Love them or hate them, selfies are here to stay. Phones are by far the most popular cameras today, and selfies are a rapidly growing use of them. So it makes sense that consumers are increasingly choosing their next phone based partially on its ability to capture selfies. Phone makers have been paying attention. They’ve introduced dual-camera front-facing camera setups for better portrait effects and wide-angle selfie cameras for group selfies. They’ve also bumped up front-facing camera quality and resolution. But until now, there hasn’t been an industry-wide published benchmark for selfie quality. DxOMark Image Labs (most famous for dxomark.com) is aiming to change that with the release of its DxOMark Selfie test suite, along with initial benchmark results for several representative phones.
AMD hasn’t formally announced that it has won the Xbox Next and PlayStation 5 contracts just yet, but it’s considered a more-or-less foregone conclusion in the industry. Now, noted hardware leaker TUM_APISAK has released a Tweet he claims identifies and unveils AMD’s Gonzalo APU — or at least, what its specifications claim about the chip. AMD Gonzalo — APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) Point of clarification. The CPU he compares with (ZD3601BAM 8 8 F4 _ 40/36 _Y is the engineering sample product number for a six-core Ryzen CPU that surfaced before Ryzen 2nd Generation had formally launched).
Our image of the outer solar system in decades past was much simpler than it is today. Pluto was the ninth planet, and that was the end of it except for some scattered asteroids and comets. Now, science doesn’t consider Pluto a planet, but some believe there’s a out there tweaking the orbit of small planetoids. A new study that idea by showing that much of the orbital weirdness out there could also come from a collection of smaller objects. In 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of Caltech noticed that some small objects in the outer solar system, known as trans-Neptunian objects or TNOs, had unusually eccentric elliptical orbits along similar alignments.
Did you put off thinking about winter tires until there’s a snowstorm bearing down? No problem. What you need to know can be digested in a couple of minutes. Winter tires, the tire-industry-preferred term for snow tires, make a significant difference in driving when it snows. Or when there’s snow on the ground, or slush, or ice. If a set of winter tires costs $500 and your collision damage deductible is $500, a set of tires and wheels doesn’t cost anything if you save yourself from an accident. Here’s more on what to know, based on a half-dozen treks to winter driving schools and dozens of new car tests in snowy, icy, and muddy conditions (some of which weren’t what the automaker intended).
We often talk about Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant in the same breath as Alexa and Google Assistant, but Microsoft doesn’t think that’s right. After pushing Cortana as a standalone assistant, Microsoft is . Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Cortana should become a “skill for anybody who’s a Microsoft 365 subscriber.” Microsoft announced Cortana (named after the AI in Halo) at its BUILD conference in 2013. That was back when Apple’s Siri ruled the voice assistant world, so there was still space for Microsoft to get a piece of the pie. However, Google’s machine learning technologies were ramping up. Microsoft had a window, but it hindered Cortana early on by bundling it exclusively with Windows Phone.
You might want to clear some time in your schedule this weekend to look up at the night sky. Those in the western hemisphere will be treated to a known colloquially as the “super blood moon.” It sounds pretty cool, but it’s just science — cool science. The super blood will be upon us on Sunday night, January 20-21st. Contrary to the very metal name, this is not your chance to carry out ritual sacrifices. It’s a lunar eclipse that comes at a particular time in the satellite’s orbit. Let’s break that name down and make some sense of it.
Pour one out for Microsoft’s smartphone platform. After years of half-measures aimed at competing with Android and iOS, Microsoft is calling it quits on Windows 10 Mobile. The December 2019 patches for Windows 10 Mobile . The company is urging any Windows Mobile holdouts to make plans to switch to Android or iOS before it’s too late. This is not the first phase in Microsoft’s mobile platform wind-down. , Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore confirmed that the company had no plans to develop new features for Windows on phones, which runs on the same code base as Windows PCs. It continued to release bug fixes and security patches as needed, but even a big company like Microsoft couldn’t leave the project in a holding pattern forever.
While Double Fine is best-known for their original games, they also serve as a publisher for other indie games. So if you’d like to try out some cool offbeat indies, this bundle absolutely delivers. • For $1, you’ll get Mountain, 140, and THOTH. From a relaxing simulation of nature to hectic platforming and shooting, this base tier has a lot to offer. Spend at least $1Mountain140THOTHBONUS: 10 percent off your first month of Humble Monthly BONUS: 140 SoundtrackBONUS: THOTH SoundtrackInvest more than the floating average price, and both GNOG and Escape Goat 2 will be yours to keep.
Companies like Intel and AMD typically make their CPUs available to both OEMs and what’s known as the retail channel for purchase. Sometimes, a limited edition chip or one intended for specialty markets may only be available to OEMs, particularly if it’s a soldered form factor or relies on other components that a typical individual user would have no use for. There are new rumors that Intel may introduce a new 5GHz 14-core CPU with no price tag at all. Instead of being readily available for purchase at any given time, these chips would be put up for auction.
