Month: April 2020

Enlarge / A man stands in front of a closed Apple Store in Tokyo. (credit: Viola Kam/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Chinese companies that manufacture iPhones for Apple are cutting back hours and have laid off some workers, the Financial Times reports.

Multiple workers told the FT that manufacturing giant Foxconn has paused hiring at its massive plant in Zhengzhou, Henan province. According to the paper, Foxconn "has also begun to cut some of the temporary workers it hired in large numbers in February as it ramped up production after a long pause."

Foxconn has limited overtime hours and encouraged workers to take time off, the FT says.

Enlarge / A member of UK rave outfit Altern-8, or a driver not wearing his seatbelt? (credit: Eyesight Technologies)

After much political to-ing and fro-ing, it seems everyone is now on the same page: people should wear face masks in public while the coronavirus pandemic rages. A mask might not stop you from getting sick, but it may well prevent you from infecting other people. But what happens if you need to wear a face mask while operating a machine that depends upon seeing your face? I am of course referring to fleet drivers who drive vehicles with vision-based driver monitoring systems (DMSes), and the answer is "you need to update your DMS to work with face masks." Which is exactly what Israeli company Eyesight Technologies has done.

A lot of the focus on DMSes has been for passenger vehicles in relation to partly automated driver aids like GM's Super Cruise (which uses gaze-tracking to ensure the driver is looking at the road ahead as a condition for operation) or Tesla's Autopilot (which has been repeatedly criticized by federal safety agencies for failing to do the same).

But a DMS isn't just a good idea for a hands-free driving aid; people can and do get distracted in plain-old regular cars, too. Which is why automakers like Subaru and Mazda equip their vehicles with camera-based DMSes here in the US and abroad.

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  The individual level will no longer be the core unit of measurement in Super Mario Maker 2.

When the original Super Mario Maker came out on the Wii U nearly five years ago, we lamented how disjointed it felt to just play individual levels without "any sense of continuity or progression." We longed for a Mario Maker that let us arrange individual levels as building blocks to create "a complete game, one that progresses gently from easy to hard, teaching you new tricks and throwing in clever twists on old themes along the way."

Tomorrow, Nintendo will finally be making those dreams a reality with what it's calling the final major update to Super Mario Maker 2 on the Switch. The new World Maker mode will let you play with "All your ideas that couldn't be contained in a single course and share them with people around the globe," as the announcement video puts it.

Yes, that includes the ability to create a world map, complete with bridges, hills, customized course icons, background elements, and a variety of cosmetic themes. Those world maps operate on a pretty coarse-grained 7×4 grid system, though, perhaps to make it harder to draw rude words or images with your course paths.