Ford just made a big promise about autonomous, or self-driving, cars—with a twist. On Tuesday at the company’s research facility in Palo Alto, California, CEO Mark Fields announced that the company will mass-produce autonomous vehicles by 2021. Up to now, companies have held out the vague goal of enabling autonomous driving by 2020 or so, but Ford is particularly aggressive in committing to a specific year in the near future. Here’s the twist: These cars won’t be for you or anyone else to buy. Instead, these first autonomous cars from Ford will be made specifically for ride-sharing and ride-hailing. Fields emphasized, too, that these cars will be fully autonomous, without a steering wheel or other traditional controls.
A compact computer called Euclid from Intel should make the development of robots much easier. Euclid looks much like the Kinect camera for Xbox consoles, but it's a self-contained PC that can be the guts of a robot. It's possible to install the Euclid computer where the "eyes" of a human-like robot would be typically placed. Intel demonstrated the Euclid computer in a robot moving on stage during CEO Brian Krzanich's keynote at the Intel Developer Forum on Tuesday. Euclid has a 3D RealSense camera that can serve as the eyes in a robot, capturing images in real-time. It has motion and position sensors that can help the robot move around both indoors and outdoors.
Well, dye my hair red and call me Harpo. A triple-level-cell (TLC) NAND-based SSD that I can recommend to users without a lot of caveats finally exists. That is, only if they can’t find a like-priced multi-level-cell (MLC) drive. (And The drive in question? Crucial’s 750GB Limited Edition MX300, which retails for a mere $179 on
Microsoft Alloy will be a wire-free,head-mounted VR device, complete with a pair of RealSense cameras to detect the outside world, including what Intel called "five-finger detection," or the ability to actually "see" your hand and allow it to interact with virtual objects. Intel did not release a price or a ship date for Project Alloy, nor disclose which chip is powering it.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial trade deal supported by many U.S. tech companies, is on death row, with both major party presidential candidates opposed. It's a long shot, but some tech trade groups are hoping for last-minute clemency from Congress and outgoing President Barack Obama. The trade groups are pushing for Congress to vote to approve the deal after November's general election, in the lame-duck session before a new Congress and a new president takes office. The TPP, a free-trade deal negotiated among the U.S. and 11 other Pacific Region nations for seven years, has become a major presidential campaign issue in recent months.
A ransomware strain has been making a pretty penny by opening its doors to unskilled hackers. Security firm Check Point gained a rare look at the inner workings of the Cerber ransomware and found that its developers are building a network of partners to attack more targets -- and rake in more cash. Check Point also warned that because of Cerber, more unskilled cybercriminals might choose to participate in ransomware schemes. "Even the most novice hacker can easily reach out in closed forums to obtain an undetected ransomware variant," it said in a
This speaker's price tag, sound, and feature set are appealing enough, but it's all undermined by a distinctly mediocre app.
Gaming laptops may never be the same again. On Monday night, Nvidia unveiled three mobile GPUs with performance almost identical to that of their desktop counterparts. The new GeForce GTX 1080, GeForce GTX 1070, and GeForce GTX 1060 are built on the company’s new
