Month: September 2018

Enlarge (credit: TechBargains)

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our friends at TechBargains, we have another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal for those in urgent need of a budget gaming laptop: a configuration of Dell's G5 15 notebook with 16GB of RAM and a Nvidia GTX 1060 Max-Q GPU is down to $880 at Walmart. (Ignore the "GTX 1060Ti" bit in Walmart's listing; there's no such thing.) Normally, Dell sells this config closer to $1,100.

The G Series launched earlier this year as the successor to Dell's Inspiron Gaming line. This particular model runs on an Intel Core i5-8300H processor and uses dual storage in the form of a 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD. There's a USB-C port (albeit of the slower Gen 1 variety), along with an HDMI port, Ethernet jack, SD card slot, and three USB 3.1 ports. The keyboard is backlit, and the 15.6-inch IPS display has a 1080p resolution.

Full disclosure: the Dealmaster has not personally tested this notebook, but given that this is a relatively affordable gaming laptop, expect a few compromises. The Max-Q version of the GTX 1060 is strong enough to get through most modern games, but it'll be a hair weaker than the desktop-class card, which itself isn't the highest on Nvidia's totem pole. Reviews around the Web suggest the whole thing is made of a cheapish plastic and that the display is far from special. At close to six pounds, it's not the most portable device either.

Enlarge (credit: Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images)

A Southern California limousine company sued Uber in federal court earlier this week, alleging violations of state unfair-competition laws.

While a company suing Uber is not new, the proposed class-action lawsuit appears to rely on a recently decided California Supreme Court decision that makes it more difficult for companies to unilaterally declare their workers as contractors, which effectively deprives them of benefits that they would otherwise receive as employees.

In that case, known as Dynamex, the court came up with a three-part test to figure out whether companies can assert contractor status or not. The new case is called Diva Limousine v. Uber.

Enlarge / Hurricane Florence as captured from the International Space Station by astronaut Alex Gerst. (credit: Alex Gerst/NASA/ESA)

In the last few years, teams of scientists have developed a consistent protocol for rapidly analyzing the influence of climate change on extreme weather events. Within a week of the disaster, reports have been available to inform the conversation about whether we can expect more events like it in the future.

But on Wednesday, we saw the first example of something new—an analysis published before the event even happened. A group led by Stony Brook University’s Kevin Reed ran a very simple computer model experiment on Hurricane Florence—which isn’t due to make landfall until Friday—and quickly released the top-line results.

The rapid studies we’ve been seeing are done by examining the historical weather record to estimate how rare and extreme a given storm or heat event would be in that area of the globe. From there, climate model simulations are used to see if climate change is expected to change the frequency of that type of event.

Enlarge / The Delfly Nimble robot hovers in front of its creator, Matej Karasek of Delft University Technology. (credit: Henri Werij, TU Delft)

Flying insects like bees, dragonflies, and fruit flies can perform impressive aerodynamic feats, particularly when seeking to evade predators or the swatting motion of a human hand. Now Dutch scientists have built a flying robot capable of executing similar maneuvers—despite being much larger than the average insects—that could shed light on how these creatures achieve those feats. The scientists described their work in a new paper in Science.

There was a time when scientists believed that insect wings worked a lot like airplane wings. The up and down motion of their wings would generate lift because air flowing over the wing follows its slightly tilted surface, while the downward flow lowers the air pressure above the wing, lifting it just enough to keep the body aloft. (This is a simplified, and therefore incomplete, explanation for the complicated aerodynamics of airplane lift based on Bernoulli's principle, but it will suffice for the purposes of this post.) But in the 1990s, a zoologist named Charles Ellington decided to test this theory by putting various insects in actual wind tunnels. The conventional lift they measured simply wasn't sufficient to account for their ability to fly.

Ellington's subsequent research showed that a stable leading-edge vortex is the most likely explanation for how insects stay aloft. Once the vortex forms, it spirals out along the wing toward the tip, drawing air outward so as to avoid a stall. That explains how insects generate lift to hover, but not how they manage to execute complicated maneuvers like making rapid banked turns. That's possibly due to how an insect wing can rotate to slightly get rid of the vortex for an extra bit of lift, enabling the insect to change direction. But there is still plenty of mystery remaining for scientists to explore. And that's where this new flying robot comes in.

Enlarge (credit: Google / Breitbart)

Breitbart News, a conservative news site known for its incestuous relationship with the Trump administration, has leaked an hour-long video showing Google's first all-hands meeting following the November 2016 presidential election in the United States. The video shows Google executives making little effort to strike a neutral tone about the election results.

"As an immigrant, a refugee, I certainly find this election deeply offensive, and I know many of you do too," said Sergey Brin, Google's cofounder and now president of parent company Alphabet. He said that the election result shows that "so many people apparently don't share many of the values that we have."

Google Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat, an avowed Hillary Clinton supporter, described the result as a "massive kick in the gut." She vowed that Google would "use the great strength and resources and reach we have to continue to advance really important values"—values, presumably, that were not shared by Donald Trump.

In the world of user experience (UX) design, no challenge is bigger than the one presented by a complex, action-loaded video game. And that goes triple for a game like Fortnite.

This online-gaming sensation combines three very complex ideas—high-speed combat, incessant equipment upgrades, and a make-your-own-buildings system—into one experience. How do you make it easy for gamers to juggle so much, all while they're battling 99 other people at once? For developer Epic Games, the answer lies with a carefully designed user experience full of secrets and subtleties.

Although Fortnite gets something of a bad rap from the "curmudgeonly gamers" demographic ("The kids play it on their iPhones, so I automatically hate it!"), the game's popularity is impossible to argue with. We are firmly in the era of the battle royale, and with Fortnite currently riding high at that genre's apex, it's worth looking at how the game does what it does so successfully.

It's time for another big Android release—and another big review to go along with it. The latest update for the world's most popular operating system is Android 9 (not 9.0) Pie. While last year's Android 8.0 Oreo release focused on under-the-hood changes, Android 9 Pie ships a ton of user-facing features and UI changes, making it feel like the "tock" to Oreo's "tick."

Android 9 Pie brings Google's updated Material Design spec (don't call it "Material Design 2") to Android OS, and it begins a wave of UI updates that will spread across Google's entire portfolio. In Android, that means revamped interfaces for the notification panel, Recent Apps, settings, and various bits of system UI. For future smartphone designs (like, say, the Pixel 3), Android 9 includes an experimental gesture navigation system and built-in notch support. There's also a new screenshot editor, lots of improvements for text selection, and changes to the way rotation works.