Month: December 2019

Enlarge / Elon Musk arrives at federal court in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Dec. 3, 2019. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Elon Musk has never been someone to back down from a fight. On Tuesday, Musk's confrontational personality brought him to a Los Angeles federal courtroom to testify in a defamation lawsuit brought by British cave explorer Vernon Unsworth. Musk told the court that he didn't intend for people to take it literally when he labeled Unsworth a "pedo guy" on Twitter, a site where he had more than 20 million followers.

Musk's feud with Unsworth began in July 2018, when Unsworth and Musk were both trying to help a dozen boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand. Unsworth, who had years of prior experience with the cave, advised authorities on the rescue effort. Meanwhile, Musk assembled a team of SpaceX engineers to construct a "miniature submarine" to aid in the rescue efforts.

The submarine was never used; rescuers had already rescued the boys by the time it arrived in Thailand. When Unsworth was asked about Musk's invention on CNN, he scoffed. The contraption had "absolutely no chance of working," Unsworth said, adding that Musk should "stick his submarine where it hurts."

Enlarge / The White Castle Impossible Slider is significantly heftier than the White Castle Beef Slider. (credit: Eric Bangeman)

A public-relations firm backed by meat producers has unleashed a savage marketing campaign that claims plant-based meat alternatives are unhealthy, "ultra-processed imitations" similar to dog food.

The campaign rolled out in recent weeks from the industry-funded firm Center for Consumer Freedom, according to The New York Times. So far, it has included full-page ads and opinion pieces in mainstream newspapers, including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. All the marketing material raises health concerns about trendy meat alternatives, such as the Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger.

One ad posed the question "What's hiding in your plant-based meat?" Another directed readers to take the quiz "Veggie Burger or Dog Food?"

Google co-founder Larry Page. (credit: Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

Google and Alphabet co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are no longer executives at Alphabet or Google. The Alphabet CEO and president, respectively, have announced they are leaving their positions. Current Google CEO Sundar Pichai will take over as CEO of both Google and Google's parent company, Alphabet. Page and Brin explained the move on Google's company blog:

With Alphabet now well-established, and Google and the Other Bets operating effectively as independent companies, it's the natural time to simplify our management structure. We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company. And Alphabet and Google no longer need two CEOs and a President. Going forward, Sundar will be the CEO of both Google and Alphabet. He will be the executive responsible and accountable for leading Google, and managing Alphabet’s investment in our portfolio of Other Bets. We are deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders, and co-founders. In addition, we plan to continue talking with Sundar regularly, especially on topics we're passionate about!

Alphabet was created in 2015 as a way to organize and separate the various "other bets" that Google was making with increasing frequency. Alphabet was created as Google's parent company, then-current Google CEO Larry Page and President Sergey Brin moved up to Alphabet, and Sundar Pichai was elevated to Google CEO. The move was seen as a semi-retirement for the two co-founders, allowing them to step away from the day-to-day monotony of running an ad and search engine company and focus on more exciting, futuristic endeavors like self-driving cars, robots, flying delivery drones, and Internet delivered via balloon. Page also has health issues to deal with: he has been fighting vocal cord paralysis since 1999, which at times has caused him to lose his voice entirely and be unable to perform normal CEO duties.

There has always been a fuzzy division line between Alphabet and Google. The various Alphabet divisions, of which Google is one, are often described as "independent companies," but the companies frequently collaborate together, share resources, or get spun off or merged with Google. Google acquired the AI outfit DeepMind and then spun it off as an Alphabet subsidiary, but DeepMind and Google still collaborate on new Android features, data center improvements, and speech technology for the Google Assistant. Nest was acquired by Google, spun off as an Alphabet company, and then dissolved into Google over the course of five years. Some independent Alphabet companies still use the Google name, like Google Fiber, adding to the confusion. Having the two companies share the same CEO will blur the lines even more.

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  The Huawei Mate 30 Pro. [credit: Huawei ]

Huawei is settling into life without the US thanks to the Trump administration's export ban, and so far the company seems to be adapting. According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Huawei's latest flagship smartphone, the Mate 30, contains zero US parts. The Journal has access to an analysis from UBS and Fomalhaut Techno Solutions, which tore apart the phone and found manufacturers for each component.

No US components is an improvement over Huawei's previous flagship, the P30 Pro. We did our own version of this analysis back in May for the P30, where we looked over teardowns for US components. The P30 Pro is Huawei's previous flagship smartphone, and while it was designed and launched before the US export ban, it still didn't have a heavy reliance on US manufacturers. Huawei says it has been working to reduce its reliance on US companies for some time, with Huawei's deputy chairman, Ken Hu, writing in May that "The company has known [a US export ban] could be a possibility for many years. We have invested heavily and made full preparations in a variety of areas, including R&D and business continuity, which will ensure that our business operations will not be greatly affected, even under extreme conditions." So far, Huawei's preparations seem to be working.

On the older P30 Pro, Huawei already had its own SoC, thanks to its HiSilicon chip design division. HiSilicon was also responsible for several smaller chips, like audio, the RF transceiver, power-management, and mid-band 5G chips. From there the P30 components were a whirlwind tour across the world: a display from BoE in China, cameras from Sony in Japan, RAM from SK Hynix in South Korea, an NFC chip from NXP in the Netherlands, and a battery from Huizhou Desay Battery Co. in China. The biggest US components were the flash memory from Micron, LTE antennas from Skyhook and Qorvo, and SMPS (switched-mode power supply) chips from Broadcom.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Panuwat Sikham)

The US Department of Justice has given its tentative approval to a wireless-industry plan to revise eSIM standards, saying that new safeguards should prevent carriers from colluding against competitors in the standards-setting process. But the DOJ warned the industry that it must eliminate anti-competitive provisions from the current eSIM standard or face possible antitrust enforcement.

The DOJ last year began investigating AT&T, Verizon, and the GSMA, a trade group that represents mobile carriers worldwide. The antitrust enforcer found that incumbent carriers stacked the deck against competitors while developing an industry standard for eSIM, the embedded SIM technology that is used instead of removable SIM cards in new smartphones and other devices.

In theory, eSIM technology should make it easier to switch carriers or use multiple carriers because the technology doesn't require swapping between physical SIM cards. But how it works in practice depends heavily on whether big carriers dominate the standard-setting process.

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  The Link to the Past randomizer can change not only the contents of the chests and rewards in the game but also your character sprite, the enemies that spawn, and the color palette of the world! [credit: Nintendo ]

Like a long-time partner or a favorite pair of socks, there's comfort to be found in revisiting a familiar game from your youth. There's a sense of ease knowing what lies inside each treasure chest, which bush an enemy will spring from, or the secret tactic that vanquishes a foe with ease. That calming intimacy makes games like these an easy nostalgic choice when you just want to take a load off.

But what if you want to add some spice back to that familiar experience? After playing a classic game to the point of memorization, how do you recapture the sense of adventure and discovery you experienced the first time you played it? A small but growing community in the retro emulation scene is aiming to answer those questions with a class of mods and hacks called "randomizers."

Shuffle up and deal

At their most basic level, randomizer mods shuffle the data in a game's ROM so that each run becomes a new and unpredictable experience. So The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Randomizer could change which items you find in which chests, alter the rewards from dungeon quests, and even replace Link's sprite for one of the numerous fan-created options (the Mega Man X sprite is a personal favorite). And you can go even further than that, changing the exit locations for various in-game doors or even scattering the boss keys for specific dungeons throughout the world (rather than in the dungeons themselves)!