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Electric vehicles and other forms of low emission cars are typically quiet in operation, which poses some risks to pedestrians.

From this week, all new electric vehicles sold in the European Union must be equipped with a device that sounds like a traditional engine. It must sounds when reversing or travelling below 12MPH, which is the quietest they typically would operate.

By 2021, all electric cars will have to feature an acoustic vehicle alert system (Avas), not just newly sold models.

Charity Guide Dogs had already complained that electric vehicles pose risks as they can difficult to hear approaching, and said that while it welcomes the changes, all EVs should have to emit a noise at any speed.

The UK government is hoping to stop the sale of all vehicles running on petrol or diesel by 2040.

Source: BBC News

Remedy Entertainment may bring the 2010 cult classic to non-Microsoft platforms after it regained the publishing rights from Microsoft.

Alan Wake is an Xbox 360 exclusive that was released in 2010, developed by Remedy Entertainment and published by Microsoft Games. It was later released on PC and was available for Xbox One through backwards compatibility.

It follows protagonist Alan Wake, a best-selling author, as he investigates his wife's disappearance in the small fictional town of Bright Falls in Washington state.

While looking for his wife, Wake begins to experience supernatural occurrences and event plots from the novel he is working on. He has no prior memory of writing the material.

"The only thing we want to clarify, now that Remedy owns the publishing rights, is that we could bring Alan Wake to different platforms if we so choose," a Remdedy spokesperson told Eurogamer after it had informed investors about regaining the publishing rights to Alan Wake, as well as its expected 2.5 million euros of royalties from previously released games as one-time income this year.

Customers who purchased ebooks from a Microsoft Store are losing access to their libraries as Microsoft pulls out of market again.

It had tried to market its Surface devices as being suitable for ebook reading when it launched its service in 2017. The Microsoft service would use the web browser rather than a dedicated app for ebook reading.

Now that Microsoft is to close the service down, customers who either downloaded free ebooks or purchased them are losing access to them.

Of course, Microsoft is offering refunds along with an additional $25 credit if highlights and notes were made on the ebooks, as those will also be lost. However, it is more the spectacle of customers losing access to books because of DRM servers going offline that is making waves.

"The fact is that you don't own e-books when you buy them with DRM [digital rights management] from Amazon or anywhere else," said Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group.

"Technical controls through DRM are said to reduce unauthorised copying, but what they are really for is putting Amazon or Microsoft in charge of the e-book ecosystem."

The United States and China have resumed trade talks at the G20 summit in Osaka, Japan. Huawei, of course, have been eagerly waiting for Trump and Xi to meet, and it seems that they have caught a good break.

Huawei's future lied largely in the hands of the two governments finding common ground. Fortunately Trump and Xi Jinping have managed to address Huawei's blacklisting, and Trump has allowed Huawei to resume trading with American companies.

According to Trump, the ban did not advance national security which was the sole purpose of putting it on the Commerce Department's list. Huawei is able to now continue working with the likes of Google and Qualcomm, although it still remains on the Commerce Department's Entity List.

Trump was not ready to talk about removing Huawei from the black list altogether. There are clearly still security concerns that perhaps Huawei has nefarious ties to the Chinese government.

I don't want to talk about it now, we're looking at that very carefully. Huawei is very much in play in terms of our country and in terms of intelligence and the intelligence community - we know a lot about Huawei - but I don't want to mention that right now. I just think it's inappropriate. We're not making it other than what I told you... We're going to save that for later.

While Apple has mastered some parts of the software world, you might give App Store as an example, it has been, and is still, first and foremost a hardware company.

Apple doesn't do all the manufacturing of the hardware but they do design pretty much everything themselves. One of the aspects that traditionally Apple was perhaps most successful designing was the aesthetics.

This is Jony Ive's realm. He's been leading Apple's industrial design team for years, and in 2015 became only the third C-level executive (in addition to CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri) in the company as the chief design officer.

Now Ive has decided to end his career with Apple and move aside from the company. The design guru that was named senior vice president of industrial design in 1997 soon after the return of Steve Jobs, and was behind iconic and immortal designs like the iMac, the iPod and of course the iPhone, is leaving to pursue more personal goals.

He is regarded as one of the key influences alongside the late Steve Jobs in the new rise of Apple.

Apple is holding on to Ive until the end of the year, and even after that he will likely work as a contractor for Apple with his new design studio.

Apple Music has reached 60 million paying subscribers, according to services & software boss Eddy Cue.

The number was reportedly confirmed by Cue in French publication Numerama in Paris. It is up from 50 million that had been reported by Apple in May of last year, and also includes users of the service that are currently on a free trial.

Rival Spotify still holds the crown with over 100 million paying subscibers worldwide to its premium tier services. Spotify also counts users who are on a free trial of the service so long as they have provided credit card or other payment details up front.

When you include those who do not pay a subscription fee, Spotify claims more than 217 million users worldwide.

Source: Reuters

YouTube Music will save up to 500 of your favorite songs so you can access them for Offline listening.

The 'Smart Downloads' feature will automatically download as many as 500 of your favorite songs to your Android device so you can listen to them with poor or no Internet connectivity. It picks songs from the collection that you have 'liked'.

This is similar to an existing feature called Offline Mixtape which creates a mix of songs based on your tastes and downloads them, though they are not necessarily songs you have heard and liked before.

Smart Downloads will only download the songs at night time and while on Wi-Fi. You can manually set the total limit of songs you want downloaded if you have concerns about storage capacity.

Subscribers of the YouTube Music Premium service will have access to the Smart Downloads feature.

Via: The Verge

DisplayPort has gotten its first major update since March 2016, bringing support for beyond 8K resolution video at high refresh rates.

The new DisplayPort 2.0 triples the video bandwidth performance compared to DisplayPort 1.4a, from 25.92 Gbps to 77.37 Gbps. This enables the new DisplayPort revision to deliver beyond 8K resolutions at high refresh rates, and support for high-dynamic range.

Additionally, DisplayPort 2.0 brings improved support for multiple display configurations, as well as improved user experience with augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) displays, including support for 4K-and-beyond VR resolutions.

As with the previous iteration, DisplayPort 2.0 functions either over a USB-C connector, or the native DP connector.

DP 2.0 is backward compatible with previous versions of DisplayPort and incorporates all of the key features of DP 1.4a, including support for visually lossless Display Stream Compression (DSC) with Forward Error Correction (FEC), HDR metadata transport, and other advanced features.

DisplayPort 2.0 Configuration Examples

Single display resolutions:

• One 16K (15360×8460) display @60Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC)
• One 10K (10240×4320) display @60Hz and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression)

• Two 8K (7680×4320) displays @120Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC)
• Two 4K (3840×2160) displays @144Hz and 24 bpp 4:4:4 (no compression)

• Three 10K (10240×4320) displays @60Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (with DSC)
• Three 4K (3840×2160) displays @90Hz and 30 bpp 4:4:4 HDR (no compression)

Spotify and Apple became fierce rivals the moment Apple Music was introduced in June, 2015. The (near) trillion dollar company has put immense focus on catching up Spotify's lead in music streaming game, and the fight has only gotten dirtier.

This include Apple pulling all the stops when it comes to exclusives, spending copious amounts of money on advertising, and of course taking advantage of its massive hardware base. It managed to claw itself into the lead in the U.S. but still has a long way to catch worldwide.

Spotify isn't without tricks to protect their beloved #1 spot either, and the most recent of them is to call Apple out for anti-trust behavior.

They've filed an anti-trust complaint to the EU for Apple's so-called 30 percent app tax. That is the 30 percent share that app developers have to pay Apple for purchases in the App Store. This also applies to the first year of subscription purchases after which it is reduced to 15%, which Spotify has called monopolistic.

Obviously Apple doesn't agree with Spotify's view of the situation, but furthermore they are now suggesting that Spotify doesn't even pay the 30%.

According to Music Business Worldwide, Apple says that Spotify isn't paying what they claim. In fact, according to Apple's response, Spotify hasn't paid any additional commission one any subscribers obtained via the App Store for three straight years.

Microsoft's success with their Surface lineup was in doubt right from the beginning. The company was in the midst of failing their mobile platform, and these new tablet devices weren't anything special either.

Gladly Microsoft didn't give up Surface like they did with smartphones, so that we can have some of the best laptop, tablet, and convertible devices around.

The company has been trying to create products that truly fill in the gap between the traditional laptop and the tablet, and their next product might be the one that does it in a way none have even tried.

Market research firm IHS Markit suggests that Microsoft is developing a new type of Surface product that features things like a dual-screen, Windows 10, as well as support for Android apps.

According to a report by Forbes, the device would feature two 9-inch displays, and it would be a foldable, ie. clamshell, design. The Windows 10 planned for the device is a new WCOS (Windows Core OS) version which supports the dual displays.

The specs are said to include a new Intel system-on-a-chip, codename Lakefield, which is built with 10 nm technology. Furthermore this new Surface would include support for iCloud as well as LTE or 5G connectivity.

OLED panels started as a quirky feature mostly on some Samsung Galaxy phones years ago. They provided better blacks and contrast but not really many other advantages compared to LCD displays.

Now years later they've become the de facto display technology for the higher end mobile devices, and for a good reason. They use less power, offer saturated colors, and amazing contrast. So it's only natural that manufacturers are trying to expand them to larger devices as time goes on.

While OLED TVs already exist, they are way beyond regular people's comfortable price range. However, the laptops are already getting more and more OLED displays, and Apple might be soon in that boat too.

According to Korean ETNews, Apple is planning on moving to OLED screens in some of their upcoming Mac products. The iPhone already made the move with iPhone X, and one could expect that iPads are on their way too.

They reason for the move might not be what you think, though. ETNews suggests that Apple has been promising to purchase OLED panels more than it has required due to slowing iPhone sales.

Another possibility is that Apple will turn their entirely iPhone lineup next time around to OLED. Previous XR model didn't feature an OLED screen, and it was a big seller.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates cites the dominance of Android in the mobile space as his greatest mistake in the Redmond firm's history.

Speaking with TechCruch, Gates spoke about the "winner-take-all" markets that exist in the software world, saying that there is only room for one non-Apple operating system. Of course, that operating system is Android, and Gates claims it is worth about $400 billion.

"So, you know, the greatest mistake ever is the whatever mismanagement I engaged in that caused Microsoft not to be what Android is, [meaning] Android is the standard non-Apple phone form platform," Gates told TechCruch.

"That was a natural thing for Microsoft to win."

While Gates did acknowledge that Microsoft is still very much a leader in the software space with assets like Windows and Office performing strongly, he bemoans the fact that Microsoft really messed up in the mobile space, which makes sense given that Windows Mobile precedes Android by many years.

"So this idea that just small differences can magnify themselves doesn't exist for a lot of businesses. You know, if you're a service business, it doesn't exist. But for software platforms, it's absolutely gigantic. And so that's partly where you have the mentality of every night you think, 'Am I screwing this up?' And eventually, we did screw up a super important one."

Rumors have suggested for quite a while that Microsoft is readying up not only a next-generation Xbox, which is undeniable at this point, but in fact two different versions of it.

While Microsoft did reveal some new information about the upcoming Xbox, Project Scarlett as they call it for now, but they didn't touch the subject of multiple devices.

However, according to an interview by Business Insider, there will only be one next-gen Xbox.

This doesn't nullify the previous rumors entirely, even though Xbox boss Phil Spencer jokingly suggests that the first one was the previous genration disc-less Xbox and the second one is Project Scarlett device.

There in fact was a plan to introduce two distinct Project Scarlett devices but that plan has now been scrapped.

These devices were known as codename Anaconda and Lockhart, and they woudld've differed in both performance and price. Anaconda was the proper next-gen console while Lockhart was planned as the slighter improvement over current Xbox One S.

The new move by Microsoft seems to be to offer lower-cost gaming with their new xCloud cloud gaming platform rather than a cheaper next-gen console.

The true love of the geeks, the miniature computer Raspberry Pi, has been upgraded to a new major version. Raspberry Pi 4 Model B changes pretty much everything there was in the previous version - and to the better.

Previous flagship model, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ sold for $35 and the same base price remains for the new model, too. But the components, connectors and everything else have gone through a major revamp.

First of all, the system chip has been updated. Raspberry Pi 4 now uses Cortex-A72 system chip with quadcore architecture, running at 1.5GHz. New chip has built-in H.265 video decoding ability, just to mention one of the perks of the new chip.

Previous Raspberry Pis have shipped either with 512MB or 1GB or RAM, but the new model takes a leap forward here, too. The cheapest option ships with 1GB of RAM, but you can also get a version with either 2GB or 4GB of RAM. Furthermore, the memory tech has been upgraded from previous LPDDR2 to LPDDR4 tech, meaning that the memory is also significantly faster than previously.

A petition doing the rounds seeking the removal of a 'blasphemous' show from Netflix is met with amusement and ridicule.

There have been many such petitions shared around social media that demand streaming services remove content that offers certain groups of people. In that sense, this is nothing new. However, when you want a streaming service to remove a show from their platform, make sure that the show is actually on their platform.

It turns out that the petition - posted by Christian group Return To Order - was demanding that Netflix remove 'Good Omens' from its platform, despite the fact that Good Omens is actually a show on Amazon Prime. At its height the petition gathered about 35,000 signatures, but unfortunately they seem to have now removed it, undoubtedly prompted by the ridicule.

"This is another step to make Satanism appear normal, light and acceptable," the organization noted on its website originally, according to BGR.

"We must show our rejection. Please sign our petition, telling Netflix that we will not stand silent as they destroy the barriers of horror we still have for evil."