When I first heard an all-electric Fisker Karma coming up behind me, I knew what it was right away. It sounded almost, but not quite, like a car. The noise came from its twin, bumper-mounted, speakers. At the time, I assumed that other electric vehicle makers would follow suit, as the sound seemed like an obvious safety measure. However, since then, electric vehicles have been largely silent at low speed. That is set to change starting in 2018, when a new regulation from NHTSA begins to go into effect. Low-speed noisemakers should save lives and money NHTSA is mandating that all electric vehicles — and hybrid vehicles operating on their electric motor — sold after September 1st, 2019 will need to artificially produce sounds at speeds below 30 kph (about 19 mph).
At some point this year the big buzzword appears to have shifted away from “the cloud” to “deep learning.” Eugen Weber once remarked that everybody who’s anybody sacked Rome. In similar fashion, everybody who’s anybody is setting machine learning loose on problems — especially the much-beloved process of deep learning. Deep learning is a machine learning method that extracts information from a volume of data by crunching through millions of entries, in order to sift out and rank the most important aspects of the data. One current wunderkind of is the Jeopardy-playing, cancer-diagnosing AI Watson, which runs on IBM’s Power architecture.
Regardless of your feelings about the outcome of the election, it’s pretty clear the present voting system is so antiquated it struggles to provide a meaningful mechanism for translating the will of the people into action. For example, I was surprised that in this age of cloud storage and wireless connectivity, I couldn’t vote at the polling place of my choice and still be presented with the relevant ballot issues from my home district. US elections are controlled at the local level, which is one reason why the widespread voter fraud sometimes alleged to exist is, in practice, almost impossible to achieve. But this same local control makes it difficult to implement the kinds of systems that would help voters better understand issues.
Whether you love Apple or hate it, there’s no denying the company’s formidable influence on product design. Over the last 39 years, a number of books have focused on various Apple products and the inspirations behind them, from the influence of 1960s hardware on the iPod, Mac Pro, and iMac, to Steve Jobs’ influence over various aspects of the original Macintosh, as well as Apple’s other products. Apple products fascinate people in a way that hardware from Dell or HP rarely does, even though this isn’t always fair to the designers at the other firms. There’s a wealth of material for Apple to draw from, and the company’s new $300 coffee table book, Designed by Apple in California, ought to be a repository for anecdotes, explanations, and ideas.
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Earlier this year, we covered the story of the fan-created legacy World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius. Nostalrius was a so-called “classic” server that emulates World of Warcraft before its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, ever launched. These efforts have often by Blizzard when they gained enough momentum to be considered significant, and Nostalrius was no exception. What was surprising was the initial engagement Blizzard offered. The Nostalrius team to Blizzard HQ and had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Morhaime and the other WoW developers to talk about the Nostalrius project, (these are servers dedicated to a previous iteration of the game), and whether or not there was any path forward for the project from there.
Personal assistants have come a long way since Siri first launched in 2011. There’s a growing number of competitors in the field, voice recognition has improved significantly, and the sheer number of tasks that these assistants can handle is incredible. And thanks to today’s sale on the Amazon Echo, you won’t have to spend much to jump in. (List price: $179.99) With a built-in omni-directional mic, you can place the Echo anywhere in your room of choice, and it’ll still pick up your voice with surprising clarity. No need to yell — just say your commands in a normal speaking voice, and you’ll be fine in most environments.
After months of and , the PS4 Pro debuted this morning. A number of outlets have already published reviews of Sony’s new console, and the overall feedback is positive. Whether the PS4 Pro is a must-have upgrade over the standard PS4, however, will depend on which games you play and how quickly you intend to upgrade from a 1080p television to a 4K or 4K+HDR screen. We’ve rounded up reviews from , , , and , and they all generally agree. The PS4 Pro is a meaningful and significant improvement over the PlayStation 4, with its expanded GPU, increased CPU and memory clock rates, and significantly improved power consumption compared with the launch model from 2013.
The Earth has been hit by large objects many times over the ages, and it will take many more hits. Unlike all the previous species on the planet, humans may actually be able to do something about that. Technology gives us a shot at stopping the worst-case scenario, something that experts from and FEMA recently got together to simulate. The emergency planning exercise took place on October 25th. Unlike past simulations, the goal of this one was not to mount a deflection mission; it was simply to survive. The exercise included representatives from NASA, FEMA, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Department of Energy’s National Laboratories, the US Air Force, and the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
