Month: May 2017

Anthony Kyriazis @ Flickr

Lotus is one of the most storied names in the automotive world. Since 1952, the company has been applying founder Colin Chapman's maxim "simplify, then add lightness" to the car; along the way it has built spectacularly successful racing cars and sublime road cars. Yet despite those four-wheeled creations, times haven't been easy for the company. Following Chapman's untimely death in 1982, it has changed ownership several times—most recently in 1996 to Malaysia's Proton—each with the promise of renewed investment, which often failed to materialize. That's why the announcement on Wednesday that the Lotus is being bought by China's Geely should be greeted as such good news.

Geely is buying 49.9 percent of Proton from DRB-Hicom. And as part of the deal, Geely also gets 51 percent of Lotus. As stated, this isn't the first time Lotus has had a new corporate owner; at one time it was owned by General Motors, at another the same businessman who revived Bugatti Cars in the 1990s. So we can forgive any skepticism about this latest transfer of control. But one only need look at Volvo's renaissance under Geely to see plenty of cause for optimism. Geely has been pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into the Swedish car company since buying it from Ford in 2010, money that Volvo has used to develop a new cutting-edge vehicle architecture resulting in some rather fine vehicles. The prospect of that kind of investment in Lotus is mouth-watering.

Enlarge (credit: @mopictures)

Cloudflare, the CDN and Internet security company, has gone full berserker-mode in its fight against patent-holding company Blackbird Technologies.

Blackbird sued Cloudflare in March, claiming infringement of US Patent No. 6,453,335. Two weeks ago, Cloudflare explained the strategy it would use to fight back. The company pledged to not only seek to invalidate the '335 patent, but it will spend $50,000 on a "bounty" seeking to gather prior art and knock out all Blackbird-owned patents.

Today, Cloudflare CEO Michael Prince said his company is doubling the amount of money it will spend to kill off Blackbird's patents and is working with state legislators to ban Blackbird's business model.

Enlarge

T-Mobile has announced the launch of its "Digits" program, coming May 31. Digits is a revamp of how T-Mobile phone numbers work, virtualizing customer numbers so they can work across multiple devices. It sounds a lot like Google Voice—rather than having a phone number tied to a single SIM card or a device, numbers are now account-based, and you can "log in" to your phone number on several devices.

T-Mobile says the new phone number system will work "across virtually all connected devices," allowing multiple phones, tablets, and PCs to get texts and calls. This means T-Mobile needs apps across all those platforms, with the press release citing "native seamless integration" in Samsung Android phones, Android and iOS apps, and a browser interface for PCs.

The new phone number system is free to all T-Mobile customers. Customers can also buy an extra phone number for $10 or by signing up to the $5-per-month "T-Mobile One Plus" package, which is a bundle of extra features like a mobile hotspot and in-flight Wi-Fi. Here, the "extra number" use case matches what Google Voice users have been doing for years: a personal and business number, or a number to give to online sales sites like Craigslist, or an easily dumpable number for your Tinder dates. Unlike Google Voice, the $10 fee means T-Mobile has no problem distributing a ton of phone numbers, and the mobile telco says you can access up to five lines from a single device.

Enlarge / Medical marijuana growing in a facility in Canada. (credit: Getty | Richard Lautens)

In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial—the gold-standard design—a component of marijuana called cannabidiol (CBD) reduced seizures in children with a rare and devastating form of epilepsy.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, provide the first solid evidence that marijuana can be used to treat epilepsy, something some patient groups and advocates have argued for years. It also adds to mounting data supporting the medicinal value of the controversial plant. The Drug Enforcement Administration currently lists marijuana as a Schedule I drug, which are those with no accepted medical use but a high potential for abuse.

A landmark review of marijuana research, released in January by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, concluded that marijuana can effectively treat chronic pain in some patients. But for other conditions, including epilepsy, the data is still inconclusive. Earlier trials on epilepsy, for instance, were small or suboptimal, and provided mixed results.

Mark Walton

While Acer's 4K, HDR-ready, 144Hz Predator X27 gaming monitor is pretty hot, Dell has something even better: the 8K Dell UltraSharp UP3218K (buy here). This, if you're unfamiliar, is a display that sports a whopping 7680×4320 pixels spread over a 32-inch 10-bit IPS panel. It can display a 33-megapixel image pixel-for-pixel at a density of 280ppi, and at 100 percent of the Adobe RGB colour space. It requires the bandwidth of two DisplayPort 1.4 ports to function, and, predictably, it costs just shy of $5,000 (UK release and price still TBC, but don't expect much change from £5,000).

But then, this is a display that is so far ahead of the curve that $5,000 seems almost reasonable. In addition to all those pixels running at 60Hz, the 10-bit IPS panel also covers 100 percent of the sRGB colour space, 100 percent of Rec 709, and 98 percent of DCI-P3. Whatever creative field you're in—photography, cinematography, graphic design, publishing, game development—Dell's 8K monitor has you covered. It's even factory calibrated to a Delta E of less than two.