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Audi's traffic light countdown tech comes to Washington DC
Audi's traffic light countdown has been rolling out very slowly in the US (it's active in just seven cities so far), but it just made one of its biggest expansions yet: it's now available in Washington, DC. Pull up to one of 600 connected intersections in the country's capital and your compatible Audi will tell you how long you have before the light turns green. You shouldn't be caught off-guard when an interminably long red finally changes.
It takes a smart city to make cars truly autonomous
Artificial intelligence is driving the autonomous car. Coupled with robust computers, automobiles of the future will be more powerful than any other device we own. But they'll only be as powerful as their surrounding allows. If your vehicle doesn't know about a traffic jam along its route, like its human counterparts, it'll get stuck in gridlock. That's where connectivity comes in. When self-driving cars hit the road, they'll not only be computing juggernauts but also sharing data with everything all the time.
Classic 'RollerCoaster Tycoon' comes to iOS and Android
Atari has just released RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic, a "new" game for mobile based on the Atari-produced theme park sims. Classic takes its cues from the original RCT and RCT 2, offering a more simple take on park design, construction and management than more recent titles in the series. It's also the first RTC game for mobile that isn't stuffed full of microtransactions. Instead, you pay $6 (£4.50) once and then you own the game. Innovation!
Audi's new traffic-light countdown is the first step to smarter cities
As I get closer to the intersection, a countdown starts on the dashboard. The light is currently green, but the new Audi I'm driving tells me it'll be 147 seconds before I make it through the junction. Sure enough, the light turns yellow, then red, and I come to a stop as the numbers tick off in reverse. Once it hits four, the timer disappears, and within a few seconds the light turns green. It seems like a trivial feature, a timer telling you when a traffic signal is about to change. But in practice, it's quite useful. More important, it's currently available in Las Vegas, a baby step toward a future where cars and cities talk to one another to reduce gridlock.
Windows 8 found to skew benchmark results on overclocked hardware
Overclocking may yield impressive benchmark results, but it turns out scores from Windows 8 PCs may not be reliable. The management at overclocking community HWBOT has discovered that tests provide inaccurate stats when then CPU base clock frequency is fiddled with from within the OS. Hardware-based real-time clocks (RTCs) help keep accurate track of time, but the operating system's timekeeping somehow slows down or ramps up when processing speeds are tweaked. When underclocked by six percent, the outfit's Haswell-infused system lagged 18 seconds behind actual time, fooling the benchmark into a higher score since it seemingly finished in a shorter period of time. Conversely, a boost to CPU speeds results in a lower mark as the internal timepiece ticks away faster than usual. However, modifying processor speeds at boot time avoids these issues. As a result of the revelation, HWBOT is no longer accepting benchmarks from computers running the eighth iteration of Ballmer and Co.'s software, and will invalidate those already in its database. "Simply no benchmark – not even 3DMark – is unaffected by Microsoft's RTC design decisions," the outlet adds. The timing issues are said to stem from Windows 8's support of disparate hardware setups, including embedded and budget PCs that don't have a fixed RTC. If you'd like to see the inconsistencies for yourself, head past the break for video proof.
