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Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

If you’ve noticed that solid-state drives (and the PCs that include them) no longer cost an arm and a leg, you’re not alone. Researchers at DRAMeXchange understand that the price per gigabyte of an SSD has fallen off a cliff in the past three years, and the trend is only accelerating. If the company’s estimates are on the mark, these drives could cost just 11 cents more per gig than conventional hard drives by 2017. At that rate, you might not have to choose between high capacity and breakneck speed when you’re on a budget — you could easily afford both. Via: Computerworld Source: TrendForce

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Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

Stuff a Raspberry Pi Zero Into an Xbox Controller for On-Demand Emulation Anywhere

The Raspberry Pi Zero is absurdly small . So small, in fact, that DIYer Terence Eden decided to stuff it inside an Xbox controller and make a little emulation machine. Read more…

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Stuff a Raspberry Pi Zero Into an Xbox Controller for On-Demand Emulation Anywhere

Use the New Find My Device Tool to Track Your Windows 10 Laptop

Microsoft has finally got around to adding a Find My Device feature to Windows 10. As you might expect, it lets you identify where your laptop is, should it get lost or stolen. The new feature is part of the major update for Windows 10 rolled out earlier this month, and here’s how to activate it on your machine. Read more…

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Use the New Find My Device Tool to Track Your Windows 10 Laptop

DirecTV will broadcast live 4K content by “early next year”

(credit: Adam Melancon ) Even if 4K TVs were popular Black Friday and Cyber Monday steals, there continues to be a lack of 4K content to watch on them. DirecTV wants to provide a solution: the company’s SVP of Video and Space Communications Phil Goswitz confirmed at New York’s TranSPORT conference that DirecTV will launch a live 4K broadcasting service sometime in “early 2016.” At the conference, Goswitz explained that the company currently has the ability to transmit up to 50 new UHD channels, and live sports transmissions are already being tested as part of next year’s rollout. DirecTV already has the hardware in place, and according to Goswitz, the company wants to get ahead of cable companies and provide viewers with 4K content they can’t get from their cable companies. “I think the belief that there are technology challenges is a bit of a misinformed myth,” he said. “I think technology throughout the entire ecosystem is ready. But I think content is king; the plane is ready to take off and there is no king on board.” Goswitz went on to say that DirecTV is “moving into working with partners” to create more 4K content. Currently Netflix and YouTube have some 4K video ready to stream, but most companies continue to focus on hardware. Roku and TiVo recently came out with updated set-top boxes ready for 4K streaming, but they still have to work with the finite amount of 4K content available. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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DirecTV will broadcast live 4K content by “early next year”

Thunderbird “a tax” on Firefox development, and Mozilla wants to drop it

Mozilla would like to drop Thunderbird from its list of projects. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) You might know Mozilla primarily for its Firefox browser, but for many years the company has also developed an e-mail client called Thunderbird. The two projects use the same rendering engine and other underlying technology, but Mozilla Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla would like to stop supporting Thunderbird, calling its continuing maintenance “a tax” on the more important work of developing Firefox. “Many inside of Mozilla, including an overwhelming majority of our leadership, feel the need to be laser-focused on activities like Firefox that can have an industry-wide impact,” Baker writes. “With all due respect to Thunderbird and the Thunderbird community, we have been clear for years that we do not view Thunderbird as having this sort of potential.” Mozilla doesn’t plan to drop Thunderbird immediately, however—the current maintenance schedule will continue and Thunderbird users can continue to use the product. But the end goal for Mozilla, according to Baker, is to find “the right kind of legal and financial home” for the Thunderbird project, and “[separate] itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology.” In other words, the company would like to give Thunderbird to people who will take care of it, freeing the Firefox team from having to worry about it. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Watch all the exoplanets orbit their stars simultaneously

The Kepler telescope has found 685 systems with 1705 exoplanets, and you can watch them whirr around together in this mesmerizing animation by astrocubs . The data is from the NASA Exoplanet Archive . I made the visualization in Python: source code available here . The fact that the worlds and systems we’ve observed are so different from our own is a limitation of our observations, not of the universe. The orbits are shown to scale, but the planets are much larger than the orbits would suggest. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see them. The planets are not to scale with one another, either. Also, the orbits wouldn’t be perfectly circular, though I guess the animator might have made the simulation adhere to the laws of planetary motion an all the observed worlds have roughly-circular orbits. Of course the solar systems aren’t this close tog—look, sshhhh, just watch it, it’s pretty.

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Watch all the exoplanets orbit their stars simultaneously

After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name

An anonymous reader writes: From January 2016, Adobe Flash will be renamed to ‘Adobe Animate CC’, killing one of the most unfortunate names in web security as the company pushes the product further and further to HTML5 output. Adobe’s release about the update, which will form part of the annual Creative Cloud upgrade, states that a third of all material output from the program is now HTML5. The transitional HTML5 Adobe animation program Edge Animate will be replaced by the renamed Flash product. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Twenty Years of Flash, Adobe Kills the Name

Christmas Lights Might Slow Down Your Wi-Fi

Did your Netflix stream grind to a halt as your loved one set up the Christmas decorations? According to British telecoms watchdog Ofcom, it could be the fairy lights that slow down your Wi-Fi network at this time of year. Read more…

There’s a New Form of Carbon That’s Harder Than Diamond

Researchers have discovered a new form of carbon structure, called Q-carbon, that’s harder than diamond and allows artificial versions of the precious stone to be made at room temperature and pressure. Read more…

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There’s a New Form of Carbon That’s Harder Than Diamond

Adobe Photoshop update brings custom toolbars and artboards

Before the sun sets on 2015, Adobe has another round of updates for its Creative Cloud software. The new features span a number of apps, but we’ll focus on Photoshop CC . To boost overall productivity, and to save you time and a few headaches, Adobe is giving the photo-editing software custom toolbars. This means that you’ll be able to add, delete and rearrange what appears in that set of tools on the left side of the interface. The new feature allows to you customize the layout of your workspace so that only the items you use are taking up valuable space. In theory, you’ll spend less time hunting for the tool you’re after, too. Slideshow-344396

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Adobe Photoshop update brings custom toolbars and artboards

Ken May

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