Month: April 2016

It wouldn't be a Dyson product if it didn't look distinctly different from other hair dryers

3 more images in gallery

British technology company Dyson, best known for its futuristic takes on vacuum cleaners and hand dryers, has turned its attention to the humble hair dryer—but it won't be cheap.

In fact, the device (full name: Dyson Supersonic) will cost £299 when it goes on sale in the UK in early June. That price tag is around twice as much as hair dryers used in high-end salons.

Dyson claimed to have invested £50 million and four years of research into development of the new technology, making it quieter and—apparently—less damaging to hair. The resulting device has a motor that the company said was eight times faster—and a lot smaller—than those used in the most popular hair dryers sold in Japan, where we're told 96 percent of the population owns one. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, Dyson's hair dryer will go on sale in Japan first.

(credit: Brick Police)

A second federal judge has now invalidated a search warrant that authorized a search of a suspect’s computer via a Tor exploit, meaning the child pornography authorities say they found on that man’s computer cannot be used as evidence. For now, the case remains live, but absent a successful government appeal, it will be quite difficult for the case against Scott Frederick Arterbury to go forward.

A week ago, a federal judge in Massachusetts made a similar ruling and similarly tossed the relevant evidence. The Massachusetts magistrate judge and now the Oklahoma magistrate judge came largely to the same conclusion: that only more senior judges, known as district judges, have the authority to issue out-of-district warrants. Because the warrant was invalid ab initio, or from the beginning, any evidence that resulted from that search must be suppressed.

Experts say that with two similar results by two different judges across judicial districts, some if not most of the other 135 "Operation Pacifier" child pornography cases that are being prosecuted may be in jeopardy. (Here, in United States v. Arterbury, an Oklahoma district judge could overrule the magistrate's ruling, and even that ruling could be appealed further.)

Vladimir Putin, center, and Dmitry Rogozin, far right, tour Vostochny in October, 2015. (credit: Kremlin)

On Wednesday morning, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country's senior space official, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, were on hand to see the inaugural launch from the new Vostochny Cosmodrome, located in the far east of Russia. They had to be disappointed after a technical glitch with the rocket delayed the launch for one day.

Based upon an unnamed source, the Russian TASS agency reported the delay came after the rocket's automated launch system "identified a glitch in one of the instruments of the control system responsible for starting and stopping the engines, for the separation of rocket stages, and for the direction of flight." The delay was not due to a problem with the the new launch infrastructure, according to reports.

It is not clear how Putin took the delay, but he will apparently remain at Vostochny for 24 hours to see the launch of the Soyuz-2.1a rocket on Thursday (10:01pm ET Wednesday). However a displeased-looking Rogozin apparently "hastily withdrew" from a launch observation deck after the cancellation and did not respond to questions from reporters.

James May (left), Jeremy Clarkson (middle), and Richard Hammond (right).

You have to hand it to Messrs. Clarkson, May, and Hammond. Together with producer Andy Wilman, they took a moribund BBC show about cars and turned it into a global phenomenon—we are of course talking about Top Gear. Under their revised format, Top Gear dropped the idea of being Consumer Reports for cars, instead opting for comedy banter, insanely impractical road trips, and breathtaking cinematography. When things ended badly with the BBC, Clarkson, May, and Hammond were snapped up by Amazon with a budget reported to be $7 million (£4.5 million) per episode. But they evidently want more. On Monday Variety revealed that the gang, together with a tech entrepreneur called Ernesto Schmitt, want to create a digital home on the Internet for car people.

The site will be called DriveTribe, and will cater to a range of different car enthusiasts—or tribes—with verticals full of written content as well as video. Each tribe will have a different host, including Clarkson, Hammond, and May. According to Hammond, "Gamers have got Twitch, travelers have got TripAdvisor and fashion fans have got, oh, something or other too. But people who are into cars have got nowhere. There’s no grand-scale online motoring community where people can meet and share video, comments, information, and opinion. DriveTribe will change that. And then some."

Clarkson was more succinct: "I didn’t understand DriveTribe until Richard Hammond said it was like YouPorn, only with cars."

How to Train your Dragon 2 (credit: DreamWorks)

Update April 28, 2016 8:30am: Comcast announced on Thursday morning its acquisition of DreamWorks Animation for $3.8 billion. In a press release, the conglomerate wrote "The studio will become part of the Universal Filmed Entertainment Group, which includes Universal Pictures, Fandango, and NBCUniversal Brand Development." The deal still needs to be approved by antitrust regulators, but if it's given the green light, Comcast said it expects the acquisition process to be completed by the end of 2016.

Original Post: Anonymous sources speaking to both the Wall Street Journal and Variety Wednesday morning confirmed that Comcast is in talks to buy DreamWorks Animation for “more than $3 billion.”

DreamWorks is one of the last major animation studios not owned by a conglomerate, and the purchase could bolster it against competition from Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios. DreamWorks has had some notable successes like Shrek, Kung Fu Panda, and How to Train Your Dragon, but in the last four years it has also had its fair share of flops. According to The Richest, movies like Rise of the Guardians, Turbo, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and Penguins of Madagascar just barely made a profit.

Choosing a database is pretty similar—it's all about the right fit. (credit: Flickr user: Sven Slootweg)

When you think of game development, the first thing that comes to mind probably isn't a database. But in the world of Jamaa, the setting for WildWorks' massively multiplayer online kids' game Animal Jam, a database keeps millions of cartoon animal characters frolicking and the cartoon trees from crashing down. The database chosen for this job was a specialized, non-relational database from Basho called Riak—one among the herd of new databases that have risen to handle Web-generated gluts of non-structured data.

The database landscape is increasingly complicated. As of April, Solid IT's DB-Engines initiative was tracking 303 separate relational and non-relational databases. In the golden years of relational databases, benchmarks such as TPC could theoretically give you some sort of way to compare databases directly. But today, it's difficult to assign a one-size-fits-all measurement to the world of non-relational databases such as Riak and Apache Cassandra (the distributed database project originally developed at Facebook). WildWorks ran its benchmarks and decided on Riak for Animal Jam, and Uber did the same for its dispatch platform. IoT car tech company VCARO decided the exact opposite: Cassandra beat Riak at handling vehicle-generated sensor data. Software company Nuance Communications opted for something else entirely, choosing Couchbase for handling speech and imaging apps.

The "why" of decisions like these are as complicated as the database technologies themselves. It may hinge on which two of three CAP theorem guarantees—consistency, availability, and partitionability—a business values most. The tipping point could alternatively be which database handles software containers or what skills you already have on hand. This list of factors is seemingly infinite.