Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Details of the SDM1000, tentatively named Snapdragon 1000, a new Qualcomm chip built for Windows 10 laptops, have started to trickle out.

Microsoft's development of Windows 10 for ARM has seen the company partner with chip company Qualcomm. The first Windows 10 on ARM machines use the Snapdragon 835 processor, with designs based on the Snapdragon 850 (a higher clocked Snapdragon 845 intended for laptops) expected later this year. Snapdragon 1000 will be the follow-up to the 850.

The Snapdragon 1000 is believed to be an even more powerful laptop chip intended to go head to head with Intel's Y- and U-series Core processors. These have a 4.5W and 15W power envelope, respectively, and are used in a wide range of tablets and Ultrabook-type laptops. The Snapdragon 1000 is reported to have a 6.5W power draw for the CPU itself, with a total power draw of 12W for the entire SoC. The Snapdragon 1000 test platform has 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM and two 128GB UFS flash drives. It also has 802.11ad gigabit Wi-Fi, gigabit LTE, and a new power management controller.

Enlarge / Close-up of logo for Tesla Solar, a home solar power generation solution offered by Tesla Motors, San Ramon, California, March 28, 2018. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

Tesla is planning to close 13 or 14 solar installation locations that were set up by SolarCity before Tesla purchased the company in 2016. Tesla will also end its partnership with Home Depot at the end of the year.

The new information was first reported by Reuters, which obtained internal emails and documents detailing the closures. A Tesla spokesperson told Ars that the closures are part of the layoffs it announced in early June.

An official statement from the company contended that Tesla's solar business is better served in its existing Tesla stores. "Tesla stores have some of the highest foot traffic of any retail space in the country, so this presents a unique benefit that is demonstrated by the growing number of Tesla vehicle customers who are also purchasing energy products through our stores,” the statement said.

Valve's march toward launching new virtual reality video games—perhaps up to three of them—got more interesting on Thursday with the announcement of an update to the company's next official piece of VR hardware. After a quiet 2016 unveil, the "Knuckles" controller is back with a major revision.

Dubbed Knuckles EV2, the mold-to-your-hand controller is still a developer-only prototype, but a huge dump of official information reveals how far Valve has gone to craft what might be the ultimate VR controller: a smart twist on how hands work in virtual space and a bonus slew of buttons for older legacy games.

Enlarge / A shot of the leaked DevMenu tool that lets users upload custom profile pictures on the Switch. (credit: Mizumi / Twitter)

Nintendo only lets users choose from a limited number of preset profile pictures (or custom-made Miis) for their online avatar on the Switch network. So at least one Reddit user was quite surprised to see pornographic profile pictures showing up on the user-placed balloons in Super Mario Odyssey's online "Balloon World" mode.

"The picture was changed several times over the course of my time patrolling, each picture being pornographic content," Redditor ewaison writes, including links to (censored) screenshots of the offending profile pictures in their post. "There are multiple [sic] of these balloons all being made by the same user. This is obviously intentional, and made to upset children."

The reported imagery seems to trace its source back to the recent leak of an internal Switch developer menu online. We've seen pictures and reports of that previously dev-kit-exclusive system menu in the past, but users are now able to make use of an unpatchable Switch exploit to install the leaked menu on standard retail Switch hardware (as seen in his video).

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is led by a deal on the popular Ecovacs Deebot N79 robot vacuum, which can be had for $160 with a discount code on Amazon. That's a good chunk off its usual price of $200.

To be clear, the Deebot N79 is on the lower end of the botvac scale: pricier devices like iRobot's Roombas are generally more thorough at cleaning, more durable, and easier to fix with replacement parts if something goes wrong. But for a budget model, the Deebot N79 performs the basics competently. It's best used in smaller areas and shorter carpets, but it's a decent cleaner that runs quietly and does a good job of avoiding getting stuck on obstacles around the house. It also works with a smartphone app if you'd like to keep some control over it.

If you don't want a robot to invade your home, though, we also have deals on the Xbox One S, Samsung SSDs, 4K TVs, and gaming laptops. Have a look for yourself below.

Enlarge (credit: Turvey et al. 2018)

Primates, especially gibbons and other apes, are rare finds in the Asian fossil record. Fossils from the Pleistocene and Holocene are most often preserved in caves, where live gibbons almost never spend time. But humans preserved the remains of at least one gibbon for posterity by burying it in the tomb of a Chinese noblewoman 2,300 years ago during China’s Warring States Period.

The unfortunate ape was buried with a noblewoman believed to be Lady Xia, the grandmother of Qin Shi Huang, the first Chinese emperor, who ruled from 259 to 210 BCE. Lady Xia also took a leopard, a lynx, an Asiatic black bear, a crane, and several domestic animals with her to her very ornate grave in Chang’an, now the city of Shenheyuan in Shaanxi Province. Morbid menageries are a hallmark of high-status burials from this period, but primatologist Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society of London says archaeologists have never before seen a gibbon interred this way.

That’s interesting in its own right. By Lady Xia’s day, gibbons had become popular among the nobility as pets and symbols of the class of scholars and officials called Junzi. Thanks to the graceful way they swing through the trees, gibbons were considered noble in ancient Chinese culture. So it’s culturally significant to find a gibbon, presumably a pet, buried with the grandmother of China’s first emperor. But this particular gibbon, besides its proximity to power, may also represent a previously undiscovered—and now extinct—species.

Enlarge / This bow-shaped wave forms only in the afternoon. (credit: ©Planet-C)

You wouldn’t expect a toy spinning top to be rotating at precisely the same rate every time you glance at it, but you probably would expect a planet to. Yet observations of Venus over the years have come up with slightly different numbers when calculating the length of a Venusian day based on its rotation.

Venus is weird enough that we have to be careful to specify what we mean by “a day.” Because Venus slowly spins clockwise as it orbits clockwise around the Sun, sunlight takes a lap around the planet faster than Venus itself does a 360. Sunrise to sunrise (metaphorically speaking, given Venus’ cloud-choked atmosphere), a day there is about 117 Earth-days long. Measurements by the Magellan spacecraft in 1990 and Venus Express in 2006 differed by about 7 minutes, though. That wasn’t slop in the measurement—it was a real change.

So why would Venus be slightly changing its rotation speed over time? The most obvious suggestion is that tidal forces from the Sun are somehow responsible. But the recent Japanese Akatsuki spacecraft spotted something strange in Venus’ clouds that shows its atmosphere may have more to do with it.