AMD's high-bandwidth memory explained For years now, AMD has taken on the responsibility of defining new types of memory to be used in graphics cards, standards that have eventually come to be used by the entire industry. Typically, being first out of the gate with a new graphics-oriented memory technology has given AMD a competitive advantage in that first generation of products. For instance, the introduction of GDDR5 allowed the Radeon HD 4870 to capture the performance crown back in the day. The Tech Report

I let IBM's robot chef tell me what to cook for a week If you've been following IBM's Watson project and like food, you may have noticed growing excitement among chefs, gourmands and molecular gastronomists about one aspect of its development. The main Watson project is an artificial intelligence that engineers have built to answer questions in native language  --  that is, questions phrased the way people normally talk, not in the stilted way a search engine like Google understands them. Medium

These two Diablo III players stole virtual armor and gold -- and got prosecuted IRL These days, we all have shadow selves that exist in virtual environments – be it on Facebook, Twitter, or in video games. And those digital avatars, it turns out, can get us in IRL trouble. Last year, in a first-of-its-kind legal case that has not previously been reported, two men pled guilty to misdemeanors in California and Maryland that stemmed from their robbing video game characters of gold, weapons and armor. Fusion

Founder of Facebook's Oculus hit with lawsuit The founder of virtual reality glasses maker Oculus VR Inc, acquired by Facebook Inc for $2 billion, has been accused of taking confidential information he learned while working with another company and passing it off as his own, according to a lawsuit filed this week. The plaintiff, Hawaii-based company Total Recall Technologies, said it hired Oculus founder Palmer Luckey in 2011 to build a prototype head mounted display. Reuters

Tracking protection for Firefox at Web 2.0 security and privacy 2015 My paper with Georgios Kontaxis got best paper award at the Web 2.0 Security and Privacy workshop today! Georgios re-ran the performance evaluations on top news sites and the decrease in page load time with tracking protection enabled is even higher (44%!) than in our Air Mozilla talk last August, due to prevalence of embedded third party content on news sites. You can read the paper here. Monica at Mozilla

'Big indie' Kickstarters are killing actual indies We all know the Kickstarter bubble is bursting. And when it inevitably pops, Kickstarters like Bloodstained will be the ones holding the thumbtack. Right now, passionate, optimistic backers who want to see their favorite old franchises return to life are being misled right and left about the "real" costs behind a game, concerns often hand-waved away by celebrity headliners and funding goals that appear to be appropriately large -- on the surface. Polygon (also, The new wave: 20 indie games to watch)

Death in the browser tab There you are watching another death on video. In the course of ordinary life -- at lunch or in bed, in a car or in the park -- you are suddenly plunged into someone else's crisis, someone else's horror. It arrives, absurdly, in the midst of banal things. That is how, late one afternoon in April, I watched Walter Scott die. The footage of his death, taken by a passer-by, had just been published online on the front page of The New York Times. The NY Times

Need for Speed 2015 reboot (teaser) trailer revealed The first teaser trailer for Need for Speed 2015 is released with a brief glimpse of some in-game engine visuals. While this isn't precisely representative of what you're going to be seeing in the game, so to speak, it is an idea of what the finest of the fine will look like in cut-scenes. As always, we'll have to wait a bit longer for full gameplay action. Like E3 2015 time, we're talking here. This game will include some of the most fantastic buzz-words you've ever read. SlashGear

Google Tracker 2015 (I/O edition): Android M, Chromecast 2, and lots more With E3 coming up next month, we'll soon be gearing up to bring you word on the glitziest, biggest-budget blockbusters that the major publishers can currently cook up. Before that happens, though, we wanted to put the spotlight on some of the smaller, possibly overlooked titles we've been enjoying at festivals and elsewhere within the past year. Ars Technica

This table sucks up heat to lower your AC bills Air conditioning is a modern wonder. It's also an expensive luxury and a total drain on the environment. Most buildings address thermal control on a structure level by building in HVAC systems, but two designers from Paris think there might be a better way, or at least an alternative way. "We wanted to see if it was possible to address climate and energy issues on a furniture scale," says designer Jean-Sébastien Lagrange. Wired

Yes, I want your goddamn AOL CDs As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. The two winners, by a landslide, are: "_______ 8″ floppies" (a whole variety of statements, from people having them to people wondering if they're possible to save, the answer of which is yes) "Hey, are you going to collect AOL CD-ROMs too?" Jason Scott

Java's key to success is simplicity Java's success in remaining relevant on the ever-changing landscape of software development has been its relative simplicity. On Wednesday, Oracle celebrated the 20-year anniversary of the birth of the Java programming language with a blitz of marketing. Certainly the largely pre-Internet IT landscape was far different when the language was introduced by Sun Microsystems (which was purchased by Oracle in 2010). ITworld

As antitrust case looms, 'Peak Google' debated As Google faces an antitrust probe from European regulators, some analysts are questioning whether the California tech giant's dominance has already peaked. While Google remains one of the world's biggest companies with overwhelming dominance of Internet search, its prospects are less rosy in a tech landscape rapidly shifting to mobile devices and social media, say some industry watchers. Phys.org

Lemon Pi, a powerful Raspberry Pi Clone The Lemon Pi single board computer tries to copy the success of the very popular Raspberry Pi, even the 40-pins feature port of the Raspberry Pi is copied(!) The Lemon Pi features a powerful ARM Quad-core cortex A9 and Imagination PowerVR SGX544 GPU. Connectivity is handled by Multi-USBs, I2C, SPI, UART, I2S, PCM, SPDIF, MIPI DSI / CSI, HDMI, and Ethernet ports. It Runs on Linux

Inside the labs where Netflix is trying to make televisions suck less In a nondescript room in the center of Netflix's headquarters, you can walk into a small, paper white chamber called the Shu. It's an homage to the solitary confinement cell inOrange Is The New Black, one of Netflix's most popular original series. And just like the Shu in the show, Netflix's version is a place of punishment -- only of TVs, not humans. The Verge

BlackBerry to lay off undisclosed number of employees in device business BlackBerry said Friday it is laying off an undisclosed number of employees in its device business including those focused on development of smartphone software and applications. The move is part of the company's goal of boosting sales of higher margin mobile-management and security software to reignite growth, it said. The WSJ

Famed 'A Beautiful Mind' mathematician John Nash, wife killed in taxi crash, police say John Forbes Nash Jr., the Princeton University mathematician whose life story was the subject of the film "A Beautiful Mind," and his wife of nearly 60 years died Saturday in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, police said. Nash was 86. Alicia Nash was 82. The couple lived in Princeton Junction. NJ.com

Second Chance: Doom 3 Ever played Doom? Little FPS game. Quite popular for a while in the 90s. Sold a fair few copies. Inspired a clone or two. Led to the invention of something called 'Deathmatch'. Don't worry if you've never heard of it. Not every game can go into legend as quickly as Syndicate, Ultima and Bert Higgins: The Man From Hell. Richard Cobbett