March 2013 – Page 22

Fix the DMCA! Repeal anti-circumvention and truly own your devices

Austin sez, “Last year the Librarian of Congress made it illegal to unlock your cell phone by changing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). This can lead to exorbitant costs to consumers traveling internationally and, perhaps more importantly, it is restricting our freedom in unfair ways. It also has odd implications like forcing the blind to file for exemption every three years in order to use third-party screen readers. After 100,000 people signed a petition on this issue, the White House responded in support of making these laws more fair. Sina Khanifar, who created that petition with support from Y-Combinator, Reddit, Mozilla Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and more has launched a website to educate the public on the issue and give them the tools to notify their representatives directly with their thoughts on the issue.” Fix the DMCA

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Fix the DMCA! Repeal anti-circumvention and truly own your devices

Microsoft Research brings mid-air multitouch to Kinect (video)

Shortly after the Kinect SDK first launched , it spawned a number of inspired efforts from researchers to make it do more than just track your body. Microsoft Research finally seems to be catching up to its own tech, as it just flaunted a recent project that allows fine-tuned gesture control, thanks to a newly developed talent for the motion sensing device to read whether your hand is open or closed. That let the team simulate multitouch-like capability on a PC as they air-painted basic images and manipulated Bing maps by varying their hand states. The hardware used doesn’t appear to be stock, so whether such new capability entails a rumored new version of the Kinect that may or may not appear on a (rumored) future Xbox , we’ll leave for you to decide. Filed under: Peripherals , Microsoft Comments Via: NeoWin Source: Microsoft Research

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Microsoft Research brings mid-air multitouch to Kinect (video)

A Graphene Antenna Could Give Us Wireless Terabit Uploads in One Second

Wireless uploads of big files take for-ev-er. But researchers at Georgia Tech University have plans for an antenna made of crazy thin graphene that would let you transfer a whole terabit of data in just one second. More »

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A Graphene Antenna Could Give Us Wireless Terabit Uploads in One Second

Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

A comet spotted earlier this year may pass close enough for Mars to feel the rock’s hot breath down its neck, according to new reports that surfaced Monday and Tuesday. The comet, named C/2013 A1, may pass within a few tens of thousands of miles of Mars’ center, with a remote chance that the miles-wide comet will collide with the planet. C/2013 A1 “Siding Spring,” a comet between 5 and 30 miles wide, was spotted January 3 by astronomer Robert H. McNaught. Researchers were able to look back in the image history of the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona and spot signs of the comet as early as December 8, 2012. NASA states that other archives have traced sightings back to October 4, 2012. According to scientists at NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program Office , Siding Spring originates from the Oort Cloud of our Solar System and has been journeying to this point for more than a million years. In less than two years, around October 19, 2014, the comet will pass very close to Mars. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Newly spotted miles-wide comet bearing down on Mars

VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

OH MY GOD, Amazon’s having a FIRE… sale . This is bad for business! 20th Century Fox Television Last week, VMware’s top executives displayed just how worried they are about the competitive threat posed by Amazon’s cloud computing service. With customers able to spin up virtual machines in Amazon data centers, VMware is concerned fewer people will buy its virtualization tools. According to CRN , VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told service partners at the company’s Partner Exchange Conference that if “a workload goes to Amazon, you lose, and we have lost forever.” VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, “I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books.” Given VMware’s view of Amazon, Gelsinger and Eschenbach won’t like the latest news from the “bookseller,” which also happens to be a large IT services provider. Amazon today announced price reductions of up to 27.7 percent for Elastic Compute Cloud Reserved Instances running Linux/UNIX, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Reserved instances requiring up-front payments already provide discounts over “on-demand instances,” which can be spun up and down at will. Using reserved instances requires a little more advance planning to make sure you get the most bang for your buck—although customers who buy more than they need can sell excess capacity on Amazon’s Reserved Instance Marketplace . Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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VMware will hate this: Amazon slashes cloud prices up to 28 percent

Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

Seagate has had some skin in the hybrid hard drive game for some time, but always in 2.5-inch wide versions — great for your laptop, not so much the cavernous spaces of a gaming tower. Its just-shipping Desktop SSHD fills that gap in a nearly literal sense. Along with slotting neatly into a 3.5-inch bay, the larger SSHD carries both 2TB of spinning storage and 8GB of flash to speed up disk-intensive tasks without throwing away capacity (or money) on a pure solid-state drive. It should be as much as four times faster than conventional desktop drives, Seagate claims. Whether or not that’s true, the firm isn’t neglecting its portable-owning friends: it’s shipping a new 1TB, regular-height Laptop SSHD and a 500GB, 7mm (0.28-inch) Laptop Thin SSHD, either of which is up to 40 percent faster than its predecessor. Seagate hasn’t mentioned pricing for any of the drives at this stage, although it’s safe to presume they’ll undercut SSDs with equivalent space. Filed under: Desktops , Laptops , Storage Comments Source: Seagate

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Seagate ships its first desktop hybrid drive, third-gen laptop models

This Warship Radar Can Detect a Tennis Ball From 15 Miles

And not just a tennis ball from 15 miles away, but a tennis ball 15 miles away and moving at three times the speed of sound . That’s the sort of sensitivity the radar operators on the UK’s HMS Iron Duke will have the chance to work with when it returns to service next year. More »

Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World

An anonymous reader writes “Canon announced today that it successfully developed a super high-sensitivity full-frame CMOS sensor developed exclusively for video recording. The new Full HD sensor can capture light no other comparable sensor can see and it uses pixels 7.5 larger than the best commercial professional cameras in existence today.” There doesn’t seem to be a gallery of images, but the video demo (direct link to an mpeg4) makes it seem pretty sensitive. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Canon Shows the Most Sensitive Camera Sensor In the World

This Antique Machine Measures Irregular Shapes Better Than a Calculus Professor

It’s assumed that just because modern machines use lasers and other electronic technologies, they’re far more precise and accurate than mechanical contraptions from many years ago. But as Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe discovered at a tannery, that’s not always the case. More »

Canonical announces Mir, a custom display server that will serve up future versions of Unity

The X Window Server has been serving Linux users faithfully for the better part of a decade. And Ubuntu has been using the standard-issue display server to push its GUI to monitors across the globe since its color scheme was more sludge than slick . Canonical originally planned to replace the aging X with another display server called Wayland, but the developers apparently couldn’t bend the compositing-friendly protocol to their cross-device whims. So, Mir was created. The goal for Mir is to easily scale from the TV, to the desktop, to tablets and phones while providing “efficient support for graphics co-processors.” That means Canonical is relying heavily on GPU acceleration, which will require the cooperation of manufacturers like NVIDIA, AMD, Qualcomm and others. As part of the cross-form factor convergence, Unity will be getting a rewrite entirely in QT and QML (the current version uses a Nux-based shell on the desktop). The Unity Next project will incorporate several core components from the Ubuntu Touch interface, inching the Linux OS closer to its goal of a truly unified codebase. Mir should make its debut on the mobile variants of Ubuntu soon, with Canonical aiming to get the UI unified and stable in time for the next LTS in April of 2014. For some more technical details check out the source links. Filed under: Software , HD , Mobile Comments Via: OMG Ubuntu 1 , 2 Source: Ubuntu 1 , 2

Ken May

Month: March 2013