Новости за 21.04.2017

Take this as something of a PSA for those of you who obsess over keeping your phone scratch-free: avoid the $50 InvisibleShield glass screen protector for the Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus. Paying $50 for a piece of glass that sticks to your phone is objectively stupid. The thing is overpriced by a mile. But more importantly, it’s just not very good. Best Buy sells it. So do some of the carriers. It will likely be one of their recommended add-on purchases when you walk in to buy the phone. Don’t get ripped off. Читать дальше...

I’ve borrowed a 2017 Volvo V90 Cross Country for an entire month, and will document my experience every week. Last week I drove to Albuquerque, New Mexico and back for a seven-hour highway test of the V90’s Pilot Assist semi-autonomous technology (and afterwards I stopped by an off-road driving park to get some cool pictures!).

Whenever I buy a Raspberry Pi I like to tell myself I'll do all sorts of cool projects with it and reinvent the face of IoT, but usually I just end up with a cheap, underpowered ARM computer that runs Linux and never takes advantage of all the I/O pins.

Every week, a slew of new music videos hits the web. Watching them at your desk is not time theft because you deserve it; think of it as a nice reward for surviving another work week. But what if you don’t have time to watch every video — maybe you have a deadline, a hungry pet, or other grown-up concerns. In consideration of your schedule, Lizzie and Kaitlyn bring you a series called One Video. Each week we’ll tell you “one video” you need to watch, why, and for how long.

Samsung’s Bixby assistant on the Galaxy S8 is a little bit hobbled out of the gate. It won’t be able to respond to your voice commands until later this spring, and one of the few tricks it can do at launch isn’t yet fully functional on Verizon Wireless.

In this week’s edition of “How could this possibly go wrong”, Target announced today that more than 650 stores across the country will get a Mario Kart makeover in honor of the launch of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe for Switch on April 28th. The promotion will turn some shopping carts into “Super Target Karts” featuring Mario, Luigi, and Peach (sorry Bowser), and shoppers will be greeted by flashing lights and the Super Mario Bros. theme song as they walk past the checkered start line at the store entrance. Читать дальше...

The first images of the Moto Z2 Play — the successor to last year’s battery powerhouse, the Moto Z Play — have leaked out, via TechnoBuffalo. Without actual information on the specs of the Z2 Play, the picture is pretty much all we have to go on for now, although hopefully the Z2 Play will be able to supply the same best-in-class battery life as the original.

Universal is considering making a Fast and Furious spinoff starring Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson, Deadline reports. Variety reports that Charlize Theron’s Cipher also might be attached to the script.

Elon Musk wants to fix disability, replace language as we know it, and use brain implants to usher us into a telepathic world. And he wants the first part of this to be done in the next four years. All of this could theoretically work, experts say. But probably not on the timeline that Musk has set.

Apple looks like it’s staffing up an internal hardware team responsible for satellite internet delivery, according to a report from Bloomberg. The company just hired Alphabet’s John Fenwick, who was Google’s head of spacecraft operations, and Michael Trela, Fenwick’s colleague and head of satellite engineering, to be part of a new team under Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy. Apple hired Duffy, who himself left Alphabet in 2015 shortly after Nest acquired Dropcam, earlier this year for an undisclosed position. Читать дальше...

Mercedes-Benz announced today that all of its 2016 and 2017 vehicles in the US can now connect with both Amazon and Google’s digital voice assistants.

Twitch today announced a new affiliate program that will let pretty much interested streamer qualify to earn money as they play. Similar to YouTube’s Partner Program, Twitch’s new tier is meant to be available to any streamer who meets a baseline criteria involving 500 minutes streamed in the last 30 days, at least three concurrent viewers, and at least 50 followers. Twitch hopes the program will expand the number of streamers on its platform who use streaming as a means to earn money and eventually even to make a living. Читать дальше...

Here we are! Another episode of The Vergecast. It’s been a busy week, which means lots for Nilay, Ashley, Dan, and Paul to talk about on the show. Facebook’s F8 developer conference took place this week so there’s lots of weird updates with AR, social VR, and mind reading. "It's two sci-fis at once," Paul says.

Do you think “These clothes are out of this world” is a little too on-the-nose as a tagline for Gucci’s new campaign? (Gucci: contact me if interested). The campaign, which Dazed notes is probably for Gucci’s upcoming Autumn / Winter ‘17 line, stars aliens and androids from far-away places in the galaxy, like the fictional planet “Xoph,” a water planet, and “unknown.”

Dell just announced its newest monitor, the UltraSharp UP2718Q. It’s a 27-inch 4K desktop monitor, but the biggest addition is support for HDR video (under the HDR10 specification).

One of the best games from virtual reality’s first year is Job Simulator: The 2050 Archives, a sandbox of experimentation from Owlchemy Labs where players are tasked with performing present-day jobs as interpreted by robots in the near future. The game was a very tongue-in-cheek game whose goofy aesthetic seemed to match and in some ways forgive VR’s early technological foibles. It was the rarest type of video game: a comedy that actually made you laugh.

The bottom of the ocean is teeming with weird animals — and this week, they’re being featured in a cute postcard created by the National Centers for Environmental Information. The postcard is part of new twice-monthly series of images taken from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s vast photo collection and paired with scientific descriptions.

Three years ago, I felt comfortable calling Mario Kart 8 on Wii U “the best Mario Kart ever.” It wasn’t a drastic shift for the long-running series, but more of a refinement. From the twisting, gravity-defying tracks to game-changing new weapons to the vibrant and beautiful levels, Mario Kart 8 took almost everything I loved about the series and made it better. Mario Kart 8 went on to become the beleaguered Wii U’s best-selling title by a huge margin; more than half of 13 million people who owned the console also had a copy of Mario Kart 8. Читать дальше...

For the last 13 years, a NASA spacecraft the size of a school bus has been whirling around Saturn, collecting data and snapping mesmerizing images of the ringed planet and its icy moons. That vehicle is Cassini, and its exploration of Saturn has led to some of the biggest discoveries ever made about the worlds in our Solar System. But as accomplished as this spacecraft is, it’s time for its life to end: this weekend, Cassini will change course and embark on a new path around Saturn — one that will eventually lead to the probe’s destruction. Читать дальше...

Microsoft is expected to unveil its Windows 10 Cloud operating system next month at a special software and hardware event in New York City. The software giant is likely launching its own hardware with a special version of Windows 10, which could debut as Windows 10 S or Windows 10 Cloud. While we’ll have to wait for May 2nd to see exactly what Microsoft is planning, some hardware specs point to plans for low-end devices to compete with Google’s Chromebooks.

Overcast, one of the best and most popular podcast apps for iOS, has a new update out that lets you send individual podcasts to the Apple Watch so you can listen to them even when you're not in the vicinity of your phone. Apple's own Podcasts app doesn't let you do this, although you can send a playlist of audio files from the Music app.

Microsoft first announced its plans to bring Windows desktop apps to mobile ARM processors last year. The software giant is planning to allow partners to build laptop devices first, with a version of Windows 10 that will support ARM chips directly by including an emulator in the operating system. Devices will be able to run traditional desktop applications like Chrome or Photoshop, and they’ll be based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chipset.

Snap has reportedly signed a deal worth $7.7 million to get its hands on a patent for geofilters — the localized filters whose sale to advertisers provides the company with a chunk of its revenue. TechCrunch reports that Snap obtained the patent (titled: Methods and systems of providing visual content editing functions) from Mobli, an Instagram rival that launched in 2011.

Fox today confirmed that The X-Files is coming back for a limited 11th season starring Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny as Agents Mulder and Scully. The series will be executive produced by show creator Chris Carter, as was the 10th season that revived the show for a limited, six-episode 10th season last year. This go around, Fox has ordered a 10-episode season.

Naked mole rats are tough creatures — they can withstand cancer, pain, and even survive 18 minute stretches without any oxygen. And now, scientists have a better idea of how the super rodents can survive that long without suffocating. The findings, published today in the journal Science, could one day help researchers figure out how to keep humans healthy when oxygen gets cut off by strokes or heart failure.