Tech

The rover has been an unqualified success since the moment it touched down on Mars aboard a magnificent rocket sled contraption. It’s traveled farther on the red planet than any other machine while delivering huge amounts of data to researchers here on Earth. Curiosity is suffering from camera envy today, though. NASA has unveiled the camera setup for its upcoming 2020 Mars rover. Why have a separate camera unveiling? Because there are 23 of them. It’s not just about having as many cameras as possible–each and every one of them has a purpose, as explained by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory .

Giving a live tech demo is a hair-raising opportunity for the universe to punish you for whatever karmic misdeeds you may have committed in this or any other life. No matter how well a demo works on your home PC or private laptop, running it in front of more than one other person seems to guarantee that formerly functional components will fail to load, browsers will crash, and/or your machine will catch fire. All of this is to make the point that I feel for the engineers caught out by this particular scenario… But it’s still hilarious. The glitch in the video below kicks off at the 37:10 mark.

Update: Ubisoft has told that “the anti-tamper solutions implemented in the Windows PC version of Assassin’s Creed Origins have no perceptible effect on game performance.” It claims that the game uses the full extent of available resources to ensure a steady 30 FPS performance. This is almost certainly false. While it is possible that the addition of VMProtect has no meaningful impact on the game’s CPU usage, there’s also no reason why a modern high-end desktop CPU should be bogged down at 100% usage to ensure a measly 30 FPS frame rate. Ubisoft has a long history of blaming everyone but itself for its own performance ; any game that can run at 25-30 FPS on the relatively weak CPUs inside the Xbox One or PS4 should never struggle on a quad-core / eight-thread CPU with much higher IPC and more than double the clock speed.

Today, you can snag a quad-core Dell Precision M3510 15.6-inch laptop on eBay at a 18% discount. While it is refurbished, you’ll benefit from a speedy SSD, tons of RAM, and a dedicated graphics card. • (List price: $1099) Inside, this model sports a sixth generation quad-core 2.6GHz Intel Core i7-6700HQ CPU, discrete AMD FirePro W5130 graphics card (with 2GB of RAM), 16GB of RAM, a 256GB solid-state drive, Bluetooth, and 802.11b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi support. And the 15.6-inch display? It benefits from an anti-glare coating and a full HD resolution of 1920×1080. Windows 10 Professional is installed automatically, so you can take advantage of the likes of BitLocker, Cortana, the Xbox app, the Edge web browser, and the Windows Store.

Microsoft offered Windows users a free upgrade to Windows 10 back when the operating system was released. In fact, Microsoft was so insistent people take the free upgrade it for essentially tricking people into installing it. The official free upgrade offer has been over for more than a year, but now Microsoft is that let you get Windows 10 by telling a little white lie. The was implemented for anyone who wanted Windows 10 for its enhanced accessibility features. All you have to do is go to and promise that you are upgrading specifically because you need these features.

Earlier this week, we reported on Best Buy’s to slap a $100 premium on the already-expensive iPhone X. The company defended this profit-taking attempt by framing it as a positive, arguing its customers somehow benefited from paying an extra $100 for a high-end iPhone. At the time, the company stated: “Our prices reflect the fact that no matter a customer’s desired plan or carrier, or whether a customer is on a business or personal plan, they are able to get a phone the way they want at Best Buy. Our customers have told us they want this flexibility and sometimes that has a cost.

A week ago, AMD’s stock was trading at $14.25, nearly its highest level in five years. As of this writing, the stock has fallen to $10.89, a drop of nearly 25 percent. The company has been slagged by investment analysts over the past week. While I’m not an investor and make no comment on the value of investing in AMD or any other technology company, I do occasionally write about whether specific reports are backed up by a company’s roadmap or current technology portfolio. In this latest case, a Morgan Stanley analyst named Joseph Moore wrote AMD’s “fundamental outlook is not quite as robust as microprocessor momentum has been slow to build, offset by cryptocurrency gains.

Nintendo released an update to its yearly earnings forecast today, substantially increasing the amount of profit it expects to earn through the end of its fiscal year (Nintendo’s fiscal year ends in March, not on December 31). The Switch has had a dynamite year, outselling the PS4 and Xbox One at multiple points since its debut, and that trend is only set to increase. Nintendo has boosted Switch manufacturing and could beat the Wii U’s entire lifetime sales in just one year. Nintendo now expects to earn $1.06 billion in profits for its full fiscal year, compared with roughly 576 million in its earlier forecasts, reports (via .

Astronomers are always tracking asteroids and comets in space near Earth, and some of them are from unfathomably far away in the outer solar system. However, scientists may have spotted the first such object that’s from someplace even more distant–. The mysterious object known only as A/2017 U1 was spotted earlier this month, and the team believes it is extra-solar in origin. Scientists have been specifically looking for something like this for decades. The discovery was made by a researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. The object was first spotted by astronomer Rob Weryk, who was reviewing images captured by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope (see above).