https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/08/tech/tencent-pubg-china/index.html
2019-05-08 12:41:00Z
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Don Giolzetti contributed to this story.
Amazon has announced the Blink XT2, the follow-up to Blink’s XT camera that was released in late 2016. The Blink XT2 is built with a new chip, which yields a longer two-year battery life via two lithium AA batteries, and enhanced motion detection over the original. Best of all, it costs less.
The Blink XT2 is now available for preorder at $89.99 per camera, each of which includes free cloud storage with no monthly fee tied to it. If you’re planning on installing multiple Blink XT2 cameras around your house or property, Amazon is selling a $99.99 bundle that includes an XT2 camera and a Sync Module, which is necessary for pairing the wireless Blink cameras together. Preorders will begin shipping in the US on May 22nd, and the new camera will be available in Canada later this summer. Best Buy will also stock the new Blink camera.
The XT2 looks almost exactly the same as the XT, and, similarly, the XT2 is weather-resistant (IP65 rated), and it can record 1080p footage. Amazon and Blink have incorporated two-way talk into the XT2, and it also works with Alexa voice commands. Beyond simple queries, you can see a live feed from your cameras on your Amazon Echo Spot, Echo Show, or Fire TV device by saying “Alexa, show me the [name of your camera].”
It’s still puzzling why the Blink cameras won’t integrate with Ring devices or even its own Amazon Cloud Cam. The XT2 actually competes directly with Ring’s own Stick Up camera. While the new features and lower price of the XT2 are appreciated, it doesn’t change the fact that Amazon has several players in the connected home space, yet they’re currently all at odds with each other.
Google has officially announced dark mode for Android Q at I/O and has updated the Material Guidelines telling developers how to properly implement the theme in their apps. But of course, there's always going to be some apps that simply won't receive a gray look, be it because it's abandoned or just not a priority to the developer. To test how the OS could circumvent these, Android Q beta 3 introduces a brute method that forces all apps into dark mode.
The feature is available in the developer settings or by searching for the keyword override force-dark (after first opting into developer settings, naturally). When the dark theme is activated, all interface elements on your screen receive intelligently reversed colors, similar to Chrome's experimental dark mode tests at the beginning of the year. For some apps, this ends up looking neither good nor functional, but take a look yourself.
As you can see, it's hit or miss for now. Bad examples include Telegram and Whatsapp, with both not really going dark, and Telegram's text becoming unreadable. But I like the way the Google app and Instagram look and hope for a similar official implementation soon. WebViews and Google Chrome remain completely untouched by this mode.
Right now, the forced theme also interferes with the standard white mode, as whites end up staying inverted here, too. This is the case for Google Feed, among others. Obviously, this feature is still a work in progress and might very well disappear or improve before Android Q launches later this year.
There’s more bad news for all you bleeding edge early adopters hoping to have one of the first folding smartphones to show off to friends. The Galaxy Fold has not only missed its original ship date, in a recent letter to those who pre-ordered the $1,980 device, Samsung now seems to have no idea when the Fold will actually see the light of day.
If you missed all the drama, it turns out there was a good reason why Samsung was hesitant to allow reporters to handle the Galaxy Fold after it was first announced. When a select number of Folds were sent to tech journalists for review, a host of concerning issues came to light, including flickering displays, screen protectors that shouldn’t have been peeled off, and physical damage to the flexible OLED display when small debris managed to find its way into the phone’s hinge. These were dealbreaker issues for a $1,980 device, and to Samsung’s credit, it delayed the Fold’s official launch to address them.
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FTC regulations require a company to ship a device that it made available for pre-order in the specified time frame, and if it can’t, it must contact the customers to allow them to cancel the pre-order, or request that they give their explicit consent to keep on waiting. For Samsung, that shipping deadline is now May 31. Anyone who pre-ordered and doesn’t respond by the end of the month (assuming the Fold isn’t released by then) will see their orders automatically canceled.
Samsung did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Droidlife has shared a copy of one of those pre-order letters that Samsung sent out earlier this week, which includes a giant link button for those who are still optimistic about the Galaxy Fold being salvageable. What the letter doesn’t include is any kind of estimated ship date, just a promise of future updates on the Fold’s status in a couple of weeks.
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As iFixit discovered on its deep dive of the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s guts, the design of the device’s hinge allows small dirt and debris to find its way underneath the flexible OLED display. Even a small speck can exert enough pressure on that display to physically damage it, requiring a complicated and expensive repair. How Samsung plans to resolve this flaw is unknown, but it’s clearly turned out to be a bigger problem than the company anticipated.
Update, 12:23 p.m. EST/EDT: A Samsung spokesperson has provided Gizmodo with the following statement on the continued Galaxy Fold delays:
“Samsung Electronics America is committed to keeping our customers informed on the status of their Galaxy Fold preorder. While we continue to make progress in enhancing the Galaxy Fold, a new release date has not yet been announced. Because of this, we have recently contacted our preorder customers to provide them information on their options as we move forward.
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As per U.S. regulations, we are required to notify customers that their preorders will be cancelled in the event the product has not been shipped by May 31st. Samsung Electronics America is offering customers an option to keep their orders past this date and customers may also cancel their orders at any time.
Samsung values the trust our customers place in us and want to thank them for their patience and understanding.”
Today at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, the Redmond company announced some major changes to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, as well as some improvements to Windows 10 command line with the Windows Terminal. Both expand the already robust ways to develop on Windows, and offer some fantastic features and additions.
Windows Subsystem for Linux has evolved dramatically since it was first introduced as a Bash shell back in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update in 2016. Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL, offered native support for Linux by translating Linux system calls into Windows APIs that could be executed by Windows itself, and the feature allowed developers that required Linux to install a distro of their choice and access its command line side by side with Windows.
While the translation layer added compatibility and ease of use, one area where it could stumble would be performance, so for Microsoft’s second iteration of WSL, Microsoft is adding a custom Linux kernel to Windows itself to handle to Linux APIs. It is doing this through virtualization, with Linux running in a lightweight Hyper-V Virtual Machine (VM) that is tightly integrated into Windows, which will allow for full system call compatibility because the Linux kernel will be responding to requests, rather than having them translated.
Although this is a VM, there will be no resources to configure, and launching a shell will only take a couple of seconds to get up and running. It’ll still be able to access the Windows file system to retrieve and modify files, just like WSL v1, but also provide the capabilities to run most Linux software, such as X-Server, Docker, and more, right in Windows. As a VM, it’ll have its own network card, although it’ll be set by default to be shared with the physical NIC in the host PC for now, although that may be changed prior to WSL v2 being formally released.
The Linux kernel itself will be a custom-compiled one for Windows based on 4.19, which is the current long-term stable branch, and kernel updates will be handled through Windows Update, so no user involvement will be required to keep the Linux system up to date by the end-user.
In addition to the added compatibility, the new virtualized Linux kernel brings some hefty performance increases for tasks that are heavy on system calls, with Microsoft seeing up to 20 times better performance with WSL v2 compared to v1 when unpacking a zipped tarball, and 2 to 5 tives better performance using git clone and other projects. Plus, you can still access and edit files with Windows utilities as well, and Microsoft has been adding support to the different end of line characters for Linux vs Windows in applications like Notepad.
If you use Windows Subsystem for Linux, these changes should be all good news. There will likely be some teething pains during the transition, but Microsoft is releasing this in June to the Windows Insider Program for feedback. That program hasn’t had a great reputation at finding bugs before release in the past, but it will allow people to get some hands-on time with the changes before they roll into production. Microsoft hasn’t officially stated what release this will be a part of, but it could be as early as this fall depending on how far along the team is and how the feedback goes.
The other major announcement today for the command line on Windows is a new Windows Terminal app, which brings some much-needed attention to the basic command line shells in Windows. Windows Terminal will be delivered via the Windows Store and offers a bevy of features that should make any command line guru excited, even if you never use Linux, although it does tie in nicely to the WSL. Terminal will offer tab support, allowing you to have multiple different shells open at the same time, including Powershell, command line, SSH, and more. You can just launch a new shell and pick when you hit the plus sign for a new tab. It also supports tab ripping, so you can move one tab to a new session or different session if you’d like
Terminal also brings with it GPU accelerated DirectWrite based text rendering, which allows for additional characters to be supported as well as symbols, which means yes, emoji are now supported in the command line. Although this may sound like something no one needs, Microsoft showed a simple test suite which leverages emoji for pass, partial, and fail, and I have to admit that is a smart use for symbols, offering instant color-based recognition for the various results.
Microsoft has also developed a new font just for Terminal which is open-sourced. It’s designed as a monospaced font for programming, so it’ll be nice it develop over time.
Windows Terminal will also allow for theming, as well as extension support, and it’s an open-source project so you can download it yourself right now and compile it if you want to get in early. For those that aren’t interested in compiling it themselves, the team hopes to have it available by summer 2019 through the Windows Store for preview, and winter 2019 as a launch target for Terminal 1.0.
Terminal will allow users to create profiles for each shell if they’d like to, allowing them to customize the experience depending on what tool they are leveraging. You can change the theme, font, blur, transparency, and more, making each shell unique so you know exactly what shell you are in at any time.
As someone who uses the Windows command line quite a bit, Windows Terminal looks like a breath of fresh air, and catapults the command line years ahead of where it is now. Microsoft has updated it with some nice features over the last couple of releases, such as resizable windows, easier copy and paste, and more, but they were running into issues where additional changes may break existing scripts, so rather than continue down that path, they’ve started fresh. The existing console will still be available for backwards compatibility.
If you are a developer, a system admin, or just someone who wants to tinker with Linux or various shells, today’s announcements are very exciting. It’ll be fun to give these changes a spin when released.
Source: Microsoft Blog
Later this morning, Google CEO Sundar Pichai will give us a glimpse of what's new and what's next for the tech giant at today's annual I/O developer's conference. It's where the company reveals product updates for Android, Assistant, Gmail and a slew of other services; We'll be on the ground in Mountain View, CA covering the latest, live from the keynote.
The focus of Google I/O has typically been the company's developments in artificial intelligence and software, but multiple leaks showing off the the Pixel 3a, Google's new low-cost phone, point to what will likely be a hardware announcement at the conference.
At the very least, expect to hear Google leadership extol the new features coming to Android Q, the latest version of its operating system. Google has also started adding more privacy-focused controls for its users' data, like the ability to automatically scrub your location data and web history and turning off Google Assistant voice recordings by default. We'll likely see more of that. It's possible that we'll also get a launch date for the new streaming gaming service Stadia.
At last year's event, Pichai unveiled the Duplex assistant, a voice bot that's creepily good at making hair appointments and restaurant reservations, and its new suite of digital wellbeing tools, aimed at helping people limit their screen time. Since then, the company has faced brewing internal turmoil. In August, employees organized to protest a project named Dragonfly, a controversial censored search app for the Chinese market. Then, in November, employees staged a massive walkout, protesting the company's handling of sexual misconduct in the workplace.
Stay tuned for the latest developments as we cover them here, and watch along starting at 10am PT on the Google Developers YouTube channel.