Новости за 14.04.2017

Battery life is an inherently squishy topic. It's hard to be precise when measuring, because there are so many variables at play. That said, battery life is hugely important, and it's worth optimizing anything that can be optimized to get more hours and minutes out of our laptops. Specifically, browsers are huge RAM hogs that drain most of a laptop's battery on a given day, and the major vendors are aware of this.

National parks in the US are already seeing the effects of climate change — glaciers are melting, whitebark pines are under attack by pests, and wildfires are eating away at acres of land across the US. What will happen to our treasured parks by 2050 if we don’t address climate change?

Corporate frontman pens letter and posts video

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Alphabet’s life sciences spinoff, Verily, has developed a health-tracking watch that will be used in observational and longitudinal health studies, the company said in a blog post today.

The Trump administration has said it will not be releasing White House visitor records, and the site the Obama administration created to host them, Open.gov, has been officially discontinued. According to Time, White House officials say that the choice stemmed from “the grave national security risks and privacy concerns of the hundreds of thousands of visitors annually.” Now, visitor logs will be kept secret until five years after Trump has left office.

Facebook is increasing its efforts to cut down on spam and improve security. Today, the company announced that it has put an end to a spam operation that generated thousands of fake Likes on publisher’s pages. Facebook says it’s been fighting the operation for six months as part of a wider crackdown on fake accounts.

It feels like a long time since we've had a great big knock-down, drag-out operating system battle. Windows vs. Mac shook out in the ’90s. iOS vs. Android is mostly settled. But another one is starting this summer if you know where to look. It's not in classic PCs, where the relative qualities between Mac and Windows have remained stable for some time now. It's not in phones, where the iPhone is dominant at the high end and Android owns massive marketshare.

Kendrick Lamar’s new album Damn. dropped last night. Anticipation was high, and Kendrick’s fans reacted to the album the way the internet has taught them to: by dissecting it for clues. Clues about what?, you, a person who is merely content to have this album, might ask. Clues about another album, the internet would respond. According to a theory floating around and rapidly growing, Lamar is going to release another album this Sunday, and it’s called Nation.

In November 2015, Mystery Science Theater 3000 creator Joel Hodgson announced a Kickstarter campaign to help bring the show back. After the initial wave of excitement subsided, fans and skeptics started asking questions. Would this be a reunion of the original cast and crew? If so, what would “original” mean, given that during its 11-year run, MST3K cycled through different casts and hosts, with Hodgson giving way to Mike Nelson in the lead role? Most importantly: Since Hodgson and his old collaborators... Читать дальше...

A seven-member team, including one emergency room doctor, won $2.6 million this week for their new tricorder-esque invention called the DxtER. The iPad-based system weighs less than five pounds and can diagnose 34 health conditions, including urinary tract infections, diabetes, stroke, sleep apnea, tuberculosis, and pneumonia.

This week on Vergecast, Chris Plante is in town! Nilay, Dieter, and Paul bring him in to discuss a few things that confused us all throughout the week — Apple and Qualcomm suing each other, how the FCC may kill net neutrality, and Nintendo discontinuing the NES Classic.

Putting an iPhone together from spare parts sounds like a daunting project. And according to Scotty Allen, a former software engineer who did just that, the hard part is finding the parts, not putting them together.

How a weapon against war became a weapon against the web

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Samsung’s Galaxy S8 is a great looking smartphone — it’s also covered entirely in very scratchable glass. So it’s no surprise to hear that Samsung is developing a rugged version of the phone for people who’d rather not worrying about shattering it.

Apple has signed a deal to give iPads to NHL coaches and referees, the Associated Press reports, allowing them to monitor specific game footage and check officiating decisions. The deal sees the arenas of the 16 playoff teams outfitted with iPad Pro tablets — three to each bench — as well as Macs for video challenges. From next season, the initiative will be expanded further, giving every team access to the devices.

It’s no surprise that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is the best-selling game on the Nintendo Switch, a console that just had its strongest US opening ever for the company. But managing to sell more copies than consoles that can actually play it? That’s what’s happened in the US, amazingly — Nintendo just announced that it sold 906,000 Switch consoles in March along with 925,000 copies of Breath of the Wild.

Nintendo’s announcement today that it’s discontinuing its wildly popular NES Classic Edition console has fans in an uproar. Why would Nintendo do this, when the device has been sold out for months and it’s clear consumers will buy it as soon as it hits store shelves? Does the company hate money? How, after so many product mishaps and sleeper successes, does Nintendo not realize when it has a genuine, certifiable hit on its hands? The company gave no concrete reason for why it made the decision.

Google Photos is where all my photos are. Long ago I was a man of SmugMug, and then Flickr, and then at some point spent days and days copying years of images to iCloud Photo Library before eventually disregarding that and switching to Google. What can I say? I’m a simple person who can be easily delighted and swayed by automatic GIF creation and reliable backups. And Google Photos keeps getting better. Here’s the latest example: now the mobile app can automatically stabilize videos in your camera roll with a tap. Читать дальше...