When Zac Vawter lost his leg in a motorcycle accident a few years ago, he thought he’d never walk like a normal person again. But today, the 32-year-old software engineer can climb stairs, wiggle his toes and stroll through parks. The only difference is that one of his legs is a mind-controlled robot . Read more…
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World’s First Fully Bionic, Mind-Controlled Leg Goes for a Walk
Just a week after it began the first phase of putting iPads in the hands of all 640, 000 students in the state, the Los Angeles school district already has a fight on its hands. In a matter of days, 300 children at Theodore Roosevelt High School managed to work around protective measures placed on the Apple tablets, giving them complete access to features — including Facebook, Twitter and other apps — that should otherwise have been blocked. Students bypassed the security lock on the device by deleting a personal profile preloaded in the settings — a simple trick that has the school district police chief recommending the board limit the rollout before it turns into a “runaway train scenario.” For now, officials have banned home use of the iPads while they assess ways to better restrict access — they would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for those meddling kids. [Original image credit: flickingerbrad, Flickr ] Filed under: Tablets , Apple Comments Via: Fox News Source: LA Times
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LA officials may delay school iPad rollout after students hack them in a week
MojoKid writes “AMD has just announced a full suite of new GPUs based on its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The Radeon R5, R7, and R9 families are the new product lines aimed at mainstream, performance, and high-end gaming, respectively. Specs on the new cards are still limited, but we know that the highest-end R9 290X is a six-billion transistor GPU with more than 300GB/s of memory bandwidth and prominent support for 4K gaming. The R5 series will start at $89, with 1GB of RAM. The R7 260X will hit $139 with 2GB of RAM, the R9 270X and 280X appear to replace the current Radeon 7950 and 7970 with price points at $199 and $299, and 2GB/3GB of RAM, and then the R9 290X, at an unannounced price point and 4GB of RAM. AMD is also offering a limited preorder pack, that offers Battlefield 4 license combined with the graphics cards, which should go on sale in the very near future. Finally, AMD is also debuting a new positional and 3D spatial audio engine in conjunction with GenAudio dubbed ‘AstoundSound, ‘ but they’re only making it available on the R9 290X, R9 280X, and the R9 270X.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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AMD Unveils New Family of GPUs: Radeon R5, R7, R9 With BF 4 Preorder Bundle
The latest science news out of Harvard and MIT sounds like a joke, but it’s not. A team of physicists were fooling around with photons when they managed to get the particles to clump together to form a molecule , one that’s unlike any other matter. And it behaves, they say, just like a light saber. Read more…
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Scientists Created a New Form of Matter and It’s Like a Light Saber
All iMacs now leave you an empty PCIe SSD slot to use if you don’t go in for the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrade, but it’s still hard to get at. iFixit Just one day after Apple quietly refreshed its iMac lineup with Intel’s new Haswell processors, the teardown artists at iFixit have pulled both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch models apart to see what makes them tick. One of our chief complaints about last year’s 21.5-inch iMac was how difficult it was to upgrade, and that remains true of this year’s model. You can still access the computer’s two RAM slots if you’re brave enough to attempt the teardown process (which includes tearing apart and replacing some foam padding), and Apple has included an empty PCIe slot on the base model where last year’s model only had an empty spot on the system board. However, the low-end iMac’s use of Intel’s Iris Pro 5200 integrated GPUs means that it uses one of Intel’s R-series CPUs, and those CPUs only come in a soldered-on ball-grid array (BGA) package. The 27-inch model proves a bit easier to upgrade: it still has four user-accessible RAM slots, still leaves people who opt out of the Fusion Drive or SSD upgrades an empty PCIe slot to use, and still uses a socketed Intel CPU for those of you who want to take the trouble to upgrade that component yourselves after the fact. Both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs were also confirmed to be using triple-antenna (3×3:3) 802.11ac configurations, meaning the iMacs will be capable of the standard’s maximum theoretical transfer speed of 1.3Gbps where the 2013 MacBook Airs used a two-antenna setup capable of 867Mbps speeds. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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2013 iMac teardowns reveal SSD slots, soldered-in CPU in the 21.5” model
Mozilla announced today that, similar to Chrome, Firefox will be blocking plugins by default in a future version of the browser. However, most plugins will be available through a “click to allow” feature, at least for the time being. Flash will still be enabled by default. You can read more here . Read more…
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Mozilla announced today that, similar to Chrome, Firefox will be blocking plugins by default in a fu
Live support has always been a dream for major retailers. While chat solutions already exist, today Amazon announced a new support service available on Kindle HD products called Mayday. It is a single-click, hardware-support solution that lets users work with a remote tech support representative to solve problems with their tablets. The service allows you to see the remote tech support person in a small window on your screen and also displays your screen on the support person’s computer where they can watch what you’re doing online, annotate the screen, and even tap through the interface. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said it’s like “actually very similar to having someone standing next to you” and offering tech support. The service is unique to Amazon, and the company built a full infrastructure to support it at their HQ in Seattle and on board the hardware. By compressing the video signals, they are able to send more data to the devices from tech support and allow tech support to see the data remotely. Amazon’s goal is a 15-second response time, and they will ramp up staffing around major holidays when Kindles are flying fast and furious under the Easter tree. While some may be concerned about privacy, rest assured the support person will not be able to see out of your camera, and you can mute your audio at any time. Bezos equated the experience to going into a store for tech support. “If you went to some physical store location to ask for help for your device, they’re going to see everything, ” said Bezos. More important, however, is how many people the service will help. “Are we in charge of our devices or our devices in charge of us? Getting good tech support isn’t easy, but it’s important, ” he said. The service will be available on the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets. You can read more about the service at Amazon’s Mayday page .
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Amazon Introduces Mayday, A Unique And Amazingly Useful Live Tech Support System For Kindle
If all your awesome dance-troupe videos keep getting bumped off of YouTube for copyright violation — there’s finally an answer. The video-sharing site has just announced the launch of a new audio library, with 150 royalty-free music tracks for use on your videos. You can browse the library direct from your video manager page, and sounds can be sorted by genre, mood, instrument and so on. YouTube’s even making a call out to musicians that would be interested in having their work added to the list. That dancing though? Let’s just keep that private. Filed under: Internet Comments Source: YouTube Creator Blog
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YouTube debuts royalty-free music library, get your free tunes right here
If you’re running Java SE 6, we have some news for you: Oracle stopped providing public updates to it after February 2013. Enterprise customers will still have access to long term help through their support channels. For everyone else, you should upgrade to Java SE 7 and remove Java SE 6 – remember Java doesn’t remove older versions by default. Malware exploiting vulnerabilities in Java isn’t new. We’ve written about Java vulnerabilities on this blog before. In fact, since July this year Exploit:Java/CVE-2013-2465 has been making the rounds and targeting Java SE 6. Oracle has done a great job of releasing Java updates to patch these vulnerabilities. However, Java SE 6 is about seven years old, and Java SE 7 was released more than two years ago. This means it’s time to think about alternatives for the aging version. While we’re talking about end-of-support software – technical assistance for Windows XP will no longer be available from April 8, 2014 . This includes the updates that help protect your PC against security risks and malware. It’s a good time to think about installing Windows 8 on your PC.
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End of support for Java SE 6
We’ve already seen a possible ‘Space Gray’ version of the upcoming iPad Mini 2 floating around and now it’s time for the big brother version to get covered in gray steel too. Read more…
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Here’s a Leaked ‘Space Gray’ Version of the Next Full-Sized iPad