Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom review:

The good: The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom's advanced controls and preset modes are easy to use. Its top-notch image quality, optical zoom, and a tripod mount make it the most flexible smartphone camera there is. Android 4.2 helps keep the device fresh and connected.

The bad: Heavy, thick, and asymmetrical, the camera-shaped Zoom is incredibly awkward and uncomfortable to use as a phone.

New York Times hit with 'malicious attack'

The New York Times' website went down for several hours on Tuesday and some users were still having problems Wednesday after it was hit with a "malicious external attack."

A tweet from the official Times Twitter account was directing readers to an alternative website -- http://news.nytco.com -- if they were having difficulties accessing the main site at nytimes.com. Readers in Europe and Asia were reporting problems Wednesday.

Marc Frons, chief information officer at the Times, told employees Tuesday that the outage was the result of an attack on Melbourne IT, the company's domain name registrar, according to the New York Times. 

Intel: Custom Microprocessor Business Set to Expand.

As large datacenter owners start to build their own servers tailored for their specific workloads, for chip companies like Intel Corp. it becomes increasingly important to offer chips tailored for exact needs of their customers. Last year the world’s largest microprocessor maker supplied such custom chips to eighteen clients, but the number is set to grow.
"That trend is growing. In the last year we have delivered 18 custom silicon processor solutions for the full array of customers -- our direct customers, the OEMS and the end users -- in order to meet their specific needs," said Diane Bryant, senior vice president and general manager of datacenter and connected systems group, in an interview with IDG News Service.

Microsoft Starts to Release Windows 8.1 to Hardware Partners.

Microsoft Corp. said on Tuesday it had hit an important milestone for Windows 8.1 operating system. The company has started releasing Windows 8.1 and Windows RT 8.1 to its hardware partners. Microsoft partners are finalizing work on their Windows 8.1-based products, which will be available starting from October 18, 2013. Microsoft expects the family of devices to include tablets, lightweight notebooks, versatile 2-in-1s and other.

Moto X teardown: X8 tech gets marquee billing under the hood

Over the past few weeks, Motorola has made sure the media knows that the Moto X does not have a stock smartphone chip. And the company won't let you forget that even if you pop off the plastic (see photo above).

 

As Motorola explained in an interview with CNET, the main component of the X8 system is a 1.7GHz Qualcomm S4 Pro that Motorola has worked with Qualcomm to customize for its devices.
The X8 part of the system is two Motorola-designed processors: one is a "contextual computing processor" that handles gestures and the other is a natural language processor, which powers the voice-recognition technology on the device.
The goal is to deliver high performance with low power consumption. 



Which bring us to the battery. iFixit gives us a clear view of the Motorola 3.8 volt, 2200mAh Lithium ion battery, which Motorola claims delivers 24 hours of power with "mixed usage."
Notable components that iFixit found inside include a Toshiba 16GB eMMC NAND Flash, 2GB of system RAM, and a 10-megapixel rear-facing camera -- which, by the way, is 25 percent more pixels than the camera in the iPhone 5.
And how easy is it to pop off the plastic cover? The Moto X internals weren't as easy to get at as iFixit anticipated. "To our dismay, the rear panel, though clipped to the device, is also adhered," iFixit said.
But said this about the back cover. "Folks can pretty easily replace the back cover with another of their choosing, provided they peel off and transplant the flash."
iFixit gives Motorola/Google mostly kudos for an interesting internal layout. "The design choices are nothing if not unique."

Windows 8.1 is ready, gets released to manufacturers

They said they'd do it by the end of August. And as we head into the last stretch, it seems Microsoft has released to manufacturing (RTMed) Windows 8.1, its next release of Windows.
Windows SuperSite editor Paul Thurrott tweeted on August 23 that Windows 8.1 had RTM'd. Thurrott said the final RTM build number is 9600.16384.130821-1623.
I talked to another contact of mine who said the internal RTM e-mail made the rounds inside the Windows division on August 23. A third source close to the company confirmed Microsoft RTM'd Windows 8.1 on August 23, and announced internally that the quality metrics for Windows 8.1 were back in line with those of Windows 7. (The vast amount of changes in the Windows 8 code base resulted in an increased number of crashes and hangs for Windows 8, one of my contacts explained.)