A good acronym also hints at what it does, and Visteon's new intelligent in-car concept, HABIT, is a good example of that. The Human Bayesian Intelligence Technology system -- to give it its full name -- learns the behaviour of drivers so it can automatically change the temperature, heat the seats and drop that Biohazardalbum just when you need it most. Factors such as weather, time of day and real-time road conditions all play a part, plus, of course a log of all your typical in-car interactions. It promises to go above just warming your behind on...
At today’s Bay Area Maker Fair, Arduino announced its new board, the Arduino Yún . The board is an Arduino Leonardo running Linino, a Linux fork based on OpenWRT. The board is Wi-Fi capable, which Arduino hopes will encourage people to use the boards to make cloud-ready projects. In an official statement the company explained: “Historically, interfacing Arduino with complex Web services has been quite a challenge due to the limited memory available. Web services tend to use verbose text based formats like XML that require quite a lot or ram
We know you've got questions, and if you're brave enough to ask the world for answers, then here's the outlet to do so. This week's Ask Engadgetinquiry is from Xan, who wants Cintiq functionality without paying Cintiq prices. If you're looking to ask one of your own, drop us a line at ask [at] engadget [dawt] com."I'm a student and I'm considering staying on to do graphic design, and I really like the look of Wacom's Cintiq devices. Unfortunately I couldn't afford one even if I sold a kidney, so I was wondering if I could turn an
If you didn't get enough mobile news during the week, not to worry, because we've opened the firehose for the truly hardcore. This week brought a new handset from Sony to the US and UK, updates to Nokia Creative Suite and three new (and very inexpensive) smartphones from Blu Products. These stories and more await after the break. So buy the ticket and take the ride as we explore...
The quantified self movement's gaining steam, with companies creating all sorts of gadgets to track our activity levels, sleeping habits and even what's going on inside our heads. Melon's an EEG headband that taps into your brain's inner workings to show you how well you maintain mental focus. We actually saw Melon's prototype predecessorlast year when it was called Axio, and while this new band packs largely the same components, the design's been refined to a much thinner profile. As before, its got a trio of electrodes for sensing brainwaves, a NeuroSky chip for filtering out extraneous electrical noise...
This is the second in our series of reboots that need the boot. We looked first at Alien vs. Predator . The third installment releases Sunday on Ars Technica. There is a small handful of game series that I've sunk thousands of hours of my life into. The most enduring of them all is SimCity , the city simulator. A considerable chunk of my gaming career has been spent building large, sprawling metropolises: zoning land, redesigning transport infrastructure, balancing budgets, building public amenities, and occasionally burning
When Valve's first hardware hire, Jeri Ellsworth, tweeted back in February that she was firedfrom the company, we were disappointed but also intrigued by what she meant by "time for new exciting projects." Well we finally saw what she's been up to here at at Maker Faire 2013. It's called Cast AR, and it's a pair of 3D augmented-reality glasses that she and fellow co-worker Rick Johnson were developing at Valve before leaving.The model we saw is still in the early prototype stages, but the concepts are already in place. Perched atop a pair of active...
Alt-week takes a look at the best science and alternative tech stories from the last seven days....
We know that "where for are thou?" was in search of a different Shakespearean character, but if you had the same question for (Dell's) Ophelia, then the answer is July. The Android pendrive / USB computer we saw back at CESmay be one of many, but distinctive thanks to its mainstream PC-maker origins. We're still lacking a lot of the specifics, other than that there's WiFi, Bluetooth, Wyse PocketCloudintegration, plus, of course, HDMI and Android 4.something. There will likely be a few enterprise-friendly features too (administration tools, remote wiping) reports PC World. As usual, developers will...
We spent the week at I/O sitting in sessions, walking around the show floor, and congregating with developers. After the keynote, things got quieter on the news front but there was still plenty to learn about. This conference is about community, bringing together developers of all types, and connecting people with similar interests and backgrounds. It's also about adorable little Androids, which absolutely overwhelmed downtown San Francisco's convention center, the Moscone Center. The Google Store A Google Store employee models the Android Superhero costume, available for a mere $32.80. There was no word on compatibility with the YouTube Socks.
Imagine a future where solar panels speed off the presses, like newspaper. Australian scientists have brought us one step closer to that reality. Researchers from the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium (VICOSC) have developed a printer that can print 10 meters of flexible solar cells a minute. Unlike traditional silicon solar cells, printed solar cells are made using organic semi-conducting polymers, which can be dissolved in a solvent and used like an ink, allowing solar cells to be printed. Not only can the VICOSC machine print flexible A3 solar cells, the machine can print directly
Sprint was clearly hungry for capacity when it bought spectrum from US Cellularlast fall, and it's at last getting its fill -- some of it, at least -- by closing the deal today. The carrier has officially taken possession of 20MHz in airwaves across Midwestern cities like Champaign, Chicago and South Bend, as well as 10MHz in St. Louis. The customer handover isn't quite as grandiose as was mentioned in November, however: Sprint is ultimately adopting 420,000 US Cellular customers, rather than the originally claimed 585,000. It should be a relatively bump-free transition, no matter who's included in...
This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange , a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites . Dokkat appears to think that databases are overused. "Instead of a database, I just serialize my data to JSON, saving and loading it to disk when necessary," he writes . "All the data management is made on the program itself, which is faster AND easier than using SQL queries." What is missing here? Why should a developer use a database when saving data to a
We have heard before of the ruggedized version of the Galaxy S4 - the Galaxy S4 Active - that Samsung is reportedly working on. Now, some more details about the hardware of the device have surfaced, in the form of benchmark results. The Galaxy S4 Active, or the SGH-I537 for AT&T, was found in the GFXBench results database. Unlike the standard Galaxy S4, which runs on the Samsung Exynos 5 Octa internationally and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 in the US, the S4 Active is running on a MSM8960, which is a Snapdragon S4 Plus part, found on last year's Galaxy...Read more http://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_galaxy_s4_active_spotted_in_benchmark_scores-news-6064.php
Even though we don't yet know what the PlayStation 4 looks like or how much it will cost, one of the many details revealed at Sony's February eventwas that games will be playable even as they download. Now it turns out we won't have to wait for the new hardware to experience that feature on a console -- Steam, for example, does this on PCs with some games -- as The Last of Usleaders Bruce Straley and Neil Druckman told Game Informerthe PS3 game will be available as a download the same day it arrives on...
Marijuana may make you overeat, but it could be an effective diabetes treatment. Lighting up a bit of weed is often blamed for people going on uninhibited eating binges. So it's a bit of a surprise to find a study saying that regular marijuana use is associated with a slimmer waistline . Perhaps even more striking, however, is the affect it had on metabolism, where it drops resting blood glucose levels. These results are consistent with past indications that marijuana users have a lower incidence of diabetes. The one unusual thing here is that the new study found no indication
This week, a handful of Ars staffers gathered in San Francisco, CA to see the new Star Trek movie at Starfleet Headquarters. (Ok, just kidding, we saw the movie at San Francisco's Metreon, and most of us were there for Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference.) Besides Google's conference and the rare spotting of more than three Ars employees sharing IRL space with each other, this week also saw notable stories hit the front page. Specifically, we wrote about a Soviet defense satellite that
With much of its information obscured it's hard to say what Google has planned for this new device revealed by its FCC filing, but the model number at least indicates someone has a sense of humor. Called an "H840 device" and rocking the model number H2G2-42 ( Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy- 42, the ultimate answer to the question of life, the universe and everything) it has WiFi of the 802.11 b/g/n varieties, but that's all we know for sure. The natural question is whether this is a proper revamp of / follow up to the failed Nexus Q...
“This stuff matters.” Jon Lander, the executive producer of CCP Games’ EVE Online , tells me this during an interview on the first proper day of the company’s Fanfest 2013 event in Reykjavik, Iceland last month. He doesn’t seem to mean much by it and at the time I took it as a throwaway comment. We were in the midst of a larger conversation about monetization and his company’s business practices. However, after three days surrounded by developers and EVE devotees, I came to understand this as the foundational idea and central thesis of the game. All human interaction—be it
The HTC One , the Taiwanese flagship smartphone was launched back in March with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean on board, and it looks like the company might soon roll out the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update for the smartphone as well. According to a tweet from an HTC Developer, the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update for the HTC One smartphone could be rolled out as soon as two or three weeks from now. However, there is no official word on the potential software update, so take it with a pinch of salt. The Android 4.2 Jelly Bean update for HTC...Read more http://www.gsmarena.com/htc_one_to_get_android_42_jelly_bean_update_in_23_weeks-news-6063.php
