It’s easy enough to put an always-on camera somewhere it can live off solar power or the grid, but deep in nature, underground, or in other unusual circumstances every drop of power is precious. Luckily, a new type of sensor developed for DARPA uses none at all until the thing it’s built to detect happens to show up. That means it can sit for years without so much as a battery top-up. Read More
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This tiny sensor could sleep for years between detection events
Like Tesla’s Powerwall, Watts is a big battery that can power your home. One Watts cell can support a few small appliances including computers and refrigerators and a few units can power TVs and electric washers. The units can charge via the grid or with solar panels and the Watts units include an app that shows discharge and battery remaining. The batteries, which were designed in… Read More
Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock When the book is finally closed on the product line known as OS X, last year’s release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks may end up getting short shrift. Sure, it brought tangible energy saving benefits to Mac laptop owners, but such gains are quickly taken for granted; internal changes and new frameworks are not as memorable to customers as they may be to developers and technophiles. And while Mavericks included many new user-visible features , and even new bundled applications , the cumulative effect was that of a pleasant upgrade, not a blockbuster. But for all its timidity and awkwardness , Mavericks marked a turning point for OS X—and in more than just naming scheme . It was the first OS X release from the newly unified, post-Forstall Apple. If iOS 7 was the explosive release of Jony Ive’s pent-up software design ethos, then Mavericks was the embodiment of Craig Federighi’s patient engineering discipline. Or maybe Mavericks was just a victim of time constraints and priorities. Either way, in last year’s OS X release, Apple tore down the old . This year, finally, Apple is ready with the new. To signal the Mac’s newfound confidence, Apple has traded 10.9’s obscure surfing location for one of the best known and most beautiful national parks: Yosemite . The new OS’s headline feature is one that’s sure to make for a noteworthy chapter in the annals of OS X: an all-new user interface appearance. Of course, this change comes a year after iOS got its extreme makeover . Read 405 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica Review
You probably won’t have noticed the following problem, unless you happen to be the IT manager in an architecture firm or other specialist environment, but it’s been an issue nonetheless. For all our ability to virtualize compute and graphical workloads, it hasn’t so far been possible to share a single GPU core across multiple users. For example, if you’d wanted 32 people on virtual machines to access 3D plumbing and electrical drawings via AutoCAD, you’d have needed to dedicate eight expensive quad-core K1 graphics cards in your GRID server stack . Now, though, NVIDIA has managed to make virtualization work right the way through to each GPU core for users of Citrix XenDesktop 7, such that you’d only need one K1 to serve that workforce, assuming their tasks were sufficiently lightweight. Does this mean NVIDIA’s K1 sales will suddenly drop by seven eighths? We couldn’t tell ya — but probably not. Filed under: Networking , Software , NVIDIA Comments
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NVIDIA enables full virtualization for graphics: up to four remote users per GRID GPU
You probably won’t have noticed the following problem, unless you happen to be the IT manager in an architecture firm or other specialist environment, but it’s been an issue nonetheless. For all our ability to virtualize compute and graphical workloads, it hasn’t so far been possible to share a single GPU core across multiple users. For example, if you’d wanted 32 people on virtual machines to access 3D plumbing and electrical drawings via AutoCAD, you’d have needed to dedicate eight expensive quad-core K1 graphics cards in your GRID server stack . Now, though, NVIDIA has managed to make virtualization work right the way through to each GPU core for users of Citrix XenDesktop 7, such that you’d only need one K1 to serve that workforce, assuming their tasks were sufficiently lightweight. Does this mean NVIDIA’s K1 sales will suddenly drop by seven eighths? We couldn’t tell ya — but probably not. Filed under: Networking , Software , NVIDIA Comments
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NVIDIA enables full virtualization for graphics: up to eight remote users per GRID GPU
NVIDIA’s CES 2013 press conference is still ongoing, but the chipmaker is already unveiling something we’ve only seen teased before: the NVIDIA Grid, a card used for cloud computing across PCs, smart TVs, and smartphones. CEO and founder Jen-Hsun Huang detailed the new card on-stage, which you can see above in a rack of 20 grid servers. Huang says the rack pushes out roughly 240 NVIDIA GPUs worth of power, or about 200 teraflops — equivalent to approximately 700 Xbox 360s. The Grid was given a tease earlier this year ; the card will assist in pushing serious horsepower to the cloud, so that gaming over the air, across multiple devices becomes a less complicated reality. During an on-stage demonstration, NVIDIA showed Frozenbyte’s Trine running on various devices, all powered by the Grid system. Beyond just looking great, it carried over seamlessly between multiple devices. Huang also detailed NVIDIA’s first partners for Grid: Agawi, Cloudunion, Cyber Cloud, G-cluster, Playcast, and Ubitus. Apparently biggies like OnLive and Gaikai are already all set? We’ll be sure to get a closer look in the coming days as CES rages on. Continue reading NVIDIA details the Grid, a card built for powering cloud computing Comments
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NVIDIA details the Grid, a card built for powering cloud computing