Enlarge/ Scott Harris, Alabama’s State Health Officer, discusses his state’s vaccination data in his office on June 29, 2021, in Montgomery, Alabama. (credit: Getty | ELIJAH NOUVELAGE)
Medical professionals in Alabama are sounding the alarm over the monstrous surge of COVID-19 cases that is overwhelming the state’s hospitals—which are quickly running short on staff and space.
Currently, Alabama is reporting around 4,000 new cases per day. Medical experts in the Yellowhammer State expect that, sometime next week, Alabama will exceed its previous record in average daily cases, which was set in January at around 4,500 new cases per day.
Ghost of Tsushima‘s Iki Island expansion, included in the new Director’s Cut version of the game, presents an even better narrative than what we saw in the base game. The Director’s Cut, which releases on August 20, also brings new armor sets, a director’s commentary, and a digital art book. The PlayStation 5 edition costs $69.99, and the PlayStation 4 version is $59.99—though you can upgrade a PS4 copy of the base game to the Director’s Cut for $19.99. (Note: A co-op multiplayer mode was not available in the prelaunch review code.)
The Iki content is separate from the stories and characters of the original game, which took place on the mainland. Ghost of Tsushima‘s protagonist, Jin, is still the main character, and as he travels to the island of Iki, he encounters an isolated people who resent outside influence, especially from samurai like him.
Jin is viewed with suspicion, even as the Mongols—the primary antagonists of Ghost of Tsushima—continue their raids on Iki’s outnumbered pirate population. The islanders’ distrust of outsiders is explained as the plot unfolds, and the new material explores themes ignored by the original game. The expansion focuses on Jin’s propensity for violence and gives thematic weight to the frequent battles that result in ludicrous body counts. Ghost of Tsushima retains its brutal gameplay, but the narrative forces players to consider the downside of cutting down anyone who looks at you funny.
Workrooms participants can see who’s talking by way of visual cues—but those with two functioning ears can also identify speakers directionally, thanks to spatial audio processing. [credit: Facebook
]
On Thursday, Facebook launched Horizon Workrooms—its first major step toward CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s imagined metaverse, an all-encompassing alternate reality that blends the real world with digital imaginations and enhancements.
Zoom for nerds in goggles
This isn’t the most flattering way to describe Horizon Workrooms, but it’s not exactly inaccurate. The basic concept is that instead of videoconferencing with a webcam, participants use virtual reality gear—like Facebook’s own Oculus Quest 2—to meet up in a VR workspace.
We haven’t been able to run the app yet—my own Oculus Quest is an original model, sadly unsupported for Horizon Workrooms. (We don’t know why the OG Quest isn’t supported but suspect it has something to do with enhanced controller-less hand tracking on the newer model.) Two-dimensional recordings almost certainly don’t do the experience justice—they look like Habbo Hotel and Bitmoji got together and had a baby.
Enlarge/ The iPhone 12 mini. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Last year, the iPhone 12 mini flopped—a setback for lovers of small flagship phones designed for one-handed use. But as anyone who has been following Apple for years knows, former CEO Steve Jobs was an advocate for small phones. Now, thanks to an email written by Jobs in 2010, we know that Apple was at one time working on an “iPhone nano.”
This year, Epic Games and Apple have been locked in a legal battle over the future of the iPhone’s app ecosystem. During those legal proceedings, several emails sent within Apple over the years have been made public. Most of the press coverage about these emails so far has focused on various statements by Apple executives decrying sideloading, but we all knew Apple leaders’ feelings about that subject already.
Now, though, we’ve learned something about the company’s one-time product plans in an email first discovered and analyzed this week by The Verge. Jobs wrote and sent the email, which shows an agenda for an executive meeting about Apple’s 2011 product plans, in 2010. Here’s the relevant excerpt, with an explicit reference to an iPhone nano at the end:
OnlyFans today announced an upcoming ban on “sexually explicit” material in a move that will affect a large amount of the content that creators post on the platform. Nudity will still be allowed, but OnlyFans has yet to detail where it will draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable content.
Critics of the move pointed out that it will reduce income for sex workers who helped make the site popular. OnlyFans said in a statement that it is making the change “to comply with the requests of our banking partners and payout providers.” The new strategy also seems to be part of OnlyFans’ attempt to attract investors at a valuation of $1 billion, a project that has reportedly hit a roadblock because of the site’s racy content.
“Effective October 1, 2021, OnlyFans will prohibit the posting of any content containing sexually explicit conduct,” OnlyFans said in a statement the company provided to Ars. “In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans, we must evolve our content guidelines. Creators will continue to be allowed to post content containing nudity as long as it is consistent with our Acceptable Use Policy.”
The Federal Trade Commission has refiled its lawsuit against Facebook and has included additional data that it hopes will bolster its case.
The refiling is a response to the FTC’s initial case, which was thrown out in June by US District Judge James Boasberg, who did not think the agency provided sufficient data or a sharp enough definition of Facebook’s market in its first filing. Judge Boasberg also dismissed a similar lawsuit against Facebook brought by 40 states on similar grounds.
“No other personal social networking provider in the United States remotely approaches Facebook’s scale,” the FTC said in its lawsuit.
Enlarge/ It’s a bit too early for photos of Alder Lake-S CPUs, much less Raptor Lake-S—so here’s a gorgeous photo of an alder tree on the shore of Llyn Gwynant, in North Wales’ Snowdonia National Park. (credit: R A Kearton via Getty Images)
It looks like big.little CPU design—an architecture that includes both fast, power-hungry cores and slower, more power-efficient cores—is here to stay in the x86_64 world, according to unverified insider information leaked by wccftech and AdoredTV.
Intel’s big/little designs enter round two
At Intel’s 2021 Architecture day, the company confirmed that its upcoming Alder Lake (12th generation) processors will use a mixture of performance and efficiency cores. This brings the company’s discontinued 2020 Lakefield design concept firmly into the mainstream.
Big.little designs run time-sensitive tasks on bigger, hotter performance cores while running background tasks on slower but much less power-hungry cores. This architecture is near-universal in the ARM world—which now includes Apple M1 Macs as well as Android and iOS phones and tablets—but it’s far less common in the x86_64 “traditional computing” world.
Plot details have been scant to date for Eternals, Marvel’s forthcoming film based on the comic book series of the same name created by Jack Kirby in 1976. We now have the final trailer, and it’s a doozy: nearly three full minutes of mostly new footage, heavy on exposition and the striking CGI-heavy visuals Marvel is known for. The trailer also answers one obvious burning question: just where were these incredibly powerful eternal beings when all the action with Thanos wiping out half of humanity was going down? I mean, humanity really could have used their help.
As I’ve written previously, the comic book storyline tells of alien Celestials who visited Earth a million years ago, creating two divergent races—the Eternals and the Deviants—by way of genetic experiments. Those experiments were also responsible for the rare emergence of mutations in certain humans, giving them super powers. The Eternals protect the human race from the Deviants, and the two races engage in recurrent violent clashes. The Eternals’ immortality and powers come from cosmic energy and their ability to channel it. A new Eternals comic series was launched in January of this year, written by Kieron Gillen with art by Esad Ribić.
We know the film takes place after the events of Avengers: Endgame and that an unexpected tragedy will force the Eternals out of hiding to join forces with humans to fight their ancient enemy, the Deviants. An extended teaser dropped in May, set to a mournful cover of “The End of the World.” The teaser didn’t convey much information in terms of plot, but it did give us glimpses of our primary characters over the course of centuries.
More than 90 policy groups from the US and around the world signed an open letter urging Apple to drop its plan to have Apple devices scan photos for child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
“The undersigned organizations committed to civil rights, human rights, and digital rights around the world are writing to urge Apple to abandon the plans it announced on 5 August 2021 to build surveillance capabilities into iPhones, iPads, and other Apple products,” the letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook said today. “Though these capabilities are intended to protect children and to reduce the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), we are concerned that they will be used to censor protected speech, threaten the privacy and security of people around the world, and have disastrous consequences for many children.”
The Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) announced the letter, with CDT Security & Surveillance Project Co-Director Sharon Bradford Franklin saying, “We can expect governments will take advantage of the surveillance capability Apple is building into iPhones, iPads, and computers. They will demand that Apple scan for and block images of human rights abuses, political protests, and other content that should be protected as free expression, which forms the backbone of a free and democratic society.”
Nvidia’s purchase of ARM sure is taking a while, and today the company told the Financial Times it is unlikely to meet the 18-month regulatory window it initially laid out. The blockbuster $40 billion deal was announced in September 2020, and it would give Nvidia control of the world’s most popular architecture, used by Apple, Samsung, Qualcomm, Huawei, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and a ton of other companies.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told the Financial Times, “Our discussions with regulators are taking longer than initially thought, so it’s pushing out the timetable… It’s not one particular regulator, but we’re confident in the deal, we’re confident regulators should recognize the benefits of the acquisition.”
Nvidia is facing several problems with regulators. First up, regulators in ARM’s home country, the UK, have national security concerns. Bloomberg spoke with a “person familiar with the matter” and reports that “the UK is currently inclined to reject the takeover” as it currently stands. Of course, Nvidia could make some concessions to push the deal through, but Bloomberg quotes one analyst as saying investors have “low expectations” that the deal will go through.
Enlarge/ Amazon has experimented with physical retail for years, including this pop-up store inside a Whole Foods in Chicago, Illinois. (credit: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
Amazon is looking for its next conquest. After years of growth, most recently fueled in no small part by the COVID-19 pandemic that also has decimated physical retailers across the country, the company is reportedly planning to open its own department stores.
The move would represent a subtle shift in strategy for the e-commerce giant. Though it has experimented with its own brick-and-mortar locations, Amazon’s few-dozen currently branded stores tend to be small affairs that offer a selection of goods. Its largest customer-facing real estate, Whole Foods, came through an acquisition. If Amazon follows through on its department store plans, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, it would represent the company’s biggest ground-up push into physical retail, a flagging but still massive sector of the economy.
Don’t expect Amazon to follow in the footsteps of JC Penney or Macy’s, however. Rather, Amazon appears to be following a playbook similar to the one embraced by grocers Aldi and Trader Joe’s. Where most existing department stores are on the order of 100,000 square feet, Amazon’s stores will be about a third the size, with the first set to appear in California and Ohio. And like Aldi and Trader Joe’s, expect Amazon’s department stores to heavily feature Amazon’s private-label goods.
Alongside a sneak peek at their forthcoming Xe-HPG architecture, the other big reveal today from Intel’s consumer graphics group comes from the software side of the business. Along with preparing Intel’s software stack for the 2022 launch of the first Arc products, the group has also been hard at work at their own take on modern, neural net-driven image upscaling techniques. The product of that research is Xe Super Sampling, or XeSS, which Intel is pitching as the best solution yet for high image quality and low processing cost image upscaling.
The redesigned (but not totally rethought) Paint app, coming soon to Windows 11. [credit:
Microsoft ]
The latest Windows 11 app to get a coat of paint is Paint, everyone’s favorite meme-making sketching and doodling app. It’s not available for download for Windows Insiders yet, but Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay posted a brief video of the new design, showing off its updated look, a new dark mode, better text tools, updated brushes, and other tweaks that collectively serve to modernize the app a bit.
The new version of Paint stops far short of making it a full-featured photo editing app like Adobe Photoshop or even Apple Photos or Paint.net—you still don’t get layers or any advanced effects tools. But the Paint app as it stands in Windows 10 is barely changed from the Windows 7 version of the app, and Windows 7’s biggest contribution to Paint was the adoption of the “ribbon” user interface introduced in the then-current Office 2007.
For reference, the Windows 10 version of the Paint app (shown here in the current Windows 11 preview) looked a lot like the Windows 7 version. [credit:
Andrew Cunningham ]
Back in 2017, Microsoft briefly deprecated the Paint app, officially halting its already stalled-out development and proclaiming that it would be removed from the suite of default Windows apps in favor of the newer Paint 3D. But the app was saved from the Recycle Bin a couple of years later and given an under-the-hood update that improved screen reader support and added keyboard controls. The new update might not signal a renewed commitment to making Paint an actual heavy-duty image editor, but it does at least suggest that Microsoft will be less willing to let the current uncomfortable mix of Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 10-era apps continue to coexist in the Windows 11 era. The updated Paint app will be going out to Windows Insiders “soon.”
For Intel’s 2021 Architecture Day presentations, the yin to the CPU company’s traditional yang is GPUs. Intel has spent the last few years preparing to enter the market for discrete GPUs, with aims of competing in everything from consumer video cards up to HPC-class accelerators. And now, as the company already begins preparing for 2022, those efforts are finally coming to a head. Intel’s big breakout effort in the discrete GPU space starts in earnest next year with Xe-HPG and Xe-HPC, so for their 2021 architecture day, Intel is opening up a bit more about the GPU architectures that will be driving their first wave of high-performance products next year.
This week Intel held its annual Architecture Day event for select press and partners. As with previous iterations, the company disclosed details about its next generation architectures set to come to the market over the next twelve months. Intel has promised the release of its next-generation consumer and mobile processor family, Alder Lake, to come by the end of the year and today the company is sharing a good number of details about the holistic design of the chips as well as some good detail about the microarchitectures that form this hybrid design: Golden Cove and Gracemont. Here is our analysis of Intel’s disclosure.
This is the Genesis GV60, a new battery-electric SUV that’s due in 2022 from the luxury Korean automaker. [credit:
Genesis ]
In previous years, you could always count on Genesis to bring something cool to the New York auto show. That auto show should have taken place this week, but for the second year running, COVID had something to say about that. Which is a shame because this year the luxury Korean automaker would have shown off a new car far more interesting than another concept car (even one as cool as 2019’s Mint). That’s because this is no concept.
I’ve been waiting for Genesis to show off its first production electric vehicle, and this is it. It’s called the GV60, and it should go on sale in the US in 2022, underpinned by parent company Hyundai Motor Group’s new E-GMP platform.
Genesis hasn’t released any technical specs of the GV60 yet. But we know that the E-GMP platform—also used to build the Hyundai Ioniq 5 and Kia EV6—uses an 800 V electrical architecture, which makes it possible to fast-charge the battery to 80 percent in 18 minutes. A clever inverter also supports 400 V DC fast charging and bidirectional charging, using the EV’s battery pack to supply up to 3.5 kW of AC power.
Enlarge/ Having personal limits on carbon emissions might motivate more people to transition to lower carbon options. (credit: Mike Kemp / Getty Images)
In 2008, the United Kingdom’s government evaluated the idea of a personal carbon allowance (PCA) to help reduce emissions. In short, the effort would put caps on the amount of carbon each person could use as they heat their homes, purchase food, or travel to work. The government decided not to implement it, and since then, this climate strategy has largely fallen off the radar.
“[A]t the time, it was considered an idea ahead of its time. [PCAs] were considered as radical, and also not implementable due to cost and a few other hassles,” Francesco Fuso-Nerini, director of the Climate Action Centre at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, told Ars.
However, Fuso-Nerini and a team of researchers performed a meta-analysis of existing literature about PCAs and considered both climate change and the social and technological changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Arecent paper by the team suggests that it might be time to revisit the concept.
This is incredible (chilling?) video of Boston Dynamics’ Atlas robot doing parkour.
Parkour is the perfect sandbox for the Atlas team at Boston Dynamics to experiment with new behaviors. In this video our humanoid robots demonstrate their whole-body athletics, maintaining its balance through a variety of rapidly changing, high-energy activities. Through jumps, balance beams, and vaults, we demonstrate how we push Atlas to its limits to discover the next generation of mobility, perception, and athletic intelligence.
It’s truly amazing (terrifying?) that this isn’t CGI but actual physical robots doing this stuff in real life. Let’s just hope they find parkour to be more enjoyable than killing humans because obviously it’s just a matter of time before they get a taste of both.
Keep going for the video as well as a behind the scenes of how they’re teaching Atlas to do these beautiful (horrifying?) things.
Akihabara News (Tokyo) — The arcade and gaming business, led by firms such as Sega Sammy, has long been a staple of Japanese pop culture, but now arcade closures across the country threaten this traditional pastime.
Last November, Sega Sammy Holdings announced that it would be selling the majority of its shares in its arcade business to amusement rental business Genda Inc., explaining that this was largely about the impact of the Covid pandemic on its arcade business.
In the past year, Sega Sammy shuttered many of its most iconic arcades.
Most recently, the ax fell on the Sega Ikebukuro Gigo arcade, which had served as a popular tourist destination in Toshima Ward for 28 years. This comes just a year after the iconic Sega Akihabara No. 2 arcade was closed after after 17 years in business.
In both instances, the company cited Covid as the primary reason for the closures, as the pandemic prevented tourists from visiting Japan’s famous arcades. Japan residents too were restricted by early closing hours and lockdown restrictions.
In its latest financial report, the firm observed that “although the market has entered a recovery trend with a focus on prize category, facility operations have not yet reached a full-fledged recovery due to the impact from the spread of Covid-19.”
However, Covid alone is not responsible for the decline in Sega Sammy’s arcade gaming business.
The same report also notes that “the advance of digitalization has brought major changes to the market environment” as the “expansion of download sales for PCs, home video game consoles, etc., the emergence of cloud gaming services, and the diversification of platforms” have rendered the arcade business inconvenient and obsolete.
Even as the rest of the world moved on from arcade gaming by the 21st century thanks to the rise of the internet and consoles, Japan stood firm in its love for its arcades, with many of them becoming major tourist destinations prior to the outbreak of Covid.
But the decline has been structural and long term. While the size of the Japanese arcade market was actually growing in the years leading up to the pandemic, it had become dependent on so-called “prize” and “medal” games, which offer physical rewards to players, while cabinet video games themselves lost popularity.
Of course, he decline in video game arcades is not unique to Sega Sammy. Konami and Round One, have also reported financial losses, intensified but not caused by the pandemic.
In the latest issue of HackSpace magazine, Ben Everard tests whether a bit of kit from Spotpear can turn Raspberry Pi Pico into a games machine.
The snappily named Raspberry Pi Pico display 1.54-inch LCD by Spotpear ($11.89) brings in a 240×240 pixel IPS screen and ten buttons in a joypad-like arrangement. There’s four for direction, four for action, a select, and a start. At least, they’re labelled like this. You can use them for anything you like.
The buttons are just a bit too small and fiddly for us
To help you get started, there’s a short manual, which includes example code for MicroPython and C.
This example code is easy enough to use, but it is a little messy. The mechanism for controlling the hardware isn’t separated into its own module, so you’re left with either the task of building the library yourself or having slightly untidy code. Not the biggest inconvenience, but compared to how neatly some maker hardware companies manage their code, we found ourselves off to a disappointing start.
There are also some sample UF2 files included along with the C example code, but these appear to have been built for different hardware and work either partially or not at all. The actual example code did compile and work properly.
Impressive quality
When we ran the example code, we were impressed with the quality of the screen. With 240×240 pixels in just 1.54 inches, there’s a high pixel density that can give crisp graphics. Obviously, high pixel densities are a double-edged sword. While they can look great, it does mean higher RAM use, more time transferring data, and more data to process.
Fortunately, Pico is well-suited to the task of driving screens. Each pixel can take 16 bits of colour data, so a full-frame buffer is just 115,200 bytes. The display data is transferred by SPI, and Pico has a maximum SPI frequency of half the clock speed. For MicroPython, that means 62.5MHz. The actual data transfer rate is a little less than this because of overhead of the protocol, but we were able to drive full-frame refreshes at over 40 fps, which is plenty for smooth animations.
Pico slots in the back, which is perfect for space-constrained builds
Obviously, if you’re looking to do animations, sending the data is only half the story. You also need to calculate the frame before it’s displayed. If you’re using MicroPython, you are quite limited by the amount of processing you can do and still keep a high frame rate (though you could use the second core to offload some of the processing). With C, you’ve got much more scope, especially as you could potentially offload the data transfer using direct memory access (DMA).
Battery-sucking light
The one disappointing thing about the screen is that there’s no control over the backlight. According to the documentation, it should be attached to pin 13, but it isn’t. You can’t turn it on or off – it’s just permanently on, and quite bright. That’s a deal-breaker for anything running off battery power, as it will suck up a lot of power. However, if you want a display permanently on, this might be perfectly acceptable.
While we were quite impressed by the screen, we can’t say the same for the other part of the hardware – the buttons. They’re small, stiff, and have very little movement. The end result is a button that is hard to press, and hard to know if you’ve pressed it. They’re the sort of buttons that are commonly used as reset buttons as they’re hard to accidentally press.
We had hoped that this screen would make a good base for a games console, but unfortunately these buttons would just make for a frustrating experience. They might be OK for a menu-driven user interface, but that’s about it.
Another minor annoyance in this is the lack of any mounting holes. This makes it hard to embed into a project as the user interface.
We wanted to like this project. It’s got a good, high-res screen and a nice layout of buttons. However, the choice of components makes it hard to see how we’ll use this in our projects. We’re considering removing the surface-mount buttons and soldering wires onto them to make a more useful device, but if you’re going to go to that level of surgery, it’s probably better to start with a plain screen and work your way up from there.
