Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates Join Forces To Invest in Clean Energy Technology

The founders of Facebook and Microsoft are teaming up to solve climate change. Mark Zuckerberg announced today that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have launched the Breakthrough Energy Coalition with Bill Gates to invest in zero-carbon energy technology around the world. The organization’s membership roster includes some of the most prolific names in technology, including Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, and Masayoshi Son.

The news was timed to coincide with the U.N. Climate Control Conference, which will take place in Paris this week. During the event, Gates and U.S. President Barack Obama are expected to unveil a significant new initiative called Mission Innovation, which will work with governments to double public investments in energy research over the next five years.

According to the Washington Post, the 19 countries that have already joined Mission Innovation will increase their annual spending on clean-energy research and development to $20 billion by 2020.

Mission Innovation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition are separate programs, but will work closely together in countries that have committed to reducing carbon emissions.

On its website, the Breakthrough Energy Coalition explains that its goal is to cover gaps in government funding in countries by commercializing the most promising and scalable ideas to come out of public research institutions. It will take a flexible attitude toward investments, providing early-stage to Series A funding in several sectors, including electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial use, agriculture, and energy system efficiency.

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Peel Turns Your Apple Watch Into A Universal Remote Control

Does it make sense to use your Apple Watch as a remote control for your media devices? Smart remote maker Peel thinks so, having just launched a universal remote control application for the Apple Watch which lets you operate over 400,000 models of home electronics, including not only televisions, but also DVD players, and even audio and streaming devices, like the Roku. The Apple Watch app is actually an extension of the company’s existing smart remote app for iPhone . And while in a few cases the new Watch app will allow you to control your devices via Wi-Fi, for the most part, it will require the Pronto hardware just like the iPhone version does. The Pronto 360-degree IR blaster is what turns the iPhone, and now the Apple Watch, into a smart universal remote control. A $49.99 piece of hardware about the size of a salt shaker, Pronto sits in your entertainment center to provide the IR capabilities required to operate your TV and other electroni...

Intel announces the first 14 nanometre processor

At the Computex conference in Taipei, chipmaker Intel has revealed a fanless mobile PC reference design using the first of its next-generation 14nm "Broadwell" processors. The 2 in 1 pictured here is a 12.5" screen that is just 7.2 mm thick with keyboard detached and weighs 670 grams. The Surface Pro 3 – for comparison – is 9.1 mm thick and weighs 800 grams. It includes a media dock that provides additional cooling for a burst of performance. The next-generation chip is purpose-built for 2 in 1s and will hit the market later in 2014 . Called the Intel Core M, it will be the most energy-efficient Intel Core processor in the company's history with power usage cut by up to 45 percent, resulting in 60 percent less heat. The majority of designs based on this new chip are expected to be fanless, with up to 32 hours of battery life, offering both a lightning-fast tablet and razor-thin laptop. Intel is also delivering innovation and performance for the ...

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla And Others Team Up To Launch WebAssembly, A New Binary Format For The Web

Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and the engineers on the WebKit project today announced that they have teamed up to launch WebAssembly, a new binary format for compiling applications for the web. The web thrives on standards and, for better or worse, JavaScript is its programming language. Over the years, however, we’ve seen more and more efforts that allow developers to work around some of the limitations of JavaScript by building compilers that transpile code in other languages to JavaScript. Some of these projects focus on adding new features to the language (like Microsoft’s TypeScript) or speeding up JavaScript (like Mozilla’s asm.jsproject). Now, many of these projects are starting to come together in the form of WebAssmbly. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the J...

Barnes & Noble is killing itself

I’ve been chronicling the slow demise of B&N for years now, watching the company bleed out, drop by drop, until it has become a shell of its former value. B&N was a cultural center in places without cultural centers. It was a stopover on rainy days in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland and it was a place you could go to get your kids’ first books. That’s mostly over now. On Monday the company laid off 1,800 people. This offered a cost savings of $40 million. But that’s particularly interesting. That means each of those people made an average of $22,000 or so per year and minimum wage workers – hourly folks who are usually hit hardest during post-holiday downturns – would be making $15,000. In fact, what B&N did was fire all full time employees at 781 stores. From a former employee: On Monday morning, every single Barnes & Noble location told their full-time employees to pack up and leave. The eliminated positions were as follows: the head cashiers (those are the pe...

How to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10?

Windows 10 has included some optional features which are in-built in the operating system but not installed by default. The Graphics Tool is one such package. The Graphic Tools are needed for users who use Visual Studio to develop DirectX apps or games. The tools have many utility like Graphics debugging, tracing Direct3D calls, inspection of parameters, analyzing Direct3D calls, experiments with shaders and many more. Visual Studio has a Graphics Frame Analysis tool that operates on graphics debugging log. It also collects all necessary information to draw Direct3D calls. The Graphics tools also consist of GPU Usage which lets you analyse and track GPU use in real time and at the same time collects and analyzes the timing data of the workloads. Steps to Install and Uninstall Graphics Tools in Windows 10? 1. Open the Start Menu, go to Settings and tap on System . 2. Go to Apps and features . 3. In the right panel, tap Manage ...

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