AMD’s Ryzen Launches March 2
February 22nd, 2017My nine year old son has watched me build a few high end PCs and he wants to build his own so badly that he can practically taste it.
For months, I’ve been saying, “Wait for Ryzen, you must, young Padawon.”
After many years, AMD will again be offering strong alternatives to Intel’s CPUs. Ryzen 7 are the high end chips. Midrange Ryzen 5 and low end Ryzen 3 will be released later.
I haven’t built a PC based on an AMD CPU since around 2002. I’m looking forward to Intel having to compete again.
Via: PC World:
Ryzen is here. AMD said Wednesday that it plans a “hard launch” of its first three Ryzen processors on March 2. The highly anticipated chips promise to outperform high-end parts from Intel and undercut their prices by as much as 54 percent.
AMD executives confidently unveiled the first three desktop chips to attack Intel’s Core i7, supported by several top-tier motherboard vendors and boutique system builders. In many cases, executives said, AMD will offer more for less, as early Ryzen benchmarks prove. The top-tier Ryzen 7 1800X will cost less than half of what Intel’s thousand-dollar Core i7-6900K chip does—and outperform it, too. You can preorder Ryzen chips and systems from 180 retailers and system integrators today.
Tesla Will Double Number of Supercharger Locations in North America in 2017
February 22nd, 2017Via: The Verge:
Tesla will double the number of Supercharger locations in North America in 2017, the company revealed today in its quarterly letter to shareholders. The company currently has 2,636 Superchargers at 373 locations across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and plans to have twice as many locations open by the end of 2017.
Tesla’s Supercharging network allows owners of its Model S and Model X vehicles (as well as future Model 3 owners) to rapidly charge their vehicles while on long road trips, providing as much as 170 miles of range after just 30 minutes of charging.
French Military Trains Eagles to Hunt Drones
February 22nd, 2017Via: Reuters:
In a battle between ancient arts and modern technology, France’s army is teaching birds of prey to bring down remote-controlled drones when they enter no-go urban airspace.
Four golden eagles are getting military training for combat against battery-charged drones that just about anybody can buy in a local store, and fly into security-sensitive zones such as presidential palaces, wittingly or not.
“These eagles can spot the drones several thousand meters (yards) away and neutralize them,” Jean-Christophe Zimmerman, a French air force general, told reporters.
The idea, he says, was inspired by Dutch police trials.
UPS Tries Arming Its Brown-Clad Drivers With an Octocopter Drone
February 21st, 2017Via: Bloomberg:
United Parcel Service Inc. sees a day when your latest purchase may be dropped off not by a brown-clad delivery driver, but by an octocopter drone.
The world’s largest courier took a step closer to that future on Monday, launching an unmanned aerial vehicle from the roof of a UPS truck about a quarter-mile to a blueberry farm outside Tampa, Florida. The drone dropped off a package at a home on the property, and returned to the truck, which had moved about 2,000 feet.
The test shows how UPS is looking to drones as a way to cut costs and ease delivery in hard-to-reach places. Deploying the aircraft in rural areas — where the distance between stops drives up fuel and labor costs — is one of the more promising applications.
“Drones won’t replace our uniformed service providers,” says Mark Wallace, UPS’s senior vice president of global engineering and sustainability. “That’s key, but in this case, it really is there to assist.”
Philadelphia: Heroin Hellscape
February 21st, 2017Via: Philly News:
Along a half-mile gorge cut by a Conrail line that runs through Kensington and Fairhill, tens of thousands of used syringes and their tossed off orange caps cover the sloping ground like a plague of locusts. The contaminated needles make conditions so hazardous that even some police officers are reluctant to traverse the embankments to get to dead overdose victims at the bottom.
The squalor and chaos along the rail line resembles a scene from Hieronymus Bosch. Addicts – many with needle marks so fresh that still-drying blood glistens in the sun – twist their bodies into unnatural forms to crouch and teeter on the trash-covered banks as they shoot up. Others sleep under nearby bridges or in makeshift shelters surrounded by garbage, drugs, and death.
At a plywood shack known to denizens as “the hospital,” users too squeamish to inject themselves can pay a few dollars to a Ray-Ban-wearing addict who looks like he stepped out of a Mad Max movie.
“People come here when they have trouble to hit themselves,” said the 45-year-old man, who declined to give his real name. “So I hit them in the neck, you know what I mean? So I’m like the doctor. So they pay me.”
This apocalyptic terrain, sometimes called El Campamento, is home to 75 to 125 addicts at any given time. Many more transient users come each day to get high. It is the festering epicenter of Philadelphia’s heroin epidemic, a benighted territory the DEA considers the East Coast’s largest heroin market, smack dab in an area often referred to as the Badlands. And it has gone largely ignored for three decades.
Florida Man Charged With Plotting to Bomb Target, Wanted to Buy Stock Cheap
February 21st, 2017Via: Reuters:
A Florida man has been charged with plotting to plant bombs in at least 10 Target Corp stores and then profit when the blasts caused the company’s stock price to fall, federal prosecutors have said.
Charles Barnett, 48, of Ocala, had asked a law enforcement informant to put the homemade bombs on the shelves of Target stores from Florida to New York state, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Florida said in a statement on Thursday.
“Barnett theorized that the company’s stock value would plunge after the explosions, allowing him to cheaply acquire shares of Target stock before an eventual rebound in prices,” the statement said.
Robots Poised to Take Over Wide Range of Military Jobs
February 21st, 2017Via: San Diego Union Tribune:
The wave of automation that swept away tens of thousands of American manufacturing and office jobs during the past two decades is now washing over the armed forces, putting both rear-echelon and front-line positions in jeopardy.
“Just as in the civilian economy, automation will likely have a big impact on military organizations in logistics and manufacturing,” said Michael Horowitz, a University of Pennsylvania professor and one of the globe’s foremost experts on weaponized robots.
“The U.S. military is very likely to pursue forms of automation that reduce ‘back-office’ costs over time, as well as remove soldiers from non-combat deployments where they might face risk from adversaries on fluid battlefields, such as in transportation.”
‘Mismatch’ Between the way Our Senses Evolved and Modern World Is Making Us Ill
February 21st, 2017Via: Independent:
The modern world is radically at odds with the way human senses have evolved, helping to make us short-sighted, obese and depressed, scientists have warned.
Spending large amounts of time indoors under artificial light and staring at computer screens has helped produce a “myopia epidemic” with as many as 90 per cent of people in some parts of the world needing glasses.
Industrial food production has also turned primates’ taste for sugar — which evolved to persuade us to gorge on healthy fruit when it was ripe — into one of the main causes of the soaring rates of obesity in the Western world.
And our sense of smell is under attack from air pollution, producing an array of different effects, including depression and anxiety.
Bill Gates Warns Tens of Millions Could be Killed by Bio-Terrorism
February 19th, 2017Mmm hmm. Tell me another one, Bill.
U.S. Researchers Trying to Create Pandemic Avian Flu
Baxter International “Unintentionally” Sent Flu Samples to Companies that Contained H5N1 Avian Flu
Scientist Makes H5N1 Highly Contagious
New Bird Flu ‘Has Unique Traits’
Bird Flu Researchers to Continue Work on Engineered Virus
Scientists Sequence Black Death Bacteria DNA
And Now… Plague Sweeps Through al Qaeda Terror Training Camp, Killing 40
Bill Gates Funds Research Into ‘Flying Syringe’ Mosquitoes to Deliver Vaccines
Via: Guardian:
A chilling warning that tens of millions of people could be killed by bio-terrorism was delivered at the Munich security conference by the world’s richest man, Bill Gates
Gates, who has spent much of the last 20 years funding a global health campaign, said: “We ignore the link between health security and international security at our peril.”
Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft who has spent billions in a philanthropic drive to improve health worldwide, said: “The next epidemic could originate on the computer screen of a terrorist intent on using genetic engineering to create a synthetic version of the smallpox virus … or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu.”
…
Gates, making his first appearance at the Munich security conference on Saturday, said: “Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”
GM Plans to Build, Test Thousands of Self-Driving Bolts in 2018
February 18th, 2017Via: Reuters:
General Motors Co plans to deploy thousands of self-driving electric cars in test fleets in partnership with ride-sharing affiliate Lyft Inc, beginning in 2018, two sources familiar with the automaker’s plans said this week.
It is expected to be the largest such test of fully autonomous vehicles by any major automaker before 2020, when several companies have said they plan to begin building and deploying such vehicles in higher volumes. Alphabet Inc’s Waymo subsidiary, in comparison, is currently testing about 60 self-driving prototypes in four states.
Most of the specially equipped versions of the Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle will be used by San Francisco-based Lyft, which will test them in its ride-sharing fleet in several states, one of the sources said. GM has no immediate plans to sell the Bolt AV to individual customers, according to the source.
