As the ongoing Meerkatification of humanity proves, the internet (in one form or another) is becoming more and more about video. At peak times, Netflix and YouTube alone account for half of all web traffic. That’s an understandably huge burden for ISPs to carry. But as well as making the pipes bigger, we can also shrink down what goes through them. Read more…
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Why You Should Care About VP9, Google’s Clever Video Codec
His true passion might be designing and building some of the most ridiculous slingshots the internet has ever seen, but even Joerg Sprave needs to stretch his creative wings from time to time. Which is why Joerg’s most recent creation is an insane chainsaw-powered wooden machine gun that can decimate a target firing nothing but marbles. Read more…
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Stop and Stare In Awe At a Chainsaw-Powered Marble-Firing Machine Gun
schwit1 writes An industry of new cubesat builders can now build satellites for anyone for any reason for very little money. From the article: “The miniaturization of technology allows people to do more with less hardware, said Chad Anderson, the managing director of Space Angels Network, an investment house specializing in the space industry. That industry, he said, was worth $300bn (£200bn) last year. Constellations of smaller satellites, like those suggested as tracking devices for planes over oceans, are now a possibility. ‘The launch costs are coming down and people leveraging today’s technology are able to do more with less and launch less mass to orbit. The price point has come down to where start-ups and entrepreneurs can really make an impact on the scene for the first time, ‘ he said.” When the first tiny satellite launch companies arrive, expect this industry to blossom at an astonishing rate. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Intel Compute Stick, a snazzy $150 dongle that can turn anything with an HDMI port into a full-fledged Windows computer, made a bit of a splash when it touched down at CES 2015. And now it’s landing for real, preorders have started at Amazon and Newegg . Read more…
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Intel’s $150 Stick That Turns a TV Into a Windows Desktop Is Now on Sale
In the quest to make parking suck less, there are apps that help you find a space, and meters where you can pay with a swipe of your credit card. But LA has launched a simple, low-tech solution to make parking better: Well-designed signage that offers no ambiguity whatsoever when it comes to where you can park, when you can park there, and how much it will cost. Read more…
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LA’s New Parking Signs Are Brilliant and Every City Should Copy Them
The Roku 2 and Roku 3 streaming boxes are getting refreshed today, with new hardware providing faster movement through the interface as you jump around between channels and apps. Read More
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Roku’s Boxes Get Better Hardware And News Ways To Find Stuff To Watch
HughPickens.com (3830033) writes “David Knowles reports at Bloomberg that former Hewlett-Packard CEO and potential 2016 presidential candidate Carly Fiorina called out Apple CEO Tim Cook as a hypocrite for criticizing Indiana and Arkansas over their Religious Freedom Restoration Acts while at the same time doing business in countries where gay rights are non-existent. “When Tim Cook is upset about all the places that he does business because of the way they treat gays and women, he needs to withdraw from 90% of the markets that he’s in, including China and Saudi Arabia, ” Fiorina said. “But I don’t hear him being upset about that.” In similar criticism of Hillary Clinton on the Fox News program Hannity, Fiorina argued that Clinton’s advocacy on behalf of women was tarnished by donations made to the Clinton Foundation from foreign governments where women’s rights are not on par with those in America. “”I must say as a woman, I find it offensive that Hillary Clinton travels the Silicon Valley, a place where I worked for a long time, and lectures Silicon Valley companies on women’s rights in technology, and yet sees nothing wrong with taking money from the Algerian government, which really denies women the most basic human rights. This is called, Sean, hypocrisy.” While Hillary Clinton hasn’t directly addressed Fiorina’s criticisms, her husband has. “You’ve got to decide, when you do this work, whether it will do more good than harm if someone helps you from another country, ” former president Bill Clinton said in March. “And I believe we have done a lot more good than harm. And I believe this is a good thing.”” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Carly Fiorina Calls Apple’s Tim Cook a ‘Hypocrite’ On Gay Rights
siddesu writes A popular ‘encryption’ package for Android that even charges a yearly subscription fee of $8, actually does nothing more than give false sense of security to its users. Not only is the app using a worthless encryption method, it also uses weak keys and ‘encrypts’ only a small portion of the files. One wonders how much snake oil flows through the app stores, from ‘battery savers’ to ‘antivirus’. What is the most worthless app purchase you made? Did you ask for a refund? Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Popular Android Package Uses Just XOR — and That’s Not the Worst Part
Exactly half a century ago this week, a rocket shot off from the California coast. It carried the U.S.’s first and only (known) space nuclear reactor, SNAP-10A, which has been circling the Earth ever since and will continue to circle for another 3, 000 years. Read more…
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For 50 Years Now, the U.S. Has Had a Nuclear Reactor Orbiting in Space
An anonymous reader writes: Programmer Michael Fogleman recently built his own emulator for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. He’s now put up a post sharing many technical insights he learned along the way. For example: “The NES used the MOS 6502 (at 1.79 MHz) as its CPU. The 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed in 1975. … The 6502 had no multiply or divide instructions. And, of course, no floating point. There was a BCD (Binary Coded Decimal) mode but this was disabled in the NES version of the chip—possibly due to patent concerns. The 6502 had a 256-byte stack with no overflow detection. The 6502 had 151 opcodes (of a possible 256). The remaining 105 values are illegal / undocumented opcodes. Many of them crash the processor. But some of them perform possibly useful results by coincidence. As such, many of these have been given names based on what they do.” It’s an interesting look at how software and hardware interacted back then, and what it takes to emulate that in modern times. Fogleman released the source code on GitHub. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Building an NES Emulator