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Desktops are dead to some, but for the rest of us they offer a great amount of performance and expansion for the dollar that simply can’t be matched by a laptop. While enthusiastic power users may prefer to build their own machine, it’s tough to beat the value of a good pre-built PC deal.
As our deal hunters have found time and again, if you happen to need a full PC setup, not just a monitor or a desktop separately, that the bundle deals offer the best value. You typically get the desktop, monitor, keyboard, mouse, and of course all the benefits of a pre-build PC like warranty and OS. Our hot deal today is an offer we haven’t come across before, pairing a high-end PC with a multi-touch monitor.
The XPS 8700 is no stranger to our deal listings here, offering a strong combination of performance, features, and design at a very competitive price. Many of the XPS 8700 deals we feature easily beat a custom-built PC for value and this one is no different. The system included in this bundle is well equipped with a quad-core Haswell Core i7, 12GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive, GeForce GT 635 graphics, Wireless-N, Windows 8, and a host of other standard features.

For a display, you get the 21.5-inch S2240T, a sleek piece of kit with 10-point multi-touch and a unique hinge that allows it to lay at the perfect angle for touch interaction. It serves up 1080p resolution on a gorgeous IPS LCD panel, ensuring extra-wide viewing angles and rich colors. Paired with the Windows 8 OS, the open-minded users will come to enjoy the added level of interaction that touch offers (I know, it sounds crazy, but I went through it myself recently).
The XPS 8700 desktop is covered by a two year warranty that includes in-home service and 24×7 phone support that covers both hardware and software support. The monitor likely comes with its own one year warranty that includes advance exchange to avoid costly shipping bills, though Dell isn’t clear about separate warranty coverage.
This bundle normally runs $1469, but a hefty instant discount knocks that down to just $1000 with free shipping. Check this out over at Dell.com and step into a complete and powerful new computer system.

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Advances in the control of prosthetic arms, or even exoskeletal arms, continue to amaze. Yet someone with a severe neck injury doesn’t need any such device since the greatest arm they could imagine is sitting right there hanging off their shoulder — but unable to perform. Efforts to control an artificial arm may seem impotent to these folks, when a bridge spanning just a couple centimeters of scar tissue in the spinal column can not even be made. A way forward is now taking shape at Case Western University in Ohio. Researchers there are gearing up to combine the Braingate cortical chip developed at Brown University with their own Functional Electric Stimulation (FES) platform.
It has long been known that electrical stimulation can directly control muscles. The problem is that it is fairly inaccurate, and can be painful or damaging. Stimulating the nerves directly using precisely positioned arrays is a much better approach. One group of Case Western researchers recently demonstrated a remarkable device called a nerve cuff electrode that can be placed around small segments of nerve. They used the cuff to provide an interface for sending data from sensors in the hand back to the brain using sensory nerves in the arm. With FES, the same kind of cuff electrode can also be used to stimulate nerves going the other direction, in other words, to the muscles.

The difficulty in such a scheme, is that even if the motor nerves can be physically separated from the sensory nerves and traced to specific muscles, the exact stimulation sequences needed to make a proper movement are hard to find. To achieve this, another group at Case Western has developed a detailed simulation of how different muscles work together to control the arm and hand. Their model consists of 138 muscle elements distributed over 29 muscles, which act on 11 joints. The operational procedure is for the patient to watch the image of the virtual arm while they naturally generate neural commands that the BrainGate chip picks up to move the arm. (In practice, this means trying to make the virtual arm touch a red spot to make it turn green.) Currently in clinical trials, the Braingate2 chip has an array of 96 hair-thin electrodes that is used to stimulate a small region of motor cortex.
The trick here is not just to find any sequence that gets the arm from point A to point B, but to find sequences similar to those that real arms actually use in particular tasks. This is important because each muscle has not only a limited contraction range, but also a limited range where it can actually deliver significant force, and generate feedback signals about those forces. When muscles contract they obviously change shape, but less obvious perhaps, is that their shape at any given moment affects how the other muscles leverage the joints they work. Just as important is the effect of the opposing muscles that control counter movements.

Few movements that we make, even low-force movements, consist of pure contractions of the active muscle and pure inhibition of the opposing muscle. In actuality, muscle units on both sides can be firing in alternating bursts to quickly ratchet joint angles open, particularly when the vector of end-point movement is oblique to the axes of individual arm segments. In other words, even in a simple movement like a bench press, both the biceps and triceps generate forces alternately at various points in the lift, despite the fact that the weight rises uniformly in the upward direction.
If artificial methods of control are going to be used for flesh-and-blood systems, particularly ones that have been idle for some time, overstimulation (or mis-stimulation) when lifting anything even slightly heavy is something to be guarded against. Many sports injuries, such as those in older people performing unfamiliar moves, happen not because they reach too far or too hard, but because their nervous system is not sufficiently practiced to be able to protect the muscle.
While no model for limb movement can be perfect, for the majority of everyday tasks, close may be good enough. The eventual plan is that the patient and the control algorithm will learn together in tandem so that the training screen will not be needed at all. At that point, we might say that Case Western will have a pretty slick interface to offer.

Nintendo is in dire straights. The Wii U sold poorly over the 2013 holiday season, and the Kyoto company is anticipating substantial losses going forward. Now, rumors are bubbling up that Nintendo is already working on its next console, and it sounds quite promising. With superior hardware and better handheld connectivity, this has the potential to turn the table once more in Nintendo’s favor.
An enthusiast site by the name of Nintendo News recently reported a number of interesting tidbits, and it all sounds too good to be true. First off, the author proposes that “Fusion” could be the name of Nintendo’s next console. The evidence, a domain name purchased over a decade ago, seems like a stretch at best. The domain NintendoFusion.com does exist, and it seems as if Nintendo is actually the owner. However, Nintendo News points out itself that the domain likely exists because of the Fusion Tour that Nintendo held in the early aughts. While the name sounds relatively plausible, I wouldn’t bet any money on it. Even if it’s true, remember that the Nintendo Wii was codenamed “Revolution,” and the GameCube once went by “Dolphin.”
The proposed spec-sheets of the “Fusion DS” and “Fusion Terminal” are available in the post as well. The handheld supposedly sports an ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, an Adreno 420 GPU, 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, and two 960×640 capacitive touchscreens. On the console side, the “Terminal” is reported to have a 2.2GHz 8-core PowerPC CPU, a custom Radeon-based GPU, 4GB of DDR4 RAM, 2GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 4K-compatible HDMI 2.0 output. Those definitely sound like compelling upgrades to the existing hardware, but Nintendo’s problems don’t lie solely with its underpowered hardware. If Nintendo wants hardware adoption, it’s going to need a flood of outstanding first-party titles that the Wii U just hasn’t offered.
With a name like Fusion, this rumor is pointing towards the potential of cross-compatibility between the console and handheld — following Sony’s lead. With cross-buy, cross-play, and remote play, Sony has been knocking it out of the park with the PlayStation Vita in the last few months. Since Nintendo has such a strong hold on the handheld market, it would be wise to follow suit here.
Even if this specific rumor turns out to be bogus, its clear that Nintendo has to do something. The company is hemorrhaging money, and the stock price just fell off of a cliff. It’s highly unlikely that Nintendo will abandon the hardware market in favor of PS4 and iPhone support, so the solution is clear: new hardware.
Nintendo needs to cut its losses with the Wii U, double down on 3DS development, and start anew in the console market in a few years. In the meantime, Nintendo needs to fire much of its leadership, and find a better way to leverage its entire back catalog. With Nintendo’s amazing software library, the Wii U and 3DS Virtual Consoles could be pure profit machines. Instead, Nintendo has squandered this opportunity by only releasing a handful of titles at a time. Frankly, Nintendo better shape up, or prepare for the impending shareholder revolt.

When AngelList — the network for young startups to find funding and employees – announced a $24 million round of funding last year, it noted that it had already helped 3,000 people find jobs through free listings. Now, it’s experimenting with ways to charge for them.
Today, a message has been popping up for would-be job posters: pay either 10% of the salary, or 0.25% of company equity, with the amount payable only after a person is hired, and refundable if the candidate leaves the job before 90 days. We have a screenshot of how the offer looks here.
Naval Ravikant, the CEO of AngelList, tells us that for now this is just a “test/expermiment right now.”
“It’s cheaper than anyone else out there, cash or equity (company’s choice) on hire only and only for new listings (95% of companies / activity are still free),” he tells me. AngelList is not making a big announcement because it may change.
The move to charging for job listings should not come as a surprise. AngelList has been adding more monetizing features to its site over the last several months, namely around its syndicate investing model (which it is now expanding by offering free investor accreditation and Syndicates in Europe).
And last year, when AngelList announced its funding, Ravikant specifically referred to recruitment as one area that it could monetize.
“We’re not charging for recruiting today but that’s a logical place to do it,” he told AllThingsD, noting that the charges could range from “$10,000 to $30,000 per hire.”
According to AngelList’s salary tracking tool, right now the average salary for a developer on the site is $101,000 through to $85,000 for those in marketing roles.

Nokia confirmed today that it sold 8.2 million Lumia Windows Phone devices in the fourth quarter of 2013. That figure represents a decline of 600,000 from the third quarter in which Nokia sold 8.8 million Lumia handsets.
The fall comes on the cusp of the sale of the majority of Nokia’s hardware assets to Microsoft, meaning that the slip is more Microsoft’s problem than Nokia’s. But it is a weak indicator for the larger Windows Phone platform that was showing signs of gathering momentum.
Last year was an excellent one for Windows Phone. Nokia sold 4.4 million devices in the fourth quarter of 2012, meaning that total volume nearly doubled on a year-over-year basis. And, except for the fourth quarter, Lumia sales expanded like clockwork in the year. Between the second and fourth quarters of the year, for example, Nokia sales expanded from 7.4 million to 8.8 million, a healthy quarterly delta of 1.4 million.
(Quickly, given the massive share of the Windows Phone market that it controls, Nokia’s Lumia sales can be treated as an essential proxy for the health of the platform at large. So, when we discuss Lumia sales we are essentially discussing around 90 percent of Windows Phone sales. The unit volume tracks up and down with Lumia sales.)
The decline is surprising. Windows Phone had showed little other than growing strength since the release of Windows Phone 8 in the twilight of 2012, and the release of increasingly excellent Nokia hardware.
So, from whence the decline is the question. Some have posited that the loss of momentum could come from Nokia curtailing its advertising for Lumia handsets, as the company is almost done unloading the assets. It could be that Nokia’s advertising decelerated in the period, but the company itself highlighted a number of other reasons for the decline.
As TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas reported this morning, Nokia said the following:

The year-on-year decline in discontinued operations net sales in the fourth quarter 2013 was primarily due to lower Mobile Phones net sales and, to a lesser extent, lower Smart Devices net sales. Our Mobile Phones net sales were affected by competitive industry dynamics, including intense smartphone competition at increasingly lower price points and intense competition at the low end of our product portfolio.

In short, Nokia indicated a very competitive market, and one that was becoming more so where it had seen much of its 2013 growth: low-priced handsets. The inexpensive Lumia 520 and its variants have been key volume drivers for Windows Phone. If Lumia sales at the lower end of the market stall, the platform itself could see its expansion slip.
There are two cases to be made. The first is that, as Tom Warren calculated, Lumia sales were up 86 percent year-over-year in the final quarter of year, and total unit volume (30 million) was up 125 percent for 2013. Regardless of the final quarter, those are strong figures.
The second case is that in a growing market, you need to expand more quickly than the industry to boost your share. Windows Phone shrank in a potentially strong quarter in a growing market. Shrinking unit volume implies that Microsoft lost market share in the quarter. That’s the wrong direction. Microsoft without question needs to grow its market share to attract more developer attention.
What’s next is a good question. I think the bull case on Windows Phone is that Microsoft, with its far greater financial resources, can pour cash into marketing its platform, and therefore grow unit volume by buying it.
Still, in a quarter in which most — your humble servant included — expected another quarter of predictable sales growth, Windows Phone stumbled. Blip? Trend? It’s too soon to tell, but falling sales aren’t as good as growing sales, and given the still extant fragility of Windows Phone, the fourth quarter’s performance matters.
Somewhere in Canada people are having a pretty good day.

I got my first real Guitar Wing
Bought it at the Kickstart thing
Played it ’til my fingers bled
It was the winter Jay Smith and Travis Redding introduced their new $149 guitar rig
The team and some guys from Austin
Had a band and were into tech.
“Guitar Wing is a wireless controller covered in sensors designed for electric guitars and basses,” said rep Mike Fratamico.
It connects right below the neck.
Oh, when I look at their Kickstarter page
You see they want $45K
And they’re planning on shipping
In probably early May
And there are 30 days in the campaign
Ain’t no use in wonderin’