Month: March 2020

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  The Xiaomi Redmi K30 Pro. [credit: Xiaomi ]

Chinese OEM Xiaomi is gunning for the price/performance crown with the newly announced Redmi K30 Pro. This phone features Qualcomm's flagship Snapdragon 865—normally found in $1,000 smartphones—at a price point that has been massaged all the way down to CNY 2,999 ($425).

The phone has a 6.67-inch 2400×1080 OLED display at a regular-old 60Hz. The base model gets 6GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB of UFS3.0 storage, and there's a bigger, faster tier with 8GB of faster LPDDR5 memory and 256GB of UFS 3.1 storage, which ups the price to CNY 3,399 ($481). The phone has a 4700mAh battery, 33w fast charging, an in-screen fingerprint reader, and a not-great dust and water resistance rating of IP53 (it will probably survive rain, but it's not submergible).

The front design looks incredible for this price point, thanks to the pop-up 20MP front camera. There's no notch, hole punch, or any other screen blemishes, just an all-screen design. There's a headphone jack on the top edge, NFC, Wi-Fi 6 compatibility, and even an IR port. Thanks to the Snapdragon 865, there is sub-6GHz (but not mmWave) 5G compatibility.

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  The opening shot of Half-Life: Alyx, as captured from real gameplay. Anything I captured while playing will appear in portrait orientation, due to how SteamVR image captures work. Any landscape images are provided by Valve.

This week's launch of Half-Life: Alyx marks the first new release in the Half-Life series since late 2007. But despite well over a decade of promises from Valve for a true sequel, Alyx's prequel storyline still leaves us hanging on Half-Life 2: Episode 2's long-dangling cliffhanger ending.

So now that Valve has proven it can actually make a Half-Life game again, why hasn't it been able to make one with a "3" in the title? IGN delved into that question with Valve staffers in a recent interview that gives as detailed an answer as we've yet seen.

Back to the ’00s

The history goes back to 2004, the end of a six-year span that saw Valve developing Half-Life 2 and its Source game engine at the same time. That lengthy, parallel development of engine and game was difficult enough that the company has found it never wants to repeat it, according to veteran Valve level designer Dario Casali. "I think our main takeaway from that is ‘get some stable technology and then build a game on top of it,'" he told IGN.

Enlarge (credit: Taechit Taechamanodom)

One of the most crucial things the United States can do to prepare for the surging coronavirus outbreak is to beef up our stockpile of ventilators. These mechanical breathing machines are crucial for keeping patients with severe cases of COVID-19 alive. The United States currently has around 170,000 of the devices; experts say that may not be enough if the number of coronavirus cases continues to grow exponentially.

On Sunday, President Donald Trump tweeted that "Ford, General Motors and Tesla are being given the go ahead to make ventilators and other metal products, FAST!" (Presumably he meant "medical products.")

This is an apparent reference to new guidance from the Food and Drug Administration, published Sunday, that dramatically loosens the agency's normally strict oversight of ventilator technology. The new policy not only gives medical professionals broader latitude to modify existing, FDA-approved ventilators, it also creates a streamlined process for complete newcomers to the ventilator market to get FDA approval.