Sunday 31 January 2016

ESP8266 Killer?

We’ve seen rumors floating around the Twittersphere about a new integrated microprocessor and WiFi SOC: the NL6621 from Nufront. Details are still scarce, but that doesn’t seem to be because the chip is vaporware: you could buy modules on Taobao.com and eBay right now for between two-and-a-half and three bucks, and Nufront’s website says they’ve produced a million modules since 2013.

The NL6621 WiFi SOC is powered by a 160 MHz ARM Cortex-M3 with 448 KB of RAM, and everything else is integrated in the SOC. The module has 32 GPIOs, SPI, I2C, I2S digital audio, and most of the …read more



Read the full article here by Hackaday

Tuesday 26 January 2016

'Five Nights at Freddy's World' removed from Steam

Five Nights at Freddy's, the jump-scare franchise depicted above that YouTubers love to make reaction videos to, has just joined company with Afro Samurai: it's had a release pulled from Steam due to poor reviews. Developer Scott Cawthon writes on the Five Nights at Freddy's 4 Steam listing that even though Five Nights at Freddy's World might have had a "very positive" rating at 87 percent, he's removing it because he wasn't happy with the reviews and ratings it'd been garnering. He's also requested that Steam-owner Valve remove the time limit from purchase refunds, so that no matter how long has passed between purchase and return, customers will get their money back. Previously, that expired once two weeks had passed. "It may take them awhile to set that up, but it will be in place soon," Cawthon writes. "I'm still going to work on FNaF World and polish it up."

Cawthon says he's polishing the game (Kotaku says that the original version was "kind of terrible") and will add a 3D overworld to the distinctly light-hearted role-playing game and that once he's finished, it'll be free. "I appreciate your support, and I encourage you all to refund your Steam game (even if you enjoyed the game), and download the new version when it becomes available on GameJolt." he writes. So there you have it: a game developer admits in earnest that he or she released an unfinished product and wants to make it up to the fans immediately. Refreshing, no?

Via: Kotaku

Source: Steam



Read the full article here by Engadget

Monday 25 January 2016

Docker buys Unikernel Systems

Docker, the Californian technology company behind the open source virtual container platform, has announced the acquisition of Unikernel Systems, a Cambridge-based startup. Unikernel Systems has a rather unique product that Docker plans to integrate into its own tools and services as it views a future beyond just containers. The integration of Unikernels into Docker would allow developers to build even more efficient microservice architectures. What makes Unikernels interesting is that it brings fine tuned specialization to virtualization by not just duplicating and isolating full OS kernels, but by minimizing the functionality to a bare minimum to run a specific application.… [Continue Reading]

Read the full article here by BetaNews

The Trouble With Intel’s Management Engine

Something is rotten in the state of Intel. Over the last decade or so, Intel has dedicated enormous efforts to the security of their microcontrollers. For Intel, this is the only logical thing to do; you really, really want to know if the firmware running on a device is the firmware you want to run on a device. Anything else, and the device is wide open to balaclava-wearing hackers.

Intel’s first efforts toward cryptographically signed firmware began in the early 2000s with embedded security subsystems using Trusted Platform Modules (TPM). These small crypto chips, along with the BIOS, form the …read more



Read the full article here by Hackaday

In Case of Emergency

I keep first aid kits in those emergency lockers. Sure, it's expensive to have them installed in the wall, but at least for those ones there's no need to pay extra for safety glass.

Read the full article here by xkcd.com

Saturday 23 January 2016

Carte Graphique Sapphire Radeon R9 270X Vapor-X 2G GDDR5 OC Lite 99.95€ @ Ldlc

99.95€
169.96€ (-42%)
Livraison : 2.95€
Code promo : NEWS
Jouez sans aucune limite grâce à cette carte graphique vraiment innovante. Avec DirectX 11.2, support Open GL 4.3 et Dolby TrueHD, la très haute résolution n'aura jamais été aussi accessible !

Caractéristiques :

Chipset graphique : AMD Radeon R9 270X
Fréquence du chipset : 1050 MHz
Fréquence boostée : 1100 MHz
Overclockée : Oui
Nombre de GPU : 1
Bus : PCI Express 3.0 16x
Taille mémoire vidéo : 2048 Mo
Interface mémoire : 256 bit(s)
Fréquence mémoire vidéo : 1450 MHz
Type de mémoire : GDDR5
Connectique : 1 x HDMI Femelle, 2 x DVI Femelle, 1 x DisplayPort Femelle, 2 x PCI Express 6 broches


Read the full article here by Dealabs.com : Tous les deals HOT

Wednesday 20 January 2016

Four short links: 20 January 2016

Experience with Rules-Based Programming for Distributed Concurrent Fault-Tolerant Code (A Paper a Day) — To demonstrate applicability outside of the RAMCloud system, the team also re-wrote the Hadoop Map-Reduce job scheduler (which uses a traditional event-based state machine approach) using …

Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

Monday 18 January 2016

Firefox pourra bientôt convertir les vidéos Flash en HTML5

Ce bon vieux Flash Player nous en aura fait voir, tout d'abord incontournable, puis jugé trop gourmand, jusqu'à devenir mal aimé à cause de failles qui tardaient à être corrigées. Le logiciel a la vie dure, même si le HTML5 parvient - avec succès - à le rendre obsolète... [Tout lire]

Read the full article here by Le comptoir du hardware

Sunday 17 January 2016

ISIS has its own secure messaging system -- this illustrates the futility of communication surveillance

Moves by governments to monitor web-based communication with a view to thwarting terrorism is utterly, utterly futile. Just like the NSA's dragnet-style dredging for intelligence, mass communication surveillance does little to home in on target -- the ones that government should be concerned about are the very ones who know who to evade detection. This is something that was perfectly demonstrated this week when it became apparent that ISIS has developed its own secure messaging system. No longer reliant on the likes of WhatsApp, ISIS is using a custom-built, Android-based encrypted messaging tool that is incredibly difficult -- if not… [Continue Reading]

Read the full article here by BetaNews

Google's Creepy Plan To Kill The Password

So, by a show of hands, how many of you out there would be okay with Google's current plan to kill the password? Anyone? Abacus would lock or unlock devices and apps based on a cumulative "trust score" -- as your phone continually monitors and recognizes your location patterns, voice and speech patterns, how you walk and type, and your face (among other things). Comments

Read the full article here by [H]ardOCP News/Article Feed

Linkpack Organizes Bookmarks Into Folders, Makes Sharing Dead Simple

iPhone/Chrome: We certainly don’t have a shortage of bookmarking services to choose from, but while the likes of Pocket and Instapaper are great in their own right, they’re not perfect for everyone. Linkpack bridges the gap between the two, at least a little bit.

Read more...



Read the full article here by Lifehacker

Friday 15 January 2016

La flemme de déléguer



Read the full article here by CommitStrip

Xiaomi's new Redmi Note 3 with Qualcomm Snapdragon processor will launch in India

Xiaomi announced Redmi Note 3 last year, in late-November, alongside the Mi Pad 2 slate. The affordable phablet, which sports a metal body and fingerprint sensor, arrived with a MediaTek Helio X10 processor, but the company is now adding a Qualcomm Snapdragon version into the mix. The new Redmi Note 3 version is powered by a mid-range, 64-bit, 1.8 GHz hexa-core Snapdragon 650 processor, which offers Adreno 510 graphics, support for UltraHD video and VoLTE, and an integrated X8 modem which enables higher transfer speeds over cellular networks. This model is likely introduced for international markets. The X8 modem is… [Continue Reading]

Read the full article here by BetaNews

Thursday 14 January 2016

Google Chrome Users Will Push Content to Chromecast Without Dedicated Extension

The Chromium developers are working on a solution that allows users to cast media content to the Chromecast without the need to have the Google Cast extension.

Read more

read more



Read the full article here by Tux Machines

Netflix Executive Admits a VPN-Blocking Policy Might Be Impossible To Enforce



Read the full article here by Slashdot

Google's developing spatial audio for Cardboard

Google's Cardboard division, which oversees development of the VR platform and its associated software, announced on Wednesday that it is updating the platform's SDK to allow developers to integrate "spatial audio" into their apps. Spatial audio -- aka 3D or binaural audio -- is designed to shift between channels depending on the user's head position to create more immersive audio. Cardboard's new SDK will not only allow devs to determine the relative position of sounds but also emulate their material and size -- all while doing so on a smartphone's CPU.

[Image Credit: Getty]

Source: Google Dev Blog



Read the full article here by Engadget

Intel: Integrated Graphics Are Catching Up With Discrete GPUs

Did you hear that guys? We can all ditch our SLI and Crossfire setups in favor of integrated graphics! Think of all the money we'll be saving! The top-level graphics processors integrated in Intel's chips, called Iris and Iris Pro, can outperform 80 percent of discrete graphics chips, Bryant said. "We have improved graphics 30 times what they were five years ago," Bryant said during a speech at a J.P. Morgan forum last week at CES. Comments

Read the full article here by [H]ardOCP News/Article Feed

Google actually seems to have a plan for VR

It ranges from cheap VR rigs to manipulating the atom.

Read the full article here by Ars Technica

Metal Gear Online PC beta already taken offline



Read the full article here by Polygon - Full

Wednesday 13 January 2016

Four short links: 13 January 2015

Object Lessons — Bogost and Schaberg edit a series about the hidden lives of ordinary things, from advocates to attendants, heresies to shares. For anyone who cares about products. A Data Programming CS1 Course (PDF) — We have found that …

Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies

Tuesday 5 January 2016

NVIDIA's Drive PX 2 is a water-cooled supercomputer for cars

NVIDIA's sequel to the Drive PX in-car computer it debuted last year is a liquid-cooled beast with the power equivalent to 150 MacBook Pros. Say hello to the Drive PX 2. It sports 12 CPU cores and has 8 teraflops worth of processing power -- similar to about 6 Titan X video cards. NVIDIA also claims that it can achieve 24 trillion operations a second, which should make it particularly useful for powering self-driving cars. Jen-Hsun Huang, NVIDIA's CEO, says it's the first supercomputer made for cars -- it's certainly the first we've seen with such insane specs.

So why the need for all that horsepower? Huang says it's all necessary for building capable self-driving cars. In particular, deep learning is going to be essential. It doesn't matter how well we program a car's maps and sensors -- it also needs to know how to deal with changes on the fly, like when a child jumps out on the road. Deep learning will allow self-driving cars to train themselves over time for all sorts of unexpected scenarios.

"We aren't realize the full potential of our vision unless we can solve city driving," Huang said. "Bikers are in the same road you are... People are sometimes following the rules and most times not... It's very chaotic and very hard."

With the Drive PX2, NVIDIA is doubling-down on the vision it had last year: Instead of just enabling high-end PC gaming, NVIDIA's GPUs can also be used to perform the crazy levels of computation necessary for self-driving cars.

NVIDIA also announced DIGITS, a deep learning platform that it's already testing with its own self-driving cars. It's basically a way for self-driving cars to take everything their learn and share it with a cloud-based network, which can then be sent to other cars, DIGITS is meant to make life easier for car companies as they start testing autonomous driving. Huang assured us that car makers will still own their own deep neural networks -- it's basically just getting the process started.

DIGITS helped NVIDIA produce its own deep neural network, dubbed Drivenet. It features nine "inception layers," which Huang described as nine separate neural networks embedded with in each other. Running information through the network just once takes 40 billion operations -- so yah, there's a lot of computing power behind it.

Drivenet is able to identify five different classes of objects, including pedestrians and motorcyclists (you can see how they're color coded above). That sort of recognition is going to be particularly important for autonomous driving. Huang noted that Audi used Drivenet to analyze visual data taken from a snowstorm, and after just one night they were able to detect data that the human eye can't see.

Ultimately, all the computing power in the world doesn't matter if nobody actually adopts your technology. Huang revealed that Volvo is the first company to adopt the PX2 officially, which is a decent start. But come next CES, NVIDIA will need more than just new hardware: It'll need to prove that it can actually land plenty of willing customers.

Roberto Baldwin contributed to this report.



Read the full article here by Engadget

Friday 1 January 2016

Four short links: 1 January 2015

Is Caffeine a Cognitive Enhancer? (PDF) — Two general mechanisms may account for most of the observed effects of caffeine on performance: (1) an indirect, non specific ‘arousal’ or ‘processing resources’ factor, presumably explaining why the effects of caffeine are …

Read the full article here by O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies