Are Steam machines upgradeable? I'm definitely going into pc gaming full on when all my exams are out the way.
Awesome read. Hope some of these benefits can filter through into home cinema too. Can't wait for the BFI IMAX in London to install these changes.
Good!
The USAF is working on a fly-like artificial compound eye that could one day be used for seekers on missiles as well as other targeting systems. This is hardly the first time the DoD has looked to mother nature for good ideas, but compound eye technology has the potential to greatly increase the field of view and fidelity over existing systems, all at a low cost.
The idea is fairly simple: instead of one large optical sensor with a limited field of view, the artificial compound eye concept works by creating a large array of equidistantly spaced smaller staring optical sensors, each pointing in a slightly different direction. The information from all those sensors is processed and digitally "stitched" together, resulting in a very high-resolution and wide field of view image. Think of a 360 degree real estate virtual tour but much higher resolution, in infrared and with live video as opposed to stills. This same type of technology is already being used on a macro scale by potential reality changing and highly Orwellian Wide Area Aerial Surveillance systems.
The artificial compound eye's (ACE) development is being closely watched by the Wide Field Of View Seeker Program, which aims to give missiles that use imaging infrared technology a much larger field of view than they have today. Once the technology is mature, it could allow advanced anti-ship missiles or Small Diameter Bombs IIs to persistently scan larger surface areas of the planet and with greater definition than current staring or gimbaled seekers systems offer. It could even continue to scan for new targets while also digitally tracking multiple targets at the same time.
Even America's super-maneuverable dog-fighting missile of choice, the AIM-9X Sidewinder, could have its gimbaled imaging infrared seeker replaced with an artificial compound eye seeker. This would not only simplify and possibly lower the cost of the missile, but it could also allow it to more rapidly lock on to targets while also making it much harder for enemy aircraft to break that lock using advanced countermeasures. Flares and BOL-IR expendables, or even directed energy countermeasures may blind one part of an artificial compound eye seeker head but not the entire thing, and with its wide field of view, even if it locked on to flares momentarily it could pick up its original target in its periphery and rapidly re-acquire it.
Even laser guided bombs, which use fairly antiquated form of guidance, could use the technology to be able to seek out a laser spot to home in on over a wider field of view. This could drastically expand such a munition's drop profile, thus allowing for aircrews to stay farther away from their targets and remain more unpredictable during their attack runs.
Even the F-35's amazing Distributed Aperture System (DAS) could be potentially enhanced, made more reliable and less expensive via using artificial compound eye technology. Additionally, it could make DAS-like systems even more accessible for vehicles like tanks, small boats and other vehicles in the future.
Currently, the USAF has allocated $100,000 from its Small Business Innovation Research/Small Business Technology Transfer Office for facilitating the development of this technology. $100,000 seems like a tiny amount of money in DoD terms for such a potentially game-changing concept but the Spectral Imaging Laboratory in conjunction with the Air Force Research Laboratory will use the funds to transition the technology over to military industry and to the private sector in an attempt to spur rapid development for multiple applications, both military and commercial.
A laptop bag can protect all of your electronics as you bump into other passengers on a crowded subway, or simply get caught in the rain. But the MTS Multi-Threat Shield briefcase goes much way further than thatit can also protect you from gunshots, knives, and even physical attacks when unfurled into a three-foot long shield.
You'll have to be OK with slinging a few extra pounds over your shoulder since the MTS weighs about eight pounds when empty. But it's able to absorb multiple impacts from handguns, shotguns, and pistol caliber sub-machine guns. It's even able to protect you from high-powered rifle attacks, although that requires the addition of optional armor plating which is going to add even more weight.
That extra protection and peace of mind doesn't come cheap, though. The MTS Multi-Threat Shield bag is a hefty $900. But if you work in a dangerous part of the world where the threat of attack is a genuine concern, this does seem like a less cumbersome alternative to wearing a bullet-proof vest, and is certainly cheaper than surrounding yourself in bodyguards.
I'll be keeping console as well when I make the move. Really looking forward to how Windows 10 looks to be combining every platform (phone/tablet/pc/console) into one experience in addition to crossbuy. And want to see what DirectX12 is going to add to the mix.
This Bullet-Proof Briefcase Unfolds Into a Personal Shield
http://forcetraining.com/products/mts
Also good for paranoid business men who fire a lot of people
The future of cables is finally coming and it's god damned fantastic. Welcome to USB Type-C.
By now you've no doubt heard how USB Type-C is the single omni-port on Apple's new MacBook. That and the ensuing outcry of dongle outrage. But don't let that sour you to the idea of USB Type-C because it really is fantasticat least if you have more than one.
Here is a quick, down-and-dirty primer of what makes USB Type-C so great:
-It's reversible, like Apple's Lightning cable. No more fumbling to plug it in the right way.
-It can transfer data at up to 10 Gbpsi.e. 10 times your crazy Google Fiber connection per second. (If you have Google Fiber, I hate you forever.)
-It can do video. Forget specialized video ports like DisplayPort and HDMI (eventually anyway) because Type-C can do that too. And in both directions. A single cable could carry video from phone to PC or PC to phone. Or to TVs, tablets, you name it.
-It can carry a crapload of power. Depending on the wall-wart you plug your Type-C cable into, it can deliver up to 100w of power. That's enough to charge full-size laptops, not just ones with underpowered processors.
-Like all USBs, Type-C is an open standard. It won't be exclusive to any one company or line of gadgets.
-Type-C is backwards-compatible. You can use with the old ports that are already all around you (if you get an adapter).
-It's tiny. Small enough to make laptops thinner and work its way into phones and tablets.
A USB Type-C port next to USB Type-A ports on the new Chromebook Pixel
It's that last point that's really exciting. Imagine a future where your unruly cable drawer can be condensed down into just a couple of USB Type-C cables. You'll want more than one, of course, but the very same cable could (and almost certainly will) someday charge your phone, your laptop, charge your phone from your laptop, and connect your PC to your external monitor. As someone who's perpetually drowning in a sea of proprietary cables for about a bazillion separate gadgets, I've never been so excited about a port.
That future's still a ways off though. USB Type-C devices have only just started to ship. The new Chromebook Pixel is the first I've seen in person, and so far other announcements have mostly been limited to the new MacBook and a few other randoms.
Of course the change comes with its downsides. It looks like USB Type-C in the new MacBook spells the end of the truly wonderful MagSafe. And even if everyone was to put Type-C in everything starting tomorrow, we'd still have to deal with legacy ports that are all over the place. Fortunately Type-C is backwards compatible, but best case scenario is still a few years of adapter hell. If Type-C doesn't reach a tipping point like Type-A did, there's no guarantee that we'll ever even move past that stage.
But just imagine, a few years from now, going on vacation with a laptop, a phone, a tablet, and a single cable to charge them all. A single cable that's easy to replace at any corner store should it break or get lost. Just one cable for all the ports. It's a future that can't come soon enough.
If you dropped a little coin on some extra-fancy kitchen counter tops, the last thing you want to do is hack them to pieces with a knife while cutting meats and veggies. But who wants a boring old slab of timber to cut on when Etsy seller CuttingBoredom will make you a beautiful walnut, maple, cherry, or mahogany cutting board shaped like a classic NES (wink) cart?
Available in 9x10 or 12x13-inch sizes starting at $40, they're both large enough for most culinary tasks, but not so gigantic that they're impossible to store. And the grooved detailing isn't just for showit also serves as a place for juices to escape so that what you're slicing doesn't up being a soggy mess. What? You thought we'd make a stupid 'blow in cartridge' joke?
Do you remember doodling what your perfect car would look like when you were six years old? There's a good chance it looked exactly like this amphibious tank-treaded ATV that Hammacher Schlemmer is now selling for the princely sum of $300,000.
It's the kind of creation you'd expect an evil genius to use to escape their private island headquarters after it was overthrown by a top secret spy, but anyone with an obscene amount of disposable income can own one.
Powered by a pair of 48-volt electric motors the craft can maneuver on land using a pair of treaded tacks like a tank, but it's completely waterproof allowing it to drive straight off a beach into a lake or ocean. Unlike a submarine it can't dive to the bottom or leave the surface, but a submerged 360-degree acrylic dome provides unobstructed views of life under the water.
Two banks of 24-volt lithium batteries power the craft for an impressive 110 hours while on the water at speeds of up to six knots. And on land it can still be driven for an impressive eight full hours before needing a charge. Before you decide to pick one up for your daily commute, though, you'll want to keep in mind that these are about as far from street legal as you can get.
You indirectly use random numbers online every dayto establish secure connections, to encrypt data, perhaps even to satisfy your gambling problem. But their ubiquity belies the fact that they're actually incredibly difficult to find. This is the story of where they come from.
Random numbers crop up entirely un-randomly around us all the time. They're used in lottery draws. They get incorporated into scientific models to replicate the real world's chaotic systems. They've been used in experimental music. But perhaps most importantly, strings of random numbers are used to ensure your data's kept safe.
Picture the simplest case: you're logging into a secure, private service and it needs to be able to identify you. But it also needs to ensure that nobody could be impersonating you. So there, on the spot, it needs to be able to find a truly unique and unpredictable ID to assign to you. This is usually referred to as a noncea number that's only ever going to be used once. Elsewhere, encryption requires keys to encode and decode dataand a good key is obviously one that is impossible to guess.
Whether it's keys or nonces, the pressure is on to find a number that nobody, nowhere can guessand that means finding something truly random. Time to go hunting.
That's, like, so pseudo-random
A random number is one drawn from a set of possible valueswhether that's a binary zero or one, or one of however many balls happen to be in a Lotto drawwhere each result is equally likely. In the case of binary, that means you need an exactly 50-50 chance of getting a one or zero; in the case of the Lotto you need each ball to be as likely to be drawn as the other. If you're creating a string of numbers, like a noncegenerating one digit, then another, then anotherthat means that each number in the series must be statistically independent of the others, too. For the binary case, that means getting a one as your first number shouldn't in any way influence what the second will be.
You may think that the natural weapon in generating a sea of convincing random numbers would be the computer. After all, they're capable of performing billions of calculations every second and churning out a seemingly never-ending stream of numbers. But there's the rub: a computer is designed to follow instructions blindly, to take an input and produce an output. Even the smartest of computer has to have a nudge in the first instance, to set off its cascade of operations. If those operations are entirely software based, they won't end randomly.
In other words, not all random numbers are made equal.
Software that generates random numbers is like a person who's decided to flip a coin many, many times and write down a zero each time they get a head or a one each time they gets tails. Over time, they'll create a long list of digits that looks random. So, you might say, this is the perfect list of numbers to generate a random number. You ask this coin-flipper for strings of random digits from their list they respond by reading you chunks of numbers from the list, in the order that they appear.
The problem is that the list is already pre-determined. It's what experts call pseudorandom. If you were using these numbers for your secure ID and anybody knew about the list, you'd be ruined. Indeed, mathematician John von Neumann once said that "anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin." And Lord, we don't want to be sinners.
What we want is entropy, also known as chaos.
Sow the good seed
"Pseudorandom number generators cannot produce any more entropy than that of their initial configuration, the 'seed'," explains Bruno Sanguinetti from the Department of Applied Physics University of Geneva. "If you run the same pseudorandom number generator twice, you get the same numbers out."
With software unable to provide a truly random fix, scientists have had to look elsewhere. "For all applications where you need the generated numbers to be unpredictable, you need a physical random number generator to generate a good seed," Sanguinetti continues. But where can you find one of those, one that's truly unpredictable?
Actually, it turns out all around you, all the time. The real world is full of randomness, from the decay of radioactive atoms to the white noise you used to hear when your TV wasn't tuned to a station. But to complicate matters, not all physical processes are as random as each other. Take, for instance, the free service Random.org. It uses atmospheric noise, detected using a common radio receiver, for its seed. But, as the site itself points out, if you were to try and do the same with the noise in your office, you'd probably pick up the sound of computer fans which, as rotating devices, produce a very consistent and predictable sound. The noise you'd be measuring would be less random than atmospheric noise. To make the strongest random numbers requires using the least predictable physical phenomena.
Identifying the most random process to use has long been a thorny scientific and philosophic issue. Over the years, people have used ball-selecting machines, subtle variations in electric signals when valves were placed in magnetic fields, variations in temperature, and more. But all of these pale into insignificance compared to one source. "It is generally accepted now that in order to make random numbers one needs a quantum mechanical process," explains Ben Sussman, Program Leader of Quantum Photonic Sensing and Security at the National Research Council Canada. In an email to me, he explained exactly why:
Quantum mechanics is interesting because the outcome of certain measurements is truly random. Einstein was concerned that it's not just that we don't know what the next outcome will be in a quantum mechanical experiment, the outcome is unknowable in advance. This is the origin of his comment that "[God] does not play dice." We now understand that not only does He throw dice, but He throws it all the time. We can use this uncertainty as a resource for random numbers. Quantum measurements, therefore, are like quantum dice and they are useful because there is no algorithm that can predict the outcome of a throw, rendering the throw safe against prediction by an adversary.
Laser-guided chance
There are, of course, many opportunities to observe quantum unpredictability. The nuclear decay of radioactive sources, the signal produced at the base of a reverse-biased transistor, shot noise caused by electrical signals in circuits and all manner of other phenomena that often drive scientists crazy in their experiments prove to be useful for creating random numbers. Many of these processes are actually relatively slow thoughat least compared to the world's insatiable thirst for random numbers. Plus, the fact that we require such long strings of random numbers for encryption can overwhelm them. "Our increased use of secure information networks, ranging from online storage to high-bandwidth communications, means that we are constantly pushing the limits of what is technologically available," says Sussman. "Speed of random number generation is therefore one of the critical parameters, as our network speeds increase."
Enter the laser beam.
In the battle for speedier random number generation, scientists around the world are using photons to create random numbers. Techniques vary. At Peking University in China, researchers use small variations in the frequency at which photons are emitted from a laseritself a a result of quantum noiseto compare bursts of laser light and extract random numbers at up to 300 million per second.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany, split a laser beam in two and pass the two beams through a vacuum. In a perfect vacuum, they should be unaltered on exit but in actual fact some differences are introduced in the form of quantum noise, known as vacuum fluctuations. Sussman calls them "microscopic, quantum mechanical wiggles." These "wiggles" were extracted at the Max Planck Institute and used to generate 6.5 million random numbers per second.
And Sussman has been using vacuum fluctuations as a seed, too. He and his team have passed laser pulses lasting a few trillionths of a second through a vacuum and into a 3-mm piece of diamond crystal, which amplifies the light and makes it easier to measure. That process creates random numbers at rates above 1 billion per secondbut it's not without its drawbacks. "In the original implementation we actually needed quite a significant amount of laser energy to do that and we didn't have enough energy to repeat the sequence at high-speed," he says. Since that time, they've managed to reduce power consumption significantly, and the approach is now gradually being adopted for use in quantum communications systems.
Is that a random number in your pocket...?
Random numbers aren't just confined to the lab though. In fact, you might be looking at your own quantum random number generator right now. That's because a team from the University of Geneva in Switzerland, including Sanguinetti, took it upon themselves to turn a smartphone into a quantum random number generator.
Their work exploits the fact that LEDs, where electrons wriggle into gaps within an atomic lattice to create photons, follow a quantum process. Because the ejection of each photon from an LED can't be predicted with accuracy, the number of photons measured to be emitted from a source over a specified time period will always differvery subtlyfrom the expected number. Thanks to the quantum mechanics at play in the LED, that number will be random. Fortunately, phone cameras are now so sensitive that they can count individual photons as they hit a sensor element, and the results compared to theory in order to create a random number. The sensor of a modern camera is huge, toothe Nokia N9 smartphone used in the research featured 8 megapixelsmeaning that it' possible to generate 1.25 billion random numbers per second.
The team has calculated that their technique isn't quite entirely random, but the process would have to be repeated 10118 times before any deviation from randomness might be observed. That's 1080 times the age of the galaxy, though, so, probably not worth losing too much sleep over.
Disorderly conduct
However these random numbers are generated, thoughin the lab or outyou should be glad that the hunt for them is finally yielding techniques that can produce them at a rapid enough rate. Because the consequences of not having enough means the end of computer security as we know it.
In December 2010, for instance, a group of hackers announced that it had obtained the private key used by Sony to authenticate software on the PlayStation 3. Private keys are generated by random numbers. Later, it transpired that the hackers were able to do so because Sony hadn't bothered to generate a new random nonce each time it signed something.
Using software to generate pseudorandom numbers can be just as bad. In 2013, it came to light that RSAthe manufacturer of those security fobs your corporate friends used to totehad created a back door in RSA's encryption products for the NSA. What's interesting is how they propped that back door open. RSA used a flawed formula for generating random numbers to provide secure access to servers. As a result, it was easy for the NSA to predict the random numbersand the resulting encryption was easy to break, too.
But with quantum devices in our pockets, and labs filled with lasers, we might just be entering an era where we don't have to rely on compromised systems for our encryption. In the coming years, random number generation will finally be able to keep a pace with our need for their unpredictable goodness. "Expect full quantum networks to become more broadly available in the coming decade," concludes Sussman.
With the NSA revelations of the past two years firmly demonstrating that our data is no longer our own if we send it as-is across the Internet, the need for full end-t0-end encryption has never been greater. With the help of quantum mechanics and its great unpredictably, we may just be certain about one thing: that, in the future, our data can be kept truly secure.
Many have criticized Apple for trying to cram too much functionality into a wearable device with a tiny touchscreen and short battery life. Breitling's first smartwatch is simpler: the B55 Connected will wirelessly communicate with your smartphone too, but only to make the watch's core functionality easier to use.
First and foremost, the B55 Connected is still a genuine Swiss-made timepiece for enthusiasts and collectors who are sticklers about where their watches come from. However, since it's packed full of accurate timekeeping functionality and targeted at pilotsBreitling's bread and butterthe B55 features the company's B50 caliber superquartz movement instead of being purely mechanical. So you get your Swiss pedigree plus modern reliability, we'd presume.
In terms of smart features, the B55 wirelessly connects to a new Breitling smartphone app that shares the majority of the watch's timekeeping and timing functionality. Want to adjust the time when you land in a new time zone? Just tweak it on the app and the watch's digital display and analog hands will automatically adjust themselves.
The same goes for other functionality like alarms, which can be set using the app and automatically synced to the phone. Timing flights or denoting the exact minute when a plane left the ground can all be done using the B55's minimal buttons, but the app backs up that data, making it easier to log when you land and share it with other people.
Missing are most of the things you'd expect a smartwatch to do: no text messages, social media updates, health monitoring, or superfluous apps like games to drain the watch's battery. But perhaps that makes sense: when it comes to companies like Breitling, Rolex, and even Swatch, this is the kind of 'smart' functionality we'll be seeing. Instead of turning timepieces into over-burdened personal assistants, apps will simply make them easier to use and maintain.
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Pricing and availability for Breitling's new B55 Connected will most likely be revealed at next week's Baselworld show in Switzerland, but don't expect it to compete with Apple Watch on price either. The B55 will surely be as expensive as every other Breitling timepiece, because that's part of the appeal. And don't expect a gold model.
