// Assume the brace position: Boeing has received a patent for, I kid you not, a laser-powered fusion-fission jet propulsion system. Boeing envisions that this system could replace both rocket and turbofan engines, powering everything from spacecraft to missiles to airplanes.
The alleged hack targeted LOT, the state-owned flag-carrying Polish airline. Reuters is reporting that the attack took place on Sunday afternoon, and was fixed about five hours later. 10 LOT flights were cancelled and about a dozen more were delayed, according to a LOT spokesman.
The spokesman didn’t provide any details of what had actually occurred, though he did give away this one tantalising morsel: “We’re using state-of-the-art computer systems, so this could potentially be a threat to others in the industry.” The spokesman said that flights that were already in the air were not affected by the hack and could land normally. Also, the hack didn’t affect the airport itself; it was just the LOT computers.
At Baselworld in Switzerland, the world’s largest luxury watch fair, TAG Heuer, Intel, and Google announced that they are working together on a “Swiss smartwatch.” While this is clearly a move to take on Apple in the luxury smartwatch space, the TAG-Intel-Google watch won’t look or feel like a smartwatch: “People will have the impression that they are wearing a normal watch,” TAG Heuer’s CEO told Reuters in an interview at Baselworld.
The announcement from the three companies was very light on details—they haven’t even shown us a rendering of what the watch might look like—but there have been enough leaks, and meaty quotes from the TAG Heuer CEO, that we can make a fairly solid prediction of the watch’s appearance and functionality.
According to the leaks and quotes, TAG Heuer will release a “digital replica” of the Carrera, a fairly bulky sports watch. It will reportedly look and feel just like a normal, mechanical Carrera, but internally there’ll be Intel hardware and Android Wear software that provide some smartwatch functionality. What isn’t clear is the extent of the computerization: Will there still be a mechanical movement inside, or will it be all-digital with an LCD clock face?
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
At Nvidia’s GTC conference in California, Tesla’s Elon Musk has given us yet another glimpse into his view of the future. Talking to Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, Musk said that, in the future, driving cars might be outlawed. “[It’s too] dangerous,” he said. “You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”
Huang and Musk were on stage during the GTC 2015 keynote, ostensibly chatting about the computational challenges of computer vision and deep learning. Then, Huang decided to ask Musk, in fairly general terms, how the whole self-driving car thing will actually go down in practice. “I don’t think we have to worry about autonomous cars, because that’s sort of like a narrow form of AI,” Musk replied. “It’s not something that I think is very difficult, actually, to do autonomous driving, to a degree that’s much safer than a person, is much easier than people think.”
The difficulty arises, though, when we have a mix of normal and autonomous cars on the road. That’s where Musk’s “you can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine” line comes into play. When every car is autonomous—and optionally also talking to each other via a car-to-car mesh network—you can cram a lot more traffic on the roads. Throw a dumb human driver into the mix, though, and suddenly you have to go back to the old way of doing things, with enough space between cars that humans actually stand a chance of braking or maneuvering in time.
Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Speaking to Reuters from the WinHEC conference in China, Microsoft’s operating system chief Terry Myerson said, “We are upgrading all qualified PCs, genuine and non-genuine, to Windows 10.” This means that everyone running Windows 7 or 8.1, irrespective of whether you pirated the operating system or not, will be allowed to upgrade to Windows 10.
It isn’t clear if Myerson’s comments only pertain to China, or to all Windows users worldwide. We have reached out to Microsoft for clarification, but haven’t yet heard back. Myerson’s wording certainly sounds like this will affect all Windows users worldwide.
Updated: ZDNet’s Ed Bott got a response from a Microsoft spokesperson, confirming that the free upgrade path is indeed available for all pirates everywhere, and not just in China.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
This week at the 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), Intel will provide an update on its new 10nm manufacturing process and new research on how it’s maintaining the march of Moore’s law to 7nm and beyond. The first chips based on Intel’s new 10nm process are expected in late 2016/early 2017, and the company says it’s hoping to avoid the delays that haunted the belabored release of 14nm Broadwell. To hit 7nm, Intel says new materials will be required—as in, it looks like 10nm will finally be the end of the road for silicon. The most likely replacement for silicon is a III-V semiconductor such as indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs), though Intel hasn’t provided any specific details yet.
ISSCC 2015, being held in San Francisco this week, is where all the big players in silicon (Intel, Samsung, TSMC, IBM, etc.) meet to talk about their latest manufacturing processes and how they might go about overcoming the current barriers to smaller, faster, and denser computer chips. It’s not unusual for Intel to have one of the largest presences at the conference, and this year is no different: it will be presenting three papers on its 14nm technology, hosting sessions on a variety of topics, and Mark Bohr—one of Intel’s most esteemed researchers—will be sitting on a panel that discusses Moore’s law beyond 10nm.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
