Tag: galleries

Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

If you’ve noticed that solid-state drives (and the PCs that include them) no longer cost an arm and a leg, you’re not alone. Researchers at DRAMeXchange understand that the price per gigabyte of an SSD has fallen off a cliff in the past three years, and the trend is only accelerating. If the company’s estimates are on the mark, these drives could cost just 11 cents more per gig than conventional hard drives by 2017. At that rate, you might not have to choose between high capacity and breakneck speed when you’re on a budget — you could easily afford both. Via: Computerworld Source: TrendForce

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Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

LG’s spending billions to make more OLED things

LG’s OLED 4K TVs are jaw-droppingly gorgeous , but the price still isn’t anywhere near the level it needs to be for mass consumer adoption . Hopefully the company’s new manufacturing plant can help that a bit thanks to economies of scale . A Reuters report says that the South Korean firm is spending some $8.71 billion (around 10 trillion Korean won) on a new manufacturing facility for the display panels in Paju, South Korea. Perhaps this can make up for some of the losses the tech giant suffered by halting production at one of its TV plants due to a gas leak earlier this year. Source: Reuters

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LG’s spending billions to make more OLED things

Amazon Video gets a bunch of new features on iOS

Amazon has released a ton of new features for its Video app. The update includes 3D touch support, Next Up (which is basically auto-play), picture-in-picture and X-Ray, which offers a wealth of IMDB information and trivia at the touch of a button. Even though some of these features are iPad exclusive (like picture-in-picture) they can help Amazon stand up against competition like Netflix when content alone won’t carry the day. The 3D touch option is only available on Apple’s latest smartphone offerings, the 6s and 6s Plus, and lets you access a number of features faster, but offers nothing in the way of exclusive functionality. Also, the app has been customized for the iPad Pro , meaning Amazon-exclusive content is bigger and better than it’s ever been before. What more could you ask for? [Image credit: AOL] Source: iMore

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Amazon Video gets a bunch of new features on iOS

Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Shazam is doubling down on what it does best with its latest update: Recognizing songs when your memory (or pop cultural knowhow) fails you. And, for the first time, the app now highlights a search feature on its main page, which lets you dig for more information about songs and artists. The goal, naturally, is to convince you to stay within Shazam rather than hopping over to the web for music research. In my brief testing, the new Shazam app recognized songs from television and radio in a few seconds — at times it even found a result in under a second. It feels significantly faster than previous versions of the app, which sometimes took over five seconds to lock onto a song. That’s not a huge difference, but given that Shazam has been around for years (it was one of the first killer apps back when the iPhone’s App Store launched in 2008), it needs to keep improving to keep up with competitors like Soundhound. Via: TechCrunch Source: Shazam

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Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Oddball machine makes ‘analog’ techno music with vinyl records

Many techno DJs are used to playing music on vinyl , but creating it? That’s another matter. However, Graham Dunning has found a wonderfully strange way to make that idea work. His Mechanical Techno device produces full-on dance tracks by driving several heavily modified records at once with a turntable, with each record relying on unique triggers to produce a sound. Electrical contacts will produce a synth sound as one record spins around, while piezoelectric triggers create that all-important beat on another disc. The result is techno that’s at once analog and not. It sounds digital, but it has the imprecision and unpredictability that you’d never get from software. Via: Boing Boing , Nerdcore Source: Graham Dunning

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Oddball machine makes ‘analog’ techno music with vinyl records

Google now lets you join Hangouts as a guest, no account needed

The worst thing about organizing an online meeting is squabbling over platform. Should you choose WebEx? Skype? Google? Your decision just got a little easier. As of today, you no longer need to have a Google account to join a meeting Hosted on Hangouts — just a link.

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Google now lets you join Hangouts as a guest, no account needed

Air Force torch cuts through locks like a hot knife through butter

Firefighters, police and soldiers don’t have many good options when they want to breach a door: blowtorches and lock picks are usually slow, while battering rams, explosives and guns aren’t exactly subtle. The US Air Force and EMPI recently crafted a far better solution, though. Their TEC Torch creates a brief but super-hot (5, 000F) metal vapor jet that cuts through steel in less than a second, making short work of virtually any lock. In some ways, it’s like Star Wars ‘ Qui-Gon Jinn cutting through doors with a lightsaber — it’s just faster and less dramatic. Via: We Are the Mighty , Business Insider Source: US Air Force (PDF) , EMPI

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Air Force torch cuts through locks like a hot knife through butter

5Gbps broadband is coming to Britain, for £399 per month

Words like “superfast” and “ultrafast” are thrown around all the time to describe home broadband in the UK. Of course, what we really want to know are the cold, hard numbers. Download and upload speeds, man. That’s why Gigaclear has us chomping at the bit with its latest announcement — 5Gbps broadband , which it’s trialling right now with a small batch of UK customers. If you’ve never heard of Gigaclear before, we don’t blame you. The company was founded in 2010 and only operates in 36 rural communities, spread across five English counties. You can check your postcode here , but the chances of you falling under its fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) network are pretty slim. Even if you own one of the 10, 000 homes with Gigaclear access, you’ll have to pay some serious cash for the new speeds. The company will be charging £399 per month for homeowners and £1, 500 for businesses when the trial expands to all Gigaclear customers next year. Got a Scrooge McDuck pile of cash in your basement? Otherwise, this is all just a pipe dream. Source: Gigaclear

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5Gbps broadband is coming to Britain, for £399 per month

One Google Glass follow-up reportedly ditches the screen

Google Glass (aka Project Aura ) might not include so much actual glass the next time around. Sources for The Information understand that there are three next-generation headsets in development, and that one of them doesn’t have a screen at all — it’s an audio-focused model meant for the “sport” crowd. That sounds like an amped-up Bluetooth headset to us, but we’ll reserve judgment until there’s something to see… or rather, hear. Don’t worry if you still want that signature eyepiece, though — there’s talk of at least an enterprise-focused model with a display, Things are reportedly still up in the air (Google may cut its three models to two), but this could give you an idea of what to expect when Project Aura arrives sometime next year. [Image credit: AP Photo] Source: The Information

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One Google Glass follow-up reportedly ditches the screen

Pop-up sensor would give robot surgeons a sense of touch

Robotic surgery is no longer the stuff of science fiction. However, these robots can’t really feel their way around — the need for super-small mechanisms rules out existing approaches to touch. That’s where Harvard researchers might come to save the day. They’ve developed a pop-up sensor whose four layers collapse to a tiny footprint (just a tenth of an inch) when necessary, but expand into a 3D sensor thanks to a built-in spring. The design is extremely sensitive, too, with a light intensity sensor that can detected mere millinewtons of force. Source: Harvard University , IEEE Sensors Journal

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Pop-up sensor would give robot surgeons a sense of touch