Adobe has rolled out another set of incremental updates to many of its flagship applications, including Photoshop, Camera Raw, and Lightroom, as has become standard since the company moved to a subscription model. We had a chance to work with the new versions, and while the features aren’t life-changing, they do provide some great timesavers. Smarter Subject Selection for Portraits The headline feature for Photoshop in this update is improved subject selection for portraits. In particular, fine detail like hair is selected much more accurately than previously. From a user perspective, the Select Subject command hasn’t changed, just the results.
It’s not unusual for a car manufacturer to have difficulty ramping up production on a new model, but reports concerning Tesla’s Model Y suggest the manufacturer is having far more problems than is normal. The Model 3 may have been when it launched, but at least a few people have gotten Model Y’s delivered to them without the backseat being attached to the frame of the car. Image by . I think we’re all in agreement that this qualifies as bad. Reports of remarkably shoddy workmanship have been surfacing ever since Tesla restarted production of the Model Y at its California factory.
NASA’s Perseverance rover is almost ready to set off on its journey to Mars, but there are a few pieces of equipment still being integrated with the robot. For example, it won’t get its nuclear battery until next month, and teams at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center have just . These tubes might one day come back to Earth, but NASA hasn’t decided how to make that happen. In the meantime, engineers have gone to great lengths to ensure that Perseverance will be able to fill these containers with Martian materials that scientists will want to get their hands on.
When you ask someone to name their favorite superhero, a few obvious choices come to mind. And with apologies to a certain Kryptonian or a New York wall-crawler, the answer will most often come back to the Caped Crusader, the Dark Knight, the World’s Greatest Detective, the one and only Batman. It’s even more remarkable to consider he’s the world’s most popular defender of justice without possessing a single superpower. No super-strength or flight or spider-senses here. Bruce Wayne trained himself to become a physical, analytical, and mental paragon. For all practical purposes, the human mind is Batman’s greatest superpower.
HTC manufactured the first Android phones, working closely with Google and carriers like T-Mobile and Verizon. However, the company’s fortunes took a downturn in the face of competition from Samsung and numerous Chinese smartphone makers. HTC has been losing money consistently since 2015, but it just , its first new phones in a year. This might not get HTC back to the upper echelons of the smartphone market, but at least it’s trying. HTC is currently living off of the $1.1 billion it got from Google for handing over its Pixel engineering division. Its revenues have consistently dropped by about 50 percent year-over-year in each quarter, and it lost more than $60 million in the first quarter of 2020.
There have been rumors floating around the past few days that AMD might delay the Zen 3 CPU family. A DigiTimes report, combined with a relatively small launch for the updated Ryzen 3000XT parts, convinced some people that Zen 3 wasn’t arriving this year, either. AMD has now pushed back directly against such reporting. According to our contacts at the company, “[T]he rumor on ‘Zen 3’ delay is inaccurate.” But what kind of Zen 3 products should we expect to see? That’s a different question. AMD has said only that Zen 3 will launch for the consumer market, but not what consumer chips it will bring forward.
Today you can get a highly versatile laptop from Dell with over $600 marked off the retail price. This system is perfect for work, but it also has a 100 percent sRGB compatible display for editing images and a GPU that’s powerful enough to keep the average gamer happy. The new Vostro 15 7500 laptop is a true jack-of-all-trades. Dell’s Vostro systems are oriented as business solutions, and this system is no different, but it also has fairly strong gaming capabilities. It’s 100 percent sRGB display is also well suited for editing images. No matter what you need a laptop for, this system should fit the bill.
There’s a new set of slides being passed around that supposedly showcase AMD’s upcoming Radeon 6900 XT. They’re completely fake. Here’s how you can tell: In the first slide, the branding has been updated at the upper right, but the branding on the actual GPU hasn’t been. Also, that’s a Radeon 5700 cooler with a Vega water-cooler next to it, and there’s a clear flaw in the image where the radiator attaches to the card. The specs themselves are pretty reasonable. I’m not saying how accurate I think they are, but the specs are the only part of the slide that isn’t instantly fake.
Boston Dynamics has announced that it’s Spot robot is now available for order directly from the company, for just $74,500. The company reportedly only plans to sell about 1,000 robots a year, so it’s not trying to address the mass market. The goal is to put Spot in the hands of customers who will experiment and adapt the product to their own uses. The base package includes Spot, two batteries, a battery charger, a tablet controller, and Boston Dynamics’ APIs. BD notes that the Spot Explorer (that’s the available version, as opposed to Spot Academic and Spot Enterprise), “can be adapted for tasks ranging from industrial inspection to entertainment.
