Новости за 27.04.2017

Numerous government reports have predicted that NASA’s next big rocket, the Space Launch System, won’t be ready in time for its first launch in 2018 — and now months of speculation have finally become reality. NASA is going to push back the vehicle’s inaugural flight, potentially to some time in 2019, according to one of the agency’s top officials. It’s another major delay for NASA’s human exploration program, aimed at sending astronauts into deep space and on to Mars.

The FCC put out its draft proposal for reversing the 2015 net neutrality order today, and the oddest thing about it may be how little the commission has thought through what to do with basic internet protections.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau released its annual report yesterday on the state of the digital ad market. The numbers looked stunning for Google and Facebook, not so rosy for everyone else. The two tech giants accounted for more than three-quarters of all the growth across the industry. And that momentum showed up today in Alphabet’s first quarter earnings.

Microsoft has published its Q3 fiscal 2017 earnings report, and the company has made $4.8 billion in net income on $22.1 billion in revenue. Both revenue and profit are up from the same period last year, and the company's Office and cloud products continue to help generate big parts of the overall revenue.

Hulu has adapted Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale, which premiered on April 26th. Catch up with the latest updates, trailers, and commentary.

A new patent filing by Apple indicates that the company is investigating the possibility of one day wirelessly charging devices over a variety of radio frequencies, including cellular (between 700 MHz and 2700 MHz), Wi-Fi (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz), and millimeter wave (between 10 GHz and 400 GHz), as spotted by Apple Insider.

Last week I got to spend a few hours shooting with the Sony A9. It’s the company’s newest flagship full-frame mirrorless camera, and it’s already made waves for its brawny specs and head-turning speed. I only wrote one note the entire time I was shooting with the A9, though, and it was about the electronic viewfinder.

Wireless mice are great for gaming in theory. There's no cable that can get in the way, or tug on the mouse when you run out of slack. Unfortunately, many wireless mice have bad wireless performance — either with latency or connectivity issues — and that bad performance is compounded in situations with high interference. Like at a pro gaming tournament, for instance.

Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Nintendo’s upgrade of the original Mario Kart 8, hits the Switch tomorrow with some new additions that might just make it the best Mario Kart game ever. But it also serves as the best example yet of just how much better the Switch’s screen is compared to Nintendo’s other portable consoles: Game Boy Advance, DS, and 3DS.

Blade Runner is considered one of the greatest science fiction films ever created. On October 6th, 2017, Denis Villeneuve will direct a sequel to Ridley Scott's 1982 classic, Blade Runner 2049. Here's all the news, images, trailers, and commentary to get caught up before it hits theaters later this year.

This week, Walt took a week off from writing his column. However, we still have a brand-new episode of Ctrl-Walt-Delete for you! This episode focuses on what has been taking over the news in our world, Amazon’s newest product the Echo Look, Twitter’s revenue and growth, and the FCC’s plan to reverse Title II net neutrality.

Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special-event releases.

If you want to show the common link between iPhones, iPads, Samsung Galaxy devices, and Google Pixels, you’ll find it in the underlying CPU technology that they’re all based on. ARM is the company, recently acquired by SoftBank for an immense $31 billion, quietly residing at the heart of the mobile revolution, designing the processors and graphics systems that go into our most-desired devices. This week ARM has expanded its portfolio to also include image signal processors (ISPs), which is the... Читать дальше...

The Chronicles of Narnia film series is getting another shot at life. Variety is reporting that Captain America director Joe Johnston has been tapped to direct an adaptation of The Silver Chair, the fourth book in the series by C.S. Lewis.

Simulated Mars soil can be packed together into a solid brick-like material — without needing any added ingredients to hold it together. That might mean real Martian soil could be easily used as a tool for building structures like habitats on the Red Planet’s surface, which could make human missions to Mars less complicated to pull off.

Master & Dynamic is known for its high-end headphones. Leica is known for its high-end cameras. Now, the two are coming together to collaborate on some limited-edition Master & Dynamic headphones with Leica-themed designs.

NASA has confirmed that its Cassini spacecraft has dived through the gap between Saturn and its rings. The journey marks the first-time an Earth-built object has navigated the space between the planet and its halo of dust and rocks, and comes as the probe (which has been circling Saturn for the last 13 years) enters its final orbit of the gas giant.

Nintendo has announced its earnings for the final quarter of its 2016 fiscal year, which are particularly pertinent to recent news as they contain the first official sales data on the new Switch console. Since it became available on March 3rd, Nintendo sold 2.74 million Switch units for the rest of the month — more than the 2 million the company long maintained it would ship in March. Nintendo also forecast sales of 10 million units for the current financial year, meaning it expects to have sold almost 13 million total by April. Читать дальше...

The Beoplay P2 is the latest Bluetooth speaker from B&O Play, and while it has most of the features you’d expect from a high-end portable speaker, there’s one thing conspicuously missing: buttons.

The Google Pixel and its predecessor, the Nexus 6P, are two of the best mobile cameras we have today, owing to Google’s algorithmic wizardry behind the scenes. I’ve been endlessly impressed with the low-light performance of the Pixel since its release, but it turns out there’s still a vast amount of untapped potential just waiting to be unlocked.

Samsung Electronics has reported Q1 earnings in line with its guidance: as predicted, the company made an operating profit of 9.9 trillion won (about $8.7 billion), its second biggest quarter ever and its highest ever figure for the January to March period. Revenue was 50.55 trillion won, or about $44.7 billion.

TED Talks are known for bringing well-known individuals from around the world to a stage before an audience to share big ideas about science, technology, and culture. But during this year’s annual TED conference in Vancouver, there was one surprising addition to the schedule that opted to telecommute: Pope Francis.

Printing ready-to-use metal objects at your desk is the dream for many engineers and tinkerers. Unfortunately, we're not there yet, but these new Desktop Metal printers, as seen on TechCrunch, get us a lot closer. The Studio Printer is a $49,900 machine that prints metal layer by layer in a way similar to that of a traditional plastic 3D printer, instead of the subtractive method that's more common with metal "printers." Then the plastic binder is removed (by a $9,900 machine) and the part is... Читать дальше...

FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced today that he’s proposing to do away with the regulatory classification his predecessor used to enact tough net neutrality rules.