Tag: fnself-program1

Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

Ford has a plan to help cut car emissions, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with batteries, hybrid powertrains, or clever engine technology. Instead, the company is focusing on improving the parking experience, and its answer involves a crowdsourced real-time database of occupied and empty parking spots across the country, and remote control vehicles enabled by off-the-shelf commercial 4G LTE. At first glance that might not sound like it has much to do with reducing vehicle CO 2 emissions, but according to Ford, their data shows that hunting for parking spaces in urban environments can account for between 20 and 30 percent of a vehicle’s emissions. To find out more about what Ford has been working on, we spoke with Mike Tinskey, director of vehicle electrification and infrastructure at Ford. He told Ars about a pair of research projects that the car maker has been working on as part of a larger program called Smart Mobility. Smart Mobility involves 25 different experiments and pilot studies around the world, but these two have both been developed in conjunction with a team at Georgia Tech here in the US; Ford has had a long-running relationship with the group, which Tinskey describes as being analogous to the company’s research and advanced modeling arm for sustainability. According to Tinskey, Smart Mobility exists at the intersection of mobility and sustainability, with the overall goal of finding novel ways to reduce CO 2 . “When you look for places to do that, you start looking at antiquated things like parking, where people waste a lot of time, and a lot of CO 2 ,” he said. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Remote valet mode and revolutionized parking: Ford’s Smart Mobility

If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

It’s a shame that Windows 8’s interface was so divisive. The UI dominated the conversation around the OS to the extent that its other, subtler changes got buried. People who stuck with Windows 7 never saw these updates at all. Windows 10, as we’ve covered, is Microsoft’s effort to repackage Windows 8’s improvements in a way that will be more appealing to Windows 7 loyalists. As if to drive that point home, Microsoft is giving current Windows 7 users a whole year after launch to hop on the Windows 10 train at no charge . Microsoft has made a bunch of changes to Windows in the last two years that have nothing to do with the new user interface. This list doesn’t have anything new on it, but if you’re still running Windows 7 and you decide to upgrade to Windows 10, it’ll be new to you, and you’ll get to use it all without having to figure out how to live life without a Start menu. (If you’re interested in seeing some of the UI stuff that you’ll be sidestepping, ZDNet’s Ed Bott recently published this piece about Windows 8 features that got cut from Windows 10). Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

Samsung has just announced a new high-end Exynos 7 Octa SoC . It uses eight CPU cores—a combination of four high-end Cortex A57 cores and four low-end, power-saving Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration—and supports the 64-bit ARMv8 instruction set. However, its most significant new feature is Samsung’s new 14nm manufacturing process, which promises performance and power consumption improvements compared to the existing 20nm process. Samsung is already shipping eight-core 64-bit Exynos chips on its older 20nm process, most notably in the Galaxy Note Edge and some variants of the Galaxy Note 4. Compared to those chips, Samsung claims that the 14nm version “enables up to 20 percent faster speed, 35 percent less power consumption, and 30 percent productivity gain.” Those numbers don’t tell us much in terms of actual clock speeds or performance-per-watt numbers, but it’s safe to assume that the 14nm Exynos 7 will be able to run at higher clock speeds for longer while consuming less power. We don’t know anything about the new Exynos’ GPU yet. The 20nm Exynos 7 Octa uses a high-end Mail-T760 GPU from ARM, and we’ll probably see something similar in the 14nm version. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Samsung’s first 14nm SoC is a 64-bit, 8-core Exynos aimed at high-end phones

South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Ice cores are often relied on to be natural archives of past climate, capturing information that predates both our measurements and our greenhouse gas emissions. They’re a way of having records of the natural world that we don’t have a history of. However, natural archives like these can also act as records of human history, either directly (via fossils or artifacts) or indirectly. In mountainous regions, glacial ice doesn’t go as deep into the past as in Greenland or Antarctica, but it can tell stories of the recent past with excellent resolution. Airborne pollutants, for example, stand out sharply in measurements of the ice. They don’t say “pure as the driven snow” for nothing. Not much of this kind of work has been done in South America, though. Some lake sediment archives have shown the influence of local mining, but the timeline was fuzzy. In a new study, a team led by Chiara Uglietti , now at Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute, has produced a detailed ice core record of air pollution from Peru’s Quelccaya Ice Cap that goes back to the year 793. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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South American ice chemistry records rise of Incas, arrival of Spanish

Wheel of Time TV pilot producers sue Robert Jordan’s widow for defamation

The tale of the late-night Wheel of Time pilot that aired in a paid infomercial slot on FXX has taken another odd turn. Producers Red Eagle Entertainment LLC and Manetheren LLC have filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for central California against Harriet McDougal (widow of James Rigney, who wrote the Wheel of Time novels under the pen name Robert Jordan), her company, Bandersnatch Group Inc., and twenty unnamed other persons (“Does 1-20”). The suit alleges that McDougal’s statements about her lack of involvement in the pilot’s production constitute breach of contract, slander, and interference with contractual relations and prospective economic relations; the suit demands declaratory relief and a jury trial. With the pilot coming essentially out of nowhere and airing with no fanfare, very few fans of the series were even aware of its existence until after the fact; it was clear that the production was accomplished in very little time and on a minimal budget. The resulting effort (titled “Winter Dragon”) did not resemble the series prologue very closely, and it quickly drew strong rebuke from McDougal, who claimed the pilot was made “without my knowledge or cooperation,” and that no one from Robert Jordan’s estate has been involved in any way with it. McDougal claims that Universal currently holds the rights to the Wheel of Time TV series, not Red Eagle Entertainment, and that the pilot made no mention of Universal or her own company, the Bandersnatch Group. That statement was apparently interpreted by Red Eagle Entertainment LLC—the corporate entity that produced the pilot and also claims to hold the television rights to The Wheel of Time —as fighting words. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Wheel of Time TV pilot producers sue Robert Jordan’s widow for defamation

Assassin’s Creed movie officially in production

The long-awaited Assassin’s Creed movie is finally moving ahead, with Ubisoft revealing the film has officially entered production. The video game adaptation will be released on December 21, 2016. Word of the production came from the most mundane of places though—Ubisoft’s quarterly financial call. The publisher is co-producing the film with studio New Regency, which has had a golden period in recent years with films such as 12 Years a Slave , Birdman , and Gone Girl under its umbrella. “We have the pleasure to announce today that the green light has been given by New Regency, and the production has already started,” said Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot. “This is a very important milestone for the project and for our team on Assassin’s Creed .” Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Assassin’s Creed movie officially in production

Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

A little over five years ago, Google unveiled SPDY, a new protocol that it positioned as a more secure, better-performing replacement for hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the communication protocol on which the Web is built. Today the company announced that it would soon be removing SPDY support from Chrome. That’s because the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has been working to update HTTP to produce HTTP/2, an updated revision of a protocol that has not seen any major changes since its introduction in the early 1990s. SPDY’s major goals were to reduce latency and improve security. To reduce latency, it included support for multiplexing—making multiple requests and responses over a single connection, with prioritization for different requests—and for security, it makes the use of TLS compulsory. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Google announces SPDY’s coming demise as HTTP/2 approaches

Understanding M.2, the interface that will speed up your next SSD

Most solid-state drives released within the last year or so have been too fast for the bus they’re connected to. The 6Gbps SATA III spec was finalized in the days when rotational hard drives still ruled and SSDs were rare, ludicrously expensive, and relatively unreliable. There are a couple of different standards that have been created to solve this problem, and they both solve it in the same basic way. One, SATA Express , uses the same physical connector as older SATA drives but uses PCI Express lanes rather than the SATA bus to boost storage speeds. The other, which will be more common in space-constrained mini-desktops, all-in-ones, and Ultrabooks, is called M.2 (previously NGFF, for “Next-Generation Form Factor”). M.2 is interesting not just because it can speed up storage with PCI Express lanes, but because it can use a whole bunch of different buses too; it stands to replace both mSATA and mini PCI Express, two older standards that have been used for SSDs and Wi-Fi cards in laptops for a while now. Intel’s new Broadwell CPUs and their chipsets include native support for M.2 and PCI Express boot drivers—neither PCIe-connected storage ( hi Apple ) nor the M.2 connector itself are new, but beginning with Broadwell systems each of those two things will become much more common. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Understanding M.2, the interface that will speed up your next SSD

First transistor built using two-dimensional silicon

Since the isolation of graphene, a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon, researchers have developed a number of other two-dimensional materials. (Yes, they are really three-dimensional; it’s just one of the dimensions is only an atom thick, and therefore negligible.) Knowledge of the periodic table would suggest that elements from the same column as carbon would have similar chemical properties, and therefore be excellent candidates for forming two-dimensional sheets. So, why hasn’t more been done with silicon, the next element down the column from carbon? People have actually made silicene, the silicon version of graphene. But they’ve only managed to make tiny patches of it on silver surfaces; under just about any other conditions, it rapidly reacts with the oxygen in air and disintegrates. On Monday, however, researchers announced that they’d managed to create the first device—a field effect transistor—using silicene. Since interactions with silver protected the silicon sheet, the authors fabricated a large sheet on a thin silver surface. They then capped this with aluminum oxide, which also protected the silicene. At this point, they could etch off some of the aluminum, and use the remaining metal as source and drain contacts. By depositing the alumina on a silicon dioxide surface, the resulting device acted as a field effect transistor. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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First transistor built using two-dimensional silicon

Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say

A pilot’s selfies “likely” caused a single-engine plane crash outside Denver that killed the pilot and sole passenger last year, the National Transportation Safety Board has concluded. The NTSB probe said investigators discovered a GoPro camera near the wreckage that captured footage aboard the two-seater Cessna 150 taken on May 30 and on the day of the May 31 crash. “Based on the evidence of cell phone use during low-altitude maneuvering, including the flight immediately before the accident flight, it is likely that cell phone use during the accident flight distracted the pilot and contributed to the development of spatial disorientation and subsequent loss of control,” the NTSB said . Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Pilot’s selfies “likely” caused fatal crash, flight investigators say