We can be fairly certain at this point that is working on a folding phone. There have been some telling patents, and executives have made that stop just short of admitting the folding Razr exists. A new report claims the phone is currently on track for a late 2019 release, but it won’t be cheap. The new folding Razr will allegedly borrow from the company’s iconic pre-smartphone clamshell, which set sales records when it launched years ago. Instead of a small screen and a keypad when you flip it open, the new Razr will have a 6.2-inch flexible OLED panel.
Human beings tend to bury objects that they consider most important to their lives. It’s not surprising, therefore, that some people chose to buy games, including board games. Some of these artifacts have survived the centuries, leaving modern-day archaeologists with a puzzle — how do you understand a game when you have no idea how it was played? Ancient humans, it seems, were downright terrible at losing the manuals for their boxed titles. Tracing the evolution of games and gaming could tell us a great deal about cultural exchange and evolution between two societies or within one society over time.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming the technology industry, which is why Google dropped $650 million on UK-based DeepMind in 2014. DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has been at the heart of the company’s research and industry outreach efforts, but now he’s mysteriously been placed on leave from the company he started with current CEO Demis Hassabis. DeepMind has been vague about the situation, but Bloomberg the move stems from controversy over some of Suleyman’s projects. It’s hard to overstate how vital neural networks like the ones developed by DeepMind can be to a company like Google — it’s more than machines that can crush human StarCraft II and Go players.
The new, barely changed Nintendo Switch has finally hit the market. It hasn’t been clear what benefits end-users could expect from this new revision of the console — data pointed to better battery life, but not much more than that as far as overall improvements were concerned. Now we’ve got an idea what improvements the new console delivers. Sometimes manufacturers sneak in improvements that aren’t widely played up beforehand, but that’s (mostly) not the case here. Digital Foundry took the new Switch and finds that Nintendo lived up to their promises as far as battery life is concerned. Overall system longevity is vastly improved and power consumption has been cut nearly in half, from 13.3W to 7W while playing Breath of the Wild.
Today there are several strong deals on desktop computers that range in price from $469.99 up to $949.99 Dell’s XPS 8930 desktop comes with an Intel Core i7-9700 processor with eight CPU cores that can operate at clock speeds as high as 4.7GHz. The system also comes with 16GB of DDR4 memory and one of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card that can run games with medium graphics settings. You can get this system marked down from $1,399.99 to a more affordable $949.99 from Dell with promo code DTXPSAFF1. Apple’s Mac Mini is a compact computer with a quad-core Intel Core i3 processor and 8GB of RAM.
Even the most successful companies in the world make occasional business blunders. Remember Apple Ping? Microsoft Bob? Well, those are nothing compared with the mess Google has made of its messaging ecosystem. Google announced major changes to its popular Hangouts messaging platform in 2017, but Hangouts is still chugging along more than two years later. Now, Google has been forced to delay the Hangouts migration . Google has traditionally had trouble picking a messaging strategy and sticking with it. Groups within Google would launch a new messaging app every year or two until Hangouts, which grew out of Google Talk, attempted to unify everyone.
Hot Chips 31 is underway this week, with presentations from a number of companies. Intel has decided to use the highly technical conference to discuss a variety of products, including major sessions focused on the company’s AI division. AI and machine learning are viewed as critical areas for the future of computing, and while Intel has tackled these fields with features like DL Boost on Xeon, it’s also building dedicated accelerators for the market. The NNP-I 1000 (Spring Hill) and the NNP-T (Spring Crest) are intended for two different markets, inference and training. “Training” is the work of creating and teaching a neural network how to process data in the first place.
NASA is moving ahead with one of its most ambitious upcoming missions. The Europa Clipper has , allowing the agency to begin final design and construction of the spacecraft that will explore the icy moon of Jupiter. The mission will begin to take shape over the next few years before it launches on something. NASA originally intended to use the Space Launch System (SLS), but it may need to rethink that in light of recent delays. has been a subject of much research ever since the Voyager probes snapped photos of the moon during their flybys in the late 1970s.
The universe is rife with mysteries, but few are as perplexing as fast radio bursts (FRBs). These distant, highly energetic radio-frequency flashes were only discovered in 2007, and most observations have come from non-repeating sources. That makes it hard to study the phenomenon in detail. Astronomers knew of just a few repeating signals before, but a team of researchers reports the discovery of that could help us understand what’s going on out there. The first recorded FRBs happened in 2001, but no one spotted it in the data until a review in 2007. As the name implies, fast radio bursts last just a millisecond, and the signal here on Earth is minute — it’s similar to a cell phone calling from the moon.
