Month: August 2017

Enlarge (credit: Francisco Antunes)

Amazon has the official green light to go through with its acquisition of Whole Foods, and customers will soon feel the difference in their wallets. According to a press release from Amazon, the company is set to lower prices of Whole Foods items the same day that the merger closes: Monday, August 28.

“We’re determined to make healthy and organic food affordable for everyone," Jeff Wilke, CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, wrote in the release. "Everybody should be able to eat Whole Foods Market quality."

Customers shopping at Whole Foods locations on Monday will see new, lower prices on various "grocery staples," including organic bananas, apples, salmon, organic large brown eggs, lean ground beef, avocados, and more. Amazon didn't detail how low those new prices would be, but any change is likely welcomed by Whole Foods customers. The store has been cheekily called "Whole Paycheck," due to how much money one can spend on a week's worth of groceries there.

Enlarge / Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (credit: Yuriko Nakao/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Self-driving cars are coming, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been pushing his engineers hard to make sure that Tesla stays on the cutting edge. Indeed, in October 2016 he promised that the latest version of the Model S and Model X—cars with Tesla's new "Hardware 2" suite of cameras and radar—would become capable of full self-driving in the future, with just a software update.

But according to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, some Tesla engineers are skeptical that Tesla can keep this promise any time soon. Disagreement about deadlines—as well as "design and marketing decisions"—is causing turmoil inside the company.

"In recent months," the Journal reports, the Autopilot team "has lost at least 10 engineers and four top managers." That included the director of the Autopilot team, "who lasted less than six months before leaving in June."

Enlarge

In a tech demo, which debuted at Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference in May, famed Japanese developer Square Enix recreated a cinema-quality, computer-generated character inside of a video game. Nyx Ulric, voiced by Aaron Paul in the CGI film Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV, had been previously been confined to the silver screen, where the complexity of producing of detailed computer graphics is offloaded to vast farms of computers one frame at a time (each taking hours to render), before 24 of them are pieced together to create a single second of film.

With top-of-line PC hardware from Nvidia (the server-grade Tesla V100, no less), Square Enix pulled character models and textures from the film, and displayed them in real-time using Luminous Studio Pro, the same engine that powers Final Fantasy XV on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and—with the upcoming release of Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition in 2018—PC. Like any good tech demo, Kingsglaive is as impressive as it is impractical, featuring authentic modelling of hair, skin, leather, fur, and lighting that no PC or console on the market today can display (at least in 4K).

The Xbox One X, Microsoft's "most powerful console in the world," sports around six teraflops of processing power (FP32, for those technically inclined) to push graphics at 4K resolution—that's four times the number of pixels as a typical HD television. The Kingsglaive tech demo requires over 12 teraflops of processing power, more than is found in Nvidia's $1000/£1000 Titan Xp graphics card.

Enlarge (credit: knowyourmeme.com)

Half-Life 3, gaming's greatest unicorn, may finally be with us—albeit in text form. Marc Laidlaw, the now retired lead writer of the Half-Life series, has published what appears to be a summary of the plot of Half-Life 3, or Half-Life 2: Episode 3, entitled "Epistle 3."

Epistle 3 takes the form of a fictional letter directed to "Dearest Playa" from a character named "Gertie Fremont." It features a ship "Hyperborea," and alien bad guys called the "Disparate," which—when swapped out for original Half-Life names and places—makes the letter as close to a resolution to the series as players are likely to get.

An edited version of the synopsis on Pastebin—which is currently the only place to read it given the unwashed massed of the Internet have taken down Laidlaw's blog—has already replaced and the names places ready for reading. The beginning of the synopsis reads:

Enlarge / Tugboats from Singapore assist the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56) as it steers toward Changi Naval Base, Republic of Singapore, following a collision with the merchant vessel Alnic MC while underway east of the Straits of Malacca and Singapore on August 21. Ten sailors were missing after the collision.

In the darkness of early morning on August 21, the guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain collided with a tanker in the Strait of Malacca off Singapore. Ten sailors are believed to have lost their lives in the McCain collision. When added to the seven who died in the June 17 collision of the USS Fitzgerald with the container ship ACX Crystal, this has been the deadliest year at sea for the US Navy's surface fleet since the 1989 turret explosion aboard USS Iowa (in which 47 sailors perished).

The McCain's collision was the fourth this year between a naval vessel and a merchant ship—the third involving a ship of the US Navy's Seventh Fleet. (The other collision involved a Russian intelligence collection ship near the Bosporus Strait in Turkey.) There hasn't been a string of collisions like this since the 1950s.

Collisions are one of the biggest nightmares of those who go to sea. Cmdr. W.B. Hayer famously posted a brass plaque on the bridge of the destroyer USS Buck misquoting Thucydides: "A collision at sea can ruin your entire day" (this quote later found its way to Navy training posters). But few can look at the photos of Berthing 2 or the captain's stateroom aboard the USS Fitzgerald in the Navy's recent supplemental report on its collision and laugh.