Новости за 30.03.2017

Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Facebook-owned VR company Oculus and primary inventor of the Oculus Rift headset, is leaving the company. “Palmer will be dearly missed,” Facebook told UploadVR, which broke the news, and later confirmed to The Verge. “Palmer’s legacy extends far beyond Oculus. His inventive spirit helped kickstart the modern VR revolution and helped build an industry. We’re thankful for everything he did for Oculus and VR, and we wish him all the best.” Facebook apparently did not confirm whether he had left voluntarily. Читать дальше...

Truly reusable rockets could dramatically change the space industry. Until now, almost all rockets that achieve orbit are either destroyed or can’t be recovered. This means that we have to start from scratch with an entirely new rocket for each new launch, and that’s expensive. For over five years now, SpaceX has been working to create reusable rockets that could save millions of dollars and make missions cheaper. Elon Musk's company has already landed its Falcon 9 rockets on land and at sea,... Читать дальше...

GoPro’s Karma drone is now available in Europe. Specifically, the company is selling the quadcopter in the UK, Spain, Italy, and Germany starting today on GoPro.com and at “selected online retailers.” A Karma bundled with the Hero 5 Black will set customers back €1,399, or they can buy the drone with no camera for €999. That’s about $1,500 and $1,100, respectively, which makes Karma significantly more expensive than it is in the United States.

Qatar Airways and Etihad Airways have both launched electronics loaner programs for passengers, flying in upper-class cabins on certain routes. The move comes after both the United States and the United Kingdom banned inbound travelers flying from a number of Middle Eastern countries from carrying electronic devices larger than a smartphone into the cabin.

Starting today, you can hail a car on Lyft via a wearable gadget for your thumb. Only you can’t really do that because this is just a dumb prank. But wow, what a prank it is.

Comcast’s prepaid internet service, after years of testing, is now available to all Xfinity customers. The package allows consumers to pay for internet service on a pay-as-you-go basis, with refills ranging from seven to 30 days.

This week, Congress voted to allow internet service providers to sell users’ web browsing histories, rolling back FCC rules passed under the Obama administration. Activists have already roundly criticized the vote as a win for a telecom industry eager to help sell targeted ads, but there’s one new idea on what users can do to fight back.

Microsoft is prepping for a gradual, multi-stage rollout of the Windows 10 Creators Update starting on April 11th. But if you’re eager to get your hands on it a bit early, you can manually download it on April 5th. The company said in a blog post today that it will make the Creators Update available through its Update Assistant so anyone who is using a licensed version of Windows 10 can install it one week ahead of the official rollout.

The dock that unlocks the Galaxy S8’s desktop PC-like experience will retail for $149.99, according to Samsung’s website. It’s scheduled to ship in “late April,” likely coinciding with the widespread launch of the company’s latest flagship smartphone. That’s not exactly cheap, but you can probably expect to see some deals for DeX; T-Mobile is giving a free dock to its @Work enterprise customers who reserve the Galaxy S8 in-store.

Matrix Labs recently released the Matrix Creator, a powerful Raspberry Pi accessory that adds a whole bunch of sensors to the miniature computer (including a microphone array, temperature, UV, pressure, and more), letting you extend a Raspberry Pi into a full-fledged development device with a ton of different uses. (via TechCrunch). And as a follow-up to the Matrix Creator, the company is going even smaller with the Matrix Voice — a cheaper version of the creator that focuses on one thing: voice recognition. Читать дальше...

The music industry has a long and tortured relationship with the tech companies that pay for the privilege of streaming their songs. Record executives and individual artists have complained that they aren’t being paid enough, and in some cases kept their catalog off of the services entirely. But in the latest report from the Record Industry Association of America, the prominence of streaming continues to grow. For the first time ever, revenue from streaming music made up the majority of the industry’s overall revenue... Читать дальше...

Flying foxes, increasingly at risk of extinction, face threats in the form of hunting, habitat loss, and mass culling. That’s bad for island ecosystems — and, eventually, the people who live there, according to a new perspective published today in Science.

When you’re stressed, people often advise you to take a deep breath — and for good reason, a new study shows. Slowing your breathing calms you, and now scientists may have figured out how you can relax your brain through your breath. It has to do with your brain’s pacemaker for breath.

You’ve probably heard of an AI technique known as “style transfer” — or, if you haven’t heard of it, you’ve seen it. The process uses neural networks to apply the look and feel of one image to another, and appears in apps like Prisma and Facebook. These style transfers, however, are stylistic, not photorealistic. They look good because they look like they’ve been painted. Now a group of researchers from Cornell University and Adobe have augmented style transfer so that it can transfer the look of one photo onto another ... Читать дальше...

There’s an emerging trend in the world of premium Android phones for devices with taller-than-usual screens. Both Samsung’s Galaxy S8 / S8 Plus and LG’s G6 have gotten on board with this, offering displays with aspect ratios of 18.5:9 and 18:9, respectively. But taller (or wider) screens can be a problem when using apps built for the more common 16:9 ratio, leading to unsightly bars at the top and the bottom of the display.

Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company is going to take another swing at history today: for the first time, SpaceX plans to take a Falcon 9 rocket that successfully launched and landed in April 2016 and try to launch it to space once again. The launch window opens at 6:27PM ET and runs until 8:57PM ET, and SpaceX will live stream the attempt on its YouTube channel — once the links are live, a hosted webcast will be embedded above, and a technical webcast (with no narration) will be seen below. Читать дальше...

It’s an occupational hazard among gadget geeks to fixate on new hardware, and yesterday’s introduction of the gorgeous Galaxy S8 by Samsung made that easier than ever. I could write for days about how pretty and pleasant that new handset is. But I also notice that the traditional competitive narrative of my smartphone versus your smartphone is starting to fade out of relevance. Samsung may still measure its mobile ventures by the iPhone yardstick, but its bigger challenges these days are coming from Google’s suite of connected services. Читать дальше...

Marshall’s Monitor headphones are the top-of-the-line model in the company’s lineup, as the only over-ear cans it offers. Marshall claims that the Monitors offer “studio quality sound” and improved noise isolation over the cheaper, on-ear Major II model, and now the company is taking them wireless with the Monitor Bluetooth.

I am a huge David Lynch fan, and one of my very favorite videos on the internet is this clip taken from the limited edition DVD extras of Inland Empire, where the legendary director expresses his thoughts on the at-the-time new idea of watching movies on mobile phones.

Samsung unveiled its new Desktop Experience (DeX) during its Galaxy S8 launch in New York City yesterday. It’s designed to turn a Galaxy S8 into a PC, with Android apps running in a desktop-like environment. To work well, it will ultimately require apps to support larger displays. But out of the gate Samsung’s DeX already overshadows Microsoft’s Continuum.

Turning household objects into musical instruments isn’t exactly a novel idea — at one point or another, most of us have tried making an impromptu drum kit out of pots and pans and glasses of water. But a new set of gadgets named Dadamachines aims to make the creation of this sort of tinkling, tapping music as straightforward as possible.

pAs one of the world's top two soccer players, Cristiano Ronaldo has one of the most famous faces on the planet. He appears on underwear ads, video games, and shaving commercials across the globe, from the US, to China. In Portugal, he's a demigod, but he's even a draw as far away as Japan, where his ultra-recognizable face is used to sell dubious mouth-toning devices.

Yesterday, Samsung showed off its new, nearly bezel-less Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus phones, and today you can preorder it through all four major carriers in the US and Best Buy. Preorder shipments should arrive on April 21st when the device will be available in stores. The S8 and S8 Plus prices vary across retailers (you can see full pricing in our post here), but most have the S8 for $750 and the S8 Plus for $850. Verizon is one exception — it’s pricing the S8 at $720 and the S8 Plus at $840 — and Best Buy promises a savings of up to $100. Читать дальше...

Of all the ideas the new Ghost in the Shell offers up, one emerges as its thesis. Memory, it posits, doesn’t define our humanity. Instead, our actions define us. As the lines between human and machine are blurred, we’re afforded the radical opportunity to create new selves that are shaped by the past, without clinging to it. That notion aligns well with the film itself, and how it was made. As part of a far larger cyberpunk tradition, it draws on old ideas and tries to forge a new path forward. Читать дальше...

On the heels of Congress’s recent rollback of the FCC’s privacy rules, some web-goers had a clever idea: why not buy Congress’s web history?