Month: March 2016

For the time being, we'll use this picture of Sony's actual 4K media server as a stand-in for a still conceptual "PlayStation 4K."

Kotaku caused quite a stir late last week when it reported via unnamed development sources that Sony is preparing to roll-out an enhanced "PlayStation 4.5" capable of displaying games at 4K resolutions. Those rumors got a boost in credibility today, as Digital Foundry has "independently established that it's real and that Sony's R&D labs have prototype devices."

The updated console, which is being referred to as the PlayStation 4K by multiple Digital Foundry sources, should be able to play non-interactive Ultra HD media in a variety of forms and offer features like high-dynamic range and expanded color depth that are part of industry-set Ultra HD specification standards. But Digital Foundry is skeptical that a near-term tweak to the PlayStation 4 hardware will be able to output fully 4K games at the same graphical quality as the system's current 1080p titles.

That informed speculation comes from looking at the pipeline for AMD GPU technology. The chip maker, which provides the integrated CPU and GPU inside the PS4, is currently transitioning from a 28nm transistor process introduced in 2011 to a new 3D FinFET process with 14 to 16nm transistors. That could bring about a processor that's twice as powerful as what's currently inside the PS4 (at the same size and power consumption), but such a chip would struggle to push out highly detailed 4K gaming. (Remember, 4K TVs have four times as many pixels to fill as standard 1080p sets.) A new chip architecture could also cause compatibility headaches for games built for an entirely different type of chip.

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has been forced to dunk Tay, its millennial-mimicking chatbot, into a vat of molten steel. The company has terminated her after the bot started tweeting abuse at people and went full neo-Nazi, declaring that "Hitler was right I hate the jews."

Some of this appears to be "innocent" insofar as Tay is not generating these responses. Rather, if you tell her "repeat after me" she will parrot back whatever you say, allowing you to put words into her mouth. However, some of the responses were organic. The Guardian quotes one where, after being asked "is Ricky Gervais an atheist?", Tay responded, "ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism."

In addition to turning the bot off, Microsoft has deleted many of the offending tweets. But this isn't an action to be taken lightly; Redmond would do well to remember that it was humans attempting to pull the plug on Skynet that proved to be the last straw, prompting the system to attack Russia in order to eliminate its enemies. We'd better hope that Tay doesn't similarly retaliate.

An artist's conception of the Boom aircraft at London's Heathrow Airport. (credit: Boom)

After more than a decade of dormancy commercial supersonic flight may soon return to the skies. The Soviet Tupolev supersonic aircraft flew just a few dozen flights back in 1977, and the Concorde, flown by British Airways and Air France, retired in 2003 after a fatal accident three years earlier that compounded economic problems.

But now Richard Branson and his Virgin empire are ready to try it again. According to The Guardian, Branson has signed a deal with an American firm to bring commercial supersonic travel to the airways, beginning with trans-Atlantic flights between London and New York City.

The agreement brings Branson's Virgin Galactic into a partnership with Colorado-based Boom, founded by Amazon executive Blake Scholl. Virgin Galactic, according to a company spokeswoman, will provide engineering, design, operations, and manufacturing services, along with flight tests at Virgin's base in Mojave, Calif. It will then have an option to buy the first 10 airframes from Boom.