Seagate has announced a new set of 12TB hard drives for desktop and NAS drives. The new 12TB volumes are part of the BarraCuda Pro, IronWolf, and IronWolf Pro product families. The BarraCuda Pro family of drives all spin at 7200 RPM and carry five-year warranties; the new 12TB drives are a straightforward extension of the previous 10TB hardware. Like all BarraCuda Pro drives over 4TB, the 12TB drive offers 256MB of disk cache, though its listed sustained sequential transfer rate of 250GB/s is slightly higher than the 220MB/s on earlier drives. The improvement is unlikely to make a major difference in real-world tests.
If you’re looking for a new laptop, now’s a great time to grab the 14-inch Kaby Lake Thinkpad T470s laptop at a $359.70 discount. With today’s coupon code in play, you’ll save a whopping 30% off the retail price. • (List price: $1199 — Coupon code: THINKPADSALE) Spec-wise, this configuration has a seventh generation dual-core 2.5GHz Intel i5-7200U CPU, integrated Intel HD Graphics 620, 4GB of DDR4 RAM (2133MHz), a 128GB solid-state drive, Bluetooth 4.1, and 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi support. As for the 14-inch display, it benefits from a full HD resolution of 1920×1080, in-plane switching, and an anti-glare coating.
The majority of car infotainment systems actually increase distraction, not ease it. So says the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety and the University of Utah, which tested 30 different cars and found 23 create high or very levels of distraction across a range of scenarios. Only seven created what were described as moderate levels of distraction, and none reduced distraction. The information is helpful in setting the stage for more discussion and ignores longer-term trends, such as whether on-board navigation can be considered all that distracting when people were driving while reading folding paper maps 20 years ago. Cognitive demand placed on the driver in University of Utah / AAA Foundation study on driver distraction.
BlackBerry used to rule the smartphone space, but then the iPhone came out. execs deemed the iPhone a “toy” and a “fad,” but that fad eventually drove the company to revamp its product lineup. It was too late, though. BlackBerry , but it’s not done with smartphones. It’s making a go of things with Android, and it looks like a new full-touch-screen BlackBerry Android phone is on the way. A posting from serial leaker Evan Blass has revealed the BlackBerry Motion. BlackBerry (formerly known as RIM) used to have its own operating system called BlackBerry OS. Well, BB OS technically still exists, but the company is no longer releasing new phones that run it.
No one knew exactly what was up to when it was acquired by Google a few years back. Now DeepMind is an Alphabet company, working on big machine learning problems like , improving AI problem solving, and making computer-generated speech more realistic. On that last count, you can experience the fruits of DeepMind’s labors right now if you’ve got an Android phone or a Google Home. The . Google launched Assistant about a year ago as an evolution of its existing Google voice command system. For the first time, Google voice interactions were available not only on phones, but also as a part of your home with the Google Home smart speaker.
AOL announced today that AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) will shut down as of December 15. AIM has been pretty dead for years, largely supplanted by services like Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Google Hangouts, text messaging, and WhatsApp. But I’m still a little sorry to see it go. AIM was the first instant messenger service that I ever used, and for years, it was one of the dominant ways I communicated online. While the service was in testing by May, it didn’t go public until the , which dovetailed neatly with major changes in my own life. I started college in August 1997.
You might recall a time not that long ago that a 1TB hard drive was considered gigantic. How far we’ve come. Western Digital has started shipping its newest and largest hard drive, the . As the name suggests, this drive has a whopping 14TB of space. Not only that, it’s faster and more efficient than . Like many super-high-capacity spinning drives, this device is filled with helium. The atmosphere in an SSD doesn’t matter because there are no moving parts, but ensuring the platters in a spinning drive (7200RPM in this case) can move smoothly is essential in high-density data storage.
General Motors says it will introduce or launch at least 20 new battery electric vehicles and fuel cell electric vehicles by 2023. Two will arrive in the next 18 months, based on the Chevrolet Bolt EV architecture. The rest will be based on a separate, all-new architecture. GM joins the quickly growing ranks of automakers who say they’re committed to electrified vehicles. Depending on maker, this can mean EVs only, EVs and plug-in hybrids, or EVs and plug-ins on models that still offer combustion engines. Chevrolet Bolt in front of shrouded prototypes this week.
Today, Dell is offering up a substantial discount on the Inspiron 15 5000 laptop. If you’re in need of a powerful 15.6-inch device, this is the perfect time to buy. With an HD display, a Kaby Lake CPU, and plenty of memory, this laptop offers a complete computing experience wherever you go. • (List price: $799.99 — Coupon code: 330SAVE) Inside, this model features a seventh generation dual-core 2.7GHz Intel Core i7-7500U CPU, integrated Intel HD Graphics 620, 8GB of DDR4 RAM (2400MHz), a 1TB 5400RPM hard drive, a DVD drive, Bluetooth 4.0, and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi support.
