It’s only April, but AMD is raring to talk about its next-generation family of APUs and their various improvement. The upcoming Bristol Ridge family of APUs will debut on mobile first — AMD has partnered with HP to launch a new iteration of the Envy x360 based on its upcoming seventh-generation hardware. Pre-announcing Bristol Ridge AMD is calling this a “pre-announcement,” a term which reminds me of George Carlin’s rant about the abuse of the prefix “pre.” Let’s just call this an early reminder AMD has new hardware coming down the pipe and a look at what the new chips are capable of.
Last week, Square-Enix announced a giant multimedia blitz around the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XV. An anime series, a CG movie, and the release date were all unveiled at a big event, but the biggest news was the release of a completely new demo that’s available to anyone with a PS4 or Xbox One. Unfortunately, it’s disappointing in nearly every way. If you move through the demo at a steady clip, there’s about 30 minutes worth of activities on offer. There are a few hidden objects here and there to keep you occupied, but this “Platinum Demo” is fairly light on content.
. It’s an interesting and bold move, as lawsuits related to safety issues can bring a company to the verge of bankruptcy. In the 1980s, the unintended acceleration lawsuits almost drove Audi out the U.S. market, and it took years for the brand to recover. More recently, Toyota and GM have had highly publicized multibillion-dollar settlements around safety related equipment failures. Infrastructure and sharing While safety is a big motivator in the path to autonomous vehicles, there is much more to be gained. Cities built around the automobile, especially newer ones, have found it hard to add public transportation infrastructure. For example, in 2014 the city of Austin floated a billion dollar bond program for an extension of the city’s MetroRail system that .
, with its 1.2GHz 64-bit quad-core ARMv8 CPU, has just enough processing power to function as a tiny budget general purpose computer. If this idea interests you, here are five add-ons to consider for your project. 1. The Western Digital PiDrive is available with either 314GB (get it?) or 1TB storage capacity. The . The drive comes bundled with the that lets you install any of the operating systems stored on the PiDrive. At bootup, the BerryBoot menu lets you select which operating system you want to use on the Raspberry Pi. Note that while this $31.42 price is amazing, this price does not appear to include the necessary PiDrive USB cable or an enclosure.
on March 7, 2016 at 3:05 pm Mercury in false color. To the naked eye, it’s a lot more grey. The answer, based on data beamed back from the and is carbon, in the form of graphite. Current thinking from the science team is that Mercury may once have had a graphite “flotation crust” from an enormous, planet-wide magma ocean. Is Mercury the remains of a much larger planet? Mercury is odd in a number of ways. Its core is believed to account for 42% of its mass (the Earth’s core, in contrast, is just 17% of its mass).
on March 4, 2016 at 4:30 pm Michael Chertoff “Once you’ve created code that’s potentially compromising, it’s like a bacteriological weapon. You’re always afraid of it getting out of the lab,” Chertoff said. He’s not the first to use a medical analogy. USA Today Tim Cook as saying the only way to give the FBI what it wants is to write software that Apple “view[s] as sort of the equivalent of cancer.” Mike McConnell, the former director of the NSA, also spoke at the RSA conference and echoed Chertoff’s statements. That’s particularly interesting, because it was McConnell who led the NSA’s push to require the use of the so-called “Clipper chip” in the 1990s.
, its distinction between people who own a console and so-called “,” and its arguments for why the PC is objectively superior. I’m aware that the general use of the phrase is meant to refer to people who exhibit “willful ignorance regarding the objective superiority of PCs over consoles,” and that the subreddit states “We don’t use the term to put ourselves above other gamers. We use the term to put our PCs above consoles. It’s not the people, it’s the platforms.” I accept that’s the intention. I also accept that many people who fly the Confederate flag genuinely believe they are demonstrating a love for their own cultural heritage rather than explicitly endorsing racism or racist behavior.
. Amazon has come out in favor of strong encryption, but at the same time, an update to its Kindle Fire devices has removed the option to encrypt the internal storage. Amazon’s Fire devices are based on Android, but not the same flavor of Android that you’d find on most devices. Amazon uses a fork of Android from the Android Open Source Project. It doesn’t work with Google to certify its devices and integrate Google Play Services or apps like Gmail and Maps. Instead, Amazon runs its own (smaller) app store and plugs in content like Kindle Books, Audible, and Amazon Music.
, which looks exactly like the original Echo when looking down at the top of the unit. It has the same design, with two buttons and a lighted volume ring as well as a seven-microphone array. However, if you look at it from the side, it looks like someone chopped off most of the Echo and flattened it. It stands a mere 1.5 inches tall, while the original Echo is a relatively gigantic 9.25 inches tall. The major difference between the Echo and the Echo Dot appears to be their respective speakers. The original Echo has both woofer and tweeter drivers, which produce, to my non-audiophile ears, excellent sound quality for music and voice content like audio books and podcasts.
