We got our first peek at Panasonic’s 4K Toughpad tablet last January at CES, and now the company says it will go on sale in the US about a year later, for $5, 999. Panasonic announced two devices for Europe , but here in the US there’s only the higher end UT-MB5 that packs Windows 8.1, 8GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, Intel Core i5 CPU and, oh yeah — that super high res 3, 840 x 2, 560 LCD. With a projected two hour battery life you probably won’t be using this on the go very often (there’s an optional desktop cradle and carrying case), but even with its incredible 20-inch size, it’s about .49-inches thick and weighs 5.27 lbs. If you’re a professional in the “video production, architecture, design, photography and healthcare” fields who can expense this six thousand dollar slate, you’re probably already sold — all others can check after the break for a demo video and more specs. Filed under: Desktops , Tablets Comments Source: Panasonic
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Panasonic’s 20-inch 4K ‘tablet’ comes to the US in January for $6,000
dcblogs writes “U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, has released 175 pages of “War Room” notes — a collection of notes by federal officials dealing with the problems at Healthcare.gov. They start Oct. 1, the launch day. The War Room notes catalog IT problems — dashboards weren’t showing data, servers didn’t have the right production data, third party systems weren’t connecting to verify data, a key contractor had trouble logging on, and there wasn’t enough server capacity to handle the traffic, or enough people on the help desks to answer calls. To top it off, some personnel needed for the effort were furloughed because of the shutdown. Volunteers were needed to work weekends, but there were bureaucratic complications.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Regardless of whether you saw them as a menace , the first 3D-printed guns were an objectively far, boxy cry from the weapons we’re used to seeing. But just from looking at Solid Concept’s newest firearm offering, you’d have no idea that it, too, started out as a mere 3D CAD file before being printed to life. Read more… 
Nicholas Carlson, at Business Insider , on the day AOL’s CEO briefly interrupted a motivational post-layoffs session with staff to fire one of them on-the-spot —and the business pressures that led to it. The impulsive firing on the heels of this statement made Armstrong sound unhinged — “schizophrenic in his thinking” is how a source close to him later described it. Several days later, Armstrong apologized privately to Abel Lenz and then publicly to AOL employees. But, by then, mainstream outlets including Yahoo and the Daily Mail had picked up the news. Some people viewed the public firing as a bad-ass CEO move, the kind of thing that a famously demanding executive like Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison might have done. But most people across the country and world saw it as gratuitous and humiliating: What’s wrong with Tim Armstrong, people wondered? What kind of CEO fires some poor guy in front of all his colleagues? What did this say about what was going on at AOL? 