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Thursday, January 10th, 2019
| Time | Event |
| 2:00a | Don't Expect A New Nvidia Shield Tablet Anytime Soon During a small press gathering at CES in Las Vegas today, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company doesn't have any plans to resurrect the Shield Tablet, which launched in 2014, was last refreshed in 2015 and officially discontinued last year. "Shield TV is still unquestionably the best Android TV in the world," he said. "We have updated the software now over 30 times. People are blown away by how much we continue to enhance it." And more (unspecified) enhancements are coming, he said. TechCrunch reports: On the mobile side, though, the days of the Shield Tablet are very much over, especially now that the Nintendo Switch, which uses Nvidia's Tegra chips, has really captured that market. "We are really committed to [Shield TV], but on mobile devices, we don't think it's necessary," Huang said. "We would only build things not to gain market share. Nvidia is not a "take somebody else's market share company.' I think that's really angry. It's an angry way to run a business. Creating new markets, expanding the horizon, creating things that the world doesn't have, that's a loving way to build a business." He added that this is the way to inspire employees, too. Just copying competitors and maybe selling a product cheaper, though, does nothing to motivate employees and is not what Nvidia is interested in. Of course, Huang left the door open to a future tablet if it made sense -- though he clearly doesn't think it does today. He'd only do so, "if the world needs it. But at the moment, I just don't see it. I think Nintendo did such a great job." 
Read more of this story at Slashdot.  |
| 7:00a | Wireless Tech Company Finds Way To Charge Drones In Flight Global Energy Transmission (GET) co-founder William Kallamn says his wireless tech company has found a way to create a "power cloud" that can charge a drone while it's in flight. "The system comprises a ground-based power station with a frame of wires positioned in a roughly circular shape," reports Futurism. "When turned on, this creates an electromagnetic field in the air near the station. A drone equipped with a special antennae charges by flying into the range of the power cloud." From the report: Eight minutes of charge time translates to 30 minutes of flight. One of GET's power stations and two customized drones, each capable of carrying 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds), currently costs $120,000. It's hard to overstate the potential for drones to change our world, but for seemingly every positive use for the machines (package delivery, search and rescue operations), there's a negative one to consider (military weaponry, citizen surveillance). So, sure, a drone that never needs to land would be amazingly beneficial for moviemaking and sports coverage -- two uses Kallman notes in [an interview with entertainment vlogger David Fordham] -- but it's hard to imagine military or government officials wouldn't be highly interested in GET's drone charging tech as well.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 2:01p | So You Automated Your Coworkers Out of a Job merbs writes: Automation is too often presented as a faceless, monolithic phenomenon -- but it's a human finger that ultimately pulls the trigger. Someone has to initiate the process that automates a task or mechanizes a production line. To write or procure the program that makes a department or a job redundant. And that's not always an executive, or upper-, or even middle management -- in fact, it's very often not. Sometimes it's a junior employee, or a developer, even an intern. In a series of interviews with coders, technicians, and engineers who've automated their colleagues out of work -- or, in one case, been put in a position where they'd have to do so and decided to quit instead -- I've attempted to produce a snapshot of life on the messy front lines of modern automation. (Some names have been changed to protect the identities of the automators.) We've heard plenty of forecasting about the many jobs slated to be erased, and we've seen the impacts on the communities that have lost livelihoods at the hands of automation, but we haven't had many close up looks at how all this unfolds in the office or the factory floor.
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 10:40p | 15 Years After Announcing the 1GB SD Card, Lexar Unveils 1TB SD Card Lexar has just unveiled the first commercially available 1-terabyte SD card. "Lexar's Professional 633x line of SDHC and SDXC UHS-I cards [...] is now listed for sale in capacities from 16GB all the way up to the flagship 1TB," reports The Verge. "That card claims read speeds of up to 95MB/s and write speeds of 70MB/s, though it's only rated as V30/U3, which guarantees sustained write performance of 30MB/s." Unfortunately, you'll pay a premium price of $499.99 for the new 1TB SD card, which is more than the cost of two 512GB cards. Still, the convenience may be worth it. Joey Lopez, Senior Marketing Manager of Lexar, said in a statement: "Almost fifteen years ago, Lexar announced a 1GB SD card. Today, we are excited to announce 1TB of storage capacity in the same convenient form factor. As consumers continue to demand greater storage for their cameras, the combination of high-speed performance with a 1TB option now offers a solution for content creators who shoot large volumes of high-resolution images and 4K video."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
| 11:20p | Nest Competitor Ring Reportedly Gave Employees Full Access To Customers' Live Camera Feeds Amazon-owned Ring allowed employees to access customers' live camera feeds, according to a report from The Intercept. "Ring's engineers and executives have 'highly privileged access' to live camera feeds from customers' devices," reports 9to5Google. "This includes both doorbells facing the outside world, as well as cameras inside a person's home. A team tasked with annotating video to aid in object recognition captured 'people kissing, firing guns, and stealing.'" From the report: U.S. employees specifically had access to a video portal intended for technical support that reportedly allowed "unfiltered, round-the-clock live feeds from some customer cameras." What's surprising is how this support tool was apparently not restricted to only employees that dealt with customers. The Intercept notes that only a Ring customer's email address was required to access any live feed. According to the report's sources, employees had a blase attitude to this potential privacy violation, but noted that they "never personally witnessed any egregious abuses." Meanwhile, a second group of Ring employees working on R&D in Ukraine had access to a folder housing "every video created by every Ring camera around the world." What's more, these employees had a "corresponding database that linked each specific video file to corresponding specific Ring customers." Also bothersome is Ring's reported stance towards encryption. Videos in that bucket were unencrypted due to the costs associated with implementation and "lost revenue opportunities due to restricted access." In response to the report, Ring said: "We have strict policies in place for all our team members. We implement systems to restrict and audit access to information. We hold our team members to a high ethical standard and anyone in violation of our policies faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties. In addition, we have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them."
Read more of this story at Slashdot. |
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