69417825
submission
MojoKid writes:
Making wireless charging a viable thing is far from being a new goal, but to date, no method has caught on in a big way. Microsoft might have an alternative solution that involves light rays, but not solar pads. Because indoor light is so weak compared to outdoor light, it's not realistic to rely on those light rays to charge a device. So, Microsoft built its own charger, in the form of a light fixture. Equipped with a high-powered LED flashlight, whenever this light fixture detects a compatible device kicking around, it'll begin beaming light straight at it. However, a big problem arises here immediately: no one is likely to want a light randomly pointing at their phone. It's mentioned that infrared lights could be used down-the-road to fix that problem. Also, this charger won't simply continue to charge a device when its battery is full. Via an on-phone LED, the mobile device would handshake with the light source, and either charge or not charge depending on the battery-level.
69375215
submission
MojoKid writes:
You have to hand it to Elon Musk who has occasionally be referred to as a real life "Tony Stark." The man helped to co-found PayPal and Tesla Motors. Musk also helms SpaceX, which just recently made its fifth successful trip the International Space Station (ISS) to deliver supplies via the Dragon capsule. The secondary mission of the latest ISS launch resulted in the "successful failure" of the Falcon 9 rocket, which Musk described as a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (RUD) event. In addition to his Hyperloop transit side project, Musk is eyeing a space-based Internet network that would be comprised of hundred of micro satellites orbiting roughly 750 miles above Earth. The so-called "Space Internet" would provide faster data speeds than traditional communications satellites that have a geosynchronous orbit of roughly 22,000 miles. Musk hopes that the service will eventually grow to become "a giant global Internet service provider," reaching over three billion people who are currently either without Internet service or only have access to low-speed connections. And this wouldn’t be a Musk venture without reaching for some overly ambitious goal. The satellite network would truly become a “Space Internet” platform, as it would form the basis for a direct communications link between Earth and Mars.
69316283
submission
MojoKid writes:
It's official, we can finally stop arguing over which is the superior game console, the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One. Quite frankly, it's a pointless debate, and it took a self-taught engineer to put the argument to rest, which he did by combining both game systems into a 22-inch laptop. Meet the "PlayBox," a gaming laptop that's equal parts Xbox One and PS4 rolled into one. The PlayBox wins the argument because it allows you to play games on either system, and when it comes down to it, the ability to play games is all that matters. Built for a "specific customer," the owner of this prototype system needn't worry about exclusives since he now has a system that can play them all, and do it while taking up no more space than a single console.
69080365
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel's strategically timed CES 2015 launch of their new 5th Gen Core Series processors for notebooks was met with a reasonably warm reception, though it's always difficult to rise above the noise of CES chatter. Performance claims for Intel's new chip promise major gains in graphics and more modest increases in standard compute applications. However, the biggest bet Intel placed on the new Broadwell-U architecture is performance-per-watt throughput and battery life in premium notebook products that are now in production with major OEM partners. A few manufacturers were early out of the gate with new Core i5 5XXX series-based machines, however, none of the major players caught the same kind of buzz that Dell received, with the introduction of their new XPS 13 Ultrabook with its near bezel-less 13-inch WQHD (3200X1800) display. As expected, the Core i5-5200U in this machine offered performance gains of anywhere from 10 to 20 percent, in round numbers, depending on the benchmark. In gaming and graphics testing is where the new 5200U chip took the largest lead over the previous gen Core i5-4200U CPU, which is one of the most common processors found in typical ultrabook style 13-inch machines.
69036411
submission
MojoKid writes:
Dell unveiled their new XPS 13 ultrabook at CES, which the company says is the smallest 13-inch laptop in the world. Dell claims it achieved this feat by employing what it calls an "infinity display" that is virtually borderless (the bezels measure just 5.2mm), allowing the XPS 13 to maintain the external dimensions of an 11-inch notebook but with a 13-inch Quad-HD display (3840X2160). Dell also says that the XPS 13 has the longest battery life of any 13-inch notebook, clocking in at 15 hours on a charge and powered by Intel's new 5th gen Core series processor. In addition, the machine was spotted at an Intel event streaming 4K video wirelessly to a 4K HDTV via Intel's next gen WiDi technology. Other interesting notables from Dell included a 34-inch wide-aspect, curved monitor dubbed the UltraSharp U3415W that sports a 2560X1440 WQHD resolution.
68996577
submission
Deathspawner writes:
With its SM951 SSD, Samsung ticks all of the right boxes. It might be an unassuming gumstick SSD — it has no skulls or other bling — but it's what's underneath that counts: PCIe 3.0 x4 support. With that support, Samsung is able to boast about cable-melting speeds of 2,150MB/s read and 1,550MB/s write. But with such speeds comes an all-too-common caveat: you'll probably have to upgrade your computer to take true advantage of it.
68946683
submission
MojoKid writes:
Dell took the wraps of their new XPS 13 ultrabook at CES today, which the company says is the smallest 13-inch laptop in the world. Dell claims it achieved this feat by employing what it calls an infinity display that is virtually borderless (the bezels measure just 5.2mm), allowing the XPS 13 to maintain the external dimensions of an 11-inch notebook but with a 13-inch Quad-HD display (3840X2160). Dell also says that the XPS 13 has the longest battery life of any 13-inch notebook, clocking in at 15 hours on a charge. In addition, the machine was spotted at an Intel event streaming 4K video wirelessly to a 4K HDTV via Intel's next gen WiDi technology. Other interesting notables from Dell today, included a 34-inch wide-aspect, curved monitor dubbed the UltraSharp U3415W that sports a 2560X1440 WQHD resolution.
68888177
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel has officially taken the wraps off it's 5th generation Core Series notebook processor, code named Broadwell-U. This new SoC is a "tick" in Intel's tick-tock plan, which means it's mostly a die shrink of the existing Haswell architecture, at least, on the CPU side. On the GPU side, there's a bevy of improvements and advances, and the video decoder block has been beefed up with dual bit stream decoders in its high-end (GT3) hardware. Other feature improvements and capabilities are expected, though Intel has been quiet on exactly what they have tweaked and changed to date. Intel is claiming that the architecture will boost battery life by 1.5 hours, speed video conversions, and offer a whopping 22% improvement to 3D performance — a gain on par with what we saw when moving from Ivy Bridge to Haswell. Intel also took the wraps off their next gen Atom CPU, code named Cherry Trail. This is essentially a 14nm Bay Trail die shrink that's been on the roadmap for a while. As with Haswell-Broadwell, the Bay Trail-Cherry Trail shift is aimed at improving CPU power consumption and overall SoC power characteristics, though again, we'll see an updated GPU baked in as well.
68821591
submission
MojoKid writes:
Microsoft, it seems, just can't catch a break. Days after a major hack took its servers offline on Christmas day, and after being lambasted in multiple stories for shipping games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection in nigh-unplayable condition, the company's Xbox One SDK has been leaked to the public by a group calling itself H4LT. H4LT, which apparently objects to being called a hacker group, offered this explanation when asked why it was distributing the SDK. The group claims that "the SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One." To be clear, what H4LT has done is a far cry from groups like Lizard Squad. The SDK for any given product is typically available behind some degree of registration, but they don't necessarily cost anything. The SDK is one small component of creating the ecosystem that would be necessary to get homebrew up and running on the platform. Whether or not users will ever pull it off is another question.
68756675
submission
MojoKid writes:
Microsoft, it seems, just can't catch a break. Days after a major hack took its servers offline on Christmas and after being lambasted in multiple stories for shipping games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection in nigh-unplayable condition, the company's Xbox One SDK has been leaked to the public by a group calling itself H4LT. H4LT, which apparently objects to being called a hacker group, offered this explanation when asked why it was distributing the SDK. The group claims that "the SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One." To be clear, what H4LT has done is a far cry from groups like Lizard Squad. The SDK for any given product is typically available behind some degree of registration, but they don't necessarily cost anything.
68674469
submission
MojoKid writes:
The Hague Security Delta (HSD) is the official title of a collaborative effort between Netherlands businesses, their federal government and multiple research institutions, to identify emerging security threats, share best practices, and foster collaboration between industry, governments, and universities. One of the most pressing issues they're tackling is that of mobile network and internet security. One point that the Netherlands' officials made repeatedly is that the country is essentially the "digital gateway" to Europe. This might seem like hubris but once you look at the arrangement of undersea cables between the US and Europe, it makes a lot more sense. The Netherlands is far from the only transatlantic connection hub between the US and Europe, but it certainly accounts for a significant chunk of total cable capacity. One of the brainchildren of the HSD is the creation of what it calls the "Trusted Networks Initiative" that would allow direct denial of service attacks originating from specific countries to be cut off. By creating a network "bridge" that can be raised and lowered, the idea is that content and visitors can be cleanly isolated from the bad actors launching an attack. There's an intrinsic assumption here — specifically, the idea that attackers are gathered into a group of systems that can cleanly be split from the so-called "trusted" networks that would continue to operate. It is however, an interesting concept to thwart broad-scale DDoS attacks.
68626633
submission
MojoKid writes:
The hard drive market has become a lot less sexy in the past few years thanks to SSDs. What we used to consider "fast" for a hard drive is relatively slow compared to even the cheapest of today's solid state drives. But there are two areas where hard drives still rule the roost, and that's overall capacity and cost per gigabyte. Since most of us still need a hard drive for bulk storage, the question naturally becomes, "how big of a drive do you need?" For a while, 4TB drives were the top end of what was available in the market but recently Seagate, HGST, and Western Digital announced breakthroughs in areal density and other technologies, that enabled the advent of the 6 Terabyte hard drive. This round-up looks at three offerings in the market currently, with a WD Red 6TB drive, WD Green and a Seagate 6TB Enterprise class model. Though the WD drives only sport a 5400RPM spindle speed, due to their increased areal density of 1TB platters, they're still able to put up respectable performance. Though the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 6TB (also known as the Constellation ES series) drive offers the best performance at 7200 RPM, it comes at nearly a $200 price premium. Still, at anywhere from .04 to .07 per GiB, you can't beat the bulk storage value of these new high capacity 6TB HDDs.
68567109
submission
MojoKid writes:
As a power user, you notice certain things that the average person might not. One of those is the difference between typing on a sweet mechanical keyboard with luxurious key action, versus pounding away on a run-of-the-mill squishy plank that relies on membrane switches to register your keystrokes. The difference may seem subtle to the uninitiated, though even casual typists can recognize that there's something inherently superior about a mechanical keyboard. Of course, it's the mechanical key switches that are responsible for elevating the typing experience. These are better than the rubber domes found in membrane keyboards in a number of ways, including feel, responsiveness, and durability. Mechanical keyboards are growing in popularity, as word is spreading about how good they are. In turn, keyboard manufacturers have responded by feeding more mechanical models into what was once a niche market. If you go out in search of a mechanical keyboard, you'll now find a mountain of options. This roundup further reinforced something we've known for a long time, which is that mechanical keyboards are the superior choice for both gaming and daily typing chores. That doesn't mean they're all created equal — there are different key switches to choose from, and features vary from one plank to the next. The choice of key switch type is highly subjective but we can say that Cherry MX key switches are indeed of higher quality than knock-offs like the Kailh switch. That's not to say Kailh switches are bad, just that you can discern a difference when going from one to the other.
68420879
submission
MojoKid writes:
Differentiation is difficult in the smartphone market these days. Larger screens, faster processors, additional sensors and higher resolution cameras, all are nice upgrades but are only iterative, especially when you consider the deluge of products that come to market. True innovation is coming along with less frequency and Samsung, more so perhaps than some other players, is guilty of punching out so many different phone models that it's hard not to gloss over new releases. However, the new Samsung Galaxy Note Edge may offer something truly useful and innovative with its supplementary 160 pixel curved edge display. The Note Edge is based on the same internal platform as the Galaxy Note 4, and features a 2.7GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoC with Adreno 420 graphics and 3GB of RAM. What makes the Galaxy Note Edge so different from virtually all other smartphones on the market is its curved edge display and what Samsung calls its "revolving UI" that offers app shortcuts, status updates, data feeds and features all on its own, but integrated with the rest of the UI on the primary display. You can cycle through various "edge panels" as Samsung calls them, like shortcuts to your favorite apps, a Twitter ticker, news feeds, and a tools panel for quick access to the alarm clock, stop-watch, a flashlight app, audio recorder and even a digital ruler. The Galaxy Note Edge may not be for everyone, but Samsung actually took curved display technology and built something useful out of it.
68069301
submission
MojoKid writes:
Earlier this year, Google made a big splash with its $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs. In the months following the announcement, Google tossed around less interesting ideas of displaying ads on your thermostat or fridge and began the process of harvesting data from Nest Thermostat users. However, the Google-Nest Labs hook-up is beginning to make more sense as the couple closes in on one year post-acquisition. Google just announced that voice control is coming to the Nest Thermostat via Google Now for both Android and iOS users. All you have to do is say "OK Google" to being the process. Once prompted, you can say, "turn the thermostat to 67 degrees" and your command will be sent directly to the internet-connected Nest Thermostat. At this time, you don't appear to be able to issue voice commands for anything other than changing the temperature, so saying something like "set system to away" or "turn system off" doesn't appear to be in the cards, yet.
