Latest Car News Update : See The World As A Self-Driving Car Does In Tesla's Latest Video

If you're not already wowed by some of the work going on in self-driving car technology then Tesla's latest video might take your appreciation levels up a notch - it shows a split screen view of what one of these autonomous vehicles 'sees' during a journey.

That includes lane lines, the flow of the road, road signs and streetlights, as well as the in-path objects that need to be avoided. It's an enlightening look at just how complex these systems are and how far they've come in recent years.

The latest clip was shared by Tesla chief Elon Musk on Twitter and follows another similar clip released last month - obviously the company is keen to get as many people comfortable with the idea of self-driving vehicles as it can.

Tesla has already said that from this point on all of its cars will be fitted with the hardware and technology required to make them fully autonomous, but it can't be switched on until all the relevant safety checks have been carried out and it becomes officially legal to take an autonomous car out on the road.

The testing that the likes of Tesla and Google are doing at the moment is covered by special licences and it's going to be a few years yet before governments are going to give the legal all-clear.

These cars also need to be tested out in more extreme conditions and on more demanding routes around the world - tootling through the wide streets of California in the sunshine is all well and good, but until self-driving motors can also get across the Pennines in the snow they'll remain in beta testing.

Posted by Unknown Sunday, November 20, 2016

New Technology Update : A Malicious WhatsApp Video Feature Invite Is Spreading Across The Messaging App

WhatsApp recently announced the launch of its video calling feature which has started to roll out for Android, iOS and Windows Phone users. While a number of messaging apps offer this feature, WhatsApp has been a little late, it does however have the biggest user base across the globe.

While the news is welcoming, many users are receiving as well as sharing an unverified link on WhatsApp which is said to be an invite to activate the video calling feature. An invite system was introduced last year on Whatsapp when the voice calling feature was rolled out. It seems that certain scammers are trying to take advantage of this as they have spread a similar looking fake link for the new video calling feature.

WhatsApp has not officially released any links this time to enable any feature, so in case you get any such links, do not visit any of the links. Visiting these links could be harmful and could expose your personal data.

According to a report, the link takes you to what seems to look like an authentic page where it asks you to send the malicious link to other people on your list. It also mentions the existence of group WhatsApp video calling, a feature that is still not officially available on the platform.

If you do happen to get an invite to activate the video calling feature on WhatsApp, do ignore it. To get the feature you just need to update the app to the latest version. In case you don’t see an update, wait for a couple of days as it is rolling out in phases.

Posted by Unknown Saturday, November 19, 2016

News Gaming Update : 10 Things We've Learned About Fallout 4

Fallout 4 is gathering momentum, with just over three months to go until it emerges from the bunker like a drowsy, post-apocalyptic Godzilla.

Bethesda recently used Gamescom 2015 to give journalists a sneak preview of Lexington, one of the game's many desolate towns, in a video that was narrated by Fallout 4 game director Todd Howard. 

Overrun by hordes of raiders and other wastelanders, it demonstrated some of the game's mechanics while introducing new enemies and locations. 

Though tempting, we didn't just sit there gawping like a ghoul: click on to discover what we learned during the brief but action-packed preview.

The preview's opening sequence made a big deal about the role strength will play in Fallout 4. "Keep doing chin-ups and push-ups because there's more that strength can do for you," advised a voice with Fallout's familiar '50s American accent. "Swing for the fences like a pro, wear specialised protective gear and craft weapons to wield." 

We know that some pretty beefy vault suits lie in wait with gatling guns and other weapons attached, and on the basis of this hint, there might be a baseball bat for bashing things in the head too. 

Fallout 4 awards you with perks, skills and abilities as you progress through the game. They're chosen via a perk chart that's organised through seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L abilities: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck.

There are 70 base perks, each with multiple ranks that do new things, providing a total of 275 abilities to pick. According to Howard, it gives you "a ton of choices and many different ways to develop your character over the game". 

There was heavy reliance on V.A.T.S (Vault-Tec Assisted Targeting System) in Fallout 3, which doesn't appear to be the case in its sequel. In the demo, Fallout's 4's protagonist dismembered feral ghouls by blasting off their kneecaps, Dead Space-style, after which they continued to crawl around.

You can still use V.A.T.S, but instead of making the came come to a dead stop it merely slows it down the action. This will invariable speed up the gameplay and force you to swiftly pick a limb for picking off and think on your toes more creatively.

Fallout 4's protagonist (the Sole Survivor) has a canine pal called Dogmeat. You're probably already aware of his canine companion, as a) he attracted more attention than anything else when the initial Fallout 4 trailer due to his slightly blocky appearance and b) Dogmeat has been a fixture of previous games in the series.

It turns out he's more than just a guide dog in Fallout 4 and can be commanded to explore rooms, attack enemies and even growl to alert you when they're nearby. Like Frodo's Sting, only furrier and less blue.

The demo gave a glimpse of the Fat Man in action. One of the most ridiculous(ly satisfying) shoulder-mounted rocket launchers ever. The chunky projectile flinger gets quite some distance on it too, as was demonstrated when our Sole Survivor used the nuke launcher to take out a troublesome enemy on a high up ledge.

Fat Man is a meaty weapon, no doubt about it, but it's not powerful enough to take out all of the game's bigger nasties in a single hit. In an encounter with a troll-like Behemoth, the Sole Survivor used V.AT.S to direct a swift Fat Boy rocket to its face, only for the beast to emerge enraged from the other side of a mini mushroom cloud. 

If you're low on firepower, some of Lexington's locations contain oil barrels that will explode when shot, providing another tactical avenue to take out some of Fallout 4's meaner enemies. 

If you don't the firepower to take out enemies yourself, it's possible to manipulate enemies or other NPCs to do your bidding. While explaining perks, Howard noted: "There's a perk for each special, and each rank of that special goes from one to ten. If you were to come out of the value with a 10 charisma, you can pick the intimidation perk that lets you manipulate and control other people." 

As in Fallout 3, enemies sometimes begin to fight each other if they come too into close contact, and throwing manipulation into the mix should let you start some interesting brawls. 

The vast array of weaponry on offer seemed to equip the Sole Survior with enough power to deal with all enemies on the ground in the video - except one.

Nestled high up in a mountain side, a turret was the only enemy that proved Fallout 4's protagonist real problems in Bethesda's preview video, raining down bullets in a hail of pain. The attack caused enough damage to make the injured Vault Boy icon appear in the top-right hand corner, which indicates that you've been injured. Mark these words: turrets are going to cause you pain. 

About halfway through the demo, we started to notice a running theme: Fallout 4's weapons - from the Fat Man to miniguns and flamethrowers - all sounded meaty and convincing while giving off some great-looking particle effects. A red energy gun called the Laser Musket was top of the pile, spitting out red laser beams that ripped through enemies and ricocheted off walls when indoors, lighting them up like a firecracker.

If it's half as fun to use as it looks, we'll be running around the wastelands doing our best X-Men Cyclops impression, which wouldn't be too difficult in that blue and yellow suit.

Bethesda recently tweeted that there'll be no level cap and you'll be able to keep playing the game once the main story is complete. If you're the kind of player that likes to carry on exploring the open world once you're done, you'll be able to continue growing your character's strengths to theoretically take on increasingly powerful enemies. Whether Bethesda will introduce new ones via DLC remains to be seen.

Posted by Unknown Sunday, August 09, 2015

News Update On Google Glass : How Google Glass v2 Could Change The Enterprise

This week a new device passed through the FCC—codenamed GG1—and many have speculated that it’s the next generation of the Google GOOGL +0.68% Glass hardware. While the Explorer Edition was anything but a runaway success, what some are calling the “Enterprise Edition” could very well be what Glass needs to take it mainstream into the office.

When Microsoft MSFT -0.18% launched their Surface Tables years ago I could see a lot more enterprise use from the device than simply moving photos around during the early days of the demos. Since then Surface adoption was a commercial disaster and are consigned to be little more than a gimmick than for day to day business use. With Hololens now in the frame, Microsoft are back in a big way, touting virtual and augmented reality as the next big thing in the office, and at home.

I’ve been writing about marrying up touch and virtual enabled devices with an enterprise productivity purpose for years and personally I still feel that losing the mouse and keyboard is somewhat inevitable, hands are infinitely more adept at manipulating an environment and objects and having a touchscreen/ gesture based version of enterprise tools would be a natural transition.

At the time in 2010 I also got in touch with Schematic (www.schematic.com), the firm behind the technology as seen in Minority Report because creating such a device for enterprises in a workshop environment would be an exciting prospect. If anything it would be a boon to lose the frankly archaic brown paper model. I even pointed towards John Underkoffler at TED demonstrating the very same thing, and in which towards the end he lists the kinds of end user industries he’d see this kind of technology implemented in (I urge you to watch the demo all the way through and try to imagine integrating this in an enterprise context. Great stuff. http://bit.ly/9lMx2G)

Anyway, I digress, back to Google Glass v2. Just how can Google Glass and Augmented Reality add value in the enterprise. If we look to an article which discusses how Glass can change advertising you can begin to see where this can lead.

    ….what if the ads you saw were different than the person next to you? What if, like the ads you see online, they are based on a composite sketch of you created by all the searches you’ve done and the websites you’ve visited? In other words, what if you looked up and instead of seeing an ad for something you would never buy — like women’s shoes — you saw an ad reminding you of that Amazon search you did a few days ago ?
So, what if you’re sitting in a call-center and instead of staring at a productivity pie-chart on a screen you pop your supervisory head above the parapet and with your Enterprise Edition Glasses can see each individuals performance figures ? By calling up the person in question using the interface you can see their stats in a heads-up (HUD) display. Plus with not being tied to your desk you can floor-walk at the same time or do this anywhere, anytime, without the need to carry a tablet or phone interface with you.

In an interview I took with Dr Ross Brown of QUT he stated that “Augmented reality system tools for Business Process Management would be nice as well.  Imagine six sigma data overlaid on the artifacts used in a process model…all on a heads up display as you walk around the company – a “BPM Tricorder”.

That was in 2011. Before Google Glass v1.

And similar to the article about advertising, every co-worker will have a different view based on their own work and position in the organisation, again able to call this up at any time, any where. Go deeper and you could have enterprise social integration, the obvious trick is to offer filters for the noise from the relevant and actionable information to present in front of the user.

It’s not just implications for workflow scenarios and businesses in customer service industries, healthcare is another example of where wearable technology like this could be a massive boost in real-time and mobile patient informatics. Or in education, no more ‘smart boards’ if the kids are wearing augmented reality sets and receiving tailored tutoring depending on their own individual needs. Indeed, BMW were experimenting with augmented reality in the workshop several years ago.

Google Glass v2 could very well be the catalyst for true mobilility and personalisation in many industry sectors.

Whether enterprise software vendors will make a serious investment in Glass v2 will remain to be seen but Glass “Enterprise Edition” will not be the only AR device on the market to develop for when it’s eventually released.

It’s interesting times as consumer devices lead the revolution in the workplace we’ve all been waiting for.

Posted by Unknown Saturday, July 04, 2015

News Sony Xperia Update : Xperia Z3 Spotted Running Android 5.1.1 With New Icons And Animations In Video

While Sony is busy testing the Android Lollipop upgrade for the Xperia Z series device, a leaked video has been spotted, suggesting the Android 5.1.1 for the Xperia Z3 smartphone.

Thanks to Wayerless we now know Sony is planning the next Android version for Xperia Z3, and the video shows that Sony might skip Android 5.1, in favour of Android 5.1.1.

The video which runs slightly more than a minute, shows Xperia Z3 bearing number D6603 is running Android 5.1.1 update, which adds new animations and a shortcut bar that allows searching for available Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth directly from the notification menu.

Apart from this, there are new icons in the settings menu which are flatter and brighter in keeping with Google's material design. And the Music app that replaces Walkman.

A couple of Android Lollipop builds such as 23.4.A.0.279 and 23.4.A.0.248 have been caught in Handtec Detection site, hinting the build template for Android Lollipop release for Xperia Z3 or, Z2 series would be 23.4.A.0.XXX.

If the latest report is to be believed, then expect the official roll-out of the new Android version for Xperia Z3 later this month or, early next month. Check out the video for more details.

Posted by Unknown Monday, May 18, 2015