Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Raspberry Pi
Note: the Pi Towers team have peeled away from their desks to spend time with their families over the festive season, and this blog will be quiet for a while as a result. We’ll be back in the New Year with a bushel of amazing projects, awesome resources, and much merriment and fun times. Happy holidays to all!
Now back to the matter at hand. Your brand new Christmas Raspberry Pi.
Your new Raspberry Pi
Did you wake up this morning to find a new Raspberry Pi under the tree? Congratulations, and welcome to the Raspberry Pi community! You’re one of us now, and we’re happy to have you on board.
But what if you’ve never seen a Raspberry Pi before? What are you supposed to do with it? What’s all the fuss about, and why does your new computer look so naked?
Setting up your Raspberry Pi
Are you comfy? Good. Then let us begin.
Download our free operating system
First of all, you need to make sure you have an operating system on your micro SD card: we suggest Raspbian, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s official supported operating system. If your Pi is part of a starter kit, you might find that it comes with a micro SD card that already has Raspbian preinstalled. If not, you can download Raspbian for free from our website.
An easy way to get Raspbian onto your SD card is to use a free tool called Etcher. Watch The MagPi’s Lucy Hattersley show you what you need to do. You can also use NOOBS to install Raspbian on your SD card, and our Getting Started guide explains how to do that.
Plug it in and turn it on
Your new Raspberry Pi 3 comes with four USB ports and an HDMI port. These allow you to plug in a keyboard, a mouse, and a television or monitor. If you have a Raspberry Pi Zero, you may need adapters to connect your devices to its micro USB and micro HDMI ports. Both the Raspberry Pi 3 and the Raspberry Pi Zero W have onboard wireless LAN, so you can connect to your home network, and you can also plug an Ethernet cable into the Pi 3.
Make sure to plug the power cable in last. There’s no ‘on’ switch, so your Pi will turn on as soon as you connect the power. Raspberry Pi uses a micro USB power supply, so you can use a phone charger if you didn’t receive one as part of a kit.
Learn with our free projects
If you’ve never used a Raspberry Pi before, or you’re new to the world of coding, the best place to start is our projects site. It’s packed with free projects that will guide you through the basics of coding and digital making. You can create projects right on your screen using Scratch and Python, connect a speaker to make music with Sonic Pi, and upgrade your skills to physical making using items from around your house.
Here’s James to show you how to build a whoopee cushion using a Raspberry Pi, paper plates, tin foil and a sponge:
Explore the world of Raspberry Pi physical computing with our free FutureLearn courses: http://rpf.io/futurelearn Free make your own Whoopi Cushion resource: http://rpf.io/whoopi For more information on Raspberry Pi and the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, including Code Club and CoderDojo, visit http://rpf.io Our resources are free to use in schools, clubs, at home and at events.
Diving deeper
You’ve plundered our projects, you’ve successfully rigged every chair in the house to make rude noises, and now you want to dive deeper into digital making. Good! While you’re digesting your Christmas dinner, take a moment to skim through the Raspberry Pi blog for inspiration. You’ll find projects from across our worldwide community, with everything from home automation projects and retrofit upgrades, to robots, gaming systems, and cameras.
You’ll also find bucketloads of ideas in The MagPi magazine, the official monthly Raspberry Pi publication, available in both print and digital format. You can download every issue for free. If you subscribe, you’ll get a Raspberry Pi Zero W to add to your new collection. HackSpace magazine is another fantastic place to turn for Raspberry Pi projects, along with other maker projects and tutorials.
And, of course, simply typing “Raspberry Pi projects” into your preferred search engine will find thousands of ideas. Sites like Hackster, Hackaday, Instructables, Pimoroni, and Adafruit all have plenty of fab Raspberry Pi tutorials that they’ve devised themselves and that community members like you have created.
And finally
If you make something marvellous with your new Raspberry Pi – and we know you will – don’t forget to share it with us! Our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+ accounts are brimming with chatter, projects, and events. And our forums are a great place to visit if you have questions about your Raspberry Pi or if you need some help.
It’s good to get together with like-minded folks, so check out the growing Raspberry Jam movement. Raspberry Jams are community-run events where makers and enthusiasts can meet other makers, show off their projects, and join in with workshops and discussions. Find your nearest Jam here.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Raspberry Pi] December 25, 2017 at 03:11AM. Credit to Author and Raspberry Pi | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
Tesla started delivering the Model 3 in higher volumes this week and we are seeing new owners already testing the market again.
Now a new Model 3 is apparently going up for auction starting at $120,000.
Tesla made early Model 3 owners benefiting from the “employee special priority” delivery sign an agreement to prevent them from selling the vehicle for a profit.
The company wrote in an email to employees about to purchase the Model 3:
“Because employees are receiving special priority, all Model 3 cars prioritized to employees must be registered to you or your family member and may not be resold for more than the original price. Reservation holders will agree to these terms when their order is placed.”
But there have been doubts about the enforceability of such an agreement from the beginning.
Now that customer deliveries without “employee special priority” are starting, Model 3 vehicles not bound to the agreement regardless of its enforceability are going on the market.
Someone is now listing a Model 3 goes on sale at $120,000 on Craiglist:
I think there are a few important things to take into account here.
First off, be careful of fake ads. With all the attention around the Model 3, there could be people trying to scam buyers.
There have been instances of people listing coveted items on eBay and Craiglist and asking deposit sight-unseen.
Of course, we would recommend against that.
In this case, there’s strangely no picture taken from inside the vehicle, which is always a red flag, though there are pictures taken with the doors open.
The VIN comes back positive, which is also a good sign, but VINs are easily visible from outside the vehicle so it’s not a guarantee either. Interestingly, the VIN is low for a vehicle delivered to a regular customer so this could be a vehicle with employee priority delivery.
Most Model 3 VINs confirmed to regular buyers have been #2000 and up.
Lastly, what’s up with the price? I have no problem with people trying to flip the vehicle for a profit since it’s in high demand and if you don’t want to wait, that can be worth a premium to some people.
But $120,000 is pushing it to a different level.
I don’t think anyone is going to pay that price just to get it sooner and it’s not like this is going to be a collector item either. We estimate that there could already be as many as 1,000 Model 3 vehicles on the road today and there will likely be hundreds of thousands by this time next year.
In my opinion, if anyone is buying this Model 3 at the asking price, it’s going to be an automaker looking to benchmark or reverse-engineer a Model 3, which happened to Tesla’s other vehicles in the past.
Anybody else would just get a Model S P100D for that price instead. No?
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 23, 2017 at 10:55AM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Curbed – All
Very impressive
It’s the end of 2017, which means tiny houses are kind of old news. By that we mean, this has been another year of so many new micro homes on wheels (or not) in all shapes, sizes, styles, and settings—which also means that it now takes a lot to impress.
Still, the year was not without some truly wow-worthy designs. Below, we recap the best tiny residences we covered in 2017 (though we did love this tiny house library as well). Whether it’s through innovative layout and engineering, or next-level interiors and amenities, these selections suggest that the tiny living world is as creative as ever and, perhaps, the best is yet to come.
The Aurora from Canadian builder ZeroSquared is an expandable tiny house with two motorized pop-out rooms that create over 374 square feet of living and storage space. The slide-outs allow a wide living space at the center of the house, big enough for a Queen-size Murphy bed on one side and a sofa and flatscreen TV on the other. The kitchen and bathroom are at the two ends of the house. Intrigued? That’ll be $88,900, please.
Setting aside the basic premise that tiny homes are supposed to be tiny, the Ohana from Viva Collectiv is rather ingenious, combining two tiny homes and an open-air sunroom into one impressive compact family home. One wing holds the kitchen, bathroom, and master bedroom, while the other contains the living room and lofted bedroom for the kids. An honorable mention with a similar ethos is this clever tiny house with a second trailer for a porch and greenhouse.
Major tiny house builder Escape released a go-big-or-go-home model this year in the One XL, which features trendy Shou Sugi Ban charred siding, a large picture window, option for French doors, and nearly 400 square feet of living space. It can sleep up to eight with two lofts and a spacious common area. Introductory pricing starts at $69,800.
Readers absolutely loved the new Roadhaus design from turn-key cabin builder Wheelhaus. Available in sizes of between 160 to 240 square feet, the modern-meets-industrial Roadhouse has tons of glazing, a kitchenette, and chrome-tiled bathroom. It starts at $76,000 and can be used as a main residence, guesthouse, or backyard office.
A motorized drop-down bed? Yup, self-taught carpenter Ana White and her husband, Jacob, did just that for this 24-foot-long tiny house. In addition to the $500 DIY retractable bed, the sectional sofa can also be rearranged into a guest bed, while modular storage cubes can serve as portable steps.
Following up on the jaw-dropping Alpha tiny house, the Escher from New Frontier Tiny Homes is bigger, pricier, and just as if not more luxurious. The 300-square-foot design, which sports sleek, industrial vibes, has one cantilevered master bedroom tucked behind doors in the kitchen area and a second loft above the bathroom. You’ve got to take a look at all the photos, because this house is bout details, details, details.
Everything you loved about Craftsman homes is channeled in small-scale in this design from Handcrafted Movement. The 290-square-foot model features deep blue wall paneling, herringbone floors, a curved oak butcher block countertop, geometric open shelving, farmhouse sink, and a loft under a skylight.
This “European-inspired” tiny house built by Florida couple Roberta and Rebekah Sofia is full of charming touches, from custom reclaimed windows to, yes, a pizza oven fireplace. Arched beams, a tree branch handrail, and a little chandelier over the dining area are all details you don’t see in the average tiny home.
We gotta give it to this “Earth and Sky Palace” for totally owning its aesthetic. The home, clocking in at just under 200 square feet, offers a master bedroom, dining room, kitchen, and bath with walk-in shower. The interior also has a surround sound theater system, smartphone-controlled A/C, and “replica embossed alligator-skin wallpaper.”
Custom designed by Tiny Heirloom, this 28-foot-long tiny house features an entire facade covered in commercial-grade reconfigurable climbing panels,. Inside, the home has a garage-style door opening, a built-in seating area, lofted office/lounge, and a kitchen with full-sized appliances, and bright blue cabinets.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Curbed – All] December 20, 2017 at 02:14PM. Credit to Author and Curbed – All | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to CNET How To
Installing a doorbell is so much easier than you’d think. Like Ring’s original Video Doorbell, the Ring Video Doorbell 2 can be either hardwired, or powered by the included rechargeable battery. Here’s how to replace your existing buzzer with the Ring Video Doorbell 2 in no time.
Step 1: Charge and install the included battery
Even if you hardwire this doorbell, you still need to install its rechargeable battery as a backup. Unlike the first-gen Ring buzzer, this model has a removable, rechargeable battery. That feature makes it incredibly simple to charge — even after you’ve mounted the doorbell to the wall.
Simply connect the battery to the included power adapter. When the red status light disappears, the battery is fully charged.
5
A simpler design helps Ring’s Video Doorbell 2 shine
Step 2: Download the Ring app on your phone
Download the Ring app on your iPhone or Android device. The app will be your main point of access for your Video Doorbell 2. It’s where you’ll receive alerts and be able to talk with visitors via the live video screen.
But before you can do all that, you have to connect your new doorbell to the app. Fortunately, Ring makes this process very easy — just open the app, create an account and follow the steps.
Step 3: Install the battery and complete the app setup
Attach the battery to the doorbell and wait for it to power on. Note: If one of the included faceplates is already attached, remove it before inserting the battery by pulling down and away from the doorbell.
Press the button on the upper right corner of the Video Doorbell 2 and select the Ring Wi-Fi network in your phone’s settings. Return to the Ring app, select your local Wi-Fi network and enter the password to connect. Now your Ring Video Doorbell 2 is online.
Step 4: Turn off power to your current doorbell
Before removing your existing wired doorbell, make sure you’ve turned off power at the circuit breaker. At this point, you can uninstall your old doorbell and set it aside.
Note: Not sold on the Ring Video Doorbell 2? Here’s an overview of Ring’s complete DIY doorbell lineup: Read more…
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [CNET How To] December 26, 2017 at 08:59AM. Credit to Author and CNET How To | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to The Verge
Most people who use Google Maps do so without much attention to detail. We just need the directions, the right subway route, or the name of that good sushi place. We don’t spend too much time pondering how Google got so good at mapping the world, and what decisions and choices were made along the way that have made it the go-to navigational tool of our time.
Justin O’Beirne pays attention to these types of details. He’s a cartographer who helped contribute to Apple Maps. So we should trust him when he explains — in depth — about what makes Google Maps so superior to any other mapping service.
This week, he published a fascinating essay that explains the concept of the “Google Maps’ Moat.” By this, he means the layers of data surrounding Google Maps that basically makes it basically impossible for Apple or any competitor to ever catch up. “Google has gathered so much data, in so many areas, that it’s now crunching it together and creating features that Apple can’t make — surrounding Google Maps with a moat of time,” he writes. “It makes you wonder how long back Google was planning all of this—and what it’s planning next…”
O’Beirne starts out by marveling at the level of detail available in Google Maps for even extremely small towns, such as the one where he grew up in rural Illinois. He highlights how Google, unlike Apple, is able to display the shapes of individual buildings and even smaller structures like tool sheds and mobile homes. These minute details can be found even in towns with populations in the double-digits. He uses this to lament the corresponding lack of detail in Apple Maps.
He charts the history of Google’s efforts to add buildings large and small, highlighting the search giant’s announcement from 2012 that they were “algorithmically created by taking aerial imagery and using computer vision techniques to render the building shapes.” So in addition to getting a first-person street view of your route, you can zoom outward to seeing a computer-rendered model of the surrounding area for contextual information such as the shapes and sizes of buildings.
He concludes that aerial imagery from satellites has outpaced Google’s famous Street View vehicles in the amount of data used to create these vivid tableaus. And he asks an important question: “[H]ow long until Google has every structure on Earth?”
Then things get interesting. O’Beirne introduces us to two researchers, Rachelle Annechino and Yo-Shang Cheng, who observed that people often describe the layout of their city as it relates to “main drags” or “commercial corridors.” He then goes on to describe Google’s unique approach to highlighting these “Areas of Interest” (AOI). About a year ago, these “main drags” began showing up in Google Maps as clusters of orange buildings. Google communicates these “Areas of Interest” to its users through a specific orange shading, but with a level of detail that is truly stunning.
O’Beirne writes (emphasis his):
This suggests that Google took its buildings and crunched them against its places. In other words, Google appears to be creating these orange buildings by matching its building and place datasets together[.]
[…]
So Google seems to be creating AOIs out of its building and place data. But what’s most interesting is that Google’s building and place data are themselves extracted from other Google Maps features.
[…]
In other words, Google’s buildings are byproducts of its Satellite/Aerial imagery. And some of Google’s places are byproducts of its Street View imagery…so this makes AOIs a byproduct of byproducts.
This is bonkers, isn’t it? Google is creating data out of data.
This leads O’Beirne to draw some pretty interesting conclusions. If Google has mapped all the buildings and knows precisely what businesses and points of interest are located within, then perhaps the search giant can install augmented reality windshields in its self-driving cars that tell you everything you need to know about adjacent structures. As you’re driving through a city — or being driven, rather — Google Maps can use its accumulated data to pinpoint buildings where you have an upcoming appointment, for example.
Another possibility is a ride-hailing service more accurate than Uber. An essay by The Verge’s editor-in-chief Nilay Patel makes a cameo in O’Beirne’s story to highlight the difficulty faced by ride-hailing apps like Uber and Lyft in pinpointing exact pickup and drop-off locations. Uber and Lyft drivers already use Google Maps and Google-owned Waze in such high volumes that both ride-hail services threw up their hands and integrated Google’s exceptional navigation tools into their own apps.
O’Beirne fails to mention Google’s own ride-hail ambitions. Waymo, the self-driving division of Google parent Alphabet, is developing its own ride-hail app in anticipation of launching a commercial self-driving mobility service next year. And Waze has been piloting a car-pooling service in California for the past year.
It’s clear that Google has its sights set on the lucrative ride-hailing market. And with a powerful tool like Google Maps in its arsenal, it could have its leg up over its more established players.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [The Verge] December 24, 2017 at 11:05AM. Credit to Author and The Verge | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Samsung Global Newsroom
Today the 3GPP TSG RAN Plenary Meeting in Lisbon successfully completed the first implementable 5G NR specification. AT&T, BT, China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Huawei, Intel, KT Corporation, LG Electronics, LG Uplus, MediaTek Inc., NEC Corporation, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., Samsung Electronics, SK Telecom, Sony Mobile Communications Inc., Sprint, TIM, Telefonica, Telia Company, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, Vodafone, and ZTE have made a statement that the completion of the first 5G NR standard has set the stage for the global mobile industry to start full-scale development of 5G NR for large-scale trials and commercial deployments as early as in 2019.
On February 27, 2017 in Barcelona, global mobile industry leaders announced their support for the acceleration of the 5G NR standardization schedule, which introduced an intermediate milestone to complete the first implementable specification for Non-Standalone 5G NR operation. As a result of this announcement, the schedule acceleration was agreed at the 3GPP RAN Plenary Meeting on March 9 in Dubrovnik, Croatia. This first specification was completed as part of 3GPP Release 15.
This standard completion is an essential milestone to enable cost-effective and full-scale development of 5G NR, which will greatly enhance the capabilities of 3GPP systems, as well as facilitate the creation of vertical market opportunities. 3GPP plans to continue to develop Release 15, including the addition of support for Standalone 5G NR operation also agreed upon by 3GPP in Dubrovnik. The 5G NR lower layer specifications have been designed so that they can support Standalone and Non-Standalone 5G NR operation in a unified way, to ensure that 3GPP benefits the global industry with a large-scale single 5G NR ecosystem. We express our appreciation for the tremendous efforts that 3GPP has dedicated to accomplishing this challenging standardization schedule.
AT&T
“We’re proud to see the completion of this set of standards. Reaching this milestone enables the next phase of equipment availability and movement to interoperability testing and early 5G availability,” said Hank Kafka, VP Access Architecture and Analytics at AT&T. “It showcases the dedication and leadership of the industry participants in 3GPP to follow through on accelerating standards to allow for faster technology deployments.”
BT
“BT welcomes the first significant step to 5G deployment and we remain excited about the further innovations that 5G will bring.” said Neil J. McRae, Chief Architect at BT, “We are proud to have played a part in this and BT is committed to continuing to drive further 5G standardisation at pace to benefit our customers and communities.”
China Mobile
“The first version of 5G NR not only provides a NSA solution for 5G deployment but also completes the common part of NSA and SA, which lay a solid foundation for a global unified 5G system with global market scale. We believe the next important milestone that is SA standard providing end to end 5G new capability could be completed by June of 2018, which is very crucial to enable the operators to explore the enterprise and vertical markets. China Mobile is actively working with industry partners for 5G commercialization in year of 2020 and providing various services to customer. ” said Zhengmao Li, EVP of China Mobile Group.
China Telecom
“China Telecom is proud of being part of the 3GPP standard efforts that led to the completion of the first implementable 5G new radio specification. We expect that this important milestone, together with the SA part to be completed later, will promote and accelerate the development of 5G products, trials and commercial deployment in the coming years,” said Liu Guiqing, EVP of China Telecom. “With this successful completion of the 5G new radio standard, China Telecom plans to lead the 5G effort by launching field trials in many major cities in China as early as 2018, and prepare for the possible commercialization thereafter.”
China Unicom
Guanglu Shao, EVP of China Unicom Group, said: “It is the significant step for both 3GPP and the whole industry. This first version of 5G NR standardization provides essential functionalities for NSA and SA deployment, which are equally important for operators. We believe in that the industry could joint together further to make 5G more advanced for both human and vertical societies. We welcome the 5G era’s coming, and will continue collaborate with industry partners to make successful 5G commercialization.”
Deutsche Telekom
“We view both the Non-Standalone and Standalone modes of New Radio as equally important for the completeness of the 5G standard specification. This timely finalization of NSA is one important step on that journey and in the development of the 5G ecosystem,” said Bruno Jacobfeuerborn, CTO Deutsche Telekom. “It is crucial that the industry now redoubles its focus on the Standalone mode to achieve progress towards a full 5G system, so we can bring key 5G innovations such as network slicing to our customers.”
Ericsson
Erik Ekudden, CTO at Ericsson, said: “3GPP has done a tremendous job to complete the first 5G specifications according to industry demand and expectations. As a prime contributor to 5G standardization, Ericsson has worked with industry partners in the evolution of mobile technology to a global network platform for consumers and enterprises. Our research team has worked on 5G since 2010 including early 5G testbed efforts created together with these industry partners. The open contribution-driven specification work and the rapid completion of the first 5G standards for global deployment demonstrates the strength of the 5G eco-system.”
Fujitsu
Masayuki Seno, EVP and Head of Network Products Business Unit at Fujitsu, said: “I’m very pleased that the first 5G NR standard has been completed today. Fujitsu will accelerate development of 5G NR products based on the first 3GPP 5G NR specifications and provide them to worldwide markets to support our customers’ trials and commercial deployments.”
Huawei
Yang Chaobin, president of Huawei 5G product line, said: “As one of the key players, Huawei has committed to develop a single global 5G standard. With the a successful cooperation and join efforts with global organizations including governments, regulatory agencies, research organizations, academia, industries, and many more sectors, 3GPP 5G NR standardization Phase 1 has been completed with great progress. Huawei will keep working with global partners to bring 5G into the period of large-scale global commercial deployment from 2018.”
Intel
“We are pleased to work in cooperation and close alignment with global mobile industry leaders to support the new 3GPP Non-Standalone 5G NR standard and to accelerate the first NR trials,” said Asha Keddy, Intel vice president and general manager, Next Generation and Standards. “As part of this coordinated effort, Intel will continue to play a leading role across the network, cloud and client devices; and with our first commercial 5G modems, we will help the ecosystem lead the way to 5G deployments worldwide.”
KT Corporation
Dongmyun Lee, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Institute of Convergence Technology, KT said: “As one of the 5G leaders, we are greatly excited to witness the first ever release of 5G NR NSA specification that the whole industry including KT has endeavored to achieve in recent years and therefore make a strong commitment to finally bring full-scale services of the true 5G standards to commercial market as early as 2019.”
KT expects that such 3GPP’s efforts meeting the market needs will further accelerate the realization of the 4th Industrial Revolution for telecommunication industry.”
LG Electronics
I.P. Park, Chief Technology Officer, said: “LG Electronics is pleased to be one of key contributors to the first global 5G NR standard completed in a timely manner, which will play a pivotal role in enabling innovative IoT services and expediting the convergence of diverse industry sectors. Along with continued contributions to evolved 5G standards, we will make all the efforts to introduce new innovative 5G convergence products and services in the market.”
LG Uplus
Joosik Choi, Head of 5G Strategy Planning, said: “We would like to thank to 3GPP and all companies for great effort on initial 5G NR NSA standard which will accelerate promising future. As one of the big contributor for RF analysis on LTE band, 3.5GHz and 28GHz dual connectivity operation, LG Uplus will keep endeavor for bring 5G NR deployment and advanced standard into industry for this ecosystem.”
MediaTek Inc.
“The milestone reached is significant as it is an important step towards making 5G NR a commercial reality,” said Dr. Kevin Jou, Corporate Sr. Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, MediaTek. “As a leading baseband chip provider, MediaTek has actively contributed to the standardization of 5G NR and will continue to do so. With the standard becoming stable, our focus is now on delivering viable commercial solutions that will enable the use of 5G NR technology to its full potential.”
NEC Corporation
Atsuo Kawamura, executive vice president and head of the Telecom Carrier Business Unit at NEC Corporation, said: “Completion of Non-Standalone 5G NR standardization is a significant milestone for the realization of full-scale 5G services. NEC is strongly committed to driving the progress of standardization for a global mobile system, and believes future 5G services will benefit society in an unprecedented manner by utilizing advanced information and communications technologies. NEC is creating secure and intelligent technologies to realize such services.”
Nokia
Marcus Weldon, president of Nokia Bell Labs and chief technology officer, Nokia, said: “This is a key milestone in bringing 5G to market, and one in which Nokia is proud to have played a significant role. 5G will advance new possibilities for the role of wireless technology in society, leading to dynamic innovation in mobile broadband and in industrial automation for industry 4.0, enabling the creation of exciting new applications that connect and control our physical and digital worlds.”
NTT DOCOMO
Dr. Hiroshi Nakamura, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, NTT DOCOMO said: “ I would like to express my deepest gratitude for 3GPP’s great effort to successfully complete the first release of 5G NR specification six months ahead of schedule. NTT DOCOMO has made tremendous contributions to the standardization as a world-leading mobile operator. We have been collaborating with various partners across industries to co-create 5G services through ‘5G Trial Sites’ since this May. This completion will accelerate these activities and we will launch 5G services with Non-Standalone 5G NR by 2020.”
Orange
Arnaud Vamparys, SVP Radio Networks said: “Orange welcomes this inaugural first release of a worldwide standard for 5G. With subsequent 3GPP releases expected from mid 2018 that will accelerate application and IoT development, Orange sees a myriad of opportunities to deliver a differentiated and high quality network, and is therefore fully committed to working with the industry to roll out 5G. ”
Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.
“We are excited to be part of this significant milestone, and to once again be at the forefront making the 5G vision a reality in 2019,” said Cristiano Amon, executive vice president, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and president, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies. “We look forward to continue working with our mobile industry peers to bring 5G NR commercial networks and devices in 2019 in smartphone and other form factors, for both sub-6Ghz and mmWave frequency bands, and to continue developing 5G technologies to connect new industries and enable new services and user experiences in the years to come.”
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
DJ Koh, President and Head of IT and Mobile Communications Division at Samsung Electronics, said: “As a global leader in the mobile industry, Samsung has been collaborating with the whole industry to achieve this milestone in 5G standards. With the completion of 5G NSA NR standard, we will be able to expedite 5G commercial deployments including chipsets, devices and network equipment. Samsung will continue making every effort to deliver complete Rel-15 NR standards. Rel-15 NR and its further evolution will be a key milestone for the industry to meet the increasing global demand for enhanced mobile broadband services and exploring new business opportunities and services inspired by 5G.”
SK Telecom
“Having global 3GPP 5G NR standard by 2017 is one of key milestones to bring 5G into early commercial service in 2019”, said Jinhyo Park, EVP, Head of ICT R&D Center, “SK Telecom is proud to be one of key contributors to the accelerated 3GPP 5G NSA-NR standardization. We will continue to work on further development of 3GPP 5G NR to ensure readiness for early 5G commercial deployment.”
Sony Mobile Communications Inc.
Mr. Izumi Kawanishi, Director, EVP, Sony Mobile Communications Inc., said: “Sony has been part of the 5G NR and NSA standardization and recognizes the progress in 3GPP to reach this important milestone with features targeting evolved mobile broadband and ultra low latency communications. Sony Mobile is ready for full-scale development of 5G NR smartphones to take benefit of the opportunities offered by the new standard.”
Sprint
“We’re excited to help usher in the next generation of wireless networks that will drive new levels of innovation and progress around the world,” said Dr. John Saw, Sprint CTO.“We congratulate 3GPP and its delegates on this important milestone, and we look forward to working with our industry partners to deploy 5G NR in our 2.5 GHz (NR band n41) spectrum.”
TIM
Mr. Giovanni Ferigo, CTO, said: “TIM has already defined a sound track towards 5G and is collaborating with key industry players, municipalities and public Institutions to unleash the full potential of 5G for people and vertical markets by 2020 expanding the footprint of LTE-A. The extraordinary work done in 3GPP in a few months to keep the promise of a first set of standards coping with the strict requirements of a new radio interface is a fundamental step in this roadmap. We are looking forward to contributing to the next 3GPP milestones which will complete the work on Release 15.”
Telefonica
Mr. Enrique Blanco, Telefónica’s Global Systems and Networks Director, said: “Telefónica greatly appreciates the efforts made by the industry for completing this major milestone towards 5G. Telefónica acknowledges the full potential of 5G, and encourages the industry to keep developing ambitious ideas in order to deliver outstanding connectivity and bring the best possible experience to our customers. Telefónica is fully committed to working with the industry in this direction.”
Telia Company
“We are happy to see that the acceleration of 5G standardization that we and the whole industry called for in February has been achieved. This allows for the early commercial deployments needed to open up for innovation and new business opportunities that our customers expect from us”, says Mauro Costa, Director Network Architecture & Strategy, Telia Company. “In order for the industry and society to take advantage of the full potential of 5G, it is vital that the standardization now continues with a focus to complete also the stand alone version.”
T-Mobile USA
“This is an important moment and a crucial development toward making 5G NR happen,” said Neville Ray, Chief Technology Officer for T-Mobile US. “At T-Mobile, we’re committed to drive a 5G rollout across the US in 2020, and the efforts of 3GPP will help us to realize this great win for our customers.”
Verizon
“Verizon is delighted that the 3GPP is moving quickly to release a global standard for mobile 5G,” said Ed Chan, Chief Technology Architect and Network Planning.“With this important 3GPP milestone, Verizon is once again well positioned to deliver next-generation technology to customers just as we did with 4G LTE.”
Vodafone
Luke Ibbetson, Head of Vodafone Group R&D said: “Completion of the 5G standard six months earlier than originally anticipated is a significant milestone that should enable compliant network infrastructure and phones to be delivered in line with our requirements. This first version of 5G will build on the success of 4G, providing fast and highly efficient mobile broadband services to our customers and setting the foundation for the Gigabit Society.”
ZTE
Mr. Xu Huijun, CTO of ZTE Corporation, said: “The completion of the Non-Standalone 5G NR standardization is a critical milestone in the industry. I really appreciate 3GPP’s efforts in meeting this challenging schedule. As one of the contributors to the 5G standards-making process, ZTE will partner with the fellow mobile industry players to commit to accelerating the 5G NR large-scale trials and deployments.”
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Samsung Global Newsroom] December 21, 2017 at 04:33AM. Credit to Author and Samsung Global Newsroom | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechRadar – All the latest technology news
Since the release of Android Wear 2.0, the smartwatch ecosystem has been growing at a rapid pace with more and more improvements to the apps. Today, if you own an Android Wear smartwatch be it the latest Samsung Gear Sport or even a Moto 360, you’ll want to fill it with the best Android Wear apps around.
So we’ve put together a selection of the top choices on the Google Play Store right now. This list will give you the best selection of apps you can use to fly the flag of Google’s wearable OS.
To help you avoid the real Android Wear junk, here are 15 of our favorites for you to download – so let’s get started.
If you’re someone like me who forgets to drink water quite often but you do own a smartwatch, the Water Drink Reminder app will do just that for you. Users have to set a target as to how much water they want to consume during the day.
The app itself has a water intake calculator which suggests the appropriate amount of water against user’s weight. Along with this, they can also preset a default mug type and set a reminder. The app also tracks a user’s drinking water habits and gives insights based on the data.
A clearly laid-out, easy to read running app for joggers who don’t like fiddling with their phone but who also don’t like the complication that some dedicated running watches present.
Features include one-tap operation, start and stop with voice commands and easily viewable time, distance and calorie stats.
One of the most useful aspects of the Android OS is its payment system. Android Pay can be installed on a variety of Android Wear products, but you may want to triple check before you download it that your watch is compatible.
You’ll need NFC on your watch to be able to use this, but it’s just so simple to tap your watch on a contactless payment reader and not have to deal with cash anymore.
It may look like a complicated name, but IFTTT stands for “If This Then That”. It lets you link your ‘Channels’ – i.e. Facebook, Instagram, Gmail etc – by creating ‘Recipes’.
So, for instance, you can set things up so when you like an Instagram photo it’s instantly saved to your Dropbox. You can do this, get alerts and more straight from your Android Wear device
Golf anyone? Hole19 is a comprehensive Android golf assistant that itself is extremely helpful.
Given that taking your phone out on the course is a big no-no, you’ll be better off making use of the distance to the pin (using your mobile’s GPS) and scoring features on your smartwatch.
The popular cab hailing app is now on Android Wear and allows you to order a taxi directly from your wrist. If you don’t want to get your phone out of your pocket you can just do it all from your watch instead.
It’s also useful to keep track of where your taxi is, plus it’ll give you updates on the price and estimated arrival time when you’re on the journey itself. This is a must-have Android Wear app for anyone who uses Uber to get around.
Google Fit is a great fitness app, especially if you’re not just into running.
Strava and RunTastic Pro – previously highlighted in this list – specialize in speedily putting one foot in front of the other, while Google Fit is more useful for those interested in biking and walking (though it can track runs as well).
It has an easy to use interface and will display all of your fitness data on your wrist at the touch of a button. You can also connect Google Fit with a variety of other mobile fitness apps as well such as MyFitnessPal or LifeSum.
This is only suitable if you have a Nest product at home, but if you have a Nest Learning Thermostat this is a must-have on your Android Wear watch.
You can control your home heating directly from your wrist. If you want to get home to a lovely warm house while you’re riding back on the bus, you can just turn your heating on from your Android Wear watch. This is living the tech dream.
The likelihood is you have a Gmail account whether it’s for personal use or business, but you should set up the app on your wrist to make sure you’re always seeing your emails on time.
It means you won’t need to take your phone out of your pocket every time your phone buzzes. This is by far the best email client on Android and having it on your wrist makes it much easier to control.
One app we can imagine being useful for just about every Android Wear owner is TripAdvisor. Just like the mobile app, it lets you search for nearby restaurants, attractions and hotels.
Sure it cuts down the phone app experience a bit, but still lets you flick through 25 entries for each of those categories, and even check out the scores and review summaries for each place.
Like all the best Wear apps, it doesn’t feel like it chucks you out to the mobile phone app as soon as you try to do anything a bit more involved.
One of the best messaging clients is Facebook’s Messenger app. Anyone you’re friends with on Facebook is instantly available with this service and you’ll be alerted immediately on the Android Wear app when they send you a message.
You can also send messages, and even dictate your messages rather than typing them out, but you may only want to do this when in private rather than talking to your watch in public.
There are many great note apps on the market, but few are as good as Google Keep.
You can make to-do lists, notes and reminders in all forms, shapes and sizes. Just say “OK Google, take a note” and then dictate what you want the app to enter.
You can put images into your notes within the Android app, but you won’t be able to do that on an Android Wear watch. You’ll still get notifications with reminders to your wrist.
You Android smartwatch is also a tiny audio recorder, in case you didn’t knew. Smartwatches coming with an inbuilt mic can capture audio with a simple tap which can come in handy at times. Now, the Wear Audio Recorder comes with a host of new features like the material design, sound quality options, sync to Google Drive, invisible recording and much more.
You know the deal: swipe right to like, left to pass, like a horny modern day Roman Emperor. But what you might not know is that the phenomenon that is Tinder and Android Wear is a match made in heaven.
Just say “Start Tinder” to start swiping, send messages and view profiles all from the privacy of your wrist.
The most popular cycling app around, we imagine any keen cyclists out there will probably already have tried this hit.
There’s now also a Wear add-on. What this does is let your Wear watch act a bit like a cycle computer, telling you how long you’ve been riding and how fast you’re going. Buy yourself a handlebar mount and you’re there.
You do still need to take your phone out on rides, though, as this is a classic ‘second screen’ app.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Mashable
Eliminate port withdrawal.
Image: Zero lemon
By Team CommerceMashable Deals
You love the sleek, minimalist design of your brand new MacBook Pro. But how annoying is it that you can’t plug in all of your devices because of its inconvenient lack of ports? What the hell, Apple. Thankfully, there’s a simple add-on that can drastically expand your MacBook Pro’s port capabilities back to normalcy.
The iMemPro USB-C Hub plugs right into your MacBook Pro and features a ThunderBolt 3 port, a USB-C port, two USB 3.0 ports, a 4k HDMI port, and an SD/MicroSD card reader. You can even use the HDMI port to output high-resolution to a 4k monitor. With this tool, you get to have your cake and eat it too by packing your ultra-lightweight laptop with all the port abilities of a bigger computer.
That new MacBook Pro is powerful, but with the iMemPro USB-C Hub, it’ll be unstoppable.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Mashable] December 26, 2017 at 08:00AM. Credit to Author and Mashable | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Wired.com
For all the hype, electric cars still make up a tiny percentage of global vehicle sales. Like, less than one percent tiny. But there’s a growing movement around the world to put a deadline on the life of the internal combustion engine. This year India, the UK, Norway, the Netherlands, and France, amongst other states and cities, have said they want to phase out gas and diesel vehicles within the next few decades. The planet’s largest car market, China, is moving in the same direction. Government incentives influence car buyers attitudes, as evidenced by Norway, where EV sales now account for around 30 percent of sales.
With the longterm future of the fossil fuel-powered car under threat, automakers have no choice but to adapt. General Motors says it’s working towards a fully electric future. All of Britain’s Jaguar Land Rover cars and SUVs will have an electric option by 2020. Sweden’s Volvo is doing the same, by 2019.
All that means that if you’re looking to buy an electric car in 2018, you have more options than ever. (And despite early threats to do so, the newly passed tax bill didn’t touch the $7,500 federal tax credit for buying an electric car.) Tesla’s Model 3, the “affordable” sedan, should finally be available in large enough numbers to start filling some of the 400,000 back orders, if Elon Musk can pull it out of “production hell.”. Nissan’s 2018 Leaf, an update to the original electric car for the masses, has some new tech tricks, and at the high end Jaguar’s I-Pace will give Tesla a run for its money.
So if your plan is to go emissions free, 2018 is a good time to do it.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Wired.com] December 26, 2017 at 08:06AM. Credit to Author and Wired.com | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Digital Trends
Elon Musk’s battery in South Australia made international headlines earlier this month for being the biggest of its type in the world.
And now, just weeks after being activated, the very same battery is claiming another world record for the time it took to spring into action following a power outage.
Built by Musk’s Tesla company, the lithium-ion battery has 100 megawatts of capacity and is reportedly three times larger than the next biggest battery. Paired with the Hornsdale wind farm 120 miles north of Adelaide, Australia and operated by French renewable energy provider Neoen, the battery stores excess energy created by the wind turbines and is used when the region’s power sources suffer outages.
Last week the battery bounded into action just 140 milliseconds after a power plant in the neighboring state of Victoria suffered a failure that would ordinarily have led to a lengthy power cut, the International Business Times reported. The battery fed its stored energy into the national power grid, preventing an inconvenient blackout from affecting numerous homes in nearby towns and cities.
“That’s a record and the national operators were shocked at how quickly and efficiently the battery was able to deliver this type of energy into the market,” South Australia Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis told 5AA radio.
He said that the battery’s fast response time exceeded expectations, and it performed far better than others sources of backup power, adding that usually one of its power stations “would take half an hour to an hour to energize and synchronize into the market; the battery can do it in milliseconds.”
Musk became involved in the project to build a battery for South Australia when he heard that the local government was looking for solutions after the region was hit by a huge storm in September 2016. It was described as a once-in-every-50-years weather event and temporarily knocked out power for 1.7 million residents.
No slouch when it comes to grabbing headlines, Musk hit Twitter to make his pitch, saying that if Tesla failed to meet his own 100-day deadline to build the battery, he’d foot the $50 million bill. Tesla completed the project with about a week to spare.
The news of the battery’s record-breaking performance will be music to the ears of Musk. While Tesla is better known for its electric cars than the batteries that power them, their need for such a power source prompted the company to diversify into the field, going beyond vehicles to explore the home and commercial energy market. It’s now manufacturing batteries at its Gigafactory in Nevada, believed to be the largest facility of its kind in the world.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Digital Trends] December 26, 2017 at 02:59AM. Credit to Author and Digital Trends | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to BGR
The iPhone X has been sold out since the phone went on preorder in late October, but Apple has been ramping up production significantly to meet demand. Right now, you can order an iPhone X directly from Apple and have it shipped to your home in a matter of days.
However, Apple has reportedly cut iPhone X orders for the first quarter of 2018, as demand is supposedly fading.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [BGR] December 26, 2017 at 07:30AM. Credit to Author and BGR | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
DETROIT (Reuters) – United Parcel Service Inc (UPS.N) said on Tuesday it is buying 125 Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) all-electric semi-trucks, the largest known order for the big rig so far, as the package delivery company expands its fleet of alternative-fuel vehicles.
FILE PHOTO: Tesla’s new electric semi truck is unveiled during a presentation in Hawthorne, California, U.S. on November 16, 2017. REUTERS/Alexandria Sage/File Photo
Tesla is trying to convince the trucking community it can build an affordable electric big rig with the range and cargo capacity to compete with relatively low-cost, time-tested diesel trucks. This is the largest public order of the big rig so far, Tesla said.
Tesla unveiled its semi last month and expects the truck to be in production by 2019.
The Tesla trucks will cost around $200,000 each for a total order of about $25 million. UPS expects the semi-trucks, the big rigs that haul freight along America’s highways, will have a lower total cost of ownership than conventional vehicles, which run at about $120,000.
Tesla has received pre-orders from such major companies as Walmart (WMT.N), fleet operator J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc (JBHT.O) and food service distributor Sysco Corp (SYY.N)
Prior to UPS, the largest single pre-order came from PepsiCo Inc (PEP.N), for 100 trucks.
UPS said it has provided Tesla with data on how its trucks function on their real-world routes in order to evaluate how the vehicle should perform in its fleet.
“As with any introductory technology for our fleet, we want to make sure it’s in a position to succeed,” Scott Phillippi, UPS senior director for automotive maintenance and engineering for international operations, told Reuters.
Phillippi said the 125 trucks will allow UPS to conduct a proper test of their abilities. He said the company was still determining their routes, but the semis will “primarily be in the United States.” Tesla will provide consultation and support on charging infrastructure.
“We have high expectations and are very optimistic that this will be a good product and it will have firm support from Tesla to make it work,” Phillippi said.
The UPS alternative fuel fleet already includes trucks propelled by electricity, natural gas, propane and other non-traditional fuels.
About 260,000 semis, or heavy-duty Class-8 trucks, are produced in North America annually, according to FTR, an industry economics research firm.
Including the UPS order, Tesla has at least 410 pre-orders in hand, according to a Reuters tally.
Navistar International Corp (NAV.N) and Volkswagen AG VOWG-P.DE hope to launch a smaller, electric medium-duty truck by late 2019, while rival Daimler AG (DAIGn.DE) has delivered the first of a smaller range of electric trucks to customers in New York.
In afternoon trade on Nasdaq, Tesla shares were down nearly 1.1 percent at $335.24.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [reuters.com] December 18, 2017 at 07:06AM. Credit to Author and reuters.com | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechCrunch
Toyota is finally revealing the details of its plan to catch up with some of its rivals on electrification; the automaker has focused primarily on hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles before now, despite having led the market with the Prius – but it’s going to focus more on pure EVs going forward, with a plan to offer over 10 purely battery-powered vehicles from 2020 on, and a goal of making available either a hybrid or a fully electric version of every car it sells by 2025.
The announcement from Toyota comes via a Tokyo press briefing on Monday, which elaborates on earlier comments made by the company around its intent to target China first for fully electric vehicle sales. It’s also planning to sell sure EVs in Japan, India, Europe and the U.S., the automaker says.
To help make this happen, Toyota will partner with Panasonic on battery tech, including developing next-generation, new batteries as well as current gen lithium-ion power houses. It’s going to invest as much as $13.3 billion through 2030 in battery development in order to help it get up to pace in the EV space.
Toyota’s plans also involve getting to a point where around half of its annual vehicle sales are accounted for by electrified cars, including both hybrid and fully electric vehicles – it has a firm target of 5.5 million electrified vehicles sold annually by 2030.
This is the latest in a series of announcements over the past year or two from automakers declaring their intent to either push the accelerator on full, electrified vehicle slates, or focusing exclusively on non-ICE engines in some cases. Toyota had faced some criticism for being behind in this regard, so this announcement is a major declaration of its intent to chart a similar path as many of its rivals.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechCrunch] December 18, 2017 at 07:06AM. Credit to Author and TechCrunch | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to BGR
Tesla is the most talked-about car company for so many reasons. What began as a small startup has grown into a massive company with a larger market cap than BMW. Tesla has completely reshaped the global automotive landscape, forcing every major car company to accelerate its plans for electric vehicles.
I’m a big fan of Tesla as a company and I love what it’s doing to the auto industry right now. Tesla is changing the world. Full stop. But to be honest, I’ve never personally been a big fan of Tesla’s vehicles. As someone who has always had an affinity for German cars, Tesla’s styling was never to my taste. And the interiors… eesh. Modern Teslas are marvels when it comes to technology and performance, however, and I decided it was high time for me to see how far Tesla has come in the four years since I last drove one of its cars.
So, I headed down to Tesla’s Chelsea showroom in lower Manhattan late last month and drove away with a Model X P100DL.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [BGR] December 18, 2017 at 12:02PM. Credit to Author and BGR | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Android Central
It’s easier than ever to watch 4K content. It’s also more confusing than ever. This will point you in the right direction.
It’s all about 4K, right? Ask anyone about streaming video, and they’ll all try to push you toward the future, which is Ultra High-Definition, or UHD. We’re talking about resolution, or the number of pixels pushed to a display. More is better — it means crisper, sharper pictures.
Maybe.
The problem is that there are a whole lot of variables at work. You need a display that can do a native 4K resolution. Sure, 1080p is good, but it’s not 4K. And it can’t do 4K. Then you’ll need a streaming solution that does 4K resolution. That’s pretty easy to come by. And then you have to deal with the fact that you can’t do a thing about the source feed itself — what’s being fed to your streaming provider.
And things get a even more muddied when you consider things like HDR — both the display and the box need to support the same standards, whether it’s the open-source HDR10, or the proprietary Dolby Vision. Same goes for audio with Dolby Atmos. It can’t be just one or the other — both the display and the box have to support the standard.
So, yeah. It’s kind of a mess. Here’s a high-level look at streaming boxes to get you started.
What it is: Apple’s top-end streaming box. It starts at $179 for a 32GB model and ticks nearly every box on the specs sheet, including HDR10 and Dolby Vision. Plus it has an ethernet port for better connections to your network. It also serves as an Apple HomeKit hub.
Who it’s for: Pretty much everybody, but especially if you’ve got an iPhone, iPad or Mac, because you’re able to “AirPlay” over pretty much anything you can see on those devices on to your big-screen display. Also, this is the only device that can play content from Apple’s iTunes.
What it’s lacking: Not a whole lot. … You can even play back content you’ve bought Google Play Movies & TV. The biggest miss here is support for the Dolby Atmos audio standard. … It’s also lacking a good remote control. We’d recommend one of these instead.
What it is: It’s the best Android TV box you can buy, period. It retails for about $179. Like the Apple TV it ticks off nearly every box for specs. Plus it’s one of the smattering of Android TV boxes that has access to Amazon Video. It’s also one hell of a gaming rig. And it has voice-activated access to Google Assistant. It’s got Ethernet, HDR10 and Dolby Atmos support. Plus expandable storage.
Who it’s for: This one’s also for pretty much everybody. And while Android folks will certainly have the most seamless experience, remember that Chromecast (Google’s version of AirPlay) also extends to a whole bunch of iOS apps. And there are a whole bunch of quality games (and some not-so-quality) available for purchase, or by subscription via NVIDIA’s GeForce Now $7.99-a-month subscription service.
What it’s lacking: There’s no Dolby Vision on board, and no access to iTunes content. (Which Apple doesn’t give to anyone else anyway.) The remote control is small and prone to be lost.
What it is: Google’s $79 (or less, depending on sales) 4K streaming HDMI dongle. It’s not a full Android experience — instead it “casts” content from apps that support the Chromecast protocol. Because it’s a dongle it means it’s one fewer box to try to hide. It does HDR10 and Dolby Vision. You’ll use your phone (or Chrome browser) to control any and all content being fed to the Chromecast. There’s an Ethernet port built in to the power brick.
Who it’s for: Someone who wants a less-expensive option than the NVIDIA Shield TV, or who doesn’t want a full-fledged Android TV experience.
What it’s lacking: There’s a bit more manual labor involved in this one — no home screen or anything. So you’ll be casting from individual apps. But if you’re comfortable with that, it’ll serve you well. There’s no official Dolby Atmos support on board.
What it is: Amazon’s $70 (or less, on sale) HDMI dongle. It comes with a remote control, supports HDR10 and Dolby Atmos. It’s got access to pretty much everything except Apple content, though I’ve found apps on the FireOS to be slower than on Android TV or Apple TV.
Who it’s for: Someone who wants a less-expensive way to stream 4K and have super-easy access to everything Amazon puts forth, including Amazon Music and Amazon Photos.
What it’s lacking: There’s no Ethernet port, so you’re going to need a good wireless connection to maintain the 4K resolution. There’s also no Dolby Vision support.
What it is: Roku’s top-shelf box — it retails for $99 or less — with Ethernet and USB. It supports HDR10 and has apps for pretty much every service out there. The included remote has large buttons and is easy to use, and allows for private listening.
Who it’s for: Someone who wants an easy-to-use streaming solution without locking in to the Apple or Android ecosystems.
What it’s lacking: No Dolby Atmos or Dolby Vision support, and it’s generally a much slower experience than Android TV or Apple TV. If you use HDHomerun for over-the-air content (and you should), you’re out of luck here — it’s not compatible.
What it is: It’s the best damned Xbox ever. That’s what. It’s also one hell of a 4K streamer at about $500. It does HDR10 and Dolby Atmos, has Ethernet and cable passthrough (via HDMI). Plus it plays the occasional game or two.
Who it’s for: If you’re a gamer — and specifically an Xbox gamer — then you’ve got to consider this for 4K streaming content. Or at least remember that it can do it all.
What it’s lacking: There’s no Dolby Vision support. The Xbox also is lacking streaming apps like PlayStation Vue (for obvious reasons), Google Play Movies and iTunes content.
What it is: Sony’s top-rated gaming box for about $350. It’s also a great streamer since it’s (obviously) a fan of PlayStation Vue. It’s got HDR10 and Ethernet.
Who it’s for: If you’re a PS4 person who wants to watch TV through the console as well. And there’s no reason why you shouldn’t.
What it’s lacking: No support for Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos. And like the Xbox, it’s missing some competing apps — no Sling, for instance.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Android Central] December 18, 2017 at 11:00AM. Credit to Author and Android Central | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to CNET
One electric-car-related development worth keeping an eye on is the solid-state battery. BMW’s clearly paying attention, because it just teamed up with a company dedicated to developing them.
Solid Power, a startup that makes solid-state EV batteries, announced today that it is teaming up with BMW in what could become a very important development for the future of electric vehicles. The goal is for BMW to get Solid Power’s solid-state batteries to a level appropriate for performance EVs.
Right now, the closest thing BMW has to a performance EV is the i8 plug-in hybrid, but there’s a sporty variant of the i3 coming soon, as well.
BMW
BMW has not said what vehicles would get this kind of battery first, nor did either company disclose any financial information surrounding the deal, nor were any timelines offered. So, consider this more of a “here’s what we hope to do” situation than a “here’s what we are going to do” situation.
Solid Power got its start in 2012, when it was spun off from the University of Colorado at Boulder. As the name suggests, the company’s primary goal is to develop a mass-market, solid-state battery sufficient for use in electric vehicles. The company believes it can be done in a way that makes this new tech less expensive than current lithium-ion EV batteries.
Solid-state batteries, as the name again suggests, rely on a solid electrolyte rather than a liquid or gel. Benefits include a lower chance of overheating, as well as a higher energy density, which means more EV range without a whole bunch of unwanted mass. The main drawback at the moment is price — they are still too unaffordable for mass-market vehicles.
Solid Power isn’t the only company in this game. Toyota is also working on its own solid-state battery breakthrough, which it hopes to have in an electric car by 2022. That could very well give the company an advantage as it prepares to launch a flurry of new electrified vehicles through the next decade.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [CNET] December 18, 2017 at 12:18PM. Credit to Author and CNET | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Lifehacker
All images: Alex Cranz/Gizmodo
The smartphone made the standalone alarm clock worthless. Sure you probably know some alarm clock holdouts (a parent or grandmother perhaps), but you probably just use your phone, which is already resting on the nightstand and has a decent enough alarm. The $130 Amazon Echo Spot, a new, tiny, Alexa device with a camera, display, and shockingly powerful speaker, is so good that you won’t mind turning off the phone to let the Spot get to the business of waking you up every morning.
The Spot is, of course, not just an alarm clock. It’s an Alexa device, so it can do everything an Echo, Dot, or Show can do. That means the weather, news, and controlling your smartphone you expect from an Alexa device, plus the trailers for movies or clips from the local news you’d also expect from the Show.
A mute button is handily sandwiched between two volume buttons. Useful if you’re at the office and the people around you won’t stop saying “hey Alexa.”
Because it has a camera built in, it’s also decent for video calls to anyone with a Show, Spot, or smartphone, and if you want you can Drop In and check on whatever is happening in front of its camera. While this is a nightmare if you value your privacy, it’s useful if you want to use it as a nanny cam.
Advertisement
There’s nothing really new about the Spot beyond the form itself, but that form is so nice—especially compared to the $150 Amazon Echo Show. It’s hard not to be a little charmed by this much smaller guy.
I mean look at it! The Spot is adorable.
The design reflects an understanding that we want the display for a quick glance—not to consume content as apparently you’re supposed to on the Show’s 7-inch display. With its single 2.5-inch display and tiny 1.4-inch speaker, the Spot focuses on dispensing quick bites of visual information, perfect for when I’m waking up and struggling to get out of bed, or snuggling in at night. It’s even nice at the office, perched beside my computer and reminding me that it’s only twenty degrees outside. There’s no reaching for my phone. It’s a half step between my old alarm clock and my newer iPhone X.
Advertisement
It’s also reminiscent of the similarly pint-sized Echo Dot. Both are small enough to be easy additions to a night stand. Both also have speakers that leave a lot to be desired. The Spot is definitely loud, filling up a 10 x 20-foot room with enough sound to overcome even the noisiest radiator. (Don’t worry, the microphone can hear your voice over the din.) But there’s zero bass. David Guetta’s “Titanium” sounded about as good as it would on a smartphone speaker, and the central beat of Run the Jewels’ “Legend Has It” is almost entirely lost.
But that powerful shrill is what makes the Spot the perfect alarm clock! This thing will get you up in the morning, and because the microphone is so responsive, you can immediately slip into NPR mode, catching the news while you brush your teeth. It’s also so tinny, it might actually make you nostalgic for the days when your parents blared talk radio on their crummy alarm clocks as they got ready in the morning.
In hindsight this device is so good it makes me question the existence of the Show. At $130 and, now, $150, they’re separated by just twenty bucks, and the Spot is so much better at doing what I want—giving me info while staying out of my way—that I can’t help but scowl a little at the Show. The show’s biggest differentiating features are its larger display, which is still way too small for anything substantial, and its speakers, which are fine, but nothing compared to the wide array of dedicated speakers you can connect to the Spot via Bluetooth or its line-in port (the Show is Bluetooth only). It reminds me a bit of how lame the clunky original Echo felt in comparison to the thrifty Dot.
Audio out means it’s easier to connect to a speaker that isn’t shrill.
These smaller devices are, I think, the best representation of what a smart home assistant should be. They stay out of the way, give me the flexibility of better audio, and they look nice. They’re also cheaper too! The Dot is just $30, which puts it firmly in impulse buy territory, and the Amazon Echo Spot is $130. If you really want an alarm clock, and are okay with that crazy $100 premium for a nice little display, the Spot does the trick. It just makes me question why half of the rest of the Amazon Echo lineup exists right now.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Lifehacker] December 18, 2017 at 01:59PM. Credit to Author and Lifehacker | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors
Apple today seeded the second beta of an upcoming macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 update to developers, one week after seeding the first beta and almost two weeks after releasing macOS High Sierra 10.13.2, the second major update to the macOS High Sierra operating system.
The macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 beta can be downloaded from the Apple Developer Center or through the Software Update mechanism in the Mac App Store with the proper profile installed.
It’s not yet clear what improvements the third update to macOS High Sierra will bring, but it’s likely to include bug fixes and performance improvements for issues that weren’t addressed in macOS High Sierra 10.13.2.
No major outward-facing changes were discovered in the first beta of macOS High Sierra 10.13.3, but we’ll update this post should new features be found in the second beta.
The previous macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 update focused solely on security fixes and performance improvements, with no new features introduced.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechCrunch
A lot of crap gets shared on Facebook, but coming soon the volume may be a little less after Facebook made a move to penalize content that shamelessly begs people for engagement.
The social network giant said today that it will penalize Page owners and people who resort to “engagement bait,” which means posts that encourage users to like, comment or tag people in the comments section in order to gain wider visibility of their content.
The incentives — such as “Share with friends to win a free trip” or “Like if you’re an Aries” — gets content shared through engagement, ultimately helping the post, and the Page owner/author, grow its reach as users interact and it shows up on their friends’ Newsfeeds.
Not so now. A new tweak to the Newsfeed algorithm will mean “stricter demotions” for Pages, and/or individual, who adopt engagement bait tactics. Starting in a couple of weeks, offenders will have the total reach on all of their posts reduced if their content is begging or baiting users to interact. As you’d expect, serial offenders will be hit hardest.
But, Facebook is extending an olive branch and — initially, at least — engagement baiters can earn their original reach back with good behavior, i.e. less of the sludge and ‘better’ content all round.
Three examples of “engagement baiting” shared by Facebook
Facebook did specify that there are some exceptions to this clampdown, and that includes examples like a missing child report, raising money for a cause, or asking for travel tips, to quote the company directly.
The crackdown itself is led by a machine learning model that the social network said has been fed “hundreds of thousands of posts” to detect different kinds of engagement bait.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechCrunch] December 18, 2017 at 06:03AM. Credit to Author and TechCrunch | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to MacRumors: Mac News and Rumors
The official app for social news and discussion site Reddit is receiving a major update today, introducing several new features and interface tweaks to allow the app to better compete with popular third-party apps like Apollo.
There’s a new Theater Mode designed to let iOS users view GIFs, photos, and videos in full-screen in either portrait or landscape mode, and there is a new option to open links in Safari View Controller instead of using the native in-app browser.
Live comments and a new chat feature, which has been in beta testing on the main Reddit site, is launching in the iOS app starting today. Live comments allow breaking news and hot topics to be discussed in real time, while chat allows for one to one conversations for those who opt into the beta test.
“Flair,” used as a sort of informational label for identifying posts on Reddit, can now be added on mobile, and a cake icon will be displayed on a user’s “cake day,” aka the anniversary of when a person first joined Reddit. In-feed usernames for original posters will make it more clear who first shared content on the site.
For moderators, there’s a new “Mod Mode” that can be switched on to allow moderators to approve, remove, and flag content on the site, and a “Mod Queue” feature allows for easier management of large subreddits. There’s access to Modmail 2 and beta moderator features. Banning, muting, and other existing actions have been simplified.
Today’s update to the Reddit app is the most significant update it’s seen since the company took over Alien Blue and then retired it in favor of an official Reddit app back in April of 2016.
Reddit told TechCrunch that it is focusing more on the mobile experience as many younger Reddit users prefer mobile devices. 58 percent of Reddit users that are 18 to 34 prefer to use mobile web and mobile apps for viewing the site.
Reddit is now up to 330 million monthly active users, with over 9 million posts per month.
Reddit can be downloaded from the iOS App Store for free. [Direct Link]
Update: The new version of Reddit is now live in the App Store.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Fast Company
Over the past few years, I’ve wanted to learn more about coding, beyond my basic understanding of HTML and CSS. I started out on Codecademy learning basic front-end web stuff, then got into learning a bit about the Command Line on Mac, then briefly into Python and JavaScript.
But it wasn’t enough, so I decided I needed a classroom setting and I enrolled in evening front-end web classes at General Assembly in Austin, where I live. After making it through a month and a half of a three-month course and bottoming out, I started thinking that the best way for me to really learn to code would be to enroll in an immersive, full-time coding course. But I’m already maxed out time-wise and don’t have the luxury of going to school full-time. After a month or two of not working on coding, other than dealing with random HTML errors on stories during the day, I more or less gave up for while. I still wanted to learn more, but I had reached a sort of impasse. I knew I would eventually return to coding again, though.
Wonder Workshop cofounder and CEO Vikas Gupta [Photo: courtesy of Wonder Workshop]
So when I started hearing about a new way to learn–through coding robots–my interest was reignited. Although many such robots are geared toward kids and STEM education, adults with limited coding knowledge can also have fun while learning coding with them. But the difference is that adults aren’t normally in daily classroom settings that teach coding like kids are.
During Fast Company‘s recent Innovation Festival, I met Vikas Gupta, the CEO and founder of Wonder Workshop, makers of the Dash and Dot robots and the new Cue. The Dash and Dot teaches kids the basics of block programming on the app that you control the robot with, and the Cue allows you to open up a full JavaScript command prompt in the Cue app once you progress through several demo challenges. Wonder Workshop sent me a Cue to test-drive, and I have been working and playing with it for a while now. The Cue uses a block-style programming language called Blockly, which is a JavaScript-based drag-and-drop language that allows you to arrange preset actions for the Cue to perform on your phone or tablet, such as motion, color, and sound, and voice parameters.
As you unlock various demo levels on the Cue’s Coding palette, you eventually open up the full JavaScript command palette, and can work with functions and variables. By starting simple and working up to more complex actions, you naturally start learning the basics of JavaScript programming. But once you unlock those demo levels and get to full JavaScript, you will still need outside help to progress further into JavaScript, either online or in a classroom setting.
Another company that uses block-style programming on its robots is Sphero, which produces the Sphero, BB-8 and other Star Wars-themed robots, and the new Mini. The Mini is a tiny ball with motion and light activators that you can control with the app using the Mini app, and go into coding with the Sphero Edu app. Sphero sent me a Mini, and it’s really fun to play with, but I wanted to know how in-depth you could go with the coding. The coding palette is very similar to Wonder Workshop’s Cue app, with a preloaded, block-style, drag-and-drop program built on JavaScript you can tweak, such as distance moved and color, but there is access to an SDK (software developer kit) that allows you to build apps for the Sphero bots. As with the Wonder Workshop Cue, you will eventually need outside help if you want to progress further with coding with Sphero bots.
Cozmo [Photo: courtesy of Anki]
Anki, maker of Cozmo, the “gifted little guy with a mind of his own,” has recently launched what it calls “a feature-packed expansion to Code Lab,” its programming environment for the Cozmo robot. The coding interface also uses block-style programming (this one is called Scratch) and is built on Python. Cozmo Code Lab also has its own SDK for developers that is accessible for download via the Anki site (and which can be accessed via Code Lab on the app). Once again you will need outside help to get deeper into coding on Cozmo.
The final robot I worked with was Vincross’s Hexa. The Hexa is a spider-like bot with six legs that can climb, dance, and do other actions. I recently spoke with Vinxcross’s COO, Andy Xu, who explained that Vincross was established in 2014 with the idea that the next area for coders and innovation going forward is in robotics, and the Hexa is their first entry into the robotics world for both beginners and established coders.
Andy Xu [Photo: courtesy of Vincross]
Instead of coding on the app, which is really just a controller for the Hexa’s actions, you build “Skills” (or Hexa functions) in the Hexa SDK on the Command Line on your computer, which would be the Command Prompt on Windows, the Terminal application on Mac, and the Command Line on Linux.
This time I decided to go for it and download and install the Mind SDK from the Vincross CDN. I have been working on using the “Build Your First Skill” tutorial. This is fairly challenging and took me several tries to figure out how to open Mind in Terminal. But the tutorial is fairly straightforward and easy to understand. Once you build your first Skill, if your computer is on the same network as the Hexa, you can upload the Skill to the Hexa.
Overall my experience with working with these robots was fun, exciting, and engaging. Being able to tweak coding parameters in the apps to control the bots in different ways gives you immediate gratification that you can actually “program” something. All of the above robots except the Wonder Workshop Cue give you access to an SDK and developer network so you can go deeper and further into coding. If I were to recommend which direction to go in, get your hands on at least two of the robots such as the Cue and the Cozmo, learn as much as you can in the app and the bot, then eventually get the Hexa and either teach yourself or have someone teach you how to code in the SDK. The more toylike robots (Cue, Mini, Cozmo) are cute and seem designed to thrill and excite the user, while the Hexa seems more serious and closer to more advanced robots such as robots from Boston Dynamics.
Having said all of this, I’ve decided that this year I’ll save some money and return to General Assembly here in downtown Austin. I’ve had my eye on their data science course, which has a heavy focus on Python. I know that eventually I’ll move to the next level with my coding, as long as I keep grinding away at it.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Fast Company] December 18, 2017 at 12:19PM. Credit to Author and Fast Company | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
We have been talking a lot about a Tesla station wagon lately since not one but two aftermarket modification companies are working on it.
Now one of those two companies has completed the very first working Model S station wagon.
Our last report was on RemetzCar, the maker of the Model S hearse, announcing that they are working on a Model S wagon, but Qwest is actually the company that first completed their working prototype.
Qwest was founded by a bunch of engineers and automotive designers based in Norfolk, UK.
Tesla’s vehicles are highly connected with sensors and it’s easy to end up with error alerts even with fairly simple modifications, but Qwest says that they checked with Tesla in order to know how to proceed to maintain support for the vehicle after the modifications, especially with future software updates.
Yesterday, they shared this video and claimed that the vehicle is now fully working:
It’s also our first look at the final design of the very first Tesla Model S wagon.
The company shared a few more images on Twitter:
They created the new parts with carbon fiber to limit the added weight for the bigger rear.
Electrek’s Take
I don’t know about you, but I am very impressed. I rarely like the aftermarket Tesla modifications, but this one turned out great and it’s also practical if you are looking for a little more cargo space.
Cargo aside, the design is pleasing if you don’t mind the shooting brake-look. As it turns out, the Model S’ design translates well into a sport wagon. We already have seen several Tesla Model S wagon renderings that were well-received, but it’s easy to make a rendering look good.
Now we see an actual working vehicle and it holds up to the renderings.
Wagons, or estate cars, or shooting-brakes, are very popular in Europe, especially in markets like the UK and Germany, but there’s currently none with an all-electric powertrain.
Despite being an aftermarket upgrade, it could technically be considered the very first one and now that they developed all the parts and the molds, Qwest could potentially bring the cost of the modification down and offer it to other Model S owners.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 17, 2017 at 12:00PM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Curbed – All
For cruise ships, it’s not easy being green. The typical vessel burns hundreds of tons of fuel oil and creates roughly 80,000 liters of sewage a day, with some ships dumping poorly treated sewage into the seas. But the Japanese company Peace Boat wants to change all that, creating an innovative new boat billed as the “world’s most eco-friendly cruise ship.”
Peace Boat has been working since 1983 to spread a culture of peace through education programs carried out primarily on its chartered vessel. Its new cruise ship—the Ecoship—is slated to launch in 2020, in time for the Tokyo Olympics, and better embody the organization’s commitment to sustainable travel.
The ship’s systems will work together to generate its own power and create virtually zero waste. Designed by Oliver Design, the ship will have a set of 10 retractable wind generators and 10 retractable solar sails. Weighing roughly 60,000 metric tons, the Ecoship will host up to 2,000 passengers at a time. Greenery planted across five decks will help absorb extra water, while built-in vertical farm systems will produce organic veggies for meals.
The $500 million Ecoship is projected to emit 30 percent less carbon dioxide than current models as well as requiring 20 percent less propulsion energy and 50 percent less electricity.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Curbed – All] December 18, 2017 at 10:04AM. Credit to Author and Curbed – All | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Go Mechanical Keyboard
Tesoro GRAM SE Spectrum – Unboxing
The Tesoro GRAM SE Spectrum comes in a handsome box. Glossy graphics showcase this mechanical keyboard, but a matte finish prevents the box from being gaudy.
I’m happy to see a keycap puller, switch puller, and four Blue Tesoro Optical switches in the box. Previous offerings from Tesoro, including flagship mechanical keyboards, didn’t include any tools. The GRAM SE Spectrum mechanical keyboard is contained in a plastic bag. Foam edge inserts prevent shipping damage. My only complaint involves the instruction booklet. It is moderately vague and provides no information about the GRAM SE Spectrum’s accompanying software. Regardless, this is an excellent package.
Build quality
Tesoro’s GRAM SE Spectrum shares much of its lineage with the GRAM Spectrum mechanical keyboard. Its painted steel upper case and ABS plastic lower case are sturdy and well finished, though tiny imperfections may exist in the paint. (I’m nit picking.) Fitment is solid. The rim around the upper and lower case doesn’t exhibit any significant gaps or imperfections. Some small bits of plastic may cling to the lower case drains, but that’s a non-issue. It can be cleared away with a single fingernail scrape. The lower case doesn’t include the sound deadening mat found in the GRAM Spectrum mechanical keyboard.
Creak may occur if the keyboard is flexed multiple times after sitting at certain angles, but it will never present itself during normal use. Traveling users might hear infrequent noises from their backpack. That’s fine, as I wouldn’t recommend traveling with the GRAM SE Spectrum mechanical keyboard. Its painted metal upper plate will chip if handled roughly, and loose items in a backpack could seriously mess the finish up. It’s also rather large and heavy.
Twelve appropriately black fasteners, two of which grip the metal upper case, hold the GRAM SE Spectrum together. The PCB is level due to some screws and a few clever supports bent down from the upper case. Some pegs in the lower case provide further support for the PCB, which is vital to keep switch activation points consistent throughout the keyboard. Tesoro’s Excalibur SE Spectrum, the first mechanical keyboard with Tesoro Optical switches, allowed its PCB to sag in the corners. GoMK’s review covered that defect in detail.
The GRAM SE Spectrum’s PCB, which is adequately thick, has an even conformal coating that shouldn’t affect its optical sensors. It’s much more even than Tesoro’s other spillproof keyboards. The solder work is well done as well. No excessive joints or residue are present.
Cables usually aren’t exemplary. The GRAM SE Spectrum’s removable cable is pretty darn close. Gold plated connectors, a durable braided exterior, and a ferrite core (which may be excessively large) are very appealing. The connector is less ideal. USB Mini B is really starting to show its age, so an upgrade to Type A male + Type C male would be ideal.
This mechanical keyboard, like the GRAM Spectrum, sits solidly on the desk. The GRAM SE Spectrum’s feet are thick and coated with rubber, so that’s a win. Its case pads are level and grippy, but the pads are also quite short. As a result, the ridges around the GRAM SE Spectrum’s feet may touch your desk. That won’t cause any problems, but it is a minor annoyance. I’m seeing issues with case pad height from a number of manufacturers, including Das Keyboard and Velocifire, so this is a regular misstep in the industry that needs attention.
Switches & stabilizers
Switches
These Red switches are awesome. Extreme linearity, smoothness, LED lenses, and responsiveness are all present. They also handle off center keypresses with more grace than most MX models. The downside? A noticeable amount of stem wobble. MX switches perform much better in that regard. Some of the stem wobble is mitigated by the click mechanism in Blue Tesoro Optical switches. Downstroke and upstroke clack are also noticeable, though that’s not unusual in linear switches.
Red Tesoro Optical switches seem exceptionally light in terms of press force due to a clever contactless design. Optical sensors wait for a cutout in the bottom of the stem to be obscured. When covered, the system registers a keypress. That solder-less design means that keyswitches can be swapped. Be careful with the switch puller, though, as it could scratch the upper case paint with ease. The switches are really stuck in there. I’m not sure if Tesoro plans to sell loose switches, but the included Blues provide a taste of customization.
My subjective impressions are also complimentary. It isn’t a typist’s switch, but gaming on it is an absolute joy. The switches are light enough to avoid fatigue and springy enough to prevent any perception of return lag. The weight, without a doubt, makes you feel like you’re in control of the keys. The optical technology doesn’t, however, make the keyboard feel any faster than its competitors. The milliseconds that some keyboards manage to shave off aren’t enough to drastically alter your gaming performance unless you’re at the very top of the bell curve.
Tesoro Optical switches feel like a refined XMIT Hall Effect switch. They both feel exceptionally close to the spring, but these Reds are less scratchy and clacky.
Stabilizers
Costar style stabilizers support the GRAM SE Spectrum’s long keys. They are lubricated, which is good, but that isn’t their most notable feature. The stabilizer inserts and wires are black. That, readers, is some serious attention to detail. The only misstep is a poorly aligned spacebar stabilizer wire. It makes contact with the edge of its switch.
Bottom outs feel crisp and defined. There is a small patch of roughness in the space bar stabilizer near bottom out, but that’s only evident during glacial key presses. Tesoro did pretty well overall.
Keycap quality
The GRAM SE Spectrum‘s keycaps are comfortable, but otherwise undesirable. Soft touch coated thin ABS plastic isn’t a winner in my book, as it won’t hold up well or look good when shined up, but it’s roughly equivalent to what other big brands are offering. The thin plastic doesn’t help upstroke or downstroke clack either.
The font is sharp and minimally gamer-ish, so that’s a step in the right direction. A thicker replacement keycap set would do wonders for the GRAM SE Spectrum.
Check out enthusiast forums like Reddit, Geekhack, and Deskthority to learn more about replacement options.
Tesoro GRAM SE Spectrum features
LEDs and power draw
The RGB LEDs on the GRAM SE Spectrum mechanical keyboard aren’t the brightest I’ve ever seen, particularly in the blue range, but they are nicely saturated and blended due to some neat switch-integrated LED lenses. Legend coverage is good overall, though slight dimming is evident near the bottom of translucent areas. I could see slight LED flicker in my peripheral vision, but the lighting and transitions looked smooth head on. A decent number of lighting and customization options are present, so I’d say it’s a good RGB LED implementation.
I should also note that the lensed lock lights aren’t quite as violent as those on the Das Keyboard 4 Professional. Worst case power draw is 532 mA, which is a bit above USB 2.0 spec. Not exactly ideal.
Software
The software suite is quite similar to the GRAM Spectrum’s. A number of organizational improvements and better profile systems make it more approachable. You can find the custom Spectrum lighting option in its own tab, for example.
It does not, however, solve core user experience issues like changing multiple key colors simultaneously, selecting multiple keys, tabbing between RGB values, or pointing and dragging within the (minuscule) RGB color chart. It’s just a hair worse than what I would call a usable, average software package. I certainly wouldn’t make social media buttons available, as frustrated users will probably vent online.
Spillproofing
The GRAM SE Spectrum implements a conformal PCB coating, contactless switches, and several case drains to mitigate spills. Its upper case also contributes to liquid removal. A gentle slope and few holes, besides the switch cutout, help it run off before sinking in.
Cleanup and switch replacement will also be quite easy, as popping everything apart takes a negligible amount of time.
Labels & branding
Tasteful, minimalist upper case branding and a plasticized lower label make the GRAM SE Spectrum mechanical keyboard a solid choice.
The disappearance of Tesoro’s infamous Harry Potter font is quite welcome. I look forward to seeing further evolutions in their branding.
Tesoro GRAM SE Spectrum – Editor’s opinion
Bringing the GRAM SE Spectrum to market was an excellent decision. It’s exactly what I would have done. Tesoro took a well reviewed existing chassis and stuck their excellent new switches in it. The keycaps are all that holds it back from barreling to the top of the ratings chart at GoMK. Frankly, it’s a great mechanical keyboard.
The GRAM SE Spectrum is an offering that competes with Razer and Corsair in the mainstream mechanical keyboard market segment. Gamers should definitely consider this as an alternative to big name gaming keyboard models. Kudos to Tesoro. That said, this isn’t necessarily a mechanical keyboard for enthusiasts. The clunky software, keycaps, and style don’t align with most trends in the community.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Go Mechanical Keyboard] December 17, 2017 at 11:02PM. Credit to Author and Go Mechanical Keyboard | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechCrunch
Researcher Michael Myng found a deactivated keylogger in a piece of software found on over 460 HP laptop models. A full list of affected laptops is here. The keylogger is deactivated by default but could represent a privacy concern if an attacker has physical access to the computer.
“Some time ago someone asked me if I can figure out how to control HP’s laptop keyboard backlight,” wrote Myng. “I asked for the keyboard driver SynTP.sys, opened it in IDA, and after some browsing noticed a few interesting strings.”
The strings led to something that appeared to be a hidden keylogger – a program that sends typed characters to an attacker – in a Synaptic device driver. Given that the decompiled code prepared and sent key presses to an unnamed target, Myng was fairly certain he had something interesting on his hands.
Luckily, HP responded quickly.
“I tried to find HP laptop for rent and asked a few communities about that but got almost no replies,” he said. “One guy even thought that I am a thief trying to rob someone. So, I messaged HP about the finding. They replied terrificly fast, confirmed the presence of the keylogger (which actually was a debug trace) and released an update that removes the trace.”
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechCrunch] December 11, 2017 at 10:04AM. Credit to Author and TechCrunch | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
It looks like Tesla is currently entering its usual end-of-quarter/end-of-year delivery rush and everything points to the automaker achieving a gangbusters quarter for deliveries due to several reasons and two specific markets.
Electrek’s Take
Of course Tesla’s overall sales this quarter are going to get some help from the Model 3, since it should be the first significant quarter for deliveries of the new electric car.
The Model 3’s very first quarter for deliveries was the third quarter, but Tesla ended up only delivering just over 200 units.
Despite the vehicle still having important production issues throughout most of the fourth quarter, we expect deliveries to be significantly higher. According to our estimate, it should be closer to 1,000 units and even higher if they end up fixing the production issues.
That’s an attractive feature for a lot of buyers and if it’s truly the last opportunity to get access to it, it might be enough to convince a few people to pull the trigger.
While I think that it will contribute to Tesla achieving a record quarter, I don’t think that it will be the main factor.
The US and Norway, two of Tesla’s three biggest markets (the other one being China), are primed to have a surge of demand that will push Tesla to a record quarter.
After the fear of a special ‘Tesla Tax’ in Norway last month, the automaker finally dodged the bullet in that market and now it’s on pace to achieve another record quarter for deliveries.
The record month led to a record quarter of 2,359 vehicles delivered, but Tesla seems well-positioned to beat the record by finishing the year strong.
Based on registration data, they are already at 2,085 vehicles and they still have a few weeks left. The last few weeks of the quarter (or year) are generally the best weeks for deliveries and it looks like this year will not be an exception based on the picture of another huge shipment of Tesla vehicles (estimated at ~700 units) seen at the port of Drammen last night (via Bent Knekten Marthinsen):
Even if only half of those vehicles are delivered by the end of the month, Tesla should be able to beat its record.
And then there’s the US.
The fourth quarter is always strong for Tesla in the US because buyers want to get delivery by the end of the year in order to take advantage of the federal tax credit during the current year.
The impact of the tax credit is likely to be even greater this year because of the current talks to remove the incentive, which is likely to push people to take a decision quicker. Then even if the tax credit stays in place by the end of the year, the arrival of the Model 3 will push Tesla faster to the phase-out period, which could also incentivize Model S and Model X buyers to take advantage of the incentive.
In conclusion, Tesla is almost guaranteed to have a record quarter for overall deliveries thanks to Model 3, but everything points to also a record quarter for Model S and Model X deliveries as well if Tesla plays its cards right.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 11, 2017 at 03:59PM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Lifehacker
Illustration by Sam Woolley / GMG
Apple keeps giving us reasons to say goodbye. iOS 11 is buggy as hell, with the most recent error making iPhones almost unusable, and the latest version of macOS briefly exposed Mac owners to a major vulnerability. As for the iPhone X, it may be pretty sleek for an iPhone, but Apple’s still playing catch-up to its Android competition.
If you’re seriously considering ditching some (or all) of Apple’s products you’re definitely not alone, but it’s easier said than done. Cupertino’s done such a good job of wheedling its way into every facet of our digital lives that weaning yourself off of its ecosystem of products is a pretty serious endeavor.
Advertisement
With that in mind, we’ve scoured the internet for tips, tricks and guides to remove yourself from every single one of Apple’s apps, services and products. Ready? Let’s get started.
Ok, let’s start with a big one. If you’re thinking of leaving Apple, your iPhone will probably be one of the first things you’ll want to get rid of (but do keep it around for a bit, because you’ll need an iPhone for a few of the other guides in this article). Thankfully, some of the most popular Android phones makes it easy to switch over without losing any of your personal data.
Advertisement
Google’s Pixel smartphones are seemingly designed to compete directly with Apple, offering an Android alternative to the iPhone that’s easy to use, well designed, and loaded with special features. Google also made it extremely easy to transfer over all your iPhone data by simply following the prompts on your Pixel phone. Just remember to shut off iMessage on your iPhone first so you don’t miss any text messages after making the switch to Android.
If you’d rather try out one of Samsung’s bezel-less Galaxy phones, that process is pretty simple, too, thanks to a special Samsung Smart Switch app. All you need to do is backup your iPhone with iTunes and switch off iMessage. Then plug your new Android phone into the same computer and Samsung will handle the rest.
Advertisement
If you’re switching to some other Android phone that doesn’t offer its own data transfer service, don’t worry. Google’s outlined a simple way to bring all your iPhone data with you in three easy steps using Google Drive.
That said, you’ll still need your iPhone for transferring your data out of Apple Photos and Apple’s Podcasts app. So don’t give away your old phone yet.
Microsoft
Switch From Your Mac to a Windows Computer
Next up is your computer. Leaving Apple means saying goodbye to the company’s overpriced laptops and desktops—though Microsoft does offer its own comparably high-end computers, too. Whether you opt for a fancy Surface or a cheaper PC, you’ll still have to do some work if you want to carry over all the information stored on your old Mac.
Advertisement
The first thing you’ll want to do is set up a Microsoft account to replace your old Apple ID. From there, you should connect your Mac to an external hard drive and transfer over all your files. This is actually a pretty complicated process, so head over to Laptop Magazine for a step-by-step guide. Once you’ve finished saving and formatting all your files, all you need to do is connect your external hard drive to your new computer and drag all your files onto your PC desktop.
As with the iPhone changeover, you’ll still need your Mac on hand to transfer data from iCloud Keychain, so don’t ditch your Apple computer until you’ve fully made the transition.
End Your Dependence on iMessage
Apple Messages (formerly, and forever in our hearts, known as iMessage) is probably the biggest single thing keeping most people from leaving the Apple universe. Deleting your account is easy, and the bugs that used to cause former iMessage users to miss out on text messages have been ironed out. However, if the rest of your friends and family keep using iMessage you may have a bit of a disconnect due to the extra features Apple keeps adding to its messaging app.
Advertisement
Your best bet is to try to get everyone else to ditch iMessage, too. Outside of the U.S., most of the world already prefers third-party chat apps like WhatsApp. So maybe try convincing your social circles to try that app instead. You could also just start relying more on Facebook Messenger(everyone already has a Facebook account, anyway). Regardless of which app you pick, it shouldn’t make much of a difference to your data plan since iMessage already uses data when you’re not already on Wi-Fi.
If all else fails, you can just use regular SMS and accept that your iPhone-owning friends will probably judge you for your green bubble messages. It shouldn’t be a significant financial issue, since almost everyone in the U.S. everyone has unlimited texting at this point
Move Your Files From iCloud Drive to Google Drive
Next up is transferring all the files you’ve stored in Apple’s cloud service over to Google Drive. This is a big one if you’re switching to Android, since you’ll likely want to start using Google Apps instead. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t make it easy, either.
Advertisement
The trick, according to Android Central, is to use desktop apps. The first thing you’ll need to do is download the Google Drive and iCloud Drive apps onto your computer. Then open up both cloud storage services in separate Finder windows on Mac (or File Explorer windows on PC). Highlight all the iCloud Drive files you want to transfer and drag them into Google Drive. That’s it, you’re done.
If you refuse to download the desktop apps there’s still a solution, but it involves going to the iCloud website and transferring each file one at a time. So do yourself a favor and just take the easy route.
If you’re somehow still using Apple’s email service, it’s time to upgrade. Seriously, even if you plan on keeping your iPhone or iMac, you should really be using Gmail.
Advertisement
Switching from one to the other is surprisingly easy; all you need is a third-party email client, and KnightWise, a tech blog focused on switching between different platforms and services, recommends Thunderbird. Once it’s downloaded, connect your iCloud Mail account so your emails all show up in Thunderbird.Then connect your Gmail account and you can drag those iCloud emails over to your Google account. That will bring them into your Gmail everywhere, including on the web.
Move From iCloud Keychain to Another Password Manager
iCloud Keychain is a nice introduction to the world of password managers, but you can do so much better. Plus, if you’re getting rid of all the Apple products in your life, you don’t really have a choice but to find another option since it doesn’t work on non-Apple devices. Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to switch to a more powerful service like 1Password.
You can transfer all your iCloud Keychain data over to 1Password, but you’ll need a Mac computer on hand to do it. Assuming you meet that qualification, you can use this importer tool to move your data over. Just download the “Testing Bits” version, drag the new file onto your macOS desktop and then complete the rest process by following the directions in the included README.pdf file.
Google
Abandon Apple Photos for Google Photos
Before we get started, the first thing you’ll need to do is decide if you want to keep all your photos at their original resolution, or downsize some to meet Google’s maximum of 16-megapixel for pictures and 1080p for video. Google Photos is only free for at the “High Quality” tier that compresses some content.
Advertisement
If you want to the “Original Quality” version for high resolution photos and video, you’ll need to pay extra, starting at $1.99 per month—unless you have a Pixel 2, which comes with free “Original Quality” photo storage through 2020.
The rest of it is pretty easy, but a little time consuming. First, You’ll need to download the Google Photos app for both macOS and iOS. Once these are installed, they’ll both quickly begin uploading all the photos saved on your devices. If there’s anything that was uploaded to iCloud and then deleted from your physical devices you can grab it by opening Apple’s Photos app for Mac, selecting Preferences, then selecting iCloud, and setting the app to “Download Originals to Mac.” Or do the same in iOS by going into Settings, then iCloud, then Photos, and then selecting “Download and Keep Originals.”
Advertisement
Once that’s all set, your pictures and videos should all be upload to Google Photos. They’ll be stored online so you can access them from any device moving forward.
Stitcher Radio
Transfer From Apple’s Podcasts App to Stitcher Radio
If you only do one thing on this list, make it this one. Apple’s podcast app is absolutely terrible, and the company doesn’t seem to be making any effort to improve it. It’s also not necessary for you to be dealing with it; there are plenty of other better options for downloading, listening to, and organizing all your favorite podcasts.
Advertisement
Stitcher Radio is one alternative app that offers a better experience. It’s also easy to swap in if you’re already using Apple Podcasts. Just install Stitcher on your iOS device, then setup your account and it will automatically import all your podcasts from Apple’s app. Once that’s done, Stitcher will sync automatically between devices, so you can switch from iPhone to Android without losing anything.
This one is a little complicated. Apple doesn’t exactly want you to leave its music streaming service for a competitor, but you still have options.
Advertisement
One way to transfer all your saved music and playlists is with a program called Soundiiz. This one requires you to export playlists from Apple music as .m3u files and them upload them to Spotify through Soundiiz’s website.
You can also use an automation app called Workflow. First, download it from the App Store and then search through the Workflow gallery for “Add playlist to Spotify.” The app should handle the rest for you pretty quickly.
Neither of these first two solutions are perfect, and they might lose a few tracks in the process. Another Spotify user offered a better solution of their own in the company’s forum, but it’s a little more complicated. It requires exporting your music out of Apple Music, doing some coding in the macOS Terminal and then uploading the files to Spotify through another third-party website called PlayListConverter.
Advertisement
Of your three options, the last one is probably your best bet if you want to make sure that every song transfers over successfully from Apple Music to Spotify. But if you’re looking for something less intensive try Workflow instead—you can probably fill in gaps using Spotify’s streaming library anyway.
Beyond whatever you have saved to Apple Music, you may have spent your own money to buy music, movies and TV shows through iTunes in the past. Just because you’re abandoning Apple doesn’t mean you need to leave all that good stuff behind.
Advertisement
You can transfer all your iTunes music to Google Play without too much effort. Just head to http://ift.tt/I2Wqd2 on your computer, log in (or create an account) and select “Upload Music.” Then select “Download Music Manager,” install the program on your computer, and once it’s downloaded, allow it to save your iTunes music. Follow the prompts and Google will store up to 20,000 of your songs in the cloud for free so you can access them from any device—this is a great way to backup your music even if you’re not leaving Apple altogether.
Unfortunately, getting your iTunes-purchased movies and TV shows onto Google Play is a little harder (and a lot more expensive) due to Apple’s use of DRM. To remove the DRM protection, you’ll need to pay for a program like TunesKit (currently available for $45). If you’re willing to spend the money, you can transfer those files by logging into Google Play in your browser and navigating to “Movies & TV.” From there, you should be able to upload all your DRM-free videos to the cloud where you can access them on any Android device.
Find a Replacement for FaceTime
Finally, if you’re worried about losing FaceTime when you leave Apple, you can put those fears to rest. There are plenty of greats apps that can replace FaceTime’s one-to-one video chat.
Advertisement
Microsoft and Google offer viable alternatives with Skype and Duo, respectively. If you can’t convince your friends to download one of those apps, try using Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp, which both come with video calling built right in. With all those options, you should be able to find something that can fill the FaceTime-shaped hole in your life.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Lifehacker] December 11, 2017 at 09:40AM. Credit to Author and Lifehacker | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to The Verge
Another former Facebook executive has spoken out about the harm the social network is doing to civil society around the world. Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
He went on to describe an incident in India where hoax messages about kidnappings shared on WhatsApp led to the lynching of seven innocent people. “That’s what we’re dealing with,” said Palihapitiya. “And imagine taking that to the extreme, where bad actors can now manipulate large swathes of people to do anything you want. It’s just a really, really bad state of affairs.” He says he tries to use Facebook as little as possible, and that his children “aren’t allowed to use that shit.” He later adds, though, that he believes the company “overwhelmingly does good in the world.”
Palihapitiya’s remarks follow similar statements of contrition from others who helped build Facebook into the powerful corporation it is today. In November, early investor Sean Parker said he has become a “conscientious objector” to social media, and that Facebook and others had succeeded by “exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.” A former product manager at the company, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, has said Facebook lies about its ability to influence individuals based on the data it collects on them, and wrote a book, Chaos Monkeys, about his work at the firm.
These former employees have all spoken out at a time when worry about Facebook’s power is reaching fever pitch. In the past year, concerns about the company’s role in the US election and its capacity to amplify fake news have grown, while other reports have focused on how the social media site has been implicated in atrocities like the “ethnic cleansing” of Myanmar’s Rohingya ethnic group.
In his talk, Palihapitiya criticized not only Facebook, but Silicon Valley’s entire system of venture capital funding. He said that investors pump money into “shitty, useless, idiotic companies,” rather than addressing real problems like climate change and disease. Palihapitiya currently runs his own VC firm, Social Capital, which focuses on funding companies in sectors like healthcare and education.
Palihapitiya also notes that although tech investors seem almighty, they’ve achieved their power more through luck than skill. “Everybody’s bullshitting,” he said. “If you’re in a seat, and you have good deal flow, and you have precious capital, and there’s a massive tailwind of technological change … Over time you get one of the 20 [companies that become successful] and you look like a genius. And nobody wants to admit that but that’s the fucking truth.”
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [The Verge] December 11, 2017 at 06:14AM. Credit to Author and The Verge | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to CNET
Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that’s taken over our lives.
A male hand, you notice.
Jonathan Knowles / Getty Images
We try.
But it’s so hard keeping up with password management.
There are so many shopping sites and apps. We want so many things. We only have so much time and patience.
So surveys regularly show that password habits can be dire. Just look at the most common passwords of 2016 and you’ll see that “123456” still reigns. Though “123456789” isn’t too far behind.
What, though, might be people’s worst password habits? A new survey by tech consultancy EPC Group offers a little window.
More than 37 percent of the 600 people surveyed last month admitted that they change their password only when a site tells them to.
Eleven percent of those polled said they’ve used to same password (or a variation of it) for at least seven years.
I’m a touch surprised that this number is so low. Perhaps people are beginning to take notice. Perhaps news of hacks and cyberattacks are getting some to pay attention.
Perhaps some have even read CNET’s fine guide to password management and why it’s important.
Still, wandering through the data in this survey, I can’t help marveling at humanity.
Men, for example, are 2.8 times more likely to use the word “password” as their password. Women showed a slightly different tendency. They are 1.3 times more likely to use their lover’s name in their password.
I leave psychologists, professional and amateur, to ponder on the relative beauty of these two habits.
Let’s hear it, though, for 22 percent of these respondents. They confessed that they use the very same password for every site they log into.
What about the 44 percent who admitted they frequently use the same password?
Indeed, only a blessed 14 percent crowed that they create a different password for every site.
Technology has invaded our brains and incited us to all sorts of actions that encourage an abdication of thought.
We seek constant rewards and need them to be as instant as possible.
And we hope for the best. Because that strategy generally works for us, right?
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [CNET] December 10, 2017 at 01:05PM. Credit to Author and CNET | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Engadget
It’s not just video games — virtual reality has lots of potential to change the way we experience information. You can experience what its like to walk in space with the BBC’s ISS app for Oculus, watch every NBA game this season with your VR headset or lean back and experience the globe without ever leaving your house via Discovery channel’s VR travel series. The trendy new tech is unavoidable, like in a new advertising campaign featuring NYX makeup and Samsung Gear VR.
Called the “Impossibly NYX Professional Makeup” experience, you’ll be able to watch three makeup tutorials from top beauty video bloggers Kristen Leanne, Mykie, and Karen Sarahi Gonzalez. You’ll also be able to use the Gear VR controllers to select different NYX products to learn more about, and you’ll be able to to buy the products that are featured in the tutorials at a reduced price. You’ll be able to try it out yourself starting December 18th in “select” NYX Professional Makeup stores, with a national rollout to the rest of its 42 retail stores during 2018.
This isn’t the first foray into merging technology with makeup, of course. Sephora has its own way of selling makeup via AR tech, yet another trend in the space. While it’s hard to say whether a makeup tutorial in VR is any better than one on a flat screen, we’ll likely see more of this type of immersive branded advertising in the near future.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Engadget] December 11, 2017 at 04:06PM. Credit to Author and Engadget | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Top of the list is the Fossil Q Venture and the LG Watch Sport, while devices from the likes of Fossil, Misfit, Casio, Huawei and TAG Heuer make up the rest of it. If you want to know when your update will appear, Google says, contact the watch manufacturer.
Missing out are smartwatches such as the Moto 360 and the Asus ZenWatch 2. These wearables will stay on Android 7.0 Nougat, though they will still receive bug fixes and security updates and so on for the foreseeable future.
Keep me updated
The Oreo update for smartwatches doesn’t bring a huge list of new features: you get improved battery life, customization options for the vibration function, and support for a few extra languages, for instance.
It’s certainly not an upgrade of the magnitude of Android Wear 3.0, which we might see roll out next year – basically your smartwatch is just going to run a little more smoothly and perhaps need recharging a little less often.
Android Wear as a whole has had a quiet year in terms of both new hardware and software updates, despite the (delayed) roll out of Android Wear 2.0, so let’s hope Google has some big plans for 2018 for taking on the Apple Watch.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to The Next Web
It’s been a while since we’ve seen a a reliable iOS jailbreak. You’d have to go back to iOS 10.2.1 to find a working version that’s widely-known. Since the last working exploit, the jailbreaking community has mostly gone dark, with repositories remaining un-updated (or closed) and a group of once cooperative hackers now at large with both each other and those hungry for future exploits.
Our own Abhimanyu Ghoshal even penned a piece to signify the cat and mouse game between exploit-hunting hackers and Apple developers was, well, pretty much over.
That’s until a recent tweet by Google researcher Ian Beer, anyway.
If you're interested in bootstrapping iOS 11 kernel security research keep a research-only device on iOS 11.1.2 or below. Part I (tfp0) release soon.
Beer’s tweet doesn’t exactly give away the ending, but popular opinion seems to suggest he’s working on, or perhaps close to revealing, a jailbreak for iOS version 11.1.2 or below.
A Motherboard piece seems to follow this logic, with a caveat — which we’ll get to in a moment.
Ian Beer is a Google Project Zero security researcher, and one of the most prolific iOS bug hunters. Wednesday, he told his followers to keep their “research-only” devices on iOS 11.1.2 because he was about to release “tfp0” soon. (tfp0 stands for “task for pid 0,” or the kernel task port, which gives you control of the core of the operating system.) He also hinted that this is just the first part of more releases to come. iOS 11.1.2 was just patched and updated last week by Apple; it is extremely rare for exploits for recent versions of iOS to be made public.
Reddit is also abuzz with the news.
The reason this is so big is that iOS 11 was only updated last week. Finding a recent public jailbreak is rare, as these are the sort of exploits that typically net a nice payday for bug bounty hunters (or blackhat hackers). But Beer, a Google employee working on iOS exploits as part of his day job would have little incentive (or is perhaps contractually obligated not to) to chase these types of rewards.
As for the likelihood OP will deliver, it’s hard to doubt Beer. He’s the same researcher who released exploits for iOS 10.1.1 and 10.3.2 in the past. And according to Motherboard, he’s found several 0days in iOS during his time at Google.
But before you get too excited, it’s important to note that whatever Beer releases probably won’t be a full-blown untethered jailbreak: meaning, you’ll have to plug in the device each time it boots. Sorry kids, the days of one-click exploits are long over.
What security researchers we spoke with all seem to agree on, however, is that it’ll provide the pieces needed for the jailbreak community to, perhaps, figure out the rest.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [The Next Web] December 8, 2017 at 08:56PM. Credit to Author and The Next Web | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
The new program was inspired by the company’s Motion Stills app, which was released last year with the goal of taking technology in development from Google and turning it into actual apps. Like Motion Stills, the trio of new apps are fully functional software in their own right, but “built on experimental technology” that Google will continue to build out over time.
It’s an approach that sounds similar to Microsoft’s Garage program, which offers developers at the Redmont company a chance to create similar smaller, experimental apps.
Image: Google
The first app, Storyboard, takes video clips and automatically pulls out six frames which it lays out in a comic book-style template. You’ll be able to refresh the app to get new layouts and frames, with Google claiming that there are over 1.6 trillion combinations.
Image: Google
Next is the somewhat ridiculously named Selfissimo!, which is kind of like an automated black and white photo booth on your phone. Once you tap the screen to start a shoot, Selfissimo! will snap a picture every time you pose. The idea is to move around into different poses, with the app taking a picture every time you stop moving.
Image: Google
Lastly there’s Scrubbies, which lets you remix videos, DJ-style by quickly scrubbing back and forth through a clip to create video loops.
The three apps are available now for iOS and Android. And seeing as Google describes these as the first wave of “appsperiments,” it’s likely we’ll be seeing more of these experimental mini-apps soon.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [The Verge] December 11, 2017 at 04:02PM. Credit to Author and The Verge | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Engadget
Google Maps will make taking the train or the bus in places you’re visiting a lot less stressful: according to TechCrunch, the app will soon guide you through every step of a mass transit ride, including telling you when it’s time to get off. Once the feature rolls out, you’ll apparently find a “start” button at the bottom of the screen when you look up how to go to a certain destination. If you tap that button, you’ll get live updates on where you are as you walk or as your ride moves, not only within the app, but also on your Android lock screen.
[Image credit: TechCrunch]
You probably won’t need a feature like that for your daily commute, but if you’re traveling to a new city, state or country with a transit system that can be overwhelming for first timers, then it could be a godsend. Simply glance on your lock screen to see where you are (if your GPS and mobile internet are working inside the vehicle, that is) or wait for your phone to tell you that you’ve arrived. You can even scroll up and make sure you’re going the right way. TechCrunch says the feature will go live “soon,” but make sure to check your app right now — it might have already rolled out to random users for testing.
The concept isn’t completely new. Transit’s self-titled app has a “Go” feature that takes you through every step of a bus or subway ride. Google’s implementation would have a clear advantage, though: on Android, you wouldn’t have to download a separate app.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Engadget] December 9, 2017 at 08:42PM. Credit to Author and Engadget | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to New on MIT Technology Review
The latest AI program developed by DeepMind is not only brilliant and remarkably flexible—it’s also quite weird.
DeepMind published a paper this week describing a game-playing program it developed that proved capable of mastering Chess and the Japanese game Shoju, having already mastered the game of Go.
Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind, and an expert chess player himself, presented further details of the system, called Alpha Zero, at an AI conference in California on Thursday. The program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player.
“It doesn’t play like a human, and it doesn’t play like a program,” Hassabis said at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Long Beach. “It plays in a third, almost alien, way.”
Besides showing how brilliant machine learning programs can be at a specific task, this shows that artificial intelligence can be quite different from the human kind. As AI becomes more commonplace, we might need to be conscious of such “alien” behavior.
Alpha Zero is a more general version of AlphaGo, the program developed by DeepMind to play the board game Go. In 24 hours, Alpha Zero taught itself to play chess well enough to beat one of the best existing chess programs around.
What’s also remarkable, though, is that Alpha Zero plays chess in such a strange way.
It sometimes makes seemingly crazy sacrifices, Hassabis explained, like offering up a bishop and queen to exploit a positional advantage that led to victory. Such sacrifices of high-value pieces are normally rare. In another case the program moved its queen to the corner of the board, a very bizarre trick with a surprising positional value. “It’s like chess from another dimension,” Hassabis said.
Hassabis speculates that because Alpha Zero teaches itself, it benefits from not following the usual approach of assigning value to pieces and trying to minimize losses. “Maybe our conception of chess has been too limited,” Hassabis said. “It could be an important moment for chess. We can graft it into our own play.”
The game of chess also has a long history in artificial intelligence. The best programs have been developed and refined over decades, and incorporate huge amounts of human intelligence. Although in 1996 IBM’s Deep Blue beat then-world champion, that program, like other conventional chess programs, required careful hand-programming.
The original AlphaGo, designed specifically for Go, was a big deal because it was capable of learning to play a game that is enormously complex and is difficult to teach, requiring an instinctive sense of board positions. AlphaGo mastered Go by ingesting thousands of example games and then practicing against another version of itself. It did this partially by training a large neural network using an approach known as reinforcement learning, which is modeled on the way animals seem to learn (see: “Google’s AI Masters Go a Decade Earlier Than Expected”).
DeepMind has since demonstrated a version of the program, called AlphaGo Zero, that learns without any example games, and instead relying purely on self-play (see: “AlphaGo Zero Shows Machines Can Become Superhuman Without Any Help”). Alpha Zero improves further still by showing that the same program can master three different types of board games.
Alpha Zero’s achievements are impressive, but it still needs to play many more practice games than a human chess master. Hassabis says this may because humans benefit from other forms of learning, such as reading about how to play the game and watching other people play.
Still, some experts believe the program’s capabilities, while remarkable, should be taken in context. Speaking after Hassabis, Gary Marcus, a professor at NYU, said that a great deal of human knowledge went into building Alpha Zero. And he suggests that human intelligence seems to involve some innate capabilities, for example an intuitive ability to develop language.
Josh Tenenbaum, a professor at MIT who studies human intelligence, said if we want to develop real human-level artificial intelligence, we should study the flexibility and creativity that humans exhibit. He pointed, among other examples, to the intelligence of Hassabis and his colleagues in devising, designing, and building the program in the first place. “That’s almost as impressive as a queen in the corner,” he quipped.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Futurism
Express Delivery
Delivery robots are still a rare sight in the U.S., but that might not be the case for much longer. In order to get ahead of the game, authorities in San Francisco have passed new regulations that will control their usage.
Companies will be limited to three robots each, only nine of which will be allowed to traverse the whole city. These limits were put in place by new rules enacted by San Francisco’s board of supervisors. Furthermore, the activity of these robots will be limited to industrial areas where there aren’t many people around.
The regulations also state that the machines are not permitted to travel at more than three miles per hour, and must be accompanied by a human supervisor at all times. Bob Doyle, a spokesman for the Association for Advancing Automation Association, compared these restrictions to the early days of automotive vehicles where cars had to be preceded by a person carrying a flag.
“To put such a strict limit on these types of autonomous delivery vehicles drastically slows down the process of testing and the potential for these being put into (use before) the general public,” Doyle told the San Francisco Chronicle.
If delivery robots are ever to enter widespread use, it’s vitally important that they have been tested at length, and in similar conditions to those that they’ll ultimately be working in. It’s being argued that these restrictions are short-sighted, as they could prevent companies from perfecting these machines through that kind of rigorous, real-world testing.
The original proposal submitted by supervisor Norman Yee set out to ban the robots outright. The ban was proposed to prevent the robots from overcrowding sidewalks, similar to previously proposed bans pertaining to Segways and bicycles.
Machines Among Us
Automation and artificial intelligence give various industries new opportunities when it comes to their workforce. This will change the job market for humans, but it’s also set to have a wider impact on society.
For instance, if a delivery robot causes an accident, who is to blame? Responsibility would likely fall to the company that owns it, but there isn’t the direct culpability that would apply to an individual. Without the proper means of compelling the owners of these robots to prioritize public safety, putting limitations on their usage might be the best idea.
San Francisco is something of an outlier when it comes to its restrictions of delivery robots. Elsewhere in California, including the Bay Area, Redwood City, San Carlos, Sunnyvale, and Concord, pilot programs have been approved. While further afield, other states, including Idaho, Wisconsin, Virginia, Florida, and Ohio, have all given their blessing for robots traversing city streets, too.
Integrating robots and other automated workers into our society will offer up all kinds of moral and ethical dilemmas. This technology stands to contribute a wide range of benefits to our society, but we’ll need to carefully plan the unleashing of robots in our cities if we want to walk peacefully beside them on the sidewalk.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Futurism] December 8, 2017 at 04:56PM. Credit to Author and Futurism | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Smart home devices can become extremely complicated. You have to use different apps for each brand, and new devices you add might not be visible to a Google Home. Google has now (partially) solved this problem, with a new voice command.
You can now say “sync my devices” to Google Assistant (on your phone, Google Home, etc) to refresh all of your smart home services. For example, if you have Philips Hue lights and WeMo outlets, Google will pull the full list of your devices from those services. You can also just refresh a certain category, with something like “sync my lights.”
If you ever have issues with new lights not appearing to your Google Home, now you can just use one command instead of disconnecting/reconnecting the entire service from your Google account. So much more convenient.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Android Police ] December 10, 2017 at 12:36PM. Credit to Author and Android Police | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to WIRED
Rockets, electric cars, solar panels, batteries—whirlwind industrialist Elon Musk has set about reinventing one after another. Thursday, he added another ambitious project to the list: Future Tesla vehicles will run their self-driving AI software on a chip designed by the automaker itself.
“We are developing customized AI hardware chips,” Musk told a room of AI experts from companies such as Alphabet and Uber on the sidelines of the world’s leading AI conference. Musk claimed that the chips’ processing power would help Tesla’s Autopilot automated-driving function save more lives, more quickly, by hastening the day it can drive at least 10 times more safely than a human. “We get there faster if we have dedicated AI hardware,” he said. He didn’t say how far along Tesla is in developing a chip, or when it will start shipping inside vehicles.
This may not be the ideal time for Musk and Tesla to be juggling a new complex and expensive technical project. Some 400,000 people have plunked down $1,000 to join the waitlist for the company’s new Model 3 sedan, but last month Musk conceded production was months behind schedule.
Musk took the stage Thursday in a historic Spanish revival building in Long Beach, California. Alongside him were Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of AI, and Jim Keller, a veteran chip engineer who became vice president in charge of Autopilot hardware last year. Their audience comprised 200 or so lucky attendees of NIPS, a premier academic machine-learning conference that has become a vital bragging and recruiting venue for leading tech companies.
Musk pitched his party as a kind of group hug with the AI community, parts of which he has sometimes been at odds with. He swore that he and Tesla care deeply about the field, and spoke of the company’s need for AI talent in software and hardware. Musk joked self-deprecatingly about his habit of using public appearances to warn that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. “You’ve all heard me sound the alarm bell—there he goes again,” he said, to friendly laughter from the free-drink swilling crowd. “I also think there are things where AI can really be useful, well before you get to godlike uber intelligence.”
As the evening wore on, Musk spoke of his worries about military uses of AI. And he suggested a regulatory agency of some kind might someday require very advanced AI systems to include ethical foundations. But Tesla’s primary use for AI is making sense of data from the cameras, radar, and other sensors through which its Autopilot system perceives the world.
Tesla owners are instructed to only use the system on highways today. Musk has said that a future software upgrade will permit “full self-driving” using the hardware inside existing vehicles. He repeated that claim Thursday, saying that the new chip in the works would improve the reliability of what was already possible. “If you have an order of magnitude more computing power, at a first order approximation that’s an order of magnitude more reliability,” he said.
Reliability will be crucial for self-driving cars. Software hiccups matter when you’re propelling thousands of pounds of machinery around the streets. A Tesla owner died last year when his Model S steered by Autopilot drove into the side of a tractor trailer pulling across the road ahead. The car’s vision system failed to register the white trailer against the bright sky. Tesla’s AI director Karpathy said Thursday that vision algorithms can be troubled by things like trucks with reflective rear ends, or walls painted to appear like roads. Musk hastened to add that he believes cars will soon be harder to fool than people, noting how they can use multiple sensors such as radar and cameras to verify what they’re seeing.
It might seem unlikely that an auto company could design a chip better than a chip company. But Musk’s chip guru Keller told the audience Thursday that nothing on the market is a good fit for Tesla’s mixture of sensors, or the reliability requirements of an auto. “You can get something a lot better if you really design what you want,” Keller said. He previously worked at Apple, AMD, and storied computing pioneer Digital Equipment.
In designing its own chips for AI, Tesla is following other big tech companies. The technique known as deep learning used by Tesla and others for tasks like interpreting camera data is taxing for conventional computer chips. Google, Microsoft, and Apple, have all created custom chips to power deep learning in the cloud or on mobile devices.
Those projects pose a challenge to established silicon suppliers, and Tesla’s chip effort could too. Tesla announced last year that all its vehicles would be powered by a computer for automated driving from Nvidia, the graphics-chip company that has morphed into the leading supplier of high-powered silicon for machine learning. Nvidia said queries about its relationship with Tesla should be directed to the automaker. Tesla declined to comment.
Musk dodged a question from WIRED Thursday about the nature and exact function of the chip his team is working on. But he did say it had features that address shortcomings of graphics chips that limit their efficiency—perhaps a reference to Nvidia. Musk said Tesla engineers calculate their chip will match the performance of existing products while consuming a tenth of the power, and costing a tenth of the price.
The chip project reflects Musk’s high expectations for Autopilot, and progress in competing self-driving projects. Last month Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving unit, said it no longer needed safety drivers in the front seat of its prototype automated vehicles in Phoenix.
On Thursday night, Musk predicted that his cars will be able to fully drive themselves better than a human in less than two years, and 100 times better in three years. The assembled AI experts roared with delight and astonishment.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [wired.com] December 8, 2017 at 01:15PM. Credit to Author and wired.com | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to WIRED
Today, a teaspoon of spit and a hundred bucks is all you need to get a snapshot of your DNA. But getting the full picture—all 3 billion base pairs of your genome—requires a much more laborious process. One that, even with the aid of sophisticated statistics, scientists still struggle over. It’s exactly the kind of problem that makes sense to outsource to artificial intelligence.
On Monday, Google released a tool called DeepVariant that uses deep learning—the machine learning technique that now dominates AI—to assemble full human genomes. Modeled loosely on the networks of neurons in the human brain, these massive mathematical models have learned how to do things like identify faces posted to your Facebook news feed, transcribe your inane requests to Siri, and even fight internet trolls. And now, engineers at Google Brain and Verily (Alphabet’s life sciences spin-off) have taught one to take raw sequencing data and line up the billions of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs that make you you.
And oh yeah, it’s more accurate than all the existing methods out there. Last year, DeepVariant took first prize in an FDA contest promoting improvements in genetic sequencing. The open source version the Google Brain/Verily team introduced to the world Monday reduced the error rates even further—by more than 50 percent. Looks like grandmaster Ke Jie isn’t be the only one getting bested by Google’s AI neural networks this year.
DeepVariant arrives at a time when healthcare providers, pharma firms, and medical diagnostic manufacturers are all racing to capture as much genomic information as they can. To meet the need, Google rivals like IBM and Microsoft are all moving into the healthcare AI space, with speculation about whether Apple and Amazon will follow suit. While DeepVariant’s code comes at no cost, that isn’t true of the computing power required to run it. Scientists say that expense is going to prevent it from becoming the standard anytime soon, especially for large-scale projects.
But DeepVariant is just the front end of a much wider deployment; genomics is about to go deep learning. And once you go deep learning, you don’t go back.
It’s been nearly two decades since high-throughput sequencing escaped the labs and went commercial. Today, you can get your whole genome for just $1,000 (quite a steal compared to the $1.5 million it cost to sequence James Watson’s in 2008).
But the data produced by today’s machines still only produce incomplete, patchy, and glitch-riddled genomes. Errors can get introduced at each step of the process, and that makes it difficult for scientists to distinguish the natural mutations that make you you from random artifacts, especially in repetitive sections of a genome.
See, most modern sequencing technologies work by taking a sample of your DNA, chopping it up into millions of short snippets, and then using fluorescently-tagged nucleotides to produce reads—the list of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs that correspond to each snippet. Then those millions of reads have to be grouped into abutting sequences and aligned with a reference genome.
That’s the part that gives scientists so much trouble. Assembling those fragments into a usable approximation of the actual genome is still one of the biggest rate-limiting steps for genetics. A number of software programs exist to help put the jigsaw pieces together. FreeBayes, VarDict, Samtools, and the most well-used, GATK, depend on sophisticated statistical approaches to spot mutations and filter out errors. Each tool has strengths and weaknesses, and scientists often wind up having to use them in conjunction.
No one knows the limitations of the existing technology better than Mark DePristo and Ryan Poplin. They spent five years creating GATK from whole cloth. This was 2008: no tools, no bioinformatics formats, no standards. “We didn’t even know what we were trying to compute!” says DePristo. But they had a north star: an exciting paper that had just come out, written by a Silicon Valley celebrity named Jeff Dean. As one of Google’s earliest engineers, Dean had helped design and build the fundamental computing systems that underpin the tech titan’s vast online empire. DePristo and Poplin used some of those ideas to build GATK, which became the field’s gold standard.
But by 2013, the work had plateaued. “We tried almost every standard statistical approach under the sun, but we never found an effective way to move the needle,” says DePristo. “It was unclear after five years whether it was even possible to do better.” DePristo left to pursue a Google Ventures-backed start-up called SynapDx that was developing a blood test for autism. When that folded two years later, one of its board members, Andrew Conrad (of Google X, then Google Life Sciences, then Verily) convinced DePristo to join the Google/Alphabet fold. He was reunited with Poplin, who had joined up the month before.
And this time, Dean wasn’t just a citation; he was their boss.
As the head of Google Brain, Dean is the man behind the explosion of neural nets that now prop up all the ways you search and tweet and snap and shop. With his help, DePristo and Poplin wanted to see if they could teach one of these neural nets to piece together a genome more accurately than their baby, GATK.
The network wasted no time in making them feel obsolete. After training it on benchmark datasets of just seven human genomes, DeepVariant was able to accurately identify those single nucleotide swaps 99.9587 percent of the time. “It was shocking to see how fast the deep learning models outperformed our old tools,” says DePristo. Their team published the results on bioRxiv in December of 2016, and the next summer it went on to win a top performance award at the PrecisionFDA Truth Challenge.
DeepVariant works by transforming the task of variant calling—figuring out which base pairs actually belong to you and not to an error or other processing artifact—into an image classification problem. It takes layers of data and turns them into channels, like the colors on your television set. In the first working model they used three channels: The first was the actual bases, the second was a quality score defined by the sequencer the reads came off of, the third contained other metadata. By compressing all that data into an image file of sorts, and training the model on tens of millions of these multi-channel “images,” DeepVariant began to be able to figure out the likelihood that any given A or T or C or G either matched the reference genome completely, varied by one copy, or varied by both.
But they didn’t stop there. After the FDA contest they transitioned the model to TensorFlow, Google’s artificial intelligence engine, and continued tweaking its parameters by changing the three compressed data channels into seven raw data channels. That allowed them to reduce the error rate by a further 50 percent. In an independent analysis conducted this week by genomics computing platform, DNAnexus, DeepVariant vastly outperformed GATK, Freebayes, and Samtools, sometimes reducing errors by as much as 10-fold.
“That shows that this technology really has an important future in the processing of bioinformatic data,” says DNAnexus CEO, Richard Daly. “But it’s only the opening chapter in a book that has 100 chapters.” Daly says he expects this kind of AI to one day actually find the mutations that cause disease. His company received a beta version of DeepVariant, and is now testing the current model with a limited number of its clients—including pharma firms, big health care providers, and medical diagnostic companies.
To run DeepVariant effectively for these customers, DNAnexus has had to invest in newer generation GPUs to support its platform. The same is true for Canadian competitor, DNAStack, which plans to offer two different versions of DeepVariant—one tuned for low cost and one tuned for speed. Google’s Cloud Platform already supports the tool, and the company is exploring using the TPUs (tensor processing units) that connect things like Google Search, Street View, and Translate to accelerate the genomics calculations as well.
DeepVariant’s code is open-source so anyone can run it, but to do so at scale will likely require paying for a cloud computing platform. And it’s this cost—computationally and in terms of actual dollars—that have researchers hedging on DeepVariant’s utility.
“It’s a promising first step, but it isn’t currently scalable to a very large number of samples because it’s just too computationally expensive,” says Daniel MacArthur, a Broad/Harvard human geneticist who has built one of the largest libraries of human DNA to date. For projects like his, which deal in tens of thousands of genomes, DeepVariant is just too costly. And, just like current statistical models, it can only work with the limited reads produced by today’s sequencers.
Still, he thinks deep learning is here to stay. “It’s just a matter of figuring out how to combine better quality data with better algorithms and eventually we’ll converge on something pretty close to perfect,” says MacArthur. But even then, it’ll still just be a list of letters. At least for the foreseeable future, we’ll still need talented humans to tell us what it all means.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [WIRED] December 8, 2017 at 07:15AM. Credit to Author and WIRED | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Android Authority
Looking to turn your living space into a smart home? We know it can be a huge pain trying to figure out how to do it. Do you get smart bulbs? Which platform do you go for? Phillips or LIFX? Wemo? Then you look at some of those prices and realize maybe you are just fine getting out of bed to flip that switch!
Smart homes should be easy and flexible, as well as accessible. This is why today we wanted to share the Elf Smart Plug with you. It’s a simple on/off switch that connects to your WiFi network, allowing for remote control from any smartphone. Use it with a lamp and you will be able to turn on the lights from afar. Or maybe hook it to your stove for those days when you forget whether you turned the fire off or not. Simple.
There will be no fancy color changes, dimming and the like, but the Elf Smart Plug does have some cool tricks to show. Smart charging protection is one of them. This means the device can recognize when a phone is fully charged and stops sending it juice. Elf also joins the digital assistant hype by fully supporting the Amazon Echo.
The best part is that the unit costs only $25 per piece. These are sold in 3 different packages: 1 for $25, 2 for $50 and 4 for $100. IF that wasn’t cool enough, this product is ready to ship! You won’t be waiting for goals and shipping is done in 3-5 days.
Interested? Hit Indiegogo for all the details. We say it is a nice investment. The most similar mainstream products we can find are the Belkin Wemo smart plugs, which start at about $35.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Android Authority] December 10, 2017 at 04:14PM. Credit to Author and Android Authority | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to xda-developers
Google Chrome browser on Android is constantly getting better with new features being added each day. Google Chrome 63 recently rolled out to the stable channel and added support for Android Oreo‘s smart text selection feature. We also recently found evidence that the browser would soon support HDR video playback and a custom download folder, but we also discovered another feature that is rolling out to Chrome 64 and above: parallel download. This feature accelerates download speeds by creating parallel jobs to handle the download.
This should theoretically increase download speeds in Google Chrome for Android, though I don’t have any numbers on how much it will help. According to the commit, the parallel download feature is activated when a download is active for longer than 2 seconds. The feature creates 3 parallel jobs to speed up the download. The commit mentions that the feature will be enabled for 100% of users running Chrome version 64 and above. That means anyone running one of Chrome Dev, Chrome Canary, or a nightly Chromium build will have this feature enabled by default, with Chrome Beta and Chrome Stable to follow sometime afterwards.
If you would like to test this feature out right now on Chrome Beta, you can enable the flag by copying and pasting this line into your address bar.
chrome://flags#chrome-parallel-download
This flag states it will “enable parallel downloading to accelerate download speed” and was actually added 3 months ago, but after undergoing lots of internal testing, it appears that the feature is in a state where Google feels it is ready to be enabled for all users. Parallel downloads will probably not make a major difference for most users who only occasionally download small files off the Internet, but you may notice a difference when downloading larger files such as ROM zips.
Let us know if you notice a difference with this feature enabled. I’m curious to see if it provides a noticeable improvement in the download speed in Google Chrome.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [xda-developers] December 10, 2017 at 09:34AM. Credit to Author and xda-developers | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Technology – Quartz
Artificial intelligence is seeping into every nook and cranny of modern life. AI might tag your friends in photos on Facebook or choose what you see on Instagram, but materials scientists and NASA researchers are also beginning to use the technology for scientific discovery and space exploration.
But there’s a core problem with this technology, whether it’s being used in social media or for the Mars rover: The programmers that built it don’t know why AI makes one decision over another.
Modern artificial intelligence is still new. Big tech companies have only ramped up investment and research in the last five years, after a decades-old theory was shown to finally work in 2012. Inspired by the human brain, an artificial neural network relied on layers of thousands to millions of tiny connections between “neurons” or little clusters of mathematic computation, like the connections of neurons in the brain. But that software architecture came with a trade-off: Since the changes throughout those millions of connections were so complex and minute, researchers aren’t able to exactly determine what is happening. They just get an output that works.
At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in Long Beach, California, the most influential and highest-attended annual AI conference, hundreds of researchers from academia and tech industry will meet today (Dec. 7) at a workshop to talk about the issue. While the problem exists today, researchers who spoke to Quartz say the time is now to act on making the decisions of machines understandable, before the technology is even more pervasive.
“We don’t want to accept arbitrary decisions by entities, people or AIs, that we don’t understand,” said Uber AI researcher Jason Yosinkski, co-organizer of the Interpretable AI workshop. “In order for machine learning models to be accepted by society, we’re going to need to know why they’re making the decisions they’re making.”
As these artificial neural networks are starting to be used in law enforcement, healthcare, scientific research, and determining which news you see on Facebook, researchers are saying there’s a problem with what some have called AI’s “black box.” Previous research has shown that algorithms amplify biases in the data from which they learn, and make inadvertent connections between ideas.
For example, when Google made an AI generate the idea of “dumbbells” from images it had seen, the dumbbells all had small, disembodied arms sticking out from the handles. That bias is relatively harmless; when race, gender, or sexual orientation is involved, it becomes less benign.
“As machine learning becomes more prevalent in society—and the stakes keep getting higher and higher—people are beginning to realize that we can’t treat these systems as infallible and impartial black boxes,” Hanna Wallach, a senior researcher at Microsoft and speaker at the conference, tells Quartz in an email. “We need to understand what’s going on inside them and how they are being used.”
Mission-critical AI
In NASA’s Jet Propolusion Lab, artificial intelligence allows the Mars rover to operate semi-autonomously when exploring the surface of an unexplored planet. AI is also used to comb through the thousands of pictures taken by the rover when they’re transmitted back to Earth.
Why would they trust [AI] to control their Mars rover or orbiter if they don’t know why it’s making the choices it’s making?
But Kiri Wagstaff, a JPL AI researcher and speaker at the workshop, says AI needs to be understood before it’s used, due to the high risks every decision brings in space.
“If you have a spacecraft in orbit around Mars, it’s 200 million miles away, it costs hundreds of millions of dollars, potentially even a billion dollars, to send there. If anything goes wrong, you’re done. There’s no way to repair, visit, replace that thing without spending an immense amount of money,” Wagstaff says. “So if we want to put machine learning in play, then the people running these missions need to understand what it’s doing and why, because why would they trust it to control their Mars rover or orbiter if they don’t know why it’s making the choices it’s making?”
Wagstaff works on building the AI that sorts through images captured in space by NASA’s various spacecraft. Since those images can number in the millions, having an AI pick out the interesting photos could be a big timesaver—but only if the AI knows what an “interesting” image looks like.
To Wagstaff, being able to understand what the AI is looking for is crucial to implementing the algorithm. If there was a mistake in how it learned to go through images, that could mean passing over data worth the millions of dollars the mission cost.
“Just being presented with an image that a computer said ‘Oh this is interesting, take a look’ leaves you in this sort of limbo, because you haven’t looked at all million images yourself, you don’t know why that’s interesting, what ticked,” Wagstaff says. “Is it because of its color, because of its shape, because of the spacial arrangement of objects in the scene?”
Hidden knowledge
In 2007, Andrew Gordon Wilson, an AI professor at Cornell University and co-organizer of the Interpretable AI workshop, was working with a team to build a new kind of PET scanning machine. Since certain particles didn’t behave in the machine as they did in the rest of the physical world, he was tasked with tracking how a certain particle moved through a tank of xenon.
His adviser suggested trying to use neural networks, which were still relatively obscure at the time. Using the technology, Wilson was able to use the light emitted by the particle to locate it in the xenon chamber.
While he got the answer he was looking for, Wilson says that understanding the internal rules the algorithm had built to understand how light indicated the position of the particle could have opened a new avenue of research.
“In a way, a model is a theory for our observation, and we can use the model not just to make predictions but also to better understand why the predictions are good and how these natural processes are working,” Wilson said.
Up for interpretation
But to make new ground on interpretability, one of the biggest challenges is simply defining it, says Wallach, the Microsoft researcher.
Does interpretability mean that AI experts know why Facebook’s algorithm is showing you a specific post, or that you understand yourself? Does a doctor using an AI-powered treatment recommendation system need to know why a specific regimen was suggested, or is that another role— like an AI overseer— that needs to be created in a hospital?
“If your system doesn’t work and you don’t know why it’s quite hard to improve it.”
Wallach calls interpretability a latent construct: Something unobservable, but instead augured by testing how real people use and misunderstand AI systems. It’s not just a matter of lifting the hood of an algorithm and watching how the engine runs.
Understanding an algorithm isn’t just to fend against bias or make sure your rover won’t fall off a Martian cliff; knowing how a system fails can help AI researchers build more accurate systems.
“If your system doesn’t work and you don’t know why, it’s quite hard to improve it,” Uber’s Yosinski say. “If you do know why it’s failing, oftentimes the solution is a foregone conclusion.”
To figure out how one of its algorithms thinks, Google is trying to sift through the millions of computations made every time the algorithm processes an image. In a paper presented at the NIPS conference, a Google team showed that they were able to fix the unwanted association between dumbbells and arms, only this time with tree bark and birds.
By looking at which neurons in the network were activated when the AI looked at images of birds, the Google team was able to determine which were focusing on the bird and which were focusing on the bark, and then turn the bark neurons off. The success is a sign that, for all its complexity, translating a neural network’s work into something a human understands isn’t impossible.
“In school we ask students to put it in their own words to prove that they’ve understood something, to show their work, justify their conclusion,” Wagstaff says. “And now we’re expecting that machines will be able to do the same thing.”
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Technology – Quartz] December 7, 2017 at 07:21AM. Credit to Author and Technology – Quartz | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
But now some spy footage shows a Tesla Semi prototype driving in broad daylight – giving us probably the best look at the electric truck.
At the Tesla Semi unveil event last month, Tesla unveiled two electric truck prototypes with different configurations.
They showed the trucks pulling trailers and later in the night after the presentation, they gave test drives without trailers to transport industry people and potential customers.
Attendees also had the chance to get in the cab, but I’d argue that this new footage gives an all-new look at the prototype and likely the best look yet for anyone that wasn’t at the event.
Roy Greenberg spotted the electric truck driving around at Tesla’s Design Studio in Hawthorne yesterday. He posted a video on Instagram:
We get to see just how deep and empty the back of the cab is – which would indicate that the battery pack is really only located at the bottom of the truck.
Based on the performance numbers that Tesla released, the battery pack would have a capacity of about 1 MWh and that would be a very large battery pack to fit on the chassis – and we are not even talking about the weight.
We can also clearly see the hitch system at the back of the vehicle:
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is now trying to take this prototype and bring it to production within the next 2 years.
Customers have already lined up hundreds of orders for the electric truck – putting some pressure on Tesla to deliver.
I was on CNBC yesterday talking about how I think that I actually like Tesla’s chances to deliver the vehicle on time, which hasn’t often been the case with Tesla’s previous vehicle programs:
Though my biggest concern is that Tesla Semi’s specs don’t appear to be possible with the current battery cells that Tesla uses in its current vehicles in term of weight and cost. Most analysts seem to agree that at least some significant incremental improvements in Li-ion batteries would be required or even a breakthrough with a new type of batteries.
I would very much like for Tesla to clarify its plans for the Tesla Semi’s battery pack.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 9, 2017 at 12:13PM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Sysco, which has the largest food service distribution network in the world, confirmed the order of 50 Tesla Semi trucks during their investor day yesterday (hat tip to Brian Brophy).
The effort is part of their plan to adopt new technologies in their distribution network in order to increase efficiency.
While it’s one of Tesla’s biggest reported orders of trucks yet, it’s actually only a small update of Sysco’s fleet, which includes over 7,000 trucks in operation.
After Tesla revealed the pricing of its electric semi trucks last month, we learned that the regular production versions for the 300-mile and 500-mile range versions will be $150,000 and $180,000 respectively, while the company is also listing a ‘Founders Series’ version for $200,000.
It means that Sysco’s order alone is worth between $7.5 million and $10 million.
Tesla first started taking reservations with a $5,000 deposit per truck, but has changed the listed deposit price last month to $20,000 for a “base reservation” of the production version and the full $200,000 for the “Founders Series” truck.
Therefore, Sysco had to put down at least $250,000 for the vehicles, which are not expected to enter production until 2019, and it could have gone up to the total amount of the purchase depending on when they placed and which version of the truck they ordered.
Electrek’s Take
It’s interesting that companies are still confirming large orders weeks after the unveiling event. It almost seems like there’s some sort of snowball effect going on and no one wants to be the one without any Tesla Semi truck on the books.
As we previously reported, it’s not exactly surprising since Tesla shocked a lot of people with the specs announced for the truck last month.
If they can deliver on it, it has the potential to significantly improve the economics of ground transport.
But the capacity and cost of the Tesla Semi seem to point at a major battery breakthrough for cost and energy density that is enabling those new impressive specs. In my opinion, I don’t see any other way that they can achieve anything close to what they are claiming based on current specs.
Therefore, there might be more to Tesla Semi than what Tesla has revealed so far and it will be interesting to see how it will affect it’s apparently growing backlog of orders – two years ahead of the start of production.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 8, 2017 at 05:51AM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Digital Trends
Of all the tech and automotive companies working on self-driving cars, Apple might be the most secretive. So far, the Cupertino company has been relatively quiet regarding its plans for autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence, but a recent article in Wired gives some insight into the tech giant’s plans.
Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Apple’s head of A.I., addressed roughly 200 people at an event held during the Neural Information Processing Systems in Long Beach, California. One of the main topics he touched upon was a recently released study documenting Apple’s advances in using lidars (3D scanners) to help self-driving cars identify pedestrians and cyclists.
There were a few other topics that he discussed as well. One was a piece of software designed to help identify cars, pedestrians, and roadways, based on data obtained from car-mounted cameras. He showed off some images showcasing the software’s ability to function even in the rain. It was also able to detect pedestrians that were partially obscured behind parked cars.
Salakhutdinov cited the above technology as an example of how far A.I. and machine learning has came in recent years.
“If you asked me five years ago, I would be very skeptical of saying ‘Yes you could do that,’” he said.
SLAM stands for simultaneous localization and mapping, and it refers to technology that helps give robots and self-driving cars a “kind of sense of direction.” In addition to self-driving cars, SLAM also has potential applications in the fields of augmented reality, and in designing maps of cities and landscapes.
During the course of the conversation, Salakhutdinov discussed a fourth technology that uses car-mounted sensors to create 3D maps of roadways, complete with features such as traffic lights and other road markings.
One thing that was not made clear during this event was how exactly these efforts work together to help bring Apple’s vision of self-driving cars to fruition. Salakhutdinov gave out plenty of puzzle pieces, but at the moment it is unclear how the puzzle fits together. That being said, it is clear that Apple is hard at work developing the technology to help self-driving cars operate safely.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Digital Trends] December 10, 2017 at 02:54PM. Credit to Author and Digital Trends | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Co.Design
Chris Bangle is an auto industry legend. An arguable mad genius of auto design (as well as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People), Bangle was BMW’s first American design chief and a longtime Fiat designer who played an outsize role in building a wild visual language for contemporary cars that owes as much to modern art as it does to 1960s Detroit. After leaving BMW, Bangle started the design firm Chris Bangle Associates,which has worked with an eclectic list of non-auto clients like Samsung.
Now Bangle is back in the car world with an entirely new project: a tiny, mostly aluminum car designed for city driving whose seats can be rearranged like a giant game of Tetris.
[Image: courtesy Chris Bangle Associates]
MEET THE REDS
At an event at the ArtCenter in Pasadena on November 28 during the Los Angeles Auto Show, Bangle unveiled his newest creation. The China High-Tech Group Corporation (CHTC), a large Chinese government-owned company, is spinning off a new auto company called Redspace. Redspace’s first car is Bangle’s Reds. It’s an aluminum electric car with a boxy shape and sharp angles everywhere–a design Bangle says was partially inspired by Calvin of Calvin & Hobbes (An “adult in a kid’s body,” Bangle said onstage at the reveal). Reds is, well, the most unique car you’ve seen in a long time.
It also reverses decades of conventional car wisdom by putting the design of the car’s passenger interior front and center. In that respect, it feels like it’s hinting at what the inside of cars will look like in the coming autonomous vehicle era.
[Image: courtesy Chris Bangle Associates]
First things first: The car is tiny, as in 9.7-feet-long tiny. It’s tinier than the Fiats and Minis Bangle used to work on. It’s smart car-sized, and has a flat roof with solar panels on top, sliding doors, wings on the side, and even little flares over the doors designed to protect you from the rain as you exit the car.The inside? It’s different. Bangle and his design team created seats you can rearrange like blocks in a game of Tetris. The driver’s seat can rotate into reverse position when parked, and four seats are packed into the tiny miniature car. There’s even a fifth seat that can be added when the car is parked; the rear hatch can be converted into a jump seat that fits over the small cargo well.
There are also several idiosyncratic touches such as a foot massager for passengers, a pop-up 17-inch video screen viewable from the whole car, and a configuration for the back seats that looks much like a loveseat sofa. The idea is that you don’t just commute to and from work in your car–your car also becomes a portable office, a place to unwind in the driveway, and even a cabin for watching television with friends.
Although self-driving cars weren’t mentioned onstage at the reveal, almost everything Bangle and his corporate backers displayed looks like it’s straight out of an autonomous vehicle techie think piece.
In our conversation, Bangle emphasized that this car is a new experiment in and of itself, and not a precursor to an autonomous vehicle. However, the living space-centric inside hints at what the interiors of future mostly autonomous vehicles will look like, when people no longer have to focus on driving.
[Image: courtesy Chris Bangle Associates]
MEGACITY TRAFFIC JAM
Onstage at the Reds event, one phrase kept popping up among the Chinese auto executives bankrolling the car: “Make megacity mobility more joyful.”
Electric vehicles are having a bit of a moment in the Chinese auto industry right now due to three factors: a slew of first-time auto owners, dense urban environments where most drivers are making short drives, and heavy investment in infrastructure for electric vehicle charge points in cities and suburbs.
But why this car design in particular? “First of all, traffic just isn’t moving,” Bangle says. “The speeds are very low and the speed limit is 120 kilometers per hour (74 miles), so it doesn’t make sense to design a car that at its best is 180 kilometers per hour–though, of course, it’s a great thing too if you want to do that.
“But when you’re at these lower speeds, you can rethink aerodynamics, keep the acoustics of aerodynamics in mind, the stability in mind, but not play slave to all the Cx value aerodynamics [a measure of the car’s drag]that are necessary at higher speeds,” Bangle added. “At this speed, the critical thing is weight. That’s why it’s an all-aluminum car–to keep the weight as low as possible, which gives us acceleration as well.”
[Image: courtesy Chris Bangle Associates]
TURNING CARS INTO LEISURE SPACES
During the unveiling, CHTC’s executives made multiple mentions of the idea of looking at cars almost as leisure spaces when drivers aren’t actively driving. Case studies were shown where the Reds vehicle functioned either as a chill-out space for busy parents shuttling their children to appointments, for office workers looking for a quiet place to get some extra work done on the way home, and as a place for teenagers and gen-Zers to hang out and watch television. In other words–using a car much like you’d use a coffeeshop or neighborhood bar.
[Image: courtesy Chris Bangle Associates]
It’s a radical reimagining of a car, but one that is less odd than it seems for many countries–not just China. Commuters on public transit are used to sitting down and playing smartphone games or reading a book on their trip; it’s not much different to imagine a white-collar worker pulling into a mall parking lot to finish a PowerPoint deck or twentysomethings streaming Netflix in a car during a bad traffic jam with a 90-minute commute home. These things are universal pretty much in any country where you have an affluent consumer base and, well, bad traffic.And when future cars gain more autonomous capabilities, you can bet that similar design cues will show up in more mass market vehicles worldwide. As Bangle put it in a press release, “It’s about time we made a car that not only has a wrap-around love seat but is also best-in-class for diaper changing.”
CHTC is referring to Reds as a “alpha prototype,” and there’s no firm info about release date or what pricing would be just yet. The car was most recently on display at the Los Angeles Auto Show, and Redspace says next steps for the vehicle are testing, developing production plans, and finalizing a supplier network.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Co.Design] December 4, 2017 at 07:43AM. Credit to Author and Co.Design | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to The Next Web
Samsung wants to hide your phone password in the palm of your hand
Samsung already lets you unlock your phone by scanning your fingerprint and your iris, but it’s now thinking of other ways to secure your device – and it involves palmistry.
CNET reports that a recently filed patent application (PDF) from the South Korean firm describes an authentication system for your phone, in which a person’s password is embedded in an image of the user’s open palm; when you point the camera at your hand, it displays some of the characters, so as to give you a hint as to what your complete password might be.
While this hasn’t been widely explored in the past, David Zhang from the Zhang-City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, noted in his 2006 book Palmprint Authentication that no two palmprints are completely identical, and so they could prove useful in biometric identification tech. Fun fact: the veins in your hands are also unique to you.
It isn’t clear if this will make it to a Samsung handset in the near future, but it’s an interesting idea that could allow for multi-factor authentication for greater security, or an on-device method for helping your recall your forgotten password. It could also mean that Samsung won’t have to ape Apple’s Face ID in its next mobile security push.
View the entire patent application on this page (PDF).
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [The Next Web] December 4, 2017 at 02:03AM. Credit to Author and The Next Web | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechCrunch
For the first time, Facebook is opening up to children under age 13 with a privacy-focused app designed to neutralize child predator threats that plague youth-focused competitors like Snapchat. Rolling out today on iOS in the US, “Messenger Kids” lets parents download the app on their child’s phone or tablet, create a profile for them, and approve friends and family who they can text and video chat with from the main Messenger app.
Tweens don’t sign up for a Facebook account and don’t need a phone number, but can communicate with other Messenger and Messenger Kids users parents sign-off on, so younger siblings don’t get left out of the family group chat. “We’ve been working closely with the FTC so we’re lockstep with them. ‘This works’, they said” Facebook product management director Loren Chung tells me. “In other apps, they can contact anyone they want or be contacted by anyone” Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus notes.
Special proactive detection safety filters prevent children from sharing nudity, sexual content, or violence, while a dedicated support team will respond quickly to reported or flagged content. Facebook even manually sifted Giphy to build a kid-friendly version of the GIF sharing engine. And with childish augmented reality masks and stickers, video calls with grandma could be a lot more fun and a lot less silent or awkward.
Facebook won’t be directly monetizing Messenger Kids, automatically migrating kids to real accounts when they turn 13, or collecting data so that it complies with Children’s Online Privacy Protections Act (COPPA) law. But the app could prime kids to become life-long Facebook users, and lock their families deeply into the platform where they’ll see ads.
“When you think about things at scale that we do to get people to care more about Messenger, this is one that addresses a real need for parents” say Facebook’s head of Messenger David Marcus. “But the side effect will be that they use Messenger more and create family groups.” Marcus tells me he’s excited about getting his 8-year-old into the family chat alongside his 14- and 17-year-old children.
How Messenger Kids Works
It’s important to understand that kids under 13 still can’t sign up for a Facebook account. Instead, parents download the Messenger Kids app to a child’s iPhone or iPad (Android coming soon). Once the parent has authenticated in with their own account, they set up a mini-profile with their kid’s name and photo. Then, using the Messenger Kids bookmark in the main Facebook app, parents can approve anyone who is friends with them as a contact for their kid, like aunts and uncles or godparents. Messenger Kids is interoperable with the main Messenger app, so adults don’t actually have to download the Kids app.
Kids still can’t be found through Facebook search to protect their privacy. So if a child wants to be able to chat with one of their classmates, their parent must first friend that kid’s parent, and then will see the option to approve that adult’s child as contact for their own kid. This is by far the most clumsy part of Messenger Kids, and something Facebook might be able to improve with a way for Messenger Kids to let children perhaps photograph a QR code on their playmate’s app to request that their parents connect.
When children open the Messenger Kids app, they’ll see a color-customizable home screen with big tiles representing their existing chat threads and approved contacts, with their last message and the last time they were online. From there, kids can dive instantly into a video chat or text thread with their contacts.
Facebook hired a special team to develop kid-friendly creative tools, from fidget spinner and dinosaur AR masks to crayon-style stickers. Messenger features like location sharing and payments have been stripped out, while the Kids version of Giphy won’t let you search for things like “sex”. Facebook actually manually selected a set of GIFs that kids can use rather than relying on a third-party startup to tag things well enough. Still, a reporting interface written specifically for kids lets them flag anything sketchy to a dedicated support team working 24/7.
One thing that might surprise some people is that there’s no way for parents to secretly spy on what their kids are saying in their chats. Instead, parents have to ask to look at their kids’ screen, which Chung says is a more common behavior pattern. The exception is that if kids report a piece of objectionable content, their parents will be notified but still not shown the content in their own app.
The launch could be a sign that Facebook is growing up. With Facebook almost 14 years old itself, children not yet born when it launched are now allowed on its main app. CEO Mark Zuckerberg just had two kids. So did his lieutanants Chris Cox, CPO, and Andrew Bosworth, head of hardware. It’s hard to think about connecting the world if you products can’t connect your own family. Today it’s laying the foundation for an intergenerational social network.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechCrunch] December 4, 2017 at 08:01AM. Credit to Author and TechCrunch | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to BGR
When the Galaxy S8 was unveiled earlier this year, Samsung announced a clever accessory that lets you turn the smartphone into an Android desktop. All you need is the DeX Station to make it happen — and a computer monitor, keyboard, and mouse, of course.
The DeX dock is hardly the perfect solution, but Samsung isn’t giving up, and it’ll introduce a different DeX accessory for the Galaxy S9 come next year, according to a new rumor.
Samsung’s new device will be called the DeX Pad, GalaxyClub has learned, and as the name indicates, we’ll be looking at a different kind of dock for Samsung’s flagship handset.
With the help of the DeX Pad, you’ll be able to place your Galaxy S9 or Galaxy S9+ flat on the desk and use the display as a mouse pad or a keyboard. That means you no longer have to carry around keyboards and mice.
That said, it’s unclear how the Galaxy S9 will connect to the DeX Pad. A wired connection via USB-C is probably what Samsung will go with, considering that there’s a lot of data to be moved between the phone and the display. Not to mention the fact that it’d be great if the dock would power the Galaxy S9 while the phone is used.
The report says the DeX Pad will launch simultaneously with the Galaxy S9, although it’s unclear when that will happen. Opinions regarding Samsung’s Galaxy S9 launch event are divided. Some say the phone will be unveiled at CES in January, while others claim the phone is on track for its standard MWC launch in February.
As for backward compatibility, it’s unclear at this time whether the DeX Pad is compatible with this year’s flagships, including the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy Note 8. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [BGR] December 4, 2017 at 08:53AM. Credit to Author and BGR | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
Earlier this year, Tesla said that it was working with insurers in order for them to better understand features like the Autopilot.
Now, a major insurer announced that they are offering a 5 percent discount for drivers using Tesla’s driver assist system.
Britain’s largest motor insurer Direct Line confirmed to Reuters that they are offering the discount to encourage the use of Autopilot.
Dan Freedman, Head of Motor Development at Direct Line, said:
“At present the driver is firmly in charge so it’s just like insuring other cars, but it does offer Direct Line a great opportunity to learn and prepare for the future,”
Earlier this year, data came out suggesting that some Tesla owners were paying higher than average premiums. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the insurers weren’t competitive and suggested that Tesla owners paying higher premiums simply change insurers.
But he also said that they will be working more closely with them to make sure the rates are fair – especially with the advent of autonomous driving and active safety features in Tesla’s vehicles.
Musk added:
“Not to the exclusion of insurance providers but if we find that insurance providers are not matching the insurance proportionate to the risk of the car, then if we need to, we will in-source it. I think we will find that insurance providers do adjust the insurance cost proportionate to the risk of a Tesla.”
Tesla also started working on a new car insurance program under its own brand and underwritten by other insurers. Last year, we published an exclusive report revealing the program when Tesla quietly launched it in Australia and Hong Kong.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 4, 2017 at 11:23AM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechHive
With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) poised to dismantle net neutrality rules next month, it’s easy to get caught up in predictions of an internet doomsday.
You might have seen, for instance, the mockup of an internet service plan that charges extra for access to popular web services, or the claims that an internet company could block unfavorable political opinions from appearing online. Without strong net neutrality rules, the fear is that cable, telecom, and other internet service providers will become powerful gatekeepers, deciding what you see and how much you’ll pay to see it. This of course would have dire implications for anyone looking to cancel cable TV in favor of cheaper streaming video services.
Comcast and other providers have denied that they’ll ruin the internet in such dramatic fashion, but the reality is that they don’t have to. Under the current FCC, these companies have already been granted a more insidious form of gatekeeper power, one that gives their own video services an unfair advantage.
The data cap disease
To understand the real risk cord cutters face under net neutrality, it helps to look at a few interconnected events that have occurred since last year.
The first came in October 2016, when Comcast started enforcing 1TB data caps in more markets. This was a more generous limit than the 300GB that Comcast had been testing, but meanwhile the surcharge to retain unlimited data ballooned, from $30 per month to $50 per month.
Four months later, the FCC stopped investigating a practice called “zero-rating,” in which internet providers would exempt certain services from counting against customers’ data caps. Although the current net neutrality rules don’t explicitly forbid zero-rating, former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler wanted to examine the practice on a case-by-case basis. The thinking was that if internet providers like Comcast and Verizon offered their own streaming services, perhaps they shouldn’t be allowed to wield data caps as a weapon against competitors. Whether the FCC had the authority to forbid these practices became a moot point when the current commission, under chairman Ajit Pai, abandoned all zero-rating investigations.
Finally, in late September, Comcast started offering a video service called Xfinity Instant TV to its cable internet subscribers. Compared to other streaming TV bundles, such as Sling TV and YouTube TV, Comcast’s service is an inferior value, but it does have one unique hook: Instead of streaming over the public internet, Xfinity Instant TV uses a managed portion of Comcast’s own network, which doesn’t compete with other services for bandwidth and doesn’t count against customers’ data caps.
Comcast can likely get away with this by classifying Xfinity Instant TV as a Title VI television service, just like regular cable TV. Although this classification is subject to various regulations that don’t apply to internet streaming services, it’s also exempt from any net neutrality rules that would apply on the public internet. (In the past, Comcast has used Title VI to justify unlimited video streaming to Xbox consoles for cable subscribers.)
Still, Comcast was apparently worried enough about net neutrality rules that it held off launching Xfinity Instant TV, which it had been testing since 2015, until after Ajit Pai took over the FCC. “The company says net neutrality rules and regulators under the Obama administration hindered [the service’s] rollout,” the Associated Press reported in July. “It wants the FCC to spike these rules, which bar internet providers from favoring their own content.”
A majority of the current FCC would likely celebrate Xfinity Instant TV as a triumph of deregulation, resulting in a new video option that might not exist under net neutrality rules. But Xfinity Instant TV is neither innovative nor competitive. It divvies cable channels into inflexible and expensive add-on packs, provides far fewer DVR recording hours than other streaming bundles, and doesn’t run on any streaming boxes that aren’t made by Roku. Exemption from data caps is the biggest advantage Comcast has.
Comcast
Xfinity Instant TV isn’t a great value, unless you’re worried about data caps.
Other internet providers are also looking to exploit that advantage, even without the Title VI justification. AT&T, for instance, already exempts its wireless subscribers from data caps when they’re watching DirecTV Now. While that exemption only applies to phones and tablets for now, there have been rumors of a TV dongle that streams unlimited DirecTV Now (but not other services) onto televisions over AT&T’s wireless network. That’s an unusual workaround for people who might be dealing with data caps at home, and of course it gives AT&T its own advantage over other streaming bundles.
Regulation loopholes
In opposing strong net neutrality rules, Ajit Pai and some third-party analysts have argued that little harm ever came of lighter regulation. With only a few rare exceptions, they say, internet service providers have a 20-year track record of treating all internet content fairly. Why introduce burdensome regulation now?
Here’s one answer (among several others): Absent some new legislation, the current Title II rules are the only protection consumers have against zero-rating. Although the practice has some consumer-friendly uses—T-Mobile’s Binge On program, which is open to all streaming video services at no cost, is one example—it also allows for anti-competitive behavior. Investigating the latter would be a way to keep internet providers honest.
All of which may explain how cable companies and telcos can now claim to support net neutrality, and how Comcast can specify that it’s against the notion of internet “fast lanes” and “anti-competitive paid prioritization.” Those tools are no longer necessary to gain an advantage in streaming video. The ever-present threat of data caps can do the heavy lifting instead.
The FCC already signaled back in February that it’s okay with this. Scrapping the current Title II rules would eliminate any remaining doubt.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechHive] November 30, 2017 at 06:06AM. Credit to Author and TechHive | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to WIRED
The China trip was only supposed to last 10 days. For Konstantinos Karatsevidis, the 23-year-old CEO of a new gadget maker called Eve, it was just a quick check-in to make sure production was rolling smoothly on his latest product. Karatsevidis and the rest of the nine-person Eve team have spent the last few years building the V, a laptop-tablet hybrid in the mold of the Microsoft Surface, working in remarkable concert with a teeming community of users and fans to create the exact product they wanted. All that was left to do was make it, perfectly, tens of thousands of times in a row. Which Karatsevidis learned is harder than it looks.
The 10-day trip stretched into a month and a half, during which Karatsevidis changed his flight home to Finland six different times. “I was living in the factory, basically, with the guys from my team,” Karatsevidis says. Day after grueling day, they’d sit with the workers on the assembly line, making sure every finish was applied with care and every part was connected just so. “We were just making sure everybody achieves the quality standard we want, because it’s very hard to communicate to the Chinese manufacturers that we want to make a nice device,” he says. Manufacturers see quality in measurables: how many times the kickstand opens before it breaks, how hot a temperature it can withstand. Karatsevidis knows users will measure quality by the texture of the fabric keyboard and the smoothness of the volume buttons.
Karatsevidis feels real pressure to get the V done, and get it right. Not just to appease the 4,208 people who backed Eve on Indiegogo more than a year ago, giving the company $1.4 million. Not for everyone else who pre-ordered, and has waited through months-long shipping delays. And not just for the 70,000 more who have signed up to be notified for Eve’s next flash sale.
Eve
Mostly Karatsevidis feels he owes it to the thousands of members of Eve’s online forum, who spent the last 18 months helping the team conceive of and build this thing. They decided the form factor. They picked most of the specs. They even chose the name. Eve’s product development doubled as a wild experiment in crowd-sourcing, in which Karatsevidis and his team let users design their ideal gadget and entrust Eve to build it. All those users, and some of the biggest players in the PC industry, are watching to see if Eve can turn a seemingly insane idea—asking a bunch of people on the internet for their opinions, and actually listening to them—into a killer product.
Ask the Audience
Back in 2012, when Karatsevidis was still a teenager, he met Mikko Malhonen at a poker table. Kindred spirits and fast friends, they talked late into the night about technology, the future, and their many business ideas. One held their attention: There were no good tablets other than the iPad, they thought, and maybe they could do it better. Or at least cheaper.
At first, Karatsevidis and Malhonen spent their time crawling Alibaba, looking for tablets they could tweak and sell. (Ever wondered why so many headphones look the same, or why every vape is just like every other vape? It’s because lots of companies find parts on Alibaba, slap their logo on them, and start selling.) But they wanted more control and flexibility, and since Karatsevidis knew a bit about manufacturing—his dad owned a company that made supplies for firefighters—the two dudes headed to China to figure out how to build a tablet.
Karatsevidis and Malhonen found a manufacturer at an electronics fair in Shenzhen that had a tablet design ready to go. They changed a couple of parts, named the device the T1, and started selling it on their website for $159 in late 2014. With a little press and some good reviews, Eve was off and running.
One thing about the T1 bugged Karatsevidis, though: Everyone had all these good ideas about how to make it even better. He’d find suggestions in comments, in forums, and in feedback from buyers. So Karatsevidis decided to steer into the feedback loop, and enlist all these ideas before they even started designing their next product. He and Malhonen knew they wanted to do something more ambitious, really make something rather than just tweak and re-brand. But that would require more resources, more suppliers, and a lot more work.
Recommended
The Eve founders went to Microsoft’s Finland team and asked for help in figuring out how things work. Microsoft directed them to the Hong Kong Electronics Fair, the massive annual gathering of suppliers, distributors, and manufacturers. There, somehow—Karatsevidis still can’t quite explain it—the Eve founders wound up at a fancy dinner, mingling with top managers from some of the largest companies and factories in the world. Karatsevidis spotted an important-looking guy walking around with an entourage, and armed with the dumb courage of youth, walked up to him and said hello. The guy turned out to be an Intel bigwig, to whom Karatsevidis immediately pitched his idea. He was going to build a laptop-tablet thing, he said, but he was going to crowdsource everything about it. “That’s a bullshit idea,” the guy said, and walked away. A few steps later, he turned around and came back. “No,” he said, “this is the future.” The Intel exec (who Karatsevidis declines to identify) is now a key mentor to Eve, and helped introduce the company to everyone worth knowing in the manufacturing world.
Over and over, that crowdsourcing pitch got Eve noticed. Microsoft and Intel both wound up investing in the project; even the Finnish government gave Eve a grant. “What’s very interesting to them is that we can tap into commoditized markets and have very rapid growth there,” Karatsevidis says. “When we enter with community, we can stand out.” Plus, he reckons being young and not asking for much helps his case too.
At first, Eve’s community consisted of 15 early T1 customers into a WhatsApp group, brainstorming what kinds of products and features they might be interested. Pretty quickly, a remarkable thing happened: Everybody seemed to agree on stuff. They’d argue and debate, but by the end, this small group usually reached consensus. Encouraged by the experience, Karatsevidis opened it up, started a web forum anyone could join. He didn’t know who would join, where they’d come from, or how they’d act. “We had zero hope that it would become successful,” he says.
The eve.community website opened on January 6, 2016. Pretty quickly, users started to introduce themselves: a student from Kokkola, an IT worker in the Netherlands, a Polish game developer. The fledgling community pored over the latest tech announcements and celebrated Finland’s victory in the U20 ice hockey world championships, but mostly got to work. The Eve team began asking questions about how people used their tablets, and what they might want from their next one.
On January 18, Malhonen wrote a post called “The Project: ‘Pyramid Flipper’—a PC when you need it, a tablet when you like it.” This was what he and Karatsevidis had decided to build next. Why Pyramid Flipper? Because they wanted to invert the way things were normally done, putting users at the top and corporate bullshit at the bottom. (The original codename was Flagburner, Malhonen said, but they were trying to be politically correct now. The embedded photo of PC Principal from South Park made clear how Malhonen felt about that.) He then laid out, in broad strokes, what Pyramid Flipper would be: an “ultimate portable PC” that was “as slim and light as possible” but still powerful enough to be “a mobile creation station.” Malhonen laid out a long list of possible specs, wrote a possible user story about a freelancer student named Maukka, and bared the whole plan for the device. People hated it. “Not really a device I would be interested in,” one user wrote.
Others began suggesting tweaks and adding features, pushing Eve’s idea toward something they believed in more. The more they talked, the more Karatsevidis and Malhonen realized the folks in this community—there were maybe 50 in the earliest days—knew their stuff. And they were, against all internet tendencies, reasonable in their thoughts, discussions, and requests. So the Eve guys bought all the way in. They decided that from then on, everything would be up to the community. And so 40 people decided that the Pyramid Flipper would be a 2-in-1, tablet-first device, with 83 percent in favor, according to a poll in the forum. They chose which ports the device would have, and how many, after spirited debates in the forum. They picked processors, screen sizes, even wireless radios.
Eve
The community won arguments with the Eve founders, making clear that pen support mattered when Karatsevidis didn’t think so. The same forum members even occasionally clashed with the team at Propeller, a well-known design firm that worked with Eve. “The community was really our user-data pool,” says Jessica Lambert, who runs business development for Propeller and was a key member of the Eve project. “They were giving us their gut reactions on things, what they wanted in a tablet, what they would use this tablet for.” Propeller wanted a slim, clean design, no more than 8mm thick, with future-proof USB-C ports. But the feedback said overwhelmingly that users wanted standard USB, and would rather have more battery instead of the slimmest possible body. That fight in particular Karatsevidis is glad he lost. “Without [the big battery], we’d be out of the game,” he says.
In every discussion, a few familiar tropes emerged. Somebody always wanted something impossible, like months-long battery life. Somebody would try and make everything about their specific needs. Somebody always just wanted to tell everyone else they sucked. But in every case, sanity prevailed. And the community, growing all the time, dreamed up a shockingly reasonable device. The Pyramid Flipper they imagined shared a lot in common with the Microsoft Surface, only with better battery (and a slightly bulkier body), more ports, and a more efficient processor. When it came time to name the thing, the place almost ate itself alive. The first poll included 120 options: Panacea, Chimera, Zeus, Stratus, Progenesis, Style, and, of course, Taby McTabFace, because this is the internet. One of Eve’s community managers, suggested calling it “V.” It sounded good, could mean victory or peace, and even looked a bit like a flipped pyramid. Four polls later, 80 voters had cast overwhelmingly in favor of the name. And so it became the Eve V.
Now Make Some
Once they’d finalized the basic specs and design, Karatsevidis and Malhonen built the prototype of the V. Once that came back, and they were confident this thing was going to work, they launched the Indiegogo campaign in November of 2016. “The idea behind Indiegogo was that none of your money is used for development,” Karatsevidis says. They’d paid for that with help from their partners and the leftover T1 profit.
The campaign was a huge success—it hit its goal in four minutes—to a degree that worried the Eve founders. “We used to hide the link to the community,” Karatsevidis says, as a way to keep too many people from joining and ruining the discussion. “Our biggest challenge has been making sure that only people who really want to contribute, get in.”
By the end of the campaign, Eve had thousands of orders to fill, $1.4 million to spend, and nearly 3,000 people in its community. “But the good news is,” Karatsevidis says, “somehow it managed to still be the same it was before, only better.” He worried that even a few trolls or angry voices would kill the vibe, but the conversations kept on. Meanwhile, the Eve team had bigger things to worry about, like actually shipping their product.
In most product development systems, the step after your first working prototype is known as the Design Validation and Testing phase, or DVT. That’s when you make 15 or 20 prototypes, all at once, with near-final software and hardware, in order to test and certify everything before you start building in the thousands. Eve decided to ship a bunch of these prototypes to community members, who could test the products in their own lives and report back. They identified countless bugs and issues, like how the headphone jack emitted a slight staticky hum, which nobody noticed in the loud factory in China but a user heard in their quiet home. There were lots of issues and a one-month delay thanks to some last-minute tweaking, but nothing huge. In early spring of 2017, Karatsevidis told the community it was time. “We were like, ‘OK guys, that’s it. Indiegogo’s successful, we’ve finished development, we’re ready to ship! That’s it.'” He said that the devices would be shipped either the last week of March, or the very beginning of April.
A few weeks later, Karatsevidis recanted in a long post in the Eve forums. “This week has been a long one,” he began, before detailing the problem they were having with the V’s screen supplier. They’d pre-ordered 15,000 displays, paid in cash, and the screens that came in were straight-up terrible. They had yellow stains, dead pixels, light bleed everywhere. “Fortunately, our screen supplier has stock and they will send us new screens already next week,” he wrote. Except the next batch, which took a month to arrive, came back the same way. Ditto the next batch. Eve couldn’t switch suppliers, since this one already had their money, and nobody else made the screen they needed. For the entire spring and summer, they were stuck in this back-and-forth, trying to keep users updated as often as possible.
Ordinarily, you’d expect everyone to be furious at delays, angry at the incompetence of the people they’ve entrusted with their money, and probably demanding of refunds. And there was that. But overall, every issue seemed to only band the community closer together. Forum members began referring to themselves as “stakeholders,” and referring to the product as something “we’re making.”
Eve’s forums are a remarkable artifact of what it takes to actually build a product. Karatsevidis often posted videos from factory floors, photos of prototypes at various stages, and long-winded digressions about things as mundane as the difficulty in getting two different materials to be exactly the same color. “We had to make a choice,” Karatsevidis says. “From the moment the delay happened, we could only be transparent. Just to show that, look guys, we’re the same as you, we really want this to be successful.” Forum members were full of encouragement, even advice on how to move forward.
Eventually Eve found a new display supplier, they got everything swapped in, and by October had entered into full mass production. With Karatsevidis there, watching over the process, making sure nothing else goes wrong. In early November, devices started to ship to Eve’s earliest backers. Reviewers, including me, started to get theirs as well. On December 4, Eve will have a flash sale for other users, then go back and make some more to sell those.
After all the debates and polls, you’d think the Eve V would be the sort of too-many-cooks device that everyone built and nobody likes. A camel is just a horse designed by committee, after all. But somehow, against all odds, Eve made a terrific device. Sure, the final V has a couple of quirks, like a backspace key marked “Oops!” and a design that won’t exactly wow a Best Buy shopper, but it’s a shockingly impressive device. “Beyond the rebellious marketing and convoluted back story, the Eve V is just a really good computer,” The Verge wrote, giving the V an 8 out of 10. Reviewers fairly worried about how such a tiny company will handle customer service or returns, but were all impressed with what a couple of young kids and a bunch of forum users could do.
Already, those forums are hard at work on what Eve should do next. They’re already working on a dock for the V, with more ports and power. The crowdsourced codename: Donald Dock. And for the next big product, everybody has ideas. User vithren proposed a more standard laptop, which garnered 294 comments. Hifihedgehog wants a straightforward iPad competitor, which got 174 comments. What about a V with an E Ink screen, borax99 wondered? (That idea didn’t get much love.) In every forum, before Karatsevidis or Malhonen could even respond, community members were debating specs, drafting press releases, even scouring the internet for manufacturers and reference designs.
Karatsevidis says he’s not sure what they’ll do next. He wants it to be something different, but close enough that he can use the contacts and supply chain he’s already set up. But after the last couple of years, even through all the complications, Karatsevidis brims with confidence. Sure, they could do a car, he says. It’d take a while, but it’s possible.
But if you really want to know what Eve’s probably going to work on next, just look at the forums. User fanoftech4life started a thread all the way back in February of 2016 called “An amazing Eve Phone.” It’s the most popular thread in the history of Eve’s forums, and the conversation continues even now. Karatsevidis is surely listening.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [WIRED] December 4, 2017 at 07:15AM. Credit to Author and WIRED | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Samsung Global Newsroom
New S3 line is now ready for ramp-up to meet the 10nm demand
Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, today announced that its Foundry Business has commenced mass production of System-on-Chip (SoC) products built on its second generation 10-nanometer (nm) FinFET process technology, 10LPP (Low Power Plus).
10LPP process technology allows up to 10-percent higher performance or 15-percent lower power consumption compared to its first generation 10nm process technology, 10LPE (Low Power Early). As this process is derived from the already proven 10LPE technology, it offers competitive advantages by greatly reducing turn-around time from development to mass production and by providing significantly higher initial manufacturing yield.
SoCs designed with 10LPP process technology will be used in digital devices scheduled to launch early next year and are expected to become more widely available throughout the year.
“We will be able to better serve our customers through the migration from 10LPE to 10LPP with improved performance and higher initial yield,” said Ryan Lee, vice president of Foundry Marketing at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung with its long-living 10nm process strategy will continue to work on the evolution of 10nm technology down to 8LPP to offer customers distinct competitive advantages for a wide range of applications.”
Samsung also announced that its newest manufacturing line, S3, located in Hwaseong, Korea, is ready to ramp up production of process technologies including 10nm and below. S3 is the third fab of Samsung’s Foundry Business, following S1 in Giheung, Korea and S2 in Austin, USA. Samsung’s 7nm FinFET process technology with EUV (Extreme Ultra Violet) will also be mass produced at S3.
Samsung Electronics’ S3 manufacturing line located in Hwaseong, Korea
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Samsung Global Newsroom] November 28, 2017 at 09:45PM. Credit to Author and Samsung Global Newsroom | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Digital Trends
Mobile infrastructure experts Ericsson predicts that in 2023 20-percent of the global population will have access to a super-fast, next generation 5G phone connection. Although that doesn’t sound like much, it’s around a billion people, and the United States is primed to be at the forefront, due to 5G tests already taking place. However, despite this, 4G LTE will remain the most likely connection you’ll see on your phone, even in six years time.
What will push 5G development during this time? Ericsson says mobile video will be one of the primary uses for faster 5G connections, but interestingly adds that virtual reality and augmented reality technology will push networks and infrastructure firms like Ericsson and Nokia to get 5G connections up and running quickly. It expects VR and AR to shift away from gaming and entertainment use, to become helpful and widely used by more people. Fast, reliable, low latency data connections will be imperative.
Ericsson echoes predictions about 5G we’ve heard already. It expects the very first 5G signals to go live in 2019, with a larger, more extensive launch in 2020. Along with the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China will also be among the first to provide commercial 5G networks. In September, Qualcomm said it expected the first 5G-ready smartphones to be available in 2019, a year earlier than the company had previously expected.
Where will you need to live to get a strong 5G connection after 2020? Ericsson says, “dense urban areas,” will be the first to enjoy 5G speeds, which means major cities to you and me. Among the networks working on 5G tests now is Verizon, and it has even more ambitious plans. It intends to test the first 5G connections in 11 different U.S. cities in 2018. T-Mobile, hot from its win to use the 600MHz spectrum, said it intends to have a nationwide, working 5G network by 2020.
How will the 20-percent 5G coverage compare to 4G LTE’s coverage in 2023? According to Ericsson, 4G LTE will be available to 85-percent of the global population at that time, reaching about 5.5 billion people. That’s a big difference, and likely gives us an indication of just how often we’ll see 5G speeds on our phones at that time, even in large cities.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Digital Trends] December 4, 2017 at 07:41AM. Credit to Author and Digital Trends | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
A couple of devices these days support HDR, though not many apps do. YouTube, Netflix, and Google Play Movies are among those apps that can handle HDR playback, and one more may soon be joining them: Chrome. This information comes courtesy of two commits that were recently spotted on Chromium Gerrit.
These first commit demonstrates that Chrome for Android will be able to “tak[e] the VP9 HDR metadata from the video container and [pass] it to MediaCodec.” The second says it’ll be able to “set color space and HDR metadata in android.media.MediaFormat,” or in plain English, played back if the device supports it.
Hopefully we see more HDR content start popping up, as the capability to play it is virtually useless if the content doesn’t exist itself. While 4K did take a while to catch on, there’s a decent amount of 4K stuff nowadays.
The location has the space to become an important delivery hub for Tesla in Los Angeles, which is one of the automaker’s biggest market and it is expected to grow in a big way with the Model 3 production ramp up.
Last month, roughly 20 Model 3 vehicles were spotted in the parking garage of the building. It may not seem like much, but it’s actually a significant volume considering how many Model 3 Tesla delivered until recently.
But now at least 27 additional Model 3 vehicles were spotted at the location last week.
Ethan Cushing (@ethancushing) managed to get a good view of the rear parking lot of Tesla’s new facility and he spotted the new Model 3 vehicles. He shared a few pictures with us:
Electrek’s Take
It looks like Tesla is stockpiling Model 3’s in Los Angeles ahead of the launch its new delivery center.
For a while now and ahead of the expected increase in delivery volumes due to Model 3, Tesla has been experimenting with delivery centers, which are similar to the automaker’s regular retail locations, but they focus on the delivery process. Some of them have been temporary locations, like one in Culver City earlier this year, but it looks like Tesla is also looking at permanent locations.
With now several dozen Model 3 units at the location, it looks like this new delivery center will have its work cut out for it once it opens, which we don’t know exactly when yhat will be, but renovation work has visibly progressed at the facility.
We have nothing yet to indicate that Tesla has fixed its production bottlenecks that have slowed the ouput of Model 3, but it’s clear that more vehicles are frequently being delivered and there are more to come.
But the total number of Model 3 vehicles on the road to date seems to still be under 1,000 units. As we reported on our Electrek podcast, Tesla had produced only just over 580 Model 3 vehicles as of mid-November, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 4, 2017 at 05:28AM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to AWS News Blog
There are only a few things more integrated into my day-to-day life than Alexa. I use my Echo device and the enabled Alexa Skills for turning on lights in my home, checking video from my Echo Show to see who is ringing my doorbell, keeping track of my extensive to-do list on a weekly basis, playing music, and lots more. I even have my family members enabling Alexa skills on their Echo devices for all types of activities that they now cannot seem to live without. My mother, who is in a much older generation (please don’t tell her I said that), uses her Echo and the custom Alexa skill I built for her to store her baking recipes. She also enjoys exploring skills that have the latest health and epicurean information. It’s no wonder then, that when I go to work I feel like something is missing. For example, I would love to be able to ask Alexa to read my flash briefing when I get to the office.
For those of you that would love to have Alexa as your intelligent assistant at work, I have exciting news. I am delighted to announce Alexa for Business, a new service that enables businesses and organizations to bring Alexa into the workplace at scale. Alexa for Business not only brings Alexa into your workday to boost your productivity, but also provides tools and resources for organizations to set up and manage Alexa devices at scale, enable private skills, and enroll users.
Making Workplaces Smarter with Alexa for Business
Alexa for Business brings the Alexa you know and love into the workplace to help all types of workers to be more productive and organized on both personal and shared Echo devices. In the workplace, shared devices can be placed in common areas for anyone to use, and workers can use their personal devices to connect at work and at home.
End users can use shared devices or personal devices. Here’s what they can do from each.
Shared devices
Join meetings in conference rooms: You can simply say “Alexa, start the meeting”. Alexa turns on the video conferencing equipment, dials into your conference call, and gets the meeting going.
Help around the office: access custom skills to help with directions around the office, finding an open conference room, reporting a building equipment problem, or ordering new supplies.
Personal devices
Enable calling and messaging: Alexa helps make phone calls, hands free and can also send messages on your behalf.
Automatically dial into conference calls: Alexa can join any meeting with a conference call number via voice from home, work, or on the go.
Intelligent assistant: Alexa can quickly check calendars, help schedule meetings, manage to-do lists, and set reminders.
Find information: Alexa can help find information in popular business applications like Salesforce, Concur, or Splunk.
Here are some of the controls available to administrators:
Provision & Manage Shared Alexa Devices: You can provision and manage shared devices around your workplace using the Alexa for Business console. For each device you can set a location, such as a conference room designation, and assign public and private skills for the device.
Configure Conference Room Settings: Kick off your meetings with a simple “Alexa, start the meeting.” Alexa for Business allows you to configure your conference room settings so you can use Alexa to start your meetings and control your conference room equipment, or dial in directly from the Amazon Echo device in the room.
Manage Users: You can invite users in your organization to enroll their personal Alexa account with your Alexa for Business account. Once your users have enrolled, you can enable your custom private skills for them to use on any of the devices in their personal Alexa account, at work or at home.
Manage Skills: You can assign public skills and custom private skills your organization has created to your shared devices, and make private skills available to your enrolled users. You can create skills groups, which you can then assign to specific shared devices.
Build Private Skills & Use Alexa for Business APIs: Dig into the Alexa Skills Kit and build your own skills. Then you can make these available to the shared devices and enrolled users in your Alexa for Business account, all without having to publish them in the public Alexa Skills Store. Alexa for Business offers additional APIs, which you can use to add context to your skills and automate administrative tasks.
Let’s take a quick journey into Alexa for Business. I’ll first log into the AWS Console and go to the Alexa for Business service.
Once I log in to the service, I am presented with the Alexa for Business dashboard. As you can see, I have access to manage Rooms, Shared devices, Users, and Skills, as well as the ability to control conferencing, calendars, and user invitations.
First, I’ll start by setting up my Alexa devices. Alexa for Business provides a Device Setup Tool to setup multiple devices, connect them to your Wi-Fi network, and register them with your Alexa for Business account. This is quite different from the setup process for personal Alexa devices. With Alexa for Business, you can provision 25 devices at a time.
Once my devices are provisioned, I can create location profiles for the locations where I want to put these devices (such as in my conference rooms). We call these locations “Rooms” in our Alexa for Business console. I can go to the Room profiles menu and create a Room profile. A Room profile contains common settings for the Alexa device in your room, such as the wake word for the device, the address, time zone, unit of measurement, and whether I want to enable outbound calling.
The next step is to enable skills for the devices I set up. I can enable any skill from the Alexa Skills store, or use the private skills feature to enable skills I built myself and made available to my Alexa for Business account. To enable skills for my shared devices, I can go to the Skills menu option and enable skills. After I have enabled skills, I can add them to a skill group and assign the skill group to my rooms.
Something I really like about Alexa for Business, is that I can use Alexa to dial into conference calls. To enable this, I go to the Conferencing menu option and select Add provider. At Amazon we use Amazon Chime, but you can choose from a list of different providers, or you can even add your own provider if you want to.
Once I’ve set this up, I can say “Alexa, join my meeting”; Alexa asks for my Amazon Chime meeting ID, after which my Echo device will automatically dial into my Amazon Chime meeting. Alexa for Business also provides an intelligent way to start any meeting quickly. We’ve all been in the situation where we walk into a meeting room and can’t find the meeting ID or conference call number. With Alexa for Business, I can link to my corporate calendar, so Alexa can figure out the meeting information for me, and automatically dial in – I don’t even need my meeting ID. Here’s how you do that:
Alexa can also control the video conferencing equipment in the room. To do this, all I need to do is select the skill for the equipment that I have, select the equipment provider, and enable it for my conference rooms. Now when I ask Alexa to join my meeting, Alexa will dial-in from the equipment in the room, and turn on the video conferencing system, without me needing to do anything else.
Let’s switch to enrolled users next.
I’ll start by setting up the User Invitation for my organization so that I can invite users to my Alexa for Business account. To allow a user to use Alexa for Business within an organization, you invite them to enroll their personal Alexa account with the service by sending a user invitation via email from the management console. If I choose, I can customize the user enrollment email to contain additional content. For example, I can add information about my organization’s Alexa skills that can be enabled after they’ve accepted the invitation and completed the enrollment process. My users must join in order to use the features of Alexa for Business, such as auto dialing into conference calls, linking their Microsoft Exchange calendars, or using private skills.
Now that I have customized my User Invitation, I will invite users to take advantage of Alexa for Business for my organization by going to the Users menu on the Dashboard and entering their email address. This will send an email with a link that can be used to join my organization. Users will join using the Amazon account that their personal Alexa devices are registered to. Let’s invite Jeff Barr to join my Alexa for Business organization.
After Jeff has enrolled in my Alexa for Business account, he can discover the private skills I’ve enabled for enrolled users, and he can access his work skills and join conference calls from any of his personal devices, including the Echo in his home office.
Summary
We’ve only scratched the surface in our brief review of the Alexa for Business console and service features. You can learn more about Alexa for Business by viewing the Alexa for Business website, reading the admin and API guides in the AWS documentation, or by watching the Getting Started videos within the Alexa for Business console.
You can learn more about Alexa for Business by viewing the Alexa for Business website, watching the Alexa for Business overview video, reading the admin and API guides in the AWS documentation, or by watching the Getting Started videos within the Alexa for Business console.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [AWS News Blog] November 30, 2017 at 12:03PM. Credit to Author and AWS News Blog | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Co.Design
Net neutrality–or the idea that the internet should be free and open–is circling the drain. The FCC is planning to repeal the 2015 law that banned blocking, throttling, or fast-laning web content. But what, exactly, are the implications of doing so? Even though ending net neutrality would essentially destroy everything that makes the internet great, the conversation around it is filled with confusing jargon. To make the stakes crystal clear, motion graphics designer Louis Wesolowsky, animator Chris Zachary, sound designers Sonos Sanctus, and voice-over artist Kirby Ferguson created a three-minute video that explains what net neutrality means for our culture as a whole and what repealing the laws that uphold it would do.
“The internet is a free market and an open democracy where our choices determine which things spread and become popular,” the video states. “[Internet service providers] would become the first internet gatekeepers in the U.S. history able to decide what sites and videos get seen. The economic, cultural, and political repercussions of this are enormous.”
Essentially, internet service providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T want the government to deregulate the internet so they can make more advantageous business decisions. They could prioritize their own content over competitors (imagine them slowing Netflix so you get frustrated and subscribe to their own streaming service instead); offer service packages structured more like cable so customers pay more money to access more sites (Portugal already does this and charges separate fees for email, social media, video, and music sites); or censor sites that criticize their practices.
As the video explains, if the internet was like this from the start, blogging would never have taken off. Independent artists and content creators who became popular on Snap and YouTube might never have found their audiences. Bitcoin likely wouldn’t exist either. Neither would puppy cams.
“The online innovation and creativity of the United States is the result of corporations and governments not having the power to control what’s on the internet,” the video states. “They should never have the power to decide the next political uprising, or how we communicate, or how we pay for things. That power is ours.”
Plain and simple, repealing net neutrality laws will revoke the rights of internet users like you and me.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Co.Design] November 30, 2017 at 08:21AM. Credit to Author and Co.Design | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Engadget
With a little lot of help from Tesla, Australia is now home to the world’s largest lithium-ion battery. Back in March, Elon Musk promised Atlassian CEO and billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes that he could create a 100MWh battery storage farm within 100 days — otherwise, his company would do the job for free. The Twitter pledge was in response to ongoing power shortages in South Australia, which were causing blackouts and political uncertainty about the country’s push toward renewable energy sources. The batteries were delivered in the summer — well ahead of the deadline — and installed last week. Today, the site is operational for the first time.
Tesla’s Powerpacks are connected to a wind farm in Hornsdale, owned by French renewable energy company Neoen. Jaw Weatherill, a politician and current Premier of South Australia, says it’s the first time the state has been able to reliably dispatch wind energy to the grid 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It was possible, of course, to capture this energy resource before — the problem has been controlling when, and how much of the resulting electricity is fed back into the grid. With a 100MWV battery farm, the state can now power more than 30,000 homes, regardless of the weather.
“The completion of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in record time shows that a sustainable, effective energy solution is possible,” a Tesla spokesperson said. “We are proud to be part of South Australia’s renewable energy future, and hope this project provides a model for future deployments around the world.” Tesla has built similar battery farms before — a year ago, the company completed a 20 MW system in Ontario, California that can store up to 80 MWh of electricity. It took just 90 days for the company — that hopes to commoditize electric cars, trucks and home energy storage — to install the necessary 396 Powerpacks.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Engadget] December 1, 2017 at 08:36AM. Credit to Author and Engadget | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Business Insider
REUTERS/John Gress
Bitcoin
futures trading can go ahead on three US exchanges, the
Commodity Futures Trading Commission said on Friday.
Futures contracts give traders a way to bet on bitcoin
prices and earn profits without buying the actual
cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin has surged nearly 1,000% against the dollar
this year as its popularity has grown.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange says it will launch its
bitcoin futures contracts on December 18.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission on Friday said
it would allow bitcoin
futures trading on three exchanges.
In a statement, the CFTC said the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and
the CBOE Futures Exchange self-certified new contracts for
bitcoin futures products. The Cantor Exchange self-certified a
new contract for bitcoin binary options.
The futures contracts will make it possible to bet on bitcoin
prices without buying the cryptocurrency. Both CBOE and CME have
said their bitcoin futures products will settle in cash.
Bitcoin
has gained nearly 1,000% against the dollar this year amid
growing interest from retail traders and big-money managers. The
futures contracts offered by establishment firms could open the
door to wider participation in bitcoin trading by other Wall
Street firms.
The CFTC’s decision came with the warning that bitcoin remains a
largely unsupervised market.
“Bitcoin, a virtual currency, is a commodity unlike any the
commission has dealt with in the past,” J. Christopher Giancarlo,
the CFTC’s chairman, said in a statement.
“We expect that the futures exchanges, through information
sharing agreements, will be monitoring the trading activity on
the relevant cash platforms for potential impacts on the futures
contracts’ price discovery process, including potential market
manipulation and market dislocations due to flash rallies and
crashes and trading outages.”
CME
said its initial listing of bitcoin futures would launch on
Monday, December 18.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Business Insider] December 1, 2017 at 08:51AM. Credit to Author and Business Insider | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Windows Blog
In October, we introduced Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android in preview, in response to your request to make Microsoft Edge work well with your phones. A special THANK YOU goes out to each of you—hundreds of thousands of you—who downloaded, test-drove, and sent feedback on the preview apps. Your ideas and passion have contributed to an even better app experience.
We are pleased to announce that we’re removing the “preview” label from our Android and iOS app.
Starting today, Microsoft Edge is available for iOS (Apple Store) and Android (Google Play Store) as a free download.
Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android brings familiar features like your Favorites, Reading List, New Tab Page, Reading View, and Roaming Passwords across your PC and phone, so, no matter the device, your browsing goes with you. But what makes Microsoft Edge really stand out is the ability to continue on your PC, which enables you to immediately open the page you’re looking at right on your PC—or save it to work on later.
And thanks to your feedback, we’ve added some new and popular features since launching the preview mobile app:
Roaming Passwords – Save a new password on your phone, and it follows you to your PC. Get to what you need, regardless of where you are or what device you are currently working on.
Dark theme – You can now enjoy this popular theme on your phone, in addition to your PC.
On market and language availability, Microsoft Edge for iOS is available in the United States (English), China (Simplified-Chinese), France (French) and the UK (English). Microsoft Edge for Android is available in the United States (English), Australia (English) Canada (English and French), China (Simplified-Chinese), France (French), India (English) and the UK (English). We look forward to bringing MS Edge for iOS and Android to additional markets and languages over time!
We are committed to empowering people and organizations to achieve more. And Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android is another step in that journey. While we’re excited to remove the preview label along with the download restrictions, we are more excited about all that’s ahead. We have a long list of new features to build and improvements to make. We hope you will try the app alongside your Windows 10 PCs and provide your ideas on what can make it even better. As has been our approach with Windows 10, we’ll continue to try new things, learn and build the best experiences possible.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Windows Blog] November 30, 2017 at 10:21AM. Credit to Author and Windows Blog | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to The Official Google Blog
To close out another great year for Google Play, we’re sharing the best and most popular apps, games, music, movies, TV shows and books in 2017.
No one knows how far she can go better than “Moana,” as she landed the most popular movie of the year on Google Play. Strong female characters dominated this year’s movies chart with “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” and “Wonder Woman” rounding out the top three. “Game of Thrones” kept “Rick and Morty” and “The Walking Dead” at bay to claim the Iron Throne for the second year in a row as the most popular TV show. Elsewhere, Kendrick Lamar may no longer be so “HUMBLE.” after beating out Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” as Google Play’s most streamed song of 2017. Kendrick’s “DNA” also holds the number three spot on this list.
Nintendo’s “Super Mario Run” was the most downloaded new game of the year, but not all bubbles were burst, as “Bubble Witch 3 Saga” was closely behind at number two. “Photo Editor – Beauty Camera & Photo Filters” was the most downloaded new app with fans touching up their favorite photos for social media. We also have curated lists this year from our editors to help you find the best apps and games of 2017, such as “Socratic – Math Answers & Homework Help” and “CATS: Crash Area Turbo Stars,” respectively.
Check out Google Play’s top five lists below for this year’s most popular content in the U.S. You can also discover the most popular lists around the world and all our editors’ choices on the Best of 2017 section of the Play Store.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [The Official Google Blog] December 1, 2017 at 03:12AM. Credit to Author and The Official Google Blog | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
Google is officially off-setting 100% of its energy usage with either wind or solar power. The company signed contracts on three wind power plants in recent days to bring them over 3GW of production capacity.
Google’s energy infrastructure investments have totaled over $3.5 billion globally, with about two-thirds being in the US.
Per an announcement made via Twitter and the LinkedIn page of Sam Arons, Google’s Senior Lead, Energy & Infrastructure at Google:
535 MW more wind brings Google over 3 GW worldwide — 2*98 MW with Avangrid in South Dakota, 200 MW with EDF in Iowa, and 138.6 MW with GRDA in Oklahoma — cementing Google as the largest corporate purchaser of renewables on the planet @ 100% renewable in 2017!
Citing a cost decrease of 60%-80% in wind and solar as the driving factor, Google has been investing heavily in renewables. They first signed an agreement in 2010 to purchase all of the production per year from a 114MW wind farm in Iowa. As of November of 2016, they’d participated in 20 renewable energy projects. The company announced that they’d break 100% renewable back in December of 2016.
The Twitter announcement offered no details – but gave a nice calming GIF:
New clean energy purchases bring our total wind and solar capacity to over 3 gigawatts—enough renewables to match 100% of the energy it takes to run our products in 2017. pic.twitter.com/8ykaWO9LU0
Avangrid Renewables was one of the developers that signed with Google. They’re building two 98MW wind farms in South Dakota. Avangrid suggested the two farms would contribute more than $40 million in land leases and tax payments over their lifetimes.
Regarding the South Dakota plants –
“Renewables from projects like Coyote Ridge and Tatanka Ridge bring value to our business as we scale and accelerate investment in the communities where we operate,” Gary Demasi, Google’s director of global infrastructure, said in a statement. “With solar and wind declining dramatically in cost and propelling significant employment growth, the transition to clean energy is driving unprecedented economic opportunity and doing so faster than we ever anticipated.”
Interestingly, just yesterday it was reported that Google shut down the lead source portion of Project Sunroof. It was suggested that Google’s logic for cancelling the program – even with an overflow of companies around the country asking for access for the leads – was that they thought selling leads for solar power was not their main skill set, but – obviously – selling ads is. The company now redirects Project Sunroof users to solar companies in Google’s main search directory.
Considering residential solar? Understand Solar will connect you with local contractors. Tweet me to pick apart quote.
For more electric vehicle, autonomous transport and clean technology news, make sure to follow us on Twitter, Newsletter, RSS or Facebook to get our latest articles.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] November 30, 2017 at 08:20PM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
When Tesla started delivering the Model 3 in July, it still hadn’t completed the software and user interface of its new electric vehicle.
The automaker has been updating the Model 3’s software since the launch and their latest update this week now brings some new (though quite basic) features.
One of the main missing features that had people puzzled was the FM radio.
A standard feature in virtually any car for decades now, some were surprised that Tesla, which makes some of the most advanced vehicles out there, didn’t include in the Model 3.
Of course, it was just an example of the incomplete software.
We have now received reports that Tesla included the feature in its latest Model 3 software update this week.
Yes, Model 3 now has the radio.
Other features recently added also include odometer, tire pressure, and energy consumption applications. All those apps have long been in the Model S and Model X, but Tesla is now adding them to Model 3.
Tesla is also adding features to the Model 3 that have been more recently introduced, like the easy entry and exit system attached to the driver’s profile.
The automaker described the feature when introducing it to Model S and Model X last month:
“Starting in this release, you can get in and out of the driver’s seat more easily. When you park, the steering wheel and driver’s seat will automatically adjust for an easier exit. After you return to the vehicle, they automatically adjust back to the recent driving profile when you step on the brake. Or, if your keyfob is linked to your driver profile, the seat and steering wheel adjust accordingly. As always, you can restore your profile by selecting it from the list.”
We are told that the Model 3’s UI is still not complete, but there has been a lot of progress since the launch and the system is now more mature – just in time for the expected start of regular customer deliveries in the next few weeks.
Electrek’s Take
While it might not seem like much, adapting all the different software applications to the different screens is actually a great task.
Tesla had to adapt its code to the new computer’s Intel chips instead of Nvidia.
I find it fascinating that Tesla releases a new vehicle like that with the software clearly in beta. I suppose it plays right into their plan to first release the vehicle to employees in order to work out the early issues. I suppose we are going to have a better idea of how well it played out after their first few regular customer deliveries.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [Electrek] December 1, 2017 at 05:33AM. Credit to Author and Electrek | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechRadar – All the latest technology news
Apps, especially free ones, understandably sometimes have adverts, but while they tend to only be displayed inside the app itself, some are more intrusive, leaking out on to your lock screen. Well, not any more, because Google has just banned that practice.
In its new ‘Lockscreen Monetization’ policy Google says that: “Unless the exclusive purpose of the app is that of a lockscreen, apps may not introduce ads or features that monetize the locked display of a device.”
So in other words, utilities, games and any other app that isn’t designed specifically to replace your lock screen won’t be able to show ads on it.
For the most part, that sounds like a very good thing, as no one really wants adverts on their lock screen, especially from an app that has nothing to do with the lock screen.
The Amazon question
But it does throw up a couple of questions. SlashGear points out that Amazon sells some phones at a discount with the catch that their lock screens will show you adverts via the Amazon Offers app.
So would this still be allowed? It’s not clear whether this would be considered a lock screen replacement or not, though it might be safe, since its whole purpose is to display adverts on the lock screen.
On a similar note there are apps such as Fronto that pay you to show adverts and articles on your lock screen, so these may be clamped down on too.
We’ve contacted both Amazon and Google for more information and will update this article if we learn anything more.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechRadar ] December 1, 2017 at 05:42AM. Credit to Author and TechRadar| ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechHive
The next generation of HDMI is here, and it holds some major benefits for PC gamers and media buffs alike. The HDMI 2.1 standard, released Tuesday by the HDMI Forum after being announced at CES, supports higher resolutions, new HDR features, and game-smoothing variable refresh rates, among other features.
HDMI 2.1 delivers massively more bandwidth than HDMI 2.0—a whopping 48Gb/s compared to the 18Gb/s achieved by today’s technology. That allows HDMI 2.1 to hit much higher resolutions and refresh rates.
HDMI Forum
The new spec supports 8K and even 10K resolutions, but those are better thought of as future-proofing or targeted towards commercial applications. Modern gamers will appreciate the introduction of 4K/120Hz display support, though. Today’s 4K monitors are limited to 60Hz and the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti and Titan XP graphics cards can already max those out in modern games. But 120Hz-plus displays are already coming in the first quarter of 2018 in the form of glorious G-Sync HDR monitors by Asus and Acer, and Nvidia’s next generation of graphics cards—hopefully due sooner than later—will presumably have the power to drive such demanding displays.
HDMI also formalizes support for variable refresh rates. Variable refresh rates are the secret sauce behind Nvidia’s G-Sync and AMD’s FreeSync displays, synchronizing the refresh rate of your monitor to your graphics card for buttery-smooth tearing- and stutter-free gameplay. AMD already has its FreeSync technology working over HDMI in some monitors but HDMI 2.1 bakes VRR into the standard—a welcome change as VRR has largely been limited to DisplayPort connections, and those aren’t often found in budget displays. HDMI is practically universal.
HDMI Forum
HDMI 2.1 also introduces Quick Frame Transport, which “reduces latency for smoother no-lag gaming, and real-time interactive virtual reality.” Smoother gaming seems to be a big push for the new standard.
Videos also get a boost, mostly due to dynamic HDR, which allows a video to send high-dynamic range metadata to your HDR television scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis, rather than simply at the start of a video. That creates a better-tuned, more vibrant image throughout. Dolby HDR currently supports dynamic metadata, and it’s being (slowly) added to the rival HDR10 format. Quick Media Switching aims to end jarring black screens when videos switch, and eARC lets HDMI’s audio return channel handle lossless audio.
HDMI Forum
You’ll need a new high-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 cable to support the fresh features, but fear not: Those cables are also backwards-compatible with existing HDMI implementations. Don’t expect to see these on the streets in the near future, though, as the HDMI Forum says the HDMI 2.1 Compliance Test Specification will be published in stages between the first and third quarters of 2018.
Got any news, tips or want to contact us directly? Email esistme@gmail.com
__
This article and images were originally posted on [TechHive] November 29, 2017 at 10:43AM. Credit to Author and TechHive | ESIST.T>G>S Recommended Articles Of The Day
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to TechCrunch
This is software to save lives. Facebook’s new “proactive detection” artificial intelligence technology will scan all posts for patterns of suicidal thoughts, and when necessary send mental health resources to the user at risk or their friends, or contact local first-responders. By using AI to flag worrisome posts to human moderators instead of waiting for user reports, Facebook can decease how long it takes to send help.
Facebook also will use AI to prioritize particularly risky or urgent user reports so they’re more quickly addressed by moderators, and tools to instantly surface local language resources and first-responder contact info. It’s also dedicating more moderators to suicide prevention, training them to deal with the cases 24/7, and now has 80 local partners like Save.org, National Suicide Prevention Lifeline and Forefront from which to provide resources to at-risk users and their networks.
“This is about shaving off minutes at every single step of the process, especially in Facebook Live,” says VP of product management Guy Rosen. Over the past month of testing, Facebook has initiated more than 100 “wellness checks” with first-responders visiting affected users. “There have been cases where the first-responder has arrived and the person is still broadcasting.”
The idea of Facebook proactively scanning the content of people’s posts could trigger some dystopian fears about how else the technology could be applied. Facebook didn’t have answers about how it would avoid scanning for political dissent or petty crime, with Rosen merely saying “we have an opportunity to help here so we’re going to invest in that.” There are certainly massive beneficial aspects about the technology, but it’s another space where we have little choice but to hope Facebook doesn’t go too far.
[Update: Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos responded to these concerns with a heartening tweet signaling that Facebook does take seriously responsible use of AI.
The creepy/scary/malicious use of AI will be a risk forever, which is why it’s important to set good norms today around weighing data use versus utility and be thoughtful about bias creeping in. Also, Guy Rosen and team are amazing, great opportunity for ML engs to have impact. https://t.co/N9trF5X9iM
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg praised the product update in a post today, writing that “In the future, AI will be able to understand more of the subtle nuances of language, and will be able to identify different issues beyond suicide as well, including quickly spotting more kinds of bullying and hate.”]
Facebook trained the AI by finding patterns in the words and imagery used in posts that have been manually reported for suicide risk in the past. It also looks for comments like “are you OK?” and “Do you need help?”
“We’ve talked to mental health experts, and one of the best ways to help prevent suicide is for people in need to hear from friends or family that care about them,” Rosen says. “This puts Facebook in a really unique position. We can help connect people who are in distress connect to friends and to organizations that can help them.”
How suicide reporting works on Facebook now
Through the combination of AI, human moderators and crowdsourced reports, Facebook could try to prevent tragedies like when a father killed himself on Facebook Live last month. Live broadcasts in particular have the power to wrongly glorify suicide, hence the necessary new precautions, and also to affect a large audience, as everyone sees the content simultaneously unlike recorded Facebook videos that can be flagged and brought down before they’re viewed by many people.
Now, if someone is expressing thoughts of suicide in any type of Facebook post, Facebook’s AI will both proactively detect it and flag it to prevention-trained human moderators, and make reporting options for viewers more accessible.
When a report comes in, Facebook’s tech can highlight the part of the post or video that matches suicide-risk patterns or that’s receiving concerned comments. That avoids moderators having to skim through a whole video themselves. AI prioritizes users reports as more urgent than other types of content-policy violations, like depicting violence or nudity. Facebook says that these accelerated reports get escalated to local authorities twice as fast as unaccelerated reports.
Facebook’s tools then bring up local language resources from its partners, including telephone hotlines for suicide prevention and nearby authorities. The moderator can then contact the responders and try to send them to the at-risk user’s location, surface the mental health resources to the at-risk user themselves or send them to friends who can talk to the user. “One of our goals is to ensure that our team can respond worldwide in any language we support,” says Rosen.
Back in February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “There have been terribly tragic events — like suicides, some live streamed — that perhaps could have been prevented if someone had realized what was happening and reported them sooner . . . Artificial intelligence can help provide a better approach.”
With more than 2 billion users, it’s good to see Facebook stepping up here. Not only has Facebook created a way for users to get in touch with and care for each other. It’s also unfortunately created an unmediated real-time distribution channel in Facebook Live that can appeal to people who want an audience for violence they inflict on themselves or others.
Creating a ubiquitous global communication utility comes with responsibilities beyond those of most tech companies, which Facebook seems to be coming to terms with.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Drone maker DJI has been criticized roundly this weekend over its alleged response to security researcher Kevin Finisterre’s discovery of a significant security issue involving the company’s system. According to Finisterre, he began hunting for bugs in DJI’s system under its recently established bug bounty program. In the process, Finisterre says he discovered a major security issue, but rather than rewarding him for his effort, DJI accused him of hacking and threatened to report him to the authorities.
DJI announced its bug bounty program in August following a report that claimed the U.S. Army had banned use of the maker’s drones over security concerns. As part of its announcement, DJI had stated:
The DJI Threat Identification Reward Program aims to gather insights from researchers and others who discover issues that may create threats to the integrity of our users’ private data, such as their personal information or details of the photos, videos and flight logs they create.
According to a long report on the matter published by Finisterre, he spent many weeks communicating with DJI through email about the scope of its bug bounty program, which hadn’t yet been publicly defined. After receiving confirmation that it included the company’s servers, Finisterre went to work in writing up a report disclosing his discoveries. Speaking of which…
Due to multiple security issues, including publicly available AWS private keys for DJI’s photo-sharing service SkyPixel, Finisterre reports that he was able to get access to highly sensitive user data, including: identification cards and passports, flight logs, and drivers licenses. Once he found this flaw, he claims that he alerted DJI to this vulnerability, and that the company acknowledged it.
After more than 130 emails back and forth between DJI and Finisterre, he states in his report that DJI said he would be rewarded with $30,000 under the bug bounty program (the maximum award). However, Finisterre reports that weeks later he received an agreement for his particular bug bounty that was “literally not sign-able.” As he goes on to explain in his report:
I won’t go into too much detail, but the agreement that was put in front of me by DJI in essence did not offer researchers any sort of protection. For me personally the wording put my right to work at risk, and posed a direct conflicts of interest to many things including my freedom of speech. It almost seemed like a joke. It was pretty clear the entire ‘Bug Bounty’ program was rushed based on this alone.
Efforts to alter the agreement didn’t pan out as hoped, says Finisterre, who goes on to claim that several different lawyers advised him that DJI’s final offer was, “likely crafted in bad faith,” and that it was “extremely risky” for him to sign it. It was about this time that Finisterre also receive a legal demand from DJI ordering him to delete/destroy the data he had gathered during his investigation, while appearing to threaten Finisterre with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
In a statement to Ars Technica, who was the first to cover this spat between DJI and Finisterre, the Chinese drone giant referred to Finisterre as a “hacker,” claiming that he had accessed one of the company’s servers without permission and that he had tried to claim it under the company’s bug bounty program without following “standard terms for bug bounty programs.” The statement goes on to claim that Finisterre “refused to agree to these terms, despite DJI’s continued attempts to negotiate with him, and threatened DJI if his terms were not met.”
For his part, Finisterre says that he ultimately turned down the $30,000 in favor of going public with what he sees as an unsettling and unacceptable experience, concluding with the following statement:
If you that are wondering if DJI even bothered to respond after I got offended over the CFAA threat, you should be happy to know it was flat out radio silence from there on out. All Twitter DM’s stopped, SMS messages went unanswered, etc. Cold blooded silence.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
Several Japanese and Korean automakers have been entrenched in fuel cell hydrogen technology for their zero-emission vehicle effort supposedly due to its range and refueling advantages over battery-powered vehicles.
Now that those advantages are fading away and they are starting to make electric vehicles, it’s interesting to see what approach they are taking to charging infrastructure. As for Honda, the automaker is reportedly aiming for a 15-minute charging system for its upcoming electric cars.
According to a report from Nikkei, the Japanese automaker is working on a new battery technology to enable “240 km (150 miles) of range in 15 minutes.”
It would represent roughly a doubling of the current best charging capacity on an average-size vehicle, but they are reportedly not planning to include the technology in their EVs until 2022.
Honda is planning to release new electric vehicles before then, but they will feature current battery technology.
The automaker currently sells its only all-electric vehicle, the Clarity Electric, a compliance car, and it plans to bring a new retro-looking urban EV to market in 2019.
Electrek’s Take
“240 km (150 miles) of range in 15 minutes” doesn’t tell us much in terms of charge rate without knowing the power consumption of the vehicle, but saying that it’s twice as fast as the current systems in production sounds about fair.
2022 is within the timeframe that some automakers and battery companies are reportedly planning to release automotive grade solid-state batteries, which are expected to enable faster charging.
With this said, other companies are promising similar charge rates using li-ion batteries, like Porsche with the Mission E and Fisker with the E-Motion. It will be interesting to see those vehicles being launched in the next few years as we get a better idea of the limits of li-ion batteries and the potential impact of a new generation of batteries to enable new kinds of performance for EVs.
Of course, that’s for passenger cars. When it comes to larger vehicles with bigger battery packs, companies have already achieved much higher charge rates, like BYD in its electric buses or Tesla’s recently announced electric semi truck.
The UK doesn’t just want to institute rules governing how you fly your drone — it wants to give police more power to take drones out of commission. A newly unveiled Drone Bill would give law enforcement the authority to order pilots to not only order operators to ground drones, but to seize drone parts if needed to prove that the machine was used to break the law. If someone’s caught flying a drone over a prison, officers could both force the robotic flier down and confiscate it to illustrate what happened.
The proposed law would also codify the rules brought up during the summer. You would have to register any drone weighing over 250g (0.55lbs) and take a safety awareness test. The law would forbid flying too close to airports or above 400 feet, and you’d be required to use apps that show whether or not your planned flight is legal.
The draft bill should be published in spring 2018, when it will be open to amendments and consultation. Police are already using other rules (such as that from the Civil Aviation Authority) to act on drone-related crimes in the meantime, but the measure would theoretically give them a clearer legal basis for whatever they do. And the UK’s effort to explicitly tackle drone crime is relatively unique. While there are certainly drone regulationselsewhere, this suggests that rogue drones are enough of a problem in British airspace that they need special legislation.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Raspberry Pi
Back in July, we collaborated with GCHQ to bring you two fantastic free resources: the first showed you how to build an OctaPi, a Raspberry Pi cluster computer. The second showed you how to use the cluster to learn about public key cryptography. Since then, we and GCHQ have been hard at work, and now we’re presenting two more exciting projects to make with your OctaPi!
Maker level
These new free resources are at the Maker level of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Digital Making Curriculum — they are intended for learners with a fair amount of experience, introducing them to some intriguing new concepts.
Whilst both resources make use of the OctaPi in their final steps, you can work through the majority of the projects on any computer running Python 3.
Calculate Pi
3.14159…ummm…
Calculating Pi teaches you two ways of calculating the value of Pi with varying accuracy. Along the way, you’ll also learn how computers store numbers with a fractional part, why your computer can limit how accurate your calculation of Pi is, and how to distribute the calculation across the OctaPi cluster.
Brute-force Enigma
Decrypt the message before time runs out!
Brute-force Enigma sends you back in time to take up the position of a WWII Enigma operator. Learn how to encrypt and decrypt messages using an Enigma machine simulated entirely in Python. Then switch roles and become a Bletchley Park code breaker — except this time, you’ve got a cluster computer on your side! You will use the OctaPi to launch a brute-force crypt attack on an Enigma-encrypted message, and you’ll gain an appreciation of just how difficult this decryption task was without computers.
Our own OctaPi
GCHQ has kindly sent us a fully assembled, very pretty OctaPi of our own to play with at Pi Towers — it even has eight snazzy Unicorn HATs which let you display light patterns and visualize simulations! Visitors of the Raspberry Jam at Pi Towers can have a go at running their own programs on the OctaPi, while we’ll be using it to continue to curate more free resources for you.
Today, the venture announced a series of new partnerships for the deployment of its charging stations. Interestingly, they are all with petrol station and truck stop companies.
The network plans 400 stations with a capacity of 350 kW across Europe by 2020 – starting with 20 stations by the end of the year.
They had already announced partnerships with “Tank & Rast”, “Circle K” and “OMV” to deploy stations in Germany, Norway, and Austria.
Today, they are expanding the deal with Shell to bring the total location deals to 18 countries.
Marcus Groll, COO of IONITY, said about the new announcement:
“The agreements with these prestigious partners constitute an important initial milestone in our relatively short company history. So in the future, we will be able to offer a large number of fast charging stations at attractive sites along major roads in Europe,”
The deal with Shell will bring IONITY charging stations to Belgium, France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
István Kapitány, Shell Executive Vice President of Retail, said about the deal:
“Customers want to be able to travel long distances in electric vehicles – with the knowledge that there is a reliable, convenient means of charging their vehicles,”
IONITY is arguably the most exciting thing to come out of the EV infrastructure sector in a long time. 5 major automakers joined force to deploy a significant network using the CCS standard.
I’d argue that the scale is not on par with Tesla’s Supercharger network, but the roll-out seems appropriate for the timeline on which those automakers plan to release their electric vehicles in Europe over the next few years.
Now I know that petrol stations are not exactly where EV drivers want to end up recharging, but they do have some prime locations ideal to enable long distance driving, which is what IONITY is aiming to do.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Futurism
Bitcoin Energy Use
Bitcoin values have been soaring over the past couple of weeks. That’s cause for celebration for those who invest in the cryptocurrency; however, it looks like the price of Bitcoin isn’t the only thing that’s skyrocketed in 2017. Cryptocurrency mining energy use has also reached new heights.
According to a research conducted by a U.K.-based energy comparison tariff service called PowerCompare, the average electricity used to mine bitcoin this year has surpassed the annual energy usage of some 159 countries. Specifically, the global average energy spent on bitcoin mining has far exceeded the electricity consumption in Ireland and most African nations.
Bitcoin mining versus the world. (Image credit: Power Compare)
The new research used data provided by Digiconomist, whose current estimate of electricity used to mine bitcoin is around 30.14 TWh annually. That’s way above Ireland’s 25 TWh yearly average electricity consumption. In fact, according to a recent paper from Dutch bank ING, a single bitcoin transaction consumes enough energy to power the average household for an entire month. Digiconomist also found that Ethereum, the second most popular cryptocurrency today, also uses more than a country’s worth of electricity.
Cryptocurrency Mining and Mass Adoption
What makes cryptocurrency mining an energy black hole, so to speak? Apparently, it’s the computational requirements needed to process the cryptography problems miners are required to solve in order to be rewarded with a cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, and pretty much every other notable cryptocurrency available, relies on miners to handle the transactions done in their respective blockchains.
To verify these transactions, miners need to solve math problems, which become increasingly more difficult the more miners there are. The more complex the cryptography problems, the more computational power needed to solve them.
In the case of Bitcoin, currently the most popular cryptocurrency, the multitude of miners now make it necessary to use either gaming graphics cards or application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), both of which consume considerable amounts of energy.
The exorbitant amounts of energy needed to mine cryptocurrency make it an environmental hazard, as much of the world’s electricity still comes from greenhouse-gas-producing fossil fuels. This means that cryptocurrency mining is contributing to global climate change. Furthermore, the high energy requirements for cryptocurrencies are also a stumbling block for mass adoption.
Interestingly, a paper published in 2014 by researchers from the Hamilton Institute at the National University of Ireland Maynooth considered the impact cryptocurrency mining has on electricity. The authors, Karl J. O’Dwyer and David Malone, concluded that “the cost of Bitcoin mining on commodity hardware now exceeds the value of the reward.”
They added that “the competition created in mining for Bitcoin has [led] to a situation where, in order to be financially viable, the hardware has had to become faster and more energy efficient.” That was a conclusion reached some three years ago.
In order to work around the energy-intensive requirements of cryptocurrency mining, some have resorted to using malware to siphon off computational power from other people’s computers. As a more viable solution, others have suggested “farming” for crypto coins instead, using a more eco-friendly verification model that looks at proof of time and storage instead of the energy-hungry proof of work scheme used in Bitcoin.
The sooner we find ways to make cryptocurrency mining energy use “greener,” the better it would be for us and for blockchain, a technology that could potentially transform every industry in the world.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Electrek
In Munich today, BMW announced a 200 million euro investment in a new ‘BMW Group Battery Cell Competence Centre’ in order to develop their next generation electric vehicle powertrain.
They will have 200 employees at the new facility working toward the goal to “advance battery cell technology and introduce it into production processes.”
Klaus Fröhlich, member of the BMW AG Board of Management, responsible for Research and Development, commented on the new effort:
“We will be concentrating all our in-house expertise along the battery-cell value chain at our new high-tech competence centre. International experts working in the new development labs and facilities will conduct important research to refine cell chemistry and cell design. We will focus on further improvements in battery performance, lifespan, safety, charging and also costs. We will set the benchmark for the industry.”
In terms of actual work, BMW says that they will analyze cell design and cell technology, create prototypes of future battery cells, focusing on the chemical composition of the cells, use of different materials, how the cell behaves in critical or extremely cold conditions, charging and rapid-charging behaviour and evaluating cell sizes and forms.
They released images of their current battery cell lab:
They expect the new facility to be completed in 2019 and play a central role in enabling BMW’s fifth generation electric drivetrain, which they plan to release in 2021.
The ones on the next generation enabled by new battery cells will have significantly better performance, says BMW. They are aiming for a range of 700 km (430 miles) on a single charge. The company also says that it is developing its next-generation electric motors without rare earth metals.
Here are a few renders of the new facility:
Electrek’s Take
While BMW has previously heavily invested in battery pack technology, this seems to be their most important effort at the battery cell level to date.
With every automaker on the planet accounting new electric vehicles every year, the demand for battery cell is exploding and it is anticipated to soon become a bottleneck in the production of electric vehicles if not properly managed.
Most automakers are relying on battery cell manufacturers either as customers/suppliers or through partnerships, like Tesla with Panasonic.
These relationships and the whole battery supply chain should become increasingly important as demand for battery cells increase with the demand for electric vehicles.
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Engadget
Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit and Airbnb were among 200 firms that signed a letter warning FCC Chairman Ajit Pai not to roll back net neutrality, according to Broadcasting & Cable. Dated on Cyber Monday (November 27th), the letter notes that record Black Friday sales are “a testament to the power of the free and open internet to encourage entrepreneurship, drive innovation, make our lives easier, and to support a healthy economy.”
The letter was delivered three weeks ahead of the upcoming December 14th vote, in which the FCC is expected to reclassify wired and wireless internet services providers (ISPs) as “information services.” That would reverse the recent FCC decision under Tom Wheeler that classified internet providers as utilities, subjecting them to stricter regulations.
Businesses may have to pay a toll just to reach customers. This would put small and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground.
“Disastrously, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) last week released a draft order that would end this open commerce by repealing the current net neutrality rules and eliminating the protections that keep the internet free and open for America’s businesses and consumers,” the letter reads.
The decision would also eliminate rules that ban paid prioritization, throttling and other practices that many consider consumer-hostile. It would then be up to the FTC, rather than the FCC, to watch over ISPs, which would essentially be operating on the honor system. That was how things worked up until Wheeler’s 2015 decision, and it didn’t work very well at all.
Without these rules, internet service providers will be able to favor certain websites and e-businesses,” the letter states. “Businesses may have to pay a toll just to reach customers. This would put small and medium-sized businesses at a disadvantage and prevent innovative new ones from even getting off the ground.”
According to an analysis of unique comments, an overwhelming majority of consumers favor keeping net neutrality rules the way they are. However, the commenting process was highly flawed because of FCC negligence, and in any event, the commission has all but suggested that it doesn’t really care what the public thinks. That’s despite the fact that it’s a body meant to protect the public good, not look after the interests of some of the worst companies in America.
Many small business and freelancers working in the “gig economy” are also afraid of service providers gaining more power. Comic strip letterer Clayton Cowles, who works on Star Wars, Batman and other series and relies on his internet, told the New York Times that he fears what his cable provider, Spectrum, would do with less supervision. “They pretty much have a monopoly,” he said. “I’m stuck with them.”
Your daily selection of the hottest trending tech news!
According to Feed: All Latest
Dag Spicer is expecting a special package soon, but it’s not a Black Friday impulse buy. The fist-sized motor, greened by corrosion, is from a historic room-sized computer intended to ape the human brain. It may also point toward artificial intelligence’s future.
Spicer is senior curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The motor in the mail is from the Mark 1 Perceptron, built by Cornell researcher Frank Rosenblatt in 1958. Rosenblatt’s machine learned to distinguish shapes such as triangles and squares seen through its camera. When shown examples of different shapes, it built “knowledge” using its 512 motors to turn knobs and tune its connections. “It was a major milestone,” says Spicer.
Computers today don’t log their experiences—or ours—using analog parts like the Perceptron’s self-turning knobs. They store and crunch data digitally, using the 1s and 0s of binary numbers. But 11 miles away from the Computer History Museum, a Redwood City, California, startup called Mythic is trying to revive analog computing for artificial intelligence. CEO and cofounder Mike Henry says it’s necessary if we’re to get the full benefits of artificial intelligence in compact devices like phones, cameras, and hearing aids.
Mythic’s analog chips are designed to run artificial neural networks in small devices.
Mythic
Mythic uses analog chips to run artificial neural networks, or deep-learning software, which drive the recent excitement about AI. The technique requires large volumes of mathematical and memory operations that are taxing for computers—and particularly challenging for small devices with limited chips and battery power. It’s why the most powerful AI systems reside on beefy cloud servers. That’s limiting, because some places AI could be useful have privacy, time, or energy constraints that mean handing off data to a distant computer is impractical.
You might say Mythic’s project is an exercise in time travel. “By the time I went to college analog computers were gone,” says Eli Yablonovitch, a professor at University of California Berkeley who got his first degree in 1967. “This brings back something that had been soundly rejected.” Analog circuits have long been relegated to certain niches, such as radio signal processing.
Henry says internal tests indicate Mythic chips make it possible to run more powerful neural networks in a compact device than a conventional smartphone chip. “This can help deploy deep learning to billions of devices like robots, cars, drones, and phones,” he says.
Henry likes to show the difference his chips could make with a demo in which simulations of his chip and a smartphone chip marketed as tuned for AI run software that spots pedestrians in video from a camera mounted on a car. The chips Mythic has made so far are too small to run a full video processing system. In the demo, Mythic’s chip can spot people from a greater distance, because it doesn’t have to scale down the video to process it. The suggestion is clear: you’ll be more comfortable sharing streets with autonomous vehicles that boast analog inside.
Digital computers work by crunching binary numbers through clockwork-like sequences of arithmetic. Analog computers operate more like a plumbing system, with electrical current in place of water. Electrons flow through a maze of components like amplifiers and resistors that do the work of mathematical operations by changing the current or combining it with others. Measuring the current that emerges from the pipeline reveals the answer.
That approach burns less energy than an equivalent digital device on some tasks because it requires fewer circuits. A Mythic chip can also do all the work of running a neural network without having to tap a device’s memory, which can interfere with other functions. The analog approach isn’t great for everything, not least because it’s more difficult to control noise, which can affect the precision of numbers. But that’s not a problem for running neural networks, which are prized for their ability to make sense of noisy data like images or sound. “Analog math is great for neural networks, but I wouldn’t balance my check book with it,” Henry says.
If analog comes back, it won’t be the first aspect of the Mark 1 Perceptron to get a second life. The machine was one of the earliest examples of a neural network, but the idea was mostly out of favor until the current AI boom started in 2012.
Objects identified in video by a simulation of a conventional smartphone chip tuned for artificial intelligence.
Mythic
A simulation of Mythic’s chip can identify more objects from a greater distance because it doesn’t have to scale down the video to process it.
Mythic
Mythic’s analog plumbing is more compact than the Perceptron Mark 1’s motorized knobs. The company’s chips are repurposed flash memory chips like those inside a thumb drive—a hack that turns digital storage into an analog computer.
The hack involves writing out the web of a neural network for a task such as processing video onto the memory chip’s transistors. Data is passed through the network by flowing analog signals around the chip. Those signals are converted back into digital to complete the processing and allow the chip to work inside a conventional digital device. Mythic has a partnership with Fujitsu, which makes flash memory and aims to get customers final chip designs to test next year. The company will initially target the camera market, where applications include consumer gadgets, cars, and surveillance systems.
Mythic hopes its raise-the-dead strategy will keep it alive in a crowded field of companies working on custom silicon for neural networks. Apple and Google have added custom silicon to power neural networks into their latest smartphones.
Yablonovitch of Berkeley guesses that Mythic won’t be the last company that tries to revive analog. He gave a talk this month highlighting the opportune match between analog computing and some of today’s toughest, and most lucrative, computing problems.
“The full potential is even bigger than deep learning,” Yablonovitch says. He says there is evidence analog computers might also help with the notorious traveling-salesman problem, which limits computers planning delivery routes, and in other areas including pharmaceuticals, and investing.
Something that hasn’t changed over the decades since analog computers went out of style is engineers’ fondness for dreaming big. Rosenblatt told the New York Times in 1958 that “perceptrons might be fired to the planets as mechanical space explorers.” Henry has extra-terrestrial hopes, too, saying his chips could help satellites understand what they see. He may be on track to finally prove Rosenblatt right.
:gifv():no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9851547/storyboard.gif)
Image: Google
:gifv():no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/9851565/scrubbies.gif)
Image: Google
A simulation of Mythic’s chip can identify more objects from a greater distance because it doesn’t have to scale down the video to process it.
ESIST 