Technology news

Advanced Micro Devices is aiming for a comeback in servers with the launch today of its Epyc processors for the data center.
The AMD Epyc 7000 series is based on the company’s groundbreaking Zen architecture, and the chips will have as many as 32 Zen cores each. The move represents AMD’s most competitive attack on Intel’s core Xeon server chip business in a decade.
At an event in Austin, Texas, AMD was joined by multiple customers and partners who presented an array of systems,

You’re hot. Your partner is cold. It’s a classic story: one of you throws off the blankets in the middle of the night while the other is burrowed within them. But it defeats the point of sleeping next to your person — if you’re spooning through a duvet, you might as well hug a body pillow.
SmartDuvet, the company that first launched a self-making bed on Kickstarter, is now offering a second edition that lets two people adjust their preferred temperatures on their side of

Those who are waiting for the upcoming The Bard’s Tale IV will have something to tide them over in the meantime: InXile Entertainment just released The Mage’s Tale, a virtual reality role-playing game that takes place between The Bard’s Tale III: Thief of Fate (1988) and The Bard’s Tale IV.
The Mage’s Tale is available for $40 on the VR headset Oculus Rift along with the Oculus Touch VR controller. It’s also InXile’s first VR game, though it’s a ve

GUEST: Recently Sam Altman from Y Combinator announced a new online Startup School. It’s a 10-week massively open online course (MOOC). The idea is to teach everyone how to start a startup and help them along the way with guidance from people who’ve started companies.
Startup School will have guest speakers covering a wide variety of topics, including Alan Kay, Jan Koum (WhatsApp), Patrick Collison (Stripe), Steve Huffman (Reddit), Jason Lemkin (SaaStr), Harry Zhang (Lob), Dalton Cal

Keila Banks is only 15 years old, but she has a good message on work-life balance, and she’s running with it.
Banks gave a motivational talk on balancing work and life, or more like school and life, before hundreds of women at the Catalyst Conference in San Francisco. The event is expected to draw 1,000 people over three days on topics aimed at encouraging women in technology. Banks was an interesting choice for a speaker, but she is clearly living an accelerated life. And she had some acc

On the 20th anniversary of Batman & Robin, much has been said about the film’s legacy. As a piece of entertainment, the movie was widely panned by critics and fans alike; today, it still holds a 10 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But more enduring than any review score is the film’s true gift: the batnipples. Batman and his partner Robin both wore costumes that prominently displayed their headlights. It was, and it remains, an act of genius.
The costume choice now symbolizes t

We all feel like imposters sometime. We fail to internalize our achievements and feel like a fraud. At the Catalyst Conference, Airbnb’s Donna Boyer talked about imposter syndrome and how to get past it.
Girls in Tech’s Catalyst Conference runs through Thursday at Bespoke in San Francisco, and Boyer was one of the speakers talking to a crowd of hundreds about career advice for women in the technology business. Women are about 20 percent of staff at tech companies, and Catalyst aims t

Lenovo has some wild ideas to share. At an event in New York today, the company showed off its idea of the future of personal computing with an image of a bendable laptop with a flexible display; a built-in keyboard; and even the signature ThinkPad pointing stick, or mouse nub — whatever you want to call it. With this concept, most of the interaction would happen over voice commands or a stylus. Lenovo says that this concept would be achieved through “advanced materials” and &l

Indigo, which hits bookstores today, has a unique selling point: it’s a superhero novel written by 10 different authors. The book follows investigative reporter Nora Hesper, who moonlights as Indigo, a costumed vigilante who can jump from shadow to shadow. She’s on the path of a cult called the Children of Phonos, which has been murdering children in New York. While she’s killing the cultists, she learns something that makes her question her origin and memories.The authors behi

Cliff Bleszinski retired from Epic Games in 2012, after two decades making Unreal and Gears of War video games. Two years later, he started Boss Key Productions, and in 2015, he revealed LawBreakers, a first-person shooter set in a sci-fi universe. It’s a game where you can float through the air in areas where the laws of physics are “shattered” and players have to decide whether to uphold the law or break it.
Nexon will publish the game on August 8 on the PC and the PlayStatio

Spider-Man: Homecoming is due out in theaters on July 7th, kicking off the third solo Spider-Man franchise in 15 years. It’s a huge deal for the Hollywood studio system: Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures Entertainment share the rights for the wallcrawler, meaning Spidey can appear in major Marvel projects, while Sony develops its own franchise around the character and his supporting cast.
But there’s some confusion as to how all this will work in practice. Homecoming exists squarely i

A garbage can is a simple thing. Its only utility is as a place to store your garbage for a period of time before you move your garbage somewhere else. All a garbage can needs is depth, four sides, and, ideally, a lid. For most people, this is enough.
But maybe you are not most people. Maybe you are someone who prefers an elevated garbage can, like this $150 Cars 3-themed one from Simplehuman. The “Lightning McQueen Special Edition” steel garbage can holds 45 liters of things you wou

ANALYSIS: As Uber struggles to overhaul its turbulent workplace culture and improve a public image tarnished by a series of scandals, the company is also reaching out to a key constituent: drivers. Notably, Uber will allow drivers to accept tips from riders.
Uber is embarking on a 180-day campaign of what it calls “meaningful changes and improvements” for drivers. Starting today, in-app tipping will be available in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Houston, with the goal of expanding the fea

Last week, Neil Blomkamp released Rakka, the first short video from his experimental short film project Oats Studios. The alien invasion film feels as though it’s ready to be scaled up into a feature film, and is one of several that he will release this summer. However, those serious projects aren’t the thing that we’ll see from him, and the latest video is a good example of what else they have up their sleeves: a twisted infomercial.Indeed, the trailer for the studio promised

 There are white boards lining the walls covered in complex formulas and earlier iterations of the company’s robotic leg are scattered in pieces on and underneath tables. You can practically chart the company’s half-decade of development with a quick look around the room, from Caputo’s 2010 PhD work on robotic feet to its first product offerings: a pair of devices designed to… Read More

Google today announced it has started using the Brotli algorithm to compress Google Display Ads “whenever possible.” According to the company’s own measurements, this results in data savings of 15 percent in aggregate over standard gzip compression. In some instances, Google has even seen a savings of over 40 percent. The switch overall translates to a reduction of “tens of thousands of gigabytes” every day.
The savings only work if your browser supports Brotli, but

Samsung is planning to announce the Galaxy Note 8 in August, according to a new report from Reuters, citing a source that claims to be familiar with the matter.
The Reuters report also claims that the Note 8 will feature a dual-camera system and a slightly larger curved display than the Galaxy S8 Plus, which is in line with rumors from earlier this year. An August announcement would make sense, as Samsung has announced previous Note devices, including the Note 5 and the ill-fated Note 7, in a si

GUEST: Artificial intelligence and machine learning have made exponential progress over the past couple of years. While science fiction often portrays AI as robots with humanlike characteristics, AI can encompass anything from Google’s search algorithms to IBM’s Watson to autonomous weapons.
Leaders of the world’s most influential technology firms such as Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are showing their interest in AI and machine learning (ML). Here’s something G

If you’re paying for Twitch Prime, you’re going to be getting free stuff in Blizzard’s biggest games thanks to a new deal between the two companies.
Twitch announced today that it will have the exclusive third-party streaming rights for some of Blizzard’s biggest tournaments through 2018. As part of the deal, Blizzard is also giving Twitch Prime members in-game content for Overwatch, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. These are some of the most popular competitive

Twitch announced today that it has signed a deal with Blizzard Entertainment that gives the popular video game streaming site two-year, third-party live-streaming rights to some of Blizzard’s biggest e-sports events in popular games like Overwatch, Starcraft, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm.The deal doesn’t seem to include total exclusivity for Twitch, just third-party streaming-platform rights, so Blizzard will still be able to offer a first-party stream through its own site. A

In Apple’s latest ad for the Memories feature for iOS 10, your iPhone is an old man.
The scene opens with a Robert De Niro lookalike strolling through a vault of archives, rummaging through old photographs and films. The old man pieces together these memories from the past year of a young, Spanish-speaking mother’s life, including the recent birth of her daughter. She gets the video at the end. Crying ensues.
Apple is trolling me
Basically, what Apple is seemingly saying is that the

It took Sony almost two years to launch a media remote for the PlayStation 4, and when it did, the results weren’t exactly worth the wait. But now, two years later, accessory maker PDP has an officially licensed option that looks far nicer than Sony’s own official option.The aptly named “Media Remote for PS4” does pretty much what it says it can: it offers a simple remote control for navigating the PS4’s menus and media controls when you’re using it for things

Microsoft is using Cortana’s speech recognition smarts to bring dictation to the company’s Office suite. The new app is simply named Dictate, and it’s the latest project to come from Microsoft Garage, which is the company’s experimental software outfit. Dictate is more of an add-on than app since you really need Office to even use it. But once you install it, you’ll be able to talk aloud in Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint and have your words automatically transcribed

Do you tip your Uber driver? Uber has always prided itself on being a cashless experience, arguing since its inception that driver tips are only optional — and maybe even unnecessary. Even as its main rival Lyft bragged about the millions of dollars its drivers were collecting in tips, Uber stood steadfast against a growing number of drivers clamoring for tips. Until today.The embattled ride-hail company announced Tuesday that tipping was finally coming to the Uber app. Starting today, tip

Kodak announced back in February that it would be working with Archos to build its own branded Android tablets for the European market, and today we’re seeing the first glimpse of that with the Kodak Tablet 7 and the Tablet 10.Aside from the Kodak branding, the two tablets are pretty average budget Android tablets. Unlike Kodak’s Ektra phone, which leveraged the company’s photographic heritage by sticking an enormous camera sensor on the back, the tablets both feature fairly pe

Pods of killer whales are stalking the boats of Alaska fishermen and stealing their halibut catches, leaving the men with no fish and thousands of gallons of fuel wasted trying to flee.
It’s not exactly new that killer whales, also called orcas, can learn to recognize boats and then steal their catches. One article from the Journal of Marine Science traces the habit back to at least the 1960s, and complaints by Japanese fishermen. Now, though, the problem seems to be getting worse. The kil

The first four chapters of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone are available to stream for free, through Audible, to your Alexa, from now until June 26th. Narrated by English actor Jim Dale, this 90-minute excerpt of perhaps the most popular book series of our generation is being released in celebration of the launch of “the official Wizarding World Book Club.”The book club, from what I can glean, is essentially a Harry Potter subreddit, except it’s an official joint pr