Google’s Smart Compose feature, should you try to enable it, will attempt to predict what you’re about to say next in an email based on what you’ve previously typed. One thing the feature doesn’t do, however, is attempt to guess the proper pronoun of address for the person you are writing to. According to a new Reuters , “Google’s technology will not suggest gender-based pronouns because the risk is too high that its ‘Smart Compose’ technology might predict someone’s sex or gender identity incorrectly and offend users.” This is a smart move, and we applaud Google for both making it and being willing to acknowledge why it did so.
With all the excitement about convertible computers and the popularity of Apple’s iPad Pro, it’s natural for Google to introduce one for its Chrome OS lineup. In some ways, the new Pixel Slate is a successor to the highly rated but expensive Pixelbook. But Google has moved from a traditional Chromebook clamshell design to one with a removable keyboard cover more reminiscent of a Surface Pro or an iPad Pro — except it runs Chrome OS (and most Android apps) instead of iOS or Windows. I’ve been using one for a few days, and for the most part, it’s very impressive, albeit with a few wrinkles.
NASA’s InSight mission has , making it the first Mars landing for the agency in six years. With the solar panels deployed, it’s time for the probe to start doing some science, Well, it’s going to prepare to do some science. InSight has to do several months of prep work before most of its instruments will be ready to relay data back to Earth. There are three major instrument packages on InSight, and perhaps the most famous is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). This is the device that will look for earthquakes — rather, marsquakes — by taking seismic readings from the surface.
Living the cryptocurrency life might give you more control over your money, but it also comes with much more risk than old-fashioned fiat money. Some users are learning this lesson the hard way after developers in a widely used open source code library. The goal, it seems, was to siphon off funds from users of the Copay crypto wallet. The scale of the breach is still under investigation, but things aren’t looking good. The attack focuses on the event-stream JavaScript library, which many companies and other open source projects use to handle Node.js streaming data. You don’t need to know the specifics of how that all works — all you need to know is this library was extremely popular with almost 2 million weekly downloads.
Google launched its Project Fi cellular service in 2015, and it was limited to Google’s phones for most of the last three and a half years. Google recently added support for a handful of Motorola and LG phones, but it’s finally opening the doors to much more popular devices. According to a now-deleted post on BGR, Google will let users join Fi with phones . Project Fi is a Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO), meaning that Google doesn’t own and operate its own network of towers. MVNOs lease space on one of the big carrier networks and then resell that access.
Final reviews on Fallout 76 have begun to drop, and reviewers and gamers alike have savaged the title for an astounding number of bugs, issues, bad gameplay decisions, and paper-thin mechanics. We’ve how the game’s decision to rely on data logs and holotapes to assign quests and create a sort-of story was a flawed mechanic, but the game’s problems clearly go far beyond this issue. The PC version is the only flavor to break a 50 percent score on Metacritic, and the average gamer review on that same site is somehow even worse, at 2.9. In this case, critics appear to like the game more than the player base, not less.
The International Space Station (ISS) has been orbiting Earth as a functional station for 20 years this month, and it’s time to celebrate as only astronauts can — with a really long timelapse video from space. The ESA has put together a fantastic 15-minute video of Earth from the ISS, but the actual length of time shown is much greater. In fact, this is the longest timelapse video ever shot in space. German astronaut Alexander Gerst captured the video aboard the ISS on Oct. 6. It has a total of 21,375 images of Earth spread out over about 90 minutes of real time.
For Microsoft, the hits associated with the October November 1809 update just keep coming. After issues with file deletion caused the update to be pulled, more evidence of additional file bugs surfaced, including problems with how file archives were handled by the default extractor (third-party utilities were not impacted by this issue). Microsoft eventually pushed the update out anyway, but the company has acknowledged some significant flaws in the final version. According to Microsoft’s (via ), installing the update will break Windows Media Player and prevent users from using the Seek Bar when playing specific files. No details are provided on which file types are broken or what the specific types are that trigger the behavior, or when a fix will be available.
In the wake of Intel’s latest Core i9-9900K launch, there have been questions about just where the CPU market would go from here. As things stand, both AMD and Intel have rolled out eight-core/16-thread chips at the top of the desktop market. Both companies are working on die shrinks and architectural improvements for their next round of products, but AMD’s 7nm Epyc demonstrations at New Horizons showed that the company has kept the same number of cores per die that it deployed with first round of 14nm hardware: Eight cores per chiplet, possibly split into two CCXs of four cores each (though this point is unconfirmed).
