Has Poland’s OBRUM and its partners designed the tank of the future? The PL-01 does pack some incredibly valuable features into a fairly compact and modular concept, and yes, it also looks cool as hell! Read more…
Visit link:
Is Poland’s Stealthy PL-01 The Tank Of The Future?
Model S 1, concrete block 0. Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has taken to Medium.com to post about a design change to the expensive-but-awesome Model S electric car: all Model S vehicles manufactured after March 6, 2014 will come with additional titanium and aluminum armor on their underbellies. The Model S carries its thousands of battery cells in a sealed enclosure below the floorpan, and the added armor is intended to protect the enclosure from puncture even under extreme conditions. This in turn should reduce the chances of Model S vehicles catching on fire. Not that the cars catching on fire is much of a thing; Musk is quick to point out that there have been only two Tesla fires resulting from road accidents (one of which involved a Model S being driven at 110 miles per hour directly into—and then through—a concrete wall), versus hundreds of thousands of gasoline vehicle fires last year. Nonetheless, Musk has directed his company to improve the car’s battery armor in an effort to assure customers (and investors) that the Model S really and truly isn’t going to burst into flames if you drive over a curb. The new armor takes the form of a three-part system: there’s a big hollow aluminum bar to deflect objects, a large titanium plate to absorb impacts, and an angled aluminum extrusion to cause the car to “ramp up and over” objects that can’t be crushed or flung aside. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
More:
Shields up: Tesla Model S gains (free) titanium and aluminum armor upgrade
The BlackBerry Q10. Ars Technica On Friday, BlackBerry announced (PDF) its quarterly earnings. Compared to the previous quarter, the embattled Canadian handset maker seems to have slowed the bleeding. In just three months, it slashed its losses by a factor of 10. In its fourth fiscal quarter ending March 1, 2014, BlackBerry sustained a net loss of $423 million, down from a net loss of $4.4 billion the previous quarter . That harsh third fiscal quarter loss was a driver behind a terrible fiscal 2014 year overall for Blackberry: the company lost $5.8 billion from March 1, 2013 to March 1, 2014. “I am very pleased with our progress and execution in fiscal Q4 against the strategy we laid out three months ago. We have significantly streamlined operations, allowing us to reach our expense reduction target one quarter ahead of schedule,” said John Chen, the company’s CEO, in a statement. “BlackBerry is on sounder financial footing today with a path to returning to growth and profitability.” Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read the article:
BlackBerry still losing money, just 10 times less than it did last quarter
Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations . A separate damages trial ended yesterday, with the jury issuing a verdict of around $41 million. That’s an estimate, because the decision was a “complex, lengthy” verdict that will take the lawyers until next week to calculate precisely, according to a Reuters report on the outcome of the trial. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Continue Reading:
Jury: MP3tunes founder must pay $41 million for copyright violations
Michael Mandiberg Researchers said they have uncovered two apps that were downloaded from the official Google Play market more than one million times that use Android devices to mine the Litecoin and Dogecoin cryptocurrencies without explicitly informing end users. According to a blog post published Tuesday by a researcher from antivirus provider Trend Micro, the apps are Songs , installed from one million to five million times, and Prized , which was installed from 10,000 to 50,000 times. Neither the app descriptions nor their terms of service make clear that the apps subject Android devices to the compute-intensive process of mining, Trend Micro Mobile Threats Analyst Veo Zhang wrote. As of Wednesday afternoon, the apps were still available. Mining apps typically consume larger-than-average amounts of electricity and can generate extremely hot temperatures as CPUs, GPUs, or other types of processors strain to perform cryptographic hashing functions required for users to mint new digital coins. The strain can be especially onerous on smartphones, because they’re equipped with hardware that’s much less powerful than that found in traditional computers. The apps discovered by Trend Micro were programmed to mine coins only when devices were recharging. That setting would help prevent batteries from draining quickly, but it would do nothing to prevent devices from overheating or consuming large amounts of bandwidth. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read More:
Apps with millions of Google Play downloads covertly mine cryptocurrency
An artist’s depiction of Sedna, the first of the objects from this class of bodies to have been discovered. NASA A new dwarf planet-like body has been found on the outer edges of the Solar System. This object, called 2012VP 113 , is about 450km wide and is the second body of its class found since the identification of the dwarf planet Sedna in 2003, and it joins an exclusive club composed of some of the strangest objects in the Solar System. The observable Solar System can be divided into three regions: the rocky terrestrial planets and asteroids of the inner Solar System, the gas giant planets, and the icy Kuiper Belt objects, which include Pluto. The Kuiper Belt stretches from beyond Neptune, which is at 30 astronomical units (where 1AU is the typical distance between the Earth and the Sun), to about 50AU. Sedna and 2012VP 113 are strange objects because they reside in a region where there should be nothing, according to our theories of the Solar System formation. Their orbit is well beyond that of Neptune, the last recognized planet of the Solar System, and even beyond that of Pluto, which differs from planets because of its size, unusual orbit, and composition. (Pluto, once considered a planet, is now considered the lead object of a group of bodies called plutinos.) Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Read More:
New dwarf planet found sneaking through the inner Oort Cloud
MojoKid (1002251) writes “NVIDIA’s 2014 GTC (GPU Technology Conference) kicked off today in San Jose California, with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang offering up a healthy dose of new information on next generation NVIDIA GPU technologies. Two new NVIDIA innovations will be employed in their next-gen GPU technology, now know by its code named ‘Pascal.” First, there’s a new serial interconnect known as NVLink for GPU-to-CPU and GPU-to-GPU communication. Though details were sparse, apparently NVLink is a serial interconnect that employs differential signaling with embedded clock and it allows for unified memory architectures and eventually cache coherency. It’s similar to PCI Express in terms of command set and programming model but NVLink will offer a massive 5 — 12X boost in bandwidth up to 80GB/sec. The second technology to power NVIDIA’s forthcoming Pascal GPU is 3D stacked DRAM technology.The technique employs through-silicon vias that allow the ability to stack DRAM die on top of each other and thus provide much more density in the same PCB footprint for the DRAM package. Jen-Hsun also used his opening keynote to show off NVIDIA’s most powerful graphics card to date, the absolutely monstrous GeForce GTX Titan Z. The upcoming GeForce GTX Titan Z is powered by a pair of GK110 GPUs, the same chips that power the GeForce GTX Titan Black and GTX 780 Ti. All told, the card features 5, 760 CUDA cores (2, 880 per GPU) and 12GB of frame buffer memory—6GB per GPU. NVIDIA also said that the Titan Z’s GPUs are tuned to run at the same clock speed, and feature dynamic power balancing so neither GPU creates a performance bottleneck.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Visit site:
NVIDIA Unveils Next Gen Pascal GPU With Stacked 3D DRAM and GeForce GTX Titan Z
Tharan Parameshwaran Google today continued the trend of cloud services price cuts, while claiming that cloud network operators aren’t cutting average prices quickly enough. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google frequently advertise price cuts , but Google today claimed that “pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law : over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30 percent annually, but public cloud prices fell at just 8 percent per year.” In today’s announcement, unveiled at Google’s Cloud Platform Live event , the company said, “We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85 percent.” Moore’s Law is the observation that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles about every two years, bringing steady increases in processing power. One Amazon price cut last year was on the order of 37 to 80 percent for its dedicated instances, so this actually isn’t that unusual. Google declined to say which companies it included in its “public cloud prices” statistic. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Visit site:
Google: Cloud prices should track Moore’s Law, are falling too slowly
In recognition of their historical importance and commercial irrelevance, Microsoft has given the source code to MS-DOS 1.1 and 2.0 and Word for Windows 1.1a to the Computer History Museum (CHM) in Mountain View, California. The source is now freely downloadable by anyone, though making practical use of it is an exercise for the reader. This source code joins other important early programs, including Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and Apple II DOS, among the CHM’s collection. Len Shustek, CHM chairman said, “We think preserving historic source code like [MS-DOS and Word] is key to understanding how software has evolved from primitive roots to become a crucial part of our civilization.” The scale of change between then and now is formidable. MS-DOS had just 300kB of source code and occupied as little as 12kB of memory. In 1981, MS-DOS was a key part of IBM’s PC, and the success of the PC—and its clones—made Microsoft the industry giant it is today. Word for Windows is the product that turned WordPerfect from market leader into all-but-irrelevant also-ran. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Excerpt from:
Microsoft releases source code for MS-DOS and Word
Aurich Lawson Giant social networking company Facebook has just announced it has “reached a definitive agreement” to acquire virtual reality headset maker Oculus for $400 million in cash and 23.1 million shares valued at $1.6 billion. Oculus can earn another $300 million if it reaches unspecified performance milestones, and the deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2014. In announcing the deal, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg indicated that the move is about much more than gaming, and goes well beyond the kneejerk FarmVille VR jokes that propagated at warp speed immediately in the announcement’s wake. “While the applications for virtual reality technology beyond gaming are in their nascent stages, several industries are already experimenting with the technology,” Facebook said in a blog post . “Facebook plans to extend Oculus’ existing advantage in gaming to new verticals, including communications, media and entertainment, education, and other areas,” he wrote. “Mobile is the platform of today, and now we’re also getting ready for the platforms of tomorrow,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever and change the way we work, play, and communicate.” Read 13 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View original post here:
Facebook purchases VR headset maker Oculus for $2 billion [updated]