Tag: events

Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

szczys writes: Google is building a 100kW transmitter at Spaceport America. As is becoming the regular source of early info, this comes via an FCC filing in which Google has asked the agency to keep the project secret. The signal strength itself isn’t [groundbreaking] until you learn this is a directional antenna. Some of the most powerful FM radio transmitters get to 100kW, but those are omnidirectional. This is a highly focused directional antenna and that makes it sound like a big piece of Google’s hushed Broadband Drone program. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Building a 100kW Transmitter at Spaceport America

Frank Miller’s Batman Was ‘Too Nice’ for Darren Aronofsky

Later this month, we’ll see Batman v. Superman , loosely based on Frank Miller’s Batman comics. But we almost got a Batman film from Miller and Darren Aronofsky, based on Batman: Year One . In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter , Miller explained what that looked like, and it was very, very strange. Read more…

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Frank Miller’s Batman Was ‘Too Nice’ for Darren Aronofsky

Scientists May Have Found Molecular Gatekeeper Of Long-Term Memory

hackingbear writes: While the general steps of forming a long-term memory are clear, the details, such as how exactly the molecular signals get shuttled to the command center, which generally has tight security, are unclear. A new study, led by neuroscientist Yi Zhong of Tsinghua University in Beijing, may finally have that answer. In the tiny minds of fruit flies, a protein called importin-7 acts to shuttle the memory-triggering signal into the nucleus with its top-level clearance to the restricted area, researchers report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. With genetic tweaking, the researchers dialed up and down the amount of importin-7 in the flies and then put them through the memory training and test. They found that cranking up levels of the shuttle protein strengthened the long-term memories of the flies, while turning it off weakened their memory. “The current work confirms that [importin-7] is indeed critical at the behavioral level in mediating [long-term memory] consolidation, ” the authors concluded. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Scientists May Have Found Molecular Gatekeeper Of Long-Term Memory

Samsung’s 16TB SSD Is Now an Actual Thing People Can Buy

Last year, Samsung made the rest of the world feel mighy inadequate by announcing a world-record 16TB SSD. Turns out that was more than just talk—Samsung is shipping drives to (very wealthy) customers today. Read more…

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Samsung’s 16TB SSD Is Now an Actual Thing People Can Buy

HTC Sold 1,000 Vive Headsets Per Minute When Pre-Orders Opened

With the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive now up for pre-order, anxious analysts worldwide are finally starting to get a handle on how much the general public cares about virtual reality. If the HTC Vive pre-sale is anything to go by, the answer is quite a lot. Read more…

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HTC Sold 1,000 Vive Headsets Per Minute When Pre-Orders Opened

Israeli Troops Who Relied On Waze Blundered Into Deadly Palestinian Firefight

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli forces mounted a rescue mission in a Palestinian neighborhood after gun battles erupted when two soldiers mistakenly entered the area because of an error on a satellite navigation app, Israeli authorities said Tuesday.The clashes late Monday in the Qalandiya refugee camp outside Jerusalem left at least one Palestinian dead and 10 injured, one seriously. According to initial Israeli reports, the two soldiers said they had been using Waze, a highly touted Israeli-invented navigation app bought more than two years ago by Google. The smartphone app, which has a settings option to ‘avoid dangerous areas, ‘ relies on crowdsourcing to give users the fastest traffic routes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Israeli Troops Who Relied On Waze Blundered Into Deadly Palestinian Firefight

The PS4 Is Finally Getting Features It Should’ve Had For Years

The PS4’s next firmware update will finally let you turn on notifications for when your friends come online. It still won’t let you change your username, but at least it’ll give you some privacy. Read more…

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The PS4 Is Finally Getting Features It Should’ve Had For Years

The Bizarre Facebook Hoax That Escalated Into a Real-Life Double Murder

The media scrambled to make sense of this strange, baffling double homicide—the angle that most outlets came up with was “unfriending on Facebook leads to murder!” (Including 20/20 , which devoted an episode to the case.) But as prosecutor Dennis Brooks explains in Too Pretty to Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee , the situation was a lot more complicated than that. Read more…

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The Bizarre Facebook Hoax That Escalated Into a Real-Life Double Murder

Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC

MojoKid writes: Even for mainstream users, it’s easy to feel the differences between using a PC that has an OS installed on a solid state drive versus a mechanical hard drive. Also, with SSD pricing where it is right now, it’s also easy to justify including one in a new configuration for the speed boost. And there’s obvious benefit in the enterprise and data center for both performance and durability. As you might expect, Google has chewed through a healthy pile of SSDs in its data centers over the years and the company appears to have been one of the first to deploy SSDs in production at scale. New research results Google is sharing via a joint research project now encompasses SSD use over a six year span at one of Google’s data centers. Looking over the results led to some expected and unexpected findings. One of the biggest discoveries is that SLC-based SSDs are not necessarily more reliable than MLC-based drives. This is surprising, as SLC SSDs carry a price premium with the promise of higher durability (specifically in write operations) as one of their selling points. It will come as no surprise that there are trade-offs of both SSDs and mechanical drives, but ultimately, the benefits SSDs offer often far outweigh the benefits of mechanical HDDs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google-Backed SSD Endurance Research Shows MLC Flash As Reliable As SLC

CompuLab Rolls out Fanless, High-End PCs With Unique Design

An anonymous reader writes: Israeli PC maker CompuLab has begun shipping the Airtop PC that allows assembling high-end PC components into a completely fanless design. Phoronix’s initial testing of the Airtop PC showed that it has a Core i7 5775C Broadwell processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, and GeForce GTX 950 all while being fan-less thanks to the innovative design. The early results are quite positive for this uniquely designed PC but it comes at a cost premium of a fully-loaded system costing more than $2, 200 USD. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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CompuLab Rolls out Fanless, High-End PCs With Unique Design