technology – Page 258

New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley

Final Fantasy maker and tech-demo master Square Enix unveiled a doozie of a demo at Microsoft’s 2015 Build conference. Titled Witch Chapter 0 [cry] , the demo showcased a range of DirectX 12 technical and processing wizardries to create a real-time animation on par with pre-rendered cut scenes and movies. During the demo (which you can view below), Microsoft’s Steve Guggenheimer explained each scene contained around 63 million polygons, which is supposedly up to 12-times more than Square Enix managed to render in its Agni’s Philosophy DirectX 11 demo back in 2012. Running 63 million polygons with high-resolution textures—8K by 8K in this case—is no small feat. By comparison, Star Citizen’s biggest carrier ships run up to around seven million polygons , while Ryse’s protagonist Marius was made up of 85K polygons on the Xbox One. One of the most impressive moments in the demo is when Guggenheimer zooms into the character model, revealing an immense amount of detail right up to the individual pores on her skin. The character’s hair was also revealed to be made up of individual polygons rendered with over 50 shaders, and not the less expensive surface mapping technique that’s commonly used to create features such as hair. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New Square Enix real-time DirectX 12 demo crosses the uncanny valley

Russian Cargo Spacehip Declared Lost

schwit1 writes: The Russians have declared lost the Progress freighter that had been launched to the ISS yesterday. They never could regain control of the craft, plus it was in an incorrect orbit. Moreover, the U.S. Air Force has detected debris nearby, suggesting a significant failure of some kind. The Russians are now considering delaying the next manned launch, scheduled for May 26, while they investigate this failure. Both Soyuz and Progress use some of the same systems, including the radar system that failed on Progress, and they want to make sure the problem won’t pop up on the manned mission. At the same time, they are also considering advancing the launch date of the next Progress to ISS from August 6. Based on these reports, I think they might swap the launch dates for the two flights. A Dragon is scheduled to go to ISS in between these missions, though that schedule could be changed as well to accommodate the Russian plans. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Russian Cargo Spacehip Declared Lost

US Successfully Tests Self-Steering Bullets

mpicpp sends this report from The Independent: The United States Department of Defense has carried out what it says is its most successful test yet of a bullet that can steer itself towards moving targets. Experienced testers have used the technology to hit targets that were actively evading the shot, and even novices that were using the system for the first time were able to hit moving targets. The project, which is known as Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance weapon, or Exacto, is being made for the American government’s military research agency, DARPA. It is thought to use small fins that shoot out of the bullet and re-direct its path, but the U.S. has not disclosed how it works. Technology in the bullet allows it to compensate for weather and wind, as well as the movement of people it is being fired at, and curve itself in the air as it heads towards its target. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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US Successfully Tests Self-Steering Bullets

Tesla To Announce Battery-Based Energy Storage For Homes

Okian Warrior writes: Billionaire Elon Musk will announce next week that Tesla will begin offering battery-based energy storage for residential and commercial customers. The batteries power up overnight when energy companies typically charge less for electricity, then are used during the day to power a home. In a pilot project, Tesla has already begun offering home batteries to SolarCity (SCTY) customers, a solar power company for which Musk serves as chairman. Currently 330 U.S. households are running on Tesla’s batteries in California. The batteries start at about $13, 000, though California’s Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PCG) offers customers a 50% rebate. The batteries are three-feet high by 2.5-feet wide, and need to be installed at least a foot and a half off the ground. They can be controlled with a Web app and a smartphone app. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New Privacy Concerns About US Program That Can Track Snail Mail

Lashdots writes: A lawyers’ group has called for greater oversight of a government program that gives state and federal law enforcement officials access to metadata from private communications for criminal investigations and national security purposes. But it’s not digital: this warrantless surveillance is conducted on regular mail. “The mail cover has been in use, in some form, since the 1800s, ” Chief Postal Inspector Guy J. Cottrell told Congress in November. The program targets a range of criminal activity including fraud, pornography, and terrorism, but, he said, “today, the most common use of this tool is related to investigations to rid the mail of illegal drugs and illegal drug proceeds.” Recent revelations that the U.S. Postal Service photographs the front and back of all mail sent through the U.S., ostensibly for sorting purposes, has, Fast Company reports, brought new scrutiny—and new legal responses—to this obscure program. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Privacy Concerns About US Program That Can Track Snail Mail

Africa E-Waste Dump Continues Hyperbole War

retroworks writes: Two stories appear today which feature close up photos of young African men surrounded by scrap metal in the city of Accra. The headlines state that this is where our computers go to die (Wired). The Daily Mail puts it in even starker terms, alleging “millions of tons” are dumped in Agbogbloshie. The stories appear the same day as a press release by investigators who returned this week from 3 weeks at the site. The release claims that Agbogbloshie’s depiction as the worlds “largest ewaste dump site” to be a hoax. It is a scrap automobile yard which accounts for nothing more than local scrap from Accra. Three Dagbani language speaking electronics technicians, three reporters, Ghana customs officials and yours truly visited the site, interviewed workers about the origins of the material, and assessed volumes. About 27 young men burn wire, mostly from automobile scrap harnesses. The electronics — 20 to 50 items per day — are collected from Accra businesses and households. The majority of Accra (population 5M) have had televisions since the 1990s, according to World Bank metadata (over 80% by 2003). The investigation did confirm that most of the scrap was originally imported used, and that work conditions were poor. However, the equipment being recycled had been repaired and maintained, typically for a decade (longer than the original OECD owner). It is a fact that used goods will, one day, eventually become e-waste. Does that support a ban on the trade in used goods to Africa? Or, as the World Bank reports, is the affordable used product essential to establish a critical mass of users so that investment in highways, phone towers, and internet cable can find necessary consumers? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Africa E-Waste Dump Continues Hyperbole War

New Dark Web Market Is Selling Zero-Day Exploits

Sparrowvsrevolution writes Over the last month, a marketplace calling itself TheRealDeal Market has emerged on the dark web, with a focus on sales of hackers’ zero-day attack methods. Like the Silk Road and its online black market successors like Agora and the recently defunct Evolution, TheRealDeal runs as a Tor hidden service and uses bitcoin to hide the identities of its buyers, sellers, and administrators. But while some other sites have sold only basic, low-level hacking tools and stolen financial details, TheRealDeal’s creators say they’re looking to broker premium hacker data like zero-days, source code, and hacking services, often offered on an exclusive, one-time sale basis. Currently an iCloud exploit is being offered for sale on the site with a price tag of $17, 000 in bitcoin, claiming to be a new method of hacking Apple iCloud accounts. “Any account can be accessed with a malicious request from a proxy account, ” reads the description. “Please arrange a demonstration using my service listing to hack an account of your choice.” Others include a technique to hack WordPress’ multisite configuration, an exploit against Android’s Webview stock browser, and an Internet Explorer attack that claims to work on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7, available for around $8, 000 in bitcoin. None of these zero days have yet been proven to be real, but an escrow system on the site using bitcoin’s multisignature transaction feature is designed to prevent scammers from selling fake exploits. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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New Dark Web Market Is Selling Zero-Day Exploits

New PCIe SSDs Load Games, Apps As Fast As Old SATA Drives

crookedvulture writes Slashdot has covered a bunch of new PCI Express SSDs over the past month, and for good reason. The latest crop offers much higher sequential and random I/O rates than predecessors based on old-school Serial ATA interfaces. They’re also compatible with new protocols, like NVM Express, which reduce overhead and improve scaling under demanding loads. As one might expect, these new PCIe drives destroy the competition in targeted benchmarks, hitting top speeds several times faster than even the best SATA SSDs can muster. The thing is, PCIe SSDs don’t load games or common application data any faster than current incumbents—or even consumer-grade SSDs from five years ago. That’s very different from the initial transition from mechanical to solid-state storage, where load times improved noticeably for just about everything. Servers and workstations can no doubt take advantage of the extra oomph that PCIe SSDs provide, but desktop users may struggle to find scenarios where PCIe SSDs offer palpable performance improvements over even budget-oriented SATA drives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Utilities Battle Homeowners Over Solar Power

HughPickens.com writes Diane Cardwell reports in the NYT that many utilities are trying desperately to stem the rise of solar power, either by reducing incentives, adding steep fees or effectively pushing home solar companies out of the market. The economic threat has electric companies on edge. Over all, demand for electricity is softening while home solar is rapidly spreading across the country. There are now about 600, 000 installed systems, and the number is expected to reach 3.3 million by 2020, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association. In Hawaii, the current battle began in 2013, when Hawaiian Electric started barring installations of residential solar systems in certain areas. It was an abrupt move — a panicked one, critics say — made after the utility became alarmed by the technical and financial challenges of all those homes suddenly making their own electricity. “Hawaii is a postcard from the future, ” says Adam Browning, executive director of Vote Solar, a policy and advocacy group based in California. But utilities say that solar-generated electricity flowing out of houses and into a power grid designed to carry it in the other direction has caused unanticipated voltage fluctuations that can overload circuits, burn lines and lead to brownouts or blackouts. “At every different moment, we have to make sure that the amount of power we generate is equal to the amount of energy being used, and if we don’t keep that balance things go unstable, ” says Colton Ching, vice president for energy delivery at Hawaiian Electric, pointing to the illuminated graphs and diagrams tracking energy production from wind and solar farms, as well as coal-fueled generators in the utility’s main control room. But the rooftop systems are “essentially invisible to us, ” says Ching, “because they sit behind a customer’s meter and we don’t have a means to directly measure them.” The utility wants to cut roughly in half the amount it pays customers for solar electricity they send back to the grid. “Hawaii’s case is not isolated, ” says Massoud Amin. “When we push year-on-year 30 to 40 percent growth in this market, with the number of installations doubling, quickly — every two years or so — there’s going to be problems.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Utilities Battle Homeowners Over Solar Power

Rocket Lab Unveils "Electric" Rocket Engine

New submitter Adrian Harvey writes The New Zealand based commercial space company Rocket Lab has unveiled their new rocket engine which the media is describing as battery-powered. It still uses rocket fuel, of course, but has an entirely new propulsion cycle which uses electric motors to drive its turbopumps. To add to the interest over the design, it uses 3D printing for all its primary components. First launch is expected this year, with commercial operations commencing in 2016. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Rocket Lab Unveils "Electric" Rocket Engine

Ken May

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