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‘Sahara Life should not procure new business’

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‘Sahara Life should not procure new business’
SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT HYDERABAD, JUNE 23, 2017 21:05 IST
UPDATED: JUNE 23, 2017 21:13 IST
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Someone filling out Restraining Order.
IRDAI order allows company to service existing business

Insurance regulator IRDAI, which earlier this month had appointed an administrator to manage the affairs of Sahara India Life Insurance, on Friday directed the company not to procure new business.

The company is directed “not to procure/collect proposal deposits/underwrite new business with immediate effect, i.e., close of business on June 23, 2017,” the regulator said in its order.

Advising Sahara India Life to inform all concerned such as agents and intermediaries of the direction, it said the company should ensure that it did not conduct new insurance business immediately on receipt of the order.

However, the company is directed to “continue to collect and account for renewal premium; and service the existing business and policyholders, unhindered,” the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India said.

IRDAI had on June 12 appointed its General Manager (F&A-NL) R.K.Sharma as administrator of the company and asked him to file a report on the most advantageous course of action in the interest of the policy holders. There were reasons to believe that Sahara India Life “is acting in a manner [that is] likely to be prejudicial to the interests” of the policy holders, the regulator had stated.

[Source”pcworld”]

Chicago’s new Apple store has a giant MacBook for a roof

Construction is underway at the new Apple store in downtown Chicago, and today, as reported by DNA Chicago, a new design element was added — a giant Apple logo. A construction crew laid out the logo on the store’s silver, rectangular roof, making it look like a giant MacBook. It stayed for less than an hour before crews rolled up the logo and removed it.

Designed by London-based Foster+Partners, the store is a relocation of Apple’s original Chicago flagship and is a 20,000-square-foot space which, upon completion, will have all-glass walls and a thin, carbon fiber roof… that looks like a MacBook.

The first renderings were originally unveiled in 2015, and touted the project’s “echo” to Prairie Style homes. As the Chicago Tribune details, the all-glass walls range between 14 to 32 feet in height, and are made out of four layers of half-inch thick glass joined with layers of stronger, thicker laminated glass.

[Source”pcworld”]

Cyber boost: New operating system will improve Navy computing power

With support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Dr. Binoy Ravindran, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech, has designed a system that could revolutionize how military and commercial computing systems perform.

It’s called Popcorn Linux—an operating system that can compile different programming languages into a single cyber tongue.

“By applying Popcorn Linux to longtime, legacy Navy and Marine Corps computer systems, we can improve software without requiring thousands of man-hours to rewrite millions of lines of code,” said Dr. Wen Masters, head of ONR’s C4ISR Department. “This could yield significant savings in maintenance costs.”

Crunching huge amounts of data for complex applications like battlespace awareness and artificial intelligence requires extremely powerful processing. Unfortunately, many of the processors capable of this speak their own specialized software programming languages—and must be programmed to interact with each other.

To increase computing speed, microchip manufacturers in recent years have placed multiple processing units on individual chips. Take the iPhone 7, for example, which has four processors—two high-power (think of a Ford Mustang) and two low-power (think of a Toyota Prius)—to simultaneously dial phone numbers, open web pages, check text messages and take photos and videos.

That involves designating specialized “heterogeneous” processors to carry out specific tasks, like displaying graphics or web browsing. Each processor can be devoted to one specialty, rather than divided among several functions, resulting in much better, faster performance.

“Before, each processor was like one handyman re-modeling your entire bathroom,” said Dr. Sukarno Mertoguno, the ONR program officer sponsoring Ravindran’s research. “Heterogeneous processors, by contrast, represent an actual plumber installing the pipes and an actual painter painting the walls. Each processor has a specialty.”

But this specialization has problems—a “language” barrier. Each processor has its own set of instructions that only it understands. To address this, software developers must manually adjust code to determine which tasks should run on which processors—a tedious process, as extra features and updates are added regularly.

“This is especially true for Navy and Marine Corps software systems,” said Ravindran. “Many of these legacy systems were built in the 1970s or earlier, have numerous security patches and millions of lines of code, and represent a huge investment of time and money. How can Navy developers enjoy the benefits of next-generation heterogeneous processors without rewriting applications from scratch?”

Ravindran’s answer is Popcorn Linux, which can be used with any computer or device, and serves as a translation tool—taking generic coding language and translating it into multiple specialized program languages. From there, Popcorn Linux automatically figures out what pieces of the programming code are needed to perform particular tasks—and transfers these instruction “kernels” (the “popcorn” part) to the appropriate function.

While Popcorn Linux is still a proof-of-concept prototype created by Ravindran and his students, the system is about to enter a new phase of development.

“In our lab and academic setting, we’ve demonstrated that Popcorn Linux works well with respect to performance speed and power usage,” said Ravindran. “Later this year, we’ll work with industry partners to create a version of Popcorn Linux that can meet the strenuous industrial standards required by the Navy and Marine Corps.”

“We’re already hearing great enthusiasm from industry for Popcorn Linux,” said Masters. “We look forward to see how Dr. Ravindran and his team further develop this exciting system.”

[Source”pcworld”]

Why Atari’s New Console Could Be Just What The Gaming Industry Needs

Yesterday, I reported on the recent GamesBeat interview with Atari CEO Fred Chesnais, a chat that confirmed the existence of an upcoming Atari console. The news came as a bit of a surprise, and since that break, speculation has been running wild. Forbes’ own Paul Tassi posted an interesting take on the whole situation, and honestly, I think he makes a great point—the market is indeed full, and introducing a brand new platform, especially one potentially poised to take on those of industry giants like Sony and Microsoft, may be an exercise in overzealous futility. And yet I can’t sit still, so break out the one-button joysticks and dusty Combat cartridges—we’re going to play devil’s advocate.

Even with everything seemingly stacked against such a machine (and there’s a lot, believe me), I still can’t manage to shake my naive excitement. I’ve been gaming for a long time, since the late 80s if I’m counting right, so the prospect of a legitimate Atari revival has set my imagination on fire. I know they’re not even close to the same company that released the 2600 and the Jaguar (or the criminally underappreciated Lynx handheld), but I feel like the potential for something compelling lay not only within this recent hardware announcement, but also amongst the remnant echos of Atari’s yesteryear 8-bit greatness. Before the infamous video game market crash of 1983, they all but owned the digital entertainment market, so who’s to say that they can’t stage a screaming comeback?

The deck is, without a doubt, stacked against such an impromptu market breach. Why? Because as it stands, Sony and Microsoft are in a constant and incredibly expensive battle for console market dominance. And while Nintendo occupies some strange, PG-rated corner of said market, one filled with jovial plumbers, wacky hardware innovation and awful online implementation, they absolutely dominate that space with consistently good first-party titles and an insane degree of consumer loyalty. When paring out the market shares, precious space for an additional dedicated gaming hardware option shrinks to almost nothing. And for the most part, it’s been this way since Sega bowed out of the race back in 2001 with its legendary Dreamcast. So beyond mobile devices and PC, we have three major options for gaming platforms. But what if people want more? What if they’re eager to try something different but lack the opportunity to jump ship?

Believe it or not, there was a time in gaming history when we did have more options. Way more, in fact. Back in the 1990s, all over the span of roughly ten years, the gaming market saw the introduction of a crazy amount of original, completely unique home consoles. Some were weird. Others ludicrously bizarre. Many were quirky experiments that only lasted several months before disappearing forever. Huge mainstream successes like the SNES and N64 were simply the machines that bubbled to the top. For every PlayStation sold there was an Apple Pippin left to forlornly rot on a lonely Circuit City shelf, ignored and forgotten by the gaming masses.

There was Panasonic’s 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, which introduced Gex—and an insane MSRP—to the world. Sega released the Sega CD and 32X, the bulky combination of which made for quite the conversation piece (and a heavy means by which you could defend your house from lions and swooping pterodactyls). And oh God, the Virtual Boy, which didn’t even last a full year before Nintendo pulled the plug. Still, that’s just the tip of the hardware iceberg: CD-i, Amiga CD32, Saturn, and Neo Geo CD are all among the onslaught of consoles that ran the gamut from world-changing to painfully obscure. The failure rate was high, though through all the pricey risks, gamers had choices. Sure, many of them weren’t the best and absolutely didn’t pan out in the long-term, but we weren’t strictly relegated to two or three major sources for our gaming needs. There was a power in that pool of options, and if we wanted to game on a Pioneer LaserActive, we could (though we might cry about it during, after and later).

If Atari’s new product ends up being a proper console with properly powerful innards, it could bring back that sense of choice, something that’s sorely missing from today’s market. Just imagine if they were able to entice several AAA developers and secure a handful of compelling exclusives; Ataribox-only titles you couldn’t find on Xbox, PlayStation or Switch. At the very least, it would make for an interesting 2018 E3, or at least one more exciting than this year’s ho-hum showing.

Oftentimes I’m struck by how homogeneous the gaming industry has become, so I think a gutsy newcomer (in the form of a wise old-timer) would do well to stir up the pot. We need something less, shall we say, predictable. And if the product is solid enough, if it bucks enough trends and pushes the right boundaries, customers may shock analysts and wander outside the comfortable camps that Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo have set up.

It’s all just speculation at this stage, of course, but it’s fun to wonder. I just hope it’s nothing like the Ouya, bless its tiny Android heart.

[Source”GSmerena”]

New national statistics report shows over 5m fraud and computer misuse offences in 2016

UK statistics cyber crime

New figures from the Office of National Statistic’s ‘Crime in England and Wales: year ending Sept 2016’ report, showed an estimated 6.2 million incidents of crime in 2016.

In addition to covering a wide variety of crimes, such as burglary and theft of vehicles, new for the 2016 results is the inclusion of statistics on fraud and computer misuse.

There were 3.6 million fraud and 2.0 million computer misuse offences for the first full year in which such questions have been included in the CSEW.

“The inclusion of these new offences yields a new headline estimate of 11.8 million incidents of crime covered by the survey, but it will be another year before a comparable time series is available,” the report stated.

“The new fraud and computer misuse estimation of 5.6 million offences highlights the challenge forces face to be better equipped to fight cyber enabled crime and the need for all of us to better protect ourselves,” said Andy Lea, Head of Policing at KPMG. “These figures also show the difficult decisions forces will need to make when prioritising their use of resources.”

Fraud and computer misuse details

The survey results show that adults aged 16 and over experienced an estimated 3.6 million incidents of fraud, with just over half of these (53%; 1.9 million incidents) being cyber-related.

The CSEW classifies a crime as being ‘cyber-related’ when the internet or any type of online activity was related to any aspect of the offence.

Key findings include:

The most common types of fraud experienced were “Bank and credit account” fraud (2.5 million incidents; 68% of the total).
“Non-investment” fraud – such as fraud related to online shopping or fraudulent computer service calls (0.9 million incidents; 26% of the total) was the second highest.
There were an estimated 2.0 million computer misuse incidents reported.
Around two-thirds (66%; 1.3 million incidents) of the computer misuse incidents were computer virus-related and around one-third (34%; 0.7 million incidents) were related to unauthorised access to personal information (including hacking).

cybercrime statistics — CSEW fraud and computer misuse – numbers of incidents for year ending September 2016 (Experimental Statistics).

Financial losses to victims

The report shows that, although a high number of cyber crimes were reported, in just under two-thirds of incidents resulting in financial loss, the victim lost less than £250 (61%).

Two-thirds of fraud incidents involved initial loss of money or goods to the victim (66%), independent of any reimbursement received. This equates to an estimated 2.4 million offences, compared with 1.2 million incidents of fraud involving no loss.

Incidents of bank and credit account fraud were more likely to result in initial loss to the victim (73%, equivalent to 1.8 million) than other types of fraud.

In the majority of these incidents, the victim received a full reimbursement, typically from their financial services provider (83%).

Traditional crime blurs into virtual crime

“We see a blurring between traditional, real world crime and virtual crime; criminals are happy to blend their techniques across the two and so ‘cyber’ can no longer be seen as a separate compartment of crime,” said David Emm, Principal Security Researcher at Kaspersky Lab.

“It is important to note that an accurate year-on-year comparison from the ONS, to demonstrate the growth of fraudulent cybercrime, will not be possible until January 2018. However, we agree that bank and credit account fraud is one of the most problematic areas with the continuing rise of e-commerce,” Emm continued.

[Source:- softwaretestingnews]

New firmware for the HP Lap Dock improves Elite x3 touchpad experience

Image result for New firmware for the HP Lap Dock improves Elite x3 touchpad experience

HP has pushed out a small firmware update for the Elite x3’s Lap Dock, which I coincidentally reviewed this morning. The update was first spotted in our forums by Christian_1 who did the update last night.

Since the Lap Dock is so new and part of its update infrastructure is just coming online, I’ll explain how to go about checking and installing the firmware.

First, let’s cover what is new with the Lap Dock’s update.

HP Lap Dock Firmware Revision: T0057

Touchpad Support for touchpad physical click, drag and drop
Keyboard backlight is on by default and turns off after 15 seconds of no keyboard activity

Obviously, not a huge update, but an important one. The first change refers to how the touchpad relied on single taps to do tasks in Continuum. Now, you can do that and press down to click the touchpad (before, nothing happened with this action). This behavior now mimics how most Windows laptop touchpads operate.

The second piece is important for conserving battery life and is self-explanatory.

How to check and upgrade firmware

HP are building out a very vital ecosystem for the Elite x3. One of the pieces to that puzzle is the HP Device Hub, which is an app that comes pre-installed on the Elite x3 to manage your device, warranty, and regulatory information as well as send feedback directly to HP about your Elite x3. There is also a User Guide and contact support for assistance.

HP are also initiating a push notification service to let the user know of new firmware availability.

[Source:- Windowscentral]

Facebook Testing New ‘Reminders’ Function for Page Admins

As you can see, using this new option, Page admins can set up reminders to prompt them of when to post, with the ability to set custom alerts for specific days and times. The idea here is to get people posting when their audiences are most active – and/or most receptive – in order to enhance reach and response potential.

There’s also an option to set a reminder to post before significant holidays – Martin Luther King Day is used in the example above – to help brands tap into the surrounding buzz and conversation.

It’s an interesting option – maintaining a content calendar is a great way to keep your social media strategy on track, and with this, Facebook’s looking to integrate that functionality direct into their eco-system, which will no doubt prove useful, particularly for businesses who primarily focus on The Social Network.

In order to make the most of this functionality, however, you still need to work out the optimal posting times to reach your unique audience.

There are plenty of generic posting guides available for this purpose, but to really make it work, you need to analyze your audience data, via a combination of your Page Insights tab and the additional Audience Insights tool, and work out how and when to post – and who to focus on – in order to boost engagement.

[Source:- Socialmediatoday]

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier Episode 1 & 2 Review

Episodes 1 and 2 of The Walking Dead: A New Frontier improve upon the series’ existing formula, offering an emotionally trying story and a new coat of gameplay polish.

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is Telltale Games’ third core series entry to its take on the long-running graphic novel. Gamers who have played any of the prior iterations of the franchise will find that A New Frontier is familiar territory, following the same general formula of decision-making and emotional upheaval, but with enough tweaks to make the game feel a bit fresher than prior entries.

The Walking Dead: A New Frontier hands the reins to a brand new main character, Javier. Doing so was probably a risk, since players have become quite invested in the story of Lee and Clementine, dating back to the very first season of The Walking Dead. However, the hand-off is arguably a success, with Javier emerging as a likable guy who’s just trying to do right by his family in the walker apocalypse, while still retaining enough character flaws to be relatable.

Thankfully for series veterans, Clementine has a strong presence in the first two episodes of the game. Players are allowed to use their saves from season 1 and 2 in order to create a custom Clementine, or they can use a story generator to make decisions regarding her character development. As a result, Clementine is still the same girl players have come to know and love, although she’s become hardened from the events between the end of Season 2 and the start of A New Frontier. The Walking Dead: A New Frontier fills in these gaps with frequent flashbacks, also uncovering the fate of baby AJ, and Kenny or Jane, depending on who Clementine was last traveling with.

During these flashbacks, players take control of Clementine, but for the remainder of the game, Javier is the sole playable character. It allows for a bit of nostalgia for series veterans, but also helps to provide balance to characters’ capabilities. In season 1 and 2, the main character was often tasked with performing an action while the remaining NPCs stood around being generally useless. Here, Clementine often feels like an extension of the main character, even though she’s generally not controlled by the player. She often engages in actions while Javier is busy with something else, moving the story along and making it feel less like everyone except for the main character is helpless and utterly relying on the main character to do everything.

The basic gameplay in The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is nearly identical to the entries to the series that have come before it, but it’s been tweaked enough to feel more fluid and enjoyable. This is due in part to the fact that the game is primarily set four years after the beginning of the outbreak, so surviving characters are more skilled in survival and combat. As a result, combat is fluid, quick, and satisfying, although it does still essentially boil down to reactionary button mashing and point-and-click shooting segments.

In addition, the main character tends to spend less time slowly wandering around an area inspecting objects and talking with people to progress. While there are still plenty of opportunities to thoroughly examine and discuss everything should the player so choose, this process has been made less tedious. There’s less backtracking, and the areas players can explore are smaller and partitioned off so finishing a task takes less time.

Visually, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier has received a bit of an upgrade since Season 2 and Michonne’s three part mini-series, probably due in part to using the new game engine it and Telltale’s Batman both use. Although the game still sticks to a cel-shaded style to emulate the appearance of the graphic novels, lighting and textures have more depth now, giving characters a more three-dimensional appearance. Characters facial expressions are a bit more subtle this time around, too, which is an improvement over the sometimes over-the-top reactions that were prevalent in Season 1 and Season 2.

In terms of story, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is just as harrowing as fans of the series have come to expect. Javier, his family, and Clementine are thrown into a series of events involving an antagonist group referring to itself as The New Frontier. Although the tension is palpable between characters prior to The New Frontier appearing on the scene, events quickly take a turn for the worse from their involvement, leading to some of the most shocking moments the game has to offer. Unfortunately, each episode clocks in at around an hour, leaving very little time to explore the motivations driving The New Frontier.

Overall, The Walking Dead: A New Frontier is off to a solid start. Fans of the series will definitely have plenty to enjoy here – and emotionally suffer through – and players who found the game to be too clunky and slow previously may appreciate this entry more. While The Walking Dead: A New Frontier doesn’t radically change the gameplay formula Telltale Games has developed, it keeps what worked all along and fine-tunes it further to create a genuinely enjoyable – albeit brief – gaming experience.

[Source:- Gamerant]

This new Microsoft design patent is unlikely to be the Surface phone

Patently Apple goes a bit heavy with the speculation especially since their earlier find from February shared some resemblance of what was eventually Surface Studio. I call that luck as most patent filings rarely become actual products. Back to this patent, no information about the features, hardware, or materials used are mentioned making the filing pretty basic.

Oddly, the Patently Apple author goes on a tangent about pens, Apple, Samsung, and how Microsoft could be bringing inking to Mobile (a forgone conclusion already). They then cite FIG. 7 with the following conclusion labeled in their image:

However, what we can clearly see is that a Surface smartphone is likely to support their Surface Pen. Like the Samsung Note-styled embodiment, a slot has been designed into the body of the design at the top.

Of course, to our eyes, it only looks like a standard 3.5mm headphone jack like the kind you used to find on every smartphone in the world. I’m not sure when we started confusing headphone jacks with pen slots. 2016 is a weird year, and I suppose Apple fans have already moved on from ‘headphone-gate’ by forgetting it ever existed? I dunno.

The bottom of the phone has a single port, which again looks like an old micro USB slot and not quite the symmetrical USB Type C design we are accustomed too.

Frankly folks, I don’t see anything interesting here. This design patent is a generic filing on what could easily be the Lumia 640. In fact, the patent cites Micromax, Sony Xperia, LG Optimus, Lumia 830, and the Lumia 530 – all phones from 2012-2014 – under ‘other publications’ for the patent’s references.

Microsoft has some exciting stuff in the pipeline for sure, but please don’t go spreading this around as ‘proof’ of a ‘Surface Phone.’ Facts and data are still necessary, not a generic drawing based on yesteryear’s inspiration.

[Source:- windowscentral]

LinkedIn announces a new online platform

Hot on the heels of the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft this year and the redesign of the company’s iOS and Android apps last year, LinkedIn will be debuting a new desktop experience. In a recent press event, the company also unveiled LinkedIn Learning, a platform designed to help its users discover and develop various skills by way of a data-driven and personalized learning experience.

In a recent blog post, LinkedIn’s VP of Product, Ryan Roslansky, established that LinkedIn’s redesigned desktop interface will take inspiration from its flagship mobile app that came out with a new design last December. The app’s redesign was met with a generally positive response, so it makes sense for the company to try and duplicate what it did right with its mobile app for its desktop, too.

The redesigned desktop experience will rely on minimalistic touches to bring users a cleaner, more intuitive, and simpler approach for users to efficiently access their jobs, insights and info that they require. As a result, the user experience should see a noticeable boon as well: Thanks to the redesign, professionals can go into their daily meetings with better preparation or, alternately, easily learn more about a new business skill that they’re interested in mastering.

the largest redesign since LinkedIn’s inception

Roslansky is calling this desktop redesign “the largest redesign since LinkedIn’s inception,” so it will be interesting to see just how far the company will go to give users a better UX while still staying faithful to the LinkedIn brand.

In tandem with this, the company’s messaging feature gets an upgrade as well as it gets more intelligent and gets more consistent with the experience offered on the company’s redesigned mobile apps. How does this look on desktop? The revamped Messaging approach bears a remarkable resemblance to Facebook’s chat feature. LinkedIn also revealed the integration of a bot platform that could conceivably be utilized for various purposes, such as scheduling meetings.

LinkedIn also revealed the integration of a bot platform

As for the new online platform, LinkedIn Learning will bring together content from Lynda.com, which LinkedIn owns, and the company’s own professional network and rich data. LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to provide its users with this service designed to appeal to their thirst for continuing education and knowledge.

LinkedIn says that it can leverage its own knowledge of how jobs and skills evolve over a period of time to identify various skills that its users require and then offer expert-led courses that allow them to acquire said skills.

LinkedIn Learning is envisioned as a freemium service, yet all of the company’s users will have the chance to try the new service free for one month. LinkedIn will also continue with its goal to constantly keep enhancing the content on Lynda.com as part of its broader ambition to create opportunities in the global workforce. In the end, the launch of LinkedIn Learning is consistent with Microsoft’s (LinkedIn’s new owner) mission to empower professionals, businesses and organizations to achieve and earn more.

With the company’s desktop redesign and debut of its new learning platform, it’ll be interesting to see how well-received LinkedIn’s new look and features will be.

[Source:- webdesignerdepot.]