another random user writes with news that NTT Docomo, Japan’s largest wireless carrier, will be rolling out a real-time translation app for phone calls on November 1. At launch, the app will translate Japanese into English, Mandarin, and Korean, and later that month it will add French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Thai. No word on Klingon. From the article: “The products have the potential to let companies avoid having to use specially trained multilingual staff, helping them cut costs. They could also aid tourism. However, the software involved cannot offer perfect translations, limiting its use in some situations. … It provides users with voice translations of the other speaker’s conversation after a slight pause, as well as providing a text readout. … NTT Docomo will soon face competition from France’s Alcatel-Lucent which is developing a rival product, WeTalk. It can handle Japanese and about a dozen other languages including English, French and Arabic. The service is designed to work over any landline telephone, meaning the company has had to find a way to do speech recognition using audio data sampled at a rate of 8kHz or 16kHz. Other products — which rely on data connections — have used higher 44kHz samples which are easier to process.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Build an Arduino-Based Hotel Room Master Key Housed in a Dry Erase Marker
A few months back at the Black Hat Security conference Cody Brocious demonstrated how you can easiy open an Onity hotel room lock, the standard system used in many hotel chains, with an Arduino but it was bulky setup and comletely obvious if anyone saw him pull out a lot of electronics. Here’s how you can fit that system in a dry erase marker. More »
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Build an Arduino-Based Hotel Room Master Key Housed in a Dry Erase Marker
How to Crack a Wi-Fi Password
Cracking Wi-Fi passwords isn’t a trivial process, but it isn’t difficult. Learn how it works so you can learn how to protect yourself. More »
Analyst calls AMD “un-investable,” downgrades rating
Another day, and AMD inches even closer to irrelevance . Just one day after the company posted pretty terrible quarterly earnings (“Net loss $157 million, loss per share $0.21, operating loss $131 million”), followed by a 16 percent drop in the company’s stock price and job cuts of 1,800 (15 percent of its global workforce), two financial analysts have now downgraded the company. It certainly doesn’t help things that the company’s CFO resigned abruptly last month, either. In a financial analysis report released Friday, Bernstein Research‘s Stacy Rasgon wrote: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Engineers create gasoline from air and water. Yes, really.
In what sounds more like alchemy than science, a small British company has figured out a way to create gasoline from air and water. To do so, engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis (AFS) produced five litres (1.3 gallons) of the fuel by extracting carbon dioxide from air, and hydrogen from water, which was then combined in a reactor with a catalyst to create methanol. This methanol was then converted into gasoline. More »
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Engineers create gasoline from air and water. Yes, really.
Caltech laser accelerometer research may bring fine-tuned position tracking, grocery ads
One way that sensors can track your position without using an array of satellites is by measuring your acceleration as you move around — but unless you’re piloting a jumbo jet, current devices aren’t very accurate. Researchers at Caltech hope to change all that with a new, ultra-sensitive accelerometer they developed, which uses laser light to detect motion changes. The scientists managed to shrink a so-called large-scale interferometer down to micro-scale sizes, creating a device “thousands of times faster than the most sensitive sensors used today.” That could allow a smartphone with such a micro-sensor to detect your exact position even while inside a grocery store, and flash “ads and coupons for hot dog buns” while you’re in the bread aisle, according to Caltech. All that sounds good, but we can perhaps think of more inspiring uses for the new tech. Filed under: Cellphones , Science , Alt Caltech laser accelerometer research may bring fine-tuned position tracking, grocery ads originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Oct 2012 13:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink Tech Eye | Caltech | Email this | Comments
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Caltech laser accelerometer research may bring fine-tuned position tracking, grocery ads
Could Magnetic Ties Be the Death Of the Tie Clip?
Unless you’re required to symbolically hang yourself every morning for work, you probably don’t have a collection of tie clips for the rare time you do dress up. But with a Magnetie around your neck, you can be assured that both ends won’t be flapping about thanks to the power of rare earth magnets. More »
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Could Magnetic Ties Be the Death Of the Tie Clip?
Microsoft launches four-year, $80 Office 365 University subscription for students
Microsoft’s given Xbox love to PC-buying students recently , and it’s just announced that it’ll carry on that tradition with Office 365 University, by offering a special four-year, $80 subscription to higher-education students. For that sum, you’ll get four years of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access if you’re seeking a sheepskin scroll, which Redmond says works out to $1.67 per month. Also included are 60 Skype world minutes per month and 27GB of Premium SkyDrive storage, along with free upgrades and the ability to install on two separate computers, to boot. That should take some of the sting out of those scholarly expenses if you need a copy, so check the source to see how to grab it. Filed under: Software , Microsoft Microsoft launches four-year, $80 Office 365 University subscription for students originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Permalink The Next Web | Microsoft Office Blog | Email this | Comments
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Microsoft launches four-year, $80 Office 365 University subscription for students