Month: August 2016

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Best Buy's 50th anniversary is just around the corner on August 22, 2016, and the company is giving its customers a bunch of exclusive deals to celebrate. The electronics retailer will have 50 deals available in store and online that will last for just 50 hours: the Black Friday-like shopping event starts today, August 18, at 10pm Central Time and ends at 11:59pm on Saturday, August 20.

Discounts include $180 off Beats wireless headphones, $400 off a 65-inch Samsung 4K UHD TV, and $150 off select MacBook Pro notebooks, with additional savings for students. Customers who shop online will also get free two-day shipping on almost everything included in the sale.

Here are some of the other deals included in the anniversary celebration:

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InF!

AMD's new Zen CPU architecture has been officially delayed until "early 2017." The first Zen chips, which will be produced on a 14nm FinFET process, had originally been expected sometime in Q3 or Q4 2016.

At an event in San Francisco, AMD also revealed a few more details of the Zen's low-level architecture, and in a multithreaded Blender rendering demo showed that an 8-core/16-thread "Summit Ridge" Zen CPU outperformed an 8C/16T Broadwell-E CPU (presumably the Core i7-6900K) at the same clockspeed.

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A Tesla Model S has burst into flames during a test drive in the south west of France. Four people were in the car, including a Tesla employee; they all escaped safely before the car was "totally destroyed" within five minutes of the fire starting.

Tesla confirmed the incident and said that it's working with French authorities to determine exactly what happened, "and will share our findings as soon as possible." A Tesla official said: "Nobody was harmed. The vehicle provided warning and passengers were able to safely exit the vehicle."

In the tweet below you can see a video of the burning Tesla. Presumably this was caught a few minutes after the blaze had begun, as there isn't much car left.

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On Monday, the Ford Motor Company made news with the announcement that it will build a fleet of self-driving ride-share vehicles. Whether or not that news had any impact at Uber is unknown, but today Uber and Volvo announced plans to partner on a $300 million program to develop fully autonomous vehicles by 2021, a year that now promises plenty of self-driving vehicles (we're expecting one from BMW as well).

"Volvo is one of the most progressive and contemporary car makers in the world. It is a world leader in the development of active safety and autonomous drive technology and possesses an unrivaled safety credibility. We are very proud to be the partner of choice for Uber, one of the world’s leading technology companies. This alliance places Volvo at the heart of the current technological revolution in the automotive industry," said Håkan Samuelsson, Volvo CEO.

Uber's boss, Travis Kalanick, was similarly upbeat: "Over one million people die in car accidents every year. These are tragedies that self-driving technology can help solve, but we can’t do this alone. That’s why our partnership with a great manufacturer like Volvo is so important. Volvo is a leader in vehicle development and best-in-class when it comes to safety. By combining the capabilities of Uber and Volvo we will get to the future faster, together."

COLOGNE, Germany—It's midnight and my friends and I, intent on staying up all night, have just downed our fifth Coca-Cola of the evening. Laid out in front of us, between a pile of unwashed sleeping bags and half-eaten chocolate bars, are four Nintendo 64 controllers and a copy of GoldenEye and Banjo-Kazooie. Brushing the sleep from my eyes, I pick up Banjo-Kazooie, slide it into the cartridge slot, and stare in awe at a blocky banjo-playing bear. Having never played on a Nintendo 64 before (I was very much s PC gamer), the bright and colourful Banjo-Kazooie was a revelation. And though it would sometimes get swapped out for sporadic bouts of Golden Gun mode, for the next 12 hours, Banjo-Kazooie was all that mattered.

The tiny booths in the back halls of Gamescom's Koelnmesse might not be as cosy as my living room floor, but there's no denying it: Yooka-Laylee is one heck of a nostalgia play, and 12-year-old me couldn't be happier.

Indeed, squint hard enough, and you might just mistake Yooka-Laylee for Banjo-Kazooie. Led by a team of ex-developers from Rare—creator of the Banjo-Kazooie series amongst others—Yooka-Laylee is an unashamed love letter to the colourful '90s platformer. The titular Yooka and Laylee, a lizard and a bat, can double-jump, float, roll, and swim much like their '90s counterparts. The levels they explore, while larger and more like the open worlds of modern games, are similar too, being made up of intricately designed platforms that shine a vibrant green where most games are content with being a dull brown.