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Microsoft has a problem when it comes to sticking with product names. With the exception of Windows and Office, it seems to re-brand everything it offers every few years. Sometimes it’s arbitrary (at least to customers). Sometimes it’s because of legalities.

Take FolderShare, for instance, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2005 and promptly renamed Windows Live FolderShare—because everything was called “Live” back then. In the years since, it has been Windows Live Mesh, Essentials, Live Folders, and SkyDrive.

SkyDrive is a great name, but it was taken. Sort of. Microsoft got sued in the U.K. by broadcaster BSkyB for using the word “Sky.” A court agreed that it infringed a trademark, and Microsoft had to rebrand again. In keeping with other products like OneNote and Xbox One, it went with OneDrive.

OneDrive really should be a bigger name than it is. But Microsoft isn’t as synonymous with cloud/sync as Dropbox or Google Drive The latter has the excellent integration of Docs and Sheets for online editing, but OneDrive has something arguably better: full integration with Office Online (formerly Office Web Apps; see what I mean about renaming?). Office Online houses the online versions of Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Plus, OneDrive is integrated directly with Windows 8.1—no utility needed. All it takes to access OneDrive is a Microsoft account. The service will sync files between all your Windows and Mac computers, which you can access online via mobile apps and the Web.

OneDrive is a favorite of PCMag analysts. It also made a big splash last week announcing unlimited online storage for those with Office 365 Home ($99.99/year), Personal ($69.99/year), or University ($79.99 for four years). That’s not exactly free, but it’s full access to install and use all the Microsoft Office products, so think of OneDrive as a bonus. Limitless cloud storage is coming for OneDrive for Business in 2015.

That unrestricted storage is up from 15GB, which is still available to non-Office 365 subscribers. The only other service that comes close is Google Drive’s unlimited storage for education users. Files stored with OneDrive can also now be as big as 10GB, up from 2GB. (Dropbox file size is unlimited.)

But…so what? Lots of storage, you install the software to sync your files (or just turn it on in Windows 8), so you set it and forget it, right? You shouldn’t. There’s a lot more to OneDrive than that. Check out our list of tips in the slideshow. You’ll get the scoop on exactly what you need to take full advantage of a service that could be named Windows Live SkyFolderShareMeshDrive… but thankfully, is not.

Click To View Slideshow »

Original post by Eric Griffith Nov. 4, 2014

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/329141/14-tips-to-help-you-master-microsoft-onedrive

Scientists have created the ‘black hole of sunlight’ – a new nanoparticle-based material that absorbs and converts more than 90 percent of captured sunlight to heat.

Image: foxbat/Shutterstock

Research from the US have developed a super-Sun-absorbing material that will help concentrating solar power (CSP) plants to generate more electricity and run for longer – a huge step towards making solar a viable alternative to fossil fuels.

Traditional power plants burn coal or fossil fuel to create heat in the form of steam. This steam then turns a giant turbine that generates electricity from spinning magnets and conductor wire coils. One of the most promising clean energy technologies are CSP plants, which create the steam needed to turn the turbine by using sunlight to heat molten salt.

A world-first CSP plant has already proved that the steam generated by solar power is pressurized and hot enough to match that produced by fossil fuels.

Most CSP plants generate energy by using hundreds of thousands of large, reflective mirrors that concentrate sunlight at a tower that has been painted with a light-absorbing black paint material. Importantly, this electricity generated from the power of the Sun can be fed directly into our existing grid, and, because the mirrors can be used to concentrate light even on cloudy days, it overcomes many of the issues of solar panels.

But one downside is that the material that is currently used degrades quickly and needs to be reapplied once a year, meaning that CSP plants are shut down and no power can be generated in this time.

To combat this problem, scientists have developed a material that has a longer life cycle and allows for greater conversion of captured sunlight into heat.

Researchers from the University of California in the US created the new “multiscale” material by covering it in thousands of scale-like particles ranging from 10 nanometres to 10 micrometres. The material can withstand temperatures greater than 700 degrees Celsius, allowing it to more efficiently trap and absorb sunlight.

It can also tolerate exposure to air and humidity, enabling it to survive for many years in the outdoors. More importantly, these unique properties allow the material to convert more than 90 percent of captured sunlight to heat.

“We wanted to create a material that absorbs sunlight that doesn’t let any of it escape,” said Sungho Jin, engineer and one of the researchers,  In a press release. “We want the black hole of sunlight.”

CSP plants can produce around 3.5 gigawatt-hours of power per year, which is enough to power more than 2 million homes. The technology can easily retrofit existing power plants, as both use the same process to generate electricity.

The team are continuing their research by further extending the usage life of the material, and hope that the breakthrough will finally prove that solar is not only a cheaper and more sustainable source of energy than fossil fuels, but also that it’s more efficient.

Source: ScienceAlert

http://www.pda.sciencealert.com.au/news/20140111-26439.html

So, I’m sure a lot of you have heard about our mayors being pitted against each other. Mayor Jeff Tripplet of Sanford has challenged Mayor Dominic Persampier of Oviedo for the title of “Most generous city.” Anyone who lives in this area knows these two have had a “healthy” back-and-forth for a few years. Not only are we gathering a lot of food to help our local food shelves but it’s also some good healthy competition. It’s also heartwarming to see people bring bags of food stuffed full to the drop-off points around the city. Just today there was a wonderful lady who came in with a huge reusable bag full, and I mean — you couldn’t put another thing in it or it would’ve burst from the sides– FULL, of baby food. It’s so nice to see so many generous people out there trying to help their local community.

Community is what we are all about at Palm Tree Computers. We’re involved in our local chambers. Very active members. We’re voted number one in central florida. And that doesn’t happen by just being good. You have to build a relationship with your customers. It’s one thing to make the customer happy. It’s another to make a customer your friend. That’s what we try to do. And being involved in the community like this is exactly how we do it. City-Wide food drives raise hope for those in need. That people actually care. I know it’s hard to think about all of the children in our local communities who go hungry because their family can’t even afford to feed them every day, but knowing that these communities are also here to help and raise support and gather food to give to people in need is such a nice blessing.

God has given us all so many blessings. From a roof over our head, to a reliable car. But what about all those people who don’t have what we do? God has a blessing for them too. You may see these stories on the news. The ones that make you sad, or angry with the way the world is. You may cry out to God saying, “Why don’t you do something?” Well He did. He made you.

He made us all. And our generous gifts and support can be that exact blessing to these people in need. So when you go home today, think about that. Think about a way you can help. And if you’re like a lot of us and have very little as it is, maybe you can just help by telling the next person. Your neighbors, co-workers, friends, and relatives. That weird guy on the street you see every day. Get the word out. Any amount will help.

Bring in any non-perishable food items to any one of dozens of locations in your area. You can find some places through our food drive facebook page. Or bring food to your local Palm Tree Computer Systems.

Oviedo vs Sanford City Wide Food Drive

Also “like” Palm Tree on Facebook for exclusive deals and discounts only available to our followers.

Thank you for your time, and God Bless!

-Jeff

The last company to make plasma TV screens for U.S. consumers said this week that it would stop production of plasma sets in November. The widely expected announcement by LG has put the final nail in plasma TV’s coffin.

Samsung (SSNLF) said earlier this year that it too would stop making plasma screens by November. Panasonic, the only other manufacturer of plasma TVs for U.S. consumers, shut down its plasma screen production in 2013.

As the TV makers sell off their existing plasma TV inventory, tech consultancy IHS expects that plasma TVs will no longer be available in U.S. stores after the 2014 holiday shopping season.

There are still a few Chinese companies producing plasma TVs, but they don’t sell their televisions in the United States. They too will likely stop plasma production by 2016, IHS forecasts.

Related: With new TVs, size matters

TV buyers have opted for the less expensive, higher-resolution and lower-energy LCD TV technology over plasma TVs. Once a popular high-end option for HDTV sets, plasma technology has been outpaced by LCD, which includes the super-thin LED TVs.

Plasma TVs are composed of pixels filled with gas that light up in different colors when they’re hit with an electrical current. LCD televisions use screens made of liquid crystals that are lit up from behind to create images.

Plasma TVs offered what many considered to be the best picture quality on the market in the past few years, albeit at higher prices than LCDs. They gained favor thanks to their brighter images, warmer tones and wider viewing angles.

Source:

http://money.cnn.com/2014/10/30/technology/plasma-tv/

Microsoft’s Chris Jones, corporate vice president of OneDrive & SharePoint, updated the OneDrive blog on Monday to report that customers of Office 365 will get unlimited OneDrive storage for free. He said that the free storage is rolling out now for Office 365 Home, Personal and University editions.

The full rollout will take a few months to complete, but customers are able to get in front of the long line by heading here. After that, customers will be notified by email when their free storage becomes available. Jones said this move to free storage is an important milestone for the OneDrive cloud service.

“For OneDrive for Business customers, unlimited storage will be listed on the Office 365 roadmap in the coming days, and we will begin updating the First Release customers in 2015, aligned with our promise to provide ample notification for significant service changes,” Jones wrote.

Office 365 Home costs $9.99 per month and can be installed on five PCs and Macs, as well as on five tablets. The Personal version costs $6.99 per month and can be installed on one PC or Mac and one tablet. Both include online versions of Office, support for offline and online storage, and $60 worth of Skype minutes each month.

On the business end, Office 365 Business Essentials costs $5 per user per month. There’s also Office 365 Business that costs $8.25 per month per user and Office 365 Business Premium for $12.50 per month per user. All three have a user maximum of 300 individuals, and they require an annual commitment.

Microsoft changed the name of its cloud storage service back at the end of January from SkyDrive to OneDrive. The company was ordered to change the name as part of a legal trademark infringement lawsuit with UK satellite company BSkyB (aka Sky). The British company used to have a cloud service called “Sky Store & Share,” but closed it in 2011. The company didn’t want customers to be confused by Microsoft’s own SkyDrive service.

tomshardware

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-one-drive-storage-office-365-subscription,27963.html

Chances are you’ve heard of wireless charging, and if you have, chances are that you’re disappointed by what’s on the market today. A new company, Energous, thinks so too and has set out to build wireless charging with a (decent) range.

The company says that today’s wireless charging isn’t really wireless, because the range of inductive charging systems is so limited that it is effectively a near-field technology. This means that you still have to put your phone or device down somewhere and cannot roam (relatively) freely with it around the room. Energous’ solution works very differently from competing implementations, and promises a much larger range, hopefully ending the wireless charging debacle.

Despite developing the technology and providing reference designs, Energous’ primary focus is on licensing its technology. Initially, the company will be working with smaller partners, but in the future it hopes to move up to tier-one home appliance manufacturers to bring its technology into the world. Energous has already announced that it is working with a handful of unnamed vendors (Energous teased that you almost certainly have a couple of products in your home from one of these vendors), but today the company announced a collaboration with Haier’s Wireless division. Haier is a Chinese company that specializes in making home appliances and consumer electronics.

Energous’ wireless charging system is called “WattUp” and consists of a transmitter and receivers. The transmitter will be about the size of a standard wireless router and will have a charging radius of up to 15 feet. Rather than using magnetic induction to charge devices, it uses radio frequencies. The frequency it operates under ranges from 5.7 through 5.8 GHz, and rather than broadcasting it in all directions, the WattUp transmitter creates small 3D RF pockets with a diameter of about four inches around the devices that it is charging.

Within the first five feet it can push up to 16 W, between five and ten feet it can push 8 W, and from ten through fifteen feet it can push 4 W. The power envelopes in each of these increments are split over the number of devices it is charging, so for example, if you have four devices within five feet of the transmitter, each device will receive 4 W of power. That’s not a lot of power, but it is enough to charge your device. The primary focus of the technology is sub-10 W devices, such as smartphones and wearables. In total, a single transmitter will be able to charge up to 24 devices at any given time.

On the receiving end, the device shouldn’t be all that complicated. The antenna for a receiver can be worked into the PCB of a device, and a single 1 x 1 mm chip is all that’s required. This means that it shouldn’t be too costly to implement in devices.

One point that Energous is particularly excited about with regard to collaborating with home appliance manufacturers is the way that the technology will be placed in your home. While you might think of a WattUp transmitter much like a wireless router, the company said that it doesn’t have to be. It hopes that transmitters will be built into all sorts of devices, including bezels around a TV, tops of refrigerators and more. That way, you can bring a transmitter into your home without feeling like you have yet another device cluttering up your house.

Naturally, when we were speaking to the company, we had to ask about health and safety. The representative who spoke to us said that the frequency it uses is very reflective, meaning that it doesn’t actually penetrate human skin all that effectively. Energous claims that when it showed the technology to a medical embedded device company, the company told Energous that it couldn’t use it – because it doesn’t penetrate human skin, Energous’ technology cannot charge devices inside your body, such as pacemakers. Energous also indicated that it does not have any worries about passing SAR testing procedures and that it is working on passing the FCC’s Part 15 testing. The tech also shouldn’t interfere with WiFi, Bluetooth or other wireless technologies.

Initially, though, it’s more realistic to start seeing so-called “wearable transmitters” show up in people’s homes because of a lower power envelope, as well as the fact that smartwatch charging is something that has a lot of room for improvement.

Energous hopes to deliver its first market-ready designs to its partners in Q2 2015, and you can expect the first products to arrive between Q4 2015 and early 2016, depending on how quickly the partners adopt the technology. Whether the actual products will live up to the promises remains to be seen, but Energous is certainly very confident.

Source: toms hardware

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/energous-wattup-wireless-charging-haier,27944.html

Researchers have created a graphene-like material that generates electricity every time its stretched, and could power the wearable technology of the

Scientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Columbia Engineering in the US have shown they can generate electricity from a layer of material that’s just one atom thick. The generator is made from molybdenum disulphide (MoS2), which is a clear, flexible and extremely light material that opens up huge possibilities for the future of electricity generation.

The new electrical generator is an example of piezoelectricity, or electricity that’s generated from pressure. Piezoelectric materials have huge potential to be used to create materials that can charge devices, such as footwear that powers an iPod. But until now, scientists have struggled to make these materials thin and flexible enough to be practical.

However, it’s been predicted that a substance capable of forming single-atom-thick molecules, or two-dimensional layers, would be highly piezoelectric.

Now the scientists have proved that this is the case for the first time ever. Their results have been published in the nature

To test whether MoS2 would be piezoelectric on the atomic scale, the team flaked off extremely thin layers of MoS2 onto a flexible substrate with electrical contact.

Because of the way these flakes were created, each had a slightly different number of layers – for example, while some were just one-atom-thick, others were eight-atoms-thick.

The scientists tested the piezoelectric response of these flakes by stretching the material, and measuring the flow of electrons into an external circuit.

Interestingly, they discovered that when the material had an odd number of layers, it generated electricity when stretched. But when it had an even number of layers, there was no current generated.

A single one-atom-thick layer of the material was able to generate 15 millivolts of electricity when stretched.

They also found that as the number of layers increased, the amount of current generated decreased, until eventually the material got too thick and stopped producing any electricity at all.

Computational studies suggest that this is because the atomic layers all have random orientations, and they eventually cancel each other out.

The research team also arranged these one-atom-thick layers of MoS2 into arrays, and found that together they were capable of generating a large amount of electricity.

This suggests that they’re a promising candidate for powering nano electronics, and could be used to create wearable technologies.

“This material – just a single layer of atoms – could be made as a wearable device, perhaps integrated into clothing, to convert energy from your body movement to electricity and power wearable sensors or medical devices, or perhaps supply enough energy to charge your cell phone in your pocket,” said James Hone, professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia engineering and co-leader of the research, in a press release

Source: Science alert

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20142010-26364.html

With the new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and the release of Apple’s new iOS 8, I’m sure people are enjoying all the new features and bells and whistles this update has provided.  Well, perhaps there are more things you’d like to learn about your new iOS 8.  In this article, PC Magazine’s, Eric Griffith goes in depth on 32 features and tips for the new iOS 8 (with pictures! I love pictures).

-Jeff

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/327859/32-ios-8-tips-every-apple-fan-should-know

Apple iOS 8 has not been the smoothest of rollouts. Though it was on 46 percent of iOS devices within five days of its release, reports of slow Wi-Fi and battery drains soon cropped up. The iOS 8.0.1 update tried to fix some of those issues, but ended up borking cellular connections and Touch ID on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. Oops. Here’s hoping the new 8.0.2 squashes all the bugs.

Once fixed, you’ll find that iOS 8 is pretty amazing. It has updates and fixes that make iPhones in particular about the best they can be. As PCMag’s 4.5 star Editors’ Choice reviewput it: “Apple’s latest update brings desirable functionality, improved navigation, and subtle design changes to an already solid mobile operating system.”

iOS has a ton of new features and tricks under the hood, things the average user may never notice or care about. But power users of the iPhone—those of us who exploit that pocket computer as a lifeline to the office and home—will benefit highly by mastering them. Apple opened up iOS more to the makers of wearables (via HealthKit) and even to third-party app makers who now have some unprecedented (for Apple) access to the hardware. It all adds up to the best iPhones yet.

Of course, iOS is not as customizable as Android. It probably never will be. That’s by design, as Apple is trying to make “the mobile operating systems for the masses,” as PCMag put it. Even Android’s customizability has a cost, in complexity and even stability. (Apple haters can chime in now with the 8.0.1 jokes.) But once Apple gets it right, which won’t take long, iOS 8 will be what those teeming masses want. When they do, they should consult these 32 tricks to master every new iOS 8 feature.

Click To View Slideshow 

Dropbox acknowledged on Monday that an issue with its Selective Sync feature has deleted the files of some users. The company is currently sending out an email explaining what happened. As compensation, Dropbox is providing these customers with one year of Dropbox Pro for free.

“We’ve fixed the Selective Sync issue that affected a small number of users and reached out to them to help restore their files,” a spokesperson told Tom’s Hardware. “Issues like this aren’t acceptable at Dropbox, and we’ve implemented additional testing to prevent this from happening again.”

Selective Sync is a Dropbox feature that allows users to select a specific file or folder to be mirrored on the user’s local hard drive. For instance, perhaps users take photos on their smartphones, and those images are automatically uploaded to Dropbox. The user may choose not to mirror those images on a local hard drive with limited storage capacity.

According to Dropbox, the file deletion occurred when the desktop application was shut down or restarted while the user was applying Active Sync settings. The company’s email said that the team worked hard to restore those files, indicating that many may not have been rescued from the dark clutches of the trash can.

The question here is this: should consumers depend on cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive? As this example indicates, one small glitch can cause users to lose valuable files such as photos, documents and so on. Sure, cloud storage is convenient when users want to access files from different devices in different locations, but there may be other ways of doing so without having to depend on third-party cloud solutions.

For instance, Pogoplug has a networking device that will allow users to access their files from anywhere. Just hook up several hard drives, and you can access them from a mobile device’s app or a web interface on a laptop. There are also a number of routers that allow users to plug in a hard drive via a USB port and access its files from anywhere.

Of course, this view isn’t meant to discourage customers from using cloud services. However, it may be wise to backup the cloud backup using a portable HDD or SSD, toss it into a fire-proof safe, and then refresh the backup when needed.

Source: TomsHardware.com

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/dropbox-selective-sync-glitch-cloud-storage-deletion,27872.html

Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia have achieved a huge breakthrough in quantum computing – they’ve created two kinds of silicon quantum bit, or qubits, the building blocks that make up any quantum computer, that are more than 99 percent accurate.

These quantum bits are made from silicon, the same material that makes up the transistors in today’s computers and phones, but the information in these bits is processed and stored in atoms, which means they’re capable of storing exponentially more information. In fact, if scientists can reliably create a functioning quantum computer out of these quantum bits, it has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than today’s most powerful supercomputers.

“For quantum computing to become a reality we need to operate the bits with very low error rates,” said Andrew Dzurak, the director of the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW, where the devices were made, in a press release.

Now the teams from UNSW have managed to create not just one, but two quantum bits with more 99 percent accuracy, and their results have been published simultaneously in Nature Nanotechnology.

“We have demonstrated that with silicon qubit we can have the accuracy needed to build a real quantum computer,” Dzurak told ABC Science. “That’s the first time this has been done in silicon.”

The interesting thing is that the two groups, who both work in the same laboratories, used different approaches to come to the same result – one team embedded a phosphorous atom into the silicon, and the other, led by Dzurak, embedded an artificial atom.

“We’ve now come up with two parallel pathways for building a quantum computer in silicon, each of which shows this super accuracy,” said Andrea Morello from the UNSW School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, who led the phosphorous atom team, in the press release.

Morello’s team based their advances on previous research on phosphorous atom quantum bits. Prior to this, the team had only managed to achieve around 50 percent accuracy with these chips, but by purifying the silicon that the atoms were embedded in, they have now achieved an incredible 99.99 percent accuracy.

The postdoctoral researcher who was lead author on Morello’s paper explained in the press release: “The phosphorus atom contains in fact two qubits: the electron, and the nucleus. With the nucleus in particular, we have achieved accuracy close to 99.99 percent. That means only one error for every 10,000 quantum operations.”

Dzurak’s team was able to create an “artificial atom” quantum bit that’s remarkably similar to the transistors used in commercial electronics. Today’s transistors work by turning on or off a flow of electrons, resulting in binary zeros and ones. In Dzurak’s quantum bit, this transistor has just one electron trapped inside, which can be on, off or in a superposition.

“This lets us use exactly the same sort of transistor that we use in computer chips and operate it as a qubit, opening the potential to mass-produce this technology using the same sort of equipment used for chip manufacturing,” Dzurak told ABC Science.

Both the breakthroughs were achieved by embedding the atoms in a thin layer of specially purified silicon, which contains only the silicon-28 isotope. Naturally occurring silicon is magnetic and therefore disturbs the quantum bit, messing with the accuracy of its data processing, but silicon-28 is perfectly non-magnetic.

The teams were also able to set a new record for how long a silicon quantum system retains information, known as coherence time.

“Coherence time is a measure of how long you can preserve quantum information before it’s lost,” said Morello in the press release. And the longer coherence time, the easier it is for computers to perform complex calculations.

The researchers were able to store quantum information in the phosphorous nucleus for 35 seconds – something unheard of in quantum computing.

“Half a minute is an eternity in the quantum world. Preserving a ‘quantum superposition’ for such a long time, and inside what is basically a modified version of a normal transistor, is something that almost nobody believed possible until today,” said Morello.

The research teams are now working together to take the best elements from each system to make a superior quantum bit. They’re hoping it will be the model that will be used to finally create the real quantum computers the world’s been waiting for.

Source: Science Alert

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20141310-26322.html