LAS VEGAS — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes in technology. But that doesn’t extend to believing autonomous driving is happening soon. Wozniak, now 69, says autonomous cars that don’t need a backup driver on board probably won’t happen “in my lifetime.” One culprit: Artificial intelligence probably isn’t intelligent or flexible enough to be better than even the worst drivers. Wozniak was a keynote speaker at the first J.D. Power Auto Revolution conference, which the company set up to “fuel innovation and drive an auto revolution,” with a bit less emphasis on the how-to of selling and marketing cars than some other Power programs.
Camera maker RED garnered attention a few years back when it announced it would release its first Android smartphone. Who wouldn’t want a RED-style camera in a smartphone? However, building phones turned out to be much harder than RED anticipated. After promising a revamped RED Hydrogen phone several months ago, company founder Jim Jannard now says he’s retiring, and the Hydrogen project will shut down. RED started taking pre-orders for the Hydrogen One in late 2017 with prices starting at $1,300. That was just for aluminum — the titanium version was a whopping $1,600. The company talked up the “4-View” holographic display, successfully creating a mystique by refusing to let anyone even photograph the phone from the front during early hands-on events.
Walmart kicked off the end of this week by releasing several excellent deals on laptops, TVs, and game console bundles. Vizio’s E65-F1 smart TV measures 64.5 inches diagonally and features full support for HDR10, which creates superior images on-screen with more vibrant colors. It also features a 120Hz refresh rate and it can dim 12 sections of the screen independently in an attempt to improve black levels and decrease light bleeding. Marked down from $798.99 to $499.99, you can get this TV from Walmart. This budget-friendly computer comes with an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U dual-core processor that operates at speeds of up to 3.5GHz.
Nuclear power could become increasingly important as the world continues to combat climate change, but atmospheric carbon isn’t the only existential threat to the future of humanity. The waste produced by nuclear power is dangerous for millions of years, and no one can decide what to do with it. Nobel laureate Gérard Mourou is using his notoriety to call attention to an interesting solution. Mourou believes that it may be possible to transmute nuclear waste into a safer form. This isn’t medieval alchemy, though. It’s . Mourou shared half of the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics with Donna Strickland.
Just when you think you’ve got a great mobile computing solution, something always comes along to upset the apple cart. In my case, it was mostly drones — more specifically, the 4K footage from my Mavic Pro drones. In addition to the added compute demands of rendering and encoding 4K video, consumer drone footage benefits mightily from substantial post-processing to reduce noise, correct artifacts, and perform color grading. My two-year-old Dell XPS 15 9560 has been a great workhorse for photo and video editing but has been limited by its 4-core CPU and thermal issues (even after I hacked on it with various thermal fixes).
In 2017, scientists around the world were excited by the news that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) project had detected gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars. This discovery confirmed a pivotal prediction of general relativity, and eventually earned . A new study now says this cataclysmic event may also have solved the mystery of . An analysis of the light from this event found strong evidence of strontium, which is too heavy for stars to produce through fusion. If you remember your high school chemistry, you’ll recall there are more than 100 known elements, most of which occur naturally in the universe.
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The 2019 Tokyo Motor Show is about what you’d expect: cars for the specific needs of a densely populated country with few onshore energy resources. Thus, lots of electric vehicles, small cars, really small cars, and retro car concepts that look odd to American tastes that same way Plymouth’s PT Cruiser looked to Japan when it came out in 2000. Every Asian auto show targets trends not fully embraced by American shows, such as the need for greater efficiency through battery power or as plug-in hybrids. Or as scooters and motorbikes. The Tokyo Motor Show is Japan’s top car show and competes with Auto Shanghai (odd years)/Auto Beijing (even years) in April.
Last year, at Intel Architecture Day, the company unveiled a unique chip called Lakefield. Lakefield blends a single high-end Ice Lake CPU core with four low-power cores built on a new iteration of Intel’s low-power architecture, codenamed Tremont. This is the first time we’ve seen Intel debut a blended CPU with cores from the Atom and Core families sharing space on the same silicon. Lakefield is connected together via Intel’s 3D Foveros interconnect and is intended for products like the recently announced dual-screen Surface Neo. From 2008 to 2011, Intel’s Atom product line kept the same architecture and focused on lowering power consumption.
