Clever Site Lets you Compare Phone Sizes Visually
Choosing between the hundreds of phone models can be difficult. Fortunately there is a new site that lets you compare them visually. The appropriately named Phone-Size.com has a database of all the latest phones, and many older models too.
Choose your phones from the dropwdown and watch as they’re splashed up on the screen, splayed next to each other. You can even toggle the screen between the default desktops of the phone and an image of candy, which gives you a subjective example of which screens have higher resolutions.
Below the images are a few vital stats. ...
Kepler has Almost Doubled Number of Discovered Planets
This Thursday, NASA announced that Kepler had discovered 26 more exoplanets scattered across 11 systems. Up until this report, only 34 planets had been discovered. This is big, big space news that bodes very well for an Earth 2 being out there, probably close by.
Finding planets is incredibly hard, as I’ve mentioned before. Kepler has made it a bit easier, but it is still darn difficult. So Kepler discovering so many planets leads to one conclusion: they’re everywhere.
As little as a few decades ago, scientists debated whether there were even any other planets around other stars...
Microsoft Working on Kinect Enabled Laptops
Microsoft apparently wants Kinect enabled hardware everywhere. A source close to The Daily, the iPad only magazine created by a collaboration between Apple and NewsCorp, told them that the company is trying to get Kinect sensors embedded in laptops, now.
Beyond the fact that the company is trying to get these things made, details are light. But you can expect that the sensors will be used less for grand hand gestures and more for facial tracking.
Right now, the prototypes "appear to be Asus netbooks running Windows 8," with their normal webcams replaced by a suite of Kinect sensor equipment....
Google Scores Contract to bring 27,000 Chromebooks to Schools
Score one for El Goog, who has managed to ink a deal with three states to bring the company’s cloud-based computers to the classroom. Soon, students in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina will be getting brand new laptops that pretty much only run a web browser.
Google believes that Chromebooks could be a game changer in education. Because of their design, it is much harder to infect a Chromebook with a virus than it is a normal Mac or Windows PC. And the account-based system insures that it doesn’t matter what laptop the students use, they will always...
Lasers Could Lead to Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough
The surface of the sun burns at a measly 10,000 degrees fahrenheit. On Wednesday, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory managed to produce a laser beam burning at 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature 200 times greater than the temperature of the sun’s surface.
The scientists said that the laser should be capable of producing a beam that is 3.6 million degrees, which, while still only a fraction the temperature of the sun’s core (which burns at ~28 million fahrenheit), is still quite impressive.
What’s the point of such a hot laser, you might ask? ...
North Korea Calls Mobile Phone Users 'War Criminals'
In yet another example of the country’s complete and total disconnect from reality, the glorious leaders that be, now Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il’s son, have decided that using a mobile phone during the nation’s 100 day mourning period is a war crime.
Apparently, food supplies have been dwindling in the country, and people have been trying to defect across the border to China or South Korea, where more than 23,000 former citizens of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have recently settled.
In an attempt to cease the abandonment of the ship that is Kim-Jong-il’s regime, the Worker’s Party has issued...
Graphics on $25 Raspberry Pi Outperforms iPhone 4S
You think that smartphone in your pocket is the end-all, be-all of graphics performance? The Raspberry Pi, a cheap, $25.00-$35.00 computer designed for tinkerers and anyone who needs a computer the size of a pack of playing cards, soundly trumps it.
The Pi boasts middling specs, with a 700Mhz processor and only 256 Mib of RAM, but the one place it does excell is in video. The Raspberry Pi is able to output full 1080P video through its HDMI port. And in additon to that, apparently, the tiny computer also boasts a killer graphics card.
Raspberry Pi...
Google Wants to Speed up the Web with Revised Protocols
Google, in its constant quest of speeding up the internet so they can deliver more ads, wants to revise the TCP protocol.
The TCP protocol, created in the 1970’s by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, is the backbone of the internet. Any time you load a website, or a website loads additional content, it relies on the TCP protocol to get it. But there’s a problem: the protocol hasn’t seen too many revisions since its initial release. As fast as the internet seems, there is some serious inefficiency. That is what Google wants to address.
Google has proposed...
Next XBox Will Sport Blu-Ray, Kinect 2
The rumor mill is turning rapidly, churning out a few choice details of the still unannounced XBox 720 (1080?), some good, some absolutely terrifying.
The first rumor probably goes without saying. According to Kotaku industry sources. This isn’t a surprise, considering that Sony’s Blu-Ray decimated the HD-DVD format, and Microsoft’s XBox has been at a disadvantage for not having one ever since. Oh, and there will be a Kinect 2. Which won’t come as a surprise to anyone.
What is a surprise, and, frankly, quite terrifying, is that some sources mentioned the 720 featuring an anti-used game technology,...
Steve Jobs Wanted Lytro's Plenoptic Camera for next iPhone
Lytro’s plenoptic camera technology might find a new home in smartphones, if the company has anything to do with it. The technology, which lets you focus a picture after the shot has already been taken (thanks to some genius optics and clever software) was at least considered by Steve Jobs for the next iPhone, and now the company has announced that it is open to licensing it.
Then head-honcho Steve apparently met several times with the company’s CEO Ren Ng, according to a new nonfiction book, “Inside Apple.”
The company's CEO, Ren Ng, a brilliant computer scientist with a PhD from...
Man Ports Original Command and Conquer to HTML5
If you have any doubt that technology has come a hell of a long ways since the early ‘90s, look no further than this HTML5 version of ‘Command and Conquer.’ Originally released in 1995, Command and Conquer pretty much revolutionized real time strategy games with its mixture of polish, balance and multiplayer.
To duplicate it with modern, cross-platform web technologies, however, only took one web developer three and a half weeks.
The build is still in the alpha stage, with a .3 designator, so expect some bugs and a lack of a few features. But as far as tech demos...
Decrypting Hard Drives not Self Incriminating, Says Judge
Decrypting a seized hard drive for police doesn’t count as incriminating yourself, says Colorado U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn. The defendant in the case, accused of bank fraud, claimed that decrypting her hard drive for the police constituted a violation of the Fifth Ammendment.
But in Blackburn’s ruling, he states “I conclude that the Fifth Amendment is not implicated by requiring production of the unencrypted contents of the Toshiba Satellite M305 laptop computer.”
As you can imagine, civil rights groups have been paying attention to this case. Until now, there has never been a ruling on whether it violated the...
The Pirate Bay Claims Pirating Objects, Next Big Thing!
3D printers are the next big step for society, at least according to The Pirate Bay, perhaps the most notorious source of illegal content on the web.
The group, who spends as much time preaching against copyrights as it does actually hosting its absolutely terrifyingly complete archive of stolen goods, thinks that 3D printers will revolutionize the consumerist world, and posit an idealist view of the future:
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able...
Ex-Stanford Professors Starting Free Online College
Ever dreamed of getting a Stanford-level education for free, complete with tests, grades and certificates of completion? Well, soon your dream will be a reality.
The two professors behind that free online artificial intelligence class decided, seeing the success of their first pilot class, that they should develop an entire free curriculum.
Sebastian Thrun originally created his “intro to Artificial Intelligence” as a bit of an experiment. He partnered with Peter Norvig, author of the definitive text on artificial intelligence and created a series of Youtube videos with interactive quizzes. They quickly had over 160,000 people signed...
Lisa Harouni- A primer on 3D printing
3D printing may be all the rage these days, but the technology is so general that it can be hard to find a specific use for it. In an absolutely wonderful TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk, Lisa Harouni gives a brief rundown of what the technology is, why it is important, and how it will likely shape the future.
If you are the least bit interested in technology, or even just have a passing interest in making stuff, you need to do yourself a favor and watch this video. Harouni does a good job of showing what makes 3d...
