| Nevada Approves Self-Driving Cars for Use Posted: 17 Feb 2012 02:49 PM PST  Nevada drivers might be seeing a new sight on the roads in the coming months. That state is the first to officially approve self-driving cars to use public roads. This is a necessary first step for Google's autonomous vehicles to move forward, but other firms are likely to follow suit. Nevada worked with Google, as well as various industry groups and law enforcement to develop the regulations that will govern self-driving cars.
For the time being, all self-driving cars will have a bright red license plate so drivers will be able to identify them. If the vehicles are even approved for public use in the state, those cars will have a green plate. There will be special licensing procedures for companies to go through before self-driving cars can be used in the state. Clearly, everyone is being very cautious, but Google isn't worried. In 2010 it announced that its self-driving cars had driven 160,000 miles without incident. Google's driverless cars make use of range-finding and image recognition technology to stay on the road. Humans will still need to be present in the driver's seat for now, but who knows how long that will last? Napping on the way to work, anyone? |
| UK Student Gets 8 Months in Prison for Hacking Facebook Posted: 17 Feb 2012 02:30 PM PST  A UK court handed down an 8 month sentence this week to a British student convicted of infiltrating Facebook's internal network. 26 year-old Glenn Mangham hacked into Facebook's servers from his home in York, England last Spring. Facebook, believing it was the victim of industrial espionage, called in the feds. It didn't take long to track down Mangham.
Prosecutors have called this attack both "extensive and flagrant." Facebook told the court that it had to spend $200,000 dealing with the matter. Though, that seems to be what Mangham wanted. It was his claim that he was only attempting to show Facebook that its system was insecure, as he had done in the past with Yahoo. The court was having none of it, ruling that his actions were malicious in nature. No data was taken in the attacks, and Facebook has since sealed the hole that Mangham exploited. What's your take on this? Was Mangham a helpful hacker, or a cyber-thug out for himself? |
| Court Overturns Conviction of Programmer on Appeal Posted: 17 Feb 2012 02:17 PM PST  A federal appeals court has overturned the 2010 conviction of former Goldman Sachs programmer Sergey Aleynikov, ordering the trial court to enter a judgement of acquittal. Aleynikov was previously convicted under the Economic Espionage Act of stealing source code from projects he had worked on at Goldman Sachs. It seems technology outstripped the law once again in this case.
The issue in the case was the wording of the 15 year-old Economic Espionage Act, which demands harsh penalties for anyone that steals a "product produced for interstate commerce." Mr. Aleynikov worked on building high-volume trading platforms for Goldman Sachs, which were never used for public commerce. Aleynikov uploaded source code from his system to an off-shore server prior to leaving Goldman for another, higher-paying job. He was arrested in short order. The government held up the prosecution of Aleynikov as proof that it was fighting the war against high-tech crime. As the judgement today proves, the feds just don't have the criminal statutes to deal with today's complicated business technology. If Aleynikov had been tried under different, less severe statutes, the conviction might have stuck. |
| Open Linux-Based Spark Tablet Now Available For Preorder Posted: 17 Feb 2012 10:59 AM PST Getting sick of walled gardens, locked bootloaders and over-managed app stores? (We're looking at you, Amazon.) We've got some good news. A few weeks back we shined a spotlight on the Spark tablet, a Linux-based open source tablet being cobbled together by KDE developer Aaron Seigo. Yesterday, it went up for preorder. Time to whip out those credit cards, Linux lovers! Oh, wait, never mind -- the site doesn't force you to whip out the plastic to land a spot in line for a Spark. 
That's probably because the final price point for the tablet hasn't officially been set yet, although Seigo is striving for a €200 (roughly $260) sticker cost. A quick refresher on the Spark tablet: it packs in a 1GHz ARM processor with a Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB of memory, a 4GB hard drive (expandable via SD card slot) and an 800x480 7-inch display. The tablet runs on Mer Linux -- a fork of MeeGo -- with the KDE Plasma Active UI. Check out the "Hardware" tab of the MakePlayLive.com website for a full set of specs. MakePlayLive is also the place to call dibs on a Spark tablet of your own. Aaron Seigo expects the Spark to start shipping in May; he's been pretty active about keeping the community up-to-date on Spark information on his blog. Keep checking in over there if you're intrigued by the project. |
| AMD Reportedly Prepping 3 New Bulldozer CPUs Posted: 17 Feb 2012 10:30 AM PST Few things set geeky hearts a-flutter more than the release of new CPUs. Valentine's Day may be a few days gone, but a leaked slide shows that AMD may try to woo system builders with the release of three new Bulldozer processors by the end of the next financial quarter. 
The slide comes courtesy of the Turkish website DonanimHaber, and as you can see, each of the planned FX CPUs have a few things in common -- namely, a 95W TDP and a 4.1 GHz Turbo clock rate. No many how many cores you like, it looks like AMD will have you covered: the 3.9 GHz FX-4150 rocks 4 cores and a 12MB cache, while the 3.5GHz FX-6120 sports six cores and a 14MB cache. The cream of the crop (assuming the slide is legit) is the octa-core AMD FX-8140, which boasts a 3.2GHz base clock speed and a 16MB cache. Pricing? Release dates? Who knows? It's a leaked slide. That being said, do any of these chips get you drooling? Image credit: DonanimHaber.com |
| Nvidia Struggling With Poor 28nm Yields Posted: 17 Feb 2012 10:07 AM PST  AMD's already released high-end and low-end versions of its new Radeon 7000 lineup, but we've barely heard anything about Nvidia's upcoming Kepler GPUs. When will the first 6xx products launch? Heck, what season will Kepler launch in? Your guess is as good as ours. (At least there are spec rumors floating around.) We know one thing for certain, however; the yields of the 28nm wafers used to make Kepler GPUs have been horrible, and it's going to cost Nvidia big in the upcoming months.
"We are ramping our Kepler generation very hard, and we could use more wafers. The gross margin decline is contributed almost entirely to the yields of 28nm being lower than expected," Xbit Labs reports Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang as saying during a conference call. "That is, I guess, unsurprising at this point." Arg, hopefully we're not going to see the ghost of delayed Fermi architectures past. Low yields aren't the only thing dropping Nvidia's gross margins, though; Huang says the ongoing fallout from Thailand's floods are also hammering the company. On the bright side, Huang told analysts that Kepler "…is probably the best GPU we have ever built and the performance and power efficiency is surely the best that we have ever created." And once Kepler GPUs do start hitting the shelves, expect them to do so in droves; Huang said that the company has signed contracts to provide Nvidia 6xx GPUs to "virtually every single PC OEM in the world." |
| Civilization V Expansion to Add Gods, Kings, Possibly God Kings Posted: 17 Feb 2012 10:03 AM PST  Firaxis may have forced the world to do a collective spit-take when it took up the reins on a new strategy-focused XCOM, but that doesn't mean Civilization's been overrun by aliens – figuratively speaking. (That is, however, precisely what it means in the literal sense.) The god king of historical turn-based tactics recently announced Civilization V: Gods and Kings, which will focus on religion and espionage, as well as a smattering of other goodies.
Foremost among the new features is "fully customizable" religion, which uses a "Faith" resource en route to world domination – or, if you're us, making people kneel before the holy trifecta that is Count Chocula, Franken Berry, and Boo Berry. Also on the docket: upgraded combat, religious and mercanitle city-states, and three new scenarios, one of which will take place in "a Victorian science-fiction setting." Steampunk Civ? And here we thought Firaxis would never reply to our politely worded ransom letters. New spy units, meanwhile, will be capable of "establishing embassies with your rival civilizations, surveying foreign cities, stealing advanced techs, and garnering influence with city-states," among other things – which presumably include dressing snazzily and having a plan to either kill or sleep with everyone in a room. It all totals out to 27 new units, 13 new buildings, 9 new wonders, and 9 new civilizations, with a release right around the chronological corner in "late spring." |
| AMD Catalyst 12.2 Pre-Certified Driver Rolls into View Posted: 17 Feb 2012 08:23 AM PST  If you want to get a jump start on upgrading the drivers for your AMD Radeon videocard, you can head over to AMD and grab the Catalyst 12.2 pre-certified drivers today. AMD says these drivers are identical to the upcoming certified release, just without Microsoft's official blessing, which will come later this month or in early March. In other words, this isn't beta code, the drivers just haven't gone through the certification process yet.
In any event, Catalyst 12.2 adds support for Radon HD 7900 and 7700 Series graphics cards in Windows 7 and Vista. The new drivers also add super sampling anti-aliasing and adaptive anti-aliasing through the AMD Catalyst Control Center for DirectX 10 and 11 applications, as well as bring about several enhancements to AMD's Eyefinity 2.1 technology. You can read the release notes here and grab the new drivers here. |
| Samsung Tries to Score Style Points by Adding Bling to Memory Cards Posted: 17 Feb 2012 08:07 AM PST  Samsung's new line of SD and microSD memory cards look so good it's a shame they'll spend most of their time hiding inside your digital camera or other portable device. Regardless of the fact that memory cards are destined to spend most of their days out of sight, Samsung decided to add a bit of bling to seven new models of SD and microSD cards as part of either its High Speed Series or Plus Extreme Speed Series.
The redesigned cards make a fashion statement with a brushed metal design. They're also rugged and have been designed to be waterproof, shockproof, and magnet proof. According to Samsung, each model is able to survive up to 24 hours in water, withstand the force of a 1.6 ton vehicle, and resist up to 10,000 gauss. Samsung's High Speed Series SD and microSD cards range in capacity from 2GB to 32GB and offer read and write speeds of up to 24MB/s and 13MB/s, respectively, depending on the model. The Plus Extreme cards are available in 8GB and 16GB capacities, all of which boast up to 24MB/s read and up to 21MB/s write speeds. |
| This week's hottest reviews on TechRadar Posted: 17 Feb 2012 08:06 AM PST 
This week we've reviewed Apple's new iBooks creation app for the Mac as well as a cracking pair of cameras and a cracking pair of graphics cards to boot. There's also a great phone for the US, the Motorola Droid Razr Maxx which takes the existing Razr and adds a huge battery. Here's our full list of this week's reviews from the site. Apple iBooks Author Amazon's Kindle, Barnes and Noble's Nook, and even Apple's iBooks have been working on moving us away from reading physical books and embracing the digital revolution. But until now, there was very little to convince us how good an idea this could be, since the digital versions looked very much like their real-world counterparts, right down to the page turning effect. But this is what Apple is trying to change with its new content creation app, iBooks Author. Its aim is to revolutionise modern textbooks by bringing interactivity to the learning experience. Fuji X-S1 Always liked the idea of an all-in-one camera with a massive zoom capability, but hated the often all too-plastic feel? Fuji's X-S1 may, nay will, cause you to re-evaluate the humble bridge camera. Whereas Fuji has previously applied an 'X' - its signifier of a premium camera - to the Leica-like FinePix X10, for the first time it gives a superzoom that same distinction. This means that the new 26x optical zoom Fuji X-S1 figuratively sits above the existing Fuji HS20 and HS30 models, even though the latter boast 30x zoom (maximum 720mm equivalent telephoto setting in 35mm terms). AMD Radeon HD7770 AMD showed its hand first in this year's GPU arms race with Nvidia by turning it into last year's arms race. While Nvidia has kept shtum about its upcoming new 'Kepler' architecture and looks to do so until spring, AMD stole the march and released the first of its new 7-series cards, the AMD HD 7970, a few days before Christmas 2011. That sure was odd timing, but it taught us a lot about AMD's new Southern Islands architecture, specifically the 'Tahiti' chip. The HD 7970's whopping £440 price made all those neat features all but irrelevant to the gaming masses though, so we're putting our hopes on this HD 7770 to deliver the best bits of the new AMD architecture for a more palatable price. Canon G1 X The new Canon PowerShot G1 X - commonly shortened to Canon G1 X, or even Canon G1X - occupies the top spot in Canon's prestigious G-series compact camera range, offering a truly impressive array of high-end features. Launched at CES earlier this year, the new digital camera is aimed at advanced photographers in search of a high-quality, take-anywhere primary camera and/or backup for their DSLR. It may not be the compact system camera (CSC) that everyone was expecting to see from Canon, nor is it a direct replacement for the highly popular Canon PowerShot G12 - rather, it's something in between. Motorola Droid Razr Maxx The Motorola Droid Razr Maxx is the newest Razr to be released on the Verizon network. It takes everything you love about the Droid Razr, and fattens it up a bit with a whopping 3,300 mAh battery. That's a battery that's capable of 21 hours of talk time on a single charge. And while we're excited to finally disconnect from that required midday charge, the true power of a battery that size comes in the form of 7 hours of LTE browsing per charge. 
This week's other reviews Audio systems Edifier Luna5 encore dock review Camera accessories Kenro Flash Meter review Camera lenses Kenko Teleplus Pro 300 AF DGX 2x review Desktops Packard Bell OneTwo L review Graphics cards AMD Radeon HD 7750 review 
Mobile phones Samsung Galaxy W review Samsung Galaxy Xcover Extreme S5690 review Samsung Galaxy Y review Monitors Hanns.G HL229DPB review Scanners Reflecta iScan 3600 review Software Apple Final Cut Pro X 10.0.3 review Storage Samsung SSD 830 512GB (Notebook Kit) review Televisions Kogan LED55 review Tripods Velbon Ultra Rexi L review Velbon QHD-61Q review 
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