Tech News

US Army Changing Bayonets For Tomahawks

The Department of Defense officially calls their new invention the Inverted Multi-Purpose Ballistic Tomahawk Bayonet. They seem to be half weapon, half Swiss Army knife. In fact, they are so deadly and useful that they’re replacing bayonets in some special units “currently fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan.” Bayonets—the traditional stabbing blade usually fixed…

Watching Tanks Racing Through the Beach Is Surprisingly Fun (If You’re Not There)

Apparently, if you go to some beaches on the Baltic Sea you will see this show quite often. Since the beach itself is not a virgin paradise, the local authorities make these armored columns go through sand instead of breaking the roads’ asphalt. I really need to go to Russia. [English Russia]

Windows 8 May Force You To Boot Into the UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro

Don’t like Windows 8’s new, currently-unnamed, obviously-tablet leaning interface? Too bad. Microsoft is apparently going to make you love it, and step one of the process is forcing you to boot into it, claims ZDnet. Citing Rafael Rivera, Windows enthusiast and co-author of “Windows 8 Secrets” Rafael Rivera, ZDnet says that Windows 8 users will…

Why Apple Ditching Google Will Make Your iPhone So Much Better

After a frosty five-year relationship—and on the heels of the highly publicized Maps breakup— YouTube and iOS have filed for divorce. And you know what? It’s the best thing that could’ve happened for Apple, for Google, and most of all for you. https://gizmodo.com/apple-has-its-own-killer-maps-with-turn-by-turn-navigat-5917324 YouTube first fell into the iPhone’s sweet embrace back in the summer…

Would You Rather Know the Origin of Life or Watch People Run Faster Than Others?

People are making a lot of comparisons between the cost of the Mars Curiosity Rover—incidentally, the cost was all spent in our economy not sent to Mars in a bag—and other events and projects. Among them, the cost of the olympics, as shown above. https://jalopnik.com/why-its-great-we-send-robots-to-mars-and-why-people-sho-5932213 Would you rather spend more money on the science that…

What Will iOS 6 Use Its New ‘Bluetooth Sharing’ Feature For?

There has been a slew of news today about the newly released Apple iOS 6 beta, and here’s another interesting if mysterious, bit. There’s a new tab called “Bluetooth Sharing” under the iOS privacy settings. It seems the new OS will allow apps to share more types of data over Bluetooth than before. What are…

Toilet Paper: A Brief and Sometimes Painful History

Seinfeld excelled at criticism of the everyday. A few months ago, in a fine essay in the NY Times, Sam Anderson suggested that Roland Barthes was the father of pop cultural criticism and that we are all now cultural critics in the Barthian vein, “decoding everything.” Perhaps. But if Barthes gave us serious criticism of…

Here’s Exactly Where Mars Curiosity Landed—And the NASA Engineer Who Won That Bet (Updated)

A friend at NASA has sent us this funny document that reveals two things for the first time. One, it shows exactly where Curiosity landed yesterday. The accuracy of the actual landing site compared to the target is impressive!* And two, the NASA guys had a pool on where it would land, called Mars Madness…

Apple Is Removing YouTube from iOS 6

Apple has removed the YouTube app from the latest beta of iOS 6 and has confirmed to the Verge that the native app will not exist at all when iOS 6 officially releases to the public. The YouTube app, if you’ll remember, has been on the iPhone since the original iPhone first released. Right now,…

Should the World Be Scared of Huawei?

China’s Huawei is growing fast, quickly rising to a strong position in the mobile market. But as it pushes abroad, it’s facing a lot of skepticism from other governments and from direct competitors, in part because of its ties to its the country’s People’s Liberation Army. But are those legitimate fears, or are western companies…

How Samsung Maybe Copied Apple’s iOS Icons Just a Tiny Bit

On day three of the Apple versus Samsung patent lawsuit battle to the death extravaganza, Apple presented some pretty convincing evidence that Samsung copied its trademarked iOS icons. Look at the contacts icon above. OK so maybe Samsung’s icon is a horrible orange color and there are two binder rings instead of many, but it…

Apple has released iOS 6 beta 4 to devs, with bug fixes and improvements galore. But… can it love? [9to5Mac]

Will Apple Update Its Entire iOS Lineup This Fall?

At this point, Apple is widely expected to swap out the iPhone’s longstanding 30-pin dock connector with something a lot smaller. But what about the rest of Apple’s iOS product lineup? Hell, what about the iPod nano? According to iMore, all of Apple’s iOS products will get updated to include the new dock adapter. https://gizmodo.com/theres-never-been-a-worse-time-to-buy-an-iphone-accesso-5930112…

How Sony Could Rule the Tech World Again

We reamed the Sony SmartWatch in a recent review. It was almost mean of us; it was definitely emotional. And while we stand by our opinion, another new Sony product perfectly illustrates why we got all pissed off: The gorgeous, awesome RX100. https://gizmodo.com/sony-smartwatch-review-maybe-the-worst-thing-sony-has-5926728 When we know a company is capable of products like this, we—and…

The Next Breakthrough in Computer Control: Plant-Fondling

In this era of Kinect, Wii, and Leap, everyone wants to capitalize on motion control. Disney still likes physical peripherals, like houseplants for example. https://gizmodo.com/is-this-the-best-gesture-control-system-ever-5911894 The Botanicus Interacticus project’s goal is to make plants a viable source of input for a computer. You’re not going to be surfing the web with them, but in very…

Amazon launched a textbook rental service; a $170 title goes for $50/semester. Translation: more beer money. [The Verge]

Eight-Core ARM GPUs Could Bring Console-Class Graphics to Your Smartphone

Right now, ARM graphics aren’t exactly bad. The Samsung’s Galaxy SIII with its quad-core Mali 400 GPU leads the pack in mobile prettiness, but the upcoming ARM GPUs, scalable to eight-cores, could blow it out of the water. While we’re still waiting on the next generation of Mali chips which includes the T604 and the…

Why the Cloud Sucks

I’ve had too many personal experiences get messed up just because companies change things on the cloud. I’ve come to a depressed state of feeling that I own nothing on the cloud and have no ability to keep things working the way they do. Features change and get dropped, things you depend on disappear, etc.…

If you’re interested in sharing a data plan on AT&T, you can do that starting August 23. [AT&T]

Why the Next iPhone’s Tiny SIM Could Make a Big Difference

The latest supposedly leaked iPhone 5 part is a tray for a nano-Sim card. We’re skeptical about the authenticity of the images from Nowhereelse.fr, but there’s plenty of reason to believe that Apple will use an even tinier SIM on its next-gen iPhone. Who cares? It turns out a little SIM could be a big…