How to overclock your new Haswell CPU like a pro

Speed freaks, take note: If you shelled out for an unlocked version of Intel’s new Haswell processor and haven’t overclocked your PC yet, you’re missing out on some serious—and free—performance improvements.

Last month I spent $1000 to build the ultimate Haswell PC, a speedy machine powered by a Core i7-4770K, a fast solid-state drive, 8GB of RAM, and a discrete graphics card.

Since gaming performance wasn’t the primary goal, I spent the majority of my budget on a premium processor and solid-state storage drive. A speedy CPU-SSD combo gives you the smoothest overall computing experience, especially with a streamlined operating system like Windows 8.

But I had an even better reason for buying a premium Haswell processor: overclocking.

The foundation of my Haswell PC is an Intel Core i7-4770K processor, a Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H motherboard, Kingston HyperX RAM, and a Sapphire Radeon HD 7790 DualX graphics card.
Sure, I could have saved a few bucks building the new Haswell-powered rig by opting for a cheaper CPU, perhaps using the extra scratch to slap in a more powerful GPU, but I thought that springing for the top-of-the-line Core i7-4770K was ideal for a couple of reasons. Not only is the Core i7-4770K the fastest quad-core processor Intel has released to date, but its “K” designation means the chip is unlocked, which allows for easier and more flexible overclocking. I didn’t do any overclocking for the original article I wrote, because budget constraints forced me to stick with stock cooling, but that didn’t stop me from upgrading the rig after the fact to see just what it could do with a bit of tweaking.

I’m happy to report that the overclocking process was simple, safe, and rewarding. You can easily net a 15 to 25 percent improvement in PC performance tests by overclocking your Haswell CPU with the following process.

First, a quick bit of background about the danger of overclocking: If you follow the desktop processor scene, you may remember reading about the thermal issues that cropped up while overclocking Intel’s third-generation Ivy Bridge processors. Eager enthusiasts immediately started overclocking the chips and found that the processors seemed to run significantly hotter than the previous generation’s Sandy Bridge-based products under certain overclocked conditions.

Intel’s Haswell-based 4th Generation Core processors require potent cooling to keep temperatures manageable while overclocking.
Two things were to blame for making Ivy Bridge chips hot under the collar: First, the 22nm tri-gate transistors used to manufacture the chips were more densely packed into a smaller area with Ivy Bridge, which in turn increased the chips’ thermal density. Second, Intel replaced the flux-less solder used to bond the integrated heat spreader (or IHS) to the die on Sandy Bridge processors with a lower-performing, paste-like thermal interface material. The combination of increased heat density and a crappier TIM caused overclocked Ivy Bridge chips to heat up pretty quickly. The chips were still highly overclockable, but you had to take extra precautions because their temperatures would more quickly and more dramatically spike under load.

Unfortunately, Haswell chips suffer from the same thermal issues. The chips are manufactured using a similar 22nm tri-gate process, and the same thermal paste is used under their heat spreaders. As such, you need to be aggressive about keeping your Haswell CPU cool while overclocking to maintain stability and ensure peak performance.

Overclocking an unlocked Haswell CPU is technically possible with any cooler, but the more significant the overclock, the more powerful the CPU’s cooler must be. This is true of any processor, but since this is your brand-new CPU we’re talking about, I have to warn you again to please, please use a high-quality cooler. The bigger and badder, the better.

If you really want to push the limits of your Haswell-based processor—using voltages above 1.25V or so, and clock speeds approaching 5GHz—I strongly recommend water or more-exotic cooling methods. A high-end air cooler, however, will still allow for plenty of fun. As part of my overclocking experiment, I enlisted the help of a gargantuan air cooler from Noctua, the NH-U14S, which dwarfs Intel’s stock cooler.

Noctua’s NH-U14S cooler is bigger than your average case fan, but it ensures that your new CPU will remain icy cool under overclocking pressure.
The Noctua NH-U14S is big—roughly 6 by 4 inches, weighing just shy of 3 pounds with a single 140mm cooling fan installed. The heat-sink assembly is made up of a copper base and multiple copper heat pipes, linked to a large, dense array of aluminum cooling fins. All of the joints on the heat sink are soldered, and the entire thing is nickel-plated and polished to a mirror-like finish. With its increased mass and large surface area, the Noctua NH-U14S can dissipate much more heat than the paltry stock Intel cooler, which will ultimately result in lower operating temperatures and potentially higher overclock speeds.

The process of overclocking your new Haswell CPU is pretty similar to overclocking older Intel processors. With Haswell though, if you plan to overclock, you must have a CPU with the "K" designator—like the Core i7-4770K we used. Non-K-SKUs have very limited overclocking potential due to hardware locks (boo!) that Intel has built in to this processor generation.

There are two ways to overclock your CPU: by increasing its multiplier or by increasing its base clock (BCKL) frequency. For example, the Core i7-4770K’s base 3.5GHz clock speed is achieved with a multiplier of 35 and a BCLK of 100MHz: 35 x 100MHz = 3500MHz, or 3.5GHz.

The Core i7-4770K’s 3.9GHz max clock is achieved with a multiplier of 39 and the same 100MHz BCLK. Increase either the multiplier or the BCLK, and the processor’s clock speed will ultimately increase as well. Because K-SKUs are unlocked, you can freely change the multipliers and set the BCLK to different ratios, or straps, of 100MHz, 125MHz, 167MHz, and 250MHz. You can then tweak the actual BCLK in small increments as well, as long as you’re using an overclocker-friendly motherboard like my Gigabyte Z87-UD3H.

Sadly, Intel’s Haswell chips, like their predecessors, offer limited BCLK adjustments. You can alter the BCLK by only a few MHz over or under the specific strap to fine-tune the processor’s frequency. BCLK adjustments larger than 4MHz or 5MHz are very uncommon.

I should also mention that you can also modify multipliers for the memory and uncore speeds—even the iGPU frequency—if you want to tweak other aspects of performance. For now, I’ll be focusing solely on CPU performance.

It's a WiDi shootout! Actiontec's ScreenBeam Pro vs. Netgear's Push2TV

Intel’s WiDi technology promises a lot: The third and fourth generations can wirelessly stream up to 1080p video, including copy-protected content such as commercially pressed Blu-ray movies, to a receiver embedded in an HDTV, a video projector, or some other display—or to a stand-alone receiver with an HDMI output that you plug into a display. Two fourth-gen adapters, Actiontec’s ScreenBeam Pro and Netgear’s Push2TV, are each smaller than a deck of cards, with just a couple of ports. How hard could this be?

Pretty hard, as it turns out: Both devices proved enormously complicated to set up. The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix Ultrabook that I used for testing required multiple reboots, driver updates, and reinstallations of Intel’s software. Unless you’re prepared for the possibility of arduous troubleshooting, I wouldn’t bother with either adapter. But if wireless streaming is something you must have, and if your laptop supports WiDi, you might consider Netgear’s product, which was the more reliable of the two—once I got it up and running.

ROBERT CARDINNetgear's Push2TV offers the option of drawing power from your laptop's USB port.
Netgear's Push2TV is the smaller of the two devices. Each one has a USB port and an HDMI output for connecting to your display. The Push2TV uses its USB port for its AC adapter, which means that you can power it from either your laptop or the provided AC adapter. The Actiontec ScreenBeam Pro has a full-size USB port, but it serves only to update the device’s firmware (you update the Push2TV’s firmware via a Wi-Fi connection). The ScreenBeam Pro relies on a separate connector for power and requires a AC adapter, which makes Netgear’s Push2TV the better travel companion.

Intel’s WiDi software does not support Macs, but it does support a specific list of WIndows 7 and 8 systems (see below for more details on compatibility). It automatically detects the WiDi adapter, sets up a peer-to-peer wireless connection, and initiates a pairing routine that’s similar to the process of pairing Bluetooth devices: The software prompts you to type in a numeric code that appears on the TV. Once you do, the software starts to stream the laptop’s video and audio to the TV. The pairing routine provides security for the connection, which is completely independent of your Wi-Fi network (apart from firmware updates for the Push2TV). You need to pair the laptop and receiver only once, and you can choose to have WiDi connect the two devices automatically when you launch the program.

Robert CardinActiontec's ScreenBeam Pro didn't perform nearly as well as its competitor did.
Audio and video quality were pretty good with both devices, but in playing half a dozen YouTube videos, I noticed that the ScreenBeam Pro was prone to minor artifacts. It also spontaneously disconnected a couple of times—a glitch I didn’t run into with the Push2TV. Actiontec suggested that the problem was interference from the many neighboring wireless networks in downtown San Francisco, where I ran my tests, but Netgear’s device exhibited neither the artifacts nor the connection problems.

I also tried both adapters using Intel’s WiDi widget, which lets you use the TV as a second screen so that you can watch, say, a movie on the TV while working in a spreadsheet on the laptop. The widget works, but figuring out how to put the content you want on the TV is difficult: I had to try several times to display the movie on the TV rather than on the desktop.

You can also stream video from Apple and Android smartphones and tablets to a WiDi receiver. I was able to watch videos running on my Samsung Galaxy Note 2 on the TV by connecting to the WiDi adapters using Samsung’s AllShare Cast app (for more details, read about Intel’s Android and iOS apps). Making the connection was easy as long as I wasn’t too far from the adapter. AllShare Cast detected the receiver, and once I authorized the connection (no numeric PIN required), the display on the Galaxy Note 2 appeared on my TV. Once again, however, I noticed performance issues with Actiontec’s product—a lot of freezes, and the occasional spontaneous disconnect—that I didn’t encounter with Netgear’s.

The ability to put small-screen content on a big screen quickly, as these WiDi adapters promise to do, is something that both consumers and businesspeople would welcome. Before investing in one of these adapters, however, make sure that your laptop supports WiDi. Although Intel’s website offers lists of required notebook components (mainly Intel’s Wi-Fi and graphics chipsets), you shouldn’t expect the technology to work unless your system has been specifically certified for WiDi.

I learned that lesson the hard way, when I tried downloading and running WiDi on another Lenovo notebook that had the listed chipsets but wasn’t certified for WiDi. I was able to install the software, and it detected the receivers, but it never successfully connected to them. An Intel spokesperson directed me to forums where users in similar situations try to help one another, but Intel doesn’t provide support or guidance for do-it-yourself WiDi, even if you think you have the required hardware.

What’s more even more annoying is that certified systems don’t necessarily ship with everything you’ll need to make WiDi work. The Lenovo ThinkPad Helix supports WiDi, but I still had to find and download the Intel software on my own.

Intel and its partners need to make WiDi deployments much easier. There’s really no excuse for the fourth generation of any technology to be this difficult to set up. If you’re willing to muck about in system settings, and if you have the patience for reinstalls should things go wrong the first time, I’d say check out the Netgear Push2TV. But nontechies might want to wait until more of the setup kinks are worked out.

OCR makes short work of digitizing your docs

The file cabinet looms large in the office, yet it guards its secrets jealously...even from you. It's time to convert those papers to space-saving, easy-to-find digital documents. For that, you need a scanner to turn them into digital images and an Optical Character Recognition program to convert those images into editable and searchable documents. I took four of the latest OCR programs and a free online OCR service for a test spin. All of them work to varying degrees.

To test the programs, I ran 22 varied and not particularly clean scans of documents—including one hand-written note—through four OCR programs and one free service. I looked for accuracy in text recognition, image extraction, and the ability to recreate them in a Word document. In addition, I processed 264 separate scans from a yearbook for output as a searchable PDF.

You don't actually need to install OCR software if you need to convert only a couple of small documents. You can use a free service such as Free-OCR (also known as Free-OCR.com) and upload a scan of your document. File size is limited to 2MB and 5000 pixels in any direction, which is about 150 dpi for a standard page. The OCR engine handles 29 languages, including English.

Free-OCR makes you jump through a CAPTCHA hoop, but does it apologetically.

  Although you don't have to register or even fork over your email address, the Free-OCR site does make you fill in one of those annoying CAPTCHAs. (Thanks, Web bad guys, for making everyone's life more difficult.) However, those CAPTCHAs serve to remind one just how difficult OCR can be. If humans, with our incredible heuristic abilities, occasionally have problems with these, just think how poor straight-line software perusing a stream of bits must feel.

Free-OCR did a decent job of extracting the text from the test documents. With standard typed pages, you should have no problems as long as you don't have fancy plans for the scanned text: The site does not output files or recreate documents. It simply places the extracted text in a box for cutting and pasting. As a matter of fact, embedded graphics tend to confuse the output.

Free-OCR s text capture works well, but even simple graphics confuse the website. Free-OCR is not suitable for large jobs or overly complex documents, but when all you need is to quickly get the text out of a basic document scan, it will do nicely in most cases.

Tip: Use Microsoft Paint to reduce the size of any image you wish to use to 150 dpi.
FreeOCR is a nice, simple front-end for HP's public-domain Tesseract OCR engine (now used by Google) and is roughly the installable equivalent of the unrelated Free-OCR website. It interfaces directly with scanners in addition to importing image files, and it extracts text into a box from which you can cut and paste. The program is extremely easy to use and works well if all you want is text. It even extracts text from PDFs, though it exports only to text.

FreeOCR, though unrelated to Free-OCR, is just as easy to use. FreeOCR processes only one image at a time, but will OCR multi-page PDFs. And, unlike the Free-OCR website, there's no limit on file size. Also, FreeOCR can create Word and RTF documents from the text it extracts, but it's just pasted text: There's no attempt to reconstruct the document or place images.

Read this dialog box and select your options carefully when clicking through FreeOCR's installation. As far as it goes, FreeOCR is a neat little program, though it tries to install toolbars and reset your browser home page. You can install the program while cancelling and declining all offers (though it's unintuitive and the negative response buttons are grayed out). If you couldn't do that, you wouldn't be reading about FreeOCR 4.2 in this roundup.

X is a busy character these days. Not only is it still used traditionally in words, it's featured in the end of movie credits as the Roman "10," and has achieved rock star status as shorthand for eXtreme. It's even used in the name of Acrobat XI. Best of all, it can be used to illustrate one the major tools available to OCR technologists for recognizing symbols: context, i.e., looking at what surrounds a character to help identify it.
Acrobat XI Standard is very good at leveraging context and does a bang-up job of recreating entire documents, including text, images, and layout, then outputting them as the increasingly popular editable PDFs, .RTF, and Word docs. If outputting documents that look like the original is your focus, it's great. It is, however, a little less aggressive and slightly less successful at extracting text from some images than Nuance OmniPage and Abbyy FineReader, which are reviewed below.

The Readiris OCR engine gives Adobe Acrobat XI an edge in accuracy. Acrobat XI lacks the side-by-side comparison of original documents with their recreated doppelgangers that most programs offer: Word, RTF, and the like are simply saved. However, the output files are very accurate (thanks to the Readiris OCR engine), and you can fine-tune the results of PDFs in-line with the "Find OCR suspects" function.

Although Acrobat XI is primarily for PDFs, its OCR is so good that you can easily forego an auxiliary OCR program if you buy it. But at $499 for the Pro version and $299 for Standard, it is expensive. OmniPage and FineReader perform OCR and handle the PDF basics for considerably less cash.

OmniPage 18 Standard ($150) is Acrobat XI's equal at outputting Word files and editable PDFs, and it also does a very good job of extracting pure text. By default, it's a tad aggressive at rotating images trying to find text to extract. However, you can disable this behavior in the settings dialog.

At defaults, Omnipage 18 Standard is a tad aggressive about rotating images. But you can turn this behavior off, and it did a great job making an editable version of my high-school yearbook.

  OmniPage features the side-by-side comparison editing of all types of files that Acrobat's lacks, and its interface is bit more flexible than Abbyy FineReader's, allowing you to arrange the various panes in more ways. Like Acrobat, OmniPage also provides a batch manager for automating multiple jobs.

OmniPage Ultimate 19 is the real news for this industry stalwart. The new $500 Ultimate marries OCR with company's speech-to-text and text-to-speech technologies from Dragon NaturallySpeaking, and starts a transition to a Windows 8-style interface. Though those aren't strictly OCR features, it does mean the program is morphing into a jack-of-all-trades translation tool. Maybe Nuance will even consider handwriting OCR in the future.

Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy's dual-paned interface makes it easy to compare originals to OCR. FineReader is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including ePub, editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.
While the $170 Professional Edition that I tested slightly more expensive than OmniPage Standard, it is also available in a capable $50 Express 9 version.

OCR programs are as useless unless they have digitized images to work with. For that, you need a scanner.
A fast sheet-fed scanner that scans both sides of the page simultaneously is worth its weight in gold for anyone with lots of two-sided business documents to transfer into the digital domain. HP's Scanjet Professionals or Fujitsu's ScanSnaps are available for under $500.

A garden-variety A4/letter-sized flatbed scanner such as Canon's $200 CanoScan 9000F or similar is great for small to standard-sized photos, magazine articles, etc.

For oversized books, such as atlases or the high-school yearbook used in my testing, you'll need something that handles larger documents. I used Plustek's pricey but fast $600 Optic Pro A320. Mustek makes a variety of cheaper, albeit slower large-format scanners.

TIp: Most scanners bundle competent, albeit less comprehensive, versions of the software we've covered. Grab your scanner first, then see if you need to upgrade the software.

If PDFs are your focus, then Acrobat XI is a very good choice, though you'll pay a lot for either Standard or Pro. Most users will be just fine with the less expensive OmniPage Standard 18 or Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional version. OmniPage gets a slight nod if you're outputting RTF or Word documents, but it's otherwise a tie. 

SanDisk outs a pair of portable, streaming-ready Wi-Fi drives

Double the pleasure, double the fundamentally flexible storage options: SanDisk announced not one, but two portable, flash-based multimedia Wi-Fi drives on Monday in the Connect Wireless Media Drive and the Connect Wireless Flash Drive. Both battery-powered devices serve as a mix of portable storage and mobile multimedia hotspots, sharing data and stream multimedia wirelessly via 802.11 b/g/n.

Connect Wireless Flash DriveSanDiskThe Connect Wireless Flash
The smaller Connect Wireless Flash plugs directly into a USB port, has all the appearance of a standard USB thumb drive, and ships in $50 for 16GB and $60 for 32GB flavors.

The name and appearance, however, are slightly misleading; There is indeed flash memory, but it's in the form of a micro SD card hidden away in a slot on the side of the unit. The Connect Wireless Flash can't currently be upgraded using a 64GB micro SD card due to file system limitations, but you may swap 32GB and lesser-capacity cards as need dictates.

The Wireless Media Drive (pictured at the top of this article) is a slick, half-inch thick, and approximately 2.5 by 2.5 inch apparatus available at $80 with 32GB or $100 with 64GB of hard-wired internal flash memory.

With a micro USB port and SDHC/XC slot—handy for viewing files from cameras and the like—it's more versatile than the Connect Wireless Flash. It's also more powerful, rated to deliver five different 720p video streams simultaneously and 8 hours of battery life, compared to its smaller cousin's three 720p streams and 4 hours of battery life.

Both Connect drives are USB 2.0, not 3.0, so expect some waiting when you copy large amounts of data to them. Internet pass-through is provided on both, so you can surf the Web while simultaneously being connected to the drives' internal storage, and there are apps for both iOS and Android. There's no DLNA serving, but according to SanDisk, you can access the drive's internal storage by normal network browsing methods.

Given their price, form factor and portability, the Connect Wireless Media and Connect Wireless Flash drives should fare well against the competition—such as the Corsair Voyager Air and Seagate Wireless Plus—if the performance claims are true.

Should you keep using Windows XP?

Mae Watson's aging computer still works fine. She asked if she should give up XP before next spring.

Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. That's less than nine months away.

The end of support means the end of updates--even security updates. When an exploit is found after that date, too bad; it will not get patched. Gradually, Windows XP will become less and less secure.

And it may not be all that gradual. Malware authors love to use outdated software as a path into your PC--and the more people there are using an outdated program, the more they love it. Besides, an outdated operating system makes a more tempting target than an out-of-date .pdf reader. A year from now, it will be hard to pick a more tempting target than Windows XP.

Long-time readers might accuse me of inconsistency. I covered this subject back in 2011, and gave very different advice, suggesting that an upgrade was a good idea but not an absolute must. "After 12 years, there may be little left in XP to patch. Besides, malware written in 2014 probably won't be designed to exploit an old and outdated OS."

I was wrong. It looks like a great many people will still be using XP next year and beyond, making it all the more dangerous.

Now that I'm telling you not to stick with XP, what should you do? Here are some suggestions:

You could buy a new PC. That will certainly solve the problem, and your new computer would almost certainly be better than your current one. Unfortunately, this is the expensive choice.

Or, for considerably less money, you might be able to upgrade from XP to Windows 8 (or to Windows 7 if you can find a copy). I say "might"because your hardware may not support a newer operating system. To find out, download and run the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant. This will tell you what you'll need to change before the transition.

Click for full image
Finally, you can switch to Linux, which won't cost you a thing. You can try Ubuntu  Linux--the most popular variation and the one I recommend as a Windows replacement--before you make the decision to give up Windows. It installs like a Windows application, giving you a dual-boot system where you can choose either operating system.

Canonical takes Ubuntu forums offline in wake of password breach

Canonical, makers of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, recently announced that its Ubuntu help forums suffered a security breach over the weekend. Attackers were able to harvest an estimated 1.82 million user names, email addresses, and passwords from the site. Canonical says it isn’t sure how hackers were able to breach its systems and the company has taken the forums at Ubuntuforums.org offline as a precaution.

Canonical is warning anyone with an Ubuntu Forums account about the hack via email. The company is also advising users to change their security credentials on other sites, especially email, if they used the same password and username/email for other online services.

Ubuntu.com services such as Ubuntu One are not believed to be affected by the hack since they do not share the same login account as the Ubuntu forums.

Fans of the Ubuntu forums began reporting that the site had been defaced on Saturday. The hacker or group of hackers who breached the site posted an image of a penguin (the Linux mascot is a penguin) holding an AK-47.

The message underneath the image suggested the hackers were more interested in exposing a poorly secured site than anything else. “None of this ‘[you got hacked] by albani4 c3bir 4rmy’ stuff,” the message on Ubuntu’s forums site said. “Straight up, you dun goofed. It's as simple as that.”

It’s not clear if the hackers plan on exposing the database of user names and passwords online. Nevertheless, there is a definite possibility these account credentials could begin circulating around the less reputable areas of the Internet.

For now, the hack doesn't appear malicious, but users should take caution.
Canonical says forum user passwords were not stored in plain text and were hashed and salted. A hash uses a mathematical algorithm to convert plain text passwords into a series of numbers and letters. A specific hash will create the same string of letters and numbers each time for the same input (in this case a password). To make hashes more secure they are further obscured by “salting,” a process that inserts random bits into the hash making it harder to guess the original password.

Canonical had not returned our request for comment at this writing, so it’s not clear which hashing algorithm the company was using. However, a report from Ars Technica says Canonical was using the md5 hash. MD5 is a popular hashing algorithm that is often used by software companies as a security check to let users ensure downloaded executable files were not tampered with or corrupted. But md5 is not considered to be a secure choice for hashing passwords.

Reports of password breaches are always a good time to reevaluate your own online security practices. Always make sure you are using unique passwords for every site you visit online. For tips on generating your own passwords check out PCWorld’s “Learn to use strong passwords” or “Passwords: You're doing it wrong. Here's how to make them uncrackable.”

Use a password manager such as LastPass or Password Safe to store all your various passwords for different online sites. These programs can also create new passwords for you and can automatically fill out login forms for you.

Finally, activate two-factor authentication for any services that support this security measure such as Battle.net, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and Outlook.com. Two-factor authentication requires you to enter a second, shorter temporary password that is usually generated by a smartphone application or small key fob.

Many services that offer two-factor authentication allow you to set trusted PCs so that you only have to enter your credentials once on new PCs or browsers.

Canonical has not said when Ubuntu forums will be back up. In the meantime, any Ubuntu user looking for support can check out sites such as Stack Exchange’s Ask Ubuntu or Ubuntu Discourse.

ISP did not throttle YouTube traffic at peak hours, telecom regulator finds

Allegations that an ISP throttled traffic from YouTube and other Google properties at peak hours were unfounded, according to the French telecommunications regulator.

Any problems with access to YouTube and other sites at peak hours were simply due to the overall volume of data flowing between the ISP, Free, and the rest of the Internet, said the regulator, Arcep.

Following a complaint from the French consumer association UFC-Que Choisir last September that Free appeared to be throttling traffic from YouTube, Arcep began an investigation, questioning the companies involved and their transit providers, and studying traffic flows.

Arcep spent six months studying traffic flows at Free, finding that Free and Google exchange traffic directly, via peering, and indirectly through a number of international transit providers, and that both routes are congested during peak hours, as they are at other ISPs.

Furthermore, there were no signs that Free was employing traffic management techniques on its network to discriminate against traffic based on the content, origin, destination or protocol used. In other words, Arcep said, “No practices contrary to principles of net neutrality were observed.”

At the time of the complaint, Free was known to be in dispute with Google over who should pay for additional interconnect bandwidth between the two. In January it briefly added a function to the DSL routers of millions of its customers to block ads served by Google and other major ad networks. The ad blocker, enabled by default although Free’s customers could choose to disable it, cut into the revenue the ad networks received from French surfers. Within days, the French government announced that such action was against the principles of net neutrality, and with the next router software update, the feature disappeared. There was no change in the number of complaints from Free customers on user forums and elsewhere about difficulties viewing YouTube videos at peak hours, though.

Neither Google nor Free immediately responded to requests for comments on the investigation’s findings.

Having recognized the importance to customers of the way in which ISPs and Internet companies balance their use interconnection and peering, the regulator now plans to conduct six-monthly reviews of operators’ practises and the effect this has on customers.

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Leap Motion first impressions: There's work to do

After more than a year of hype and some impressive canned demos, Leap Motion is finally here.
The $79 motion controller for Windows and Mac is available for purchase, and its app store is up and running. I've been playing with a Leap unit provided by the company since last Thursday.

It's hard not to be impressed with Leap Motion on a basic level. Here's a motion controller that's more precise than Microsoft's Kinect, for a fraction of the cost, in a package small enough to sit discretely on a desk. Although Leap doesn't have a video camera like Kinect, it's able to detect the motion of individual fingers.

But is it practical, and does it work as well as it looked in all the promo videos we've seen over the last year? That's where things get a little messy.

Leap Motion's Airspace Home is used to launch most of 

LM's roster of promising, if inconsistent apps.

  Leap's biggest problem is inconsistency in the quality and behavior of its apps, which for the most part are launched through an app hub dubbed “Airspace Home.” Some apps, such as Corel's Painter Freestyle and Leap's own Touchless mouse control app, use a 3D vertical plane to register input. Move your finger beyond that plane, and it's as if you're clicking with a mouse. This works terribly in practice because you have no physical feedback for when your finger has crossed the plane. In Painter, it's too difficult to control when you're actually drawing, and in Touchless, it's too easy to accidentally click on things.

Touchless, for that matter, is somewhat disappointing as a mouse supplement. While it'd be nice to use the app for leaning back and reading through Web pages, scrolling can be tough to initiate in an accurate and predicable way. The app also doesn't support multiple monitors.

Photoscape is one of the few apps that uses
the technology to its advantage.

  Other apps handle input better. Photoscape, a stylish viewer for online photo sources like Instagram and Flickr, uses a quick point gesture to simulate a mouse click, and uses hand swipes to scroll through menus. Additional navigation is based on the position of your hand in 3D space. The app is intuitive and fun, and doesn't run into issues with accidental input.

The big takeaway here is that Leap and its developers have a lot of work to do on making motion controls as consist as possible. One size doesn't need to fit all, but Leap still needs to figure out what works, and prescribe some best practices for app developers. The idea of passing some arbitrary vertical plane to initiate input needs to be thrown out entirely for apps where accuracy is key.

Leap's other big challenge is to come up with some must-have apps for the device. Right now, the collection consists mostly of games or silly diversions, with wildly varying degrees of quality. Some of these games are enjoyable enough—Double Fine's Dropchord being the most notable example—but they don't make a very strong case for PC motion controllers. For this kind of entertainment, you'd be better off in the living room with Kinect.

That's not say there aren't any useful apps available. Unlock is a quick and easy way to log in to Windows with biometric authentication, and for Mac users, Swish provides simple gesture controls such as app switching and volume adjustments. There's also a surprisingly robust selection of MIDI control apps for musicians.

At the moment, though, Leap doesn't provide any truly compelling reasons to get on board. At $79, it's basically something you might buy if you're interested in motion controls, and want to see where the technology goes. It should be fun to watch Leap's journey continue, even if the product isn't ready to be part of your daily computing life. 

Review: Generate better-looking Windows 8 start tiles with OblyTile

One of the biggest selling points of Windows 8 is the tiled start page, which looks pretty and enticing to use. But one of the drawbacks of that page is that, when you install a third-party program (i.e. something not from the Windows App Store), that program's start tile usually comes out looking like a mess. Small portable app OblyTile lets you generate better-looking tiles and make the start page a pleasure to look at again. And if you hate tiles, you may like what OblyTile can do for your standard desktop, too.

Upon opening the app, you can view the manager that shows your list of installed apps. Just choose the one you want to install the tile for.

  The reason why a third-party tile looks strange is because it pulls the default logo from the program's installation folder. Most of these logos aren't optimized for the Windows 8 tile menu. They may be too small, too low-definition, or both. The key is to get a logo or icon big enough and high-def enough to stand on the tiled start page.

Although OblyTile will generate new tiles for you, it doesn't actually supply the icons. I recommend websites such as the Icon Archive, where you can download high-quality icons for free.

Alternatively, you can choose a file, a folder, or a website URL and enter the path of the program or website manually.

  OblyTile doesn't require installation. Once you're in the program, you can either manually search for the desired program on your PC or open up the Manager on the right-hand side, which generates a list of your installed programs. The Manager can also make a list of your current program shortcuts and offer you the ability to convert those shortcuts into tiles.

OblyTile's interface is very straightforward. If you go the manual route, enter in all the details, navigate to both the installed folder and the icon on your PC, choose your background color and title text color, then click "create tile."  Your old tile on your Windows 8 start page will then be deleted and in its place the new tile will be inserted.

The tiny old Angry Birds icon is on the left, and the bolder new one is on the right. You can also, if you want, have shortcuts to Windows 8 apps (such as Mail, Skydrive, Bing, and so on) put on your desktop, and OblyTile will use the default Windows 8 icon. This is especially useful for people who want to use these services but hate the whole tiled start page concept.

This app is really something that Microsoft should be offering users by default, if they want users to be using the tiled start page extensively. Half an hour with OblyTile transformed my Start tiles into something more visually appealing and as a result, I am now more likely to use it. Are you listening

Oracle and ARM to tweak Java

Oracle and ARM are working together to make the Java programming language more suitable for ARM processors, in order to encourage its use for embedded systems and enterprise software.

The work will customize the Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) for ARM 32-bit platforms, making it more suitable for embedded systems, and the Java SE for ARMv8 64-bit platforms, where it could be used to build enterprise software and networking firmware to run on ARM servers and networking gear.

While Java was originally developed to work across different platforms, the new work will focus on improving the throughput and scalability of Java applications on ARM multicore systems.

In the market for embedded systems, Java could play a role in the emerging, so-called Internet of things, where it could be used in conjunction with energy-efficient ARM chips to build industrial control and factory automation systems.

As ARM pitches its processors as an energy-efficient alternative to x86 chips for servers, a boost in the one of the chief programming languages and runtime environments for enterprise software could help attract more organizational customers.

An optimized Java Virtual Machine (JVM) could enhance performance of enterprise Java systems on ARM multicore systems in a number of ways, according to ARM. Bootup times could be cut and more power could be saved through the additional work.

“A diverse, optimized software ecosystem must be in place to support these systems. This extended relationship with Oracle to enhance Java SE is an important step in growing the ARM ecosystem,” said Ian Drew, an ARM chief marketing officer and executive vice president for business development, in a statement.

Although ARM did not specify what work specifically the two companies would do, Java and ARM are no strangers. Oracle, and former Java owner Sun Microsystems, have been working on making Java and ARM compatible since 1996, when ARM helped port the JavaOS to the ARM architecture.

The company has done a lot of work with setting standards for Java in the embedded market in particular. ARM engineers have served on the Java Embedded Microprocessor Benchmark Consortium (EEMBC) subcommittee, which helps establish benchmark metrics for the embedded market, as well as on the Java Community Process Executive Committee, which helps to outfit Java for the embedded systems.

Break the Bottleneck: Smooth out your business’s voice and video streaming with QoS

If you’ve ever engaged in a voice over IP (VoIP) phone call or conducted a video conference over the Web, you’ve probably experienced choppy audio, pixelated video, and other “hiccups” that make these technologies frustrating to use at best and and an impediment to doing business at worst.

Those annoying interruptions are the result of data struggling to get across your network. It’s important for all of the data to get from Point A to Point B, but some types—like streaming voice and video—simply won’t work if the data can’t travel smoothly. You can solve the problem by spending a lot of money for a bigger, faster Internet connection, but the smart way to address the issue is with QoS: Quality of Service.

QoS manages network traffic, and prioritizes certain types of data over others to ensure consistent network quality. It is generally managed at the network router or switch, to direct network traffic appropriately.

Data traveling across the Internet is a lot like vehicles driving across town. If five cars leave a building to drive to a restaurant, there’s a mesh of roads in all directions, and there are multiple potential paths to take. Each vehicle could take an entirely different route, and the car that left first might arrive at the destination last.

There are also certain vehicles that are given priority treatment. An ambulance transporting a patient to a hospital or a fire truck racing to a house on fire is allowed to bypass standard traffic rules to ensure they reach their destination as quickly as possible because lives are in danger. It’s unlikely anyone’s life hangs in the balance of your streaming voice or video connection, but that same sense of urgency that occurs with emergency vehicles on the road is similar to the high priority treatment your voice and video data require.

When you transfer data from a server on the Web to a PC on your network, you might imagine that the data packets all follow each other in sequence on the same path, but that’s not how it works. Data crossing the Internet has to bounce across multiple routers, and those routers determine the best possible route on a packet-by-packet basis. Like the vehicles driving to the restaurant, the packets of data in a file you download may all take different paths and arrive at your PC out of order. They’re each tagged with sequence information, though, so your PC rearranges them in the proper order as they arrive.

That’s fine for downloading the latest version of Firefox because you can’t actually use the file until all of the packets have arrived. However, it doesn’t work for streaming audio or video. When those packets arrive out of order, it introduces jitter and lag into the stream as your PC struggles to put the packets in order in real-time as the audio or video arrives.

QoS is like designating certain data as the emergency vehicles of your network: It gives higher priority to specified data to ensure it arrives at the destination in order as quickly as possible.

You can use QoS to create “express lanes” on your network for designated applications or computers, but QoS is not simply about getting the data there faster. It employs different techniques and algorithms for streaming media to make sure it arrives smoothly in the proper order to avoid interruptions, or the dreaded “buffering” message.

There are a variety of benefits to using QoS, but it can also get complicated. Small and medium businesses should keep it as simple as possible and set up basic QoS policies for critical services and applications.

For example, if your business relies on Skype for online voice and video chat, you can designate a QoS policy that prioritizes network traffic for that service. If you have a designated PC in a conference room that is used for conducting video conferencing with clients, you can configure a QoS policy to maximize network throughput to that device.

QoS also comes in handy if you host a podcast, video tutorials, or other streaming media content from your own servers, or have files that customers might need to download. You want visitors to your business’s site to have a good experience, so you should set up QoS policies that give your server a higher priority than other data or systems.

Most small and medium businesses rely on consumer-grade equipment and don’t have dedicated IT personnel or router experts on staff to monitor and manage network performance. This presents a couple of problems: First, QoS is an advanced network management feature that doesn’t exist on most consumer-grade routers, and second, proper configuration of QoS requires at least some knowledge of how networks work, and why some traffic might deserve a higher priority than others.

You can get a router or switch with QoS features by doing a little homework. Devices like the Netgear RangeMax WNDR3700 wireless router include an automated form of basic QoS. Essentially, the Netgear router is able to automatically detect audio, video, and gaming traffic, and apply different techniques to improve the quality and stability of the data transfer.

There are also devices like the Linksys E2500 wireless router, which are equipped with basic QoS features. Hidden under Applications & Gaming in the Web-based management console are settings for QoS. You can designate applications, games, or the MAC address of specific servers or PCs to be handled as a higher priority than standard network traffic. You can also use the QoS settings to assign a lower priority to data or systems that aren’t as important to make sure they don’t interfere with other traffic.

Linksys wireless routers include some rudimentary QoS features.
If you’re feeling more adventurous, you can try DD-WRT. DD-WRT is a firmware update that’s available as a free download. It can be installed in place of a manufacturer’s firmware on a wireless router and includes functionality that may be missing—like QoS features.

A word of caution, though: You have to be careful using something like WW-DRT. It’s easy to mess up the configuration and disable the router entirely or make it impossible to log back in and fix it without doing a complete reset. You also won’t be able to rely on the product manual or contact the router manufacturer for technical support, so make sure you know what you’re doing.

Keep in mind that QoS is not a “silver bullet” that will magically make all of your network traffic flow smoothly all the time. When you’re uploading or downloading data over the Internet, that traffic has to traverse a number of networks, routers, and switches to get where it’s going, and you don’t have any control over what happens to the data outside of your own network.

That said, employing QoS at the edge of your network can ensure that the right servers, applications, or services are treated with a higher priority, and help make certain your video conference with an important client isn’t interrupted by a co-worker streaming his Spotify playlist.

How Intel's modded chips make your smartphone a better listener

For years, Intel and other chip makers designed processors like stock engines, dropping them into PCs, notebooks, and servers. Now, Intel has shown a newfound willingness to mod custom silicon for server customers, tweaking them with hardware and software accelerators to improve their performance.
These same servers are the ones powering cloud applications that include email and storage, but also interpret the gestures and spoken commands of smartphone users. On Monday, for example, Intel and Nuance Communications disclosed that Intel is developing an accelerator to improve Nuance’s voice recognition, which powers as many as 6 billion connected devices, according to Sean Brown, Nuance’s senior manager of innovation.

Intel has also developed custom chips for both eBay and Facebook, said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s data center group, at an Intel datacenter event on Monday.

IntelIntel’s Jason Waxman holds a server motherboard.
The bottom line? By specifically improving these cloud functions, smartphone and PC users will see their performance increase over time, for free, with new capabilities. “With advanced natural language processing, you can really say anything to [connected devices] and have a natural response,” Nuance’s Brown said. “But the personal systems of tomorrow will be proactive, when you need it automatically.”

Intel has been designing “accelerators” for decades, Waxman explained, dating back to the MultiMedia eXtensions (MMX) instruction set that it shipped with 1997’s Pentium MMX. Those chips included dedicated hardware registers that were designed to accelerate software written with the MMX software in mind, a technique that Intel used with subsequent chips up to and including its Core processors. Most of today’s server chips ship with dedicated hardware logic blocks on board designed to specifically accelerate functions like encryption. Accelerators for technologies like Nuance take the same approach, but are optimized for a single company.

IntelIntel’s Pentium with MMX Technology.
Meanwhile, incoming Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich has invited non-competing chip customers to manufacture their chips at Intel’s own fabs, analyst Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights and Strategy noted. Intel has had partners that would like Intel to design accelerators around their technology, but lacked the resources, Waxman said. The new spirit of collaboration benefits both sides.

Waxman referred to Intel’s new approach as an “SoC methodology,” an industry term for the systems-on-a-chip (SoC) approach used by many consumer manufacturers, including rival AMD, to optimize chips for specific products.

As an example of Intel’s commitment to custom chips, Intel announced a 14-nm “Broadwell SOC,” Intel’s first semi-custom chip, that will ship as part of Intel’s Atom line in 2014 or later. For years, Intel has shipped its Xeon chip to server customers, but recent shifts in the server space caused Intel to beef up its Atom tablet and set-top chip line to address enterprise customers.

In part, Intel’s hand is being forced by ARM and the smartphones and tablets that those chips power. ARM is riding three trends: first, a general shift away from the PC—Intel’s center of power—to slimmer, cheaper, tablets and smartphones. That’s a segment of the market Intel hopes to address with its Atom processor, whose “Bay Trail” derivative could power Windows and Atom tablets and convertibles as low as $150 by the holidays.

Intel has already begun mixing and matching chips to various customer segments.

An ARM chip.
”The first thing [that’s different about Intel] is that they’re using an array of products,” said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. “If you go back a few years, they designed a chip for the desktop, and then they optimized it a little bit for mobile, and they put a bigger cache on it and called it [a] server [chip]. And there were three basic markets being served by one design. And now, they’re taking stuff that was designed for mobile... Atom stuff, that can also can go into servers, with server stuff. And now they’re taking another chip that they designed for a laptop, and they’re beefing that up... for desktops.”

The second trend that benefits ARM is that ARM, unlike Intel, doesn’t manufacture its own chips. Instead, it licenses its processors as essentially a kit—intellectual property that can be used as is, or surrounded with a chip designer’s own peripheral logic. That’s forced Intel’s hand, Moorhead said. “So they’re going to have to be custom, and more flexible, to keep their 95 percent market share,” Moorhead said of Intel.

Finally, while the PC has remained generally unchanged for decades, server manufacturers have shown a willingness to optimize their servers for specific functions, known as “disaggregation”. Currently, racks of servers perch one over the other in a server chassis, all with their own CPU, storage, and memory.

 Eventually, the idea is that servers will have “pools” of computing, storage, and I/O resources, much like the a bunch of flash chips are combined together to make a single flash “drive”.

In recent years, Intel has arguably invested more in the server space than it has in the PC, into software, services, networking, storage, and other areas. For right now, the trend is toward custom-designed servers, with specific applications in mind.

“Flexibility is the key, because the architecture is disaggregating, meaning the only way to efficiency in the datacenter is workload by workload, where virtualization is not cutting it,” Moorhead said. “In the scale out data center, you have to have a specific server type for a server workload, whether it be Web tier, data mining, Hadoop or otherwise.”

The talk now is of a software-defined future, where applications “ask” for resources, which are managed by a central server—powered by Intel, the company hopes. ARM is hoping to cash in on the third trend, with low-power 64-bit server processors it will ship later this year. For right now, however, Intel hopes it can control the conversation—part of the reason executives are holed up with analysts and customers this week.