When a franchise is around for four decades, it can get impossibly unwieldy to try and grasp its lore — and Star Wars canon is no exception. Here’s a guide to the origins of Star Wars Canon, the rise and fall of one of the most prominent Expanded Universes in fiction , and where the saga stands with Disney today. Read more…
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A Brief History Of Star Wars Canon, Old And New
Uber, which is notorious for more or less ignoring its drivers’ needs already , is apparently looking to one-day cut out the middleman entirely. According to a report from TechCrunch, the on-demand car service is building a robotics research lab to ” kickstart autonomous taxi fleet development .” Because at least robots won’t get all uppity about sketchy loans and unfair wages . Read more…
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Report: Uber Is Building a Robotics Factory for Self-Driving Cars
While Raspberry Pi fans were told to expect a brand new board somewhere around 2017 , it turns out that wasn’t quite true. This is the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B: a substantial upgrade from the Model B+ that will reportedly go on sale later today from the Raspberry Pi foundation for $35. The new board has some fundamental upgrades that could well warrant the upgrade for existing Raspberry Pi dabblers — that is, if smaller wasn’t better . Raspberry Pi Foundation lead Eben Upton told The Register that the new Model B “is a usable PC now.” “You could use a Raspberry Pi 1 as a PC but you had to say ‘this is a great PC in so far as it cost me 35 bucks’. We’ve removed the caveat that you had to be a bit forgiving with it. Now it’s just good.” How much better? Well, the team’s upgraded the processor on-board to a 900MHz quad-core chip and have loaded in 1GB of RAM, which the foundation reckons will offer at least six times the performance of the old Model B+ . It may look the same, but the board (with that processor which has apparently been in development for years), also has a special a tweak connecting to the quad-core brains to ensure it handles the gig of RAM on board. Naturally, it’ll be up to the Raspberry Pi community and makers to show what is possible with this sequel PC — but we’re assuming the specification bump will mean “a whole lot more”. Once Raspberry Pi goes official with the news, we’ll be adding more of the important details right here, but it will be available for the same price as last year’s B+; $35. Filed under: Peripherals , Science , Internet Comments Source: The Register
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Raspberry Pi 2 appears two years early with substantial hardware upgrades
The lure of quantum entangled computing is strong, as it can provide a means of impenetrable encryption —but the hardware has always been too bulky to make it practical. Now, though, researchers have shrunk the technology down to less than the width of a human hair, small enough to squeeze onto a chip. Read more…
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Quantum Entanglement Can Now Be Performed on a Chip
Photon entanglement is one of the odder properties of quantum physics, but it promises a lot for computing — if one photon can instantly affect another no matter how far away it is, you could make super-speedy computers and communications that aren’t easily limited by physical distances. It hasn’t been easy to get entanglement tech down to a manageable size, however, and that’s where Italy’s Università degli Studi di Pavia might just come to the rescue. Its researchers have developed a tiny emitter that could pump out entangled photons as part of an otherwise ordinary silicon chip. The device, which uses a ring shape to both rope in and emit light, measures just 20 microns across. That’s hundreds of times smaller than existing devices, which are comparatively gigantic at a few millimeters wide. You probably won’t see whole processors built around this technique, at least not for a while. Chip makers usually work on the nanometer scale — Intel’s new 14nm processors are far more intricate than this ring. Moreover, there’s some refinement left to make sure this part produces a reliable stream of tangled photons. If everything falls into place, however, you could see entanglement rings boosting performance in certain tasks. You might also see an entanglement-based component that handles jobs which aren’t otherwise possible, like spy-proof quantum cryptography . This breakthrough isn’t going to change semiconductors overnight, but it could make quantum computing more of a practical reality. Filed under: Science Comments Via: EurekAlert , SpaceDaily Source: OpticsInfoBase
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Entangled photons on a chip could lead to super-fast computers
Rogers Family Company Coffee and Tea is offering a free “Freedom Clip” that disabled DRM in your new-model K-Cup machine, letting you use it with anyone’s coffee pods. Read the rest
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Free "freedom clip" turns off K-Cup DRM
Windows/Mac/Android: If you want to show off your iPhone or iPad screen, typically you need an Apple TV. Reflector puts your iOS screen on a Mac, PC or Android device by acting as an AirPlay receiver. Read more…
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Reflector Mirrors your iOS Screen to a Mac, PC or Android device
Bryce writes: Four years since the last major Inkscape release, now news is out about version 0.91 of this powerful vector drawing and painting tool. The main reason for the multi-year delay is that they’ve switched from their old custom rendering engine to using Cairo now, improving their support for open source standards. This release also adds symbol libraries and support for Visio stencils, cross platform WMF and EMF import and export, a native Windows 64-bit build, scads of bug fixes, and much more. Check out the full release notes for more information about what has changed, or just jump right to downloading your package for Windows, Linux, or Mac OS X. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Inkscape Version 0.91 Released
MojoKid writes: In all of its iterations, NVIDIA’s Maxwell architecture has proven to be a good performing, power-efficient GPU thus far. At the high-end of the product stack is where some of the most interesting products reside, however. When NVIDIA launches a new high-end GPU, cards based on the company’s reference design trickle out first, and then board partners follow up with custom solutions packing unique cooling hardware, higher clocks, and sometimes additional features. With the GeForce GTX 970 and GTX 980, NVIDIA’s board partners were ready with custom solutions very quickly. These three custom GeForce cards, from enthusiast favorites EVGA, MSI, and Zotac represent optimization at the high-end of Maxwell. Two of the cards are GTX 980s: the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G and the Zotac GeForce GTX 980 AMP! Omgea, the third is a GTX 970 from EVGA, their GeForce GTX 970 FTW with ACX 2.0. Besides their crazy long names, all of these cards are custom solutions, that ship overclocked from the manufacturer. In testing, NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 980 was the fastest, single-GPU available. The custom, factory overclocked MSI and Zotac cards cemented that fact. Overall, thanks to a higher default GPU-clock, the MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G was the best performing card. EVGA’s GeForce GTX 970 FTW was also relatively strong, despite its alleged memory bug. Although, as expected, it couldn’t quite catch the higher-end GeForce GTX 980s, but occasionally outpaced the AMD’s top-end Radeon R9 290X. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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GeForce GTX 980 and 970 Cards From MSI, EVGA, and Zotac Reviewed
Google Earth Pro , the premium version of Google’s popular Google Earth service, is now free. Google sliced the price from $400 a year, so this is a pretty solid deal. If you like to make 3D measurements or create HD videos of virtual trips around the world, I’d jump on this. You can download the software key directly from Google and start an online global journey. Read more…
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Google Earth Pro Is Now Available for Free