Новости за 02.06.2017

Tilt Brush is sort of like fancy MS Paint for virtual reality. It fosters creativity, allowing you to paint, smear, and dab beautiful (or in my case, sort of okay) works in a 3D space. Traditionally, artists use their hands to craft their VR art. But drones aren’t a bad option either.

The seventh season of Game of Thrones (coming July 16th) was pushed back several months due to a production schedule that needed to revolve around winter, but the eighth season may be pushed back even further, for vaguer reasons.

Nutella’s manufacturer Ferrero partnered with its advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather Italia to devise a plan to get people to buy more Nutella. Their idea? Have an algorithm design the packaging. The company provided the software with a database of patterns and colors that Ferrero felt fit with the hazelnut spread brand. It then created 7 million unique jars that were sold throughout Italy.

The new Wonder Woman film has most of what Wonder Woman fans would expect from a cinematic adaptation of her comics. There's Paradise Island, the distant utopia where women warriors live and fight together, sans men. There's the magic golden lasso which compels people to tell the truth. There are the magical bracelets that deflect bullets (and the occasional World War I shell, since the film is set in that era). Steve Trevor, brave airman in need of rescue? Yep. Etta Candy, jovial sidekick? She's there. Читать дальше...

By now, most smartphone users have experienced some form of augmented reality on their phones, whether they play Pokémon Go, use Snapchat, or actually remember the days of Yelp Monocle (from way back in 2009). But for the people who make the apps, AR isn’t quite as simple, particularly when the apps they’re building involve 3D or “volumetric” objects — stuff you can walk around and interact with through the screen of the phone.

AT&T has a new deal for customers on the company’s cheaper, $60-a-month Unlimited Choice plan: DirecTV Now for an extra $10 a month.

There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Vivo, a China-focused smartphone company that is similar to Xiaomi or Oppo. But unlike those other two companies, chances are that, unless you live in China (or more recently, India), you’ve probably never encountered a Vivo device, or even seen the company’s name before.

Until recently, back issues of Omni Magazine were stored on the Internet Archive, for readers to page through at no cost. The collection of issues was taken down a couple of years ago, but it’s now back online on Amazon.com.

Airbnb hosts have already been found to discriminate against guests with "black-sounding" names, and now it sounds like host discrimination extends to guests with disabilities as well.

This week’s Vergecast is recorded out of the studio. Nilay heads to the West Coast to reunite with Dieter, Lauren, and Casey at this year’s Code Conference. The gang discusses the speakers (in more than one way) at the event including Andy Rubin, Hillary Clinton, and Reed Hastings. They also chat a little about the news outside of the conference.

For some reason, Samsung is releasing a Pirates of The Caribbean-themed Galaxy S8. Spec-wise, the phone isn’t any different than the standard Galaxy S8, save for a fancy box, some wallpaper, and a case. But when Disney is trying to make a film with a $230 million budget a success... well, this is what you get.

Go fund yourself

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Police should be allowed to unmask anonymous callers who have made serious threats over the phone, the Federal Communications Commission has proposed.

Back in April, Verizon launched its prepaid unlimited plan, giving customers the option to talk, text, and use as much data as they want (with a few caveats) for $80 a month. Now it’s tackling the prepaid plans below that threshold, adding data and cutting prices for users.

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.

Ever since the DC Extended Universe launched with 2013’s Man of Steel, it’s been troubled and contentious. DC Comics’ attempt at a revitalized, unified superhero film franchise has faced nonstop comparisons with Marvel’s more long-running and critically acclaimed cinematic universe, and it’s consistently come out worse in comparison. Warner Bros.’ DC films (to date: Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad) have been dour, sullen, narratively messy, and heavily criticized for their particularly... Читать дальше...

On November 13th, 2010, marine biologist Austin Gallagher was out on a boat in the Florida Keys, when he and his team pulled an 8-foot-long tiger shark on board to tag it with a satellite tracker. Gallagher was straddling the shark to take measurements, when all of a sudden, “I just saw a huge plume of feathers explode on the back of the boat,” he says.

Taking a decent photo on your smartphone is easier than ever, but if you want to graduate to the next level with a DSLR or mirrorless camera, there’s a lot more to think about. Factors range from focus to shutter speed, aperture to ISO, color range and more, and knowing how to balance them all requires practice. Now, though, a gadget named Arsenal — currently raising funds on Kickstarter — claims it can do all the hard work for you, taking the perfect photograph every time.

A new kind of instant camera that’s not quite there yet

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With fast cars, silly stunts, and a seemingly endless string of sequels, Need for Speed already had a claim to be the gaming world's Fast and the Furious, even going so far as to lend its name to a markedly similar movie. But new game in the series — Need for Speed: Payback, announced today — makes that connection even clearer.

It’s June again, so it’s time for Apple to give the world a look at what it’s been up to and what we should expect from the iPhone, the Mac, and everything in between in the months to come.

It’s Friday morning and everyone’s already eager to clock off from work, including astronauts Oleg Novitskiy and Thomas Pesquet, who will depart the International Space Station this morning just before 7AM ET. You can watch live in the stream above, with the undocking procedure expected to start around 6.30AM. If all goes to schedule, the Soyuz capsule containing Novitskiyi and Pesquet will perform its routine de-orbit burn at 09.17AM (firing the engines to slow the craft’s approach) before... Читать дальше...

You know just from using a laptop that computers give off a lot of excess heat. For data centers containing tens of thousands of servers, this is a big problem, wasting energy and money. To try and mitigate this, companies have experimented with moving facilities to near the Arctic Circle and even submerging servers underwater. But Dutch startup Nerdalize has a different approach. Rather than trying to dissipate excess energy from servers, it wants to harness it, using it to heat people’s homes instead. Читать дальше...

If you work in technology there’s often a joke about someone tripping over the power cord whenever a server goes down. It appears that joke became reality for British Airways last weekend. British Airways flights were disrupted worldwide due to a power supply issue in the company’s main datacenter, with 75,000 passengers affected by canceled flights. The Times reports that the datacenter shutdown was triggered by a contractor accidentally switching off the power supply.

US visa applicants may be required to disclose any social media handles, email addresses, and phone numbers used over the previous five years, under new procedures approved by the Trump administration. As Reuters reports, a new questionnaire for visa applicants was approved by the Office of Management and Budget on May 23rd, after receiving sharp criticism during a public comment period.