Our smartphones ride around all day in a pocket or bag, but we’ve taken to making them out of fragile glass. That might not be ideal, but Samsung has gone a step further with the Galaxy Fold. This “luxury” foldable has finally launched, and Samsung is trying to just how gentle they have to be with the fledgling smartphone. If you’re not sufficiently careful, the Fold could cost a lot to repair. announced the Galaxy Fold in early 2019, aiming to launch it in April. However, the first handful of review units failed at a troubling rate. Samsung recalled the phones and put the release on hold so it could explore the issues.
Today you can get a high-end LG FreeSync gaming display with UHD resolution for 31 percent off. LG’s high-end 27UL650-W display features a 3840×2160 IPS panel that supports 99 percent of the sRGB color spectrum. The monitor also comes with a versatile stand that allows the display to be used in portrait mode. You can pick one up from Amazon marked down from $549.99 to $379.99. Seagate designed its Ironwolf NAS HDDs as long-term network storage solutions. This particular model features a large 6TB capacity with 256MB of cache, and its MTBF rating is set at 1,000,000 hours.
NASA is currently on an incredibly ambitious timetable to send the new crewed missions to the moon by 2024. The Artemis Program will use the agency’s Orion spacecraft, which borrows liberally from the old Apollo-era command module. Now, NASA is formalizing its plans with a long-term contract for Lockheed Martin. The long-time government contractor will supply NASA with over the coming decade. The Orion spacecraft consists of two parts, both using the same basic layout as the Apollo command and service module. The crew module is the cone-shaped section that returns the crew to Earth, and is the only part that is potentially reusable — NASA has not committed to SpaceX-style reusability, though.
According to Xiaomi, its latest smartphone, the Mi Mix Alpha, is literally more screen than ought to be possible according to the laws of physics. The Mi Mix Alpha is, according to the company, sigh, 180 percent screen. 180.6 percent screen, to be exact. The Mi Mix Alpha is using a special “Surround Screen” technology that might be left over from an effort to build a foldable phone. The phone includes a 108 MP camera — not that increased megapixel ratings are intrinsically better as my colleague David Cardinal , though shooting in 12,032 by 9,024 is unusual if nothing else.
A paper published — and then removed — from NASA’s website claims that Google has established so-called quantum supremacy. If true, it would be a significant achievement for quantum computing as a whole. The impact on the general-purpose world of computing from this specific breakthrough is minimal, but it’s an important milestone towards the practical, real-world use of quantum computing. First, let’s talk about the paper itself. A number of news outlets have led with headlines like “Google Announces Quantum Supremacy” or “Google Claims Quantum Supremacy,” implying that the company has made a major PR effort around this issue.
Deepfake videos have demonstrated their applications in entertainment—both acceptably and controversially—but these general adversarial networks (GANs) still have a long way to go before they offer convincing results. This has led to a lack of practical applications and plenty of paranoia, but we’re beginning to see efforts to employ deepfake technology in ways that can help people protect themselves. A recent paper published at the demonstrates how deepfakes could help protect the right to privacy before they become a tool used to cause harm. The paper utilizes face-swapping to anonymize the speaker’s appearance. Although the authors were , initial work simply transplanted expressions onto an existing face that consented to the swap.
Volvo Trucks will ship electric trucks in California shortly, in a plan to showcase what big trucks can do when they’re running solely on big batteries. Over the next year, the California-focused program for the VNR Electric full-size regional truck will expand to more EV truck types, up to and including the largest tractors for 80,000 tractor-trailer rigs. Volvo’s rollout includes recharging systems as well as insurance and analytic services. Alternative-energy trucks are starting to gain popularity. In addition to Volvo, makers of large electric trucks include Freightliner/Daimler, Mack, Paccar (Kenworth, Peterbilt, DAF), Navistar. There are also startups such as Tesla and Nikola.
Sony has announced that it will join the UN’s efforts to fight climate change through the United Nations “Playing for the Planet” initiative. The initiative appears designed to support the development of games that encourage players to think about the impact of climate change and work to preserve or document the natural world, as well as encouraging developers and hardware manufacturers to adopt more sustainable methods of manufacturing, use renewable power for manufacturing, and reduce e-waste by making consoles and other gaming hardware 100 percent recyclable. Sony’s blog post on the initiative notes that it will achieve some of its goals for “” by targeting much lower idle power.
If you’re ready to do away with hard drives and switch to an all SSD solution for your storage needs, then you may want to pick up one of Samsung’s 970 Evo 2TB SSDs. Not only does this drive offer a large storage capacity, but it also features a fast data transfer rate and a $200 discount. Reading data at 3,500MB/s, this SSD hits the limits of what the M.2 interface is capable of when connected using PCI-E 3.0 lanes. With a total of 2TB of storage capacity, this drive removes any need to have a second drive to store files as it can hold more data than the average user typically needs.
