Month: June 2019

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's roundup is headlined by a big sale on Nintendo Switch games, which, like Sony and Microsoft's recent offerings, Nintendo is running to commemorate this year's E3 show. The sale technically started earlier in the week, but Nintendo says it will run through June 18.

Some highlights here include first-party games Super Mario Odyssey, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze available for $40, which is about $10-15 off their usual going rate. The Switch version of Doom, which looks worse than its PC and other console counterparts but still runs well (and is generally excellent), is half-off at $30, while platformer Celeste, our 2018 game of the year, is down to $13 from its usual $20. Nintendo has a full list of what's on sale at its eShop digital store.

The catch here is that most of the deals on offer apply to digital games, so they'll likely take up more of the Switch's 32GB of internal storage than physical cartridges. Many of the third-party multi-platform titles can be found cheaper on other consoles, too, and at least a few of the games on offer are still more expensive than their physical copies. So be sure to cross-check prices if a game interests you and isn't on our curated list below. We'd also like it if games like Odyssey and Mario Kart 8 were a little cheaper at this point, given that they've been out for a couple of years. But solid discounts on the Switch's most popular games are still fairly rare, and much of what's available here is good value relative to their usual prices on the console.

Enlarge / A health worker puts on protective gear as he prepares to screen travelers at the Mpondwe Health Screening Facility in the Ugandan border town of Mpondwe as they cross over from the Democratic Republic of Congo, on June 13, 2019. (credit: Getty | Isaac Kasamani)

UPDATE 6/14/2019, 1pm ET: The World Health Organization's Emergency Committee met today to discuss the spread of Ebola outbreak and declared (for the third time) that the ongoing outbreak does not constitute a “public health emergency of international concern" or PHEIC. It is an emergency for the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the region, but does not meet the criteria for an international public health emergency, the committee concluded. Original story from 6/13/2019 follows.

Local and international health officials are scrambling to smother a flare-up of Ebola in Uganda, which spread this week from a massive, months-long outbreak in the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. The outbreak has sickened 2,084 and killed 1,405 since last August.

Uganda announced its first case stemming from the outbreak on Tuesday, June 11. The case was in a 5-year-old Congolese boy who traveled across the border with family a few days earlier. The Ugandan Health Ministry reported shortly after that the boy succumbed to his infection the morning of June 12. Two of his family members also tested positive by that time: the boy’s 50-year-old grandmother and his 3-year-old brother.

Today, June 13, the Ministry announced that the grandmother had also passed. In an urgent meeting over the situation, officials from Uganda and the DRC mutually decided to send the remaining family back to the DRC. That includes the 3-year-old boy with a confirmed case, as well as the mother, father, a 6-month-old sibling, and their maid. Health officials noted that the latter four family members are all considered “suspected cases.”

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Google Drive is a place to store all your files, and Google Photos is a place to store all your photos. On the surface, having these two Google services integrate somewhat makes sense, and today, all your Google Photos end up in Drive and all your Drive photos end up in Google Photos. But this week Google has announced that this integration will be ending soon, citing user feedback that the integration is "confusing." Starting in July, the two services will be separate with photos in one service no longer moving over to the other.

Google Drive's "Backup and Sync" desktop app is Google's equivalent of Dropbox. Install it to your desktop computer, and it will download all your Drive files into a folder and keep that folder synced and up to date. Usually this involved a ton of office files generated by Google Docs and the like, and the Google Photos integration meant that, by default, Drive also tried to download your entire photo collection to every computer you own. While it's hard to fill up a hard drive with office files, the Google Photos folder could be tens or even hundreds of gigabytes depending on how much of a shutterbug you are.

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  The $250 base system (with 4GB of RAM) doesn't include either of these two controllers.

LOS ANGELES—At E3 meetings this week, Atari finally showed off playable, near-final prototypes of its long-delayed, heavily crowdfunded VCS, the company's modernized homage to the original Atari Video Computer System (aka the 2600). Obviously, there was a lot of discussion of what the system—which starts at $250 in a package without controllers—actually is at this point. But there was just as much focus on what it is not.

First off, representatives wanted to stress that despite outward appearances, this is not just a retro "mini" console along the lines of the NES Classic Edition or the recently announced TurboGrafx-16 Mini (or even the long-running Atari Flashback line). Yes, the VCS will come with a collection of classic games in the "Atari Vault," and Atari will also sell classic 2600 ROMs that work through a built-in emulator. And yes, players can buy a $50 wireless, rumbling, four-direction, "single-button" digital joystick modeled after Atari's classic design. That joystick comes complete with modern touches like menu buttons, an LED light ring that responds to directional input, and a stick that rotates on its axis for "paddle" controls.

But Atari representatives stressed that the VCS is a modern platform, powered by a Ryzen R1606G Raven 2 APU (roughly the equivalent of a Zen 2 4-core CPU and a Vega GPU). That can handle 4K video streams, which means it's ready for services like Google Stadia or Microsoft's Xcloud. Getting 4K resolution on a locally run game with a decent level of 3D detail and acceptable frame rate seems nearly impossible, though. Atari's provided example of a "modern" game running on the system was a Linux version of Borderlands 2, a 2012 title that frankly chugged along at a pretty choppy frame rate in our hotel-suite demonstration.

Enlarge / If everything's set up properly, you know you have a solution when the input light results in a single point of light as the output. (credit: Robert Horn/Argonne National Laboratory)

When it comes to computation, the modern approach seems to involve an enormous bucket of bits, vigorous shaking, and not a lot of explanation of how it all works. If you ever wondered how Excel became such an abomination, now you know.

We don’t seem to have a problem creating and filling enormous buckets of bits, but shaking them up is energy-intensive and slow. Modern processors, as good as they are, simply don’t cope well with some problems. A light-based, highly parallel processor may just be the (rather bulky) co-processor that we've been looking for to handle these tasks.

Solutions are downhill

One way to compute a solution to a problem is called annealing. I’ve written a lot about annealing in the context of quantum computing, but annealing works for classical computers as well. The essential idea is that a problem is recast so that the solution is the lowest energy state of an energy landscape. The landscape determines how strongly the value of one bit affects the value of the surrounding bits.

Enlarge (credit: Hyundai)

It has been a busy week for Aurora, the self-driving startup founded by veterans of the Google, Tesla, and Uber self-driving programs. On Monday, Aurora announced it had forged a partnership with Fiat Chrysler. On Tuesday, Aurora said it was ending its partnership with Volkswagen. Now Hyundai is deepening its partnership with Aurora with an equity investment.

It's the latest example of an industry-wide pattern: one after another, car companies have made big investments in self-driving startups. And these deals mean that carmakers are effectively entering into self-driving alliances with one another.

Some carmakers are taking big stakes in self-driving projects

General Motors started the process back in 2016, buying self-driving startup Cruise for more than $500 million. In 2018, GM sold a modest stake in Cruise to Honda, cementing a self-driving alliance between the two companies.