Few developments in gaming have caused as much controversy of late as the integration of loot boxes. In video game parlance, a loot box is an item you can purchase in-game, either by spending real money directly or by purchasing a specific type of currency, which can then be spent on loot boxes. They became popular in free-to-play mobile titles initially, but have made the jump to AAA console titles in recent years. In 2018, several games were hammered for their inclusion of the mechanic, including Star Wars: Battlefront II, which attracted the lion’s share of the controversy and customer anger.
Several tech giants are trying to get artificial intelligence into your home by way of smart some speakers, but Amazon reportedly wants to take it a step further. Sources claim that Amazon is working on a home that will be unveiled later this year. The is code named “Vesta” after the Roman goddess of the hearth, and it comes from the same top-flight hardware division (known as Lab126) that brought us the Echo speakers, Fire tablets, and the Fire Phone. Okay, that last one was a fluke, but Amazon has high hopes for home robotics. The idea of a “domestic” robot should be familiar to everyone — they’ve existed in science-fiction for decades.
Right now, the PCMag Shop is selling two manufacturer-refurbished versions of the 13.3-inch Dell Latitude. One sports a full HD InfinityEdge display, and the other enjoys a quad HD InfinityEdge display, and both of them are incredible deals. Better yet, both options include Dell warranties until 2020. • • For the most part, the two configurations here are very similar. Both feature Windows 10 Pro, 8GB of RAM, 256GB solid-state drives, Bluetooth 4.1, and support for 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi. They both have dual-core Intel Core m5 with a base clock of 1.1GHz, but the 1080p model can boost to 2.8GHz compared to the 2.7GHz in the other model.
Google’s tendency to release multiple competing chat apps is almost meme-worthy on the internet. Whereas Apple long ago settled on iMessage, Google has gone through Google Talk, Huddle, Hangouts, and more. Its most recent attempt at chat is Allo, but no one is using it. As a result, . Let’s not sugarcoat this — Allo is dead. Instead, Google is putting all its eggs in the RCS basket. Allo was announced at Google I/O alongside the Duo video call app. Duo has gotten good traction and people like using it. Allo, on the other hand, has stagnated. This app takes a WhatsApp-style approach to messaging, as it’s based on your phone number, but it sends messages over the internet with more features than SMS.
Lego has unveiled a new series of space-themed sets. The new blocks are part of Lego’s FIRST initiative and are intended to be used in the 2018 – 2019 challenge. First is an annual challenge event sponsored by , previously known for inventing the Mall Cop Transporter Segway and for inventing drug infusion pumps (the latter is where his wealth came from). FIRST stands for and has sponsored a number of robotic competitions and programs for students of all ages. Founded in 1989, the program has proven quite popular, with an estimated 350,000 children expected to participate this year from all around the globe.
Apple used LCDs on every until last year, when it finally moved to OLED for the iPhone X. Apple reportedly intends to use more OLED panels for this year’s iPhone refresh, but sources indicate the company’s plans to source some of those panels from LG is falling flat. As LG spins up its mobile OLED production to compete with Samsung, it just can’t make enough panels that are to Apple’s liking. That could mean Apple’s new iPhones will all , and that could mean higher prices for buyers. Apple has a reputation for being ruthless with suppliers in order to get the best deals.
Sixteen months after the initial Japanese release, those of us in the west have finally received a proper English-subbed PS4 release of . And as the first Yakuza game made exclusively for current-gen hardware, we were excited to see how well the streets and shops of Japan hold up. Sega released a demo of Yakuza 6 earlier this year, but it had to be temporarily removed because players could actually play the for free. Whoops! It’s in its intended form, and all of your progress in the prologue will transfer over to the full game. If you want to get a feel for the style of storytelling and combat, it’s well worth an hour of your time.
One problem with researching the formation of the solar system is finding material that’s existed for more than four billion years. Much of our understanding of this time period comes from studying asteroids and the meteors that fall to Earth. On this planet, plate tectonics and surface weathering have destroyed, sunk, or remodeled most of the rock that constituted Earth’s crust during the Hadean period. But there are asteroids still floating in space that formed in the earliest days of our solar system — and every now and then, one of them crashes to Earth. In 2008, one such asteroid, Asteroid 2008 TC3 landed in the Nubian Desert.
When AMD launched the , it ran into a few rough spots around 1080p gaming performance. The company told gamers to expect that this situation would improve, thanks to a combination of motherboard updates and game-specific/Ryzen-specific optimizations. At the time, this wasn’t surprising — it’s not unusual for a CPU architecture to need software optimizations to hit its full potential. As far as I recall, these discussions were generally confined to games and only relevant at 1080p. It was surprising, therefore, to see a few spots where the Ryzen 7 1800X’s performance had significantly improved. We’ve identified several applications where this has happened.
