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Nvidia launches new Tegra K1 Shield Tablet and separate gamepad, priced rather optimistically at $360 July 22, 2014 at 9:08 am
Nvidia’s new Shield is dropping today and the updated tablet packs a number of high-end features. Will gamers bite, considering the increased price tag but better use cases?
Air Force One finally upgrades its 1980s Reagan-era phone system July 21, 2014 at 1:47 pm
Air Force One — the US President’s flying fortress — which has been using the same clunky handsets since the Reagan administration in the ’80s, has finally received some slick new phones that are much more in keeping with Obama’s 21st century aesthetic. These new phones — customized versions of the the Airborne Executive Phone (AEP) — are provided by military contractor L-3 Communications, and they probably cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars each. In what must surely be some of the best news the President has received in the last couple of years, while the old system consisted of two different phones — one for secure communications, the other for non-secure — each AEP is capable of making calls in either mode from a single handset.
Pyrrhic victory: Intel forces its way into mobile, but might destroy itself in the process July 21, 2014 at 12:17 pm
Intel is determined to shove itself into the mobile market, but it may be doing so in a way that destroys its own chance of ever earning a profit.
Seagate starts shipping 8TB hard drives, with 10TB and HAMR on the horizon July 21, 2014 at 11:17 am
Seagate, after hinting in May that it would release 8TB and 10TB hard drives in the next 12 months, has started delivering early samples of its 8TB hard drive to “major customers” (i.e. enterprise customers). Curiously, while Western Digital hit 6TB last year by filling its drives with helium, Seagate appears to be pushing the 3.5-inch spinning disk storage envelope by simply increasing areal density. Western Digital, incidentally, despite being the first to 6TB, hasn’t announced anything new since November 2013. Maybe helium wasn’t quite ready for prime time?
The Apollo 11 moon landing, 45 years on: Looking back at mankind’s giant leap July 21, 2014 at 9:32 am
On July 20, 1969 — 45 years and one day ago — Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the Moon. Buzz Aldrin would soon follow suit and climb down the ladder of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module (the Eagle), and the pair would then spend two and a half hours being the first ever humans to explore the surface of another world. Let’s take a retrospective look at some of the awesome photos from Apollo 11, and explore some of the fun (and perhaps lesser-known) factoids from the mission.
Verizon caught throttling Netflix traffic even after its pays for more bandwidth July 20, 2014 at 7:08 am
Verizon and Netflix have been arguing over whose fault it is that Netflix’s performance is so terrible — and the evidence is all pointing in the same direction.
MIT upgrades human hand with two extra robot fingers. But why stop there? July 18, 2014 at 11:00 am
While the human hand, with four fingers and opposable thumb, is pretty darn awesome, it still falls woefully short when it comes to some tasks — such as opening a soda bottle or peeling a banana. MIT, which is obviously a firm believer that we can and should enhance humans as far as physically possible, has a solution: a wrist-mounted robot that gives you two extra fingers. With the so-called “7 Finger Robot” equipped, you can both grasp a soda bottle and turn the cap at the same time. According to the MIT engineer who led the project, Harry Asada, some users might even begin to perceive the robotic helping fingers as part of their body — “like a tool you have been using for a long time, you feel the robot as an extension of your hand.”
US scientists push ahead with memory-boosting brain implants, but we still have to crack the brain’s code first July 17, 2014 at 2:05 pm
As the latest effort to build some kind of implantable “memory bridge” now takes form at Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL), we might ask — can such a device actually work?
Microsoft will cut 18,000 jobs, 15% of its global workforce July 17, 2014 at 9:30 am
Microsoft has announced that it will fire around 18,000 employees over the next year, or almost 15% of its global workforce of 127,000. The bulk of the layoffs — 12,500 — will be former Nokia employees who are no longer needed after the acquisition. The mass job-cut is occurring for two key reasons: There is a lot of ‘synergy and strategic alignment’ to be made following Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia — and, of course, tons of space must be made so that Nadella can successfully reorient the company towards his Mobile And Cloud vision.
UK, the world’s most surveilled state, begins using automated face recognition to catch criminals July 17, 2014 at 8:03 am
Police in the UK have become one of the first major police forces to deploy automated facial recognition technology to catch criminals. The British police will be using NEC’s NeoFace technology, which can match faces from crime scene photos or videos against a database of images in just a few seconds. Combined with the highest density of CCTV cameras of any country in the world, police body-worn cameras that are constantly recording, and a CSI-like smartphone and tablet app that allows for face and fingerprint matching in the field, it is rather hard to be a criminal in the UK nowadays.
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