Samsung Galaxy S7 – Battery Life Tips and Tests

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Writer

The new Galaxy S7 flagship was finally released and it’s powered by a larger non-removable battery of 3000mAh (it’s 18 percent bigger than that of the Galaxy S6), but in some parts of the world, it’s available with the latest Qualcomm MSM8996 Snapdragon 820 chipset, while the model with an Exynos 8890 Octa chipset can be purchased in Asia and Europe. Android Authority performed a battery test (WiFi browsing and video playback) on both versions and told us the results.

For the Exynos version of the S7 was used the SM-G930F model, while for the Snapdragon version was used the SM-G930V model for Verizon Wireless – this one has some Verizon preloaded applications which can affect the battery life. Both devices were tested at the same display brightness, alongside a Galaxy Note 5 and Nexus 6P and here were the results for the two tests:

WiFi Browsing Test

Each handset was charged to full, the charger was removed and the custom WiFi browsing test tool was performed until the battery was drained. Then, the battery was recharged to between 2 and 10 percent and the phones were connected to the same WiFi network, without logging into accounts and syncing data. The best score was obtained by the Galaxy Note 5: 9 hours and 32 minutes, being followed by the Exynos Galaxy S7 with 6 hours and 48 minutes, while the Snapdragon model lasted 6 hours and 30 minutes. The Nexus 6P had a battery life between the two models.

Video Playback Test

The phones were

Article source: http://neurogadget.com/2016/04/08/samsung-galaxy-s7-battery-life-tips-tests/27906

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Panasonic Claims It Has the World’s Best Weather Model, But Experts Have Their Doubts | The Weather Channel

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Writer

Forecasting the weather is big business. Behind the scenes, billions of dollars are invested on high-powered forecast models that process immense amounts of data each day to provide guidance for meteorologists as they build forecasts.

Many of these models are funded by governments. Numerous countries have their own model that studies global weather conditions, but two have risen above the rest. There’s the American model, also known as the GFS, run by NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Protection, and there’s the European model, known as the Euro, operated by the ECMWF center in Europe.

But now, there’s another competitor in town, and it’s not publicly funded. Panasonic – yes, the electronics company – says it has developed a weather model that doesn’t just compete with the GFS and Euro – it has actually outperformed both in some instances.

(MORE: GFS Experiences Outage Hours Before Winter Storm Regis Hits East Coast)

Panasonic began its unlikely dive into the weather forecasting business in 2013 with the acquisition of AirDat, a company that specialized in TAMDAR systems which collect in-flight weather data for airplanes to help warn of potential problems like icing or other weather-related dangers, according to Ars Technica.

“The original version of this sensor was developed literally in a garage by a physics professor at the University of North Dakota, and it was strictly an ice detector,” Neil Jacobs, chief atmospheric scientist with Panasonic Weather Solutions, told the North Jersey Record.

These sensors were the

Article source: https://weather.com/news/news/panasonic-weather-forecasting-model

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How we made a room-scale VR game work on your desk … or floor

Posted on April 8, 2016 by Writer

Fantastic Contraption is a game played in a room-scale environment with hand controllers. It’s the one thing we’ve shown consistently throughout development and in all of our trailers and teasers. It’s always been true.

But it won’t always be true. In fact, visible in the game’s settings menu right now are some experimental alternates we’ve been quietly working on, and you can try right now if you’re feeling adventurous. Not everyone has an entire room for VR, and we want to make sure you can play our game.

There will soon be four different scales in which to play the game, depending on what’s comfortable for you and how much space you have in which to play. This is, partially, how we’re bringing a game that has been so tied to the Vive to the Oculus Rift. It hasn’t been easy, but the results have been worth it. We want you to have fun, no matter how you play.

This isn’t something we’re doing lightly. It’s important to us.

Accessibility

We were working on the tutorial for particular shortcuts that require two-handed manipulation early in development. Stretching and collapsing a rod feels particularly cool in VR with two hands, but during playtesting we realized we hadn’t recharged the batteries in one of the

Article source: http://www.polygon.com/2016/4/7/11379894/fantastic-contraption-htc-vive-rift

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A False Accounting

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Writer

My father died of a heart attack in Santa Barbara, California, on the morning of August 4, 1988. He had been living in Santa Barbara for four years, and my mother, an English professor at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, joined him, as I did, for the summers. After my father died, my mother, sister and I spent three weeks in Santa Barbara, and together we packed up the apartment, and put it up for sale. My father’s papers and books were sorted, roughly by year, into fifteen banker’s boxes. In mid-August, movers packed up the contents of the house—furniture, household items, and a car—and transported the items back to Athens, Ohio, where my parents had spent most of their lives, beginning in 1959 when my father was hired to set up a ceramics program at Ohio University. When my mother moved into a retirement home in Pennsylvania in 2000, the banker’s boxes went with her, and when my mother passed away in August 2013, the boxes were moved to a storage unit in New York where my sister Maya and I live.

Maya was intent on not leaving a lot of stuff for her children to deal with, and I was hoping to find things that might interest my ten-year old daughter Ahn, who had been asking about her grandfather. Between the present desire to dispose of the past and an imagined future desire to have saved some of it, Maya and I began sorting through the material. In

Article source: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2016/04/fiction/a-false-accounting

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Climate Change Can’t Excuse Electric Car Subsidies

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Writer

The New York Times reports the auto industry “will be hard pressed to meet its [federal government] target of 54.5 miles per gallon in 2025,” despite spending billions on fuel-saving technologies. Average mileage for vehicles sold this year is about 25 mpg, the article notes, and “the lowest-emission models are among the least popular.”

The excuse for this quixotic crusade to shove us into tiny cars designed in Washington (preferably electric) is that U.S. cars and SUVs are widely believed to be a huge source of global greenhouse emissions. “Our personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming,” claims The Union of Concerned Scientists. But such claims aren’t based on science or even basic math.

In reality, all U.S. passenger vehicles account for barely 3 percent of global greenhouse emissions. Let’s walk through the numbers.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that Transportation accounted for 31.2 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2014. That’s the figure the Union of Concerned Scientists cite in their effort to blame “personal vehicles.” The fallacy is that 40 percent of transportation’s greenhouse gases come from heavy trucks, trains, airplanes, buses, boats, and pipelines – not personal vehicles.

According to the Energy Department’s Transportation Data Energy Book , cars, light trucks and motorcycles accounted for just 60 percent of the greenhouses gases from transportation. In other words, our personal vehicles accounted for only 60 percent of the 31.2 percent attributed to transportation, or just 18.7 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

But global

Article source: http://dailycaller.com/2016/04/06/climate-change-cant-excuse-electric-car-subsidies/

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Augmented Reality, Not VR, Will Be the Big Winner for Business

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Writer

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Sometimes exponential technologies hide in plain sight. Their innovation speed, market size, and number of practical uses seem to be progressing linearly, until suddenly they tilt upwards and turn on the boosters.

A case can be made that augmented reality (AR) in enterprises is just such an exponential technology. A growing number of companies are busy developing and releasing AR systems for enterprise settings.

Augmented and virtual reality analyst Digi-Capital’s numbers give a good indication of just how big AR is expected to be in a few short years. According to Digi-Capital AR companies will generate $120 billion in revenue by 2020, compared to the $30 billion revenue expected for their ‘cousin’ companies in virtual reality.

Part of AR’s explosive growth can be traced to a wide array of uses in business settings. The tech is a fundamental component in the hardware and software revolution, known as Factory 4.0.

First Systems Are Go

While virtual reality is about creating closed, fully immersive digital experiences, augmented reality systems overlay sensory information, such as visuals and sounds, on the real world around you.

The best-known example is Google Glass—a kind of partial AR experience where a square display appears in a user’s field of

Article source: http://singularityhub.com/2016/04/06/augmented-reality-not-vr-will-be-the-big-winner-for-business/

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TV maker Panasonic says it has developed the world’s best weather model

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Writer

For a long time, weather forecasting was largely the domain of governments, with the National Weather Service leading the way in the United States. During the last two decades, however, the private weather forecasting industry—which includes well-known companies such as AccuWeather and many hundreds of smaller businesses—has grown up and is now estimated to be worth as much as $6 billion.

Even so, these companies largely just repackage model forecasts and incorporate data from government weather agencies. The heavy lifting, in the form of sophisticated computer models and the processing power to run them, is still done by the large ECMWF center in Europe, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction in the United States, and similar forecasting services in Canada, Japan, and elsewhere.

All of these government agencies, with staff generally in the hundreds of scientists, forecasters, and coders, collect weather data from a variety of sources, including shared satellite data along with in-situ observations from aircraft, balloon soundings, surface observations, and other sources. Then, using their own software, they “assimilate” these observations into physics-based forecast models that simulate weather conditions around the globe at various levels of the atmosphere over a 10- to 16-day period. The results from these global models are then used to predict things like the high temperature on Wednesday and whether it is likely to rain on Saturday afternoon for little Joey’s birthday party.

For much of the 21st century, to the chagrin of US scientists and forecasters, the

Article source: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/tv-maker-panasonic-says-it-has-developed-the-worlds-best-weather-model/

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