Month: May 2018

Razer

With Razer releasing a smartphone and a three-screen laptop concept alongside updating its Blade Pro and Blade Stealth machines, the mid-tier Razer Blade sat quietly in wait for its next moment in the spotlight. Today, Razer debuted big updates to its Razer Blade laptop, focusing on design and performance to usher the gaming notebook into 2018.

While the new Blade still looks unmistakably "Razer," its design has changed dramatically for the better. Razer upped the screen size from 14 inches to 15.6 inches, reducing the surrounding bezels to just 4.9mm so that the device fits in with the other nearly bezel-less ultrabooks popular today. Razer is offering 1080p 60Hz or 144Hz panels, along with a 4K touchscreen option as well. The larger display panel makes the laptop slightly heavier than its predecessor, and it's a bit wider overall, too (4.7 pounds and 9.3 inches, respectively). However, the slimmer bezels, sharper edges, and aluminum unibody make the new Razer Blade look like a clear upgrade from the previous model.

Enlarge / Days Gone shows off the old "run past an explosive barrel, then turn around and shoot it" trick. (credit: Sony Bend)

SANTA MONICA, California—Twenty minutes behind the motorcycle handlebars of Days Gone was long enough to determine one thing: 20 minutes isn't nearly enough to get us excited.

Greatness may very well hide within this upcoming PS4 exclusive from Sony Bend, but I got nowhere near excavating that during a pre-E3 hands-on event. Instead, I found an experience that sounds as standard and predictable as this description: an open-world, side-quest-filled, post-apocalyptic battle against zombies and survivors alike through which you must scavenge and craft to get ahead.

There's clearly a bigger story going on in Days Gone, and Sony Bend appears to leverage some incredible motion-capture and lip-sync technologies to bring its stories and actors to life in attractive fashion. But that's not what I got to experience.

The crew of the Rocinante. L-R: Engineer Naomi Nagata, Mechanic Amos Burton, Captain James Holden, Pilot Alex Kamal. (credit: SyFy)

A couple of weeks ago we got some terrible news. The Expanse, the critically acclaimed adaptation of the James SA Corey space opera novels now in its third season, was cancelled by Syfy.

Although the US-based cable channel was responsible for broadcasting the science fiction show, it wasn't responsible for the production—that's all down to Alcon Entertainment. Syfy only bought the first-run linear rights, meaning that it only really cared about viewers watching the show live in the US on Wednesday evenings. Streaming rights after each season was complete went to Amazon here in the US, with Netflix carrying the show internationally.

But it looks like the day may have been saved. On Monday, The Hollywood Reporter revealed that Amazon appears set to step into the breach for season four. By all accounts, Amazon boss Jeff Bezos was a big Expanse fan and wasn't happy that Syfy had the broadcast rights for the show in the first place.

Enlarge / A sooty Falcon 9 rocket is ready for launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. (credit: NASA)

SpaceX will attempt its 10th launch of the year on Tuesday, a mission serving two different customers. The Falcon 9 rocket will carry five communications satellites for the Iridium NEXT constellation, along with two gravity-measuring satellites for NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences.

This first-stage booster has flown once before, a little more than four months ago when it launched the Zuma mission for the US government—a satellite or spacecraft that was apparently lost in space after it failed to separate from the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX appears to have been absolved from blame for this mishap, and certainly the first stage booster performed nominally during that mission.

SpaceX will not attempt to recover this core, as it is a Block 4 variant of the booster. Each Block 4 core will fly just two times as the company seeks to move all of its launches onto the newer Block 5 version of the rocket, which has slightly increased performance and numerous upgrades to optimize the first stage for reusability.