Presidents’ Day is still a few weeks off, but this year Amazon is kicking off its deals early. Today you can get several of Amazon’s smart devices with large discounts. Amazon’s Echo Dot smart speaker comes with the company’s Alexa virtual personal assistant built-in, which is able to hear and obey numerous voice commands. In addition to being a speaker for listening to music, it also works as a hands-free device for making phone calls and it can control other devices that support Alexa as well. Right now, you can get a 3rd generation Echo Dot from Amazon marked down from $49.99 to just $29.99.
One issue that’s been of increasing concern to US companies and customers is the fear that Chinese companies will create hard-wired backdoors into the various networking and 5G products they sell in Western markets. Such backdoors could then be exploited for corporate espionage or government surveillance. Thus far, the evidence for this kind of deliberate backdooring has been mixed. A damning report by Bloomberg last year — one that I believed — faded into over whether the company had accurately reported the situation, along with disagreements over whether the backdoor as described was even technologically possible. A UK report on Huawei’s security practices last year found of sloppy coding and poor version control, but turned up no sign of corporate or government backdoors aimed at allowing a coordinated surveillance campaign.
Key competitors like Microsoft and Google keep coming, yet for all their in-roads, there’s still only one name that stands head and shoulders above all others in the exploding web services field. Amazon and its popular Amazon Web Services (AWS) collection of cloud system tools and features remain the industry gold standard. Meanwhile, associates with AWS skills and certifications for their services. You can join that growing army of experts with the knowledge from , the regular price. This training is a full download for working in the AWS environment. Once you’ve gone through this nine-course package, you’ll understand how to navigate the AWS Management Console as well as how to design, implement, and scale up web operations for an organization of any size, no matter its budget or timeframe.
NASA’s Parker solar probe started its journey by setting a record — the fastest rocket launch in history. It’s gone on to set several other records as it studied the sun in unprecedented detail. NASA now reports that Parker has during its latest trip past the sun. Setting records is all well and good, but NASA also says the probe is working splendidly and collecting valuable data. Studying the sun up close is a complicated endeavor. As you’d expect, the surface of the sun is extremely hot, but the corona around it is 300 times hotter at more than 1 million Kelvin.
Several game streaming services have come and gone while Nvidia has been fiddling with its GeForce Now cloud gaming platform. It tried to launch once in 2015, but ended up going back to the drawing board with a new beta program. That program is over now, and . Confirming , this service will start at just $5 per month, and you can play for an hour at a time for free. The technology behind GeForce Now is similar to Microsoft’s xCloud or Google’s Stadia. Nvidia’s servers render the games and send the video to your devices. That means you can play high-end PC games on a PC with integrated video or a smartphone.
Current-generation console sales have plunged more quickly than anticipated, as potential customers apparently hold off on purchases ahead of this year’s reveal. That’s the consistent messaging we’ve heard from multiple companies in the game console market, including AMD, GameStop, and now Sony itself. Hardware sales are down across the industry by larger amounts than we saw at this point in the previous console cycle. That’s the takeaway from Sony’s most recent quarterly earnings conference call. Sony’s gaming division revenue fell 20 percent year-on-year, primarily due to the impact of decreased hardware sales. Software was a more complicated situation — revenue was down, yes, but while third-party sales were down, first-party sales were up (but not enough to meet expectations).
Today only you can save on your purchase of select Samsung products, including a few high-end displays and the company’s Galaxy Tab S6. Samsung designed its Galaxy Tab S6 tablets with Qualcomm’s 855 SoC. This is the same SoC that’s used inside of many flagship smartphones today, and it guarantees the tablet will have excellent performance. Right now you can get it from Amazon marked down from $729.99 to $583.99. This version of Dell’s XPS 15 notebook features a quad-core Intel Core i5 processor and a 1080p display with 100 percent coverage of the sRGB color gamut.
Super Bowls used to mean Tom Brady hoisting another trophy along with ads of polar bears drinking Coke on not-yet-melting polar ice caps, that and the Budweiser Clydesdales. Now the most memorable – sorry, memorably good – commercials are cars and tech. Car ads have always been part of the 54 Super Bowls, but in the dotcom boom years “tech ad” meant money frittered away. Remember Pets.com? Agillon? Epidemic.com? All goners. Maybe automakers did a better job because there really are differences among cars. And the tech guys have learned from the money-wasting days at the turn of the century.
Amazon-owned Ring has come under fire in recent years for its lax approach to privacy and cooperation with police departments around the US. As 2020 dawns, the company has promised to re-emphasize its commitment to privacy, and it appears to be following through. The newest version of the Ring mobile app includes a “control center” that offers more control over what happens to your data, including the option to . Ring got its start with doorbell cameras but has since expanded into other types of cameras and home security. Following the Amazon acquisition in 2018, Ring forged its first partnerships with police departments.
