berenson, a former Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, believes the company is merely switching out the Windows Embedded Compact code of Windows Phone with parts of “MinWin,” which is described as the “detangled core Windows kernel/file system/networking stack code.” Microsoft supposedly wouldn’t want to actually shove Windows 8 into a phone nor does it want to throw out all of the “Windows Phone OS” customized bits layered on top of the core, so the company is likely taking the MinWin route.

“[MinWin] is not a complete rewrite of the [Windows] kernel, but a reorganization of the APIs, so that components only call down the stack, and not up it,” explains Microsoft’s Mark Russinovich via the Windows Now blog, clarifying that it’s not an actual kernel. “It is isolated in the build tree from the rest of Windows, so it can be innovated on by itself. It is fully bootable, 25-40 MB of disk space, and contains the executive systems, memory management, networking, and optional file system drivers. It’s fully testable, and Microsoft is working on a large suite of test cases to run against it. And it *is* indeed in Windows 7.”

Previous reports indicated that Windows Phone 8 “Apollo” would arrive by mid-2012, but Microsoft later dismissed those claims. The software will likely launch alongside the general public release of Windows 8 or sometime thereafter. However it’s believed that the use of MinWin will not only help accelerate the mobile OS release, but deliver cross platform coding simplicity and a significant boost in functionality. Software engineering costs would also be reduced because the desktop and mobile teams will be working on a common Windows stack code.

SOURCE via The Register

It’s not uncommon for someone who is depressed or feeling suicidal to use sites like Facebook, Twitter or MySpace to express their emotions. This week, in an effort to help those sharing such thoughts on Facebook, the social networking giant has announced a partnership with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. The company yesterday revealed the partnership, which aims to provide suicidal people with an opportunity to have a private chat with a trained crisis representative from the Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

Available to Facebook users in the United States and Canada, the service Facebook users to report any suicidal comments they see posted by a friend to Facebook using either the Report Suicidal Content link or the other report links found throughout the site. The author of the comment in question will then receive an email from Facebook providing them with a link to begin a confidential chat session with a crisis worker and encouraging them to call the NSPL.

Speaking to CNet in an interview, Lidia Bernik, associate project director of the Lifeline, said that the The Lifeline has been working with Facebook since 2006 “to basically reach out to individuals who are flagged or reported for suicidal content.” Bernik said that a lot of users have said that they feel more comfortable talking over text or chat as opposed to on the phone and said the partnership with Facebook is “an attempt to reach people in a medium where they are most comfortable.”

Dr. Regina Benjamin wrote in a guest post on Facebook that more than 100 Americans commit suicide every day and in the past year, more than eight million Americans 18 or older had thought seriously about suicide. She encouraged people to learn the symptoms of mental illnesses so they can do their part to help.

“I ask everyone to help by learning about the symptoms of mental illnesses and substance abuse, the warning signs of suicide, how to stand with and support someone who is in crisis, and how to get someone you care about the help they need,” she said.

SOURCE via Facebook

OCZ Technology revealed its Petrol Series SSD, a new drive based on its Indilinx Everest platform, which reduces SSD deployment cost by 30 percent. The Petrol follows in the footsteps of the OCZ’s Octane, which is based on OCZ’s own Indilinx Everest platform. The drive features a 2.5-inch form factor, Asynchronous MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory, a SATA 6.0 Gbps interface, and NDurance technology. The Petrol will be available in four capacities; 64 GB, 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB. Performance varies based on model size and shows a performance difference between 1) OCZ’s Agility 3 SandForce based drives and 2) Octane’s Synchronous MLC NAND Flash Memory based drives.

• 64 GB: 185 MB/s max sequential read & 75 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 475 MB/s Write)
• 128 GB: 360 MB/s max sequential read & 135 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 500 MB/s Write and Octane – 535 MB/s Read & 170 MB/s Write)
• 256 GB: 370 MB/s max sequential read & 240 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 500 MB/s Write and Octane – 535 MB/s Read & 270 MB/s Write)
• 512 GB: 370 MB/s max sequential read & 250 MB/s max sequential write (Agility 3 – 525 MB/s Read & 410 MB/s Write and Octane – 535 MB/s Read & 400 MB/s Write)

“Until today, SSD adoption has been limited to high performance applications due to the high cost of SSDs in relation to slower rotating discs, and we are proud to once again close the gap in pricing without sacrificing durability,” said Ryan Petersen, CEO of OCZ Technology. “The new Petrol Series showcases the flexibility of the Indilinx Everest platform and NDurance Technology, allowing OCZ to deliver the benefits of SSDs to a wide new set of applications while retaining the superior real world performance and reduced latency that separate Everest-based SSDs from our competitors.”

Early pricing of the Petrol in stores have the 64 GB listed at $113, 128 GB at $187, 256 GB at $396 and 512 GB at $803. These are early listing, so the final pricing may differ once available.

SOURCE via OCZ

Distracted driving has long been pointed to as one of the major causes for America’s high traffic fatality rates; more than 3,000 traffic deaths in 2010 are attributed to the problem. Citing these stats, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended a nationwide ban on cell phone usage and texting while driving. Due to lax enforcement of existing statues and a high fatality rate, the state of Missouri was singled out in the recommendation.

In making the case for such sweeping regulations, the NTSB’s Robert Sumwalt compared distracted driving to alcohol impairment.  “This is becoming the new DUI. It’s becoming epidemic”. That’s something of an exaggeration – in 2009, the total number of alcohol related traffic fatalities was 10,839. But 3,000 people is still far more than should be dying for something as meaningless as checking on a Words With Friends game. The recommendation of a total ban is non-binding, and laws governing cell phone use vary considerably from state to state. While 30 states ban cell phone use by inexperienced drivers and another 35 ban texting, only 10 have laws strict enough to meet today’s recommendation.

If the states heed this advice, the ban would apply to everything except for emergency calls, and would apply equally to hands-free phone accessories as well as to standard phone-in-hand use. Built-in cell phone systems like a bluetooth car stereo installation would not be affected. The full recommendation is available on the official NTSB site.

SOURCE via CNN

On Tuesday Nvidia announced its plans to provide the source code for the new CUDA low level virtual machine (LLVM) based compiler. This will be available for academic researchers and software tool vendors so they can easily add GPU support for more programming languages and support CUDA applications on alternative processor architectures. The actual compiler itself resides in the latest release of the publicly available CUDA Toolkit (v4.1), and is enhanced to support Nvidia’s parallel GPUs.

“Opening up the CUDA platform is a significant step,” said Sudhakar Yalamanchili, professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and lead of the Ocelot project, which maps software written in CUDA C to different processor architectures. ”The future of computing is heterogeneous, and the CUDA programming model provides a powerful way to maximize performance on many different types of processors, including AMD GPUs and Intel x86 CPUs.”

LLVM is an open source compiler infrastructure with a modular design that makes it easy to add support for new programming languages and processor architectures. It is used for a range of programming requirements by many leading companies, including Adobe, Apple, Cray, Electronic Arts, and others.

Nvidia believes that releasing the source code to the LLVM-based CUDA compiler will enable alternate approaches to programming and thus accelerate the development of exascale computing. Researchers will have more flexibility in mapping the CUDA programming model to other architectures. It will also further the overall development of next-generation higher performance computing platforms.

Early access to the CUDA compiler source code is available for qualified academic researchers and software tools developers by registering here: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-source. To learn more about the Nvidia CUDA programming environment, visit the CUDA web site.

SOURCE via Nvidia

24-year-old Facebook user Max Schrems of Vienna, Austria recently sent a formal request to the social network and asked for a copy of every piece of personal information the site has collected on him since he created an account a year ago. According to ThreatPost, EU Directive 95/46/EC (PDF) grants each person the right to access data relating to him/her in order to verify the accuracy of that data and the lawfulness of how long it’s being used. What he eventually received was a CD packing a 1,222 page collection in a single PDF file.

To Schrems’ surprise, much of the data he discovered to be retained in Facebook’s records were previously believed to be deleted. These records included the times when Schrems logged in and out of Facebook, the times and content of every message sent and received, and an “accounting of every person and thing he’s ever liked, posted, poked, friended or recorded.” Facebook kept records of friend requests, photos, employment and relationship statuses, and former or alternative names and email addresses.

However Schrems notes that the PDF file he received from Facebook is based on himself and his 234 friends. He also said the experience with Facebook’s obvious data collection practice has inspired him to launch a legal project he calls Europe vs. Facebook. Schrems is looking to increase Facebook transparency, make opt-in data access the default (instead of opt-out) and to encourage data-minimization on the network.

“Facebook offers no sufficient way of deleting old junk data,” he writes. “Every inconsiderate comment, every invitation to an event (e.g. a demonstration) and every ‘like’ is recorded for an indefinite amount of time. But Facebook does more than that: even removed tags, friends or messages are kept in Facebook’s systems. Even if you delete your whole account, Facebook will keep some of this personal data.”

As of this writing, Facebook has not issued a response to Schrems’ claims.

SOURCE via Threat Post