A self-driving car made by Google: lots of detail about what the computer ’sees’. Photograph: ReutersA burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Shira Ovide:
"That's definitely been an eye opener: some of the slowdowns we've seen in the tablet market," said Daniel Ives, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets. "Microsoft, they have no choice. They have to drive whatever share gains they can in the tablet market."
Microsoft had a tough first foray into homegrown computing devices with the introduction of the Surface in October 2012. Microsoft has recorded about $2.64 billion in Surface sales so far. Apple, by comparison, sold $7.6 billion in iPads in the past quarter alone. Nomura Securities estimated that Microsoft has accumulated roughly $2 billion in operating losses on the Surface.
The struggle in part reflects Microsoft's misjudgment of the market, analysts and people familiar with the company's strategy said. When it first introduced the Surface with a 10.6-inch screen, tablets with 7- to 8-inch screens were taking off in popularity. Small tablets accounted for more than half of tablets sold in 2013, estimates IDC.
Klint Finley:
The Internet of Things is coming. And the tech cognoscenti aren't sure that's a good thing.
For years, the prospect of an online world that extends beyond computers, phones, and tablets and into wearables, thermostats, and other devices has generated plenty of excitement and activity. But now, some of the brightest tech minds are expressing some doubts about the potential impact on everything from security and privacy to human dignity and social inequality.
That's the conclusion of a new survey from the Pew Research Center.
Big potential benefits, big potential downsides - mostly around security.
Russian border guards near Kaliningrad "detained" a low-flying drone entering the country from Lithuania last week. According to a spokesperson for Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), it wasn't on a spy mission—it was smuggling cigarettes.
The autonomous aircraft, which had a four-meter (13-foot) wingspan, flew close to the ground following GPS waypoints and released cigarette cartons from its cargo bay at designated drop zones. When captured, it was carrying 10 kilograms (about 22 pounds) of illicit cargo.
Tom Morgan:
Whether or not to buy an expensive HDMI cable is one of the most contentious subjects on the internet. On pro the side of buying them are home cinema magazines and audiophile websites, which sing the praises of more expensive cables, heralding how they can do remarkable things, such as boosting flesh tones.
On the other side, you have the sceptics that say HDMI uses digital, so all cables are equal. In fact, James Randi has even extended his $1 million prize for anyone that can prove paranormal activity to include anyone that can prove that expensive HDMI cables make a difference.
Wes Miller:
Whether it's software or hardware, I've spent a lot of time over the last year or so working to eliminate tools that fail to make me more productive or reduce day-to-day friction in my work or personal life. Basically looking around, pondering, "how often do I use this tool?", and discarding it if the answer isn't "often" or "all the time." Tangentially, if there's a tool that I even use at all because it's the best option, but rarely do so, I'll keep it around. PaperKarma is a good example of this, because there's honestly no other tool that does what it does.
However, a lot of software and hardware that I might've found indispensable at one point is open for consideration, and I'm tired of being a technology pack-rat.
If all digital data were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be?
And loads more fascinating things that you can learn about quite how big Google's data store is. (It's really big.)
James King:
When it bought Oculus, I did what thousands of rabid fanboys all over the world did (very vocally) on social media. I vowed to never, EVER buy an Oculus Rift. C'mon, there is NO way I'd buy a product made by a company whose sole purpose is to sell my identity to advertisers.
Facebook is a monolith, a ridiculously pervasive data collection operation; imagine if it could CREATE the world in which you live? How much could it learn about you by not only understanding your relationships and preferences in the real world, but actually creating worlds in which it PROVIDES those things to you?
However, as with many things that spur self-righteousness, the reality is a lot more nuanced than that.
He's totally queueing up for an Oculus Rift.
Fascinating detail from Yudhijit Bhattacharjee - it really is like something out of all those films or TV series:
For weeks, agents had been watching Blandwood Road, the street the Maks lived on, researching the nightly patterns of nearby neighbors. The person next door routinely woke up at three to go to the bathroom, walking past a window that offered a partial view into the Maks' house. Behind the Maks' residence was a dog that was given to barking loudly. A neighbor across the street came out every morning at four to smoke a cigarette. If any of them were to raise an alarm, the search would not remain secret. Mak would find out and, if he was indeed a spy, it would become harder to find evidence against him.
Shortly before midnight, Gaylord and two other agents got into a Chevy minivan with the middle and back rows of seats removed. The vehicle was identical in appearance to the one that Mak drove; it would raise no suspicions even if neighbors happened to notice it.
Alexis Madrigal:
But there's a catch.
Today, you could not take a Google car, set it down in Akron or Orlando or Oakland and expect it to perform as well as it does in Silicon Valley.
Here's why: Google has created a virtual track out of Mountain View.
The key to Google's success has been that these cars aren't forced to process an entire scene from scratch. Instead, their teams travel and map each road that the car will travel. And these are not any old maps. They are not even the rich, road-logic-filled maps of consumer-grade Google Maps.
They're probably best thought of as ultra-precise digitizations of the physical world, all the way down to tiny details like the position and height of every single curb. A normal digital map would show a road intersection; these maps would have a precision measured in inches.
But the "map" goes beyond what any of us know as a map. "Really, [our maps] are any geographic information that we can tell the car in advance to make its job easier," explained Andrew Chatham, the Google self-driving car team's mapping lead…
…So far, Google has mapped 2,000 miles of road. The US road network has something like 4 million miles of road.
Madrigal suggests that it would be more accurate to say that Google is "crawling" the world than "mapping" it.
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