Blog

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ video offers a ‘deep dive’ on playing styles

[ad_1]

The developers stressed that there’s no fixed class system, and that you’re free to develop hybrid characters with their own specializations.

However you play, you’ll have to tread carefully. The video illustrates the possible consequences of choosing one faction over another, or your approach to the AI in your head (Johnny Silverhand, aka Keanu Reeves). Add branching storylines to this and there’s a real possibility that one playthrough will vary wildly from another. Whether or not this leads to satisfying gameplay is hard to say — there’s still a long way to go between now and Cyberpunk‘s April 2020 release.

[ad_2]

Source link

Samsung’s first mid-tier 5G phone emerges in leak

[ad_1]

The clips themselves don’t say much about the specs besides promises of existing Samsung features like extra-stable video and high-speed wired charging. A recent box leak suggests this will satisfy people who need at some brawn in their phone, though. The A90 5G will reportedly tout a 6.7-inch “full HD+” AMOLED screen, an octa-core processor (possibly a Snapdragon 855 in some regions) with 6GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and a 32-megapixel front camera. There’s ‘just’ one high-resolution rear camera with a 48MP sensor, hinting that the 5MP and 8MP companion cameras are there more for effects (such as depth of field changes) than anything else.

It’s not certain when the A90 5G will arrive, although these clips suggest Samsung is close to a debut. Just don’t expect the phone to be truly inexpensive. The A-series is usually more affordable than the Galaxy S or Note lines, but 5G still tends to carry a premium. It’s just that the A90 shouldn’t hammer your bank account quite so badly as its high-end counterparts.

[ad_2]

Source link

Instagram may help you curb DM spam on a public account

[ad_1]

Instagram’s current set-up still allows randos to send you a DM, though it shows up as a request you can ignore. This feature can presumably prevent them from messaging you at all. The setting will apparently appear under a new Messaging option in your Privacy settings. Based on Wong’s screenshot, it will even give you a way to choose who can add you to group chats.

This is just something the Facebook-owned social network is working on, though, and experimental features don’t always get released. As Wong notes, if you have access to Instagram’s Creator Account option, you can enable it to get access to an inbox with two tabs that lets you prioritize messages. Instagram gave influencers first access to Creator Account, but the feature’s support page says it’s “slowly rolling out as an option for all users…”



[ad_2]

Source link

Tariffs hit Apple and other tech companies tomorrow

[ad_1]

The tariffs will also affect a range of components, including cameras, flash storage, optical discs (like Blu-ray and DVD) and lithium-ion batteries. A further wave of tariffs affecting prices for phones, laptops, consoles and other tech is due on December 15th barring negotiation.

It’s uncertain if Apple or other companies will raise prices to compensate for the tariffs. Apple has historically maintained its profit margins whenever possible, but it also hasn’t had to contend with tariffs like this before. There may be pressure to swallow some or all of the added costs, though. Apple in particular is dealing with slowing revenue growth — preserving its margins might not help if the higher prices result in fewer buyers.

[ad_2]

Source link

Behind the scenes of Netflix’s ‘Dark Crystal’ prequel

[ad_1]

The creators of ‘The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance’ just loved throwing puppets
Liz Shannon Miller,
The Verge

Netflix’s Dark Crystal prequel series debuted this week, offering fans another look at the world created by Jim Henson and Frank Oz. The Verge caught up with executive producers Javier Grillo-Marxuach, Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews for a behind-the-scenes interview ahead of the streaming debut. There’s plenty of detail on the cast, the crew, the tech and “Olympic-level puppet-throwing.”

[ad_2]

Source link

The Morning After: Galaxy Note 10 review

[ad_1]

Good size, bad price.Samsung Galaxy Note 10 review

The Galaxy Note 10 squeezes a 6.3-inch screen and S Pen into a phone that’s about the same size as an iPhone XS. But, as Cherlynn Low explains, it makes tradeoffs to shave off those millimeters with less RAM, no microSD slot and a lower resolution display. The real problem, however, is that its $950 price didn’t drop to account for the missing features.

Oops.Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s account has been compromised, again

On Friday evening, Twitter suffered an embarrassing episode as its CEO’s account suddenly started spewing racial slurs and various taunts as hackers took it over. After cleaning things up, the company confirmed that Jack Dorsey was the victim of a “SIM-swap” attack, where someone took advantage of his mobile phone provider to steal his number. After that, all they had to do was text messages to Twitter’s 40404 number and watch them automatically post to his account.

Aluminium.Apple will replace some cracked Watch Series 2 and 3 screens for free

Apple has launched a screen replacement program for its wearable, because of a crack that can form along the smartwatch’s edges. It will swap broken screens with new ones free of charge for Series 2 and 3 aluminum devices, including Nike+ models, sold within a certain time period.

It would represent an ignominious milestone for spaceflight if true.Divorce dispute leads to accusation of crime in space

Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Worden and her family have filed complaints accusing Worden’s estranged spouse, astronaut Anne McClain, of committing a crime while in space. When McClain appeared to know of Worden’s spending habits despite an ongoing separation battle, Worden found that McClain had accessed their still-linked bank account while aboard the International Space Station — supposedly committing the crimes of identity theft and improper access to private financial records. It could possibly be the first crime committed from space.

Time to reminisce.The Atari Lynx’s 30th birthday gift is a bunch of new games

This weekend, to celebrate the 30th anniversary, the Lynx faithful could be treated to as many as ten new homebrew games thanks to a developer competition organized by AtariGamer.com.

But wait, there’s more…

The Morning After is a new daily newsletter from Engadget designed to help you fight off FOMO. Who knows what you’ll miss if you don’t Subscribe.

Craving even more? Like us on Facebook or Follow us on Twitter.

Have a suggestion on how we can improve The Morning After? Send us a note.



[ad_2]

Source link

Robots came for our jobs, then they came for our coffee

[ad_1]

Talking to Robots: Tales From Our Human-Robot Futures
by David Ewing Duncan

Book cover

We have no chance of escaping the coming robot revolution, nor should we want to. Our modern lives are already full of robots — they’re in our phones, our cars, hospitals and boardrooms, assisting everyone from factory workers to astrophysicists. They make our lives overwhelmingly better — that is, until one gets between a hungover human and their morning jolt of java.

In Talking to Robots, journalist and author David Ewing Duncan — with help from some of today’s leading scientific researchers — presents 24 visions of the future and what our personal and professional interactions might look like once robots finish taking over.

Coffee Delivery Bot

Waiting.

Waiting.

Cranky.

Need coffee.

It’s so early in the morning.

Need my hit of caffeine.

Now.

Wait, here it comes!

My holo-app has detected my incoming coffee delivery robot drone, designated as CoffeeBot-FRED.

It’s only 4.7634 minutes away.

Whew!

I track it on my 3-D GPS holo-app as the drone bobs and weaves. It’s looping around, using elaborate sensors to avoid literally billions of other drones buzzing through the sky even this early in the morning—huge driverless bus and car drones taking people to work, and Amazon delivery drones that range from the size of an old-style semi to the size of a hummingbird. All these drones zip, zap, and fly amid police surveillance drones, anti- surveillance drones, 1-800-FLOWERS drones, baby diaper delivery and pickup drones, birthday surprise drones, carbon monitoring drones, emergency condom delivery drones, and every other sort of robot drone for everything that humans do.

Once, before the Drone Age, people supposedly could see the sky uncluttered by buzzing, hovering flying machines. Back then, at this early hour just after dawn, they say you could actually see the sunrise—clouds dappled in orange, yellow, red, and pink glowing with the dawn. They could see sunsets, too.

I’m not kidding! You’ve seen the vids, and some of us have traveled to drone- free zones to see for ourselves.

None of this matters, however, as I lie under my covers, waiting, waiting, waiting!

Jesus. It’s still 4.7634 minutes away.

Are you fucking kidding me?!

Uh-oh, that did it. My agitation has generated concern with my iHealth X-700, which is monitoring all my health metrics (see “Doc Bot”). I get a small flag that pops up on the holo-dashboard floating above my head, informing me that my cortisol levels are elevated, and the flush in my face is increasing, though it’s undetectable by human eyes. Out of habit, I glance at the stress metrics on the holo- display, even though I don’t really care right now. Actually, they’re not that bad, just slightly out of range.

Shall I inform your iDoc bot? The words from my biometric monitor bot float in the air, appearing as a readout in soothing light blue and green letters and images.

I shake my head. It’s nothing a little joe won’t take care of.

Then I wonder: Am I addicted?

And just like that, an ad pops up for a caffeine addiction detection app. Amazon Bot Neural-Prime is offering it at 30 percent off if I buy it using Opti-Order Prime XT Deluxe, which allows me to select products and purchase them literally with a blink of my robo-enhanced eye.

I ignore the ad, not really caring if I’m hooked on joe.

“Come on,” I say out loud as I watch CoffeeBot-FRED hover in a holding pattern, waiting for a space big enough to fly through without smashing into other drones.

3.7633 minutes.

3.7632 minutes.

3.7631 minutes.

Great. A whole 0.0003 minutes closer—which of course isn’t accurate, since the drone has been obviously hovering and barely moving for something, like, five minutes. Why, for fuck’s sake, did these coffee delivery apps say a drone is just 3.7631 minutes away when it could be ten minutes until it actually gets here?

I verbally order my iHealth X-700 to stand down—and repeat the command for all my machines to go into sleep mode—machines that monitor not only my health metrics but also the air moisture and chemical content in my sky-condo, the weather outside, and much, much more. My holo-feed shows the ongoing data on these small dashboards that float in the air, ghostlike apparitions of displays and data glowing in pleasant colors that I can see through. My feed also displays a queue of waiting messages for me to read once I get my joe (most of them are stupid holo-ads), plus various news feeds that normally I like to read and watch. Right now, though, they’re driving me crazy with their gentle beeps and chirps.

“What part of ‘sleep mode’ didn’t you understand?” I say, realizing that my sarcasm is lost on most of these nonsentient machines.

But my bots should know that I can’t handle all this without my first coffee!

2.9335 minutes. A little better, even if the app shows CoffeeBot-FRED hovering again.

Wow, I just had a crazy thought. I hear that some people are buying old-fashioned coffeemakers that people used ages ago. Apparently, you actually grind the coffee beans yourself and put them into a papery thing. (What’s it called? A filter?) You then heat up some water and the machine makes the coffee for you.

No drones!

This is how people got their fix before coffee delivery drones, an idea, by the way, that originally came from an ancient computer company called IBM. In the early twenty- first century, they patented the first coffee delivery drone designed to deliver this luscious liquid directly into your cup or by lowering a cup of coffee using an unspooling string—both options still available today. The original idea was to have coffee delivery drones available just in offices, where workers could summon them with a wave of their hand.

The patents also detailed biometric systems on the drones that would measure facial expressions and other metrics that indicated whether a person ordering the coffee was tired and perhaps needed a strong blend, or if a person had reached their limit of caffeine and might become jittery and agitated if they drank more.

1.0001 minutes.

It’s almost here!

0.0022 minutes.

It’s here! It’s here!

I raise myself up on my elbow, still in bed, as I hear the drone portal in my roof open and shut and the low, steady, reassuring buzz of the tiny flying machine approaching.

“I thought you’d never come,” I say, careful to smile and sound friendly so the drone’s rating software will give me five stars. The drone’s holo-readout flashes back a smiley face.

The grinning drone hovers for a minute, its precious cargo dangling below it in warming pouches. It’s scanning my biometrics to gauge my disposition. I smile as best I can, barely able to contain myself I want that hit of caffeine so badly.

“We’re sorry, madam,” says the drone’s soothing voice, its holo-readout flashing an expression of concern, “but we detect a higher than nominal level of anxiety in your biometrics, which indicates that you should forgo full-strength coffee this morning.”

I’m irate as my own biometric readings floating in the air agree with the drone’s assessment. Traitors!

Of course, these are all mere suggestions. As a human, I have the final decision over what happens here. But a failure to comply with the machine’s recommendations could mean a less-than-five-star rating.
“How about a nice cup of decaf?” suggests the drone in a pleasant voice, smiling again, “or an herbal tea? Perhaps mint or chamomile?”

“Fuck that!” I erupt, and instantly regret it.

The drone shifts to a frowny face.

“Please, madam, there is no need to get further excited.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right,” I manage to say with a smile so fake that it almost certainly won’t fool the biometrics.

“I really would like a strong brew,” I say, knowing that this will impact my rating, but what the hell.

“If you insist,” says the drone with an even more frowny face, even as my iHealth X-700 begins blinking a stronger suggestion to inform my iDoc bot about my anxious state.

CoffeeBot-FRED hovers there for a moment as it begins to brew my order. Then it flashes an expression of sorrow with virtual tears flowing on its facial readout as it informs me that it’s actually out of strong-brew coffee. It apologizes for the inconvenience and for an apparent glitch in its sensor array that didn’t notice its strong-brew tank was on empty.

“I have just ordered another coffee delivery drone for you,” says CoffeeBot-FRED soothingly. “Please consult your app.”

And just like that, CoffeeBot-FRED zips away.

My hands are shaking as I check my holo-app and see that another CoffeeBot is indeed coming, CoffeeBot-FATIMA. The icon appears on my 3-D GPS holo-tracking grid along with another smiley face that says, “Your order is on its way!”

“Thank God,” I manage to mutter as I get an incoming holo-text from a very concerned looking iDoc bot that looks like Ellen Pompeo playing Meredith Grey from Grey’s Anatomy, which I refuse to accept. Ads for various meditation neural-apps and antianxiety nutraceuticals also pop up in my holo-feed, which I immediately blink away.

Then I see the time to delivery: 17.6533 minutes! CoffeeBot-FATIMA appears to be hovering amid the billions of drones, apparently not moving at all.

Excerpted from the book Talking to Robots: Tales From Our Human-Robot Futures by David Ewing Duncan. Copyright © 2019 by David Ewing Duncan. Published by arrangement with Dutton, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

[ad_2]

Source link

The right size at the wrong price

[ad_1]

But Samsung had to make some tradeoffs to shave those millimeters. For example, the Note 10 has a full HD display, which would maybe be excusable if this were a $500 phone or if it were 2016. But the Note 10 costs $950. And in 2019, pretty much all high-end phones have gone quad HD. Samsung also ditched the microSD slot here — something that has been a staple of the Note series since day one, and that power users will surely miss.

Yet the new, smaller phone isn’t meant for the average Note fan. With it, Samsung is trying to sell the S Pen to a larger audience — whether it’s people who find Notes too big or those who obsess a little less over spec sheets.

Most of the Note 10’s new features are the same as those in the Plus, and Chris Velazco has already gone over those in excruciating detail, so I’m not going to retread all of them. Instead, I’m going to focus on what makes the Note 10 different, and whether you should pick the smaller handset.

Samsung Galaxy Note 10 review

The importance of the S Pen

First, though, allow me to gush over the S Pen for a moment, since it is after all one of the biggest selling points of the Note series and is also why getting a smaller Note is a big deal. Back in the day, the stylus was really only useful for those who wanted to draw or write notes on their phones. Now, though, the S Pen is more than just a writing implement.

After adding Bluetooth support to the S Pen last year and turning it into a remote control, Samsung expanded the number of gestures you could use by giving the stylus a gyroscope and accelerometer. Instead of simply clicking once or twice to trigger actions, you can now swing the pen around to do things like switch cameras or zoom in on a scene from afar.

I really enjoyed having the S Pen as a wand-like controller for my camera, especially when my friend challenged me to a yoga pose-off where we needed to send each other pictures and videos of us beating the other at challenging poses. I was always too embarrassed to ask my friend to take a photo for me at the studio, plus I wanted to respect the privacy of my fellow yogis. I tried using my Pixel 3’s timer to capture my achievements, but even with the maximum 10-second window, I couldn’t get a picture of exactly when I had the right limbs up. The Note 10 came to the rescue — I got into position in my own time and clicked the button when I was ready, and I won the challenge. Yay.

It’s nice to have the S Pen in a device that fits in the snug pocket of my yoga pants, but that was a really specific instance where the Note 10 did something I couldn’t do with another phone. What you might use it for more frequently is to take digital handwritten notes. You can write on the Note 10’s face even when it’s asleep thanks to Screen Off Memo, which was a great feature when Samsung first launched it in the Note 5 in 2015. But with the Note 10, the company made it easier to sort through and make sense of your scribbles by improving its handwriting recognition system. All your notes are now automatically converted in the background and the words are indexed so you can search for a specific thing you scrawled and find it even if you hadn’t manually hit convert.

I wrote a list of things I had to do ahead of IFA 2019 on a Screen Off Memo and hit save. Later, I went into the Notes app and found the exact list by searching for “IFA.” This, more than the wand-like controls, felt like magic.



[ad_2]

Source link

New Telegram feature will protect HK protesters’ identities

[ad_1]

Telegram founder Pavel Durov even revealed shortly after the protests began a few months ago that its network was targeted by a DDoS attack. Most of the attackers’ IP addresses came from China. Since anybody can join group chats, protesters believe that authorities have been infiltrating their conversations and uploading large quantities of phone numbers to figure out who’s who. Once the app matches a number with a username in the group, authorities can request information on their real identity from their mobile provider.

Reuters‘ source said Telegram found evidence that authorities had used that method, but it’s not clear if it allowed them to successfully identify and locate protesters — and if it led to any of the 900 related arrests made thus far. Either way, Telegram’s update will allow users to protect themselves by disabling matching by phone number. The feature will make it harder to find each other on the app, but it’ll most likely be worth it for those who want to keep on taking to the streets despite the ban on demonstrations.

[ad_2]

Source link

8K Association lays out ‘key performance attributes’ for 8K TVs

[ad_1]

8K Association

They’re pushing this spec as a set of display performance for HDR, color performance and more that establishes what customers can expect when they see a TV with its logo, and are working on a compliance test.

  • Resolution: 7680 x 4320 pixels
  • Input Frame Rate: 24p, 30p and 60p frames per second
  • Display Luminance: More than 600 nits peak Luminance
  • Codec: HEVC
  • Interface: HDMI 2.1

Those are the publicly listed requirements, while details available to members include “8K Input Parameters (bit depth, frame rate, chroma sub-sampling), Display Performance (resolution, peak brightness, black level, color gamut, white point), and the Interface & Media formats (High Dynamic Range, codec).” We’ll need to see more of these TVs in action, but if you need a reason to upgrade that goes further than mere pixel and resolution count, then these specs may be key in pushing the new displays, just like HDR was for 4K sets when they began to appear.

[ad_2]

Source link