Would you sleep in a Barbie Themed Hotel Room? See photos

 

The Hilton hotel in Buenos Aires Argentina has launched the world's first Barbie-themed suite. According to the official room description, it’s based on Barbie’s Dreamhouse with the decor ‘flushed pink’ throughout and it's located on the first floor of the hotel in room 136. You'll be able to spot the suite by its pink door.

It costs £112 per night (rising to £356 during peak holiday season) but the suite is already fully booked till 2015. See the pics after the cut and tell us if you will sleep in it..if you had the opportunity 

 

iPad Air 2 teardown reveals the ‘magic’ of Apple’s thinnest tablet: A smaller battery

         


How undignified: The iPad Air 2 — the world’s thinnest tablet! — has only been officially released for a few hours, and already the brutes at iFixit have torn down Apple’s new fondleslab to find out what magical gubbins lie within. Most notably, the teardown reveals that the iPad Air 2 is thinner and lighter than the original Air because… it has a much smaller battery. This explains why the listed battery life for the iPad Air 2 is the same 10 hours as the Air 1 — and why, in practice, some reviews have found that the new Air 2 actually has less battery life than its predecessor. Curiously, the teardown also found that the iPad Air 2 does have an NFC chip — even though reviews of the tablet show that NFC isn’t available.
Just like the original iPad Air, iFixit found that the iPad Air 2 is almost unrepairable, netting a Repairability Score of just 2 out of 10. Like the original iPad Air, the only way into the device is by removing the screen — and there’s so much adhesive that there’s a significant risk of cracking the display while trying to leverage it out. The Lightning connector is still soldered to the logic board, too, meaning it can’t be easily or cheaply replaced — and yes, removing the battery and its oodles of adhesive glue goo still requires a lot of fiddly elbow grease.


Speaking of the battery, the iPad Air 2 now has a 27.62 Wh (watt-hour) battery, as opposed to the 32.9 Wh unit in the original iPad Air — a reduction of about 17%. Amusingly enough, that reduction is almost exactly tied to iPad Air 2’s thickness, which is 18% thinner than the original iPad Air (6.1mm vs. 7.5mm). Apple maintains that the iPad Air 2 is still capable of the same “10 hours of surfing the web on Wi‑Fi, watching video or listening to music,” but some reviews have found that there is indeed a battery life hit. Recode, for example, found that the iPad Air 2 lasted 10 hours and 37 minutes in a battery life benchmark — a full 86 minutes less than the 12 hours and 13 minutes of last year’s iPad Air 1.
Rounding out the rest of the teardown, iFixit found the same NFC module that’s present on the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, 2GB of Elpida RAM, and a new 8MP iSight camera that, despite the same name and pixel count as the camera on the iPhone 6 Plus, clearly isn’t the same piece of hardware (which explains why the iPad Air 2 still doens’t take great photos). The WiFi antennas have been moved to the top of the iPad Air 2 (they used to be along the bottom), which should improve reception a bit. The NFC module is a bit weird, considering the iPad Air 2 apparently (according to both reviews and Apple) doesn’t have NFC/contactless payments enabled. Maybe Apple will enable NFC at a later date?

 




So, there you have it: If you were wondering how Apple could make a very thin and light tablet even thinner and lighter, it wasn’t some magical feat of engineering — they just made the battery thinner. Apple was obviously hoping to compensate for the smaller battery with the new A8X SoC — and no doubt some other small system-wide power savings elsewhere  — but seemingly didn’t quite pull it off. It’s worth pointing out that the iPad Air 2’s 10-hour battery life is still comparable to other flagship tablets on the market — but it is somewhat ironic that it’s beaten by last year’s model.
As I’ve said before, our shift towards mobile computing is still very much hindered by battery tech; displays are still doubling in resolution every few years, and chips are posting huge power reductions year over year, but at least for the foreseeable future, batteries are moving very slowly. If you want faster smartphones and tablets, and brighter and higher-resolution screens, battery life is going to take a hit — there’s currently no two ways about it, and there probably won’t be for many years to come.

JLo steps out in green crop top & matching trousers after revealing why she left Marc Anthony

                                                                                    
Lo wore this bright green crop top and matching trousers teamed with spiky black heels as she stepped out in LA yesterday. I think it's a fierce outfit but many people didn't like it. Would you rock it? Meanwhile, the actress and singer has revealed that she left Marc Anthony in 2011 after 7 years of marriage after suffering a panic attack during a photo-shoot. Read what she wrote after the cut..

Jennifer Lopez detailed her split in her new book titled True Love, which will be out on November 4th. She writes;

'As I sat there getting made up, my heart was beating out of my chest and I felt like I couldn't breathe... I became consumed with anxiety. What was happening to me? I leaped from my chair and said to my dear manager Benny Medina, "Benny, something is happening! I feel like I'm going crazy." My mom was there and she rushed to my side too. 

'It was one of those moments when you're so scared you can't even scream. In a blur of fear and panic, I looked at Benny and my mother and blurted out the words: "I don't think I can be with Marc anymore." Then I burst into tears. 

'It was out. The thing I feared more than anything in the world. I collapsed into their arms and began to sob.'

'Anybody looking from the outside in would have thought my life was great. I had a husband and two beautiful children. I was on American Idol and my new single On The Floor had gone to number one all over the world.

'What people didn't know was that life really wasn't that good. My relationship was falling apart and I was terrified.'

Windows 10 will come with a command line package manager, much to the lament of Linux users

   


Sorry, penguin lovers — if you thought that 2015, in the heinous wake of Windows 8, would finally be the year of desktop Linux, you were sadly mistaken. Microsoft is trying its best to make make amends with Windows 10, to ensure it’s the dream OS for billions of people around the world who use a desktop PC with a mouse and keyboard — and, as a result, this means Microsoft is going to ship Windows 10 with a package manager. Yes, in Windows 10 you can open up a command line shell and install VLC or Firefox or thousands of other packages by typing in a single command.
If you’ve ever ventured into the dark and mysterious land of Linutopia, where Ubutologists and Debianites reign, you will have noticed that one of the things that Linux users are most proud of is package management. While Windows and Mac users have to run graphical installers — you know, where you hit Next a few times and try to avoid installing bundled crapware — Linux users can just open up a command line and type sudo apt-get install vlc. I’m a Windows user through and through, but I have to admit that installing apps and keeping a system updated is much more pleasant in Linux.
With Windows 10, however, we are finally getting an official package manager: OneGet. In the current build of Windows 10 Technical Preview, you can open up PowerShell and use OneGet to install thousands of applications with commands such as Find-Package VLC and Install-Package Firefox. OneGet seems to implement all of the usual functions that you’d expect from a package manager. You can search for packages, add new sources/repos, uninstall packages, install packages, and so on. OneGet uses the same package format as Chocolatey, one of the most popular third-party package managers for Windows (and indeed, you can add the Chocolatey repo to OneGet if you so wish).

     
OneGet was originally rolled out as part of the Windows Management Framework 5.0 preview for Windows 8.1, and it’s being actively worked on to try and ship it as a standard tool in Windows 10. As far as we’re aware, it will only be available through PowerShell — a command-line utility that’s mostly used by power users and IT admins. If you don’t know your way around PowerShell (and indeed, it’s a much more complex beast than cmd or most Linux shells), you can still theoretically use OneGet through the standard cmd command line with @PowerShell. HowToGeek has some more details on OneGet and its implementation in Windows 10, if you’re interested

Android 5.0 Lollipop: All the details and features of Google’s sweetest treat yet

     

Google revealed many details about the new version of Android a few months ago, but we didn’t get a name — it was simply “Android L.” Now there’s finally a name and a version number to go with it. Android 5.0 Lollipop is a seismic shift for Android in both design and features. With all the details of Android 5.0 now in the wild, it’s time to tell you all about the latest, largest, and greatest Android release yet. Buckle up and sit back: There’s a lot of awesome new features to run through.

Materially different

Google’s last design language was known as Holo, but that has been replaced by Material Design. This was thoroughly previewed when the developer preview was released, and Google went on to update the design guidelines for developers to start making Material apps. However, Google is stressing something new with the unveiling of Lollipop — consistency across devices.

 From your phone, to your tablet, to your watch, to your car,  to your TV — it’s going to be Android Lollipop all the time. Well, as soon as your device maker gets around to pushing out an update. There will still be manufacturer skins, but Google is trying to create a vibrant new UI that OEMs will have a hard time covering up. The use of “hero” colors in apps is an example of this. The header color will carry over to the status bar (if the developer supports it), and that color is then shown in the header when you open the app switcher. OEMs love to skin the app switcher, but doing so now will mean taking away useful new UI cues, so why bother?



                  
     

                                                                                                                                                                    The preview of Android L came along at a time when there were almost no Material apps to test, but that won’t be a problem when Android 5.0 starts rolling out. It wasn’t clear last spring just how important (and cool) animations were going to be in Android 5.0. Developers have been trying to come up with ways to fake all the subtle button morphing and panel layering of Lollipop on KitKat devices, and these do add something, but Android 5.0′s native support for Material Design is going to make even cookiecutter apps looks amazing. The updated UI samples and upcoming SDK are looking great.

Battery life fixes

Android phones have long suffered from battery life issues caused by the way apps and services can behave in the background. Any app can be granted the power to wake up a device and keep it awake (called a wakelock). This is an important feature of the platform, but sometimes apps are coded poorly or there’s a minor incompatibility that causes a device to stay awake too long. Android 5.0 is supposed to prevent that while also providing you more information about when you’ll have to charge up.

Mark Zuckerberg donates $25million to help fight Ebola

    

Facebook founder and the 13th richest person in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, estimated to be worth over $30billion just announced on his Facebook page that he's donating $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola. Continue to read the statement he released...
  

Priscilla and I are donating $25 million to the Centers for Disease Control Foundation to help fight Ebola. The Ebola epidemic is at a critical turning point. It has infected 8,400 people so far, but it is spreading very quickly and projections suggest it could infect 1 million people or more over the next several months if not addressed.

We need to get Ebola under control in the near term so that it doesn't spread further and become a long term global health crisis that we end up fighting for decades at large scale, like HIV or polio.

We believe our grant is the quickest way to empower the CDC and the experts in this field to prevent this outcome.

Grants like this directly help the frontline responders in their heroic work. These people are on the ground setting up care centers, training local staff, identifying Ebola cases and much more.

We are hopeful this will help save lives and get this outbreak under control.

Samsung announces production of three-bit, 3D, high-density NAND flash

       




Over the past few years, Samsung has risen to dominate much of the consumer NAND business thanks to a stream of well-reviewed SSDs that combined excellent performance and low prices. The company’s first SSD with three-bit (Triple-level Cell, or TLC) NAND, the Samsung 840, offered modest performance but was quite affordable, and the Samsung 840 Evo upped the ante last year by combining slower TLC with faster SLC NAND. Now, Samsung is moving to combine its TLC NAND production and its 3D vertical NAND in a move that could hit a real consumer sweet spot.
One note is that Samsung is attempting to have its cake and eat it too as far as the NAND is concerned, referring to this as “3-bit multi-level cell (MLC).” That’s not how the term is typically used, and until Samsung demonstrates that it’s built TLC NAND with MLC characteristics in both performance and longevity, it’s a misapplication of terminology for the sake of marketing.
Underneath that marketing, however, there is reason to think that TLC built vertically could be superior to its traditional planar counterpart. Samsung’s 850 Pro, the first SSD to use V-NAND, has substantially better reliability and performance than traditional planar counterparts. If Samsung can keep those characteristics and extend them into a TLC drive, it could create the most attractive consumer drive on the market.
Samsung’s PR also inadvertently highlights the misleading ways that process nodes are used to market to consumers. While it claims that its 3D NAND is more than twice as productive per wafer as its 10nm-class NAND, an editor’s note remarks that “10 nanometer-class means a process technology node somewhere between 10 and 20 nanometers.” Independent analysis from Anandtech has shown that Samsung’s V-NAND has a very small die advantage over the leading 16nm NAND from Micron.


If Samsung’s V-NAND has truly doubled wafer productivity over its old “10nm-class” NAND, either its feature sizes were nowhere near as good as what Micron is building or its wafer yields were absolutely terrible. Or, as is most likely, it’s using alternate meanings of wafer productivity to make the comparison look better.
The reason I’m less concerned about the underlying technology, even if I’m snarky on the marketing, is because Samsung’s 3D NAND has already proven itself as a potent force and the company’s TLC drives have done equally well — even if the 840 Evo family has a performance issue with older data (there’s a fix for that coming in less than a week, if you own an affected drive). In short, there’s good reason to think the company can take the two products and combine them into something even better — possibly pushing SSDs below the 50 cents per GB line that they’ve been bumping against for a while.

Ebola-killing robots now being used in US hospitals

    



Ebola can kill humans quickly, sometimes just a few days after symptoms appear. Its effect on airplanes however, can be even more infectious. Last night for example, the mere mention of the word after a woman threw up caused American Airlines Flight 2791 to make an emergency landing. Hospitals aren’t messing around either: To combat this new threat some have even introduced a special purpose robot — an Ebolabot if you will — to fight back.
The “robot” is not much more than a UV lightbulb on wheels at his point, but it is perhaps a preview of more evolved defenses yet to come. The $115,000 device is made by San Antonio-based Xenex Disinfection services and currently does battle with viruses and bacteria in some 250 hospitals across the US. Certainly not least among these is the Dallas hospital where the first US case of Ebola also just took a drastic turn for the worse last night.


The market for remote decontamination services may be even greater abroad. Other countries, like Spain for example, seem to be be taking things a bit more seriously. Authorities in Madrid have just moved to euthanize the dog of the first person to contract Ebola outside of Africa. A study by the CDC in 2005 indicated that dogs can be infected by the virus yet may not be overtly symptomatic. As for Ebola spreading to the rest of Europe, the World Health Organization (WHO) has already chosen their word for the situation: “unavoidable.”
UV light is certainly one way to kill, but if the virus is lurking in a shadowy corner it seems additional measures may be necessary. It can’t hurt at this point to avail ourselves of the CDC guidelines for disinfection and sterilization for healthcare facilities. Liquid decontamination probably could have a place on version 2.0 of the Ebolabot, as may a gaseous beat-down like ethylene oxide which could reach even more concealed recesses. We are not sterilization experts here, or for that matter Ebola experts, but we do try to keep a bit of common sense handy.