Comma.ai will ship a $999 autonomous driving add-on by the end of this year At TechCrunch Disrupt SF this year, famed iPhone and PlayStation hacker George Hotz unveiled the first official product of his automotive AI startup, Comma.ai. The Comma One is a $999 add-on shipping before the end of the year, with a $24 monthly subscription for its software, which Hotz says will be able to drive your car from Mountain View to San Francisco without requiring a driver to touch the wheel, the brake or the gas. TechCrunch
New system could break bottleneck in microprocessors Engineers at North Carolina State University and at Intel have come up with a solution to one of the modern microprocessor's most persistent problems: communication between the processor's many cores. Their answer is a dedicated set of logic circuits they call the Queue Management Device, or QMD. In simulations, integrating the QMD with the processor's on-chip network, at a minimum, doubled core-to-core communication speed, and in some cases, boosted it much farther. IEEE Spectrum
Game time for Twitter: Jack Dorsey's big bet on live events Once upon a time, there was an ocean that surged with a billion and one stories. Every one was different, and they combined in unexpected ways to create new stories. Fishing one out of the torrent took patience, but could be enormously rewarding. The ocean in question is the subject of Salman Rushdie's 1990 fantasy novel,Haroun and the Sea of Stories, a book unfamiliar to me until Jack Dorsey spontaneously urged me to read it as we chatted in the Aviary, a secluded spot at Twitter's expansive San Francisco headquarters. Fast Company
AMD increased market share in Q2 2016 despite overall GPU shipments declining 4%, from last quarter GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every system before it is shipped, and most of the PC vendors are guiding cautiously for Q3'16. Once again, the Gaming PC segment, where higher-end GPUs are used, was a bright spot in the market in the quarter.
One thing to note, the Gaming PC segment, where higher-end GPUs are used, continues to deliver growth for PC makers. Jon Peddie Research.
GlobalFoundries skips the 10-nm node on the way to 7-nm FinFETs GlobalFoundries recently announced it would be adding a 12-nm node to its FD-SOI roadmap, and it's now announcing a more mainstream node for high-performance silicon: 7-nm FinFET. That move follows reports that the company would make exactly this move last month. Surprisingly, GloFo says it'll achieve this shrink using optical lithography alongside "EUV (extreme ultraviolet lithography) compatibility at key levels." The Tech Report
Amateur Radio Parity Act passes in the US House of Representatives "The bill is passed without objection." With those words, Amateur Radio history was made on September 12, when the US House of Representatives approved the Amateur Radio Parity Act, H.R. 1301 on a voice vote under a suspension of the rules. The focus of the campaign to enact the legislation into law now shifts to the US Senate. The House victory culminated many years of effort on ARRL's part to gain legislation that would enable radio amateurs living in deed-restricted communities to erect antennas that support Amateur Radio communication. ARRL
The man behind the million dollar homepage Alex Tew isn't really known for following the crowd. His mantra has always been to see what everyone else is focusing on and to do the opposite. In 2005, Tew was obsessed with one thing: making money, enough to pay his way through a three-year business management course at Nottingham University. For most young people, that would mean taking on a part-time job or going to the bank. BBC
This interview with Elon Musk is from Y Combinator's How to Build the Future series Interviewer: Today we have Elon Musk. Elon, thank you for joining us.Elon: Thanks for having me.Interviewer: So, we want to spend the time today talking about your view of the future and what people should work on. To start off, could you tell us, you famously said, when you were younger, there were five problems that you thought were most important for you to work on. If you were 22 today, what would the five problems that you would think about working on be. Y Combinator
Welcome to Uberville My first morning in Altamonte Springs, Florida, I was faced with a dilemma: how to travel the two miles from my hotel to city hall without a car. Walking would take nearly an hour in the sweltering June heat. Taking a bus would entail waiting up to a half hour at a stop with little shelter from the forecasted thunderstorms, followed by a looping detour to the local mall. The trip could potentially take longer than walking. The Verge
Microsoft researchers achieve speech recognition milestone Microsoft researchers have reached a milestone in the quest for computers to understand speech as well as humans. Xuedong Huang, the company's chief speech scientist, reports that in a recent benchmark evaluation against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task, Microsoft researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3 percent, the lowest in the industry. Microsoft
Microsoft weaponizes Minecraft in the war over classrooms Minecraft is not your average video game. It's phenomenally popular, yes, with more than 40 million people playing it every month. ButMinecraft is a crossover hit: it's the rare game that's big among four-year-olds and forty-year-olds alike, and it boasts more female players than many other hit games. The second-bestselling game of all time, Minecraft has proven itself to be an enduring cultural phenomenon. Backchannel
Arithmophobia Tony Van was the producer in charge of localizing a Japanese RPG called The Story of Thor: Hikari wo Tsugu Mono(Ancient, 1994) for Western audiences, but received a badly translated copy of the story to work from. In an interview for the The Game Localization Handbook, he explained: "I tried my hardest to figure it out, but was completely baffled. I was under extreme time pressure to get it out for Christmas, so I didn't have time to contact the Japanese office to track down the original source and get it re-translated. Electron Dance
Tokyo Game Show 2016 photo gallery In the late '90s and early 2000s, the Tokyo Game Show was a news juggernaut. If a Japanese game studio or publisher had a big game to announce – unless it was Nintendo – the odds were pretty good that they would do so at TGS. These days, the show doesn't make the same sort of headlines, thanks to changes in both the game industry and the media. Polygon
The Wall Street veteran who's helping Google get disciplined Subfreezing temperatures didn't stop Ruth Porat from setting out for her beloved spinning class. But black ice kept her from getting there. Early one Sunday in January 2015, Porat slipped and fell near her home on Manhattan's Upper West Side, shattering her left shoulder blade. After she rushed to an emergency room, doctors told her she would need immediate surgery. Fortune
The age of Apple is over - It's become the new Microsoft. This week, Apple unveiled iPhone 7 – or, rather, the company's Twitter account accidentally leaked the release video before CEO Tim Cook could make the announcement. It's no big deal because iPhone 7's most noteworthy upgrades are that it comes in black, is water resistant and no longer has a headphone jack. Nothing earth-shaking. Hacker Noon
HP pre-programmed failure date of unofficial/non-HP ink cartridges in its printers Investigation of an online printer ink retailer shows that HP has programmed a date in its printer firmware on which unofficial non-HP cartridges would fail. Thousands of HP printers around the world started to show error messages on the same day, the 13th of September 2016. MyCE