53143775
submission
puddingebola writes:
Toyota has announced plans for a fuel cell powered car at the Tokyo Motor show. From the article, "Satoshi Ogiso, the Toyota Motor Corp. executive in charge of fuel cells, said Wednesday the vehicle is not just for leasing to officials and celebrities but will be an everyday car for ordinary consumers, widely available at dealers. "Development is going very smoothly," he told The Associated Press on the sidelines of the Tokyo Motor Show. The car will go on sale in Japan in 2015 and within a year later in Europe and U.S." I couldn't find any further details in searches.
50636977
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puddingebola writes:
Perhaps influencing Microsoft's $7.2 billion acquisition, the New York Times is reporting that Nokia had an Android phone in development. From the article, "A team within Nokia had Android up and running on the company’s Lumia handsets well before Microsoft and Nokia began negotiating Microsoft’s $7.2 billion acquisition of Nokia’s mobile phone and services business, according to two people briefed on the effort who declined to be identified because the project was confidential. Microsoft executives were aware of the existence of the project, these people said." Perhaps Nokia feared they had put too many eggs in one basket? Whatever the case, the project is most likely dead at this point.
49388981
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puddingebola writes:
From the article, "Jean-Baptiste Quéru, godfather of the Android Open Source Project and one of the most influential figures in the ongoing development of the platform, abruptly stepped down from his position as AOSP maintainer this week. Though JBQ, as he’s generally known, didn’t give explicit reasons for the move, the clever people over at Android Police quickly connected the dots from some of his recent Twitter activity, which bemoaned legal interference in the AOSP release process. Specifically, Quéru’s frustrations about being barred from releasing critical binaries for the new-model Nexus 7 tablet appear to have boiled over. In a subsequent Google+ post, Quéru more or less confirmed this. Well, I see that people have figured out why I’m quitting AOSP,” he wrote. “There’s no point being the maintainer of an Operating System that can’t boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support, especially when I’m getting the blame for something that I don’t have authority to fix myself and that I had anticipated and escalated more than 6 months ahead.”
Does this deserve a "Qualcomm, F*** You!"?
49386803
submission
puddingebola writes:
A filmmaker named Brian Aiken made this film using a DJI Phantom Quadcopter. The movie consists of sweeping aerial shots of Dallas, Texas. I suppose there are artistic possibilities for the use of drones also.
49372173
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "Acer has told investors that it will reduce its emphasis on Windows PCs and laptops over the next few quarters in favor of devices based on operating systems from Microsoft's archrival Google. The Wall Street Journal reports that that Taiwanese hardware maker plans to grow its "non-Windows business" rapidly, such that Android devices will probably make up 10 to 12 per cent of Acer's revenue by year's end."
49010407
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "To break the minute barrier, George Heinze and colleagues at the University of Darmstadt, Germany, fired a control laser at an opaque crystal, sending its atoms into a quantum superposition of two states. This made it transparent to a narrow range of frequencies. Heinze's team then halted a second beam that entered the crystal by switching off the first laser and hence the transparency."
48979781
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "Federal prosecutors said on Thursday they have charged five men responsible for a hacking and credit card fraud spree that cost companies more $300 million and two of the suspects are in custody, in the biggest cyber crime case filed in U.S. history... Authorities in New Jersey charged that each of the defendants had specialized tasks: Russians Vladimir Drinkman, 32, and Alexandr Kalinin, 26, hacked into networks, while Roman Kotov, 32, mined them for data. They allegedly hid their activities using anonymous web-hosting services provided by Mikhail Rytikov, 26, of Ukraine." Albert Gonzales, already serving a 20 year sentence from another case, is also named in the indictment.
48740395
submission
puddingebola writes:
The ACLU has published a study saying the widespread use of police and traffic cameras has made it possible to track individual's movements, even across multiple jurisdictions. From the article, "While the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that a judge's approval is needed to use GPS to track a car, networks of plate scanners allow police effectively to track a driver's location, sometimes several times every day, with few legal restrictions. The ACLU says the scanners are assembling a "single, high-resolution image of our lives." "There's just a fundamental question of whether we're going to live in a society where these dragnet surveillance systems become routine," said Catherine Crump, a staff attorney with the organization. The group is proposing that police departments immediately delete any records of cars not linked to any crime."
48725003
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "In a blog post Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel and EVP for legal and corporate affairs said that the firm can't talk about national security requests and wants to tell its story. Smith said that the US government is preventing it from revealing NSA demands, so Microsoft is going directly to the US Attorney General.
"Today we have asked the Attorney General of the United States to personally take action to permit Microsoft and other companies to share publicly more complete information about how we handle national security requests for customer information," he said."
48594331
submission
puddingebola writes:
A number of different websites are commenting on NPD's consumer research numbers that claim Chromebooks are getting 20-25% of the sub-$300 PC market. From the article, "The NPD says that Google’s Chromebook has now gained 20 to 25 percent of the sub-$300 laptop market in the U.S. That’s a huge gain for a computer that’s only been on the market for two years. It’s even more impressive when you consider that Chromebooks were seen as nothing but a self-serving experiment on the part of Google for the first year of their existence." Stephen Vaughan-Nichols is also blogging about this over at ZDnet. While the PC market shrank again in the second quarter of 2013, Chromebooks seem to have grown.
48367289
submission
puddingebola writes:
Youtube is livestreaming the Solar Impulse flight across the US to New York. The solar powered aircraft is on the last leg of its flight, having left Washington DC this morning.
47909637
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "UCLA researchers have found that older adults who regularly used a brain-fitness program on a computer demonstrated significantly improved memory and language skills. The UCLA team studied 69 dementia-free participants, with an average age of 82, who were recruited from retirement communities in Southern California. The participants played a computerized brain-fitness program called Dakim BrainFitness, which trains individuals through more than 400 exercises in the areas of short- and long-term memory, language, visual-spatial processing, reasoning and problem-solving, and calculation skills."
47886037
submission
puddingebola writes:
John Morris at CNET offers a brief review of PC Android devices, many of them hybrids running Windows 8 and Android. From the article, "Microsoft has spent a lot of time and effort trying to get Windows onto smartphones and tablets--so far without a whole lot to show for it. Now several PC companies are trying the opposite approach, taking the Android operating system and porting it to PCs." The article reviews the recent releases from HP, Acer, Asus, and Samsung. Does Android creeping onto desktop or "traditional" PC devices have any kind of possible long term consequences? Could this be a way for Android and Google to develop a larger presence in corporate IT, or could Android ever really supplant the Windows foothold?
47769833
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "California's Department of Financial Institutions has issued a cease and desist letter to the Bitcoin Foundation for "allegedly engaging in the business of money transmission without a license or proper authorization," according to Forbes. The news comes after Bitcoin held its "Future of Payments" conference in San Jose last month."
47380467
submission
puddingebola writes:
From the article, "A previously undetected layer in the cornea, the clear window at the front of the human eye, has been discovered by scientists at The University of Nottingham. This new layer, called the Dua’s Layer after Professor Harminder Dua who discovered it, could help surgeons to dramatically improve outcomes for patients undergoing corneal grafts and transplants. This is a major discovery that will mean that ophthalmology textbooks will literally need to be re-written. Having identified this new and distinct layer deep in the tissue of the cornea, we can now exploit its presence to make operations much safer and simpler for patients,” said Dua, Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences."
