Update (6/2/2020): This is a story I’m truly glad to return to. Since this ran in December 2018, there’s been a huge surge in game mods with exactly these kinds of upgrades. Deus Ex now has There’s the for Final Fantasy VII, for Final Fantasy IX, Hexen to improve that title, and an AI upscale mod for . There’s a mod for Vampire the Masquerade: , and one for . Fan of the original ? Grab the upscale here. The methods behind these AI upscales vary. Many use Topaz VEAI, but some AI mods use ESRGAN or don’t identify the specific AI model.
Google is facing yet another lawsuit that claims the search giant collects too much information on users. But what else is new? Well, this time the proposed class-action lawsuit claims Google has been collecting data on users even when it says it won’t. According to the plaintiffs, Google still monitors people via online tools when they have Incognito Mode enabled in Chrome. They demand . Chrome has become the most popular browser in the world despite Google’s propensity for accumulating data on our online habits. Incognito Mode provides a way to limit what data you leave behind as you poke around the web, but the lawsuit claims it is inadequate and misleading.
HP has to be thinner, faster, and cheaper. The new Omen 15 starts at $1,000 and has both Intel and AMD CPU options. While it’s thinner and less clunky than the last-gen Omen laptops, this is still a hefty device at 5.4 pounds. Although, there aren’t exactly lightweight options if you want high-end graphics in a laptop form factor. HP waited just one year to release a new Omen 15 gaming laptop, possibly because the was so divisive. It had a secondary display above the keyboard for chat, screen captures, and other functions. That shifted the keyboard toward the bottom of the chassis and the trackpad to the far right.
SpaceX has made the Falcon 9 the heart of its launch operations, sending both cargo and now people into space. However, the private spaceflight company plans to transition its operations to its Starship rocket in the future. Developing that craft has been slow going, though. Just a month after nailing a pressurization test, the Starship SN4 prototype exploded during an engine test. It’s not clear what happened, but CEO Elon Musk has . The Starship will eventually have enough power to send large payloads to destinations in the outer solar system, but first SpaceX needs to get the kinks worked out.
Helayne Seidman is a professional photographer who took a glamorous photo of New York’s luxury apartment building Gotham West. She licensed that photo for use by the New York Post — but she didn’t give permission to Vox Media, who used the same image on a story that appeared on one of their websites. Now, over this fairly open-and-shut case of copyright infringement. While it’s unknown exactly how much Seidman’s lawyers are seeking from Vox, , with some cases settling as high as $150,000. Using an image that doesn’t belong to you on your website, marketing materials or anywhere else can be a painfully expensive lesson that the content you use must actually be yours to use.
Update (6/1/2020): We’ve republished the story below as a discussion of how Intel’s mobile efforts consumed so much of the company’s attention, yet ultimately came to naught. In the years since this story was published in 2016, Intel attempted to build a competitive 5G modem that would put it on the cutting edge of the new market. Unfortunately, that effort ultimately failed and Intel sold its 5G modem business . Atom has continued to develop as a low power mobile solution for entry-level Windows systems and Chromebooks. The observations on foundry models are more salient now than they were in 2016.
Update (6/1/2020): The article below may have been written in 2016, but it still stands up as a postmortem of what went wrong with Intel’s mobile efforts — with one very important omission. Back in 2016, we didn’t know Qualcomm had been ruthlessly enforcing licensing and purchasing terms that made it effectively impossible for manufacturers to offer Intel-based mobile devices. I remember wondering why Intel couldn’t find a single US company to produce a phone around its hardware platform for love or money when the original Xolo X900 compared against a then-current iPhone. Intel still made a number of mistakes with Atom, as this article discusses, but the fact that Qualcomm on the market behind the scenes obviously had an impact on what kind of success Intel was ever going to achieve.
Today you can save big on a new display or pickup fast high-end laptop from Dell with a substantial discount. Already got a PC? There is also a good deal on a 1TB NVMe SSD that should help boost your system performance and give your existing system a performance boost. Dell designed this modern laptop with one of Intel’s new Core i7-1065G7 processors and a fast 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD. The notebook also features an LED-backlit keyboard, which makes the system look cool as well as being useful while typing in the dark. Currently, you can get this system from Dell marked down from $799.99 to $729.99 with promo code 50OFF699.
Google is not the first company to try its luck at cloud gaming, but game developers seemed more excited by Google’s service. In the months leading up to launch, Google signed numerous partners, including Take-Two Interactive, but the bloom is off the rose just six months after launch. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick , and he questions the value of cloud gaming as a whole. Stadia, GeForce Now, Microsoft xCloud, and other cloud gaming services operate in the same basic fashion. A server someplace runs your game and renders each frame with powerful hardware. The video of the game streams across the internet to your device, and your control inputs go back up to the server.
