New Flash Memory from Sony

Sony has announced a new flash memory card called  an XQD flash memory card. It is developed with better speed and capacity than its CompactFlash predecessor.

The new card which is supposed to come in two models, the 16GB QD-H16 card and the 32GB QD-H32 goes for $129.99 and for $229.99 respectively. The cards are scheduled to be available in February this year. 

The SD card technology is making the cards smaller and smaller and most devices these days are manufactured to use these smaller SD Card technology. On the contrary high-end SLR cameras from Sony, Canon and Nikon, still use CompactFlash memory cards because of their performance and capacity.

The new XQD format developed by Sony also trys to keep ahead of SD by borrowing the PCI(Peripheral Controller Interface) Express; (PCIe) high-speed serial communications link interface from computers. Users can transfer data off the cards without having to plug their cameras into a USB port, Sony also announced the $44.99 MRW-E80 card reader that plugs in with USB 3.0 and the $44.99 QDA-EX1 adapter that plugs into laptops with ExpressCard slot. 

These cards can read and write data at up to 125MBps. That's not necessarily faster than CompactFlash--Lexar's new 1000X CF cards read at 150MBps and write at 145MBps. But though faster CompactFlash cards helped photographers, cameras can hardly keep pace with the full card speed.

Card speed compared with the XQD memory card(credit Sony)

 XQD will be able to exceed 2 terabytes capacity eventually, according to the  CompactFlash Association, which developed the format. Second-and third-generation versions of PCIe double and quadruple transfer speeds to 250MBps and 500MBps. The initial cards use the first-generation interface, but PCIe provides for backward compatibility so that newer devices will be able to use older XQD cards.

The XQD cards don't fit into CompactFlash slots, and vice versa. The XQD cards are smaller than CompactFlash but larger than SD cards.

Facebook Accounts login Information has been stolen by a Worm

For all you facebook users/lovers or facebookers as they are sometimes called, you all should be more careful and cautious as it has been reported that a bit of malware known as Ramnit that has making its rounds on Facebook since two years ago, has made off with more than 45,000 usernames and passwords.

According to a bulletin issued by security researchers at Seculert, most of those reported to have been affected by the worm are from France and the United Kingdom. The said worm is capable of infecting Windows executables, Microsoft Office, and HTML files, according to anti-virus manufacturer, McAfee.

Securlet said in its bulletin and i quote "We suspect that the attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims' Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends, thereby magnifying the malware's spread even further". They also said that  "In addition, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access, etc.) to gain remote access to corporate networks". 

The discovery of the worm was first reported two years ago( in April 2010), it was known for stealing sensitive information such as stored FTP credentials and browser cookies. The worm later "went financial" a few months back( August 2011 to be precise) after malware developers borrowed source code from the Zeus botnet. With its new borrowed code form Zeus botnet, Ramnit was given the power to be able to "gain remote access to financial institutions, compromise online banking sessions and penetrate several corporate networks." Approximately 800,000 machines were infected between September 2011 and the end of the year, can you imagine that!!!.

Facebook has been notified by the security researcher and they(Facebook) have been provided with all the stolen credentials that were found on Ramnit's server.

Apple's ipad + Microsoft

Software giant Microsoft, is working on an app for Apple's tablet as reported by the an ipad based news outlet. The app which is an adaptation of Microsoft Office could arrive before the next version of Office for Mac comes out, which is expected to hit the market late next year.

Microsoft said in a statement

"We already deliver Office on multiple platforms and devices and are committed to expanding in the future, but have nothing further to share today."

Microsoft already presently offers a handful of apps for both the iPad and the iPhone, including Bing and Windows Live Messenger, among others. Creating the Office application for the iPad could help the device's prospects in work environments, a market where it's already making inroads at the expense of Windows PCs.

It is no news that Microsoft is busily working on Windows 8, the next version of its flagship operating system which promises many features, for tablet computers. To download a developer's version of the window 8 click here.

March last year, Apple introduced its own office software,  the iWork, as a collection of individual apps for the iPad. The suite consists of Pages, Keynote and Numbers, the same lineup as offered for the Mac OS X users. All three of those apps can open and export Microsoft Office files that match up with Microsoft's Word, PowerPoint and Excel software, with Apple providing ways to natively view those files in its own built-in e-mail application.

The cost for the Office ipad app is likely to be around $10 as reported by the Daily. The amount is the same amount Apple charges for each of its individual iWork for iPad apps.

IPv6 versus IPv4

The support for IPv6 (internet protocol version 6) has grown by almost 20 times in the past year by one measure, but most websites can only still be reached with the IPv4, the current Internet Protocol, which is already almost being exhausted of its available free addresses.

The number of sub-domains under .org, .net and .com that support Internet Protocol version 6 increased by about 1,900 percent in the year leading up to last month (October 2011), according to an automated sampling of sub-domains by Measurement Factory. The study, which was sponsored by IPv6 software specialist InfoBlox, used a script to automatically sample 1 percent of the sub-domains under the three well-known top-level domains.

The IPv4 can accommodate about 4 billion addresses only, while the IPv6 can accommodate nearly an unlimited supply of addresses. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the global governing body for the Internet, assigned the last of the unclaimed IPv4 addresses to regional registry bodies earlier this year. Some enterprises and service providers are using dual software stacks to  make a gradual transition to IPv6, but experts expect users eventually to come to the Internet without IPv4 addresses. They will need pure IPv6 communication, which cannot be currently offered by most website operator.

Last month, 25.4 percent of sub-domains under .com, .net and .org supported IPv6, up from just 1.27 percent a year earlier. All the figure means is that a DNS (Domain Name System) server can point to those sub-domains using IPv6. If a user with an IPv6-only device tries to go to a website, for example, the site's registrar can match up its URL with an IPv6 address and kick back an answer to the Web surfer, said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture at InfoBlox.

Most of the dramatic boost in the past year came when GoDaddy, one of the world's largest domain registrars, made its DNS work with IPv6. GoDaddy claims its DNS service has more than 30 million customers. Had it not been for GoDaddy, the number of sub-domains supported would have grown by a bit more than double, to about 3 percent, according to Measurement Factory.

But for now, most of those DNS requests wouldn't take an IPv6-only user to an actual Web page, because less than 1 percent of all sub-domains surveyed had IPv6-enabled Web servers, according to the Measurement Factory study. Likewise, there were very few IPv6 email servers. Just over 2 percent of zones were served by IPv6-compatible mail servers.

The good news is that many more operators of websites, such as GoDaddy's customers, now can serve IPv6 visitors once they have an IPv6-compliant Web server, Liu said. Along with GoDaddy, Measurement Factory cited three other major registrars, Gandi and OVH in France and Active24 in the Czech Republic, that adopted IPv6 during the period.

GoDaddy has said that plans where underway to extend its IPv6 strategy by supporting the new protocol on its website hosting service. Then, companies that rely on GoDaddy instead of operating their own Web servers will be able to run an IPv6 site.

The study found France as the leader in IPv6 adoption, with 57 percent of sub-domains in France reachable by IPv6, followed by the U.S. and Czech Republic with 42 percent and 36 percent adoption respectively. But its scope was limited by examining only .com, .net and .org. For one thing, that left out sub-domains that are under country-level domains in Asia, where a more severe shortage of IPv4 addresses has led to strong government efforts behind IPv6 in some countries. 

The sample also overlooked other top-level domains where IPv6 has been more widely adopted, such as the .gov domain of the U.S. government and the .edu domain used by universities, said Nav Chander, an Internet infrastructure analyst at IDC. However, the move to pure IPv6 networking remains slow, Chander said. "There's still very little IPv6 usage," he said.

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Google Android updates causes confusion

Google Android OS upgrades may leave many consumers scratching their heads in confusion and others pulling out their hair in frustration.

The first smarpthone sporting the new Ice Cream Sandwich software, the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, hit the market yesterday in the U.K. The heavy anticipated smartphone is expected to be made available in other markets around the world by the end of this month.

The biggest selling point of the new smartphone is the Operating System it runs on: Ice Cream Sandwich. This new OS not only redesigns the Android user interface and provides one release of software for both tablets and smartphones, but it also adds a whole lot of new cool features. These includes but are not limited to: facial recognition to unlock the phone, and a very cool new exchange platform Android Beam, it provides an NFC-driven feature to exchange content like maps, contact details, and YouTube videos.

The release of the Samsung's Nexus Galaxy and the new Google's Ice Cream Sandwich OS software has millions of existing Android owners wondering when or if their smartphone might get the new OS software. Even though Google said earlier this week that it's made the source code available to developers, it's unclear when and on which devices manufacturers and carriers will start rolling out the software.

Even Samsung, which is the manufacturer making the Galaxy Nexus, hasn't been clear about when other Samsung Android phones will get the update.

Galaxy Nexus, the first Ice Cream Sandwich OS powered smartphone

(Credit: Samsung)

Other manufacturers have been just as kept in the dark. Motorola has said that its new Droid Razr will likely run on the OS software in the early part of 2012. And HTC said its new Rezound smartphone announced earlier this month is already "Ice Cream Sandwich-ready," but it wouldn't say when the device would actually get Ice Cream Sandwich.

The confusion over which devices will get Ice Cream Sandwich and when they might get it is just one more example of how the rapid evolution of the operating system is fragmenting the market. Not only are there dozens of hardware options for Android phones, but in the three years that the Google OS has been on the market, there have already been six major releases of the software introduced not including Ice Cream Sandwich. There have also been several minor point updates, or sub-updates, to the software along the way.

These software releases get version numbers and are also associated with names of yummy desserts. They span from Cupcake Android 1.5 to Honeycomb Android 3.2 and now Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0.

Google is well aware of the problems associated with how different versions of software and hardware complicate the market. In May, at its Google I/O developer conference, the company announced a new initiative to reign in software version fragmentation across Android devices. Google said it would work with manufacturers and wireless carriers to develop guidelines to help get updates to devices more quickly. Google pledged that participating partners and carriers would receive the most-current version of the Android software, for up to 18 months after the device's initial release. There's been little talk of these efforts since the announcement was made.

Internet Architects Warn of Risks in Ultrafast Networks

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — If nothing else, Arista Networks proves that two people can make more than $1 billion each building the Internet and still be worried about its reliability.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The Arista Networks founders, Andreas Bechtolsheim, left, David Cheriton and Kenneth Duda, with a data-routing switch at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Lorenz Redlefsen, an Arista engineer, with a data-routing switch.

David Cheriton, a computer science professor at Stanford known for his skills in software design, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, have committed $100 million of their money, and spent half that, to shake up the business of connecting computers in the Internet’s big computing centers.
As the Arista founders say, the promise of having access to mammoth amounts of data instantly, anywhere, is matched by the threat of catastrophe. People are creating more data and moving it ever faster on computer networks. The fast networks allow people to pour much more of civilization online, including not just Facebook posts and every book ever written, but all music, live video calls, and most of the information technology behind modern business, into a worldwide “cloud” of data centers. The networks are designed so it will always be available, via phone, tablet, personal computer or an increasing array of connected devices.
Statistics dictate that the vastly greater number of transactions among computers in a world 100 times faster than today will lead to a greater number of unpredictable accidents, with less time in between them. Already, Amazon’s cloud for businesses failed for several hours in April, when normal computer routines faltered and the system overloaded. Google’s cloud of e-mail and document collaboration software has been interrupted several times.
“We think of the Internet as always there. Just because we’ve become dependent on it, that doesn’t mean it’s true,” Mr. Cheriton says. Mr. Bechtolsheim says that because of the Internet’s complexity, the global network is impossible to design without bugs. Very dangerous bugs, as they describe them, capable of halting commerce, destroying financial information or enabling hostile attacks by foreign powers.
Both were among the first investors in Google, which made them billionaires, and, before that, they created and sold a company to the networking giant Cisco Systems for $220 million. Wealth and reputations as technology seers give their arguments about the risks of faster networks rare credibility.
More transactions also mean more system attacks. Even though he says there is no turning back on the online society, Mr. Cheriton worries most about security hazards. “I’ve made the claim that the Chinese military can take it down in 30 seconds, no one can prove me wrong,” he said. By building a new way to run networks in the cloud era, he says, “we have a path to having software that is more sophisticated, can be self-defending, and is able to detect more problems, quicker.”
The common connection among computer servers, one gigabit per second, is giving way to 10-gigabit connections, because of improvements in semiconductor design and software. Speeds of 40 gigabits, even 100 gigabits, are now used for specialty purposes like consolidating huge data streams among hundreds of thousands of computers across the globe, and that technology is headed into the mainstream. An engineering standard for a terabit per second, 1,000 gigabits, is expected in about seven years.
Arista, which is based here, was built with the 10-gigabit world in mind. It now has 250 employees, 167 of them engineers, building a fast data-routing switch that could isolate problems and fix them without ever shutting down the network. It is intended to run on inexpensive mass-produced chips. In terms of software and hardware, it was a big break from the way things had been done in networking for the last quarter-century.
“Companies like Cisco had to build their own specialty chips to work at high speed for the time,” Mr. Bechtolsheim said. Because of improvements in the quality and capability of the kind of chips used in computers, phones and cable television boxes, “we could build a network that is a lot more software-enabled, something that is a lot easier to defend and modify,” he said.
For Mr. Cheriton, who cuts his own hair despite his great wealth, Arista was an opportunity to work on a new style of software he said he had been thinking about since 1989.....>>

Read more by checking out the full story on new york times, follow the link below....





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Twitter's business model is based on 'serendipity'

Jack Dorsey

When Jack Dorsey, the creator and executive chairman of Twitter, was asked about Twitter's business model, he said it was hardly thought out.

"The business model is focused around serendipity," said Dorsey, who spoke with moderator David Kirkpatrick on Sunday at Techonomy 2011.

It's hard to imagine that answer will silence the Twitter skeptics.

Twitter, for now, is about growth and, according to Dorsey, engagement. While growth is obvious--after just five years in business, Twitter is now handling 250 billion Tweets every day--the engagement seems less so.

Dorsey, who splits his time between Twitter and Square, where he is co-founder and CEO, said that Twitter's ad products--promoted trends, promoted accounts, and promoted Tweets--get engagement rates between 1 percent and 5 percent.

Dorsey compared it with the early days of Google AdWords, referring to the text ads that appear alongside search results.

"When AdWords came out, people resisted," he said. Now, he argues, that people believe that the ads make the search experience better. Dorsey said he doesn't even think of Twitter's promoted products as ads "in the traditional sense."

"It's how we introduce you to something new," he said. "Something that might be hard to find but that you have an interest in."

That sounds like the sort of talk any advertiser would use justify ads that people might or might not want. Twitter, however, is till new territory for advertisers, and the company is moving carefully with altering the experience.

"The user experience is what matters," said Dorsey. "If the user experience is bad, then we fail."

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Ipad 3

Reports on the launch of the next iPad range from Apple releasing an ‘iPad Mini’ along with the iPad 3, to the company only launching the iPad 3 at some point in 2012.  According to a new report however, Apple’s next tablet will be an upgraded iPad 2 in early 2012, with the iPad 3 arriving later in the year.

The report from Digitimes claims the next iPad will be released in March of 2012, featuring better battery life, while being thinner overall.

Unfortunately for those desiring a a massive upgrade over the iPad 2, Digitimes believes the next iPad will only be an upgraded iPad 2, not the iPad 3.  The story goes on to claim Apple will then release the iPad 3 in third quarter of 2012.

Much like reports from July which proclaimed Apple would announce an iPad 2 Plus in September following the release of the iPad 2, It is difficult to believe Apple would launch a minor upgrade to the iPad 2 and then follow that up with the iPad 3.

What does seem likely is that the next iPad will feature better battery life, a modified form, the A6 processor, and possibly a Retina Display​ provided Apple’s suppliers can manufacture enough of the displays to suit Apple.

Will Apple will release an upgraded iPad2 and the iPad3 in 2012?

what do you think?

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Video 'radar' to stop drone mid-air collisions

 Something for the programming and robotics dudes/guys....check it out

IF DRONES are ever going to monitor road traffic, say, they will need a way to automatically avoid other aircraft. This is vital in case the drone loses radio contact with its ground pilot, but the radar systems needed to see other aircraft are too heavy for most lightweight drones.

Now Debadeepta Dey of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has a possible solution. If drones only fly in clear weather, when visual flight rules allow light aircraft to fly without radar, corners can be cut. That means video cameras and image-processing software can do a drone's sense-and-avoid work, says Dey.

His team has written software that applies three filters to a drone's video feed. The first detects contrast deviations in the sky that might be aircraft in the distance. The next filter sorts distant aircraft from, say, much nearer birds by their shape. The third then tracks the motion of the object to see if it is steady and flies like an aircraft, rather than a bird, allowing false positives to be removed.

In early test flights the team has achieved a 98 per cent success rate at picking up aircraft at ranges of up to 8 kilometres (International Journal of Robotics Research, DOI: 10.1177/0278364911412807).

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Submarines talk securely using Quantum keys

SUBMARINES must be able to talk securely with remote naval bases while remaining submerged. Could quantum communications allow them to pull off this technically challenging feat?

Submarines employ random "keys" known as one-time pads to encrypt messages. Each key can only be used once, making it impossible for eavesdroppers to crack the code.

One problem with this is that the key must be securely agreed before the submarine leaves base. There is a risk involved in having many keys on board, in case the sub is captured and they fall into hostile hands.

The other problem is that submarines receive messages using low-frequency radio waves that can penetrate water, but only a few characters per second can be transmitted at these frequencies. To receive high frequencies, which can boost the data rate, submarines have to surface and risk detection.

"You want the submarine to be undetectable for as long as possible - we're talking about several weeks," says Marco Lanzagorta, director of quantum technologies at US defence firm ITT.

He suggests that a technique called quantum key distribution (QKD) could solve these problems. It uses the quantum properties of photons, which are polarised in two different ways to encode 0s and 1s, to generate and exchange a key. Any attempt to intercept the photons disturbs these properties and raises the alarm.

To establish a secure link while remaining 100 metres underwater, submarines could transmit photons of laser light to satellites, for retransmission to base. With the key exchanged, the submarine could then communicate via laser pulses with guaranteed security.

Lanzagorta's simulations suggest it would be possible to transmit and receive data at 170 megabytes per second, enough for video communication. He will present his ideas next month at a cryptography workshop in Gaithersburg, Maryland, hosted by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. Later he plans to conduct experiments at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC to investigate how well a photon's quantum state is preserved as it travels through water.

Rupert Ursin of the University of Vienna in Austria was part of a team that, in 2007, set a QKD record by sending photons 144 kilometres through air. That showed that quantum-encrypted signals can in principle be sent to and from satellites, though Ursin says such an experiment is still far off because much of the necessary equipment has never flown in space. It is "quite visionary" to contemplate quantum-encrypted signalling from Earth to a satellite, he says. "This submarine communication stuff is even more visionary."




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Memristor:The future

 

Memristor circuits lead to ultra small PCs. Intel and AMD unleash massively multicore CPUs. Samsung TVs respond to your every gesture. These and other developing technologies will fundamentally change the way you think about--and use--technology.

Researchers at Hewlett-Packard developed a working unit of a memory circuit that has existed in theory for 37 years, which could ultimately replace RAM and make computers more intelligent by tracking data it has retained.

The technology, called memristor, allow computers to make decisions by understanding past patterns of data it has collected, similar to human brains collecting and understanding a series of events.

For example, a memristor circuit could be capable of telling a microwave the heating time for different food types based on the information it has collected over time, said Stanley Williams, senior fellow at HP.

A memristor circuit requires lower voltage and less time to turn on than competitive memory like DRAM and flash, Williams said. "Because it [uses] less voltage and less time, of course, it uses much less power," Williams said. Denser cells also allow memristor circuits to store more data than flash memory.

Through prototypes, HP is trying to show circuit designers what memristor is capable of doing. "What we have done is confirmed a concept for a new electronic device that was originally proposed nearly 40 years ago," Williams said.

Memristor is the fourth fundamental circuit

Users location can be exposed on Skype due to a Security Flaw

Skype is known for being cheap and extremely secure, but the reputation of the internet telephone service has taken a knock after researchers revealed how to covertly track the location of people who use it.

The problem lies with the service's peer-to-peer technology, which establishes a direct connection between the two people participating in a call. Stevens Le Blond of the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Wartburg, Germany and colleagues worked out how to probe that connection to reveal the IP address of the person they were contacting.

IP (Internet Protocol) addresses identify individual computers and can be used to locate a device in the city, and sometimes even the specific building, where it is being used.

Le Blond's hack is doubly worrying because it can be executed without alerting the victim. His team showed that they could initiate a Skype connection and scoop up the IP address without the person's Skype account ever registering the call.

What's more, a malicious hacker could scale the process and automatically track many users at once. Le Blond and colleagues demonstrated this by showing that they could check the location of 10,000 Skype users on an hourly basis. Location information can be potentially embarrassing or even dangerous: stalkers could use the hack to pursue victims and employers could check up on the location of employees.

Le Blond says that he notified Skype of the problem in May, but that the security hole remains open. Skype's Chief Information Security Officer, Adrian Asher, told PC World "through research and development, we will continue to make advances in this area and improvements to our software."

Le Blond will present his work next month at the Internet Measurement Conference in Berlin, Germany.

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RIM may face possible class action suit over BlackBerry outages

Research In Motion (RIM), faces a possible class action lawsuit over recent outages in its BlackBerry services earlier this month, they also could face class action suit for a trademark infringement complaint in their use of the BBX name for their upcoming  tablets and smartphones platforms.

Consumer Law Group (CLG), a Canadian law firm, said on Tuesday that it had filed in the Quebec Superior Court a proposed national class action lawsuit against RIM on behalf of individuals who have BlackBerry smartphones and pay for monthly data plan, but were unable to access their email, BlackBerry Messenger service, or Internet from Oct. 11 to Oct. 14 (during the outage in Black Berry services).

The lawsuit was filed by CLG on behalf of the lead plaintiff, M. Blackette, a BlackBerry customer with a data plan from a local operator.

"The lawsuit is only dealing with the refund of people's data plan charges during the outage. No punitive damages, nor inconvenience is being claimed," said Jeff Orenstein, a CLG attorney, in an email. "Plain and simple: if you pay for a service you should receive it. And if you don't, you should be entitled to get your money back."

In a separate action in the U.S., a software company said it had filed a complaint on Monday in the United States District Court, District of New Mexico, alleging that RIM's use of the BBX name infringes its trademark for its software. Basis International of Albuquerque, New Mexico said it had also written on Oct. 19 through its counsel to RIM, a day after RIM announced the new platform, asking it to cease all use of the BBX mark.

Basis also said last week it had taken legal action to preserve and protect its "longstanding ownership" of the BBX trademarked operating system-independent language, database, and tool-set, but did not specify the action.

RIM was not immediately available for comment but the company said last week that it had not yet seen the legal complaint from Basis, but did not believe the marks are confusing because the two companies are in different lines of business.

The Blackberry service disruptions affected customers in North America, Latin America, and EMEIA (Europe, Middle East, India and Africa). RIM said the disruption was caused by a failure of a core switch within its infrastructure. Although the system was designed to fail-over to a back-up switch, the fail-over did not function as previously tested, creating a large backlog of data that RIM had to clear.

RIM tried to placate-irate customers with an apology...

...from president and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. It later said it will give away apps worth over US$100 to consumers "as an expression of appreciation for their patience during the recent service disruptions". It also offered enterprise customers one month of free support to help make up for the problems.

According to the motion to authorize the bringing of a class action filed before the Quebec court, the right to download specific free apps does not properly compensate BlackBerry users who have paid for services that they were unable to use. The respondent has failed to take action to either directly or indirectly compensate BlackBerry users by arranging for wireless service providers to refund their customers and to take full responsibility for damages, it added.

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Coolest Android Ice Cream Sandwich Features

Android Ice Cream Sandwich is the new phone OS from Google...Check out some cool features of this  phone Operating System...

Wednesday morning last week, Google and Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Nexus, the first phone designed specifically with Android 4.0 (aka Ice Cream Sandwich) in mind. Ice Cream Sandwich will, naturally, make its way to other handsets when it's released to the public sometime in November. As such, we're taking a look at the latest Google Android mobile operating system.

Ice Cream Sandwich contains many new features, but we've highlighted 10 of the tastiest, ranging from wireless sharing to new widget management. Check out the features and images below for a rundown on the new operating system. Which is your favorite?

Face Unlock

Is swiping the home screen to unlock your phone growing a bit tiresome? Ice Cream Sandwich's new Face Unlock feature taps a phone's camera so that users can log in by simply looking at the handset. Don't worry, if you don't want to use your grill, you can still use a code number (or a drawing interface) to unlock the handset.

Tributes to Steve Jobs

The state of California is also honoring the late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs.

California Gov. Jerry Brown, in an announcement he made on Twitter, declared yesterday as "Steve Jobs Day" in the Golden State.

Silicon Valley royalty assembled yesterday at Stanford University to pay their respects to Jobs at a memorial service that was organized by Apple. The company sent invitations for the private event to some of the Valley's biggest names, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Apple as a company has put down plans to hold a company wide celebration of the Apple co-founder's life this Wednesday morning at the company's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters.


Also on Sunday, the Discovery Channel plans to run a one hour long special about Jobs called "iGenius: How Steve Jobs Changed the World." MythBusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman pay tribute to Jobs through interviews with people whose lives and careers were impacted by Jobs, including Stevie Wonder, Tom Brokaw, and the company's (Apple) employees.


Steve Jobs, who died on the 5th of October after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, was buried a few days later during a private, non-denominational funeral in Santa Clara County.