Author: kenmay

VW offers $1,000 in gift cards and vouchers to affected diesel owners

Volkwagen’s attempt to compensate vehicle owners who drive one of the models included in the company’s emissions scandal is now official. The initial reports were indeed correct, as the company will offer $1, 000 in gift cards and other incentives to VW customers. On top of a $500 dealership credit, the 482, 000 diesel owners will also receive a $500 Visa gift card that can be used anywhere and free roadside assistance for three years. Audi customers who drive affected vehicles will be privy to the same “goodwill package, ” too. Owners will have to visit a special website to request the items by entering their car’s VIN number and mileage alongside their name and address. Volkwagen says those customers should receive the package in a month. The company is already offering $2, 000 in trade-in credit, and with today’s announcement, the total compensation for owners of vehicles included in the on-going saga can be worth up to $3, 000. [Image credit: Getty Images] Via: Phys.org Source: USA Today

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VW offers $1,000 in gift cards and vouchers to affected diesel owners

This Is What the Orion Service Module’s Propulsion System Looks Like

Now this is some engineering. You’re looking at a model—though sadly, not a working one—of the propulsion systems that will power the Orion European Service Module (ESM). Read more…

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This Is What the Orion Service Module’s Propulsion System Looks Like

WordPress Now Powers 25% of the Web

An anonymous reader writes: According to data from W3Techs one in four websites is now powered by WordPress. According to the report: “WordPress is used by 58.7% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 25.0% of all websites.” Venturebeat reports: “Today is a big day for the free and open-source content management system (CMS). To be perfectly clear, the milestone figure doesn’t represent a fraction of all websites that have a CMS: WordPress now powers 25 percent of the Web. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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WordPress Now Powers 25% of the Web

Intel Skylake-U For Laptops Posts Solid Gains In Testing, Especially Graphics

MojoKid writes: Intel’s 6th Generation Skylake family of Core processors has been available for some time now for desktops. However, the mobile variant of Skylake is perhaps Intel’s most potent incarnation of the new architecture that has been power-optimized on 14nm technology with a beefier graphics engine for notebooks. In late Q3, Intel started rolling out Skylake-U versions of the chip in a 15 Watt TDP flavor. This is the power envelope that most “ultrabooks” are built with and it’s likely to be Intel’s highest volume SKU of the processor. The Lenovo Yoga 900 tested here was configured with an Intel Core i7-6500U dual-core processor that also supports Intel HyperThreading for 4 logical processing threads available. Its base frequency is 2.5GHz, but the chip will Turbo Boost to 3GHz and down clocks way down to 500MHz when idle. The chip also has 4MB of shared L3 cache and 512K of L2 and 128K of data cache, total. In the benchmarks, the new Skylake-U mobile chip is about 5 — 10 faster than Intel’s previous generation Broadwell platform in CPU-intensive tasks and 20+ percent faster in graphics and gaming, at the same power envelope, likely with better battery life, depending on the device. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Intel Skylake-U For Laptops Posts Solid Gains In Testing, Especially Graphics

Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California

An anonymous reader writes: Faraday Future, an electric car startup based in California, wants to take on Tesla and is building a $1 billion factory in the California. Business Insider reports: “The startup of about 400 employees has poached executive talent from Tesla and also draws its name from a luminary scientist — Michael Faraday — who helped harness for humanity the forces of nature. Even Faraday’s public announcement that California, Georgia, Louisiana and Nevada are finalists for the factory mirrors the approach Tesla took to build a massive battery factory. Nevada won that bidding war among several states last year by offering up to $1.3 billion in tax breaks and other incentives. Faraday hopes to distinguish itself by branding the car less as transportation than a tool for the connected class.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Electric-Car Startup Faraday Future Building a $1 Billion Factory In California

Badly-Coded Ransomware Locks User Files and Throws Away Encryption Key

An anonymous reader writes: A new ransomware family was not tested by its developer and is encrypting user files and then throwing away the encryption key because of an error in its programming. The ransomware author wanted to cut down costs by using a static encryption key for all users, but the ransomware kept generating random keys which it did not store anywhere. The only way to recover files is if users had a previous backup. You can detect it by the ransom message which has the same ID:qDgx5Bs8H Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Badly-Coded Ransomware Locks User Files and Throws Away Encryption Key

10,000 wax cylinders digititzed and free to download

The University of California at Santa Barbara library has undertaken an heroic digitization effort for its world-class archive of 19th and early 20th century wax cylinder recordings, and has placed over 10,000 songs online for anyone to download, stream and re-use. (more…)

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10,000 wax cylinders digititzed and free to download

Sorry, No Aliens! The Navy Test Fires Trident Missile Off The Coast Of California

Reports flooded in today stating that the warning areas off the coast of Southern California—around the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range —would be activated, causing noise issues associated with re-routed LAX operations. Theories flew, some being totally absurd. In the end, it was exactly what it should have been—a Trident submarine-launched ballistic missile test. Read more…

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Sorry, No Aliens! The Navy Test Fires Trident Missile Off The Coast Of California

The Keurig Kold: You could just buy a mini-fridge instead

As I took Keurig’s Kold machine out of its box, the first thought that ran through my head was, “Man, Alton Brown would hate this.” You see, the Good Eats and Cutthroat Kitchen host has a vendetta against single-use kitchen gadgets: that is, products designed to do one thing and one thing alone. And it’s usually a purpose that could easily be replicated by another doodad already living in your kitchen. In the case of the Kold, a device that dispenses single servings of cold drinks at the touch of a button, that doodad would be your fridge.Slideshow-339263

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The Keurig Kold: You could just buy a mini-fridge instead