Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Extreme Tech- Computing

Computing

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  • AMD R7 SSD

    AMD teams up with OCZ to launch its first SSDs, the Radeon R7 series August 19, 2014 at 8:00 am

    AMD is pushing into the consumer SSD space and partnering with OCZ to do it. Will consumers bite or is AMD bringing too little to an already saturated, and highly competitive, market?
  • Windows 9 Threshold Start menu crop

    Windows 9 technical preview, the first step towards fixing Windows, may appear next month August 18, 2014 at 7:54 am

    Windows 8 has been a bit of a train wreck for Microsoft as users have expressed their displeasure in the tablet-oriented direction. Windows 9 is supposed to pull it back, and the first technical preview may be just a month away.
  • Tesla

    Tesla swings by DEF CON in search of car hackers to secure the Model S August 15, 2014 at 2:22 pm

    Tesla’s connected cars are tempting targets for hackers, but the company is looking to hire its own army of bug hunters to fix problems before they present themselves.
  • Tattoo

    Smart tattoo generates electricity from sweat, could power future wearable computers August 15, 2014 at 12:41 pm

    Joseph Wang, a researchers from UCSD, has now come up with a way to generate power for these devices without using any external equipment. The secret is to harness electrons from lactate acid secreted in sweat.
  • Low battery

    Software on your smartphone can speed up lithium-ion battery charging by up to 6x August 14, 2014 at 11:01 am

    A startup in California, with the rather odd name of Qnovo, says it has developed a new way of rapidly recharging conventional lithium-ion batteries. With Qnovo’s technology, you can get six hours of phone life from just 15 minutes of charging — compared to just 1-2 hours from conventional charging. The secret, according to Qnovo, is that no two batteries are identical — and knowing exactly how much power you can pump into the battery without damaging it can significantly improve recharge times.
  • Why the sudden end to Snowden's principled silence?

    Snowden went too far by revealing the NSA’s MonsterMind cyber weapon August 14, 2014 at 10:02 am

    The latest NSA program to come out of Edward Snowden is MonsterMind, an autonomous cyber warfare program that signals a sharp turn for the whistleblower.
  • Realistic sexbot, face

    By 2025, ‘sexbots will be commonplace’ – which is just fine, as we’ll all be unemployed and bored thanks to robots stealing our jobs August 14, 2014 at 9:04 am

    According to a new report that looks at how continuing improvements to artificial intelligence and robotics will impact society, ‘robotic sex partners will become commonplace’ by 2025. A large portion of the report also focuses on how AI and robotics will impact both blue- and white-collar workers, with about 50% of the polled experts stating that robots will displace more human jobs than they create by 2025.
  • DirectX 12 logo

    DirectX 12 reduces power consumption by 50%, boosts fps by 60% in new tech demo August 13, 2014 at 1:32 pm

    At its Siggraph 2014 booth, Intel is showing off one of the first public demos of DirectX 12 and Direct3D 12 — and the improvement over older graphics APIs, such as DirectX 11, is really quite startling. The exact same demo under DirectX 12 consumed 50% less power than the DirectX 11 version. In a similar demo, the higher efficiency and lower overheads of DX12 allowed for a 60% increase in frame rate over DX11 while consuming the same amount of power. After an awful lot of talk about the benefits of Mantle, DirectX 12, and OpenGL NG, it’s very exciting to see an example of the actual real-world gains of these new graphics APIs.
  • A mess of networking cables and routers

    Brace for the BGPocalypse: Big disruptions loom as internet overgrowth continues August 13, 2014 at 11:10 am

    Over the past 24 hours, you may have felt some tremors of high latency and dropped connections as you surfed the internet. Usually these tremors would be nothing to worry about — they’re usually just the standard low-level interference caused by the occasional router reboot or similar — but in this case they’re actually the early rumblings of a much larger networking earthquake that could cause major outages and disruptions across the global internet. You’ve heard of the IPocalypse caused by the exhaustion of IPv4 addresses — now it’s time to learn about the BGPocalypse.
  • Alienware Alpha console

    Alienware Alpha is the first Steam Machine … but it runs Windows, and comes with a normal Xbox 360 gamepad August 13, 2014 at 9:01 am

    Alienware has announced that its Steam Machine — the Alienware Alpha — will be available in November for $550. Curiously, though, the Alpha — which should be the first commercially available Steam Machine — won’t ship with Valve’s purpose-built Steam Controller. The Alpha also won’t ship with SteamOS. In fact, the Alienware Alpha is basically just a mid-spec Windows 8.1 PC that boots straight into Steam Big Picture Mode. Considering Steam Machines were meant to usher in a new era of Linux-based living room game consoles, with a magical gamepad that makes PC games playable from your couch, what exactly is Alienware playing at?
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