Author: kenmay

Lyft tests a new fixed-route ‘Shuttle’ service for commuters

Now that shared rides represent a sizable portion of Uber and Lyft’s business, both companies have been looking for new ways to expand their offerings while making the whole system more efficient and affordable at the same time. According to TechCrunch , Lyft is currently testing a new version of its shared Line rides called “Lyft Shuttle” aimed directly at commuters and riders who regularly take busy routes. As it’s only a test for now, Lyft Shuttle is only available in Chicago and San Francisco. Riders in those cities will see the “Shuttle” option while searching for Line rides in the app — but only if their pickup and drop off locations are close enough to one of the test routes. The service is only available during the morning and evening commute hours (6:30-10AM, 4-8PM), but the fares are a fixed price so riders can avoid surge pricing during rush hour. Uber tried a similar feature for UberPool called “Smart Routes” back in 2015 , and it still highlights nearby pickup points for shared rides, but the bus-like highlighted routes seem to have fizzled out. And unlike other services intended to cover long-distance commutes like Waze Rider , Lyft’s offering is meant for shorter trips within the city limits. In San Francisco, at least, Lyft will be competing more directly with Chariot, which runs private shuttles along popular commuter bus routes and handles ticketing through its own app. Chariot was bought by Ford last year and the automaker intends to expand to eight more cities by the end of 2017, so there’s definitely a market for this type of in-between service. Source: TechCrunch

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Lyft tests a new fixed-route ‘Shuttle’ service for commuters

App Store Sales For Android To Overtake Apple’s iOS, Research Firm Says

An anonymous reader shares a report: For years, Apple’s App Store, the place where people download apps for games and social networking services on their iPhones, has generated far more revenue worldwide than its Android competitors. This year, things are changing: The App Store will fall second to the amount of revenue generated by Android app distributors, predicts analytics firm App Annie. In 2017, the App Store will generate $40 billion in revenue, while Android app stores run by Google and other parties will generate $41 billion, App Annie said. That gap is expected to widen in 2021, with Android app stores generating $78 billion in revenue and Apple’s App Store at $60 billion in revenue, according to App Annie’s report released on Wednesday. The surge in revenue for Android comes from a growing number of consumers in China who are buying Android phones and are willing to pay for apps. In 2021, App Annie expects there to be eight Android smartphone users to every single iPhone user in China. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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App Store Sales For Android To Overtake Apple’s iOS, Research Firm Says

Jeff Bezos Is Now the World’s Second Richest Person

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Jeff Bezos has leapt past Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the world’s second-richest person. Bezos, 53, added $1.5 billion to his fortune as Amazon.com Inc. rose $18.32 on Wednesday, the day after the e-commerce giant said it plans to buy Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com. Bezos has a net worth of $75.6 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, $700 million more than Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Buffett and $1.3 billion above Ortega, the founder of Inditex S.A. and Europe’s richest person. Amazon’s founder has added $10.2 billion this year to his wealth and $7 billion since the global equities rally began following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president on Nov. 8. The rise is the third biggest on the Bloomberg index in 2017, after Chinese parcel-delivery billionaire Wang Wei’s $18.4 billion gain and an $11.4 billion rise for Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jeff Bezos Is Now the World’s Second Richest Person

The Matrix Voice is an Alexa for your Raspberry Pi

 Matrix Labs just completed a successful crowdfunding campaign for what amounts to an AI voice recognition system for the Raspberry Pi which allows you, a mere mortal, to make your own Alexa in your basement. Created by Rodolfo Saccoman and Brian Sanchez their first board, the Creator, fits right on top of a standard RaspPi and gives you an 8 microphone array, a temperature sensor, … Read More

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The Matrix Voice is an Alexa for your Raspberry Pi

This Elusive Giant Octopus Snacks on Giant Jellies

The giant deep-sea octopus Haliphron is so rare that marine biologists have seen it just three times in 27 years. Using a robotic sub, scientists have finally caught video footage of this animal at mealtime—revealing its distinct preference for gelatinous sea creatures. Read more…

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This Elusive Giant Octopus Snacks on Giant Jellies

Self-assembling wires could lead to faster processors

There’s a very real fear that processor speed upgrades will slow to a crawl as it becomes increasingly difficult to make denser chips. Don’t tell that to a team of researchers at MIT and in Chicago, though — they’ve devised a chip-making technique that could keep Moore’s Law relevant for a while longer. Their approach produces much finer wires by letting them partly assemble themselves, rather than relying on the very deliberate (not to mention slow) ultraviolet or scanning processes used to make chips today. The team starts out with the conventional process of using an electron beam to etch patterns on a chip, but that’s where much of the familiarity ends. The next step is to lay down a mix of two polymers that naturally separate themselves into patterns. When you place a protective polymer coating on top of those polymers, you force them to self-assemble in a dense, vertically oriented way that produces four wires where there would usually be one. There’s a long way to go before you see this method put into practice. Thankfully, it promises to be relatively simple. You could use existing chip lithography techniques, and it wouldn’t be difficult to add the coating process. This would use well-understood materials, to boot. As such, there’s a real possibility that companies could build very dense (that is, denser than 10nm ) chips without throwing out their current technology, leading to speed and energy improvements that once seemed unrealistic. Source: MIT News , Nature

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Self-assembling wires could lead to faster processors

Stealth update to enemy power causes an uproar in World of Warcraft

This patch announcement video fails to mention a massive change to late game enemy power hidden in the latest World of Warcraft update Keeping a massively multiplayer online game fresh and challenging for longtime players while simultaneously staying accessible and fun for lower-powered relative newcomers is always a challenge. In World of Warcraft , a hidden change to the way end-game enemies power up alongside players has unintentionally thrown that balance out of whack, and Blizzard is working on a fix. Shortly after yesterday’s release of Patch 7.2 for the long-running MMO, players quickly began noticing that high-end enemies were scaling up in power depending on the power of the gear the player characters were wearing. The specific power numbers involved seem to make it so that players could perversely make a fight easier by taking off their high-end gear and replacing it with slightly worse weapons and armor, reducing the enemy’s health and power greatly in the process. The change in how enemy scaling works took many players by surprise because it wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the extensive patch notes Blizzard released yesterday. Furthermore,  WoW assistant director Ion Hazzikostas spoke out specifically against this kind of gear-based enemy scaling in a Twitch interview last year . Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Stealth update to enemy power causes an uproar in World of Warcraft

Intel: Our next chips will be a ‘generation ahead’ of Samsung

Intel says that when its long-delayed 10-nanometer Cannon Lake chips finally arrive, they’ll be a “full generation ahead” of rivals Samsung and TMSC, thanks to “hyper scaling” that squeezes in twice as many transistors. That will yield CPUs with 25 percent more performance and 45 percent lower power use than its current Kaby Lake chips when they ship towards the end of 2017. Furthermore, Intel thinks the tech will keep Moore’s Law going and give it a 30 percent cost advantage over competitors like AMD. These are bold words, particularly since its chief rival Samsung is already producing 10-nanometer chips like the Snapdragon 835 , the world’s hottest mobile CPU. However, Intel says that while the chip trace sizes are the same, it has better feature density, letting it squeeze in twice as many transistors as chips from Samsung. That in turn produces smaller die sizes, which “allows Intel to continue the economics of Moore’s Law, ” the company explains in a PowerPoint . Down the road, Intel will also release enhanced 10-nanometer tech called 10+ and 10++. To be sure, that’s mostly marketing-speak that will help it keep consumer’s attention until 7-nanometer chips come along. However, the refinements will offer a further 15 percent performance and 30 percent efficiency boost, it says. Intel laid out all this chip info as part of its Technology and Manufacturing Day yesterday, probably to sooth buyers and investors. Not only did Samsung and Qualcomm beat it to the punch for 10-nanometer chips, AMD also unveiled Ryzen processors that could eat into both its high- and low-end PC markets. However, Intel sounds pretty confident about its next-gen chips and beyond. It’s planning on building 10-nanometer chips for three years before moving on to 7-nanometer tech, about the same cycle length as its current 14-nanometer chips. “We are always looking three generations –- seven to nine years — ahead, ” says Intel Executive VP Stacy J. Smith. “Moore’s Law is not ending at any time we can see ahead of us.” Source: Intel (PDF)

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Intel: Our next chips will be a ‘generation ahead’ of Samsung

NBC will finally air all of the Olympics live, across time zones

Today NBC announced that for the 2018 Winter Olympics, it will finally back off of its hated policy of tape delaying significant portions of the games. In 2016, it streamed much of the competition live, but segments like the Opening Ceremony and each day’s prime time programming got the tape delay treatment on TV. In a world connected in real time by phones, Facebook and Twitter, splitting up viewers makes less sense than ever, and NBC is finally acknowledging that instead of just pointing to the ratings or encouraging that viewers ” move back east .” Ratings for the 2016 Olympics dropped 18 percent from the 2012 London games, and going live everywhere could help turn that around. With the 2018 event occurring in PyeongChang, South Korea, big events that are scheduled to take place in the morning there will happen during the prime time window on the East Coast of the US. Rather than forcing viewers to jump on the internet to watch events live, going all live on TV could boost those ratings back up in the place where advertisers are paying the most money. NBC will kick off its evening lineup simultaneously at 8PM ET, 7PM CT, 6PM MT, and 5PM PT, with a break for local news and then the “Primetime Plus” package in all areas. The network has already signed up for Olympics broadcasts rights through 2032, however, exec Jim Bell would only tell the LA Times that it is “likely” to continue the all-live broadcasts for Tokyo 2020 and Beijing 2022. Source: NBC

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NBC will finally air all of the Olympics live, across time zones

Windows 10 Creators Update starts rolling out on April 11th

Windows 10 users won’t have to wait much longer to get their hands on Paint 3D . Microsoft announced today that the upcoming Creators Update for the OS will be available starting on April 11th. As usual, though, Microsoft is staggering the rollout so it doesn’t inundate every Windows user (and its servers) at once. Windows 10 desktop users will have their go at it first, and afterwards it’ll head to laptops and mobile devices. The Creators Update is a big deal for a few reasons: It’ll introduce Paint 3D, Microsoft’s new 3D creation app that’s simple enough for children to use. And it packs in some useful new features like Game Mode , which devotes more system resources to games, ensuring better overall performance. There are also some helpful Edge upgrades , like the ability to preview tabs and file away collections of tabs for later use. The Creators Update won’t make Windows 10 look much different, but it should hopefully make it a much more useful OS.

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Windows 10 Creators Update starts rolling out on April 11th