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Lidar sensors are about to become a mainstream car feature

posted onJanuary 3, 2020
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

Auto-parts maker Bosch is getting into the lidar business, the company said in a Thursday announcement. That's significant because Bosch is a "tier 1" supplier—one of the few companies with the scale and infrastructure to supply parts directly to global car makers.

Wired for sound: How SIP won the VoIP protocol wars

posted onJanuary 1, 2020
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

As an industry grows, it is quite common to find multiple solutions that all attempt to address similar requirements. This evolution dictates that these proposed standards go through a stage of selection—over time, we see some become more dominant than others. Today, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is clearly one of the dominant VoIP protocols, but that obviously didn't happen overnight. In this article, the first of a series of in-depth articles exploring SIP and VoIP, we'll look at the main factors that led to this outcome.

How to get started with HomeKit home automation

posted onDecember 31, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Cult of Mac

Controlling the lights and other gadgets in your home from your iPhone is convenient and fun, too. There are plenty of HomeKit and Alexa accessories that make home automation a snap.

I’ll go over some of the best options I’ve found that will get you started with as little trouble as possible.

Can 5G replace everybody’s home broadband?

posted onDecember 12, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

When it comes to the possibility of home broadband competition, we want to believe. And in the case of 5G mobile broadband, wireless carriers want us to believe, too. But whether or not technological and commercial realities will reward that faith remains unclear. As with 5G smartphones, the basic challenge here sits at the intersection of the electromagnetic spectrum and telecom infrastructure economics.

How neural networks work—and why they’ve become a big business

posted onDecember 2, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

The last decade has seen remarkable improvements in the ability of computers to understand the world around them. Photo software automatically recognizes people's faces. Smartphones transcribe spoken words into text. Self-driving cars recognize objects on the road and avoid hitting them.

Intel Core i9-10980XE—a step forward for AI, a step back for everything else

posted onNovember 27, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

Intel's new i9-10980XE, debuting on the same day as AMD's new Threadripper line, occupies a strange market segment: the "budget high-end desktop." Its 18 cores and 36 threads sound pretty exciting compared to Intel's top-end gaming CPU, the i9-9900KS—but they pale in comparison to Threadripper 3970x's 32 cores and 64 threads. Making things worse, despite having more than double the cores, i9-10980XE has trouble differentiating itself even from the much less expensive i9-9900KS in many benchmarks.

Huawei hits record 5G speed of 3.67Gbps on live Swiss C-Band network

posted onOctober 9, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Venture Beat

While most carriers in the U.S. initially focused on launching 5G networks based on short-distance millimeter wave hardware, Asian and European carriers have deployed 5G using “sub-6GHz” radio frequencies — longer-range signals that might compromise on speed. But Huawei today announced that it has achieved a 5G download speed milestone without using millimeter wave technology: 3.67 Gigabytes per second on a live 5G network in Zurich, Switzerland.

USB4 is coming soon and will (mostly) unify USB and Thunderbolt

posted onSeptember 6, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

This Tuesday, the USB Implementers Forum published the official USB4 protocol specification. If your initial reaction was "oh no, not again," don't worry—the new spec is backward-compatible with USB 2 and USB 3, and it uses the same USB Type-C connectors that modern USB 3 devices do.

How Close Are We to Self-Driving Cars, Really?

posted onJune 16, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Slate

 Cars that drive themselves—really drive themselves, without a human supervisor in the passenger seat—are coming. It won’t happen tomorrow or even next year. But Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora, a company that makes self-driving car software for automakers, says he expects that in about five to 10 years, Americans will start seeing robots cruising down the road in a handful of cities and towns across the country. It will be about 30 to 50 years, he says, until they’re everywhere.

Two self-driving startups team up to build a different kind of lidar

posted onMay 29, 2019
by l33tdawg
Credit: Arstechnica

Fresh from a $530 million fundraising round earlier this year, self-driving startup Aurora made a big bet on lidar last week. The company—founded by veterans of Tesla and of Google's self-driving car projects—scooped up a Montana-based lidar startup called Blackmore.

Lidar sensors have a lot in common with fiber-optic communications gear. Both work by sending out information encoded in light, then recapturing it and interpreting the information it contains.