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| Pick a Card Any Card | |
| Number | 2762 |
| Broadcast Date | MAY 17, 2016 |
| Episode Length | 48:37 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt |
| Guests | Patrick Beja |
Nvidia’s new GTX 1080 could improve VR. Plus its’ their fastest yet and beautiful. But is it worth the money? Patrick Beja and Tom Merritt discuss.
Guest
Headlines
- Backchannel reports on Otto a startup founded by Anthony Levandowski, the man who built Google’s first self-driving car, and three other ex-Google engineers. The company has bought and retrofitted three Volvo truck cabs with lidar, radar and cameras and driven them sometimes with no human occupant, on highways in Nevada. Otto plans to sell after-market self-driving kits at a fraction of the cost of a new cab. Initially the tech will only work on highways, exit to exit.
- Sources tell the New York Times that a committee associated with the Cyberspace Administration of China has been reviewing encryption and data storage on products from foreign companies for the past few months. Executives or employees of foreign tech companies supposedly must answer questions about the products in person. The Cyberspace Administration told the Times that the inspections did not target any particular product or country.
- BitTorrent announced BitTorrent Live which uses peer-to-peer to deliver live streaming video with less than 10 seconds of latency. It has 13 free channels to launch including live sports, news, film and tech, with TWiT as one of the channels! Subscription, ad supported, and pay-per-view network are planned for the future. You can sign up to get an email when the service becomes available.
- Submitted by DrewCPU
- Soundhound-- the app that can identify music-- can now be controlled by your voice. Houndify is a virtual assistant in the Soundhound app that can play music from Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music and others. You can also ask it to add songs to a Spotify playlist and play music videos through YouTube. And you can play music trivia with it.
- Google announced Shopping ads in image search results Monday. In a blog post to clients Google said their ads could appear at the top of related image search results. Google also introduced “local inventory ads”, a feature that makes a local advertisers’s store’s inventory searchable via the Local Knowledge Panel, and “store pickup link” which allows advertisers to offer customers the option to buy online and then pickup in store via a Google-hosted local product page.
- Google’s Waze is testing a carpool service with employees of Adobe and Google in the San Francisco area. The service pairs people based on their home and work addresses and ideal departure times. It’s only available during morning and evening commute and riders only exchange money for gas. Waze took a 15% cut in a similar pilot program in Israel but will not take anything from the California test.
- IBM has increased capacity of phase-change memory or PCM, a potential replacement for both Flash memory and RAM. PCM is used in optical disks by using high current to change phase in a crystalline cell that can be read back at low current. IBM has found a way to save 3 bits of data per cell by tracking variations caused by heating that used to limit the reliability. This could bring the cost of PCM down below DRAM and close to flash. PCM can already read data in less than a microsecond compared to 70 microseconds for flash.
- Submitted by spsheridan
- HP showed off two new 3D printers that they promise are 10 times faster than competitors at 340 million voxels per second -- and are cheaper to run too. The new 3D printers use "multi jet fusion" which puts down a thin layer of powder and then uses a thermal inkjet array to add a chemical agent that fuses the material. But it can only print in monochrome thermoplastic. The Jet Fusion 3D 3200-- which is meant for prototyping-- will cost $130,000 next year. The Jet Fusion 3D 4200 has no price or availability but is targeted towards small production runs.
- Bell Labs announced Monday it has achieved 10gbps symmetrical speeds over coaxial cable in the lab with its XG-CABLE technology. It uses echo cancellation to achieve full duplex. With a point-to-multipoint deployment, Nokia's results were nearly 8Gbps downstream and 7.5Gbps upstream. Fiber would have to be deployed within 200 meters of the home to achieve the speeds. And within 100 meters to get full 10 Gbps. It would integrate with DOCSIS 3.1 so as not to break existing service.
- Eyesight Technologies has developed gesture control that uses a phone’s rear camera allowing touch-free input for Things like GearVR and Cardboard. No mention on when it will come to phones-- though Engadget says Eyesight is bringing its control scheme to phones with built-in 3D sensors.
- TechCrunch reports a jump in traffic to VPNs and unblockers from users in Vietnam seems to back up reports on Twitter that Facebook and Instagram were blocked this weekend in parts of Vietnam. Protests have been taking place over environmental problems relating to a steel plant. It seems to be the season as Iraq shut down the Internet for a few hours each morning Saturday through Monday during student exams and Uganda blocked access to social media last Thursday while President Museveni took the oath of office.
Discussion
- GEFORCE GTX 1080 IS A BEAUTIFUL POWERHOUSE, BUT YOU STILL MAY WANT TO WAIT
- Nvidia GTX 1080 review: The new performance king
- NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080 is the GPU upgrade you've been waiting for
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 & GTX 1070 UK release date, price, features and specification: New Pascal GP104 graphics cards launched
Pick of the Day
- I have a boss in Paris while I work in New York. So I felt bad sending an email during work hours for New York that would be late in the evening for my boss. My solution to this is a Chrome extension called Boomerang. I believe Veronica alluded to services like this, but basically it adds a "Send Later" button to my Gmail window and will hold my messages in limbo until whatever time I tell it to send. This way, when I have a non-critical email to send my manager, I just have it set to deliver to him at 8AM his local time.
- Submitted by Drew
Messages
- Don't forget that most smart phone notifications can be turned off. I don't need to be notified in real time for for Facebook mentions, likes, comments, tags, tweets etc and for me email is included in this list. I'm happy to forgo the 'notification dopamine' if it means I become more productive in my daily life.
If you want to read more about the negative effects of smart phones on worker productivity, please check out the book 'The Organized Mind' by Daniel Levitin. Excellent read for those who want to reclaim productivity and creativity in their lives. - Sent by Lee
- Don't forget that most smart phone notifications can be turned off. I don't need to be notified in real time for for Facebook mentions, likes, comments, tags, tweets etc and for me email is included in this list. I'm happy to forgo the 'notification dopamine' if it means I become more productive in my daily life.
- I work on a closed network and when I leave work there is actually no way for me to access my email. I find it mostly a blessing but when something extremely important requiring immediate (or nearly immediate) action happens, I have to travel to my office to take care of it. This is rare but happens at times especially if I'm supporting co-workers overseas. The other part of the curse is that usually on Monday (or any day that I return from a prolonged absence due to work travel or leave) I AM inundated with literally hundred's of emails that I have to prioritize and inform myself on.
- Sent by gadgetchaser
- We live in California, and my wife has to take meetings with Europe almost every morning at 5 or 6AM. (The Europeans will almost never meet during U.S. hours.)
Laws like this ignore the reality that most work is global. If we are to develop ethics and corporate cultures around work/life balance they should be based in the realities of the 21st century!
cheers, - Sent by Adam P.
- We live in California, and my wife has to take meetings with Europe almost every morning at 5 or 6AM. (The Europeans will almost never meet during U.S. hours.)
- We are a global firm and think a lot about this. One of the big challenges is time zones. We often work across many time zones with teams in different parts of the world which necessitates communication outside of the nontraditional workday. With more and more businesses operating on the global stage being flexible on this seems like a reality that, while maybe not ideal, we need to embrace and manage as best we can.
- Sent by Russell
YouTube
Links
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Pick a Card Any Card |
Followed by: "with Scott Johnson" |