Monday, December 2, 2013

Amazon's drones delivery





Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced his company plans to use commercial drones. Amazon called the new serves as Amazon Prime Air. According to the company, the goal of this new delivery system is to get packages into customers' hands in 30 minutes or less using unmanned aerial vehicles. The drones are expected to carry items up to five pounds, which is approximately 86% of all deliveries Amazon makes, and they also expected to provide services to customers who live within 10 miles from the point of origin. 

Amazon is expected to use the drones after 2015 if it gets permission from The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). But getting permission is not going to be easy because there are a lot of safeties questions need to be answered. For example, will Amazon able to design the drones to commercial aviation standards? The possibility of a collision between a drone and a commercial aircraft. Some congressional lawmakers are even rejecting military use of drones. At this time there is a little optimistic to expect them to pass law for commercial drones. But, we might see the use of drones in other countries.

Amazon is not the only company that came up with this idea. Domino's U.K. and Zookal from Australia also released a video of drones delivering pizzas and textbooks. Zookal is already got permission to use drone to deliver textbook rental in Australia next year. It will take some years, but we will definitely see use of commercial drones around the world.

Source CNN
By: AW - Extra Blog
 






Sunday, December 1, 2013

Laptop "Entire Palm" Reader

 Toshiba has recently launched the first laptop utilizing their Palm authentication technology.

This new technology is more than just a bio-metric print reader. The device actually scans a user's entire palm. One may wonder how an entire bio-metric reader for the palm can be done on the dimensions of a laptop. The answer is with conventional bio-metric technology. What Fujitsu has done is instead of using a bio-metric print scanner similar to the finger-print scanners on several modern day laptops, they have instead used a device that scans the veins in ones palm with near-infrared rays.

Laptops with Palm scanners should be even more secure than ones using finger print readers since it is harder to copy the vein signature of a palm than the images of one finger print from a convention bio-metric reader.

The way to use the device is to simply raise your hand over the reader, where it will then copy your vein signature in black and from there it will verify the hand to be the user's or someone attempting to break into the user's computer.


-posted by TL (Extra Blog)