My Appearance on WGST's "The Sully Show" 5/23/14 Talking Tech Topics and More

Always fun to join Sully on WGST each week to talk the latest tech topics and whatever else comes up.

 Have a listen and have a safe Memorial Day weekend:

listen to ‘The Sully Show May 23, 2014’ on Audioboo

Microsoft introduces the Surface Pro 3

On Tuesday, Microsoft debuted the new Surface Pro 3. The tablet was faster, thinner and lighter than previous Surface Pro models, and the larger 12-inch screen made for comfortable reading and viewing. In a PC market desperate for innovation, the Surface Pro 3 stands big among the hybrid laptop-tablet models from other device makers.

The 800-gram tablet felt lighter in the hand than the predecessor Surface Pro 2 despite the larger screen. But I preferred using the tablet placed on a table, giving it more of a PC feel.
Customers “wanted screens that were sized so they could work on it all day,” explained Brian Eskridge, senior manager for Surface computing at Microsoft. “It’s a tablet when you need it and a laptop when you want it,” he told me.

The $799 model includes an Intel Core i3 processor and 64GB of storage, and $1,949 will buy you a Core i7 processor and a 512GB solid-state drive. The tablet will be available starting May 21 in Microsoft retail stores and Best Buy, and in more U.S. and Canadian stores starting June 20.

The model in my hand had a 2.5GHz Core i5-4300 CPU based on the Haswell microarchitecture, 256GB of storage and 8GB of DDR3 DRAM. The tablet booted in seconds and loaded applications faster than my current laptop with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor. The touchscreen was more responsive than the Surface Pro 2, which is less sensitive to pressure.

Microsoft claims the tablet offers battery life of up to nine hours. Other features include 802.11ac Wi-Fi, two 5-megapixel back and front cameras, a USB 3.0 port, a mini-DisplayPort slot and a microSD card reader. An optional docking station expands the port options to include Gigabit ethernet, display connectors and USB ports.
One big missing feature is LTE or any form of mobile broadband connectivity.
 


Google Maps adds elevation info

"Google Maps has introduced a new feature, useful for humans. Find out which hills will cause brake/heart failure before you take that last bike ride."
he feature is accessed simply by clicking on the bicycle icon in the map's info box after you input two locations as starting and ending points for Directions. You'll then be presented with a graph of the elevation changes over the course of the route, along with the highest and lowest elevations and the total elevation changes, up and down.

The new feature is apparently only activated when there's an appreciable elevation change along the route.  Works in various locales where there are hills around the Metro Atlanta area.

Google's Driverless Cars Could Cripple Law Enforcement Budgets

"Google's driverless cars have now combined to drive more than 700,000 miles on public roads without receiving one citation, The Atlantic reported this week. While this raises a lot of questions about who is responsible to pay for a ticket issued to a speeding autonomous car – current California law would have the person in the driver's seat responsible, while Google has said the company that designed the car should pay the fine – it also hints at a future where local and state governments will have to operate without a substantial source of revenue.

Approximately 41 million people receive speeding tickets in the U.S. every year, paying out more than $6.2 billion per year, according to statistics from the U.S. Highway Patrol published at StatisticBrain.com. That translates to an estimated $300,000 in speeding ticket revenue per U.S. police officer every year. State and local governments often lean on this source of income when they hit financial trouble. A study released in 2009 examined data over a 13-year period in North Carolina, finding a 'statistically significant correlation between a drop in local government revenue one year, and more traffic tickets the next year,' Popular Science reported.

For US Customers, Text Access To 911 Slowly Rolls Out - but comes to Georgia

After it was long rumored and discussed about, the ability to text 911 in case of emergency is slowly rolling out in the United States to subscribers of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless. For the time being, the service is available in areas of Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Montana, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Vermont and Virginia. According to the FCC, the service will gradually roll out to more areas and by the end of this year, virtually anyone with a cellphone and enough service will be able to make use of it. Which means that all carriers will support it.

The Indian Prime Minister's Office Just Threw Away 1.24 Million Twitter Followers

Since January 2012, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the outgoing prime minister of India, has regaled the 1.24 million followers of the prime minister's official account on Twitter with blurry photographs, links to turgid Press Information Bureau releases and festive tidings. Tuesday, in one of the final acts of the outgoing government, the prime minister's office changed the name of its Twitter account from @PMOIndia to @PMOIndiaArchive and put it in cold storage.