This is the week of the robot-controlled vehicle. Sometimes, it works wonderfully. And sometimes it crashes into another car that looks just like it.
Still, the U.S. Army is undeterred, because a press release from Lockheed Martin declares that four Squad Mission Support System robo-jeeps are being dispatched to Afghanistan.
The SMSS is, so Lockheed Martin says, the biggest unmanned vehicle (11 feet long) ever to be deployed with the U.S. Army.
Here’s something you can’t get with an iPad: 250GB of internal storage. Archos’ upcoming Android “Honeycomb” 3.2 tablet will pack a 250GB hard disk drive that’s been tweaked to perform more like a flash drive.
After 45,000 Verizon workers walked off the job this weekend, Chief Executive Lowell McAdam issued a letter today to management justifying the need to extract better contract terms, saying that the company must make “additional hard decisions” to keep the cost of its wireline business in check.
From the “I guess this makes sense” files, the New York Times reports that North Korea has unleashed a squad of hackers to infiltrate South Korean gaming sites. The two countries have technically been at war for almost 60 years, and cyber-attacks are the modern-day equivalent to a slap in the face.
There are a lot of things to consider when buying a smartphone–operating system, screen size, keyboard or no keyboard, camera–but one feature that more people are starting to pay attention to is the processor. This is, no doubt, in part due to the recent influx of dual-core smartphones like the Motorola Photon 4G, HTC Sensation 4G, and Samsung Galaxy S II.
When it comes to the mobile world, it’s all about apps.
More than ever, people are using apps to augment the capabilities of their smartphones. They can remind you of your next meeting, play the latest Lady Gaga song, and make catapulting virtual birds into evil pigs a family pastime.
The rumors from last week about Apple being “on the edge” of launching a cloud-movie service that would enable iTunes users to stream movies from Apple’s servers and then re-download them to other devices are at best premature.
When we dig uranium out of the ground, 99% of it is U-238, which we don’t care about. 1% of it is U-235, which we use for all kinds of things, including conventional reactor fuel. Bill Gates and some of his pals figure that it would be a much better idea if we could just burn the U-238 instead.
Using U-238 as fuel wasn’t Bill’s idea, but it’s taken until recently for supercomputers to figure out how to make the reaction work properly. Based on these new data, Gates helped fund a startup called Terrapower, which is attempting to build the first prototype of a new type of nuclear reactor called a “traveling wave” reactor.
Theoretical area covered by one single 802.22 base station
Tired of your Wi-Fi cutting out every time you take your laptop into the bathroom with you? IEEE (also known as the Institute of electronics geeks) has just released a new, official standard for 802.22 Wi-Fi, and this bad boy can cover 12,000 square miles with just one single base station.
Before hitching up with Windows Phone and Windows 8, Microsoft’s cross-platform rich Internet application framework gets a modest upgrade
Microsoft Silverlight has had a topsy-turvy year. Apparently doomed or at least marginalized by HTML5, Silverlight found a foothold in Windows Phone and has more recently emerged as a key component of the Jupiter application framework and programming model for Windows 8. If Silverlight has become less important as a rich Internet application (RIA) framework, it has become more important to Microsoft’s desktop and mobile platforms overall.
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