Though we’ve seen plenty of our beautiful blue marble from space before, here’s what Earth looks like from a hundred million miles away. That’s roughly the same distance from the Earth to the Sun. More »
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What Earth Looks Like from a 100 Million Miles Away
An anonymous reader writes “HBO programming president Michael Lombardo not only says that illegal downloading of Game of Thrones isn’t hurting the show, but goes far as to say it’s ‘a compliment’ and worries about the image quality of pirated copies” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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HBO Says Game of Thrones Piracy Is “a Compliment”
The increasingly ambiguous divide between man and machine just got blurred that much more with Stanford’s recent announcement : scientists have successfully created the first truly biological transistor made entirely out of genetic material. More »
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New DNA-Based Transistor Brings Us One Step Closer to True Human Computers
iOS ( Jailbroken ): If you want to enable the passcode on your iPhone you usually need to jump into the settings, hit the toggle, and enter your passcode. It’s a bit tedious, but if you want to speed up the process TapTapPass makes it possible to enable your passcode from pretty much anywhere. More »
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TapTapPass Quickly Enables Your iPhone’s Passcode from Anywhere
Egypt’s Naval forces claim they have captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean. Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement that the divers were caught while “cutting the undersea cable” of Telecom Egypt. Internet services have been disrupted since March 22 in Egypt. From the article: “The statement was accompanied by a photo showing three young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what looks like an inflatable launch. It did not have further details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Egyptian Forces Capture 3 Divers Trying To Cut Undersea Internet Cable
iOS ( Jailbroken ): It doesn’t take all that many taps to go in and update your apps on your iPhone or iPad, but if you’d prefer it just happened automatically in the background, Auto App Updater is a jailbreak app that does just that. More »
Lucas123 writes “It may be a movie about a stone age family, but DreamWorks said its latest 3D animated movie The Croods took more compute cycles to create than any other movie they’ve made. The movie required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks’ last record holder, The Rise of the Guardians. The production studio said between 300 and 400 animators worked on The Croods over the past three years. The images they created, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity. When the movie industry moved from producing 2D to 3D high-definition movies over the past decade, the data required to produce the films increased tremendously. For DreamWorks, the amount of data needed to create a stereoscopic film leaped by 30%.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Animation Sophistication: The Croods Required 80 Million Compute Hours
The coming of the Hyperkin RetroN 3 marked the end of doing a rain dance while blowing into your childhood SNES. And now Hyperkin is so excited about expanding compatibility that they’re skipping ahead and calling their next console RetroN 5 . More »
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RetroN 5 Console: Play All the Best Games From Your Wasted Youth
People don’t wear watches anymore. You’ll look ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you just use your smartphone instead? These are just some of the negative sentiments skeptics are spewing about smart watches, which are still very much in their nascent stage. Guess what? They’re wrong. More »
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Why You’ll End Up Wearing a Smart Watch
Nerval’s Lobster writes “IBM announced this week that it has developed a way to manufacture both logic and memory that relies on a small drop of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip oxides back and forth between an insulating and conductive state without the need to constantly draw power. In theory, that means both memory and logic built using those techniques could dramatically save power. IBM described the advance in the journal Science, and also published a summary of its results to its Website. The central idea is to eliminate as much power as possible as it moves through a semiconductor. IBM’s solution is to use a bit of ‘ionic liquid’ to flip the state. IBM researchers applied a positively charged ionic liquid electrolyte to an insulating oxide material — vanadium dioxide — and successfully converted the material to a metallic state. The material held its metallic state until a negatively charged ionic liquid electrolyte was applied in order to convert it back to its original, insulating state. A loose analogy would be to compare IBM’s technology to the sort of electronic ink used in the black-and-white versions of the Kindle and other e-readers. There, an electrical charge can be applied to the tiny microcapsules that contain the ‘ink,’ hiding or displaying them to render a page of text. Like IBM’s solution, the e-ink doesn’t require a constant charge; power only needs to be applied to re-render or ‘flip’ the page. In any event, IBM’s technique could conceivably be applied to both mobile devices as well as power-hungry data centers.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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IBM Dipping Chips In ‘Ionic Liquid’ To Save Power