Despite owning the most popular mapping app in the world, Google acquired Waze for almost a billion dollars in 2013. Google did not shut down the app as many had feared, but it has slowly integrated Waze’s crowdsourced driving features into Google Maps. Google is adding a raft of new features to Maps today, all of which are making their way over from Waze. Mobile users will be able to report new road conditions like lane closures and construction, but it’ll take a few taps. Waze’s selling point has always been the way it integrates data from other drivers.
After over 40 years, the Strategic Automated Command and Control system (SACCS) no longer runs on venerable 8-inch floppy drives from circa 1972. As of this past June, the entire system has moved to a “highly-secure solid-state digital storage solution.” That’s according to Lt. Col. Jason Rossi, commander of the Air Force’s 595th Strategic Communications Squadron. The federal government, for obvious reasons, declined to say much about the exact methods it uses to network the strategic operations center for the ground-based nuclear arsenal. The status quo, however, could not have endured indefinitely. Back in 2016, a GAO report drew attention to the fact that the SACCS was still running on an obsolete IBM Series/1 computer, which was first developed in the 1970s.
Building your own games online can be profitable as well as fun. With Adobe’s long-standing Flash software nearing the end of its life and the world wide web transitioning over to HTML5, now is an excellent time to learn how to make games for this new framework. Learning to do this, can be quite difficult, but the course from Udemy aims to make this task easier by teaching you the basics and walking you through building a simple game. Course Overview After a brief course introduction and along with an accompanying PDF document containing instructions on how to download the software required for this course, the lecturer gets started immediately by showing you how to set up the basic framework for creating your game using JavaScript.
If you’ve been looking for a fast computer to replace an aging system then we’ve got the perfect system for you. For a limited time you can get refurbished HP Envy desktops that come loaded with fast Intel Core i7-8700 processors and 12GB of RAM all for just . As with any PC, the star of the show in this system is its Intel Core i7-8700 processor that has six Hyper-Threaded CPU cores clocked at 3.2GHz with a 4.6GHz turbo boost operating frequency. This processor, paired with the system’s 12GB of RAM, enable to to work on multiple tasks simultaneously and with exceptional speed.
Large gaming monitors are becoming increasingly popular in today’s modern world. As a fan of large displays, for the last decade I’ve forgone the use of a real computer monitor and opted for an LCD TV instead. I remember discussing this on a public forum some years ago and being chided by fans of smaller displays who made a few nonsensical jokes about the enormous size of the pixel I must be seeing due to the TV’s low pixel density. This view appears to be changing, though. Nvidia’s made waves a few years ago when it introduced its big format gaming display (BFGD) monitor design with a truly enormous 65-inch panel.
The week may be at an end, but it’s not too late to take advantage of some of this week’s best deals. If you want to pre-order Google’s upcoming Pixel 4 smartphone then you have until October 24, and there’s a great deal on Nintendo’s new Switch gaming console. Google’s Pixel 4 comes equipped with Qualcomm’s SnapDragon 855 SoC and 6GB of RAM. This hardware gives it a healthy performance boost over the Pixel 3 and also makes it competitive with other flagship smartphones from Apple and Samsung. If you pre-order one of these phones now from Amazon, you will also receive a $100 gift card with your purchase.
Razer made its name creating flashy gaming peripherals like mice, headset, and of course, keyboards. It has since moved into the laptop space with the Blade series of gaming-oriented notebooks. Its previous innovation in laptop keyboards has been mostly limited to equipping them with RGB LEDs, but the new Razer Blade 15 Advanced is the . Razer says these allow for improved responsiveness and typing feel, but you’ll pay handsomely to get them. The keys on a desktop keyboard have about 4mm of travel, but laptops need to have a much more compact form factor to make them practical to carry around.
We’ve talked a lot about fancy on ExtremeTech, including , , and . That’s just barely scratching the surface, though. You might think it’s crazy to spend a few hundred on building a custom keyboard, but fans of Topre switches will go to greater extremes to customize their mechanical keyboards. You can’t “build” a Topre board, so fans have taken to purchasing accessories and expensive, bespoke housings into which they transplant their keyboards. It’s a fascinating and bizarre part of keyboard culture that warrants some exploration. What Is Topre, and Why Do People Care So Much? Before you can hope to understand why someone would pay the better part of a grand for a keyboard case, you have to understand why people love Topre.
Long ago, in a gaming ecosystem far, far removed from the one we currently occupy, there were a solid handful of great Star Wars games. While they weren’t all produced by the same developer, they shared one common trait: They were principally single-player titles, though some of the FPS games did include multi-player game modes. The entire Jedi Knight series (Dark Forces, Dark Forces II, Jedi Outcast, Jedi Academy) and titles like Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 are great Star Wars games, though KOTOR 2 plays much better if you install fan-made patches and mods. And then, it all ended.
