Internet hyperbole (and financial analysis) have rendered HTC, a once high-flying mobile brand, essentially valueless. In short, the company is trading below cash on hand which means if you bought all HTC stock the company would have to pay, you, the buyer to take it over. This means the company’s factories, stock, and brand are worth nothing, at least on Wall Street. Furthermore, the… Read More
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HTC Is Now Essentially Worthless (And Insecure)
Supply chain leaks have indicated that Apple is working on an iPhone 6s, and details of the new device have been surfacing one at a time for the past few weeks. Unbox Therapy has obtained the rear casing of the 6s and meticulously compared it with the iPhone 6. Apple is reinforcing some weak points with this year’s new iteration, and the company is also switching to lighter, stronger… Read More
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Apple Addresses Bendgate Complaints With Sturdier iPhone 6s Shell
Microsoft has released the public version of their pared down version of Windows 10 meant for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Minnowboard Max, called Windows IoT Core. Read more…
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Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi 2 and MinnowBoard Max Released
iPhone users have low-level Metal code to speed up games and other visually intensive apps, but what if you’re an Android fan? Don’t worry, you’ll get your boost soon. Google has announced that Android will soon support Vulkan , an open graphics standard that cuts a lot of the computing overhead and gives apps more direct control over video hardware. It’s not as easy to work with as OpenGL, but it should let developers wring more performance out of your phone’s processor. That could prove very important when you’d otherwise struggle to run a game on a lower-end phone, or want to get pretty, high-detail graphics on a shiny new flagship . It’ll be a while before Vulkan for Android is ready — the standard itself isn’t available, let alone Google’s implementation of it — but it should be worth the wait if your Android devices double as game consoles . Filed under: Cellphones , Gaming , Tablets , Mobile , Google Comments Source: Android Developers Blog , Imagination Technologies Tags: android, gaming, google, graphics, khronosgroup, mobilepostcross, opengl, smartphone, video, vulkan
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Your Android games are getting a software speed boost
Foxconn is opening a $5B facility in Maharashtra; Huawei just got a green-light for a networking gear factory; Xiaomi already runs a phone assembly plant in Andhra Pradesh that will announcing new products today. Read the rest
Archaeologists working in the Sicilian Channel between Tunisia and Sicily have discovered a submerged 40-foot-long (8-meter) limestone monolith carved by Stone Age humans some 10, 000 years ago. Read more…
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An Ancient Monolith Has Been Discovered in the Mediterranean Sea
You’ve probably seen “retweet to win” contests on Twitter, and maybe even won a t-shirt, concert tickets or marshmallows . But computer engineer Hunter Scott completely automated the idea and created a bot that entered every Twitter contest it could find — 165, 000 in total. As a result, he claims to have won four contests a day for nine months, for a total haul of over a thousand prizes . A lot of that swag was terrible, and a lot of it he couldn’t accept. But the interesting part was how he allegedly managed to beat Twitter’s system. The most difficult part of this project was preventing the bot from getting banned by Twitter. Scott said that “the most difficult part of this project was preventing the bot from getting banned by Twitter.” The social network has limits in place to stop such activities: unless you have a high follower count, you can only follow up to 2, 000 people yourself, for instance. At the same time, you can’t follow and unfollow users too rapidly or retweet too often. Luckily, Scott’s Python script was able to balance all that and follow every single contest it found. He said his win rate was “pretty miserable” considering the low quality of the prizes. He couldn’t claim the best one, a $4, 000 trip to New York’s fashion week because of taxes and fact that he didn’t live near New York. Nevertheless, he was fond of a few them, especially a cowboy hat autographed by actors in a Mexican soap opera. “It really embodies the totally random outcome of these contests, ” he said. Scott never revealed the name of his Twitter bot, so we’ve reached out to verify his claims — but the prizes appear to check out. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: Hunter Scott Tags: contests, HunterScott, Python, retweet, Twitter, Twitter bot
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Coder wins a thousand Twitter contests using a bot
Mickeycaskill writes: A report from Adobe and anti-ad blocking startup PageFair says the number of ad block users worldwide has increased by 41 percent in the past 12 months to 198 million monthly active users. The study suggests the growing popularity of ad blocking software is set to cost online publishers $21.8 billion in 2015 and could reach $41.4 billion by 2016. “About 45 million of them are in the United States, with almost 15 percent of people in states like New York and California relying on these services. The figures are even higher in Europe, where 77 million people use versions of the software. In Poland, more than a third of people regularly block online ads.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Study: Ad Blocker Use Jumps 41 Percent
Do pendants and other wearable ornaments lack pizzazz for you? Alexander Zolotov has a way to spice things up… if you’re fond of 8-bit graphics gone haywire , at least. His Quantum VJ is small enough to hang around your neck, but clever enough to turn audio into wonderfully glitchy visuals on its 128 x 64 OLED display. As you’ll see below, the result is at once modest yet mesmerizing — plug in some tunes and you’ll have a tiny, synchronized light show several inches away from your face. It runs for 20 hours on a typical coin-sized battery, too, so it can distract passers-by all day long. This is currently a one-of-a-kind device that doesn’t even have video out, but Zolotov tells The Creators Project that future models might have output. If so, you may one day have a dance party backdrop dangling around your chest. Filed under: Misc , Wearables Comments Via: The Creators Project Source: WarmPlace.ru Tags: alexanderzolotov, audio, glitch, music, necklace, quantumvj, video, visualizer, vj, wearable
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Quantum VJ puts a glitchy audio visualizer around your neck
Those eggs you might have had for breakfast? They’re not just food — they may be the key to longer-running batteries in your devices. Scientists at MIT and Tsinghua University have developed a nanoparticle battery electrode whose egg-like design is built to last. Their invention, which houses a shape-changing aluminum “yolk” in a titanium dioxide cell, can go through charging cycles without degrading like the graphite electrodes in conventional power packs. That could improve not only the overall longevity of the battery, but also its capacity and maximum power. You’d have gadgets that not only hold out for longer between charges, but don’t need to be replaced quite so often under heavy use. This is still a lab experiment, but it’s closer to practical reality than you think. The manufacturing technique is simple, and these materials are relatively easy to find. The yolks already hold up well under stress, for that matter. Even with super-fast charging (which typically shortens a battery’s lifespan), a test unit had just over half its capacity after 500 cycles. So long as the team does get its tech into a shipping product, you could see a wave of hardware that reduces many of your energy-related woes, such as range anxiety in electric cars or phone batteries that die before you’re ready to upgrade. [Image credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT] Filed under: Science Comments Source: MIT News Tags: aluminum, battery, biomimicry, lithium-ion, lithiumion, mit, nanoparticles, science, TsinghuaUniversity
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Nano-sized ‘yolks’ should lead to longer-lasting batteries