Items tagged with makers
Whether it's playing Duck Hunt on the NES with a Zapper or pumping quarters into Area 51 or Time Crisis in arcades, just about everyone is familiar with light gun games. The simplicity of these games is born from their "on-rails" design where players are automatically taken from area to area, and then just point and shoot. The trouble with them is you can't really dodge incoming fire, or control where you're going. However, one clever maker has built a way to play Call of Duty with a very familiar shooting device, and complete with player movement. It all starts with Fortnite -- or rather, a Fortnite-licensed Nerf gun. Alfredo Sequeida wanted to build a control interface into a Nerf gun,...
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Last November the refreshed Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ developer board landed on the market with a price tag of $25. A new version of the developer board has debuted called the Raspberry Pi 4 starting at $35. The Raspberry Pi 4 brings with it improved performance and more connectivity along withdual Micro HDMI ports supporting up to two 4K displays. Raspberry Pi 4 is powered by a Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 64-bit unit running at 1.5GHz. The Pi 4 can be fitted with 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4-2400 SDRAM. Both 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz 802.11ac WiFi is supported along with Bluetooth 5.0 BLE. Wired connectivity support includes a gigabit Ethernet port, and the board has a pair of USB 3.0 ports...
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Intel is inside many computers, but the company wants to be inside retail locations, too. The company produced a video outlining its efforts to prop up Intel Experience Stores, the first of which will open in Nolita, New York at 10am on November 23rd. The whole venture sounds intriguing, if somewhat odd. Clearly, the CPU maker wants to push its brand presence and get people seeing its wares in person and spending hands-on time with its technology, but it appears as though Intel is looking to do more with the stores. Artist rendering The Intel Experience stores will also be designed as a sort of tech-based (and Intel-branded) community center, replete with free-to-attend events designed for kids...
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Mobile manufacturers launch star rating system comparing the energy consumption of chargers November 19, 2008 - Espoo, Finland - A group of mobile manufacturers has launched a common energy rating system for chargers, making it easier for consumers to compare and choose the one that saves the most energy. The star rating system developed and supported by LG, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung Electronics and Sony Ericsson is one of a series of measures being taken by the industry to reduce the environmental footprint of its products. Many consumers are unaware that chargers consume electricity when disconnected from the phone but left plugged into the wall socket. Around two thirds of the energy used...
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It should be common sense that electronic devices can cause interference with other electronic devices (remember the old pacemaker / microwave problem?). After all, an earlier study about RFID tags interfering with medical devices has been released, and a new study released on Sunday shows that headphones might throw off pacemakers and implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) when placed within an inch of the medical devices. The presentation, titled Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) of Implanted Cardiac Devices by MP3 Player Headphones was shown at the American Heart Association's annual scientific sessions in New Orleans on Sunday. It took a look at the possible interaction between the...
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Intel, Samsung, and TSMC--big players in the fabrication of semiconductors--have announced that they will be collaborating in order to target an industry-wide transition to 450mm wafers starting in the year 2012. Most semiconductors today are manufactured on 300mm wafers--a transition that started in 2001--which was 10 years after the transition to 200mm wafers. Targeting 2012 as the next transition period keeps "in line with the historical pace of growth." The reasons for this planned transition were spelled out in a joint press release from the three companies:"Historically, manufacturing with larger wafers helps increase the ability to produce semiconductors at a lower cost. The total silicon...
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The distinctly different manufacturing expertise needed for success in the mechanical and the solid state storage markets means that few companies are prepared to play both sides of the fence. As faster and cheaper SSDs loom, it isn’t surprising that major players are doing everything they can to stop or stall the march of progress long enough to give them time to catch up.Enter Seagate’s CEO Bill Watkins who made good on his promise to sue SSD manufacturers if it looked like they were going to become a threat. Here’s what Bill had to say:"Unfortunately, others in our industry have taken shortcuts in the race to innovate, and in the process, we believe they are relying on intellectual property...
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A report, to be presented at a California computer-security conference in May, suggests that pacemakers and defibrillators may be targets for hacking.Millions of Americans have pacemakers, which keeps hearts beating regularly, or an implanted defibrillator, which can restart stopped hearts with an electric jolt. After implanting a defibrillator under a patient's skin, a doctor uses a special device, about the size of a breadbox, to tell the defibrillator what to do -- for example, to instruct it to keep the heart beating at a certain rate or deliver a test jolt.The devices, called programmers, communicate with a defibrillator using radio waves. To prevent tampering, only physicians are allowed...
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It was a short stay in the top 10. After buying ATI, AMD entered the top 10 chipmakers, but it's already set to drop out of that list.Intel will increase its market share by the end of 2007 to 12.5 percent, keeping its place as the world's top chipmaker, while rival AMD will drop out of the top 10, research firm iSuppli predicted. Samsung Electronics will remain the world's second-biggest chipmaker with 7.4 percent of the market while Toshiba will rise to third place, pushing Texas Instruments to number four, iSuppli said. Total semiconductor revenues are expected to reach $271 billion, up 4.1 percent from 2006. In September, iSuppli had said it expected the market to grow by 3.5 percent....
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If watching all 3 “Back To The Future” movies was supposed to teach us anything, it's that people shouldn't tinker with time. Nor should anyone modify DMC-12s without serious contemplation of the consequences, but perhaps attempting to treat time like a toy was perhaps the more serious message.Apparently nobody got this message out to the good people in the U.S. Congress, and their 2005 change to the daylight savings system has caused all kinds of havoc. Thankfully nothing along the lines of Armageddon-esque/Y2K-horror story events seem to have happened, but rather plenty of small things seem to have gone wrong. Here are a few interesting stories about such events:“At least...
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Yesterday Hot Hardware pointed out the Digitimes report on the tight supply of the lowly DVD pick-up head component. Today's version of "we're running out of stuff" includes an assortment of components needed to build notebook computers. Many notebook manufacturers are in danger of missing their targets for sales for 2007, not because of a lack of demand, but because they can't get all the components they need in a timely fashion. All top-three branded notebook suppliers have been impacted. Dell's 8-series consumer notebooks are in short supply, with Taiwan retailer Tsann Kuen still awaiting delivery of the first batch, according to industry sources. The Dell notebook shortage has...
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According to a telephone interview with John Antone, VP and GM of Intel’s Asia-Pacific division, Intel is providing samples of its Penryn workstation and server CPUs to various computer makers way before the planned launch date, which is Q4 of 2007. “‘We're now broadly sampling [Penryn] for all the various platforms.’” Penryn is the code name for Intel’s line of 45nm processors, which it hopes will keep up the hurt on AMD. Nonetheless, Penryn will be introduced after the long awaited launch of AMD's Barcelona workstation/server chip, which will probably begin shipping in August. Though AMD is hoping for Barcelona to save the day, Intel seems confident that the Penryn will extend its dominance...
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Are LCD manufacturers colluding to keep prices artificially high? If they are, they're doing a crummy job; LCD prices are plummeting. Regulatory agencies in Japan and The US are looking at Samsung, NEC, Sharp, AU Optronics, LG Phillips, and Chi Mei Optoelectronics anyway: The companies are being investigated for allegedly curbing their output for the purpose of keeping LCD prices from falling too quickly, something that has been a great concern for some electronics manufacturers as of late. Sony's president Stan Glasgow told reporters last week that prices for LCD televisions will drop 25 to 30 percent this year, a more drastic drop than...
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HELSINKI (Reuters) - Mobile phones will deal a final blow to makers of music devices and video camcorders, having already hit the photo industry, a senior executive at handset maker Nokia told the Financial Times newspaper. Anssi Vanjoki, head of the multimedia unit at the world's largest cellphone maker, pointed in comments published on Tuesday to Nokia's 2000 forecast of the death of the photo industry, and said the same fate was looming for other sectors. Nokia made 100 million cameraphones last year, making it the world's largest camera manufacturer. READ MORE......
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