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Submission + - Could a quadcopter land rovers on Mars? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Taking a page from NASA’s rocket powered landing craft from it most recent Mars landing mission, the European Space Agency is showing off a quadcopter that the organization says can steer itself to smoothly lower a rover onto a safe patch of the rocky Martian surface. The ESA said its dropship, known as the StarTiger’s Dropter is indeed a customized quadcopter drone that uses a GPS, camera and inertial systems to fly into position, where it then switches to vision-based navigation supplemented by a laser range-finder and barometer to lower and land a rover autonomously.

Submission + - ARM Launches Juno Reference Platform For 64-bit Android Developers (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the trickiest aspects to launching a new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't willing to pay for new equipment. This is the crux of the issue with respect to the ARMv8 architecture and enabling development for 64-bit Android platrforms. As such ARM is readying their Juno development platform that combines several of ARM's most advanced technologies on a single board. The product supports big.Little in an asymmetric configuration; each board ships with two Cortex-A57s, four Cortex-A53s, and a modest Mali T-624 core. All this hardware needs an OS to run on — which is why ARM is announcing a 64-bit port of Android as part of this new development board. By including AOSP support as well as additional hooks and features from Linaro, ARM wants Juno to be a sort-of one-stop shopping product for anyone who needs to test, prototype, or design a 64-bit product for the ARM ecosystem. The Android flavor that's coming over is based on Linaro Stable Kernel 3.10. At launch, Juno will support OpenGL-ES 3.0, on-chip thermal and power management, up to 8GB of RAM (12.8GB/s of bandwidth), an optional FPGA, and USB 2.0. OpenCL 1.1 will be added in a future product update. The project is positioned as a joint ARM / Linaro launch with ARM handling the hardware and Linaro taking responsibility for the software stack.

Submission + - Microsoft Wants To Keep The NSA Out Of Your OneDrive And Outlook Accounts (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Ever since Edward Snowden leaked details on how the government had forced various IT companies to disclose information (or secured their willing cooperation), companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been desperate to regain their users' trust. Six months ago, Microsoft announced that it would re-engineer its products and services to provide a much higher level of security — today, the company revealed that it has reached an important milestone in that process. As of now, Outlook.com uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide end-to-end encryption for inbound and outbound email — assuming that the provider on the other end also uses TLS. The TLS standard has been in the news fairly recently after discovery of a major security flaw in one popular package (gnuTLS), but Microsoft notes that it worked with multiple international companies to secure its version of the standard. Second, OneDrive now uses Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Microsoft refers to this as a type of encryption, but PFS isn't a standard like AES or 3DES — instead, it's a particular method of ensuring that an attacker who intercepts a particular key cannot use that information to break the entire key sequence. Even if you manage to gain access to one file or folder, in other words, that information can't be used to compromise the entire account.

Submission + - DARPA demos lightweight, 94GHz silicon system on a chip (networkworld.com) 1

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: Looking to bring lighter, more powerful and less expensive systems for various applications such as communications, radar or guidance systems, DARPA said this week it had recently demonstrated an all-silicon, microchip-sized system on a chip that runs at 94 GHz. DARPA claims that this chip is the first time a silicon-only package has achieved such a high frequency, which falls in the millimeter-wave range.

Submission + - Samsung Launches First SSD With 3D Stacked NAND And It's Fast, 10 Yr. Warranty (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Samsung has just unveiled its latest series of solid state drives for consumer applications, the SSD 850 PRO. Like the previously-released SSD 845 EVO series, the 850 PRO leverages Samsung's tri-core MEX controller, but these new drives also feature bleeding-edge, 32 layer, 3D V-NAND flash memory that offers better power, endurance, and performance characteristics than traditional MLC NAND. Other features of the Samsung SSD 850 PRO series includes "Device sleep" (DEVSLP), which can maximize battery life in mobile devices and support for Samsung's RAPID mode technology, which leverages system RAM to boost performance. The SSD 850 series drives put up impressive numbers in a variety of benchmarks, besting many other drives in its class, but they also carry a long 10 year warranty.

Comment Re:Can an "atheist company" refuse too? (Score 1) 1330

by PCM2 (#47356593) Attached to: U.S. Supreme Court Upholds Religious Objections To Contraception

As for roads, most of them were made by private people and companies, long before government got involved.

I give him credit for not reminding you that he never even used the word "government." He said "society." You want rid of that, go live on some forgotten island in Indonesia and see how long you last. Until then, your attitude of "I've got mine, plus all the benefits society gives me as well, so fuck you, Jack" is not just selfish and stupid, it's completely morally bankrupt. You're a turd and you're really not worth anyone's breath.

Submission + - Facebook Alters 689K User Feeds In 'Emotional Contagion' Experiment (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Here's an interesting psychological factoid: Emotional states can be transferred to other people via text-based messages on social media, such as Facebook. That means that if, for instance, you view a bunch of sad posts, you're more likely to pen a sad post yourself shortly thereafter even though you don't realize that the sad posts made you sad. Here's a snippet from the "Significance" section of the paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS): "We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness." That's almost 700,000 people that Facebook experimented on. The social network purposely manipulated the Newsfeeds of hundreds of thousands of people. Shouldn't Facebook have had to notify those users that it was doing--something? The research itself is significant because, according to its authors, "emotional contagion" can happen not just in real-world interactions, but also from social media interactions. Thus, a social network could be a vehicle for massive, large-scale emotional contagion.

Submission + - LG Innovates With 2560x1440 G3 Smartphone Display And Frickin' Laser Beams (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: LG is probably getting a little tired of scraping for brand recognition versus big names like Samsung, Apple and Google. However, the company is also taking solace in the fact that their smartphone sales figures are heading for an all-time high in 2014, with an estimated 60 million units projected to be sold this year. LG's third iteration of their popular "G" line of flagship smartphones, simply dubbed the LG G3, is the culmination of all of the innovation the company has developed in previous devices to date, including its signature rear button layout, and a cutting-edge 5.5-inch QHD display that drives a resolution of 2560X1440 with a pixel density of 538 PPI. Not satisified with pixel overload, LG decide to equip their new smartphone with 'frickin' laser beams' to assist its 13MP camera in targeting subjects for auto-focus. The G3 performs well in the benchmarks with a Snapdragon 801 on board and no doubt its camera takes some great shots quickly and easily. However, it's questionable how much of that super high res 2560 display you can make use of on a 5.5-inch device.

Submission + - Google Cardboard, A DIY VR Headset You Can Build, Fold And Recycle (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Google's I/O developer conference has had a large number of announcements, some a little more interesting than the others. Then there are some that are down-right strange — at least at first. Google's "Cardboard" easily falls into that category. Imagine sitting at I/O, watching a keynote, and then being told to pick up some cardboard on the way out. You might begin to think that Google had lost it. Well, that really did happen, and event-goers were handed a sheet of corrugated cardboard on their way out of the auditorium. Of course, this wasn't an ordinary piece of cardboard — it could be unfolded, and reconstructed into a Virtual Reality housing unit for an Android smartphone. A device like this would be useless without an app, so don't worry, Google has one. With it, you can take a tour of different locations through Google Earth, watch YouTube videos on a "massive screen", walk down the street with Street View, and partake in some other fun activities, while the app takes advantage of a phone's head-tracking functionality.

Submission + - Carnegie Mellon system lets you get to the good parts of video, fast (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: While Video has become ubiquitous thanks mostly to smartphones it doesn’t mean you want to actually watch all of it. Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists say they have invented a video highlighting technique called LiveLight that can automatically pick out action in videos shot by smartphones, GoPro cameras or Google Glass users.

Submission + - NVIDIA Tegra K1 At Google I/O, Unreal Engine 4 "Rivalry Demo" On TK1 Impresses (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA is claiming that its Tegra K1 low power SoC has "led the charge" at I/O with Android-based products on the way that target the gaming, TV, automotive, and robotics markets. K1, for example, is the first processor to support Google's upcoming Android L release. Making this even more important is the fact that Google will have a 64-bit version of L, which not so surprisingly will suit NVIDIA's upcoming 64-bit Tegra K1 variant as well. That same K1 variant will be the backing CPU in Android's Project Tango devkit. As if that wasn't enough, K1 is also the first processor to support the new Android TV development platform. In conjunction with all of these announcements, NVIDIA showed once again what their new Tegra K1 SoC can muster from a gaming standpoint. The company had the Unreal Engine 4 "Rivalry" demo and running on Tegra K1 with effects like tessellation, image-based lighting, HDR tone-mapping, and so forth all running on a mobile platform. The demo simply looks awesome by any measure but especially when you consider it was targeted to run on a mobile device like a tablet.

Submission + - 100Mb/sec Ethernet coming to a car near you? (networkworld.com)

Submitted by coondoggie
coondoggie writes: As more and more infotainment and crash avoidance technology gets stuffed to cars and trucks, the need for better, faster and more reliable in-car networking equipment grows. In theory at least. With an eye towards that concept the IEEE this week said it formed the 802.3 Single Twisted Pair 100 Mb/s Ethernet Study Group to explore the technological needs for a 100 Mb/s speed for Ethernet in automotive networking.

Submission + - Intel And Micron Build New Xeon Phi Processor With Hybrid Memory Cube Technology (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel today made a splash at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany by revealing new details about its next-generation Xeon Phi processor technology. You may better recognize Xeon Phi by its codename, Knights Landing. No matter what you call it, this represents a significant leap in High Performance Computing (HPC) that will deliver up to three times the performance of Intel's previous generations while consuming less power. A big part of the reason for this is the construction of a new high-speed interconnect technology called Intel Omni Scale Fabric, which Intel has been a bit cagey about, though reportedly it is comprised of silicon photonics interfaces as well as IP from Cray and QLogic. This will be integrated into the next generation of Xeon Phi processors as well as future general-purpose Xeon chips. At launch, more than 60 HPC-enhanced Silvermont-based cores will connect with up to 16GB of on-package, high-bandwidth memory designed in partnership with Micron, which leverages the fundamental DRAM and stacking technologies found in Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) product.

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