Lifeboat Foundation

And Steve Jobs was not yet back at Apple when he gave a remarkably prescient interview to Wired’s website the same year. Although the iMac, iPod, and iPhone were still years away, and Jobs was working at NeXT, he clearly saw where the computing industry was headed.

And although his later work at Apple clearly influenced the way things turned out, he still offered a slew of predictions that are shockingly accurate today.

Here’s what Jobs got right:

Continue reading “Steve Jobs gave an interview in 1996 with a bunch of predictions about the future — it turns out he nailed it” »

POSTECH has created a solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that not only adds life to drones but can also replace lithium-ion batteries in smartphones.

Battery life. Two words that can turn anyone who owns an electronic device into a total wreck. But scientists at POSTECH may have found the solution to prevent you from having a panic attack each time you see your device almost out of juice.

Prof. Gyeong Man Choi and his Ph.D. student Kun Joong Kim have developed a miniaturized solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) powerful enough to extend the flying time of drones to more than an hour. And that’s just the start.

Continue reading “Scientists Make Mini Fuel Cells That Keep Phones Charged For a Week” »

Researchers in Finland have figured out a way to reliably make quantum computers — technology that’s tipped to revolutionise computing in the coming years — even more powerful. And all they had to do was throw common sense out the window.

You’re almost certainly reading this article on a classical computer — which includes all phones, laptops, and tablets — meaning that your computer can only ever do one thing at a time. It reads one bit, then the next bit, then the next bit, and so on. The reading is lightning fast and combines millions or billions or trillions of bits to give you what you want, but the bits are always read and used in order.

So if your computer searches for the solution to a problem, it tries one answer (a particular batch of ones and zeros), checks how far the result is from the goal, tries another answer (a different batch), and repeats. For complicated problems, that process can take an incredibly long time. Sometimes, that’s good. Very clever multiplication secures your bank account, and faster or more efficient equation-solvers put that in jeopardy.

Continue reading “New quantum computer device takes advantage of a loophole in causality” »

Now, we’re hitting Terminator mode with this.

If you’re worried that artificial intelligence will take over the world now that computers are powerful enough to outsmart humans at incredibly complex games, then you’re not going to like the idea that someday computers will be able to simply build their own chips without any help from humans. That’s not the case just yet, but researchers did come up with a way to grow metal wires at a molecular level.

At the same time, this is a remarkable innovation that paves the way for a future where computers are able to create high-end chip solutions just as a plant would grow leaves, rather than having humans develop computer chips using complicated nanoengineering techniques.

Continue reading “Remarkable nanowires could let computers of the future grow their own chips” »

You may have never heard of AMD, but you’ve almost certainly used products powered by the company’s technologies.

AMD, or Advanced Micro Devices, is one of the biggest chipmakers in the world. The 46-year-old California company makes computer chips and all the related tech needed to power applications on PCs, smartphones, tablets, and more.

On Monday, AMD surprised everyone with its newest initiative: The Sulon Q, built out of a partnership with Ontario-based Sulon Technologies.

Continue reading “This powerful headset can switch between virtual and augmented reality on the fly — you need to see it in action” »

A few weeks ago DJI unveiled its newest drone, the Phantom 4, the first craft to offer robust obstacle avoidance at a price the average consumer can afford. It relied on computer vision to power its autonomous flight, and since DJI had shown off this kind of tech before, we assumed that all the hardware on the Phantom 4 was homegrown, or backed by a giant like Intel. But today the chipmaker Movidius announced that its latest offer, the Myriad 2, was at the center of the onboard processor powering the Phantom 4’s incredible new abilities.

As it turns out this isn’t the first time Movidius has partnered with a big name to develop cutting edge technology. Back in 2014 its first chip, the Myriad 1, was revealed as the brains inside of Google’s first generation of Project Tango tablets. After a decade toiling in relative obscurity, the small 125 person company is suddenly poised to emerge as a leader at the intersection of several major markets — from drones to phones to virtual reality — which are looking for ways to enable cheap, power-efficient computer vision.

Continue reading “The revolutionary chipmaker behind Google’s project Tango is now powering DJI’s autonomous drone” »

The legendary hacker George Hotz, known by his nom de guerre “geohot,” who first came to public attention by hacking Apple’s (AAPL) first iPhone, spoke this morning at the South by Southwest conference about taking on Tesla’s (TSLA) self-driving car initiatives with his own garage efforts, a talk titled “I built a better self-driving car than Tesla.”

By the end of the talk, it was clear he had numerous targets, including Alphabet’s (GOOGL) self-driving car efforts, despite mighty respect for the search giant.

Hotz’s achievement, rigging up home made parts to an Acura ILX to make it self-driving, first came to prominence with an article in mid-December by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance.

Continue reading “We Are Coming for You, Tesla, And You, Too, Google, Says Hacker Hotz” »

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Samsung is bringing second-generation 14nm technology to its midrange smartphone devices this year, along with (we hope) a solid battery life boost. Hopefully manufacturers will use 14nm power savings to offer devices that prioritize battery life over shaving a few millimeters off the frame.