polls – Page 20

IMAX Embraces Virtual Reality, To Open Six VR Theaters This Year

An anonymous reader writes: IMAX is getting into the virtual reality business. Tthe company has announced that it is teaming up with Google to build cinema-quality virtual reality video cameras. It is also planning to launch virtual reality “locations.” The cinemas will be opened in shopping malls, much like traditional movie theatres. There are six reportedly planned for this year, including in Los Angeles and China. From the Verge report: IMAX chief executive Richard Gelfond told The WSJ that he imagined that the VR content would be tied to existing movie franchises, that they would last around 10 minutes and cost between $7 and $10. The idea, suggests Gelfond, is to create a VR experience that’s better than what you can get at home — the same way that a movie theater is better than your living room TV. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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IMAX Embraces Virtual Reality, To Open Six VR Theaters This Year

Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Verge: Google’s low-cost Chromebooks outsold Apple’s range of Macs for the first time in the U.S. recently. IDC analyst Linn Huang confirmed the milestone to The Verge. “Chrome OS overtook Mac OS in the US in terms of shipments for the first time in 1Q16, ” says Huang. “Chromebooks are still largely a US K-12 story.” IDC estimates Apple’s U.S. Mac shipments to be around 1.76 million in the latest quarter, meaning Dell, HP, and Lenovo sold nearly 2 million Chromebooks in Q1 combined. Chromebooks have been extremely popular in US schools, and it’s clear from IDC’s comments the demand is driving US shipments. Outside of the US, it’s still unclear exactly how well Google’s low-cost laptops are doing. Most data from market research firms like IDC and Gartner focuses solely on Google’s wins in the US. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chromebooks Outsell Macs For the First Time In the US

Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future

An anonymous reader writes from a report via PCWorld: Google says its Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) advances machine learning capability by a factor of three generations. “TPUs deliver an order of magnitude higher performance per watt than all commercially available GPUs and FPGA, ” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai during the company’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday. The chips powered the AlphaGo computer that beat Lee Sedol, world champion of the game called Go. “We’ve been running TPUs inside our data centers for more than a year, and have found them to deliver an order of magnitude better-optimized performance per watt for machine learning. This is roughly equivalent to fast-forwarding technology about seven years into the future (three generations of Moore’s Law), ” said Google’s blog post. “TPU is tailored to machine learning applications, allowing the chip to be more tolerant of reduced computational precision, which means it requires fewer transistors per operation. Because of this, we can squeeze more operations per second into the silicon, use more sophisticated and powerful machine learning models, and apply these models more quickly, so users get more intelligent results more rapidly.” The chip is called the Tensor Processing Unit because it underpins TensorFlow, the software engine that powers its deep learning services under an open-source license. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google’s Tensor Processing Unit Could Advance Moore’s Law 7 Years Into The Future

Samsung Unveils 256GB MicroSD Card, Highest Capacity In Its Class

Samsung recently unveiled its EVO Plus 256GB microSD card, capable of storing more than 12 hours of 4K video footage, 33 hours of full HD recording, 55, 200 photos or 23, 500 MP3s. While you most likely do not need such a large microSD card in your life, you’ll probably want one. The card features Samsung’s newest V-NAND technology, with read/write speeds of 95MB/s and 90MB/s, respectively. It will be available in June to over 50 countries at a price of $250, which includes a 10 year warranty. Personally, I have no need for such a high-capacity card at this time, but I marvel how far technology has progressed in the last few years, let alone months. SanDisk, for example, revealed a 200GB microSD card back in March, 2015, which was the highest capacity microSD card up until now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Slashdot reader RockDoctor brings an update on a project to build Babbage’s Analytical Engine: Between 1822 and 1847, Charles Babbage worked on a number of designs for general-purpose programmable computing engines, some parts of which were built during his lifetime and after. Since 2011 a group under the name of “Plan-28” have been working towards building a full version of the machine known as the Analytical Engine. (The group’s name refers to the series of Babbage’s plans which they are working to — versions 1 to 27 obviously having problems.) This week, they’ve released some updates on progress on their blog. Significant progress includes working on the machine’s “internal microcode” (in today’s terminology; remember, this is a machine of brass cogs and punched cards!) [and] archive work to bring the Science Museum’s material into a releasable form (the material is already scanned, but the metadata is causing eyestrain). “One of the difficulties in understanding the designs is the need to reverse engineer logical function from mechanical drawings of mechanisms — this without textual explanation of purpose or intention…” Progress is slow, but real. Last year marked the bicentennial of Ada Lovelace, who wrote programs for the Analytical Engine and it’s predecessor, the Difference Engine, and whose position as “the world’s first programmer” is celebrated in the name of the programming language Ada. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Researchers Are Reconstructing Babbage’s Analytical Engine

Microsoft Overhauls SharePoint To Compete With Slack In The Mobile Era

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft is overhauling SharePoint today, and introducing iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile apps. The iOS SharePoint app will arrive by the end of June, with the Android and Windows 10 Mobile versions due for release later this year. All of the mobile apps are designed to make SharePoint more accessible on the go, allowing users to access things like corporate intranet sites and content. Alongside the new apps, Microsoft is also providing access to SharePoint Online document libraries in OneDrive mobile apps, and the ability to copy from OneDrive to SharePoint. Microsoft plans to synchronize SharePoint Online document libraries with the new OneDrive sync client by the end of the year, and integrate SharePoint sites with Office 365 Groups. Microsoft’s new Flow service, which lets you automate tasks, will also be integrated into SharePoint by the end of the year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Robot Stitches Tissue By Itself Without A Real Doctor Pulling The Strings

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists have created a robotic system that is capable of stitching up tissue in living animals without a human doctor pulling the strings. Wednesday’s research brings us one step closer toward autonomous surgical robots. While doctors did supervise the robot, the robot performed as well, and in some cases a bit better, as some competing surgeons in stitching together intestinal tissue of pigs used in the tests. Wednesday’s project is “the first baby step toward true autonomy, ” said Dr. Umamaheswar Duvvuri of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. He cautioned others to not expect to see doctors leave entire operations in a robot’s digital hands — yet. The tissue-stitching robot is designed to do one specific tasks, similar to machines in other industries. For example, robot arms do the welding and painting in most U.S. car assembly lines. The Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) system is equipped with suturing equipment plus smart imaging technologies to let it track moving tissue in 3D and with an equivalent of night vision. Sensors have been added to help guide each stitch and tell how tightly to pull. All the surgeons have to do is place fluorescent markers on the tissue that needs stitching, and the robot takes aim. Human studies should begin within the next few years. The STAR system is just one of many up and coming robots to put surgery into the hands of non-surgeons. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Robot Stitches Tissue By Itself Without A Real Doctor Pulling The Strings

Biotech Company To Attempt Revitalizing Nervous Systems of Brain-Dead Patients

Sarah Knapton, writing for The Telegraph: A groundbreaking trial to see if it is possible to regenerate the brains of dead people, has won approval from health watchdogs. A biotech company called BioQuark in the U.S. has been granted ethical permission to recruit 20 patients who have been declared clinically dead from a traumatic brain injury, to test whether parts of their central nervous system can be brought back to life. Scientists will use a combination of therapies, which include injecting the brain with stem cells and a cocktail of peptides, as well as deploying lasers and nerve stimulation techniques which have been shown to bring patients out of comas. The trial participants will have been certified dead and only kept alive through life support. They will be monitored for several months using brain imaging equipment to look for signs of regeneration, particularly in the upper spinal cord — the lowest region of the brain stem which controls independent breathing and heartbeat. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Biotech Company To Attempt Revitalizing Nervous Systems of Brain-Dead Patients

20-Yr-Old Compaq Laptop Is Still Crucial to Maintaining McLaren’s Multi-Million Dollar Cars

An anonymous reader writes: It may come as a surprise to many, but the 20-year-old Compaq LTE 5280 still plays a vital role in maintaining multi-million dollar McLaren F1s. Jalopnik recently visited McLaren’s Special Operations workshop where it found several of Compaq’s old laptops serving their masters. Why do they rely on these dated computers, you ask? A McLaren Special Operations staff explains, “The reason we need those specific Compaq laptops is that they run a bespoke CA card which is installed into them. The CA card is an interface between the laptop software (which is DOS based) and the car. We are currently working on a new interface which will be compatible with modern laptops as the old Compaqs are getting less and less reliable and harder to find.” For those wondering, the Compaq LTE 5280 comes with a 120MHz Intel Pentium processor, up to “80MB” of RAM, and up to 16MB of HDD. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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20-Yr-Old Compaq Laptop Is Still Crucial to Maintaining McLaren’s Multi-Million Dollar Cars

Slack To Disable Thousands of Logins Leaked on GitHub

An anonymous reader writes: Thursday one technology site reported that thousands of developers building bots for the team-collaboration tool Slack were exposing their login credentials in public GitHub repositories and tickets. “The irony is that a lot of these bots are mostly fun ‘weekend projects’, reported Detectify. “We saw examples of fit bots, reminding you to stretch throughout the day, quote bots, quoting both Jurassic Park…and Don Quixote….” Slack responded that they’re now actively searching for publicly-posted login credentials, “and when we find any, we revoke the tokens and notify both the users who created them, as well as the owners of affected teams.” Detectify notes the lapse in security had occurred at a wide variety of sites, including “Forbes 500 companies, payment providers, multiple internet service providers and health care providers… University classes at some of the world’s best-known schools. Newspapers sharing their bots as part of stories. The list goes on and on…” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Slack To Disable Thousands of Logins Leaked on GitHub

Ken May

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