Author: kenmay

Nike’s LED basketball court boosts training with motion tracking

Wearables have become popular among athletes for monitoring training progress , but on its recent Rise campaign stop in Shanghai, Nike took a different approach. Inside the so-call House of Mamba, NBA star Kobe Bryant hosted 30 young players from all over China who trained on a full-sized LED basketball court — complete with projected graphics and motion tracking. The playing surface displayed reactive visuals based on players’ movements for drills based on Bryant’s own regimen. A dozen athletes will compete this weekend in Beijing with three winners moving on to the Nike World Basketball Festival in Barcelona next month. Curious to see how it works? Well, there’s a pair of videos after the break that show just that. Filed under: Misc Comments Via: Gizmodo (Sploid) Source: Nike

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Nike’s LED basketball court boosts training with motion tracking

How Verizon lets its copper network decay to force phone customers onto fiber

Aurich Lawson The shift from copper landlines to fiber-based voice networks is continuing apace, and no one wants it to happen faster than Verizon. Internet users nationwide are clamoring for fiber, as well, hoping it can free them from slower DSL service or the dreaded cable companies. But not everyone wants fiber, because, when it comes to voice calls, the newer technology doesn’t have all the benefits of the old copper phone network. In particular, fiber doesn’t conduct electricity, where copper does. That means when your power goes out, copper landlines might keep working for days or weeks by drawing electricity over the lines, while a phone that relies on fiber will only last as long as its battery. That’s  up to eight hours  for Verizon’s most widely available backup system. Thus, while many customers practically beg for fiber, others—particularly those who have suffered through long power outages—want Verizon to keep maintaining the old copper lines. But Verizon continues pressuring customers to switch, and it’s getting harder to say no. Read 89 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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How Verizon lets its copper network decay to force phone customers onto fiber

Cheap Solid-State Batteries That Last Twice as Long as Li-On Are Coming

Most of our devices run (not for long enough) on lithium ion batteries. But there could be a new, old kid on the block—in the shape of a solid-state battery that can hold twice the charge as li-on. Read more…

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Cheap Solid-State Batteries That Last Twice as Long as Li-On Are Coming

Hackers transform a smartphone gyroscope into an always-on microphone

Apps that use your smartphone’s microphone need to ask permission, but the motion sensors ? No say-so needed. That might not sound like a big deal, but security researchers from Stanford University and defense firm Rafael have discovered a way to turn Android phone gyroscopes into crude microphones. They call their app ” Gyrophone ” and here’s how it works: the tiny gyros in your phone that measure orientation do so using vibrating pressure plates. As it turns out, those can also pick up air vibrations from sounds, and those in many Android devices can do it in the 80 to 250 hertz range — exactly the frequency of a human voice. By contrast, the iPhone’s sensor only uses frequencies below 100Hz, and is therefore useless for tapping conversations. Though the system can only pick up the odd word or the speaker’s gender, the researchers said that voice recognition experts could no doubt make it work better. They’ll be delivering a paper next week at the Usenix Security conference, but luckily, Google is already up on the research. “This early, academic work should allow us to provide defenses before there is any likelihood of real exploitation.” Filed under: Cellphones , Mobile Comments Via: Wired.com Source: Stanford University

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Hackers transform a smartphone gyroscope into an always-on microphone

Pilots banned from acting like Uber drivers in the sky

“You’re going to Napa in your Cessna? Me too! If you let me hop in, I’ll pay my share of the gas!” That arrangement is legal, but the FAA has declared that connecting brave passengers with amateur pilots for a fee is definitely verboten. The ruling came from a request for clarification by a company called Airpooler , a small plane equivalent of UberX . That service and others like FlyteNow let private pilots post listings for flight dates and destinations, along with a corresponding fee. Thanks to a 1963 decision, such sharing is legal if done by word of mouth or a notice board, provided the pilot only asks for a fair share of the expenses. However, in a rather confusing letter, the regulator told Airpooler that its service violates the spirit of that ruling. Instead of offering a bonafide “joint venture with a common purpose, ” participating pilots are “holding out to transport passengers for compensation.” That means unless you have a commercial ATP or CPL license, using such a services is DOA. [Credit: Brianc/Flickr] Filed under: Transportation Comments Via: TechCrunch Source: FAA (Scribd.com)

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Pilots banned from acting like Uber drivers in the sky

16 Ways To Use FLIR’s Incredibly Fun Predator-Vision iPhone Camera

There’s no doubt about it, being able to see more than just the visible spectrum is the closest thing most of us will ever have to superpowers . Seeing the world through its heat signature is almost like having x-ray vision, and let’s not forget, even the Predator made sure to bring his thermal camera with him on his hunting trip to earth. Read more…

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16 Ways To Use FLIR’s Incredibly Fun Predator-Vision iPhone Camera

Windows 9 preview could materialize as soon as next month

Microsoft could be shipping a preview release of the next major version of Windows—codenamed “Threshold,” and expected to be named “Windows 9″—in either late September or early October, according to sources speaking to ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley . The preview will be widely available to anyone who wants to install it. The final version of the operating system is currently believed to be scheduled for spring 2015. Microsoft has all but confirmed some of the features that Threshold will ship with, including a new hybrid Start menu that includes bits of the old Windows 7 Start menu alongside new live tiles and the ability to run modern Metro applications in windows. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Windows 9 preview could materialize as soon as next month

Beacon Transmitter Service Ifinity Valued At $12M After Seed Round

 Apple’s iBeacon tech is still in its early stages, but we’re starting to see more people show interest in the idea of connecting their smartphones with real-world places and items. Ifinity, a Warsaw-based company, uses a similar type of beacon service but wants to raise its scalability so that a whole city can make use of it. Ifinity’s beacons are small transmitters… Read More

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Beacon Transmitter Service Ifinity Valued At $12M After Seed Round

Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

When I first started reading Ars Technica, performance of a processor was measured in megahertz, and the major manufacturers were rushing to squeeze as many of them as possible into their latest silicon. Shortly thereafter, however, the energy needs and heat output of these beasts brought that race crashing to a halt . More recently, the number of processing cores rapidly scaled up, but they quickly reached the point of diminishing returns. Now, getting the most processing power for each Watt seems to be the key measure of performance. None of these things happened because the companies making processors ran up against hard physical limits. Rather, computing power ended up being constrained because progress in certain areas—primarily energy efficiency—was slow compared to progress in others, such as feature size. But could we be approaching physical limits in processing power? In this week’s edition of Nature , The University of Michigan’s Igor Markov takes a look at the sorts of limits we might face. Clearing hurdles Markov notes that, based on purely physical limitations, some academics have estimated that Moore’s law had hundreds of years left in it. In contrast, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), a group sponsored by the major semiconductor manufacturing nations, gives it a couple of decades. And the ITRS can be optimistic; it once expected that we would have 10GHz CPUs back in the Core2 days. The reason for this discrepancy is that a lot of hard physical limits never come into play. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Are processors pushing up against the limits of physics?

Microsoft Black Tuesday Patches Bring Blue Screens of Death

snydeq (1272828) writes “Two of Microsoft’s kernel-mode driver updates — which often cause problems — are triggering a BSOD error message on some Windows systems, InfoWorld reports. ‘Details at this point are sparse, but it looks like three different patches from this week’s Black Tuesday crop are causing Blue Screens with a Stop 0x50 error on some systems. If you’re hitting a BSOD, you can help diagnose the problem (and perhaps prod Microsoft to find a solution) by adding your voice to the Microsoft Answers Forum thread on the subject.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Black Tuesday Patches Bring Blue Screens of Death