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(credit: Western Digital)

The Raspberry Pi 3 was released earlier this month with some significantly improved hardware, including a quad-core 64-bit ARM CPU, an upgraded GPU, and embedded wireless—updates that will let people use it for a wider variety of tasks than before. For people whose use cases require a decent amount of storage, Western Digital has just announced a specialized low-profile hard drive called the PiDrive.

The 314GB drive, which will normally cost $45.81 but is currently available for $31.42, is a 7mm-high drive based on the basic Western Digital Blue drives that still ship in many budget and mid-end laptops and PCs. The difference is the interface, which has been changed from SATA to USB and is designed to connect to the Pi directly without drastically increasing the footprint of the device. WD says it has customized the drive in order to "reduce the electrical power load of the hard drive on Raspberry Pi while still maintaining sufficient performance to deliver maximum USB data transfer rate." It's also a cheaper solution than the 1TB PiDrive kit the company already sells for $79.99.

Western Digital says that the 314GB PiDrive will come with the BerryBoot bootloader to make it as easy as possible to install and run multiple operating systems from the same drive. The new PiDrive is compatible with WD's existing PiDrive cables and enclosures and is available for purchase today.

(credit: Chris Young)

Customers who sued AT&T over its practice of throttling unlimited data plans will not be able to pursue a class-action lawsuit against the company. AT&T argued that the customers could only have their complaints heard individually in arbitration, and Judge Edward Chen of US District Court in Northern California has sided with the cellular company.

The customers' contracts with AT&T required them to arbitrate disputes with AT&T on an individual basis. But customers argued that the arbitration cause would violate their First Amendment right to petition a court for a redress of grievances. While the arbitration clause allowed claims to be brought in small claims court, the plaintiffs argued that such a court would not be an adequate forum.

But Chen accepted AT&T's argument, noting that the Supreme Court previously upheld AT&T's arbitration provision in a 2011 decision. In the 2011 case, AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, the Supreme Court found that the Federal Arbitration Act preempted a California state law that limited the power of companies to force customers into arbitration.

Last year set a rather notable record for the warmest global temperatures, as a strong El Niño bumped up a steady trend of greenhouse warming to push the temperatures well above the previous record. Our report on the temperature record, however, noted that it was likely to be short lived. The El Niño that drove it wasn't going to switch off at the end of the calendar year, and additional time would allow the heat it was pushing into the atmosphere to spread more widely across the globe. As a result, some observers were predicting that 2016 would be even hotter.

So far, those predictions seem to be spot on. Over the weekend, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies released its figures for the month of February, which registered as a startling 1.35°C above the baseline period (1951-1980). The previous monthly record had been 1.14°C; last year's annual record was a paltry 0.84°C.

(credit: NASA-GiSS via Gavin Schmidt)

The graph above shows data from a period that contains all of the 15 warmest years in the instrumental record. The February reading, at the far right, provides some indication on how much of a radical departure this warming is.

The AMD-powered Sulon Q sounds like wearing a Windows-powered VR PC on your head.

The growing virtual reality platform wars got a little more complex this morning. That's because graphics chip maker AMD has thrown in with Toronto-based startup Sulon Technologies to unveil the Sulon Q headset, which aims to provide a PC-based, fully tracked virtual reality experience without the need to tether yourself to a computer tower.

According to the announcement, that "wear and play" untethered design makes the Sulon Q quite different from competition like the Oculus Rift or SteamVR-powered HTC Vive, which both need a relatively high-end PC to actually generate the images on the headset. With the Sulon Q, the Windows 10 PC hardware is built into the unit, including an expected four-core AMD FX-8800P processor with a Radeon R7 graphics card.

Add in a built-in 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and a 2560×1440 OLED display with a 110° field of view, and it's a bit like wearing a lower-end (but still apparently VR-capable) PC on your head. AMD isn't specifically discussing the mass of the "lightweight" headset, but it seems likely to be much heavier than tethered headsets where the heavy processing is done externally (or even mobile headsets like the Samsung Gear VR, which are powered by much-more-compact smartphones)