Monday, June 23, 2014

Natural Progression: E-Cigs Pave the Way for New E-Joints

Natural Progression: E-Cigs Pave the Way for New E-Joints
jointchrome-2


There may not be any need to spark it up anymore.
It was only a matter of time before e-cigs begot e-joints. A Dutch company called E-Njoint BV says it now produces 10,000 electronic joints in fruity flavors every day, which are rolled out across Europe. These E-Njoints contain no THC, tobacco or nicotine, and as such they claim the product is 100 percent legal. Users, though, can fill it with their own cannabis liquid or dry herbs.
via E-Njoint
via E-Njoint

The International Business Times has more on the new product:
The firm’s chief executive Menno Contant, said: “Holland is well known in the world for its tolerant and liberal attitude toward soft drugs and the introduction of this new product clearly makes a statement: As long as you don’t bother or disturb other people and stay within the legal boundaries, all is well.”
“Developed, manufactured and sold at lightning speed. Everyone should feel fine, because what we are doing is no crime,” Contant continued.
E-Njoint BV is currently in negotiations with medical cannabis company Tikun Olam to see if the E-Njoint will work as a health product, which may be particularly appealing to some US states where marijuana has either been decriminalised or made available medicinally.
Don’t get too excited. E-cigs are facing FDA and state/local regulation, and surely E-joints will face the same scrutiny, brah.

 


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Thursday, June 19, 2014

Harley-Davidson’s First Electric Motorcycle Surprisingly Doesn’t Suck

Harley-Davidson’s First Electric Motorcycle Surprisingly Doesn’t Suck


harley-04


Harley-Davidson is more than a motorcycle, or even a brand. It is an icon, one that brings to mind big, loud bikes ridden by burly men with tattoos and beards. The company has long been known for rumbling V-twin engines and the open road. All of which makes the idea of an electric Harley seem downright absurd.
It’s actually pretty cool.
The LiveWire is the first electric two-wheeler out of Milwaukee. We spent an afternoon riding one amongst the weeds and broken glass of an abandoned Marine Corps runway outside Los Angeles last week and came away impressed. The Hell’s Angels aren’t going to be riding them anytime soon, but the bike offers an entertaining blend of power and comfort. It doesn’t sound anything at all like a proper Harley—or a “fighter jet landing on an aircraft carrier” as Harley brass say—but it’s got a futuristic sound that brings to mind an airliner taking to the air.
The LiveWire may not rumble like the Harleys everyone knows, and it doesn’t perform like them. But it’ll hit 60 mph in under four seconds and it’s got more style than other electrics we’ve ridden. Now Harley has to find out if anyone actually wants the thing.

Cutting weight and potatoes

If Harley-Davidson isn’t the world’s most famous motorcycle, it’s close. The company has been building motorcycles since 1903, and typically subscribes to the bigger-is-better school of engineering. But even Harley-Davidson knows the times are changing, and it recognizes the need to diversify a customer base dominated by middle-aged white guys. Upstarts like Zero Motorcycles and Brammo have proven one way to attract younger, urban riders is selling small, compact bikes powered by batteries. Even major players like Yamaha are giving electrics a go. So Harley is trying it out, too.
“Any business has always got to look ahead to see where customers are interested in going, and see where society might be going,” says Mark-Hans Richer, Harley’s top marketing guy.

That said, this isn’t a production model. Not yet, anyway. Harley is taking a few dozen LiveWires on a tour, dubbed Project LiveWire, of the United States and Europe. It will invite people in each city to check out the bike and provide feedback. The tour starts Monday in New York.
The key challenge in building the LiveWire was the shift from building a bike around an engine to building one around a battery. A battery is heavy—Harley wouldn’t say what the pack weighs, but one EV expert told us something with the range and recharge time Harley claims would be around 250 pounds—so engineers had to cut weight elsewhere. The cast aluminum perimeter frame wrapped around the battery box weighs just 14 pounds, which makes it a full eight pounds lighter than the Zero’s frame. The wheels have hollow spokes, and Harley claims they’re among the lightest aluminum wheels it’s ever produced. There’s no need for an exhaust system, which not only saves weight but gives the bike a sleeker look. The result is a clean, tightly packaged bike without frivolous details.
Harley did most of the chassis work—it’s been building bikes since the dawn of internal combustion, so it’s got that down pat—but brought in experts like Mission Motors for help with things like the motor controller.
Speaking of the motor, the LiveWire marks quite a departure from Harley’s signature sound. You don’t get the syncopated “potato, potato, potato” that is synonymous with a 60-degree V-twin engine. But even though it’s electric, and therefore has no engine, the LiveWire had to live up to Harley’s “look, sound, and feel” mantra. That took a lot of work, but company president and COO Matt Levatich insists the result is “not contrived.”
The high-pitched whir of the longitudinally-mounted, three-phase AC induction motor reverberates through the chassis, amplifying the sound. It starts off quietly, then builds in pitch and volume as the bike gains speed. It’s louder than you’d think, and though it’s not going to set off any car alarms, it’ll definitely make you smile.
harley-03
 Harley-Davidson

What customers want

The LiveWire offers 74 horsepower, 52 foot-pounds of torque and a (governed) top speed of 92 mph. It’s more powerful and quicker off the line than the $13,000 Zero DS, but it’s got less torque and range. That said, it’s got more torque and power than Harley’s Iron 883.
Still, Harley execs and engineers don’t like talking about specs. They don’t want potential customers making judgments based on what the LiveWire offers right now. The LiveWire is a work in progress, based on “what we think our customers are looking for,” Richer says. The company hopes to glean more info during the LiveWire tour, and iterate accordingly to suit consumer tastes. Think of this as LiveWire v1.0.
Harley isn’t saying much about the drivetrain beyond saying the bike uses a lithium-ion battery with a range of 53 miles. It charges in 3.5 hours at 220 volts. Assuming the bike has a 3.3 kw charging system like other electric motorcycles, some back-of-the-envelope math suggests the LiveWire uses a 10 kilowatt-hour pack. Twist the throttle and the bike leaps forward with authority. Roll off the throttle and the regenerative braking kicks in, bringing the bike down from speed with due efficiency.
harley-05
 Harley-Davidson
Harley emphasizes its excitement over the LiveWire, but downplays its importance. An electric bike is just an idea, something that could draw younger, urban buyers to the brand. Companies like Zero have had some success with that strategy, and even convinced a few police departments to add electrics to their fleets. “This is just part of us understanding where the world might want to go,” Richer says. The upside of so cautious an approach, of course, is there’s less fallout if the bike is a flop.

New direction

That’s not out of the question. Harley’s past forays into the potentially lucrative market for smaller, city-focused bikes have ended poorly. That hasn’t kept it from trying again this year with the launch of the Street, a simpler, cheaper, bike made for city riding. The LiveWire is another step in that direction.
“Why can’t Harley do some of these other cool things, too, and see where it takes us?” Levatich says.

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Tuesday, June 17, 2014

The Shadow Internet That’s 100 Times Faster Than Google Fiber

Illustration: dzima1/Getty

When Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said the tech giant might bring10 gigabits per second internet connections to American homes, it seemed like science fiction. That’s about 1,000 times faster than today’s home connections. But for NASA, it’s downright slow.
While the rest of us send data across the public internet, the space agency uses a shadow network called ESnet, short for Energy Science Network, a set of private pipes that has demonstrated cross-country data transfers of 91 gigabits per second–the fastest of its type ever reported.
NASA isn’t going bring these speeds to homes, but it is using this super-fast networking technology to explore the next wave of computing applications. ESnet is a test bed where scientists can explore new ideas before setting them loose on the commercial internet, and it’s an important tool for researchers who deal in massive amounts of data generated by projects such as the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project. Rather sending hard disks back and forth through the mail, they can trade data via the ultra-fast NASA network.
In short, ESnet a window into what our computing world will eventually look like. “Our vision for the world is that scientific discovery shouldn’t be constrained by geography,” says ESnet director Gregory Bell.

The Other Net

The first nationwide computer research network was the Defense Department’s ARPAnet, which evolved into the modern internet. But it wasn’t the last network of its kind. In 1976, the Department of Energy sponsored the creation of the Magnetic Fusion Energy NETwork to connect what is today the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center with other research laboratories. Then the agency created a second network in 1980 called the High Energy Physics network to connect particle physics researchers at national labs. As networking became more important, agency chiefs realized it didn’t make sense to maintain multiple networks and merged the two into one: ESnet.
The nature of the network changes with the times. In the early days it ran on land lines and satellite links. Today it is uses fiber optic lines, spanning the DOE’s 17 national laboratories and many other sites, such as university research labs. Since 2010, ESnet and Internet2—a non-profit international network built in 1995 for researchers after the internet was commercialized—have been leasing “dark fiber,” the excess network capacity built-up by commercial internet providers during the late 1990s internet bubble.

An Internet Fast Lane

In November, using this network, NASA’s High End Computer Networking team achieved its 91 gigabit transfer between Denver and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. It was the fastest end-to-end data transfer ever conducted under “real world” conditions.
ESnet has long been capable of 100 gigabit transfers, at least in theory. Network equipment companies have been offering 100 gigabit switches since 2010. But in practice, long-distance transfers were much slower. That’s because data doesn’t travel through the internet in a straight line. It’s less like a super highway and more like an interstate highway system. If you wanted to drive from San Francisco to New York, you’d pass through multiple cities along the way as you transferred between different stretches of highway. Likewise, to send a file from San Francisco to New York on the internet—or over ESnet—the data will flow through hardware housed in cities across the country.
A map of ESnet's connected sites. Image: Courtesy of ESnet
A map of ESnet’s connected sites. Image: Courtesy of ESnet
NASA did a 98 gigabit transfer between Goddard and the University of Utah over ESnet in 2012. And Alcatel-Lucent and BT obliterated that record earlier this year with a 1.4 terabit connection between London and Ipswich. But in both cases, the two locations had a direct connection, something you rarely see in real world connections.
On the internet and ESnet, every stop along the way creates the potential for a bottleneck, and every piece of gear must be ready to handle full 100 gigabit speeds. In November, the team finally made it work. “This demonstration was about using commercial, off-the-shelf technology and being able to sustain the transfer of a large data network,” says Tony Celeste, a sales director at Brocade, the company that manufactured the equipment used in the record-breaking test.

Experiments for the Future

Meanwhile, the network is advancing the state of the art in other ways. Researchers have used it to explore virtual network circuits called “Oscars,” which can be used to create complex networks without complex hardware changes. And they’re working on what are known as network “DMZs,” which can achieve unusually fast speeds by handling security without traditional network firewalls.
These solutions are designed specifically for networks in which a small number of very large transfers take place–as opposed to the commercial internet where lots of small transfers take place. But there’s still plenty for commercial internet companies to learn from ESnet. Telecommunications company XO Communications already has a 100 gigabit backbone, and we can expect more companies to follow suit.
Although we won’t see 10-gigabit connections—let alone 100 gigabit connections—at home any time soon, higher capacity internet backbones will mean less congestion as more and more people stream high-definition video and download ever-larger files. And ESnet isn’t stopping there. Bell says the organization is already working on a 400 gigabit network, and the long-term goal is a terabyte per second network, which about 100,000 times faster than today’s home connections. Now that sounds like science fiction.


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Friday, June 13, 2014

'Breaking Bad' star Aaron Paul is controlling your Xbox One

'Breaking Bad' star Aaron Paul is controlling your Xbox One

An ad showing Paul telling his Xbox One to turn on is reportedly turning on some users' consoles.

 
Microsoft's Xbox One KinectMicrosoft

Aaron Paul, co-star of the wildly popular "Breaking Bad" television series, is featured in a Microsoft ad that just might take control your Xbox One.
Microsoft released ad earlier this month with Paul showcasing the voice commands available in theXbox One. At the beginning of the commercial, Paul says "Xbox On," the command console owners can use to interact with the Kinect sensor and turn on the console. While everything initially seemed just fine about that commercial, it turns out some gamers have discovered that Paul's command in the ad will get picked up by their Kinect and turn on the Xbox One in their home.
Although it doesn't appear to be a universal hack on Microsoft's part -- some users are seeing their devices turn on and others not -- it calls into question whether the company intended for it to happen or if it's a simple mistake.
Microsoft's Kinect comes with a surprisingly sensitive microphone that allows gamers to speak commands from across the room. "Xbox On" turns the console on, but there are countless others that will launch games, bring up the built-in Xbox store to buy digital goods, and more. Paul uses other voice commands in the video, but according to affected users, those don't appear to have been registered by the Kinect.
Beyond the possibility of having a celebrity control your gaming console, there's one other interesting thing to mention about the ad: it promotes features gamers can only find with Kinect integration with the Xbox One. At the end of the ad, however, Microsoft puts up a screen that mentions its new Kinect-free bundle now available for $400 instead of the $500 bundle that includes the Kinect. That could prove confusing to customers who don't follow the ins and outs of the gaming industry and wonder why, out of the box, their $400 Xbox One won't deliver the Aaron Paul experience.
 



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Sunday, June 8, 2014

The 2014 Razer Blade Is the Best Gaming Laptop, Period [REVIEW]

The 2014 Razer Blade Is the Best Gaming Laptop, Period

Razer-blade-6

The Razer Blade is the thinnest, lightest gaming laptop around, and it’s mind-blowingly fast. Thinner than a MacBook Pro Retina, the all-new graphics processor can play today’s top games and look gorgeous doing it without breaking a sweat. Talk about good looking.





Mark 2014 as a year to remember on your calendar, your Facebook page, your brand newTwitter profile page that you still haven’t quite figured out. Because you won’t remember what made this year great until someone on Reddit writes about it ten or twenty years from now and you think to yourself, “Oh yeah, that’s when laptops became awesome.” Finally.
In my nearly eight years of writing about technology and 20+ revolutions around our little sun playing with tech, this is the first time when mobile computing hasn’t sucked. In fact, it’s a joy! And the new Razer Blade is the epitome of excellence in mobile computing: kickass desktop-level performance, over six hours of battery life, a gorgeous display, all in a thin clamshell design that's lick-worthy. Come and get it.

Refinement, minus the screen

If you think the Blade looks a lot like the MacBook Pro Retina, you're right. Last year's model was a success, and aside from some fine tuning, almost nothing has changed. The keyboard is tighter with excellent low-profile keys; the trackpad is smooth and for some reason still includes two physical buttons and no multi-touch right click; and the speakers produce soft, high-quality audio for movies, music, and of course, games.
The big update is a vastly improved 3K monitor. This Blade has a 3,200 x 1,800 pixel resolution display
The big update is a vastly improved 3K monitor. This Blade has a 3,200 x 1,800 pixel resolution display, the highest I’ve ever seen on any monitor less than double the size. And that’s a problem.



4K (3,840 x 2,160) content may be all the rage nowadays, but unless you're watching House of Cards, there's no content. 3K? It doesn't even exist, and it never will. 1080p video content doesn't fit right, and neither does 4K. The only exception is games, which can almost always fit to the screen's native resolution. Windows doesn't even look good on it; everything's too small.
Yet the display is so gorgeous, so well made, that almost anything looks spectacular on it. 720p video content is fuzzy, but 1080p video looks great, and if you set the screen for other high resolutions like 2,048 x 1,152, the video quality is still excellent. This is one of the best laptop monitors I’ve ever tested, one that produces excellent color and light contrast, is bright enough for outdoor use even with a glossy display, and it’s a touchscreen to boot. It looks so good at other resolutions that even if you never use the native 3K, every other widescreen resolution looks great.

Performance? Let slip the dogs of war

For a 14-inch laptop, the Blade is the fastest, highest-performance machine I’ve ever tested of its size. It boasts some incredible specs: a quad-core 2.2GHz Intel Core i7 4702HQ, 8GB of RAM, and the all new NVIDIA GTX 870M with 3GB of video RAM. The Blade supports 802.11ac Wi-Fi, the fastest wireless technology, and the whole thing ships with 128/256/512GB of memory. The pre-production test unit Razer provided shipped with 128GB and retails for $2,200.
This machine was built for speed, and every part pushes the envelope. It doesn’t matter if you’re just browsing the web or playing Metro: Last Light in its native Russian, the Blade gets the job done fast. And it’ll last over six hours on the battery when word processing or web browsing. Gaming battery life isn't so hot, lasting just about an hour.
Razer Blade 2014


IMAGE: MASHABLE, JAMES PIKOVER
The Blade gets hot and while it’ll run many games extremely well when plugged in, it does throttle performance when on the battery. That means what’ll typically run at a steady 30 frames per second when plugged in will be unplayable on the battery, though with the right settings the Blade will run just about any of today’s top games and still look stunning.
Still, this laptop barely lasts over an hour for Batman: Origins and Crysis 3 while maintaining a solid 30 fps. Plug it in, and you’ll get noticeably better performance, and no longer fear losing another game save.

UltraHD gaming is the future... and it’s not ready for mobile

There’s only one place the Blade slips, and that’s at high resolution. Throw any game up at 3K and everything slows down. Adding more pixels on the screen is the most punishing task for the graphics processor, and it shows. The Blade can play every single game I threw at it at 1,600 x 900 with every graphical option set to maximum. At 3K, everything must be cut in half, and even then performance is always noticeably worse.
So yes, 3K gaming is possible on the Blade, but it isn’t worth it. That’s not to say that ultra-high-definition gaming isn’t better, because it absolutely is. Photorealistic games like Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag look ridiculously good at higher resolutions, but not if you have to turn off all of the settings that make it look so damn pretty.
Razer Blade 2014


While the Razer is a superb gaming laptop, it's still not the machine you want for true 4K gaming.
IMAGE: MASHABLE, JAMES PIKOVER
As powerful as the Blade is, it cannot handle 4K/UltraHD gaming. Not in the way anyone would want to play, and certainly not in a reasonable way for a laptop. And if you thought 3K performance had limitations, 4K is just even harder to stomach. I tested the Blade with the Samsung U28D590D Ultra-HD 4K monitor and every single game ran better than on MSI’s GS60 Ghost, but not enough to warrant using those extra pixels.

Blade running

The Razer Blade isn’t a desktop replacement — it’s a mobile desktop. If I owned one, I’d replace my desktop for it because it’s so damn powerful, and it just so happens to fit very comfortably in practically any bag. Every other computer you can own is secondary. 
The Blade is a refined, beautiful laptop that is an absolute joy to use
The Blade is a refined, beautiful laptop that is an absolute joy to use for everything from typing this review to hours of gaming.



As great as the Blade is, it’s a bit too ambitious. The 3K display produces excellent picture quality and is very bright, but it’s more than the laptop can handle. And all that power comes at a high price. $2,200 is expensive, and that’s for just 128GB of memory, barely enough for a few games. It’s not worthwhile without at least 256GB, which costs $2,400; 512GB sells for $2,700. The Blade is a machine that’ll be powerful for years, but that’s still a heavy cost.
When it comes to laptops however, nothing else compares. The Blade is the thinnest, lightest gaming laptop on the market. It’s sleek and badass and you’ll love every second of it. There are more powerful laptops out there, and I would get the Blade over all of them every time.




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Android can now wake you up when you're close to your bus stop

Android can now wake you up when you're close to your bus stop


Sleeping on the subway

If you've ever taken the bus or subway home after drinking too much at a party, you know how tough it can be to get off at the right stop -- you may fall asleep well before then. That shouldn't be an issue if you're using a recent Android phone, however. Android Police hasnoticed that the latest version of Google Now on Android lets you set an alarm that wakes you up shortly before a favorite destination comes up; you can safely catch some shut-eye knowing that you'll still be home on time. There are third-party apps that offer similar reminders, but it's good to have a built-in safety net when you're not entirely sober.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

The Ingenious Way South Korea Unclogs Toilets




The Ingenious Way South Korea Unclogs Toilets


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How To Hack A Car




How To Hack A Car


Information security researcher Mathew Solnik, with a little over a grand and about a month of work, found time outside of his full-time job to reverse-engineer a car's computer system to make it ready for a takeover.

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