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Osx Uninstaller 2024 Released

Osx Uninstaller has announced Osx Uninstaller 2024, the latest version of the popular app removal utility for Mac. Osx Uninstaller has been our editor’s choice for the best app removal tool for years. The latest version includes a new interface and rebuilt app removal core. All users with valid license can upgrade to this new version at no cost.

First MV to be Made Entirely with Sora Released

On May 2, the first music video created using OpenAI’s long-form video generation model Sora was released. The music video, which accompanies the song The Hardest Part, is a collaboration between American singer Washed Out and director Paul Trillo, and is about four minutes long. It shows the life of an American couple, from the time they met in high school to the time they got married and had children. All scenes and characters in the movie, including the main characters, were generated using Sora. A dynamic watermark representing AI generation is continuously displayed in the bottom right corner of the video. According to the Los Angeles Times, the MV took about six weeks to make, with about 700 clips generated before and after the production process, with about 55 clips ultimately being used for the final version. In order to generate usable scenes, cues needed to be very specific, including camera angles and character movements, such as “the camera moves quickly through popped bubbles, quickly through bubblegum, and into an open soccer field; the scene moves quickly to show a frontal view, with the students taking up more and more of the frame and going faster and faster”. The video also reflects some limitations, such as the failure of the characters’ appearances to remain consistent between scene switches. The producers did not disclose how much the video cost to make, but said they did not pay OpenAI for the use of the model. OpenAI initially announced the progress of Sora’s research in February, but did not release it publicly and only privately contacted professionals, including Hollywood producers, to conduct tests.

Apple Says Half of Fortune 100 Companies Use Vision Pro

On May 2, during a conference call announcing second-quarter fiscal 2024 results, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that half of the Fortune 100 companies have purchased Vision Pro devices for office use. Apple’s CFO then described some of the practical uses of Vision Pro in the enterprise. For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines uses it to aid in aircraft engine design, Porsche uses it for teamwork, and home improvement retail chain Lowe’s uses it for kitchen design, etc. Companies such as Gucci have also launched Vision Pro apps. In response to another question, Cook said Apple’s immediate focus is on growing the Vision Pro ecosystem and attracting more apps and enterprise users, and claimed to be feeling a surge of enthusiasm. Apple didn’t mention any specific sales figures in its earnings report for the quarter. As Bloomberg previously reported, Apple initially set a first-year sales target of 3 million units for the Vision Pro, but gradually lowered it to 900,000 units. Sources familiar with Apple’s sales figures claim that 200,000 units of the Vision Pro were sold during its initial launch, but it’s unclear how many of those were returned. Late last month, Kuo claimed that Apple had cut orders for the Vision Pro, with production expected to be 400,000 units this year.

Global Smartphone Sales up 6%

On May 3, market research firm Counterpoint released its Q1 2024 global smartphone statistics.

The global smartphone market shipped 296.9 million units, up 6% year-on-year;
Samsung’s share by shipments reached 20%, replacing Apple as number one;
Apple’s shipments were down 13% year-on-year due to high inventory buildup in the previous quarter, but the average selling price increased 2% year-on-year;
Xiaomi had the fastest shipment growth among the top five vendors, at 34%;
Global smartphone sales grew 7% year-on-year, the highest of any quarterly figure ever.

Counterpoint analysts expect the smartphone market to maintain modest and steady growth in the near term, but trends such as continued premiumization, foldable devices and generative AI may help drive sales acceleration.

Apple Cuts Tech Fees

On May 2, Apple announced further changes to its app distribution policies in the European Union via its developer website. Apple announced that it would expand the circumstances in which the Core Technology Fee (CTF) would be waived for developers who choose to obtain new rights under the EU Digital Marketplace Act (including distributing apps on their own outside of the App Store, creating a third-party app store, and using an external payment method) through “Alternative Terms of Business.” In addition to the previously exempted use by government agencies and accredited educational institutions, developers who do not generate revenue from app sales and advertising will not be required to pay the CTF; at the same time, developers with annual global revenue of less than 10 million euros will receive a three-year exemption from the fee and will not be required to pay the CTF. Additionally, in response to the European Commission’s recent decision that iPadOS constitutes a “gatekeeper” as defined by the Digital Marketplace Act, Apple has indicated that it will comply with the Act by extending the EU-specific policy, which currently applies only to iOS, to iPadOS. iPadOS-related software adjustments will be completed later this fall. For the purposes of calculating the CTF charge threshold, installations of iOS and iPadOS versions of the same app by the same user within a year will be counted only once.

Aliyun Doubles Cloud Hosting with Caching Technology Paired with QLC

Recently, in the proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), a group of engineers from Aliyun and Solidigm, a subsidiary of SK Hynix, introduced a disk technology called CSAL (Cloud Storage Acceleration Layer) and claimed that it has helped Aliyun to double the number of cloud hosting instances. to double the number of cloud hosting instances. According to the article, modern multi-core CPUs are able to support a large number of virtual machines running on the same host, with the bottleneck mainly being the hard disk. Mechanical hard disks are not fast enough to support a large number of simultaneous reads and writes, while TLC-particle SSDs cannot achieve the same capacity with the same number of disks, and only QLC-particle SSDs can balance performance and capacity, but their native performance and lifespan are still insufficient. For this reason, CSAL accelerates QLC drives with two layers of caching, DRAM and high-speed SSDs: the most recent data is first stored in DRAM, and the high-speed SSDs are used for swapping out memory and initially carrying write data, which is then shunted to the QLC drives. This improves performance while reducing writes and increasing endurance. Aliyun says that in practice, servers with CSAL (with 15.36TB QLC SSDs, 800GB of high-speed SSDs, and 64-core Xeon Ice Lake CPUs) can host more than twice as many cloud hosts as previous-generation mechanical hard disk servers, while maintaining the same service levels.The code for CSAL has been released as part of the open-source Storage The code for CSAL has been released as part of the open source Storage Performance Development Kit.

Windows will Support Forced Encryption DNS

On May 2, Microsoft announced in a blog post that future versions of Windows will support the Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) feature. When ZTDNS is enabled, Windows will disable all IPv4 and IPv6 outbound connections by default, and only allow connections to pre-configured encrypted DNS servers or IP address segments; IP addresses returned by the resolution of these secure DNS servers will also be automatically unblocked. The server used as the preconfigured secure DNS must support DNS over HTTPS (DoH) or DNS over TLS (DoT). Microsoft says that with ZTDNS’ zero-trust approach, network administrators in organizations such as enterprises can identify and filter all outbound traffic without having to use insecure plaintext DNS or decrypt outbound traffic through man-in-the-middle attacks.ZTDNS relies exclusively on existing network protocols to ensure compatibility with existing architectures.ZTDNS is currently in an internal preview phase and will be available for public testing first through the Windows Insider Preview in the future. ZTDNS is currently in internal preview and will first be available for public testing through the Windows Insider Preview.

Other News

According to photos of iPhone 16 series models published by French website ShopSystem, the MagSafe components of this year’s new models will be thinner, implying a further improvement in craftsmanship. The photos also suggest that the iPhone 16 and 16 Plus will come with two vertically aligned cameras, while the Pro lineup will have a similar triple-camera layout as previous models.

According to the parameter images posted by X user Arsène Lupin, the Pixel 8a will come with a 6.1-inch AMOLED display with up to 2,000 nits of brightness; more than a day’s worth of battery life, or up to 72 hours if you turn on the power-saving mode; a Google Tensor G3 processor with 8GB of RAM; and two different storage options, 128GB and 256GB; The rear camera is a 64-megapixel primary and 13-megapixel wide-angle, while the front camera is a 13-megapixel; it’s priced at €549 in Europe. As in previous years, the model is likely to be announced at Google I/O 2024, which will take place on May 14th.