Month: January 2016

We walk through CES so you don't have to. Video shot/edited by Nathan Fitch. (video link)

LAS VEGAS—Is CES the world's largest trade show? To this author, it certainly felt like it. In my past life as a scientist, I used to attend massive scientific and medical conferences like the American Heart Association's annual meeting, and in recent years, I've been going to the major auto shows. But the monster that takes over Sin City for the first week in January each year dwarfs all of those by at least an order of magnitude (attendance was apparently capped at 176,000). We put together this short video to give you just a tiny flavor of the event.

CES is spread out over the Las Vegas Convention Center and several of the larger hotels, and its purview runs the gamut from laptops and computer bits to TVs, home appliances, drones, toys, and in recent years, cars (which explains my presence at the show). The consequence of all that is that you'd better be prepared to fight your way through a gigantic scrum of humanity in to get where you need to go, and about 80 percent of the show could well be completely irrelevant to your interests.

In 2012 Lenovo released the Thinkpad X1 Carbon as part of Intel's Ultrabook initiative. It was thin, it was light, and it boasted Levovo's excellent build quality and reliability. Windows users jealous of the MacBook Air finally had a thin-and-light to call their own. Around about the same time Dell updated to its own business line of notebooks, the best of which was the Dell Latitude E6430s. While it managed to cram a 14-inch screen into a 13-inch chassis, it was hardly a desirable laptop. At 2.68cm thick (it still had an optical drive) and around 2kg when kitted out with a much-needed 6-cell battery, it wasn't exactly a particularly portable one either.

A year later, in September 2013, Dell founder Michael Dell and a group of investors from Silver Lake succeeded in taking the company private in one of the largest corporate privatisations in history. While there's no doubt that a slowing PC market had plenty to do with its falling share prices at the time, it was clear Dell's product range had fallen behind the times, despite some success in the consumer market with the XPS 13. It was a pretty bold move, considering Dell had been a public company for 25 years.

"We find ourselves in a world increasingly afflicted with myopia—governments that can't see beyond the next election, an education system that can't see beyond the next round of standardised tests, and public financial markets that can't see beyond the next trade," wrote Michael Dell in the Wall Street Journal in 2014. "This was what Dell faced as a public company. Shareholders increasingly demanded short-term results to drive returns; innovation and investment too often suffered as a result. Shareholder and customer interests decoupled."

Intel has confirmed that its Skylake processors suffer from a bug that can cause a system to freeze when performing complex workloads. Discovered by mathematicians at the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS), the bug occurs when using the GIMPS Prime95 application to find Mersenne primes.

"Intel has identified an issue that potentially affects the 6th Gen Intel Core family of products. This issue only occurs under certain complex workload conditions, like those that may be encountered when running applications like Prime95. In those cases, the processor may hang or cause unpredictable system behaviour."

Intel has developed a fix, and is working with hardware partners to distribute it via a BIOS update.

The star of the show, and some of the men behind the 'bot.

DULLES, Va.—Regular watchers of the annual Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) video game speedrun marathon are probably intimately familiar with the power of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot). Two years ago, the emulator-fueled bot used its controller-port interface to write a simple version of Pong and Snake on top of a running Super Mario World cartridge. Last year, TASBot outdid itself by using a copy of Pokemon Red and a Super Game Boy to force a live, IRC-based Twitch chat through an unmodified Super Game Boy.

By now, simply taking over a game and replacing it with a brand new app was beginning to feel a little predictable. So this year, TASBot decided to show off a new skill. At the AGDQ marathon, the bot set out to edit new features onto a game that's still running in active memory. TASBot wanted to be magnanimous with its new capabilities, too, allowing human players (and livestream viewers) the opportunity to edit the game on the fly.

But just how did TASBot—and the team of coders behind it—intend to turn an old game of Super Mario World, running on a standard SNES, into a heavily editable game of Super Mario Maker? Luckily, we had a behind-the-scenes invite to the event and the opportunity to find out.