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Israeli Troops Who Relied On Waze Blundered Into Deadly Palestinian Firefight

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli forces mounted a rescue mission in a Palestinian neighborhood after gun battles erupted when two soldiers mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.The clashes late Monday in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. According to initial Israeli reports, the two soldiers said they had been using Waze, a highly touted Israeli-invented navigation app bought more than two years ago by Google. The smartphone app, which has a settings option to ‘avoid dangerous areas, ‘ relies on crowdsourcing to give users the fastest traffic routes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Israeli Troops Who Relied On Waze Blundered Into Deadly Palestinian Firefight

Remains of the Day: TaskRabbit Promises to Complete Certain Tasks in 90 Minutes

Has your Tuesday been super? Maybe TaskRabbit can help with their new real-time option to connect you with taskers and get some chores done on demand. Read more…

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Remains of the Day: TaskRabbit Promises to Complete Certain Tasks in 90 Minutes

The PS4 Is Finally Getting Features It Should’ve Had For Years

The PS4’s next firmware update will finally let you turn on notifications for when your friends come online. It still won’t let you change your username, but at least it’ll give you some privacy. Read more…

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The PS4 Is Finally Getting Features It Should’ve Had For Years

The Bizarre Facebook Hoax That Escalated Into a Real-Life Double Murder

The media scrambled to make sense of this strange, baffling double homicide—the angle that most outlets came up with was “unfriending on Facebook leads to murder!” (Including 20/20 , which devoted an episode to the case.) But as prosecutor Dennis Brooks explains in Too Pretty to Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee , the situation was a lot more complicated than that. Read more…

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The Bizarre Facebook Hoax That Escalated Into a Real-Life Double Murder

Vivo Xplay5 boasts 6GB RAM and a familiar curved screen

If you need an excuse to acquire a new exotic Chinese smartphone, then how about 6GB of RAM? Not only is Vivo’s new Xplay5 the first mobile device to announce this spec, but it’s also the second non-Samsung device — following the BlackBerry Priv — to pack a screen that’s curved on both sides. Judging by its familiar metallic design, you’d easily think that the Xplay5 is the bastard child of the Galaxy S6 Edge (front) and the iPhone (back) after a one night stand in Dongguan (the S7 Edge’s chamfer isn’t as shiny). Despite the unfortunate similarities, this is still a surprisingly decent product in terms of hardware and specs — much like how its predecessor, the Xplay3S , managed to wow us a little over two years ago. The dual-SIM Xplay5 comes in two flavors. The “Flagship Edition” features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset, 6GB of speedy LPDDR4 RAM, 128GB of internal storage and a “HiFi 3.0” package consisting of two ES9028 SABRE Mobile DAC chips plus three OPA1612 amplifiers for improved audio quality overall. As for the regular model, you get the mid-range Snapdragon 652 , a “mere” 4GB of RAM, also 128GB of storage and a different combination of audio chips (CS4398 plus AD45257). Both versions sport a 5.43-inch Super AMOLED display with QHD resolution (2, 560 x 1, 440) along with a fingerprint reader on the back. For photography, a 16-megapixel f/2.0 Sony IMX298-powered main camera with phase detection auto-focus plus dual-tone LED flash, and a generous 8-megapixel f/2.4 front-facing camera for you selfie addicts. The built-in 3, 600mAh battery should be plentiful, and the rapid charging support comes in handy (we’ve yet to confirm whether it’s the Quick Charge 2.0 or 3.0 standard). What’s a bit disappointing is the lack of NFC and USB Type-C here, as well as the fact that the Xplay5 only comes with Android 5.1 (under Vivo’s skin, of course). While no date has been mentioned for the “Flagship Edition” just yet, the regular model is already up for pre-order. It’s no Xiaomi; you’ll need to pay up 3, 698 yuan or about $560, or you can wait for a while to save up 4, 288 yuan or about $650 for that beast of a phone. Both are available in gold and pink. Source: Vivo

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Vivo Xplay5 boasts 6GB RAM and a familiar curved screen

Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC

MojoKid writes: Even for mainstream users, it’s easy to feel the differences between using a PC that has an OS installed on a solid state drive versus a mechanical hard drive. Also, with SSD pricing where it is right now, it’s also easy to justify including one in a new configuration for the speed boost. And there’s obvious benefit in the enterprise and data center for both performance and durability. As you might expect, Google has chewed through a healthy pile of SSDs in its data centers over the years and the company appears to have been one of the first to deploy SSDs in production at scale. New research results Google is sharing via a joint research project now encompasses SSD use over a six year span at one of Google’s data centers. Looking over the results led to some expected and unexpected findings. One of the biggest discoveries is that SLC-based SSDs are not necessarily more reliable than MLC-based drives. This is surprising, as SLC SSDs carry a price premium with the promise of higher durability (specifically in write operations) as one of their selling points. It will come as no surprise that there are trade-offs of both SSDs and mechanical drives, but ultimately, the benefits SSDs offer often far outweigh the benefits of mechanical HDDs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC

Scientists Achieve Perfect Efficiency For Water-Splitting Half-Reaction

Dthief writes: Splitting water is a two-step process, and in a new study, researchers have performed one of these steps (reduction) with 100% efficiency. The results shatter the previous record of 60% for hydrogen production with visible light, and emphasize that future research should focus on the other step (oxidation) in order to realize practical overall water splitting. The main application of splitting water into its components of oxygen and hydrogen is that the hydrogen can then be used to deliver energy to fuel cells for powering vehicles and electronic devices. The process involves exposing the water to a mass of platinum-tipped nanorods, with visible light driving the reaction. The 100% efficiency refers to the photon-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency, and it means that virtually all of the photons that reach the photocatalyst generate an electron, and every two electrons produce one H2 molecule. At 100% yield, the half-reaction produces about 100 H2 molecules per second (or one every 10 milliseconds) on each nanorod, and a typical sample contains about 600 trillion nanorods. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists Achieve Perfect Efficiency For Water-Splitting Half-Reaction

As of Tonight, 1900 Steam Games For Linux

New submitter KGIII writes: “After a recent Steam change, there were more than 1, 900 Steam Linux games listed as Valve ended up including yet-to-be-released Linux game ports. That total including unreleased Linux games is now up to 2, 009! But in terms of released Linux game titles available for download right now, the 1, 900 threshold was crossed tonight to end out February.” It’s getting there. All of you gamers might just be able to make the choice to move to Linux soon. It looks like there are quite a few more games coming down the pipe. This is a good thing as it gives gamers more options for their operating system. I imagine this bodes well for the SteamOS project and for the dedicated SteamOS devices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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As of Tonight, 1900 Steam Games For Linux

One Animal in Zootopia Has More Individual Hairs Than Every Character in Frozen Combined

Computer animation evolves at an alarming rate. One year, a movie like Frozen or Big Hero 6 looks like the peak of what’s possible. Then, only a year later, the next thing goes way beyond that. In this case, the next thing is Zootopia , and in this movie a single giraffe has more individual hairs on it—nine million—than every single character in either Frozen, Big Hero 6, or Wreck-It Ralph . Read more…

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One Animal in Zootopia Has More Individual Hairs Than Every Character in Frozen Combined