Extreme tech

Culture | August 24th, 2016

By Chuck Solly

Some new tech from http://www.extremetech.com. Not all new tech will reach the street or your computer room but this one evidently has:

New Audis will tell you when the next traffic light will turn green. Audi’s new Traffic Light Information gives drivers a countdown until the light turns green. It lets you maximize the 15 to 120 seconds while you’re stopped. The car gets an accurate signal via its telematics module and displays the time-to-green in the instrument panel and head-up display. Audi says this is the first commercial application of V2I, or vehicle-to-infrastructure, communications.

Audi suggests the time can be used for checking out the car (gauges all in the green? seat belt snug?), checking a child in a second row child or baby seat, or even (wink, wink) checking your e-mail or text messages — though in most states it’s not legal to do that, even when you’re stopped in traffic for an extended period.

For those still engaged in the youthful pastime of driver and passengers hopping out and exchanging places (the so-called Chinese fire drill), now everyone knows how much time they have left, though the driver still has to remember to put the transmission in park.

I should mention that I am not a big fan of some of the uses Audi mentions such as Chinese Fire drills. Traffic density and carelessness have increased 10-fold since that game was invented. How long it will take the hackers to play around with that module?

Happy anniversary!

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update has dropped, bringing a significant number of under-the-hood changes to the operating system. There are some significant privacy issues involved with Win 10. Microsoft has added these things to present a more pleasant user experience for most of us.

A very good change to Win 10 concerns One Drive, the MS cloud backup solution. OneDrive will work just as it did on Windows 7. As with competing services like Dropbox and Google Drive, placeholder files are no more. You’ll have to choose what to sync ahead of time. Microsoft said they did this because the placeholder files in Windows 8.1 were buggy and incompatible with some Windows desktop programs.

By default, Win 10 AUTOMATICALLY uploads mandatory Windows updates and apps from the Windows Store to other PCs over the Internet. You don’t have a choice. This is a great feature when restricted to the local network, but Microsoft opts everyone into the Internet part of it by default, using your upload bandwidth for something that doesn’t help you.

Worse yet, there’s no indication this is happening unless you read about it online, find your Internet connection slow, or get contacted by your Internet service provider because you’re using up your limited upload bandwidth. It could appear as an option in the custom setup process or a note about it could appear somewhere, but it doesn’t — it just works in the background. You have to find a special option hidden five clicks deep in the operating system to disable it.

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