Robots are becoming more common in regular households, and robot vacuums are probably the most common example of that. While they are not even close to intelligent, or humanoid, they are somewhat relatable with all their faults.
They are like clumsy animals that instead of leaving things around, collect and clean them. The manufacturers have realized this too, and allow users to name their pet robots.
While some argue that making robots more relatable might be the biggest problem we do with artificial intelligence, some do want their robots to be more human-like.
One of these people is robotics YouTuber Michael Reeves who has finally filled his promise of delivering a screaming Roomba. So what would a Roomba that feels pain for every wall or furniture collision sound like?
Here's your chance to indulge into that experience. For those who can't play the video and are wondering, it sounds like someone perpetually stubbing their toe.
Hilarious? Yes. More relatable? Probably. Also probably a bad idea in many ways.
Fortunately if you still want to give your own try, you only need a Roomba, a Raspberry Pi, and a speaker of sorts.
Everything is electronic, or smart, these days. Well, everything except voting it seems. For years upon years electronic voting has been suggested as the fix to all election problems, yet here we are with hackable voting machines and cries about rigged elections.
While electronic voting is becoming more popular, there are problems with both security and convenience. Microsoft agrees, and has introduced their own platform for elections, called ElectionGuard, at their Build 2019 conference to solve most of it.
The company promises that ElectionGuard is as secure and transparent as you would hope a voting platform to be. It has been working in partnership with multitude of voting system providers, including Democracy Live, Election Systems & Software, Hart InterCivic, BPro, MicroVote, and VotingWorks, and developed the software with Galois.
Microsoft has said the pilot programs kick off next year, just in time for the 2020 elections.
However, ElectionGuard isn't exactly a complete electronic voting system, more like a software platform to build the system on top of. It collects and handles the data that is fed to it from voting machines.
Microsoft has build it in open source which provides a great deal of transparency as well as opportunity for constructive critique. The company also says that it is compatible with current generation of voting machines, which makes it easy to deploy and use.
Microsoft's Build 2019 developer conference launched yesterday, and company leads took the stage to introduce some of their new projects, and reveal updates to others, to kick it off for the developers.
One of the updates was about the company's new search engine tool, first unveiled last year. Microsoft Search is said to now come to all apps and company's platforms.
While it was introduced last years it hasn't been extended over to all possible places, which is exactly what Microsoft intends to do starting this month. Most apps and services will be featuring Microsoft Search functionality in the near future.
Better yet, Microsoft Search is context aware. While it uses Bing's engine, if logged in to Microsoft Graph on your work computer, you'll be presented with different kinds of results than on your regular home PC.
Microsoft Search is a competitor for Google's Cloud Search. They are both meant for searching on corporate networks and internal searches. Making it available as widely around the desktop experience as possible increases the likelihood that the search will be in the right place at the right time.
Soon it will be found in Office apps, on the desktop, and on Bing, and that's probably one of the bigger advantages compared to Google's offering.
Stranger Things lawsuit turns upside down as plaintiff drops the case just days before the hotly anticipated trial was set to get underway.
Charlie Kessler claimed since 2018 that Matt and Ross Duffer (aka, The Duffer Brothers) had effectively stolen key elements of Stranger Things from his short film Montauk, and had breached an implied contract when he spoke to them about his ideas in 2014.
The Duffer Brothers insisted that Kessler's claims were bogus and that they had never agreed to make any TV show with him, and further that they had been working on the project that would become Stranger Things since 2010.
Kessler pressed ahead with the lawsuit despite lawyers for the Duffers insisting that they had e-mails and Google Documents dated years before Kessler briefly interacted with them at a film festival to prove they had created the series.
Conspiracies surrounding a location called Camp Hero in Montauk, New York, have been abundant for decades, ranging in content from time travel to cold war experiments on test subjects. In fact, the Duffers originally referred to the project that would become Stranger Things as "Montauk", and you can even read the original pilot script dubbed "Montauk" online.
The conquering of ExaScale supercomputing continues with a $600 million machine to be built by AMD and Cray for the U.S. government.
Dubbed "Frontier", when this new supercomputing beast is fully completed it will be capable of exceeding 1.5 ExaFlop/s. An Exaflop is one quintillion floating point operations per second.
The system will be based on Cray's new Shasta architecture and Slingshot interconnect and will feature high-performance AMD EPYC CPU and AMD Radeon Instinct GPU technology.
"Frontier's record-breaking performance will ensure our country's ability to lead the world in science that improves the lives and economic prosperity of all Americans and the entire world," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry.
"Frontier will accelerate innovation in AI by giving American researchers world-class data and computing resources to ensure the next great inventions are made in the United States."
Researchers will harness Frontier's powerful architecture to advance science in such applications as systems biology, materials science, energy production, additive manufacturing and health data science.
This year's iPhone is largely still a mystery, but perhaps a new report from a revered Apple analyst gives us some information about iPhone 11.
According to TF Securities' analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is developing a new antenna design, which would greatly improve navigation features in iPhones. Especially the new antenna is going to be improving indoor navigation, which has been talked about for years, but no real breakthroughs have been made.
Kuo has previously suggested that Apple could introduce a new antenna technology this year, but now that the design of the phone is being finalized and mass production soon starts, he seems more confident that this is indeed the case.
He says that Apple is replaced liquid crystal polymer (LCP) antenna technology used in previous iPhones to modified PI antennas, which is more cost-effective and performs better than the previous solution.
It is only a temporary fix for some issues with high-frequency connections, because Apple intends to go back to LCP for the first 5G iPhone in 2020, Kuo says.
What makes the upcoming iPhones better at indoor navigation is the improvements in ultra-wideband.
Obviously antenna designs haven't always went well for Apple. Most famously Apple introduced a new antenna design in iPhone 4, in which holding the phone "wrong" would drop the cellular connectivity.
People love their iPhones. Not as much as they used to, but people still love their iPhones.
One of the things that they usually don't like, however, is the battery life. Controversies like the #batterygate didn't do much to help Apple's case either.
'Member? Apple admitted that it is throttling older phones so they could keep it lasting longer because of degraded batteries. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but they didn't tell the users about it, until it was exposed and they had to.
Well, there's more bad news about Apple's battery practices. According to a British customer advocacy group Which?, as covered by Business Insider, Apple has been fooling customers with the battery life figures.
As they tested iPhones, a total of nine different models, and how long you could actually use them as a phone, the results were not even close to what Apple claims.
Among the models the new iPhone XR was the worst offender. Apple promises 25 hours of talk time but it only managed 16.5 hours. Apple is giving the phone more than 50% more talk time than it can actually manage.
Smartphones are getting better and better, but for a while now the sales volume has gone down. That's probably the reason many manufacturers are making their phones more expensive, to combat the declining quantity.
For some it is not necessary, namely Huawei. The controversial Chinese manufacturer has managed to grow their business among others struggling and the entire market posting -6.6% growth.
Apple has fallen very sharply, according to IDC's newest report. In fact it is leading in negative year-over-year change with -30%. Huawei has now passed the American giant by a huge margin by increasing the volume YoY just over 50%. That is insane in this market.
In 1Q18 Apple shipped 52.2 million iPhones while Huawei "only" managed 39.3 million. A year later the tables have turned, and more, with Apple dropping to 36.4 million and Huawei with 59.1 million shipped smartphones.
Huawei's 19% market share is a scary prospect for Samsung as well, who is leading the pack with 71.9 million units and 23.1% share of the market. Even they dropped 8.1%.
Huawei has managed this without getting into the competitive U.S. market, thanks largely to the governments' hostility towards the Chinese company's suspected spying.
The old magnetic strip of debit and credit cards is nowadays rarely used in most of the Western countries, having been mostly replaced by either contactless payments or chip-and-pin payments. Finnish bank S-Pankki has now introduced a line of debit and credit cards that are designed vertically rather than horizontally.
Reasoning behind the design change is that consumers mostly see their cards positioned vertically - either when stored with their phone flip-covers or when paid with chip-and-pin terminals.
The card itself is still the same, standard-sized bank card we all know, but the all the graphical design elements - including the numbers on the card - are positioned so that they're meant to be read when the card is positioned vertically.
S-Pankki is not the first one to do the switch, as some banks have introduced the portrait cards in past two years, too, such as Sterling Bank in the UK. But S-Pankki is one of the largest banks in Finland, whereas most other banks around the world to introduce portrait cards have been "new banks" rather than traditional, big banks.
Traditional 16 digit card number is split into four lines, each having four numbers. Card still has the old, black magnetic strip so the card can still be used in countries where chip-and-pin payments and contactless payments aren't the norm. More info from S-Pankki website (in Finnish).
The patent dispute between Apple and Qualcomm had all the right ingredients to become a decade long battle like the one between Apple and Samsung, but who knew a failure by a third-party would open this gridlock.
When Intel recognized that it couldn't make 5G chips for Apple, like they promised, Apple had to quickly figure out a new 5G partner. The problem was that they were fighting in the courtroom with the obvious partner, Qualcomm.
According to Qualcomm's latest quarterly financials it is receiving at least $4.5 billion in the settlement. This doesn't include royalties with the new licensing deal.
The deal is a exclusive six-year licensing agreement with a two-year extension option where Qualcomm provides Apple's iPhones with modems. Apple is also developing their own modems in-house, so it remains to be seen how the company manages the development of their own modems and a lengthy deal with Qualcomm.
Revolutionary electric car company, Tesla, is looking for investments to continue operations as planned. The company is looking to raise another $2 billion from investors.
According to CNBC, Tesla is going to try and raise the money via convertible notes and new equity. $1.35 billion would come from convertible notes and $650 million from new equity.
Tesla is looking for investors and one of them is said to be company CEO Elon Musk. Musk has offered to buy around $10 million worth of stock, which is of course a drop in the bucket for both the entirety of the investment round, or Musk's 20% stake in the company worth over $12.5 billion.
Tesla has been burning through their cash deposits in a remarkable pace for couple years. Musk said in the quarterly conference call to shareholders that raising money is not a fix, but instead the company needs to be more efficient.
I don't think raising capital should be a substitute for making the company operate more effectively. I do think there is some merit to raising capital, but this is sort of probably about the right timing.
The controversial Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is quickly climbing to the top of the smartphone market share worldwide, but they are hardly done.
In 2016, Huawei introduced their MateBook laptop. Last year they redesigned the device, and released the highly acclaimed Matebook X Pro.
Now they have decided to diversify their portfolio further by expanding to television manufacturing. According to Nikkei Asia Review, Huawei is developing a 5G-enabled TV with 8K resolution.
The first ever 5G TV is said to be unveiled later this year, and according to the sources it would enter the market this year as well. However, even if the reports are correct, it is not clear at all that the TV would be sold in the U.S. or even Europe.
Many of the Chinese manufacturers never enter the western markets, and some of them only bring selected products to the U.S. and Europe. This combined with current government's distrust of Huawei's devices could be detrimental to the TV's chances in the U.S., especially considering it's equipped with 5G.
Apple has revealed latest quarterly results, and as expected revenue went down from last year. However, figures weren't as bad as expected and the stock shot up slightly.
Last fiscal years second quarter ended with revenue of $61 billion and this year the figure dropped to $58. The revenue from iPhones took a fairly steep dive, although Services as well as wearable technology, like the Apple Watch and especially AirPods, mostly plugged the hole.
Services generated $11.5 billion in revenue, which is an all-time high for Apple. One service that is certainly responsible for much of that is Apple Music, which has gained fast inside the U.S. even though trailing Spotify by a hefty margin worldwide.
Apple also managed to grow iPad business once more, from $4 billion to just $4.9 billion, likely thanks to the new iPad Pro. Unfortunately Apple no longer reports unit sales.
The company also revealed that there are more than 1.4 billion Apple devices currently in use worldwide. According to CEO Tim Cook, the trade war between Chine and the U.S. calmed down, and the relationships have been improved greatly since last year.
Apple took a significant hit from complication with the trade policies between the two countries. Now at least Cook believes that the tides are turning, and it's already evident in their operations in China, although tariffs are still in place.
Facebook owns some of the world's most popular social media and communication channels, but haven't done much to improve their interoperability. This is about to change soon, as the company plans to allow sending private messages between its main messaging platforms: Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.
The feature was already rumored earlier this year, but it was finally confirmed at yesterday's f8 developer event. It is unclear how the interoperability would exactly work, as WhatsApp relies solely on phone numbers, while Instagram and Messenger require users to create their own accounts. Thus, to what "phone number" would WhatsApp user send a message to when wanting to contact a person who is only in Messenger.
Company didn't give a clear timeline for the change, but it wont happen soon - it seems that the next year is most likely timeline for the roll out.
Facebook has been tipping its toes with the massive dating app market recently with its Facebook Dating feature, available in handful of countries. Now, company is expanding that business by launching a feature called Secret Crush.
With Secret Crush, one can tag up to 9 of his/her friends as the ones who the user is interested in. To limit the scope, the people added to the Secret Crush list must be either user's friends or friends of the user's friends.
People added to the list wont know about the addition ever, unless they also add the user to their own list. If so, both users will receive a notification from Facebook about the match. According to Facebook, the feature, announced yesterday at the f8 event, wont change the way Facebook newsfeed works, i.e. the people you've added to the lis wont appear more frequently in your newsfeed than without the list.
Secret Crush is part of the Facebook Dating feature, which has been available only in select few countries, including Colombia and Canada. Now the service is expanding to 14 new countries, but yet to the U.S. or any of the Western European countries.
Feature itself is simply a "power to the user" feature - it could be automated, as studies have shown that Facebook actually knows about your love interests before you do.
Robots are becoming more common in regular households, and robot vacuums are probably the most common example of that. While they are not even close to intelligent, or humanoid, they are somewhat relatable with all their faults.
Everything is electronic, or smart, these days. Well, everything except voting it seems. For years upon years electronic voting has been suggested as the fix to all election problems, yet here we are with hackable voting machines and cries about rigged elections.
Microsoft's Build 2019 developer conference launched yesterday, and company leads took the stage to introduce some of their new projects, and reveal updates to others, to kick it off for the developers.
