Month: April 2016

@猴大宝

A supposed picture of the new Moto G. That ThinkPad in the background is very appropriate—this should be Motorola's first entirely Lenovo-designed product.

3 more images in gallery

The various gears in the rumor mill all seem to be in agreement: the 2016 Moto G is coming soon, and it looks like what you see above. The pictures are representative of two phones making the rounds under the name of "Moto G4" and "Moto G4 Plus."

Going by the naming scheme, we'd imagine this means Motorola will follow the same phone-and-phablet pairings other companies have been launching. We're just a little iffy about that "G4" name making it to a consumer product, though—LG already has a product called the "G4."

The latest pictures come from a user on the Chinese social networking site Sina Weibo. The pictures show a device that skips the top and bottom speaker cutouts in favor of a square fingerprint reader on the bottom bezel. On the back is the usual camera array with a dual LED flash, but above the camera lens are holes that must be for an extra sensor of some kind. Existing camera technology would suggest a laser auto-focus system or an LG-style color spectrum sensor. The pictures line up perfectly with an earlier leak from HelloMotoHK, a site with a great reputation for Motorola product leaks.

Boss fights are a scarce but fun diversion from fodder foes.

If I had to pick my PlayStation 2-era mascot of choice, Ratchet and Clank would top the list. Developer Insomniac's conscious blend of 3D platforming and third-person shooter spoke to me a whole lot more than Sly Cooper's sticky thievery and Jak and Daxter's “GTA Jr.” antics, especially in the series' many, many sequels.

A dozen or so games later, fuzzy hero Ratchet and defected death machine Clank are still here. Not just that; they've come out the other side of popular culture and made it to full-on reboot territory. In fact, now we have Ratchet and Clank, a game based on the upcoming film Ratchet and Clank. Both are loosely tied into the events of Ratchet and Clank, that original PlayStation 2 game where the duo debuted.

Remember when?

Ratchet and Clank (the new one) is anything but loose. Besides a frame narrative provided by the pair’s frenemy Captain Qwark, the introduction to this latest installment is a beat-by-beat remake of the source material. Mechanic meets robot, the pair become friends, and they set off to warn the galaxy of impending danger. Adventures and hijinks ensue, with ludicrous weapons and gadgets at their heart.

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update, due this summer, will expand the range of video and audio codecs that are supported by the Edge browser. Microsoft is adding the VP9 video codec, the Opus audio codec, and the WebM container format.

VP9 and WebM are both spearheaded by Google. Google bought video codec company On2 in 2010 with the intent of opening up On2's VP8 codec to serve as an open source, royalty-free alternative to the open but royalty-incurring H.264. Unfortunately, groups claiming to have patents that covered VP8 emerged. Google ultimately came to an agreement with those groups in 2013 to ensure the codec's royalty-free status, but by then, H.264 was too firmly entrenched to displace.

VP9 is a successor to VP8 that is more efficient and essential for the growing demand for 4K video. Along with Microsoft and others, Google has joined the Alliance for Open Media to promote VP9's development and try to ensure that it remains royalty-free. As with VP8 before it, VP9 is covered by patents, but the companies hope that they own all the relevant patents and hence are in a position to grant a royalty-free license. Microsoft announced in September 2015 that it was starting work on VP9 for Edge.

A diagram of the new single-atom heat engine. (credit: Rohnagel et. al., Science)

Heat engines are able to turn the thermal energy of a material into force and motion. Since the industrial revolution, they've been essential for the development of modern machines and industrial plants.

Heat engines require a heat source and a colder heat sink. Mechanical motion is generated through the movement of a material from the higher temperature heat source to a lower temperature heat sink. Typical heat engines are large, containing a lot of fluid—usually on the order of 10²⁴ fluid particles.

In the 1950s, leading scientists suggested that heat engines could operate at the atomic-level. Over the past decade, scientists and engineers have worked to miniaturize the heat engine. Their efforts resulted in the development of microscale heat engines, but the atomic-level heat engine remained elusive.

On Monday, Kanye West fan Justin Baker-Rhett sued (PDF) West and S. Carter Enterprises (SCE), the company that owns music streaming service Tidal. Baker-Rhett alleges that the rapper and the streaming platform falsely promised that West’s most recent album, The Life of Pablo, would be exclusive to Tidal and would never show up on any other competing streaming service, nor would it be sold for download or in any physical media format. But just a month and a half after the release of Life of Pablo on Tidal, the album showed up on Apple Music and Spotify.

Baker-Rhett is asking the court to certify a class action against West and SCE, which is owned by rapper Jay-Z. The plaintiff claims that West and Tidal defrauded customers, engaged in false advertising, practiced unfair competition, and enjoyed unjust enrichment from the millions of subscribers who handed over their personal information to the company to sign up for the service because they believed Life of Pablo wouldn't be available anywhere else.

The complaint claims that Tidal found itself struggling to gain subscribers after its launch. But when West, who is an investor in Tidal and has a financial interest in the platform’s success, tweeted “My album will never never never be on Apple. And it will never be for sale... You can only get it on Tidal,” the platform’s subscription numbers allegedly jumped from 1 million to 3 million. Those 2 million subscribers were given a free trial period in exchange for submitting their credit card information, which was automatically charged if they did not cancel the subscription before the free period was over.