Tag: videos

Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

If you’ve noticed that solid-state drives (and the PCs that include them) no longer cost an arm and a leg, you’re not alone. Researchers at DRAMeXchange understand that the price per gigabyte of an SSD has fallen off a cliff in the past three years, and the trend is only accelerating. If the company’s estimates are on the mark, these drives could cost just 11 cents more per gig than conventional hard drives by 2017. At that rate, you might not have to choose between high capacity and breakneck speed when you’re on a budget — you could easily afford both. Via: Computerworld Source: TrendForce

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Flash-based drives may soon be as cheap as the spinning kind

Adobe Photoshop update brings custom toolbars and artboards

Before the sun sets on 2015, Adobe has another round of updates for its Creative Cloud software. The new features span a number of apps, but we’ll focus on Photoshop CC . To boost overall productivity, and to save you time and a few headaches, Adobe is giving the photo-editing software custom toolbars. This means that you’ll be able to add, delete and rearrange what appears in that set of tools on the left side of the interface. The new feature allows to you customize the layout of your workspace so that only the items you use are taking up valuable space. In theory, you’ll spend less time hunting for the tool you’re after, too. Slideshow-344396

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Adobe Photoshop update brings custom toolbars and artboards

Sit in the orchestra pit with Google’s 360-degree video

To get a good view of a world-class orchestra in New York’s Carnegie Hall, you normally have to buy an expensive front row seat. With a little help from Google, however, you can now sit on stage for free. The company is launching a “virtual exhibition” today called Performing Arts which includes four performances recorded with multiple 360-degree camera rigs. Alongside Carnegie Hall , you can experience the Berliner Philharmoniker , London’s Royal Shakespeare Company and the Theatro Municipal in São Paulo. Via: Google (Blog Post) Source: Performing Arts

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Sit in the orchestra pit with Google’s 360-degree video

6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon

By Cat DiStasio Fuel efficiency is one rating that can really set a car apart from the pack. Although you can’t yet walk into just any dealership and drive away in a vehicle that gets more than 100 miles a gallon, there are some sweet rides out there that demonstrate just how incredibly efficient a car can be. To get a better idea of what the uber-efficient car of tomorrow looks like, we’ve compiled some of the most efficient vehicles on the planet, all of which exceed that 100-mpg marker. In fact, most of the cars featured here leave that rating in the dust, and several break into the quadruple digits .Slideshow-342967

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6 hypermiling cars that get over 100 miles per gallon

Scientists use ‘spooky action’ to mail electron messages a mile

Researchers at Stanford University announced Tuesday that they had successfully leveraged the “spooky” interaction of entangled electrons to send a message between them over a span of 1.2 miles. This is by far the longest distance that scientists have managed to send entangled particles and provides the strongest evidence to date that quantum computing can have practical applications. Quantum computers exploit the phenomenon known as quantum entanglement , what Einstein famously referred to as ” spooky action over distance “, wherein two particles are connected regardless of the distance between them. That is, as in this case, if two electrons are entangled, the direction of their spin will always be the same. If one electron is spinning clockwise, the other will be too. If one reverses the direction of its spin, the other will as well. Doesn’t matter if they’re on the opposite sides of a molecule or on opposite sides of the galaxy, the two particles and their behaviors are inextricably linked. “Electron spin is the basic unit of a quantum computer, ” Stanford physicist Leo Yu said in a statement. “This work can pave the way for future quantum networks that can send highly secure data around the world.” The problem is that electrons are confined to atoms. And in order to get two electrons to entangle over long distances (and allow their quantum computer networks to communicate with one another) they need photons to act as the messengers. This is accomplished by “pairing” the photon and electron, a process called “quantum correlation”. But that runs into another issue: photons love to change the direction of their spin while travelling through fiber optic lines. So while you can get the first electron and the photon to correlate pretty easily, keeping the photon on task as it travels to the second electron is way more difficult. To overcome this, the Stanford team created “time-stamps” for the photons that act as reference points for the photons, allowing them to confirm that they arrived with the same spin orientation that they left with. Using this method, the team successfully entangled a pair of electrons over 2 kilometers of fiber optic line. Their research has been published in the journal Nature Communications . [Image Credit: L.A. Cicero] Via: Stanford University Source: Nature Communications

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Scientists use ‘spooky action’ to mail electron messages a mile

Bill Gates is launching a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is set to reveal a massive clean energy project on Monday, during the first day of the United Nations climate change summit in Paris. According to Reuters , which originally reported the news, the French government has confirmed that the ex-CEO-turned-philanthropist will launch the Clean Tech Initiative, a push to commit countries to double their budgets on clean energy tech research and developments by 2020. But Gates won’t be working on this multibillion dollar fund alone: The US, Australia, Canada, France, India, Indonesia, Norway, Saudi Arabia and South Korea will all be backing the plan, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters .

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Bill Gates is launching a multibillion-dollar clean energy fund

Apple’s next iPhone reportedly ditches the headphone jack

Apple’s quest for ever-thinner , ever-smarter devices may produce another casualty: your iPhone’s headphone jack. A rumor at MacOtakara claims that the next iPhone might drop the 3.5mm port and use the Lightning port for audio instead. The move would let Apple slim its phone even further (reportedly, over 1mm thinner than the iPhone 6s ) and take advantage of Lightning’s features, such as headphone-based DACs and app launching. You’d have to use an adapter for any conventional wired headphones, or else make the leap to Bluetooth. Via: MacRumors Source: MacOtakara (translated)

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Apple’s next iPhone reportedly ditches the headphone jack

Google Street View gives you a tour of ancient Jordan landmarks

Jordan is home to some extremely significant historical and religious sites. However, visiting those landmarks in person is no mean feat — which is why Google just added many of them to Street View. Fire up your web browser and you can get virtual, 360-degree tours of more than 30 ancient locations, including the city of Petra (above), Jerash and legendary castles from the Crusades. We suspect that this will pale in comparison to the grandeur of seeing these relics first-hand, but you should at least have an inkling of what the experience would be like. Source: Google Maps

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Google Street View gives you a tour of ancient Jordan landmarks

Square’s new reader arrives to accept mobile payments and chip cards

We’ve known about Square’s new NFC-friendly reader for a while, and now the point-of-sale gadget is available for use. Starting today, 100 merchants in “select cities” (quite a few, actually) will begin accepting NFC-driven payments like Apple Pay , Android Pay , Samsung Pay and those newfangled chip credit/debit cards . The reader is a square pad (of course) separate from the company’s usual POS setups and sliding readers, allowing you to hover your phone or insert a card to complete purchase. The unit is wireless and pairs with either a countertop system or Square’s free mobile app to handle the transactions. However, the new reader itself will set businesses back $49 in order to get started. For the initial rollout, look for the device at businesses in the following cities: Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Nashville, New Orleans, New York, Miami, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Seattle, St. Louis Tampa, and Washington, D.C.

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Square’s new reader arrives to accept mobile payments and chip cards

Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster

Shazam is doubling down on what it does best with its latest update: Recognizing songs when your memory (or pop cultural knowhow) fails you. And, for the first time, the app now highlights a search feature on its main page, which lets you dig for more information about songs and artists. The goal, naturally, is to convince you to stay within Shazam rather than hopping over to the web for music research. In my brief testing, the new Shazam app recognized songs from television and radio in a few seconds — at times it even found a result in under a second. It feels significantly faster than previous versions of the app, which sometimes took over five seconds to lock onto a song. That’s not a huge difference, but given that Shazam has been around for years (it was one of the first killer apps back when the iPhone’s App Store launched in 2008), it needs to keep improving to keep up with competitors like Soundhound. Via: TechCrunch Source: Shazam

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Shazam’s song recognition just got a lot faster