Month: April 2020

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  The Stadia main menu interface, as seen in a Chrome browser (it looks largely similar on mobile and Chromecast).

Nearly five months after its paid launch, Google's Stadia streaming-games service is finally rolling out a (relatively) simple way to try it out for free. Curious new users no longer have to pay $130 upfront or a $10 monthly fee (or rely on an invite code from a Premiere Edition subscriber) to try the service.

Google announced today that it would be rolling out free access to Stadia across 14 countries over the next 48 hours. Anyone with a Gmail address should soon be able to sign up for Stadia at its website or through the mobile app on Android or iOS. Despite this morning's announcement, that free offer wasn't available via the website in the United States as of press time, though Android users are reporting the ability to sign up through the app.

Those new signups will include two free months of Stadia Pro, which includes instant streaming access to nine games:

Enlarge (credit: Android)

Google is putting new rules in place for Android 11: it's going to make support for Android's "seamless update" feature mandatory for devices launching with the new OS. The news comes to us via an Android source code commit first spotted by XDA Developers, which reads, "Require Virtual A/B on R launches." In English, this means the seamless update system, which requires two partitions (labeled "A" and "B"), will be required on Android R, aka Android 11.

Android's seamless update system was introduced in Android 7.0 Nougat (it was actually borrowed from Chrome OS) as a way to reduce the downtime caused by OS updates and to offer a recovery mechanism in case an update applies incorrectly. Applying an update to an operating system usually means taking the OS offline for an extended period of downtime. On Android, before seamless updates, the phone would boot into recovery and could be stuck on the "Installing System Update" screen for as much as 25 minutes. That's a lot of downtime, and during this time you can't run any apps, see any text messages, or get any phone calls. The downtime happens because updating the system files requires taking the system partition offline, but the seamless update system fixes this by just having a second copy of the system partition.

As referenced in the commit, the two system partitions are called "A" and "B." Normally they are exact copies of each other. One of the system partitions is online and being used for the phone operating system, and the other one is offline, just sitting there. When it comes time to apply an update, the update is applied to the offline partition first. So if you're running on system partition A, then it's system partition B that gets updated. This happens, well, seamlessly, in the background, and while system partition B is having files updated, you can still do all the normal phone stuff on system partition A. Instead of having to stare at a phone locked to an "Installing System Update" screen for 25 minutes, the phone only has an "installing system update" notification that you can ignore.

Enlarge / Elon Musk. (credit: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Tesla announced Tuesday that salaried workers would take pay cuts of 10 percent or more through the end of June. Most hourly workers—many of whom haven't been working since Tesla shut down its Fremont factory last month—are being formally furloughed, making them eligible to claim unemployment benefits. The changes take effect on April 13.

"We expect to resume normal production at our US facilities on May 4, barring any significant changes," the email from Tesla HR said. It said that pay cuts and furloughs were a "shared sacrifice across the company that will allow us to progress during these challenging times."

Tesla is slashing pay for vice presidents by 30 percent and directors by 20 percent. Lower-level salaried employees will see their pay fall by 10 percent. These are predominantly white-collar workers who have been able to continue working from home.