Month: April 2019

Enlarge / The Fire TV Cube is a small Fire TV with an Echo Dot baked into it. It has a shiny black finish around the sides, with a matte black top. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Feuding tech giants Amazon and Google have come to an agreement on their streaming services. After over a year of absence, the official YouTube app will return to Amazon Fire TV devices and Fire TV Edition smart TVs. Google pulled the video streaming app in early 2018 after it could not strike a deal with the online retail giant surrounding the availability of its products and services.

According to reports at the time, Google was unhappy with Amazon because the retailer didn't sell a number of its products including Chromecast and Google Home devices. The two companies couldn't strike a business deal that pleased both parties, so Google removed the official YouTube app from Fire TV devices at the start of 2018. This came after Google also revoked YouTube access on Amazon's Echo Show devices, citing a "broken user experience."

In the time since YouTube left Fire TVs, users have been able to access the site using browsers. But that experience isn't the most user-friendly, so the real losers in this situation were YouTube lovers that owned Fire TV devices.

Enlarge / A miniature version of the standard Switch dock.

A new report from Japanese news service Nikkei (Google translation) suggests a rumored "less expensive" version of the Switch will be available this fall. The report also suggests that the new design will not be strictly portable, as some have suggested, and will still be able to dock to a TV set for larger-screen play.

Nikkei's report adds a bit more context to rumors most recently reported by the Wall Street Journal in March regarding Nintendo's plans for two new Switch models in the near future. The second model, according to the WSJ report, would be a more expensive, "enhanced" version of the system with improved hardware power and other special features.

Public translations of Nikkei's report suggest that an "overhauled next-generation model" could actually replace the current Switch and bring enhancements "including usability, improved image rendering, and changes to the operating system, among other things." But Nikkei's development sources suggest that the next step in hardware power may still be in the early planning stages at Nintendo, with no one assigned to lead "conceptual development" as of yet.

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  Geraldyn “Jerrie” M. Cobb died Thursday at the age of 88. [credit: Cobb family collection ]

Geraldyn “Jerrie” M. Cobb, a noted aviation pioneer and fierce advocate for women flying into space, died Thursday at her home in Florida, her family has said. She was 88.

Cobb is perhaps most well known for her participation in what became known as the "Mercury 13," a group of 13 women who passed preliminary screening processes in 1960 and 1961 to determine their suitability as astronauts under the guidance of Dr. Randolph Lovelace. Cobb scored in the top 2 percent of all who had taken the battery of tests for candidates previously, including both women and men.

However, the privately funded effort was not officially sanctioned by NASA. A Netflix documentary about the experience, released in 2018, offered a clear verdict for why women were excluded from NASA in the space agency's early days—"good old-fashioned prejudice," as one of the participants said.