80849633
submission
Bismillah writes:
Westfield's Scentre Group has removed SMS notifications for its ticketless parking system after it was discovered they could be used to track other people's cars unnoticed. The system allows you to enter any licence plate, which in turn will be scanned upon entry and exit at mall parking facilities — and when the free parking time is up, a notification message is sent to the mobile phone number entered, with the exact location of the car.
57057765
submission
alphadogg writes:
Ahead of a major new spectrum auction scheduled for next year, America's four major wireless carriers are jockeying for position in the frequencies available to them, buying, selling and trading licenses to important parts of the nation's airwaves. Surging demand for mobile bandwidth, fueled by an increasingly saturated smartphone market and data-hungry apps, has showed no signs of slowing down. This, understandably, has the wireless industry scrambling to improve its infrastructure in a number of areas, including the amounts of raw spectrum available to the carriers. These shifts, however, are essentially just lateral moves – nothing to directly solve the problems posed by a crowded spectrum. What’s really going to save the wireless world, some experts think, is a more comprehensive re-imagining of the way spectrum is used.
55088259
submission
ananyo writes:
From a few fragments out of a collection of 23-century-old Chinese bamboo strips, historians have pieced together what they say is the world's oldest example of a multiplication table in base 10.
Each strip is about 7 to 12 millimetres wide and half a metre long, and has a vertical line of ancient Chinese calligraphy painted on it in black ink. The bamboo pieces constitute 65 ancient texts and are thought to be among the most important artefacts from the Warring States period before the unification of China. But 21 bamboo strips contained only numbers and, on closer inspection, turned out to be a multiplication table.
As in a modern multiplication table, the entries at the intersection of each row and column in the matrix provide the results of multiplying the corresponding numbers. The table can also help users to multiply any whole or half integer between 0.5 and 99.5. The researchers suspect that officials used the multiplication table to calculate surface area of land, yields of crops and the amounts of taxes owed.
55087953
submission
mpicpp writes:
Intel has put a PC into an SD card-sized casing. Dubbed Edison, the micro-microcomputer marks the chip giant’s first attempt to address the emerging wearable computing business; part of its strategy to cope with a world where punters buy far fewer traditional personal computers.
Edison is based on Intel’s Quark chip, which is a 22nm low power processor
8360204
submission
ideonexus writes:
South Korea, China, Brazil, parts of Europe, and Japan have been watching television on their phones for free since 2005, but American mobile carriers are struggling to offer clunky streaming video using Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO system for an additional monthly fee and excessive bandwidth demands. Now, with America having gone digital in June, if Mobile carriers were to have ATSC M/H (advanced television systems committee—mobile/handheld) television-tuner chips built into their handsets it sounds like we could enjoy free TV on our cell phones too; however, these companies have already invested a great deal of money adapting their networks to Qualcomm's format and Qualcomm is considering becoming a Mobile-television distributor itself.
