Tag: gadgets

Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an easy upgrade for old PCs

A whole bunch of people are going to upgrade to Windows 10. Not everyone . But when you offer free Windows via a nag message delivered to over 80 percent of the user base, you’re going to attract people who wouldn’t have driven to MicroCenter to buy an upgrade DVD. Especially if you bought an eligible PC in Windows 7’s heyday, you will probably be installing the new OS on five- or six-year-old hardware that has long since been forgotten about by the company that sold it to you. Or maybe you bought something during the post-Chromebook era, where Windows PCs dipped back into netbook territory in their quest for a low price tag. We installed Windows 10 on a few of these kinds of systems to see what you can expect, at least if you’re comparing a clean install to a clean install. Current users of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 should expect to recover a few gigabytes of drive space, a few megabytes of system RAM, and a few precious seconds of boot time. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an easy upgrade for old PCs

HTC Spends Nearly $10M On A 15% Stake In Virtual Reality Platform WEVR

 HTC is planning to release its extremely well-received virtual reality headset Vive to consumers later this year, possibly in November. In the meantime, the Taiwanese company is busy building out its VR ecosystem. HTC disclosed that it spent almost $10 million for a 15 percent stake in WEVR, an open VR platform and community based in Los Angeles. Read More

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HTC Spends Nearly $10M On A 15% Stake In Virtual Reality Platform WEVR

Facebook’s ‘Security Checkup’ is ready to guard your account

Facebook initially rolled out a new account safety feature, dubbed Security Checkup , this May as part of a limited test release . Today, that feature is available for all users. Security Checkup is designed to make finding and enabling Facebook’s multitude of optional security settings much easier. Users will be able to automatically logout of rarely used devices, set alerts for suspicious login activity and reset their password. Even finding the checkup function itself will be a snap as it’s going to be positioned at the top of your feed for the next few weeks. [Image Credit: shutterstock] Filed under: Internet , Facebook Comments Source: Facebook

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Facebook’s ‘Security Checkup’ is ready to guard your account

US wants the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025

President Obama has signed an executive order demanding that the US build the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025. The National Strategic Computing Initiative has been implemented to get the country building an Exascale machine and not fall behind rival nations in the technological arms race. This supercomputer will be developed by arms of the federal government and then be harnessed to speed up research into a wide variety of topics. One example is that the hardware will be used to help NASA better understand turbulence for aircraft design, while another is to crunch the numbers for medical researchers. The US may have more of the Top 500 supercomputers than any other nation, but its prestige in this area is slipping to nations like China and Japan. China’s Tianhe-2 has been the world’s fastest machine for two and a half years in a row, and the list’s authors feel that the US approaching is plunging to a “historical low.” With the weight of the federal government behind it, the NSCI is hoping to steal a march on its rivals and break new ground in the high performance computing sphere. With all of the various challenges that the planet is facing — challenges that we’re told Exascale computing will be able to fix — it can’t come soon enough. Filed under: Desktops Comments Via: BBC News Source: White House , (2) (.PDF)

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US wants the world’s fastest supercomputer by 2025

LG made 1.2 cents in profit for every phone it sold last quarter

LG’s latest earnings report shows just how tough the smartphone market is getting. On the one hand, LG Mobile shipped 8.1 million LTE smartphones, its best result ever. On the other hand, it sold fewer premium models in Korea and spent a lot of money marketing its flagship G4 in the US against models by Apple, Samsung, et al. (The company singled out Apple , saying that iPhone sales hurt its earnings this quarter.) The net result was a mobile operating profit of just 200 million won ($172, 000) or 1.2 cents per phone. The good news is that the LG G4 has only been on sale in the US for two months , so it may have a stronger impact on LG’s bottom line next quarter. On top of a tight smartphone market, LG’s Home Entertainment division said that global demand for LCD TVs was “soft, ” as revenue dropped 22.7 percent to 3.93 trillion won ($3.59 billion). However, the company is bullish on its 4K OLED TVs , and plans to expand its lineup “with newer designs at more attractive price points.” For the quarter, LG saw an overeall drop in sales of 7.6 percent and earnings that were down 45 percent over last year to 226.4 billion won ($195 million). And if not for the company’s profitable Home Appliance division , that number would’ve been a loss. Filed under: Cellphones , Home Entertainment , LG Comments Source: LG

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LG made 1.2 cents in profit for every phone it sold last quarter

Scientists make a transistor from a single molecule

You’re looking at what could be not just one of the smallest semiconductor parts ever, but one of the smallest semiconductor parts possible . A worldwide research team has built a transistor that consists of a single copper phthalocyanine molecule, a dozen indium atoms and an indium arsenide backing material. The trick was to abandon the usual mechanics of a transistor, which normally controls current by modulating the gate voltage, in favor of a field effect. Here, you only need to vary the distance of the gate (in this case, the atoms) to modulate electricity. Don’t start preparing for a world full of tiny-but-complex gadgets just yet. The scientists created their transistor in a near-total vacuum, at a temperature barely above absolute zero. That’s a far cry from real-world conditions, and it’ll take much more research before transistors this small are in devices you can actually buy. Nonetheless, the breakthrough is promising — it shows that there’s still a long, long way to go before we hit the physical limits of electronics . [Image credit: US Naval Research Laboratory] Filed under: Science Comments Via: IEEE Spectrum Source: NRL , Nature

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Scientists make a transistor from a single molecule

Sydney gets world’s first e-ink traffic signs

Sydney is now using the world’s first outdoor e-ink traffic signs to guide motorists during special events. The city’s Roads and Maritime Services (RMS) agency was apparently fed up with the constant chore of changing signs, and developed the tech with a company called Visionect . Like your Kindle , the signs are easy to read in Sydney’s bright sunshine, and also powered by it via solar panels. The messages can be updated remotely via a cell connection to an “internet of things” network. Sydney’s tech is pretty basic, but e-ink holds enormous potential for signage. We’ll no doubt see fancier outdoor displays one day, but for now the city’s just hoping to save some money — Los Angeles spends up to $9.5 million putting up temporary parking restriction signs, for instance. The group also developed anti-tampering and location detection tech, because you just know that someone’s going to try to steal or hack them. Filed under: Displays Comments Via: The Register Source: Visionect

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Sydney gets world’s first e-ink traffic signs

Google Voice transcriptions will soon actually make sense

One of the most prevalent qualms users have of Google Voice is its occasionally accurate (but usually absurd) interpretations of what’s being said. However, with the upcoming public debut of the Project Fi cellular service , Google has reportedly greatly improved its transcription service. According to a post on the company’s blog , Google’s managed to reduce its transcription error rates by nearly 50 percent by leveraging a “long short-term memory deep recurrent neural network.” Users don’t even have to change their routine to take advantage of the new system, just keep using Voice and Fi as they always have. [Image Credit: shutterstock] Filed under: Internet , Mobile , Google Comments Source: Google Blog

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Google Voice transcriptions will soon actually make sense

LG bets big on flexible displays for cars and phones

More and more smartphones , TVs and wearables like Apple’s Watch now use OLED displays, but only two companies mass produce them — Samsung and LG. LG is trying to stay on top of demand by building a new 1.05 trillion won ($900 million) flexible OLED plant in Korea. Starting in 2017, the 6th-gen line will spit out four times as many screens as the current-gen plant thanks to a larger “substrate” sheet size. The plastic-based displays are aimed at smaller next-gen devices that can benefit from the bendability like automotive displays, cellphones and wearables. Most of LG and Samsung’s high-end smartphones and smartwatches already use OLED displays (P-OLED and AMOLED, respectively). Some — like LG’s G Flex 2 “banana” phone and the Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge — specifically take advantage of the flexibility. But, it’s other companies — the Vivo X5 , Oppo R7 and 2nd-gen Motorola Moto X all have OLED-based displays, for instance — that are creating demand for the technology. LG said it will eventually build another plant for larger, TV-sized displays that uses the same 6th-gen tech. Samsung also recently pledged $3.6 billion toward OLED production. Filed under: Displays , LG Comments

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LG bets big on flexible displays for cars and phones

The AP adds 550,000 old newsreel clips to YouTube

The Associated Press has teamed up with British Movietone to share more than a century’s worth of newsreel footage with the denizens of the internet. The pair will upload more than a million minutes of archival clips to YouTube with the intention of creating a “view-on-demand visual encyclopedia” for the world. The 550, 000-plus stories range from footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake through to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It’s not the first time that a news organization has used YouTube to take its archives online. Last year, British Pathé uploaded more than 85, 000 newsreel clips from between 1896 and 1976 to the site. Users can feel free to embed the clips in whatever story they’re working on, but we assume that re-editing the work isn’t permitted. Which is a shame, because we were hoping for some cheeky dance remixes of the footage of Prince Charles getting frisky at the Rio Carnival. Which, for no reason at all , we’ve embedded below… Filed under: HD Comments Via: The Guardian Source: AP

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The AP adds 550,000 old newsreel clips to YouTube