Sunday, March 6, 2016

IT News Head Lines (HardOCP) 07/03/2016





Scientists To Drill At Site Of Asteroid Impact That Killed Dinosaurs
It would be ironic if we inadvertently dug up a deadly ancient virus in the process and made ourselves extinct.

Scientists will try to sink a diamond-tipped bit into the heart of Chicxulub crater—the buried remnant of the asteroid impact 66 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, along with most other life on the planet. They hope that the retrieved rock cores will contain clues to how life came back in the wake of the cataclysm, and whether the crater itself could have been a home for novel microbial life.

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Teen Charged For Stealing Nude Photo From Teacher's Phone
The kid is obviously in the wrong here, but why are people dumb enough to leave things like nudes unsecured on something that is so easily accessible by others? She didn't even use a lock screen?

On February 18, Arthur had left her phone on her classroom desk when she went to go monitor the halls. She taught mechatronics -- mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and computer programming. She came back after a few minutes, but that was all it took for a 16-year-old student to allegedly look at the pictures on her phone, find one that showed her partially unclothed, photograph it and post that image online.

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What One Year Of Space Travel Does To The Human Body
Everyone is concerned about how being in space affects your health, but I'm over here worrying about how fast the Internet is on the ISS.

Without the forces of gravity to help circulate air inside the orbital laboratory, the carbon dioxide its residents exhale can form an invisible cloud around their head, which can lead to headaches. In weightlessness, the fluids in the human body float upward and clog the sinuses, making astronauts' heads feel congested and their faces appear puffy. Their skeletons become useless; bones don't need to support muscles in microgravity, so they start losing minerals and regenerating cells at a slower pace.

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Microsoft DirectX 12 Video
Okay, so which parts of this video aren't a marketing stunt? I am pretty sure that DirectX 11 can give me yellow lighting, too...



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How To Politely Ask People To Get Off Their Phones
Does it actually bother you when someone checks their phone during a social event? Or are people taking the wrong things personally?

You're with a small group of friends at a nice restaurant. Everyone is enjoying the food and conversation when someone decides to take out his phone — not for an urgent call, but to check email, Instagram and Facebook. Maybe you've witnessed this behavior and found it unsettling. What do you do? Do you sit idly by, thinking disparaging thoughts? Or do you call out the offender?

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Converting Carbon Dioxide Into Batteries
Scientists have figured out one solution to dealing with CO2: converting the gas into a material that may be used to develop lithium-ion batteries that power electric cars and electronics.



The team adapted a solar-powered process that converts carbon dioxide into carbon so that it produces carbon nanotubes and demonstrated that the nanotubes can be incorporated into both lithium-ion batteries like those used in electric vehicles and electronic devices and low-cost sodium-ion batteries under development for large-scale applications, such as the electric grid.


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Galaxy S7 Edge Teardown
Chipworks provides a look inside Samsung's latest smartphone. While they didn't photograph every part, there are some good close-ups of noteworthy components like the camera's OIS system and Snapdragon chip.

So what is new with the S7's camera system? Dual pixel phase detection autofocus (PDAF) technology! We first saw this concept in use in 2013 in a much different imaging application: the Canon EOS 70D DSLR. Canon committed 80% of the 70D's active pixel array to dual pixel CMOS AF functionality. A similar concept has now been adapted to the world of small-pixel mobile camera chips, where 100% of the 12 MP active pixel array is committed to both sensing

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Quantum Computer Could Mean End Of Encryption
Researchers have built a computer that can tackle a fundamental challenge of cracking present-day encryption schemes: factoring large numbers.

The computer uses laser pulses to carry out Shor's algorithm on each atom, to correctly factor the number 15. The system is designed in such a way that more atoms and lasers can be added to build a bigger and faster quantum computer, able to factor much larger numbers. The results, they say, represent the first scalable implementation of Shor's algorithm.

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Is Amazon Prime Really Worth it?
I would imagine that Prime is totally worth it if Amazon is your primary go-to retailer, especially now that perks for non-members are steadily changing for the worse or dissolving altogether.

...it has since expanded quite a bit into a slew of varied services that run the gamut from books to movies to, yes, additional shipping perks. This gradually increasing range of services was precipitated by a price hike in 2014 from $79 per year to $99 per year. In response to this adjustment, many Prime users really started to wonder if it was worth keeping their membership. Now that question is even more difficult to answer, because Amazon Prime's value hinges not only on how many items you order, but also how much use you get out of its other services. Here we'll take a look at everything that Amazon Prime encompasses in 2016 and try to figure out if it's really worth it.

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AMD, Razer Want To Standardize External GPUs
Following the announcement of the Razer Core earlier this year, AMD is throwing their hat into the ring by announcing their interest in developing a standardized external GPU interface.

Gamers today mostly have to choose between ultraportable systems with lower-end graphics or larger desktop-replacement class hardware. There are a handful of 15-inch laptops that attempt to straddle this divide, but reviews show that they tend to run hot and noisy — an unavoidable consequence of their configurations. AMD has a plan to solve this problem through the use of a standardized external GPU interface that would allow customers to attach a desktop graphics card via an external chassis.

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Portable And Cost-Effective Anti-Drone Launcher
This looks like something out of an FPS game, but unfortunately, no explosions are involved.



The Northumberland firm's launcher looks like something out of a computer game, complete with a targeting computer and holographic scope to predict a drone's flight, which the company says will help law enforcement take out potentially dangerous targets. The launcher weighs 10kg, uses compressed air and can fire almost silently at drones up to 100m away, reloading in 8 seconds, according to the company.

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DisplayPort 1.4 Can Drive 8K Monitors Over USB Type-C
I believe that HDMI 2.0, in comparison, tops out at 4K 60Hz. It remains to be seen just how well DSC's compression is and whether image quality differences are truly imperceptible, however.

The new standard drives higher-resolution displays with better color support using Display Stream Compression (DSC), a "visually lossless" form of compression that VESA says "enables up to [a] 3:1 compression ratio." This data compression, among other things, allows DisplayPort 1.4 to drive 60Hz 8K displays and 120Hz 4K displays with HDR "deep color" over both DisplayPort and USB Type-C cables (note that DisplayPort 1.4 doesn't add USB Type-C support; the two have been compatible from the beginning thanks to the USB Alternate Mode spec). USB Type-C cables can provide a USB 3.0 data connection, too.


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Samsung Shipping 15TB SSD For Enterprises
I could eliminate so much weight and cable jungle from my 25TB system with just two of these.

The Samsung PM1633a SSDs utilize the company's third-generation 256 Gb TLC 3D V-NAND memory chips. The 256 Gb dies are stacked in 16 layers and form a single 512 GB package. Samsung uses 32 of such packages to build its most spacious SSD, leaving around 1 TB of NAND for overprovisioning. The giant drive also features 16 GB of DRAM cache to ensure smooth performance. The Samsung PM1633a 15.36 TB will be the second product to use the company's 48-layer TLC 3D V-NAND after the Portable SSD T3. Eventually, Samsung will further expand usage of this flash memory.


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Fractal Design Define S Window Mid-Tower Chassis
Fractal Design is known for utilitarian designs that make installing PC hardware easier and keeping it cooler. Its new Define S chassis makes claims enthusiasts will want to see come to true, namely a "layout, providing a perfectly straight airflow path to the CPU heatsink for air cooling set ups or extensive radiator mounting possibilities for water cooling set ups."

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Available Tags:Microsoft , Galaxy , Amazon , USB , Samsung , SSD

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