For a long time now, our smartphones have been getting more and more, well, smart. They do more things. You probably haven’t beaten your phone at chess in years. And the race to cram increasingly granular, eventually useless, features into them has defined the past few years of phone making. Except the next big waypoint won’t be some technological marvel like week-long battery life . It’s something much simpler: Plain old chat. Read more…
Back in February, Nevada officials rushed through a bill which made interstate online poker legal. Unsurprisingly, people have started taking advantage of the law change—and today sees the launch of Ultimate Poker , America’s first legal, real cash poker site. Read more…
Not too long ago, Microsoft introduced its grand, pie-in-the-sky plans to maybe, someday turn your entire wall into an extension of your TV screen . Now, Microsoft Research has dropped some new details about how it all would work, and it’s shaping up to be pretty awesome . Read more…
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Microsoft’s Crazy IllumiRoom: More Details About a Real-Life Holodeck
The world’s largest fat-fueled power station will generate some 130 GWh a year. And “fat icebergs” won’t end up in landfill sites. [Read more]
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‘Fatbergs’ choking London sewers to be used for energy
The new E6 Series Super Komachi has a sleek design and a top speed of nearly 200 mph. Operators hope it will help the quake-ravaged north. [Read more]
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200-mph red bullet trains thrill rail-mad Japan
The Chromebooks we usually see around these parts can be summed up in two words: competent and cheap. This nicely sums up our reviews of both Samsung’s $249 ARM Chromebook and Acer’s $199 C7 . Google’s recently announced Chromebook Pixel goes against that grain: it’s a high-quality machine with a gorgeous 2560×1700 display, but you’ll pay a hefty $1,299 (or $1,449, for the LTE version) for the privilege of owning one. Our full review of the computer—and, with it, our continuing thoughts on whether this machine makes any sense —is in the works, but in the meantime we took the Pixel out of its box to give it a good once-over. “Understated” is an understatement The Chromebook Pixel’s box is simple to the point of being nondescript. Andrew Cunningham 15 more images in gallery Read on Ars Technica | Comments
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Unpacking the Pixel: A first look at Google’s expensive new Chromebook
New submitter razor88x writes “Although just 16% of Americans have purchased an e-book to date, the growth rate in sales of digital books is already dropping sharply. At the same time, sales of dedicated e-readers actually shrank in 2012, as people bought tablets instead. Meanwhile, printed books continue to be preferred over e-books by a wide majority of U.S. book readers. In his blog post Will Gutenberg Laugh Last?, writer Nicholas Carr draws on these statistics and others to argue that, contrary to predictions, printed books may continue to be the book’s dominant form. ‘We may be discovering,’ he writes, ‘that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction) but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.'” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
This uranium-based reactor would use nuclear fission energy to power small spacecraft and possibly installations on Mars. [Read more]
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DOE, NASA testing fission reactor for spaceflight