Google has announced it will cut off Huawei’s access to the Google Play Store and to the core components of the Android ecosystem that are actually built by Google rather than being distributed under the AOSP (Android Open Source Project). My colleague, Ryan Whitwam, has more . But these aren’t the only companies moving to cut Huawei off. Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Xilinx have also announced they are suspending sales of products to Huawei as well. This seems largely equivalent to the ZTE ban that was levied (and then withdrawn) at roughly this same time last year, but Huawei is a much larger company than ZTE, with a significant share in many markets.
Google initially launched Glass as a consumer device in 2013, but the age of face computers never arrived. There was an undeniable creepy factor when talking to someone wearing Glass, and society wasn’t ready for that. Google ended up pulling Glass from sale in 2015, but an enterprise version has continued to exist. Unlike consumers, workers in some industries actually have a use for a head-mounted holographic display. To accommodate those workers, Google today of Google Glass for enterprise. Glass Enterprise Edition 2 still looks almost identical to the Glass of old. There’s a long arm on the right side of the glasses, which houses the hardware and battery.
When you install a Windows Update or make a major change to the OS, the system often reminds you to create a restore point (assuming it doesn’t create one itself). Restore points are meant to save you from exactly the kind of mid-OS update failure that used to result in BSODs if interrupted or broken and a need for “overtop” or repair Windows installations. These could replace core files and allow the OS to boot, but also had a habit of breaking previously installed applications. In theory, using a restore point after a Windows Update has been performed shouldn’t cause any problems — but it does.
Drone aircraft used to be prohibitively expensive, but now you can buy a camera-equipped drone that talks to your smartphone for under $100. The US Department of Homeland Security has issued an alert that manufactured by Chinese firms might have become a little too accessible. The DHS says much of the data collected by these drones ends up on servers in mainland China . The agency doesn’t mention any Chinese drone makers by name, but the target is crystal clear. Shenzhen-based DJI makes approximately 80 percent of the drones currently operating in the US and Canada. These range from consumer units that cost a few hundred dollars (the popular Spark and Mavic lines) up to advanced enterprise-oriented models that can cost several thousand dollars.
The population of the International Space Station (ISS) has just gone up, but the newest residents are not human. Last month, several small cube-shaped robots arrived, and now NASA has of the Astrobee robot working aboard the space station. NASA delivered the Astrobee robots to the ISS on April 17 aboard a Northrop Grumman resupply mission. The robot in the image is called “Bumble” and there are two more of the same design called “Honey” and “Queen.” The Astrobee system was designed and built at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley specifically for use aboard the ISS.
In the months since Nvidia launched Turing, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang has been aggressive in positioning the GPU family as a decisive success. Sales data (not to mention Nvidia’s revenue) has not reflected this argument, but the collapse of cryptocurrency sales and the decline in data center shipments make it much harder to tease out how Nvidia’s shipments have changed between Pascal and Turing. Steam Hardware Survey data, however, is available for both time periods. We’ve been tracing the month-by-month changes in Turing adoption and comparing them with the same time period (measured in months since launch) for Pascal. Up until now, none of these comparisons have been good for Turing.
Although the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence has provided us with powerful tools that can and , they all operate as isolated algorithms with none of the incredible associative power of the human brain. Our current computational architecture can’t match the efficiency of our own minds, but a composite team of researchers from the Universities of Münster, Oxford, and Exeter discovered a way to begin narrowing that gap by creating a small artificial neurosynaptic network . Today’s computers store memory separately from the processor. The human brain, on the other hand, stores memory in the synapses that serve as the connective tissue between neurons.
Huawei is currently the second-largest smartphone OEM in the world, but its future has been thrown into question by the US Commerce Department. The federal agency added the Chinese company to its “Entity List” last week, and that has prompted Google to reevaluate its association with the Chinese firm. Google has ended its work with Huawei, cutting future phones off from Google services. Placing Huawei on the Entity List essentially bans the company from importing US hardware or software without specific government approval. The action seems aimed at Huawei’s network hardware business, but its consumer smartphone activities are under the same umbrella.
SpaceX hoped to have 60 custom communication satellites in orbit today, but instead, it has zero. The private spaceflight company scrubbed the first attempted launch of its Starlink internet satellites on Wednesday this week, and now a second launch has been aborted. It’s not mother nature’s fault, though. SpaceX says the satellites need a software update. Starlink is Elon Musk’s vision for the future of internet access. The system will eventually include more than 12,000 satellites in varying orbits. The goal is to get low-latency internet access to large swaths of the globe. More than 7,500 of those satellites will be in very-low-earth orbit (VLEO) to reduce latency on the ground.
