Amazon already has a sizeable foothold in homes with its Alexa-powered Echo products, but Google has eaten into its market share with the Home devices. Meanwhile, Apple is converting some of its fans with the HomePod. Amazon is reportedly inching closer to more advanced Echo devices to combat these threats: There’s a premium smart speaker as well as an . Both devices are supposedly in development at Amazon’s Lab126 facility in Sunnyvale, California. The premium Echo speaker seems like a solid upgrade and will almost certainly launch in the coming months. All of Amazon’s competitors in the smart speaker market have a more powerful speaker offering — for example, Google’s Home Max.
If you’ve computed for a long enough period of time, chances are you’ve seen some weird stuff. For example, I once had an HP printer that — and I swear to God, I’m not kidding — would only print when turned off. It would sit, placidly mocking your attempts to send print jobs to its damnable, hellspawned queue, until you actually hit the power button to shut the printer down. Upon being deactivated, the spiteful ink-swilling beast would print a single document. If you needed to print multiple documents, you had to turn the printer on and off in between each one.
Black Friday isn’t the only time to find excellent deals on high-end electronics. Today you can get a large 75-inch Samsung QLED TV for just a fraction of its original retail price. Samsung’s large format QN75Q7FN TV measures 75-inches diagonally and uses QLED technology to create an image with exceptional clarity and rich blacks. The TV also supports HDR, and it has several smart TV functions including support for Bixby voice commands. Right now you can get it from Walmart marked down from $4,799.99 to just $1,499.99. Dell’s XPS 8930 desktop comes with an Intel Core i7-9700 processor with six Hyper-Threaded CPU cores that push their clock speed up as high as 4.7GHz.
The start-up company Tachyum has raised $25M in a Series-A funding round for a new processor design it calls the Prodigy Universal Processor. Prodigy is supposedly faster in single-threaded code than Xeon, with smaller CPU cores than ARM. It can be used to simulate human brain-sized neural networks in real time. It outperforms CPUs, GPUs, and Google’s TPU. It can run 64 cores at an all-core frequency of 4GHz, fits into just 290mm2 of die space (half the size of AMD’s 7nm Epyc design on the same node), supports eight channels of DDR5, 72 PCIe 5.0 lanes, 2x 400G Ethernet connections, and has support for HBM3.
The proliferation of smart speakers has made it easier to listen to tunes and control smart home devices, but they also raise some potential privacy concerns. After all, these are internet-connected microphones capable of listening to your conversations from a great distance. Amazon has been under fire for how it manages Alexa voice data, and now Google is facing similar questions after a contractor . When you talk to the on your phone or smart speaker, the recording of that interaction gets stored in your Google account — you can go back and listen to any past recording and see what Google made of your speech.
Google’s DeepMind division has been hard at work applying artificial intelligence to problems like computer vision and climate change, but there’s still some room for games. DeepMind first dominated the game of Go, and then it moved on to StarCraft II, . Now, you might have a chance to , but you’ll probably get wrecked. Before challenging pro players, simulated more than 200 years of StarCraft II gameplay to train the bot. It’s a convolutional neural network that started by absorbing replays of pro StarCraft II matches. Using competing models, DeepMind trained several “agents” that can build and battle as well as human players — better, in fact.
Several years ago, Microsoft changed how it delivered security patches to its older operating systems like Windows 7, 8.1, and Windows Server 2012. Under the rules for its “Security-only updates,” Microsoft only includes, well, security updates for these products when it releases its monthly patches. This week, Microsoft released updates that touch the telemetry gathering side of its operating systems, and that has certain users seeing red. One of the updates included in the monthly rollup, formally known as KB4507456, is KB2952664, titled “Compatibility update for keeping Windows up-to-date in Windows 7.” The description for the update states:
Finding games on Steam has always been difficult, but the flood of titles being published on the platform has made discoverability a massive problem for creators and gamers alike. Valve is attempting to improve the situation with a new game recommendation system that relies on AI, rather than user-curated metadata. The AI isn’t given any information about a game at all, rather than its release date, and it isn’t impacted by review scores or tags. Instead, it learns about games solely based on what players do. Valve : Underlying this new recommender is a neural-network model that is trained to recommend games based on a user’s playtime history, along with other salient data.
Google—the internet’s largest search destination—can legally profit from fraud on its platform and has little incentive to fix it. But this isn’t a problem easily solved by ethics or legal amendments because current circumstances make changing the status quo extremely difficult. Nevertheless, there’s still more that we all can do to mitigate fraud on the internet. Why Google Maps Has a Fraud Problem Google corners the search market with . You might’ve even expected that number to be higher given that Microsoft garners almost all of the rest and . Despite , almost two-thirds of the world still chooses Google for search and .
