cards – Page 2 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

Graphene e-paper is brighter and bendier

Who said that e-paper was old stuff ? Certainly not China — the country’s Guangzhou OED Technologies has created what it says is the world’s first graphene -based e-paper. The extremely strong yet light material promises very thin screens that are both brighter and more flexible. You could get e-readers that are easier to read on a sunny day, for instance, or activity trackers that can put up with more abuse. It should even be less expensive, as graphene’s carbon is much easier to find than the exotic indium metal you see in conventional e-paper. The main question is simply availability. The company expects to start production of graphene e-paper in a year, and it’s not clear just who’s lined up. You shouldn’t count on Amazon making a graphene Kindle, unfortunately. If the technology takes off, though, it could give e-paper some relevance in an era when it’s being crowded out by LCD- and OLED-based devices. Via: DNA India Source: Xinhua

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Graphene e-paper is brighter and bendier

Opera Now Has a Totally Free and Unlimited Built-In VPN

Dodging firewalls and masking your IP address usually requires firing up separate—often paid-for—software or plug-ins while you’re browsing. Now, though, Opera has its own free VPN baked right into the desktop browser. Read more…

New Nanowire Batteries Can Be Charged More Than 100,000 Times

Li-on batteries gradually deteriorate as they’re repeatedly drained and recharged. But now researchers from University of California, Irvine have developed a new nano-wire battery that can survive hundreds of thousands of charging cycles. Read more…

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New Nanowire Batteries Can Be Charged More Than 100,000 Times

Samsung Begins Mass Production of World’s Fastest DRAM

MojoKid writes: Late last year marked the introduction of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) DRAM courtesy of AMD’s Fury family of graphics cards, each of which sports 4GB of HBM. HBM allows these new AMD GPUs to tout an impressive 512GB/sec of memory bandwidth, but it’s also just the first iteration of the new memory technology. Samsung has just announced that it has begun mass production of HBM2. Samsung’s 4GB HBM2 package is built on a 20 nanometer process. Each package contains four 8-gigabit core dies built on top of a buffer die. Each 4GB HMB2 package is capable of delivering 256GB/sec of bandwidth, which is twice that of first generation HBM DRAM. In the example of NVIDIA’s next gen GPU technology, code named Pascal, the new GPU will utilize HBM2 for its frame buffer memory. High-end consumer-grade Pascal boards will ship with 16GB of HBM2 memory (in four, 4GB packages), offering effective memory bandwidth of 1TB/sec (256GB/sec from each HMB2 package). Samsung is also reportedly readying 8GB HBM2 memory packages this year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Begins Mass Production of World’s Fastest DRAM

Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms "because Millennials"

Yahoo sport columnist Dan Wetzel checked into a Marriott, something he does a lot, and was bewildered to discover that his room didn’t have a desk. When he called down to the reception, he discovered that the whole chain was gradually removing its desks, because some consultants told them that Millennials like to chill on couches with their phones, not sit at desks like square-ass Old People. (more…)

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Marriott removing desks from its hotel rooms "because Millennials"

Magic cards generated by neural networks

@RoboRosewater is a twitter account that posts, once a day, a Magic: The Gathering card generated by a recurrent neural network. [via Ditto ] This is an implementation of the science described by Vice’s Brian Merchant in this article . Reed Morgan Milewicz, a programmer and computer science researcher, may be the first person to teach an AI to do Magic, literally. Milewicz wowed a popular online MTG forum—as well as hacker forums like Y Combinator’s Hacker News and Reddit—when he posted the results of an experiment to “teach” a weak AI to auto-generate Magic cards. He shared a number of the bizarre “cards” his program had come up with, replete with their properly fantastical names (“Shring the Artist,” “Mided Hied Parira’s Scepter”) and freshly invented abilities (“fuseback”). Players devoured the results. Here’s the code , and here’s a simple text-only generator . Magic: The Gathering is Turing-complete .

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Magic cards generated by neural networks

Hundreds of city police license plate cams are insecure and can be watched by anyone

Dave Maass from the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes, “Earlier this year, security researcher John Matherly alerted us to potentially massive vulnerabilities in a certain vendor’s automated license plate reader systems. We dug into the data and found that, sure enough, hundreds of LPR systems were potentially vulnerable, with many openly accessible online.” (more…)

Amazing photos along China’s Silk Road

My friend Kevin Kelly wandered down the Silk Road (the one in China) and took many stupendous photos. He wrote, “Technically this region is called Xinjiang (New Province), also once known as East Turkestan. This area has more in common with the culture of Turkey than with Beijing. It’s kebab with chopsticks. But this is really China. In fact it is the largest province of China. I took a bunch of photos and the usual caveat applies: this is a very selective view, and it does not represent the typical scene in the province at all. Like most of China it is rapidly urbanizing. But I think these images capture the spirit of this part of Asia, which once connected east and west.”

Facebook Is Testing Six New Reaction Emoji Instead of a Single "Dislike" Button

It was exciting when Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook was building a “Dislike” button . So many things not to like! However, the social network just started testing a new emoji reactions feature that is probably the real future of disliking stuff on Facebook. Read more…

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Facebook Is Testing Six New Reaction Emoji Instead of a Single "Dislike" Button

How the Newest Generation of Credit Cards Protects Your Information From Getting Stolen

Have you had your credit card info stolen recently? You’re not alone. It’s happened to me a couple of times in the past year, and it’s annoying as hell. Thankfully, credit card companies are finally tackling this issue head on, with technology that’s just now reaching the U.S. in full force. Read more…

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How the Newest Generation of Credit Cards Protects Your Information From Getting Stolen