It's a slow day tech news-wise, but May 25th has turned out to be an early Christmas for space geeks. Any self-respecting science nerd is no doubt already aware that SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft has successfully completed its mission and become the first commercial space craft to ever dock with the International Space Station, but today marks key milestones for a pair of beloved space-based sci-fi franchises as well.
A few weeks back, we highlighted Nvidia's supercomputer-powered "GeForce Experience" initiative, which wants to use the power of the cloud to scan your hardware and offer one-click graphics setting optimization for PC games. Nvidia announced another cloud-based graphics platform at the same time: the GeForce Grid, a Kepler-based GPU that gaming services can use to power games at a remote location, then stream them to you over an Internet connection. (Think OnLive, but powered by Nvidia.) Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang says he thinks Grid's potential for cross-platform ubiquity could break down barriers and create legions of new gamers.
The human race's march towards becoming disposable batteries for power-hungry robot overlords continues. A mere day after Intel announced a new project that hopes to bring senses, smarts and adaptable machine learning to robots, word's come in that M.I.T. has developed a program that can detect frustration in human smiles much, much more accurately than people can. That's right, your future robo-master will be able to outsmart you and tell when you're lying.
With Diablo III going through growing pains, perhaps you've found yourself going back to Skyrim to pick more pockets and to slay a few more dragons. The problem with Skyrim is that even though there's so much to do, it has a tendency to get repetitive, though continued updates and mods are helping to keep things fresh. The newest update, straight from Bethesda, adds a brand new element to Skyrim in the form of mounted combat.
In an effort to be more transparent about copyright removals in search, Google this week expanded its Transparency Report with a new section that discloses precisely how many requests the sultan of search receives from copyright owners, including organizations, to remove allegedly infringing search links. That number now stands at over 1.2 million requests per month, or over 250,000 per week, which is more than it received in all of 2009.
Provided you've left your twenties behind, can you remember what you were doing 30 years ago? Microsoft does. In 1982, the Microsoft Hardware group was formed while Michael Jackson's "Thriller" album was selling a million copies a week, E.T. was phoning home on the big screen, and emoticons were in the process of being popularized. As Microsoft puts it, "1982 truly epitomized all that was glorious about the 80s," pointing out that Yale was offering a 14-week course aimed at solving the Rubik's Cube. Share your own favorite memory on Twitter and you could win a 30th Anniversary Arc Touch mouse.
The whole point of building a mini-ITX system is to have something with a small footprint that you can tuck inconspicuously out of the way or plop on your desk without having it dominate your work/play environment. And that's well and good, but it typically means making sacrifices in your component selection. What if you didn't have to? That's the question BitFenix asks with its new Prodigy, "the first mini-ITX chassis designed with enthusiasts in mind."
During Dell’s quarterly earnings call earlier this week, CEO and founder Michael Dell promised a “full complement” of devices, including tablets and other touchscreen products, for the launch of Windows 8 later this year. Now, a slide purportedly showing a 10.8-inch Windows 8 tablet from Dell has cropped up on the Web. Hit the jump for more.
When web surfers aren't busy calling each other Nazis on forums, they're often cracking jokes about greeting their future robotic overlords with open arms. It won't be funny forever; the groundwork for our eventual demise is already being laid by the best minds in the land. IBM announced that it had created prototype cognitive chips modeled after the human brain almost a year ago, and today, Reuters reported that Intel is launching a research project in Israel dedicated to creating smart tech that can learn the habits of its users. (That way, SkyNet will know the best time to strike.)Connect with MaximumPC
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