If you’re running out of digital storage and are on a tight budget, you could do a lot worse than consider Seagate’s latest hard drive. Part of its Archive HDD line , you can pick up an 8TB model for just $260. Read more…
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This 8TB Seagate Hard Drive Only Costs $260
A new year means a new flagship smartphone brain, and Qualcomm has detailed some of the most fun features of its upcoming Snapdragon 810 chip, which will start popping up in phones next year. It’s faster, and it supports better graphics sure, but it also has other tricks up its sleeve. Here’s what you can expect to see. Read more…
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Snapdragon 810: Your Next Phone’s Brains Are Way More Than Just Fast
Some time in 2015, Iowa will become the first state to offer an official app from the state’s Department of Transportation that can serve as your driver’s license and ID . That’s pretty incredible. It’s also getting us much closer to a more convenient, wallet-free future. Read more…
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Iowa Is Going To Let You Use a Smartphone As Your Driver’s License
Normally, it’s the Western Powers who are remembered for developing some of the most innovative and conceptual weapons of the Second World War. But when it came to experimental military technologies, Japan suffered from no shortage of ideas. Here are 11 you should know about. Read more…
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11 Secret Weapons Developed By Japan During World War 2
Remember how we told you that the resolution of Google Maps’ satellite images would soon be doubled ? Well, today we’re seeing the first of those images pop up, and they are indeed a noticeable improvement. New York and San Francisco are the first to get the high-res 3D treatment, but we should see this update rolling out for more cities around the world in 2015. Read more…
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Google Earth’s New Satellite Imagery Is So Much Better
After a long drought, California is suddenly getting pounded with its biggest storm in a decade. Whoa, what’s happening? It’s all the work of an atmospheric river, a particular weather event that can be devastating when it hits land. Read more…
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The Meteorological Phenomenon That’s Flooding California
Consider the trackpad. The ones in Windows laptops are rarely (if ever) their best feature, but they nevertheless remain ubiquitous. Synaptics is one of the biggest names in trackpads, and today it announced a new one called the ” SecurePad ” that integrates a fingerprint reader into the trackpad itself rather than as a separate component. The SecurePad will have a small, 4mm by 10mm sensor on the trackpad’s surface that can scan a “fingertip placed at any angle on the sensor.” Said sensor will be available in a variety of different Synaptics trackpads, including the TouchPad , ClickPad , and ForcePad , and those trackpads will all be available in a variety of sizes. LED lights will provide feedback and allow the sensor to be used in dark environments. Fingerprint data traveling between the sensor and the “host processor” is encrypted to prevent the information from being accessed by other apps (Apple uses a similar sort of encryption with TouchID , and it prevents user apps from accessing fingerprint data in transit). We’ve contacted Synaptics to see if storing and reading fingerprints securely requires a separate chip to be installed in laptops that use the SecurePad and to get more detail on how this encryption works—we’ll update this article if we receive a response. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Synaptics builds a fingerprint reader right into its trackpads
While the last time most of us thought of shingles was when we were itchy in eighth grade, Seagate has been thinking of them as a way to store data. Called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) Drives, Seagate’s new drives can store eight terabytes of data for about 3 cents a gigabyte. The catch? These are great back-up drives but they’re not very fast. At 5, 900 RPM and an average… Read More
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New “Shingled” Hard Drives Hold Terabytes For Pennies A Gig
An anonymous reader writes Fabrice Bellard (creator of FFMPEG, QEMU, JSLinux…) proposes a new image format that could replace JPEG : BPG. For the same quality, files are about half the size of their JPEG equivalents. He released libbpg (with source) as well as a JS decompressor, and set up a demo including the famous Lena image. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Bellard Creates New Image Format To Replace JPEG
An anonymous reader writes This FreeNAS update is a significant evolutionary step from previous FreeNAS releases featuring: a simplified and reorganized Web User Interface, support for Microsoft ODX and Windows 2012 clustering, better VMWare integration, including VAAI support, a new and more secure update system with roll-back functionality, and hundreds of other technology enhancements. You can get it here and the list of changes are here. Existing 9.2.x users and 9.3 beta testers are encouraged to upgrade. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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FreeNAS 9.3 Released