All the fallout surrounding Britain’s historic decision to leave the European Union is still being sorted out. But a brand new piece of bad news for Brits is that OnePlus’ new phone, the surprisingly great OnePlus 3
, may get a price hike in the UK. Not because of any strong EU bias or anything, but because the British pound is currently garbage.
Source: Gizmodo – One of the Best Cheap Phones Might Get a Price Hike Thanks to Brexit
MSI is proud to add AMD’s latest Radeon™ RX 480 to its graphics card lineup. The new Polaris architecture combines the latest FinFET 14 process technology and AMD’s advanced power, gating and clocking technologies for a superior cool and quiet gaming experience. The new 14nm process allows for an impressive increase in efficiency, providing 2.5 times more performance per watt over the last generation.
Get ready for a whole new level of gaming at 1440p where powerful Async shaders and new geometry capabilities enable unique support for DirectX® 12 and Vulkan™ in the best version of Graphics Core Next yet. Every PC gamer knows how incredibly smooth gaming can be at a steady 60+ FPS. Now you can have that polished experience at virtually any framerate with AMD FreeSync™ technology. Radeon™ GPUs based on the Polaris architecture are a dream for streamers. Support for H.265 video compression enables streaming at up to 4K at 60 FPS with virtually no performance impact.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – MSI Starring New Polaris-Based Radeon RX 480 Graphics Card
The second season of Zoo, CBS’ bonkers thriller about a global animal uprising, premiered last night with a double episode. Not only did this mean more globe-trotting for our fearless team (who now have a super-swanky plane), but a “phase two mutation” may be out there, making the animals crazier than ever.
Source: io9 – Zoo Is Back and It’s Somehow Even More Ridiculous Than Ever
What’s not not to love about VLC Media Player? It’s free, lightweight, intuitive, and plays damn never every file format
under the sun. Now, a long-awaited beta is finally available for Windows 10 users. It’s okay to nerd out a little bit.
Source: Gizmodo – VLC Is Finally Available for Windows 10
Butter makes everything better, but browned butter makes everything more complex and sophisticated. When used in Rice Krispies Treats it tempers the cloying sweetness of the marshmallows and adds depth and nutty goodness.
Source: LifeHacker – Upgrade Your Rice Krispies Treats with Browned Butter
It’s no secret that Amazon’s Fire Phone tanked on the market. But while the e-commerce giant is keeping a distance from smartphone manufacturing business for some time, it is not ignoring the platform. The company is now willing to offer its Prime members a $50 discount on two unlocked phone models should they agree to see ads on the lock-screen of their smartphone. Recode reports:Unlike the Fire Phone, which used Amazon services in place of Google, these two phones (the fourth-generation Moto G and Blu R1 HD) will include all the standard Google apps (Play Store, YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, etc.) along with Amazon apps for shopping, watching video and playing music. With the discount, the Blu phone will sell for just $49, while the price of the Moto G drops to $149. The move is clearly a modest one but could at some point become more significant, particularly if Amazon is willing to strike deals with other hardware makers to include its apps and services.The bigger news is Amazon finding its way into Google Mobile Services-powered Android smartphones. Most of the Amazon-branded devices don’t have Google Mobile Services (Google Play, Google Play Services, Gmail etc).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Amazon Prime Will Knock Off an Android Phone If You Watch Amazon’s Lock-Screen Ads
Engadget is re-reviewing the current generation of game consoles, each of which has benefited from major firmware updates, price drops and an improved selection of games. We’ve already revisited the Xbox One, and now it’s the PlayStation 4’s turn. Th…
Source: Engadget – The PlayStation 4 revisited: Small improvements for a solid system
In the photo above we see a videophone (or picturephone
as they were sometimes called at midcentury) being demonstrated at the International Radio Exhibition in Stuttgart, West Germany in 1965. The weird part? The woman in the photo is apparently not even bothering to look at the person she’s speaking with.
Source: Gizmodo – Wait, Why Isn’t She Looking at the Dude?
Jane’s Carousel is one of the most iconic carousels in the world, but few people know it’s crazy backstory. Prior to arriving at its new home in a $9 million glass box facing the Manhattan skyline, the carousel sat in Isadora Park in Youngstown, Ohio, where it was constructed in 1922. So how the hell did it end up in Brooklyn?
Source: Gizmodo – Take a 360-Degree Tour of One of The Most Expensive Carousels in the World
It’s no secret that algorithms can be biased against certain demographics, but the American Civil Liberties Union wants more proof — and it’s willing to go to court to get it. The organization has sued the US in the belief that the Computer Fraud an…
Source: Engadget – ACLU sues US over law limiting data discrimination studies
Conexant on Wednesday introduced its third CODEC for upcoming digital headsets using a USB Type-C interface. The new CX20888 chip is specifically tailored for headsets and supports a variety of advanced features, such as a headphone amplifier, active noise cancellation, sampling rates up to 96 kHz and so on. The company unveiled the product at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai in a bid to attract the attention of Chinese makers of consumer electronics.
The Conexant CX20888 is built around an ARM Cortex-M0 controller core (clocked at 50 MHz) and is equipped with two 32-bit Conexant DSPs (both clocked at 100 MHz) with floating point assist—bringing the total compute power of the DSPs to 400 MIPS—as well as 504 KB of SRAM that’s shared between the M0 core and the DSPs. The CODEC also incorporates a variety of interfaces for peripherals, including two I2C master (or master + slave) interfaces, one I2S interface, one SPI, two multi-rate timers, a self wake-up timer, four monitor ADCs (to enable volume control, temperature sensor and battery monitor), two stereo PDM digital microphone interfaces, S/PDIF input and up to 28 GPIO pins.
Conexant utilizes the processing capabilities, as well as rich I/O features of the CX20888, to enable such functionality as low-latency active noise cancellation (eliminating up to 30 dB of external sound with a range of up to 3.8 kHz), acoustic echo canceling, equalization, microphone automatic gain control, volume control and others. The chip also supports a wake-on-voice trigger, which is important for enablement of services like Cortana that can listen to what is happening in its surroundings while the OS is in sleep mode.
To enable high-quality audio output, the CX20888 contains one 24-bit stereo ADC (97 dB dynamic range) and one 24-bit stereo DAC (104 dB dynamic range), supporting sampling rates between 8 kHz and 96 kHz. In addition, the chip incorporates a class-H headphone amplifier as well as programmable microphone preamplifiers with dedicated bias to prevent crosstalk. Because power circuitry is important for audio devices, the CX20888 has an integrated DC-DC converter with power switches and dynamic voltage scaling to ensure quality of output while keeping power consumption under control.
Like other USB-C Digital Audio solutions announced so far, the CX20888 supports USB 2.0 bandwidth, which should be plenty for audio and smart functionality. It also auto switches between CTIA and OMTP headsets if used inside a docking station.
Conexant tells us that the CX20888 is the industry’s only single-chip solution with such feature-set, which is suitable for digital USB-C headsets. The company naturally does not reveal the exact price of its solution, but claims that the chip reduces BOM costs of headsets because of its high level of integration. As for form factor, the CX20888 comes in 5×5×0.5 mm 81-pin BGA package and is small enough for a variety of designs.
Intel made a number of proposals for its part in the USB-C Digital Audio specification earlier this year and Conexant expects billions of people to adopt headsets and smartphones with a USB-C interface in the coming years (to support the transition of audio devices to USB-C, Conexant introduced two appropriate codecs earlier this year). The new interface is projected to improve the quality of headsets and expand their functionality by adding features, such as temperature sensors or noise cancellation technologies, but these depend entirely on decisions of actual hardware makers and not the standard itself. On paper USB-C Digital Audio enables a lot, but we will have to wait and see how it takes shape.
Source: AnandTech – Conexant Reveals CX20888: A New Chip for USB-C Headsets with Advanced Functionality
More than almost anything in the world, we want the 2018 Han Solo movie to be great. On paper, it’s a terrifying idea to solidify a backstory for such an iconic character, but at least one person assures us the script is amazing (although he probably has to say so).
Source: io9 – The Han Solo Movie Has the Best Star Wars Script Ever, Says Star Wars Employee
This is the footage of a napping great white shark captured for the first time ever by a robotic submersible. Apparently great white sharks sleep-swim against the current with their mouths open. You know the nice thing about being a great white shark is? You don’t have to worry about running into anything more dangerous than yourself when you’re sleep-swimming. Merpeople aren’t so lucky. I heard one of Ariel’s sister’s boyfriends sleep-swam straight up a whale’s butthole and has never been seen again.
Keep going for the video.
Source: Geekologie – Great White Shark Caught Napping On Video For First Time
Bad idea: trying to use a crane to lift a water tank before checking if it’s empty or not. You can see the crane’s arm begin to buckle under the weight of the tank and then watch it totally collapse as it drops the tank onto the side of the building and flips itself off the ground.
Source: Gizmodo – Watch a Crane Totally Collapse After Trying to Move a Water Tank
Google Now
offers a wide range of voice commands designed to work with your natural language, but it can help to know exactly what the virtual assistant is capable of understanding. That’s where OK Google comes in—it’s a growing, searchable list of every known Google Now command.
Source: LifeHacker – Learn New Google Now Commands With OK Google
Imagine a future full of electric cars where everyone’s a passenger. Where traffic is not only managed but controlled by a digital network. Where on-demand ride-sharing services have become the norm, and the only human drivers are emergency crews behind the wheel of super-fast vintage “antiques” tasked with taking down AI cars that have gone haywire.
Source: Kotaku – This Obscure Anime Predicted So Much About The Future Of Cars
Stanford scientists find a ‘water windfall’ deep underground; its viability as a resource is problematic, its protection is essential.
Source: TreeHugger – Will California start drilling deep for water?
Reader itwbennett writes: Security vendor FireEye said on Tuesday that malware that can spoof the user interfaces of Uber, WhatsApp and Google Play has been spreading through a phishing campaign over SMS. Once downloaded, the malware, which has struck Android users in Denmark, Italy and Germany, will create fake user interfaces on the phone as an ‘overlay ‘s top of real apps. These interfaces ask for credit card information and then send the entered data to the hacker.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Android Malware Pretends To Be WhatsApp, Uber and Google Play
At last, VideoLAN’s VLC media player has a universal Windows 10 app… and it definitely won’t be confined to conventional Windows devices for long. The developer has released a Windows 10 beta that, on a base level, embraces Microsoft’s modern OS o…
Source: Engadget – VLC media player hits Windows 10 today, Xbox One this summer
