Month: August 2012

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From Engadget: Best Buy founder wants slashed prices, Apple-style customer service in $10 billion rescue plan

Best Buy founder wants slashed prices, Applestyle customer service in $10 billion rescue plan

Best Buy founder Richard Schulze is proposing a plan to turn around the ailing electronics store as part of a $10 billion buyout. He’s proposing the retailer slashes prices to compete with online rivals like Amazon, while offering Apple Store-levels of customer service. He’s concerned that the current closure and size-reduction policy will spell the end of the business, which is rumored to announce another round of closures shortly. It’s yet to be seen if his plan, which would mean running Best Buy at a loss for several years, would be accepted by the company’s management, who are meeting to discuss the proposals at the end of the month.

 

from Engadget

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From Discover Magazine: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Deserts

cracked, dry desert

3  There are parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile where no rain has ever been recorded. Scientists believe portions of the region have been in an extreme desert state for 40 million years—longer than any other place on Earth.

5  If you get lost in the desert, you don’t have to urinate on your shirt and wear it on your head like Bear Grylls to avoid dying of thirst. You can suck water from the branches of some palms, such as buri and rattan.

9  The world record for crossing the Sahara by bicycle was set in 2011 by Reza Pakravan, 36, a market security analyst in London, who made the 1,084-mile journey in 13 days, 5 hours, 50 minutes, and 14 seconds. He started in Algeria, cycled south, then turned east through Niger and Chad to reach Sudan.

16  In northeastern China, a Green Great Wall of shrubs and trees now being planted may win back the edges of the Gobi Desert. The wall will eventually stretch 2,800 miles from outer Beijing through Inner Mongolia…

Image: Shutterstock

from Discover Magazine

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From Engadget: NVIDIA Q2 earnings bounce back through Tegra: $119 million profit on $1.04 billion in revenue

NVIDIA logo

NVIDIA’s fiscal performance in its second quarter shows the rewards of patience in the mobile sphere. It just saw its profit double versus a glum first quarter to $119 million, even though the company only slightly edged ahead in revenue to $1.04 billion. In explaining the success, the company is quick to point to a confluence of events that all worked in favor of its bank account: a slew of Tegra 3 phones and tablets like the Transformer Pad TF300 made NVIDIA’s quarter the brightest, but it could also point to a much-expanded GeForce 600 line on the PC side and the shipments of the first phones with NVIDIA-badged Icera chips. The graphics guru expects its revenue to climb more sharply in the heat of the third quarter as well — between the cult hit Nexus 7 tablet and a role as a major partner for Windows RT, NVIDIA has at least a temporary license to print money.

 

from Engadget

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From Ars Technica: Google Translate can now read images of text

The newest version of the Google Translate app can now translate text from photos, according to Android Central. The image feature works with all languages available in Translate, and allows users to highlight the text they want to convert to another language.

In the app, users take a photo of their foreign blurb of choice, and then swipe their fingers to highlight the text in the photo that needs to be translated. Google sends the image off to its servers and gives the user back the translated phrase. It can’t auto-detect what language it’s trying to read, however—that’s your job.

The new functionality is similar to an iOS app released in December 2010 called Word Lens, which can translate text picked up by the iPhone’s camera. Word Lens could display the translated text right in the viewfinder itself, but is still restricted to only three language packs for translating to and from English (Spanish, Italian, and French), each of which cost $4.99.

 

from Ars Technica

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From Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now: Giant 3-D Printer to Make An Entire House in 20 Hours

3-D Printing Concrete Houses Contour Crafting

3-D printers can make airplanes and their parts, food and more – why not entire buildings? A professor at the University of Southern California aims to print out whole houses, using layers of concrete and adding plumbing, electrical wiring and other guts as it moves upward.

Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis at USC created a layered fabrication method he calls Contour Crafting, which he says can be used to build a single house or “a colony of houses.” It could be used with concrete or adobe, he says. Khoshnevis has been developing the system for several years and hosted a presentation about it at a recent TEDx event.

It would use a movable gantry taller than the house you want to build. Concrete pours out and is set down layer by layer, like a typical 3-D printer would sinter plastic together. It could be ideal for emergency housing, commercial or low-income structures, but it could also be used to print out customized luxury homes, according to Khoshnevis. Or, he adds, it might be ideal for the moon or Mars. “Contour Crafting technology has the potential to build safe, reliable, and affordable lunar and Martian structures, habitats, laboratories, and other facilities before the arrival of human beings,” his website reads.

Khoshnevis is hardly the only 3-D printing expert advocating this – Enrico Dini, the Italian inventor of the D-Shape 3-D printer, wants to 3-D print moon buildings out of lunar regolith.

On Earth, the automated system could prevent delays, injuries and other labor issues related to human workers. With this system, maybe a 3-D printer could beat the Chinese attempt to construct the world’s tallest building in three months.

[via Dvice]

 

from Popular Science – New Technology, Science News, The Future Now