Новости за 05.04.2017

In a bombshell blog post today (via OMG Ubuntu), Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, announced the company will stop investing in its "Unity" user interface for Linux and instead move back to GNOME as a default for the next major version of Ubuntu. This also ends work on Ubuntu phones, which has been a major focus for the company in recent years.

Crosley gets you, Star Wars fans. For Record Store Day this year, the company is releasing a special edition of its portable Cruiser Deluxe turntable. An image from Star Wars: A New Hope’s iconic movie poster will encase the player, thereby making it a themed item.

The hot new trend in aeronautics these days is VTOL (pronounced vee-tol), which stands for “vertical take-off and landing.” These aircraft are known colloquially as “flying cars,” but we should probably think of them more as drones crossed with helicopters. Uber is working on a VTOL project, as is Airbus, DARPA, and Google co-founder Larry Page. Because nothing says “I’m very rich and I hate traffic” like a flying car project.

Dish’s Sling TV now lets customers add Showtime to their channel package for an extra $10 per month. That includes the regular, linear Showtime network and seven other channels as well; they’re all listed in this blog post announcing the addition of Showtime to Sling TV. Tacking Showtime onto your monthly subscription also adds around 2,000 on-demand titles. The timely announcement comes days before Homeland’s season six finale.

LG did something peculiar with its new G6 flagship smartphone, releasing it with wireless charging as a headline feature in the United States and an upgraded, quad-DAC audio system as a highlight in its native South Korea. There’s no option to have both on your phone, and no opportunity (short of importing the device yourself) to pick the other market’s variant. Today we posted our comprehensive review of the American G6, but I want to talk about the Korean alternative. I want to tell you exactly how much better it is. Читать дальше...

Apple’s MagSafe charger is essentially dead for all intents and purposes, replaced on all modern MacBooks by USB-C chargers. Yes, you can still find a MagSafe port on the MacBook Air, but you should not buy that laptop under any circumstances. It turns out, it may not be dead for long, as it seems a MagSafe to USB-C adapter may eventually show up in an Apple Store near you.

Hulu’s science-fiction anthology series Dimension 404, created by Video Game High School’s Dez Dolly and Will Campos, is openly a riff on The Twilight Zone. The whole idea of a show like this is a little cynical in 2017 — another speculative-fiction pastiche, another tribute to something old and better. We’re familiar with those beats by now, and it’s not so thrilling anymore. But Dimension 404 makes up for that somewhat with the sheer number of ideas it throws at the conceit.

I’m reluctant to label The Discovery as science fiction, even though Netflix’s new drama has what sounds like a classic Isaac Asimov premise: a scientist has found irrefutable evidence that after death, the human spirit goes somewhere; he’s just not sure where. Like good science fiction, the film raises a handful of questions that could span seasons of television — Can science really prove something like this? Should it? — but the 110-minute film largely ignores those questions in favor of melodramatic twists. Читать дальше...

You might remember movie characters like Hannibal Lecter, who suffered from hair loss, or the Wicked Witch of the West with her green skin and bumpy complexion. Turns out, these movie villains aren’t the only ones suffering from unflattering skin conditions. Six of the top 10 villains in film sport scars, deep wrinkles, and warts, according to a study published today in JAMA Dermatology. That’s detrimental for people who deal with these conditions in real life, the study authors say.

Doreen Green is heading to TV. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Freeform has given a straight-to-series order to New Warriors, a the comics company’s first half-hour comedy starring none other than the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

All the major carriers offer similar unlimited plans these days, which means cell providers are going the extra mile to entice customers to use their service. The latest is AT&T, which announced today that it will be offering free HBO to customers on its top plan, the $90-a-month Unlimited Plus service.

Facebook unveiled a new system today that it hopes will cut down on revenge porn shared on its services.

The year is 2030. Former president Donald Trump’s border wall, once considered a political inevitability, was never built. Instead, its billions of dollars of funding were poured into something the world had never seen: a strip of shared territory spanning the border between the United States and Mexico. Otra Nation, as the state is called, is a high-tech ecotopia, powered by vast solar farms and connected with a hyperloop transportation system. Biometric checks identify citizens and visitors... Читать дальше...

SpaceX made history last week when it landed a used Falcon 9 rocket on one of its drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean. Never before has the space transport outfit attempted to relaunch one of its recovered rockets before, making this a landmark moment in SpaceX’s ongoing rocket reusability mission.

I’m of the firm belief that the rap song describing what just happened in the film you watched — think Men in Black or Deep Blue Sea — is one of humanity’s greatest artforms. But you can’t just take that formula and apply it willy-nilly, as Moto showed this week. The company decided, in the year 2017, to release a one-minute rap video describing its 44-year corporate history. The results are... awkward.

BioWare has announced a major update for Mass Effect: Andromeda, the epic spacefaring RPG that arrived last month to a somewhat muted reception. Patch 1.0.5 will address many of the issues that players have found with the game: inventory limits will be increased, matchmaking and latency will be improved, and yes, you’ll be able to skip the interminable cutscenes that occur when travelling between planets. (Though my colleague Rich kind of likes them.)

For those who love the idea of being surrounded on every side by Nicolas Cage, I have good news! For everyone else, I still have good news. It’s called The Cage Cage, and it’s a browser-friendly VR simulation of what it would be like to be trapped in a cage and surrounded by Nic Cage films. It’s as awful as it is magical, just like most Nic Cage movies.

Building Apple’s original Macintosh computer out of Lego isn’t exactly a new feat on the internet, with numerous versions of the famous computer floating around online (including this one from Chris McVeigh, featuring both accurate hardware internals and comprehensive instructions is probably the best of them.)

Before every episode of The Vergecast I sit down, read through a bunch of news, and take a bunch of notes. It’s one of the most enjoyable parts of my week, and I started thinking it might be fun to do every day on the site. So, every chance I can, I’m sitting down and writing some notes on the news as though I’ll be talking about it later. Are you into this? Am I into this? I don’t know. But it’s fun to do! Give me some feedback and we’ll keep mutating this into something good.

More than 10 years after a new episode aired on TV, Invader Zim, Nickelodeon’s creepy yet lovable series about a wannabe alien menace, is ready for a comeback. Entertainment Weekly reports that a 90-minute film has gotten the greenlight from the network, and it will feature the core voice cast in their return to the cult hit.

Nearly one year after Amazon was found guilty of illegally billing users for unauthorized in-app purchases, the company has dropped its appeal against the decision, paving way for refunds to finally commence.