Train Your Brain to Think Like a Creative Genius

If you're unfamiliar with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes, you're missing out on both a classic series of novels that will undoubtedly make you think, as well as a number of cult-classic films and television series. Holmes, it seems, is a thinker that has inspired generations with his wit, creativity, and intelligence.P

But how well does a fictional character with remarkable intellect such as Holmes relate to us? According to Konnikova, we can all learn to think like Holmes, whether we're creative geniuses and unfathomably intelligent, or whether we're just an average thinker who occasionally likes to pursue the sporadic day dream.Pe, or how to come up with better ideas. 

As it turns out: you don't have to be remarkably intelligent to be creative, you just have to know how to use the intellect you've got to produce ideas. Specifically, there are three ways to see this process through

Google announces $2.7 mn bounty for hacking Chrome OS

Google has reportedly announced a whopping $2.7 million bounty if security experts are able to hack its Chrome browser-based OS at the Pwnium 4 hacking contest. 

This year at the Pwnium 4, researchers would be allowed to choose between Intel- or ARM-powered laptops, while last year, they had to try to crack a Chromebook with an Intel processor. 

According to PC World, hackers would be paid prizes of $110,000 and $150,000 for exploiting the Chrome OS, and the highest bounty would be rewarded to those who deliver an exploit able to persistently compromise a Hewlett-Packard or Acer Chromebook. 

Last year, Google put $3.14159 million in the contest, but paid out just $40,000 to a prolific hacker who goes by "Pinkie Pie," the contest's sole participant, for what Google later called a partial exploit. 

Google said that it would consider larger bonuses to researchers who demonstrated a "particularly impressive or surprising exploit," like one that could circumvent kASLR, a new variant of the better-known ASLR anti-exploit technology used by Apple, Microsoft and Chrome OS. 

The report said for hackers to qualify for the prizes or bonuses, they must provide functional exploit code and details on all the vulnerabilities put into play. Pwnium 4 is scheduled to take place on March 12 at the Canadian Security conference. 

Intel developing its own Siri, and making it better by avoiding the cloud

When Apple first debuted Siri, the tech world was taken aback — we might finally get a chance to live in a science fiction future where little pocket robots do our bidding when we yell at them. In practice, Siri has been a mixed bag. Now Intel is working on its own version of Siri, but is avoiding using the cloud because that will make the product much better.

Voice recognition itself has come a long way from the days of using something like IBM’s ViaVoice; we can now whip out our little pocket computers and it can purchase a pile of video games for us if we tell it to. If you bought into the Xbox One, you can sit on your couch — both hands wrist-deep in Cheetos dust — and tell your console to turn on the tonight’s NBA game or load up season three of Archer on Netflix without turning your gamepad orange. When voice recognition works, it’s amazingly practical. However, when it doesn’t work — as it often doesn’t — you’re left screaming at an inanimate object, wasting the time it would’ve taken you to just push some buttons yourself without commanding your device to do it for you. Siri works as well as consumer-level voice control ever has. Intel, however, realizes that Siri could work better, and it doesn’t involve expanding the recognition software’s vocabulary.

With Jarvis, a new headset being developed that might be named after Iron Man‘s butler, Intel plans to remove the cloud from the equation, cutting down the time it takes for the voice recognition software to make sense of your garbled commands. Major voice recognition platforms work in such a way where they take a compressed recording of your voice command and ship it off to a central server. The computers at these servers then translate the voice command into text or a command, then send it back to your device. Obviously, this can be slow depending upon outside factors that aren’t entirely controllable, such as the speed of the current data connection. By doing all of that processing on the client’s side, Intel can cut down on all the time it would take to ship the voice command off to the servers.

Partnered with an unnamed third party, Intel has created a wearable device that processes the voice commands without shipping anything off to those servers. At the moment, Jarvis comes in the form of a headset that sits inside your ear and wirelessly connects to your phone. Because of this local interaction, Jarvis does the unthinkable, and works even when there is no data connection available — something of which everyone who commutes on a subway dreams.

The more tech-hardened crowd will tell you that even when voice recognition works flawlessly, it still isn’t as convenient as using your fingers to push some buttons. That’s because most voice recognition doesn’t respond as fast as you can push a button, even though sound travels faster than your finger. So, the goal of voice recognition would be to have it act immediately after your command, and this is something that Intel hopes to solve with its local solution.

For now, Intel is working on selling the tech to mobile phone manufacturers, which is obviously where the technology would fit best, since the hardware in a brand new laptop would be powerful enough to handle the local recognition on its own. Of course, once the speed issue is settled, developers still have to create a piece of software that never misunderstands what we say, and is also capable of dealing with colloquial phrases.

Five Best Remote Desktop Tools

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Managing your own computer from afar or troubleshooting a family member's PC without being in front of it is much easier when you have a good remote desktop utility to rely on. This week we're going to look at five of the best remote desktop and management tools, based on your nominations. P

We've talked about remotely controlling your PC from anywhere and troubleshooting other people's PCs, now it's time to have your say. It's been a while since we looked at remote desktop tools, and now that one of our favorites, LogMeIn, is killing its free service, we thought it was time to take a fresh look at the field and see what's turned up. 

3 Reasons Why Distributed Solar Inverter Architecture Increases Performance

Distributed architecture in the case of solar inverter configuration means dedicating multiple inverters to a solar array such that the entire array (up to 2MW) is available to feed every inverter via a DC Bus. In this configuration, all the available energy can feed as few inverters as needed at any instant in time. This configuration allows for several benefits. Here are a few of the most significant advantages:

1. Improved Efficiency (Increased Investment Return) – It takes as little as 650 watts of solar power to start exporting energy to the grid. So, every morning, every evening and during overcast conditions, the system expands the operating window by funneling all the available energy to only one solar inverter, which starts exporting energy at 650 watts.

2. Reliability – Units are allowed to rest when not needed. There is less wear and tear on all the units when they are rotated. As the most active electronic component of a solar field this is also the most necessary to maintain function.

3. 100% Up-Time – Should a failure occur, having multiple solar inverters at a field minimizes the impact to the total array. If an  inverter fails, the repair process is quick and the rest of the field does not shut down.

At the end of each day the smart controller reads the operating hours of each solar inverter and establishes a sequence for the next day’s operation. Each inverter has three modes; standby, master, or slave. The unit with the least amount of operating hours begins the day as master, and subsequent slave units are brought on as needed in the order of their operating hours. The next day, the sequence is rotated, insuring equal run times for all units.

Nextronex Ray-Max inverters feature distributed architecture.

When the first inverter reaches 85% of its capacity, the next one is brought on, in slave mode. This is repeated until solar noon when all inverters are on. As the day wanes, inverters are pulled off. At the end of the day, the only one left running is the one that started the day. This describes a fully sunny day. It gets more interesting on a partly cloudy day.

Using a distributed inverter architecture design maximizes the field performance and return on investment of any given solar field between 500kW and 10 MW. The built in reliability of multiple inverters, the lower power threshold needed to start the energy production process and the lower per unit use of each inverter presents the distributed architecture design as a superior solution for solar installations.