As reported on The Verge. By Jesse Hicks The only way to win is to fight fire with fire. “I think most people feel that if you can find a way to beat the casino, more power to you,” says Arnold Synder, his eyes, those telltale features, hidden behind a pair of black sunglasses. “This place set up the rules, they provide the equipment, they provide the dealer, and they’re basically saying, ‘Come in and try…
As reported on The Verge. By Nathan Ingraham While many people may think of sailboating as a fairly tranquil activity, Paul Larsen has long equated sailboating with extreme speed. In Wired, Adam Fisher has profiled the Australian-born Larsen’s search for the perfect speecboating runway, which he found off the coast of the small African country Namiba. This windswept coast is where Larsen has spent the last decade attempting to break the boating speed record — recently by piloting the Vestas SailRocket…
As reported on The Verge. By Tom Warren With aggressive pricing and growing support for Chrome OS, Microsoft has its work cut out Should the lowly Chromebook — once a laughing stock of the PC world — have Microsoft worried? Google first announced its Chrome operating system back in mid-2009, before shipping the first Chromebook laptops with the software preinstalled two years later. At the time the idea of just a web browser for an OS seemed…
As reported on TechCrunch. by FREDERIC LARDINOIS Education is quickly moving online, but we haven’t seen all that many studies that actually look into the effectiveness of these new forms of online learning. To see how its program performed, the language learning serviceDuolingo, founded by CAPTCHA inventor Luis von Ahn, commissioned a study (PDF)into the effectiveness of its program. The result, which even surprised von Ahn: it only takes a Duolingo user 34 hours to learn the equivalent…
As reported on TechCrunch. by RYAN LAWLER The latest entrant into the mobile video segment is Montaj, a new app launching next week which seeks to be a kind of “Instagram for Video.” Montaj was founded by Demir Gjokaj and Dan Long, a couple of New York-based entrepreneurs who had originally been focused on making a more engaging travel site. Key to that experience would be video, but they had to tackle the video problem first. The…
As reported on TechCrunch. by RIP EMPSON Last year, James Smith and Simon Maynard left mobile gaming startup Heyzap, where Smith was the CTO, to build and launch a new venture that aimed to tackle one of the biggest problems they encountered in working with mobile developers: The need for better crash detection. In an attempt to bring some continuity to the fragmented set of point solutions developers use to monitor and capture errors in their…
As reported on Engadget. By Sean Buckley Despite losing a little less each quarter since Kazuo Hirai took over as CEO, Sony still appears to be looking for ways to cut the fat. Its latest move? Sell the house. Taking a page from Nokia’s book, Sony has announced that it has agreed to sell its New York headquarters building to a consortium led by The Chetrit Group. After settling its debts on the building, the $1.1 billion sale will net Sony about $685…
As reported on Engadget. By Jon Fingas The US Supreme Court might have ruled last year that GPS tracking is equivalent to a search, but that doesn’t mean the government’s practices are transparent. If anything, they may be more opaque than ever. The Department of Justice has responded to an ACLU Freedom of Information Act request for a pair of GPS tracking policy memos by providing almost completely redacted versions that, effectively, say nothing. Not surprisingly, the ACLU isn’t…
As reported on Engadget. By Nicole Lee If Google+ wants any chance of beating the social media juggernaut that is Facebook— especially after the latter’s latest efforts in the search arena — it needs to reach a far wider audience than it does now. The Mountain View company has just made a small but significant step in that direction with the availability of its G+ iOS app to 48 more countries and territories, according to a G+ post by engineer Frank Petterson. The countries…
As reported on Businessinsider.com by Geoffrey Ingersoll DXLiberty via YouTube A video from Defense Distributed popped up just in time for Barack Obama’s momentous address to the nation about, among other things, banning the sale of 30-round magazines. The video shows a test fire of an assault rifle using a 3D-printed 30-round clip. The capability adds another layer to the loopholes and problems that exist in a ‘high-capacity magazine’ ban. The implication is that, as technology becomes more available, it won’t…