Largest-ever math proof chews up 200TB of data
You’ve probably been asked to prove a math solution at some point, but never like this. Researchers have created the world’s largest math proof while solving the Boolean Pythagorean triples problem, consuming a whopping 200TB of data — the previous record was ‘just’ 13GB. The sheer size came from having to consider the sheer range (nearly 1 trillion) of possibilities involved in coloring integers. You could technically use a 68GB compressed version at home, but it’d take about 30,000 hours of processing time to crunch the data.
It’s impressive stuff, although Nature is quick to note that this isn’t quite a Holy Grail. A giant proof might solve the problem, but it doesn’t provide a consistent explanation for why the results come out the way they do, something that you can apply to other cases. In one sense, it’s like cheating on an exam. While you may know the answers, you aren’t really learning how to solve things on your own.
Via: Nature, Popular Mechanics
Source: ArXiv.org
Acer Liquid Zest Plus Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
Acer
For a phone that’s going to cost just $199 or £199 (around AU$275) Acer sure has tried put a lot into the 5.5-inch frame of the Liquid Zest Plus.
Big battery and big camera are the two initial stand outs. The 5,000 mAh battery is significantly bigger than some flagship phones that have been renowned for their lifespan: Samsung’s latest Note, for example, has just 3,000 mAh. Similarly the 13-megapixel rear camera isn’t what you’d expect from a sub-$200 phone.
But they aren’t the only tricks the Zest Plus has up its fairly plain sleeve. The battery has a quick charge system that’ll get it to 50 percent capacity in just one hour and it can even be used to charge other phones.
The camera has what Acer is calling a “hybrid tri-focusing system” which means it pulls focus fast: In just 0.3 seconds, in fact. Selfie fans (and aren’t we all these days) should get a kick from the 85-degree angle on the 5-megapixel front facing camera. There’s even an automatic selfie mode that uses face detection and you can shake the handset to start an automatic selfie timer.
Acer
The Liquid Zest Plus even comes with DTS-HD sound, dual-SIM capacity and a bluelight shield for night use. Of course, the real question is what did Acer leave out to get that low price tag?
We should get some deeper information on the Acer Liquid Zest Plus in a few days when Computex 2016 in in full swing, so stand by for some hands-on impressions later this week.
Fitbit Charge HR vs Garmin vívosmart HR
Fitbit vs Garmin: a battle between two fitness giants that’s been debated for quite some time.
Whether you simply need to keep better track of your daily activity or are looking to add something more to your workouts, the Fitbit Charge HR and the Garmin vívosmart HR are two of the best devices for the job. They have similar features and price points, but beyond that, these two devices have a number of notable differences. So which one is worth your hard-earned cash? Allow us to help you decide — read on for our full Fitbit Charge HR vs Garmin vívosmart HR comparison!
Buy the Fitbit Charge HR
Buy the Garmin vívosmart HR
Review notes: I’ve been using the Fitbit Charge HR for about 12 months, and the Garmin vívosmart HR for roughly two weeks. The Nexus 6P has been my smartphone companion of choice for the duration of the review period.
Design
The first thing you’ll notice when comparing these two devices are their displays. While Fitbit chose to employ a small OLED display on the Charge HR, the vívosmart HR comes with a much larger 1-inch LCD screen. You can cycle through your daily stats on the Charge HR by pressing the side button or tapping the display. It’s not a touchscreen, though, which means you’ll have to do pretty much everything else in the Fitbit app.
Alternatively, the vívosmart HR has a big touchscreen display that allows you to do much more on the device itself. Not only can you cycle through your daily stats, you can also change settings, manage Bluetooth connections, view past workouts, and much more.
The jury is still out as to whether or not a bigger touchscreen display is necessary on a fitness tracker of this size. While it’s a tad more convenient to be able to manage your Bluetooth connection directly from your vívosmart HR, I kind of prefer the simplicity of the Charge HR’s display. It just gives you what you need, and not a whole lot more. I know some people will have a different opinion, though.
Don’t miss: Fitbit Charge HR review3
Both of these devices come with standard watch-style clasp mechanisms, which I really like. They’re both incredibly easy to put on and take off, and once they’re on, they’re on.
Both devices’ straps are made of a soft rubber material, and both are incredibly comfortable to wear all day. The vívosmart HR is quite a bit bulkier, though. It sticks out from the wrist much more than the Charge HR does, which could prove to be an annoyance for some users.
On the design front, I don’t think there’s a clear winner here. Both are comfortable to wear all day, and both are pretty inconspicuous on the wrist.
Features and performance
Fitbit’s SmartTrack is one of the best features on the Charge HR
When it comes to activity tracking, the Charge HR and vívosmart HR both provide the essentials. They’ll track your steps taken, distance traveled, calories burned, stairs climbed, active minutes and even your sleep. The Charge HR offers one notable thing above the Garmin device, though, and that’s automatic activity tracking. Fitbit’s SmartTrack technology has been around for a while now, and it’s certainly one of the best features on the Charge HR. It will automatically track when it thinks you’re starting to exercise, and it’s pretty much spot on every time. Whether you’re going for an intense run, light jog or just a walk, all of your data will be there inside the app when you’re done. It’s a convenient feature that unfortunately isn’t offered on the vívosmart HR.
Both devices do, however, support automatic sleep tracking. There’s no need to tap a sleep now button — just fall asleep with one of the trackers on your wrist, and your sleep data will be there in app when you wake up. Both seem to be very accurate, too. They had no problems recognizing when I went to bed, when I woke up, or how often I was restless. To take sleep tracking one step further, both the Charge HR and vívosmart HR support silent alarms. Once you set your alarm time, these devices will wake you up with a small vibration on your wrist. Well, the Charge HR will anyway. The vívosmart HR’s vibration motor is quite strong, and definitely takes some getting used to.
Auto Goal is a feature every fitness tracker company should adopt
While Fitbit has a leg up in automatic activity tracking, Garmin has a handy little feature called Auto Goal. Just about every fitness tracker out there lets you adjust your daily step goals, but the vívosmart HR will do it for you automatically. So when you meet and exceed your daily step goal for a certain amount of days in a row, your device will start to automatically adjust the number of steps required for that day. This is a really nice feature that more companies should adopt.
Garmin packed a ton of other features in the vívosmart HR that the Fitbit device doesn’t offer. The vívosmart HR has a waterproof rating of 5ATM (up to 50 meters), whereas the Charge HR is only splash and sweat resistant. The vívosmart HR also shows you the weather and lets you control your music right from the device itself. One other big difference in functionality – while the Charge HR will give you call notifications, the vívosmart HR can give you much more than that. Call, text, email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and basically any other app that’s installed on your phone can give you notifications through the vívosmart HR. Of course, it’s not a mind-blowing experience since the screen is pretty small, but it sure is much more handy than what the Charge HR offers.
If you need a device that can track your steps accurately, both devices will do the trick. I’ve been using the Charge HR for about a year, and I’ve found step tracking to be one of its strong points. And when comparing the Charge HR’s results with those of the vívosmart HR, I didn’t find many differences at all. I took both devices out for a 5 mile run, and the Garmin was only about 90 steps off from the Charge HR when I arrived back home. That’s pretty good considering I took about 8,600 steps.
While the devices are very similar in some areas, that’s certainly not the case with heart rate tracking, though. Both the Charge HR and vívosmart HR have optical heart rate monitors that can record your resting and active heart rate. Throughout our testing period, both devices have provided similar resting heart rate results, but active heart rate numbers were all over the place. I went on a 5 mile run, and the vívosmart HR consistently recorded my active heart rate to be about 20 bpm higher than the Charge HR’s numbers. When the Garmin device said my HR was at 178 bpm, the Charge HR would tell me I was at 158 bpm. These numbers didn’t even out until after I got down to resting heart rate levels.
This was pretty much the only discrepancy between the two devices on the performance front, though it is one you should definitely keep in mind. It’s also worth noting that you shouldn’t be looking for a wrist-mounted activity tracker if you need accurate HR results. Chest straps are the way to go for all of your HR-tracking needs, though they are a bit more cumbersome to wear during a workout.
Both Fitbit and Garmin claim their devices can achieve up to 5 days of battery life on a single charge, and that’s certainly the case here. The Charge HR and vívosmart HR can last up to 5 days on one charge, and you might be able to squeeze a little more life out of them if you keep the HR monitors turned off.
| Display | OLED | LCD |
| Tracking | Steps, calories, distance, active minutes, stairs, sleep | Steps, calories, distance, intensity minutes, stairs, sleep |
| Heart rate monitor | Optical | Optical |
| GPS | No | No |
| Waterproof | No, splash and sweat proof | Yes, 5 ATM (up to 50 meters) |
| Battery life | Up to 5 days | Up to 5 days |
| Notifications | Call | Call, text, email and more |
| Music control | No | Yes |
| Compatibility | Android, iOS, Windows, web | Android, iOS, Windows, web |
| Colors | Black, Blue, Plum, Tangerine, Teal | Black, Imperial Purple, Midnight Blue |
| Dimensions | Small: 137mm – 157.5mm (21mm wide) Large: 157.5mm – 193mm (21mm wide) |
Regular: 136mm-187mm (21mm wide) X-large: 180mm-224mm (21mm wide) |
Software
I’ve said time and time again that Fitbit’s smartphone companion app is one of the best out there, and I still believe that to this day. It’s simple, easy to use, and gives you access to your most important stats right on the main screen. It’s a good thing, too — since you can’t do a whole lot on the Charge HR itself, you’ll be spending a good amount of time in the app looking through activity summaries. You can tell Fitbit spent a lot of time making its app clean and easy to use. It doesn’t bombard you with too much information at one time, and it certainly doesn’t seem cluttered at all.
See also: Which Fitbit is right for you?14
There’s a slide-out menu on the left side where you can view your Challenges, Friends, Account and manage alarms. The Fitbit app is pretty good at giving you daily, weekly, monthly and yearly challenges, and will let you know when each challenge is met. You can also connect with friends who are in the Fitbit community. Finding new friends with which to connect is as easy as tapping the FAB at the bottom of the screen, and selecting which people in your contact list have Fitbit accounts.
Speaking of cluttered fitness applications, Garmin’s Connect app is what you’ll be using to sync all of your vívosmart HR’s data with your phone. It’s not a bad app, not in the slightest. It’s just confusing to navigate at times. Once you learn to use it, though, it will provide you with some incredibly detailed information that not many other apps provide.
The app is divided up into a few main sections: Snapshots, Leaderboard, Calendar, News Feed and Insights. Snapshots features all of your stats for the current day. When viewing your Snapshots, swipe left or right to navigate through your steps, sleep, and other stats. The Leaderboard is where you can connect with friends who also have Garmin devices, and Calendar gives you a detailed view of your stats for each day you’ve worn the device. News Feed is where all of your workouts are listed, and the Insights page houses a list of tips and tricks from Garmin that will help you make the most of your workouts.
Which comes out on top?
Right now the Fitbit Charge HR is sitting at around $130 on Amazon, while the Garmin vívosmart HR can be yours for $150. Are all the extra features on the vívosmart HR worth $20 extra? I’d say yes, most definitely.
Buy the Fitbit Charge HR
Buy the Garmin vívosmart HR
I love both of these devices. They’re great workout companions, they look good, and they can both last 5 days on a single charge. The vívosmart HR just offers more for the money, though. It’s waterproof, its screen can feed you more information, and the Auto Goal feature is great for those who are looking to improve on their past workouts. Fitbit’s Charge HR is easier to use than the vívosmart HR, and the fact that it can track your activity automatically is just great. If you’re spending over $100 for a fitness tracker that will help improve your workouts, I’d have to recommend the vívosmart HR.
What are your thoughts? Have you used either of these devices? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Read more reviews:
- Fitbit Alta review
- Fitbit Blaze review
- Withings Activité Steel review
- Jawbone UP3 review
- Withings Go hands-on
Iran orders messaging app makers to store data inside the country
Iran’s attempts to stifle dissenting views through online censorship don’t usually work all that well, so it’s trying a new strategy: bringing more of that data within its own borders. It’s ordering messaging app developers to move all their Iranian users’ data to the country within the next year if they want to “ensure their continued activity.” It’s not hard to see Iran would do this, of course — in theory, this makes it easy to delete unwanted content, spy on traffic and seize servers.
The clamp-down is potentially rough for secure messaging services like Telegram, which are particularly popular thanks to encryption that keeps messages safe from the government’s prying eyes. As Reuters points out, there are 20 million Iranian Telegram users in a country with just 80 million people — it’d be a big blow if Telegram had to withdraw.
Whether or not companies like this actually have to withdraw is another matter. Iranians are used to circumventing bans through technologies like virtual private networks, so an attempt to block messaging apps might do little more than introduce an additional step into the connection process. Unless Iran finds a way to completely shut off outside access, this move could be more symbolic than it is practical.
Source: Reuters
The new ‘Doom’ hides sinister images in its soundtrack
It’s no secret that the new Doom is chock-full of Easter eggs and other surprises, but the latest is one you wouldn’t find just by wandering around the game’s tortured halls. Intrepid fan TomButcher has noticed that at least one tune in the soundtrack, “Cyberdemon,” shows both pentagrams and the number 666 when you visualize the music’s frequencies through a spectrogram. Composer Mick Gordon recently teased that this hidden sinister imagery might be present in a video (below at the 3:29 mark), but there’s no doubt about it now. Clearly, he remembers the days when the original Doom’s hellish artwork had some parents in a frenzy.
Music aficionados will be quick to note that stealthy image insertion isn’t new. Aphex Twin (aka Richard James) legendarily inserted his own face into the spectrogram for a track on his Windowlicker EP, for a start. All the same, it’s good to know that the art of sneaking in subtle audio references is far from dead — even if you’re unlikely to see this feat in many other games going forward.
Via: Reddit
Source: TomButcher (Imgur)
Fill the Pot misses the mark (review)
P
eeing in a bucket. That is the basis of this Android game. I’m not kidding. Fill the Pot by developer South Pacific Apps is a physics game where everything rides on your…um…aim. (I’m requesting official kudos from the AndroidGuys editorial team for my restraint from multiple bathroom metaphors in this review. It was not easy.)
You play the role of a homeowner in his backyard (apparently) who REALLY has to relieve himself. Yes, you play only males in this game, if you were really thinking about asking that question.
You start by downloading the game from Google Play, of course. The game does link you to your Google Play Games account, if you so choose. If you don’t link to your account, you won’t be able to access leaderboards or log your achievements. If that’s your thing.
After startup, you start with only a single avatar to use (more avatars are available as you 
collect bonus coins in the game). This initial avatar can fill each pot in 3 seconds (more on that in a moment). The higher-level avatars can fill pots in shorter times, through both accuracy and flow.
Gameplay and Controls
When each pot appears, a countdown timer begins on-screen. Each timer is of varying time. You have to:
Place your ‘stream’ into the pot with accuracy.
Hold your ‘stream’ at the pot’s opening long enough to fill said pot, before the countdown timer reaches zero.
Controls work in two different ways. The first is moving your ‘stream’ left and right; this is done by simply tilting your device either way. The second is the strength/reach of your ‘stream’; this is done by an up-arrow on the left of the screen and down-arrow on the right. You combine these controls to place your effluent in a pot placed randomly on the screen.
The controls are the weakest point of the game, in that they are just not discrete enough. The gyro (or tilting action) worked fine for me, but the up/down controls were simply too crude. I continually under – and over – shot my target; this is frustrating when you know you’re more accurate than that….male pride steps in here.
If you successfully fill the pot in time, that pot disappears and another magically appears in a different location, dictating you adjust your placement to start filling again. You continue this endlessly, until you can’t fill a pot in the allotted time. To quote the developer, “Don’t worry you never run out of pee.”
During this urinary steeplechase, random bags of coins (of varying value) appear. They are clearly a temptation: veer to the money and collect it for upgrading your avatar, but to do so you risk losing valuable filling time. Such choices in life. Count me in as a dedicated urinator (is that a word?). During my time with this game, I never could grab enough coin to upgrade my avatar, as I was solely focused on pot-filling.
Sound and Graphics
The game actually hits high marks here. The graphics are simple but with bold primary colors that don’t grow tiresome. The sound effects are very realistic, from the standard ‘flow’, to bounding off the side of the targeted pot, to the oh-so-satisfying sound of proper fillage (you know what I mean, fellas). All the while the never-ending bing of the countdown timer reminds you that your life in this game is tenuous.
Conclusion
Honestly, the game is fun to play, and could be much more so if the controls were fine-tuned some more. Unfortunately, the game’s premise is bound to deter some folks from having this on their device, let along playing it in public. A similar setup with a more publicly-acceptable premise would certainly make it more public-friendly.
Download Fill the Pot here.
Tesla hosts a grand opening for its Gigafactory on July 29th
Tesla’s sprawling Gigafactory has yet to kick into full swing, but that isn’t stopping the electric car maker from giving its plant an official debut. It’s inviting its biggest fans (including those who referred buyers) to a grand opening for the Gigafactory on July 29th, even though the Nevada facility is still well away from being finished. There’s no mention of what’s on the itinerary, although it’s reasonable to suspect that this could be the first truly revealing, officially sanctioned peek inside the factory. Motor Trend got a tour in April, but mainly showed the outside.
The EV pioneer is certainly under pressure to show that the Gigafactory is ready for business. Tesla needs the building to start making car batteries soon if it’s going to fulfill the flood of early Model 3 orders. On top of that, it’ll want to show that its accelerated production plans (which have it making batteries for 500,000 cars per year by 2018) are realistic. The more confidence Tesla shows in its manufacturing, the more it reassures buyers and investors worried that the company’s reach might exceed its grasp.
Via: The Verge
Source: Tesla Central, Fortune
Google won’t get a deal on French taxes
If Google was hoping that France would give it a UK-style tax break, it’s going to be in for a rude surprise. The country’s Finance Minister Michel Sapin informs Reuters that there won’t be any negotiations with Google over the €1.6 billion in back taxes (roughly $1.76 billion) the company reportedly owes. The French “don’t do deals,” Sapin says. He adds that the recent raid on Google’s Paris office over alleged tax fraud was really just the next step for investigations that started a few years ago.
Google maintains that it’s already obeying the law through its current approach, which uses international tax loopholes to report sales in Ireland. However, that clearly doesn’t matter to France — it’s convinced that foreign companies are evading their legal responsibilities, and it’s cracking down wherever it can. McDonald’s is also a target, for instance. Barring some new discoveries, Google might not have much choice but to pay up.
Source: Reuters
‘Catlateral Damage’ VR is out on Steam for HTC Vive
Smashing pots and vases as a rampaging virtual kitty sounds so much more fun if you can physically act it out, doesn’t it? Good thing you can do just that if you have an HTC Vive. Catlateral Damage, that game that puts you in the body of a mischievous cat, now has a virtual reality version for the headset. Motion controllers serve as your paws and tools of destruction as you walk around houses and museums causing havoc. The VR version is available as a free DLC on Steam — even better, the game itself is 50 percent off until May 31st. Of course, if you don’t have a Vive, you can always unleash your inner feline on the PS4.
Source: Steam
AIVAnet 