Microsoft to take on iPad with British chips

(Telegraph.co.uk) But ARM, the Cambridge-based firm behind the silicon, says not even it knows for what will be unveiled, with the event surrounded by unusually strict secrecy for Microsoft. Warren East, ARM’s chief executive told The Telegraph he hadn’t been told what to expect from the big reveal, which will take place in Los Angeles. “We’ve heard about this event on Monday but we don’t know anything more about it,” he said. “It’s a Microsoft product and they’re responsible for development and marketing. We haven’t been involved.” Microsoft announced a new ARM-compatible version of Windows 8, dubbed Windows RT, at the Consumer Electronics Show last year. It represents a shift from x86 processor architecture and a weakening of Microsoft historic alliance with Intel, which makes most of the microchips in desktop and laptop computers. The move therefore underscores Microsoft’s desire to break the iPad’s stranglehold on the tablet market, which is encroaching on its corporate IT stronghold. ARM architecture has come to dominate mobile computing because it is designed to consume as little power as possible, extending battery life. “We obviously welcome Microsoft moving to ARM architecture,” said Mr East. “Windows will be an exciting new market for us.” Both the ARM and x86 versions of Windows 8 have been designed with Microsoft’s touchscreen-friendly “Metro” user interface, adapted from its smartphone operating system Windows Mobile 7. It does away with the familiar start button and presents information from apps in constantly-updated “tiles” on the home screen. Some reports ahead of Monday’s announcement have suggested Microsoft will introduce an own-brand tablet before licensing the software to third parties manufacturers such as HP, in an echo of the way Google makes its own “Nexus” Android smartphones. Tim Anderson, a journalist and expert on Windows, said such a move would make sense. “Microsoft wants to make a splash with Windows RT, the ARM version, and there is evidence that it is having difficulty communicating its benefits or convincing its [manufacturing] partners to get fully behind it,” he wrote. He added that Windows 8 on x86 appeared to be too expensive and too hard to use to be an iPad-beater. “Windows RT is critical to Microsoft and if it has to make its own hardware in order to market it properly, then it should do so,” Mr Anderson wrote.

First Painters May Have Been Neanderthal, Not Human

(Wired.com) European cave paintings are older than previously thought, raising the possibility that Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens were the earliest painters. That’s not yet certain: The paintings may have been made by humans at an unexpectedly early date, which would itself raise intriguing questions, though none so tantalizing as Neanderthal painters. “It would not be surprising if the Neanderthals were indeed Europe’s first cave artists,” said João Zilhão, an archaeologist at Spain’s University of Barcelona, at a press conference on June 13. Researchers led by Zilhão and Alistair Pike of the United Kingdom’s University of Bristol measured the ages of 50 paintings in 11 Spanish caves. The art, considered evidence of sophisticated symbolic thinking, has traditionally been attributed to modern humans, who reached Europe about 40,000 years ago. Traditional methods of dating cave paintings, however, are relatively clumsy. Even the previous best technique — carbon dating, or translating amounts of carbon molecule decay into measurements of passing time — couldn’t discern differences of a few thousand years. Instead of carbon, Pike and João Zilhão’s team calibrated their molecular clocks by studying mineral deposits that form naturally on cave surfaces, including paintings. The thicker the deposits, the older the painting. And as the researchers describe in a June 14 Science paper, some of the paintings are very old indeed. Some handprint outlines are at least 37,000 years old. Several red circles are at least 41,000 years old and may be several thousand years older. That’s 10,000 years older than paintings in France, which until now were considered the oldest cave art. If H. sapiens made the Spanish paintings, they would have needed to arrive in Europe already possessing a symbolic art tradition, something for which there’s no other evidence. Alternatively, humans may have arrived in Europe and promptly learned to paint, raising the question of why such an important cultural leap occurred so suddenly, in that particular place. Maybe something about the environment, such as competition with Neanderthals, made symbolic thinking important. Or — and this is still just a hypothesis, one that needs to be tested by dating of many more paintings — the artists were not human. Maybe they were Neanderthals. If so, the paintings would be a pièce de résistance addition to a decade of Neanderthal research that’s showed how our closest evolutionary relatives, long considered less intelligent than humans, were truly sophisticated thinkers capable of symbolism, social planning and empathy. Paintings would provide the last bit of evidence needed to throw out the image of Neanderthals as archetypally dumb, Zilhao said. “What’s really exciting about this possibility,” said Pike, “is that anyone, because it’s open to the public, could walk into El Castillo cave and see a Neanderthal hand on the wall.”

Tune of the summer - thanks Zane Lowe

Wow

I'm ready

New Order - World in Motion by Tunashaker