GeForce GTX Titan two-way SLI scaling: PCIe 2 vs. PCIe 3 Back when I had Origin’s tri-Titan equipped Genesis in house, I received a few requests for benchmarks with PCIe 3 enabled. Because we tested the system with its default out of the box settings, the system was configured by default to only use PCIe 2 since NVIDIA does not officially support PCIe 3 on SNB-E based systems. As a result there was some interest in whether PCIe 3 would improve performance at all compared to PCIe 2, due to the high amount of PCIe bus traffic generated by three GTX Titan cards working together. IVB/Haswell is of course limited to 16 PCIe 3 lanes, whereas if PCIe 3 is enabled SNB-E systems have more than twice that with a combined total of 40 lanes, giving SNB-E a large bandwidth advantage. AnandTech (TechSpot's Titan review)
The Prism An extraordinary fuss about eavesdropping started in the spring of 1844, when Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian exile in London, became convinced that the British government was opening his mail. Mazzini, a revolutionary who’d been thrown in jail in Genoa, imprisoned in Savona, sentenced to death in absentia, and arrested in Paris, was plotting the unification of the kingdoms of Italy and the founding of an Italian republic. He suspected that, in London, he’d been the victim of what he called "post-office espionage": he believed that the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, had ordered his mail to be opened, at the request of the Austrian Ambassador, who, like many people, feared what Mazzini hoped -- that an insurrection in Italy would spark a series of revolutions across Europe. The New Yorker
Scrubbed On November 29, 2010, federal agents in San Francisco arrested a 33-year-old New Yorker named Samuel Phineas Upham, setting in motion the chain of news reports that are responsible for Google’s autocompleting his name in the following ways: PHINEAS UPHAM TAX, PHINEAS UPHAM ARREST and PHINEAS UPHAM INDICTMENT. The case against Upham, who goes by "Phin," was laid out by Preet Bharara, the financial-crime-fighting U.S. Attorney. The indictment alleged that Phin tried to cheat the IRS by conspiring to hide over $11 million in Zurich at the Swiss bank UBS, and helped his mother, Sybil Nancy Upham, sneak the money into the United States. New York Magazine
Secrets of a trailer guru: how this guy gets you to the movies You don’t know his name. But if you care about trailers you know his work: iconic previews for films like The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Tree of Life, and director Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest project, Only God Forgives, out July 19. Meet Mark Woollen. A video editor since high school -- he was already cutting trailers for movies like Schindler’s List in his early twenties -- Woollen now runs his own company in Santa Monica, California. It’s one of the go-to trailer boutiques for an elite group of Hollywood filmmakers that, in addition to Fincher, includes Spike Jonze, Terrence Malick, and the Coen brothers. Wired
Mark Woollen's "Captain Phillips" Trailer
Michael Dell urges shareholders to support his buyout bid Dell argued his case in a presentation filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, saying that keeping any part of the company public while it transformed itself would hurt Dell's stock price. That in turn would threaten customer perception and make it more difficult to keep employees, he said. If his buyout proposal fails to sway shareholders, he reiterated that he will remain with the company but said he "will also oppose the kind of imprudent leveraged recapitalization that has been suggested by certain other parties." Reuters
Globalfoundries on capacity expansion spree Globalfoundries has undertaken major expansion projects to increase production capacity at its manufacturing sites in Singapore and New York to meet growing demand for semiconductors used in mobile devices, according to Michael Noonen, executive vice president of global sales and marketing at the contract chipmaker. Monthly capacity at Globalfoundries' US site, Fab 8, has reached 60,000 12-inch wafers, said Noonen, adding that the facility focuses on the production of chips using 28nm and more advanced process technologies. Digitimes
Post-process: why the smartphone camera changed photography forever I am a professional commercial photographer. I have been for the last 25 years. Throughout most of my career, I’ve had a hard time taking personal pictures -- and for years I thought that shooting film was to blame. I’ve always found shooting film nerve-wracking. The joy of the “latent image” isn’t quite so joyous when you’re wondering if the shots are actually going to come out. And it got steadily worse: The more experienced I became, the more I realized what could go wrong. The Verge
Can Microsoft’s exFAT file system bridge the gap between OSes? One of the more painful areas of cross-platform computing is data sharing. While networking between Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux has gotten a lot easier thanks to SAMBA, disk sharing still feels like it’s in its infancy thanks to proprietary file systems and the unique legacy needs of the respective operating systems they run on. There are options for cross-platform file sharing -- plenty actually-- it’s just that each one presents its own limitations and appeals. Ars Technica
Doctor performs first Google Glass-equipped surgery We've seen Google Glass in the shower; we've seen Google Glass at Disneyland; we've even seen Google Glass pop the question. Now, it's time for a little Google Gross. Dr. Rafael Grossmann, of the Eastern Maine Medical Center, recently performed his first Google surgery with Google Glass in tow. As far as we can tell, it's also the first such Google Glass-equipped surgery in the device's history -- complete with a corresponding Google Glass Hangout... PCMag
Snowden said to plan asylum in 'democratic country' The Hong Kong government announced Sunday afternoon that it had allowed the departure from its territory of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who has acknowledged disclosing classified documents about United States government surveillance of Internet and telephone communications around the world. The government statement said that Hong Kong had informed the United States of Mr. Snowden’s departure. The NY Times
Project Loon: Google’s biggest obstacle isn't technology. It's politics The ballon-powered network known as Loon may be one of Google’s famed moon shots, but the biggest issues facing the project are grounded right here on Earth. This won't just be a major technological feat for Google. It will be a huge political undertaking. I give Google credit: it's never shied away from a challenge. But if Loon is going to be a success, it's going to have to wade deeply into the morass of global international relations. Gigaom
MIT researchers measure your pulse, detect heart abnormalities with smartphone camera Last year, a group of researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) showed us just how easy it is to “see” a human heartbeat in ordinary video footage. With a little filtering, a little averaging, and a touch of turn-of-the-century (1900) mathematical analysis, the telltale color changes in the skin associated with the peak pressure pulse of the heart can be seen by anyone. ExtremeTech
Google confirms antitrust review of Waze deal Google on Saturday confirmed that it has been contacted by lawyers from the Federal Trade Commission over the company’s $1.1 billion acquisition of the mobile navigation company Waze, which closed in mid-June. A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on details of the antitrust review by the FTC. Representatives of the agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The Wall Street Journal
