You know that company that builds all your electronics? The one that makes your iPhone and your Xbox and your Kindle and has to install anti-suicide nets to deter miserable workers from ending their lives? It’s a company known to Americans as Foxconn, and it’s the 10th largest employer in the world. Read more…
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Foxconn is the 10th Largest Employer in the World
dkatana writes: WiFi Offloading is skyrocketing. This is the conclusion of a new report from Juniper Research, which points out that the amount of smartphone and tablet data traffic on WiFi networks will will increase to more than 115, 000 petabytes by 2019, compared to under 30, 000 petabytes this year, representing almost a four-fold increase. Most of this data is offloaded to consumer’s WiFi by the carriers, offering the possibility to share your home internet connection in exchange for “free” hotspots. But this article on InformationWeek Network Computing also warns that “The capacity of the 2.4GHz band is reaching its limit. the growing number of WiFi devices using unlicensed bands is seriously affecting network efficiency. Capacity is compromised by the number of simultaneously active devices, with transmission speeds dropping as much as 20% of the nominal value. With the number of IoT and M2M applications using WiFi continuously rising, that could become a serious problem soon.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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WiFi Offloading is Skyrocketing
Polyphasic sleep is a method of training your body to requiring much less sleep by taking multiple short naps throughout the day instead of one long sleeping time at night. Over at Quartz, science-trained journalist Akshat Rathi reports on his year-long experiment attempting to “cheat sleep.” Read the rest
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How one person “cheated sleep”
As taxi drivers across France protested UberPop in several cities nationwide, on the other side of Europe, Uber quietly launched UberBoat in Istanbul on Thursday. Uber As the name implies, the service allows people to summon boats to ferry them across the Bosphorous Strait, the waterway separating the European and Asian sides of Turkey’s largest city. Uber is working with an existing boat company, Navette-Tezman Holding , to provide the maritime service. According to Bloomberg , public ferries currently serve roughly 20 different routes and are quite affordable to most locals at the price of 2.15 Turkish lira (81¢) per ride. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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As French taxi drivers protest, UberBoat arrives in Istanbul as on-demand ferry
Amazon has announced that some of its Prime Instant Video shows will be screened in high dynamic range. It’ll start with original series and Samsung SUHD TVs, but moew shows and devices should be supported soon. Read more…
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Amazon has announced that some of its Prime Instant Video shows will be screened in high dynamic ran
The prospect of a material that can change color yet is still flexible enough to wear as clothing is a perennial sci-fi dream—and now amazingly close to reality. This new electronic skin is just a few microns thick and yet manages to change color, acting as a credible digital display. Read more…
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This Full-Color Display is Just Microns Thick and Flexible Like Skin
23.2 lightyears from Earth sits the Scorpius Constellation, where scientists are working on an artificial biosphere that can harbor human life. And perhaps some other forms of life, too. Read more…
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Intense Scifi Film Shot Entirely in Moonlight Looks Completely Alien
Microsoft MVP Patrick Barker, who spends a large portion of his life analysing, debugging, and helping other people troubleshoot Windows, has discovered that Samsung is actively disabling Windows Update on some of its PCs. Barker stumbled across the issue while trying to assist a user who found that Windows Update “kept getting disabled randomly.” By using Auditpol and registry security auditing, Barker discovered that a program called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe was being run every time the PC booted up—and that EXE file, unfortunately, belonged to Samsung’s SW Update suite. SW Update is exactly what it sounds like: it’s one of those bundled OEM tools that ostensibly keeps all of your PC’s software and drivers up-to-date. In this case, though, SW Update also installs a service that regularly downloads and executes a file called Disable_Windowsupdate.exe directly from Samsung’s servers. The file is even digitally signed by Samsung (but don’t run it unless you want to disable Windows Update). Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Samsung silently disabling Windows Update on some computers
The first reviews for AMD’s top-of-the-line Radeon R9 Fury X —which sports the first iteration of stacked High Bandwidth Memory (HMB) and a huge 8.9-billion-transistor Fiji GPU—have landed, showing performance almost as good as the identically priced Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti. While that not might be the total landslide AMD fans might have been hoping for, the Fury X is the first time in a long time that AMD has been competitive with Nvidia at the high-end: not just in terms of price, but performance as well. Naturally, there are some caveats to the Fury X’s performance, the biggest being that at 1080p resolution it’s easily beaten out by the GTX 980 Ti, and in some cases even the GTX 980. That’s not too surprising given the Fury X’s focus on memory bandwidth, which comes into play when larger textures are being shuffled in and out of memory. That said, it’s unlikely anyone buying a £550/$650 graphics card is looking to play at 1080p (unless they’re into 100 FPS and higher gaming). At 1440p and 4K resolutions the Fury X more than holds its own. Over at Tom’s Hardware , the site found the Fury X bested the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X running Far Cry 4 at 1440p by around 10 FPS, with a similar lead in the game at 4K. Performance at 4K is definitely a high point for the Fury X, where in games like The Witcher 3, Metro Last Light, and Shadow of Mordor , it beat the Nvidia cards. But in Grand Theft Auto V , it was the GTX 980 Ti that was faster at both 1440p and 4K. This was a theme across the reviews of most sites, with the two cards trading blows across a range of games. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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AMD Fury X reviews show strong 4K performance, but doesn’t beat 980 Ti overall
I used to work at Boeing and repaired the computerized part of the machines which put together 747’s. People not familiar with airplanes are scared because they are forced to be quiet and go along with acting normal while stuck in a tube hurtling through the air at 600 miles an hour, and 30, 000 feet above the earth. What could go wrong? Read more…
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What Are All Those Weird Noises You Hear on an Airplane?