About three weeks ago, Microsoft decided the best way to boost its search engine share would be to force Office 365 ProPlus users to use Bing. The justification for this behavior was that Bing was going to automatically start displaying information from your company when you performed local searches. Mandatorily. Without your consent. Microsoft framed this as an advantage, claiming “By making Bing the default search engine, users in your organization with Google Chrome will be able to take advantage of Microsoft Search.” Users, needless to say, were not happy about this. Except, apparently, it isn’t needless to say, because someone at Microsoft actually thought this was a good idea.
Ground-penetrating radar may soon be the sensor that makes your car autonomous in all weather conditions. It turns out that when you scan the 10 feet below the roadway surface, you get a unique identifier that is accurate to an inch or two. Mapping cars would scan the roadways once, then your self-driving car with its own ground-penetrating radar would rescan as you drive, matching its real-time scan to the master map. That would keep your car centered, even if pavement markings are covered by snow or ice, according to WaveSense, an MIT spinoff that already has already tested military applications.
Folding phones are the hot new trend in smartphone design, even if they aren’t always as durable or useful as we might hope. They’re still a refreshing change from the endless succession of flat glass slabs we’ve seen in recent years. TCL might be planning to take to a new place if a posted on Cnet is to be believed. This alleged TCL prototype features a slide-out flexible display instead of a folding display. The unnamed phone looks like any other flat smartphone when closed. However, the frame telescopes out to slide the full panel into view. That roughly doubles your available screen real estate.
President’s Day is here, and if you’re like most, you’re on the hunt for a good deal. If a powerful computer is what you’re after, consider shopping these factory re-certified computers instead—they’re good as new but available for a fraction of the cost of buying new! Read on for details: This is the Surface Book . The blistering fast Intel Core i7 processor with 2.9GHz speed flies through projects, even with multiple apps running, all thanks to 16GB of RAM. The hard drive is a spacious 512GB and, of course it’s ready to flip from laptop to tablet and back again in seconds.
We haven’t talked about Nuvia (no relation to Nvidia) to-date, but I’ve had an eye on the startup since it came out of stealth mode late last year. Nuvia is a new CPU design company with an impressive industry pedigree, and it intends to challenge Intel and AMD for part of the overall server market, using its own custom ARM-based architecture. That’s an eyebrow-raising claim, given how hard it has been for ARM-based companies to do just that. Ever since Calxeda imploded in 2013, we’ve seen multiple companies claiming they would bring ARM-based servers to market. Not all of those firms have been startups.
In DevOps, everything is measured by the time between when an idea begins to when a finished product is delivered to a customer’s hands. The best DevOps pros are all about finding ways to speed up and streamline that process without losing any quality or hemorrhaging money. As you’d expect, companies are keenly interested in individuals who show skill in this area. Also as you’d expect, cloud services like the sprawling collection of features under the Amazon Web Services (AWS) banner can go a long way toward making a DevOps pro’s life much, much easier. So if you want to get working now as an AWS-certified DevOps expert, () is a perfect launching point.
Epic has been a big name in the games industry for years, but the incredible success of Fortnite has catapulted it to the head of the pack. It’s also given the firm enough clout to try and change the way game distribution works. At the DICE Summit, Epic Games CEO Time Sweeny took the stage to . He said Android is a “fake open system,” and Apple is even worse. Fortnite began its run as a desktop game, following in the footsteps of other battle royale titles like PUBG. Fortnite successfully left the more “realistic” PUBG in the dust, earning billions of dollars for Epic Games.
Both and Microsoft have started teasing their 2020 game console releases, but there are precious few confirmed details. A new report claims that anxious gamers could have sticker shock when they try to pick up a PlayStation 5 later this year. The more powerful hardware in Sony’s upcoming console could amount to a . Sony has talked in general terms about the hardware it plans to use in the PS5. The device will have a new Ryzen-based CPU, nearly instant game loads, 8K video decoding, and ray tracing graphics. Sony has said it will have about as much raw power as a low-end gaming PC.
The release date on Final Fantasy VII Remake is now under two months away, and Sony has decided to release the opening movie early, to build buzz around the title. It’s working. I’m feeling rather buzzed. As befits a remake (as a reminder, a remaster is usually the exact same game with updated graphics, while a remake has more freedom to depart from the original source), there’s some additional material in the video that sketches out what Midgar is, how it works, and what type of world we’ll be adventuring in. Since some of you might like to refresh yourselves with the original opening, I’ve included it below.
