If you love to learn, check out the outstanding classes at Udemy. Thousands of online courses are being discounted right now, so you can invest in numerous skills — even if you’re on a budget. Whether you want to learn how to design a business logo or how to speak Arabic, there’s something here for just about every area of interest. And if you’re trying to brush up on your development skills, here are some top-notch recommendations. (Coupon code: LEARN25OFF) If you’re trying to break into the world of web development, consider taking “” by Rob Percival. Even if you’ve never done any serious web development before, this class will run you through the process from tip to tail.
Way back in 2005, when Will Wright unveiled Spore to an astonished crowd at GDC, there was one particular part of the demo that seemed to generate buzz: procedural dance. Spore uses player input to generate everything from a creature’s walk animation to its mode of social interaction, but it was the ability to take a novel body shape and dance that seemed to excite people’s imaginations the most. Yet Spore took the easy road: None of the creatures look like human beings, which means we have no idea what they’re supposed to dance like. Spore basically just defined dancing as rhythmic movement, sometimes around a fire; that’s not a bad definition by any means, but it’s also nowhere near good enough to generate lifelike human dance.
A new research initiative between a University of Washington team and TU-Delft in the Netherlands has created a microprocessor that can power itself through stray radio waves and receive programmable updates in the same fashion. While the CPU in question is exceedingly weak by modern standards (it’s a RISC-derived 16-bit microcontroller clocked at just 16MHz), it’s an order of magnitude more powerful than any other device that’s powered by ambient energy in the environment with no battery required. This has significant implications for Internet of Things development and for ambient computing as a whole. There are several aspects to this breakthrough, which we’ll discuss below.
As a long-time users of pen-and-stylus-based applications, I was very excited when I read the announcement of Microsoft’s new Ink Workspace in the latest Windows 10 Anniversary Edition preview build. I probably should have known better, since Microsoft has been trolling pen computing breakthroughs for over a decade, and has never delivered anything amazing other than the inking support in OneNote, and that it grudgingly added to Office. The Ink Workspace is cute, and hopefully will at least attract some new users to the possibilities of their stylus, but for anyone who already knows how to use the inking features of Windows, it won’t make much of a difference.
Despite all the publicity about virtual reality, for the average consumer that wants to participate, it isn’t easy to figure out how to get started — and in particular which VR headset to buy. The good news is that 2016 has finally seen the launch of several fairly well-polished offerings, and will see more before it’s over. We’ll help you decide which to buy, or whether you’re better off waiting. First, decide on your goals — VR covers a lot of territory If you simply want to get a taste of VR, you might not need to buy anything at all.
The EM Drive is the most important advance in space propulsion since rocket fuel itself — just so long as it isn’t a big, fat mistake. It’s being hailed as a next-generation electric space thruster that requires no fuel, but its apparent ability to generate thrust has defied scientific explanation. The question of whether the EM Drive is a huge step forward for science, or simply a refresher course in the importance of taking careful measurements, has vexed NASA engineers. Last year they announced thrust readings that could not be falsified by any means they devised, but in their own paper they went on to actively disown the results.
For the past 12 months, Samsung’s foundry division has occupied a leadership position at the 14nm node. The company recently revealed some of its plans for future nodes, including an aggressive rollout of extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), a technology that’s been promised, hyped, and slowly developed for nearly twenty years at this point. The image above shows why companies for , despite its problems, power costs, and vastly increased cooling requirements. Current technology is based on 193nm wavelengths of ArF excimer lasers, but this technique can no longer scale to the tiny feature sizes used in cutting-edge lithography.
For almost a decade, Steam has been the go-to source for downloadable PC games and content. The service has expanded a great deal since its earliest days as a Valve game distribution center, with thousands of titles, support for Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows, as well as its own third-party mod distribution system and Early Access hub. Now it seems that Valve is expanding Steam in another direction: Streaming movies. The company announced today that it had signed a major deal with Lionsgate to distribute more than 100 feature films via Steam. Films from The Hunger Games, Kill Bill, Saw, and Divergent series are already available online, as are titles from The Expendables, Twilight, and Leprechaun (nobody said these were all good movies.
Qualcomm’s Quick Charge technology has shipped on a number of high-profile devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S7, LG G5, and HTC 10. The latter actually claims to support USB 3.1 Gen 1 transfer speeds as well as USB-C, which means you get both top-end USB 3.1 transfer rates and the directionless cable. According to Google engineer Benson Leung, however, there’s a significant flaw in all of the devices that claim to support both Qualcomm’s Quick Charge technology and USB-C. Specifically, it’s not possible to support both standards in the same device. Here’s the problem: While Qualcomm’s Quick Charge technology is capable of charging a smart phone at up to 18W (12V * 1.5 amps), it takes over the data lines (D+/D-) on the USB-C device to do it.
