Tag: technology

Ars talks self-driving car technology with Ford at CES

Wayne Williams from Ford shows us one of the company’s fully autonomous Fusion research vehicles. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link) LAS VEGAS—As we’ve noted elsewhere, CES has now evolved to be part car show. But not just any car show—the focus is on how technology is transforming the car, and nowhere is that more evident than in autonomous driving. The goal is to get to “level four”—the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s highest level of self-driving vehicle, capable of getting from point A to point B without any human driver intervention. We’re not there yet—no one in the industry Ars has spoken to recently thinks the tech challenges are quite solved yet—but research vehicles from companies like Google , Delphi , Audi , and Ford are testing out the hardware and software necessary to get us to that point. With that in mind, we spoke to Wayne Williams, who gave us a quick tour of one of Ford’s fully autonomous hybrid Fusions. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Ars talks self-driving car technology with Ford at CES

Finally, over-the-air software updates for your car are becoming a reality

Harman’s Yoram Berholtz explains how Harman is helping the car industry stay current with over-the-air software updates. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link) LAS VEGAS—A constant bugbear in automotive tech is how inconvenient it is to have to take one’s car to the dealership to get a software update—something Tesla owners often gloat about since their cars don’t suffer that problem. Well, have faith, non-Tesla owners, because it looks like the auto industry is moving in the right direction. To find out more, we spoke to Harman’s Yoram Berholtz at CES. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Finally, over-the-air software updates for your car are becoming a reality

Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Officially Released

prisoninmate writes: January 10, 2016, will enter in the Linux history books as the day when the Linux kernel 4.4 LTS (Long-Term Support) has been officially released by Linus Torvalds and his team of hard working kernel developers. Prominent features of Linux kernel 4.4 LTS include 3D support in the virtual GPU driver, allowing for 3D hardware-accelerated graphics in virtualization guests, a leaner and faster loop device that supports Asynchronous I/O and Direct I/O, thus increasing the system’s performance and saving memory, and support for Open-Channel Solid State Drives (SSDs) through LightNVM. Phoronix also took a look during the newest kernel’s development cycle, and has an overview of 4.4’s new features. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Kernel 4.4 LTS Officially Released

OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Unveiled With Nearly 2.7GB/Sec Tested Throughput

MojoKid writes: Solid State Drive technology continues to make strides in performance, reliability and cost. At the CES 2016 show there were a number of storage manufacturers on hand showing off their latest grear, though not many made quite the splash that Toshiba’s OCZ Technology group made with the annoucement of their new RevoDrive 400 NVMe PCI Express SSD. OCZ is tapping on Toshiba’s NVMe controller technology to deliver serious bandwidth in this consumer-targeted M.2 gumstick style drive that also comes with a X4 PCI Express card adapater. The drive boasts specs conservatively at 2.4GB/sec for reads and 1.6GB/sec for writes in peak sequential transfer bandwidth. IOPs are rated at 210K and 140K for writes respectively. In the demo ATTO test they were running, the RevoDrive 400 actually peaks at 2.69GB/sec for reads and also hits every bit of that 1.6GB/sec write spec for large sequential transfers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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OCZ RevoDrive 400 NVMe SSD Unveiled With Nearly 2.7GB/Sec Tested Throughput

How We Know North Korea Didn’t Detonate a Hydrogen Bomb

StartsWithABang writes: The news has been aflame with reports that North Korea detonated a hydrogen bomb on January 6th, greatly expanding its nuclear capabilities with their fourth nuclear test and the potential to carry out a devastating strike against either South Korea or, if they’re more ambitious, the United States. The physics of what a nuclear explosion actually does and how that signal propagates through the air, oceans and ground, however, can tell us whether this was truly a nuclear detonation at all, and if so, whether it was fusion or fission. From all the data we’ve collected, this appears to be nothing new: just a run-of-the-mill fission bomb, with the rest being a sensationalized claim. (Related: Yesterday’s post about how seismic data also points to a conventional nuke, rather than an H-bomb.) Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How We Know North Korea Didn’t Detonate a Hydrogen Bomb

After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain

An anonymous reader writes: The X.Org domain predates the X.Org Foundation. It was used in the ’90s as a destination by The Open Group around the X Window System. While many are expecting Mir and Wayland to eventually succeed the X.Org Server, it seems the X.Org/X11 Server may outlive the valuable domain. Thanks to poor management by the X.Org Foundation, they risk losing access to their one-letter domain. Procrastination, paired with not transferring the domain when forming the non-profit foundation, has led to a last-minute mess. They left the domain registered for years to a person who is no longer involved with X.Org — and doesn’t want to relinquish it. In the few days until the domain expires, they are hoping for a “Hail Mary.” Let this be a lesson for open-source projects to better manage their assets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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After Years of Serving X11, X.Org Stands To Lose Its One-Letter Domain

New Dell Tech Support Scams Have Customers Worried Company Was Hacked

Trailrunner7 writes: A new twist on the fake tech support scam has arisen that has victims wondering whether Dell has been hacked.There has been a recent rash of calls to Dell customers in which the caller says he is from Dell itself and is able to identify the victim’s PC by model number and provide details of previous warranty and support interactions with the company. These are details that, it would seem, only Dell or perhaps its contractors would know. One person who was contacted by the scammers wrote a detailed description of the call, and said the caller had personal details that could not have been found online. Dell officials say they’re looking into it. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Dell Tech Support Scams Have Customers Worried Company Was Hacked

Users Are Suing Fitbit Over Inaccurate Heart Monitors

Just days after its shares dropped a whopping 18% , Fitbit just took another big hit. The wearables company has been slapped with a class-action lawsuit alleging that its heart rate monitoring technology is inaccurate, and that the company is knowingly misleading users. Read more…

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Users Are Suing Fitbit Over Inaccurate Heart Monitors

Intel’s next NUC will be a quad-core mini PC with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt 3

Andrew Cunningham The Broadwell NUC (left) and the new Skylake NUC (right). 4 more images in gallery Last night, Intel’s opening-day CES keynote focused mostly on wearables and Internet of Things things, the sort of forward-facing, maybe-useful, possibly-vaporware technology that characterizes CES. But in a small meeting this morning, we were able to get more information on less zeitgeist-y but more practical gadgets like the Compute Stick and the NUC mini desktops. The basic NUC boxes have been around for four generations now, so their Skylake refresh is predictable. They still use low-voltage U-series dual-core Core i3-6100U and i5-6260U CPUs like the ones you’d find in Ultrabooks. The i3 versions come with Intel HD 520 graphics, while the i5 boxes have Iris graphics—non-Pro Iris GPUs in the Skylake generation get 64MB of eDRAM cache to help add memory bandwidth, so graphics performance should be quite a bit better than the HD 6000 GPU in the equivalent Broadwell NUC. Intel has dropped the mini HDMI port on the back of the PC in favor of a full-size HDMI port, and it’s added an SD card reader on all models. Otherwise input and output is the same: four USB 3.0 ports (two on front, two on back, one yellow one that can charge devices when the NUC is powered off), a mini DisplayPort 1.2 port, gigabit Ethernet, and an IR receiver and a headphone jack on the front. The lids are still interchangeable, and they can connect to a USB header on the motherboard to extend the capabilities of the box. Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Intel’s next NUC will be a quad-core mini PC with Iris Pro and Thunderbolt 3

How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers

Trailrunner7 writes: Few, if any, companies or government agencies store more sensitive personal information than the IRS, and consumers have virtually no insight into how that data is used and secured. But, as the results of a recent Justice Department investigation show, when you start poking around in those dark corners, you sometimes find very ugly things. Beginning in 2008, a small group of people–including an IRS employee who worked in the Taxpayer Advocate Service section–worked a simple and effective scam that involved fake tax returns, phony refunds, dozens of pre-loaded debit cards, and a web of lies. The scheme relied upon one key ingredient for its success: access to taxpayers’ personal information. And it brought the alleged perpetrators more than $1 million. What sets this case apart is that the accused IRS employee, Nakeisha Hall, was tasked specifically with helping people who had been affected by some kind of tax-related identity theft or fraud. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How an IRS Agent Stole $1M From Taxpayers