Tag: linux

XYZPrinting Releases All-In-One 3D Printer With Internal Laser Scanner

Lucas123 writes XYZPrinting today released the first 3D printer with embedded scanner that has the ability to replicate objects between 2-in and 6-in in size and print objects of up to 7.8-in square from .stl files. The printer’s retailing for $799. A review of the new da Vinci 1.0 AiO all-in-one 3D printer revealed the 3D scanning capability, which is supposed to have a .05mm resolution, captures overall size and some finer features of an object but it falls short when it comes to precise details; thin protrusions and through-object holes are often missed in a scan. The mechanics — the printing head, two laser scanning/camera pods and turntable, and the motorized print table — are fully enclosed in a sleek-looking blue and white cubical case with a large transparent, hinged-front door. The front of the printer has a simple push button keypad for traversing a menu on a 2.6-in LCD black-and-white display. The printer is about 18-in. x 20-in. x 22-in. in size and weighs 60.6 lbs. While this is a desktop printer, it takes up a sizeable amount of room on your desk. It can print with either ABS or PLA thermopolymer. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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XYZPrinting Releases All-In-One 3D Printer With Internal Laser Scanner

OEM Windows 7 License Sales End This Friday

colinneagle writes This Friday is Halloween, but if you try to buy a PC with Windows 7 pre-loaded after that, you’re going to get a rock instead of a treat. Microsoft will stop selling Windows 7 licenses to OEMs after this Friday and you will only be able to buy a machine with Windows 8.1. The good news is that business/enterprise customers will still be able to order PCs ‘downgraded’ to Windows 7 Professional. Microsoft has not set an end date for when it will cut off Windows 7 Professional to OEMs, but it will likely be a while. This all fits in with typical Microsoft timing. Microsoft usually pulls OEM supply of an OS a year after it removes it from retail. Microsoft cut off the retail supply of Windows 7 in October of last year, although some retailers still have some remaining stock left. If the analytics from Steam are any indicator, Windows 8 is slowly working its way into the American public, but mostly as a Windows XP replacement. Windows 7, both 32-bit and 64-bit, account for 59% of their user base. Windows 8 and 8.1 account for 28%, while XP has dwindled to 4%. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OEM Windows 7 License Sales End This Friday

Microsoft Is Bringing WebRTC To Explorer, Eyes Plugin-Free Skype Calls

An anonymous reader writes Microsoft today announced it is backing the Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) technology and will be supporting the ORTC API in Internet Explorer. Put another way, the company is finally throwing its weight behind the broader industry trend of bringing voice and video calling to the browser without the need for plugins. Both Google and Mozilla are way ahead of Microsoft in this area, both in terms of adding WebRTC features to their respective browsers and in terms of building plugin-free calling services that rely on the technology. In short, Skype is under threat, and Microsoft has finally decided to opt for an “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” strategy. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Is Bringing WebRTC To Explorer, Eyes Plugin-Free Skype Calls

Century Old Antarctic Expedition Notebook Found Underneath Ice

An anonymous reader writes During his second expedition to Antarctica, British explorer Robert Scott—and most of his team—died from overexposure to the elements. Over 100 years after their deaths, an artifact from his journey has surfaced. New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust reports that they have found a notebook which tracked Scott’s last Terra Nova Expedition. According to the Antarctic Heritage Trust, the notebook belonged to a surgeon, photographer and zoologist named George Murray Levick, who accompanied Scott at the unfortunate Terra Nova expedition. Executive Director Nigel Watson said, “It’s an exciting find. The notebook is a missing part of the official expedition record. After spending seven years conserving Scott’s last expedition building and collection, we are delighted to still be finding new artifacts.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Century Old Antarctic Expedition Notebook Found Underneath Ice

Apple A8X IPad Air 2 Processor Packs Triple-Core CPU, Hefty Graphics Punch

MojoKid writes When Apple debuted its A8 SoC, it proved to be a modest tweak of the original A7. Despite packing double the transistors and an improved GPU, the heart of the A8 SoC is the same dual-core Apple “Cyclone” processor tweaked to run at higher clock speeds and with stronger total GPU performance. Given this, many expected that the Apple A8X would be cut from similar cloth — a higher clock speed, perhaps, and a larger GPU, but not much more than that. It appears those projections were wrong. The Apple A8X chip is a triple-core variant of the A8, with a higher clock speed (1.5GHz vs. 1.4GHz), a larger L2 cache (2MB, up from 1MB) and 2GB of external DDR3. It also uses an internal metal heatspreader, which the Apple A8 eschews. All of this points to slightly higher power consumption for the core, but also to dramatically increased performance. The new A8X is a significant power house in multiple types of workloads; in fact, its the top-performing mobile device on Geekbench by a wide margin. Gaming benchmarks are equally impressive. The iPad Air 2 nudges out Nvidia’s Shield in GFXBench’s Manhattan offscreen test, at 32.4fps to 31 fps. Onscreen favors the NV solution thanks to its lower-resolution screen, but the Nvidia device does take 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited by a wide margin, clocking in at 30, 970 compared to 21, 659. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple A8X IPad Air 2 Processor Packs Triple-Core CPU, Hefty Graphics Punch

What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company

An anonymous reader writes: The Atlantic has a nice profile of SpaceX’s rise to prominence — how a private startup managed to successfully compete with industry giants like Boeing in just a decade of existence. “Regardless of its inspirations, the company was forced to adopt a prosaic initial goal: Make a rocket at least 10 times cheaper than is possible today. Until it can do that, neither flowers nor people can go to Mars with any economy. With rocket technology, Musk has said, “you’re really left with one key parameter against which technology improvements must be judged, and that’s cost.” SpaceX currently charges $61.2 million per launch. Its cost-per-kilogram of cargo to low-earth orbit, $4, 653, is far less than the $14, 000 to $39, 000 offered by its chief American competitor, the United Launch Alliance. Other providers often charge $250 to $400 million per launch; NASA pays Russia $70 million per astronaut to hitch a ride on its three-person Soyuz spacecraft. SpaceX’s costs are still nowhere near low enough to change the economics of space as Musk and his investors envision, but they have a plan to do so (of which more later).” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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What It Took For SpaceX To Become a Serious Space Company

Hungary To Tax Internet Traffic

An anonymous reader writes: The Hungarian government has announced a new tax on internet traffic: 150 HUF ($0.62 USD) per gigabyte. In Hungary, a monthly internet subscription costs around 4, 000-10, 000 HUF ($17-$41), so it could really put a constraint on different service providers, especially for streaming media. This kind of tax could set back the country’s technological development by some 20 years — to the pre-internet age. As a side note, the Hungarian government’s budget is running at a serious deficit. The internet tax is officially expected to bring in about 20 billion HUF in income, though a quick look at the BIX (Budapest Internet Exchange) and a bit of math suggests a better estimate of the income would probably be an order of magnitude higher. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Hungary To Tax Internet Traffic

Ubuntu Turns 10

Scott James Remnant, now Technical Lead on ChromeOS, was a Debian developer before that. That’s how he became involved from the beginning (becoming Developer Manager, and then serving on the Technical Board) on the little derivative distribution that Mark Shuttleworth decided to make of Debian Unstable, and for which the name Ubuntu was eventually chosen. On this date in 2004, Ubuntu 4.10 — aka Warty Warthog, or just Warty — was released, and Remnant has shared a detailed, nostalgic look back at the early days of the project that has (whatever else you think of it ) become one of the most influential in the world of open source and Free software. I was excited that Canonical sent out disks that I could pass around to friends and family that looked acceptably polished to them in a way that Sharpie-marked Knoppix CD-ROMs didn’t, and that the polish extended to the installer, the desktop, and the included constellation of software, too. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ubuntu Turns 10

Samsung Achieves Outdoor 5G Mobile Broadband Speed of 7.5Gbps

Mark.JUK writes: Samsung has become the first to successfully demonstrate a future 5G mobile network running at speeds of 7.5Gbps in a stationary outdoor environment. They also managed 1.2Gbps while using the same technology and driving around a 4.3km-long race track at speeds of up to 110kph. Crucially, the test was run using the 28GHz radio spectrum band, which ordinarily wouldn’t be much good for mobile networks where wide coverage and wall penetration is an important requirement. But Samsung claims it can mitigate at least some of that by harnessing the latest Hybrid Adaptive Array Technology (HAAT), which uses millimeter wave frequency bands to enable the use of higher frequencies over greater distances. Several companies are competing to develop the first 5G technologies, although consumers aren’t expected to see related services until 2020 at the earliest. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Samsung Achieves Outdoor 5G Mobile Broadband Speed of 7.5Gbps