Electronic Arts is actively courting buyers — or another company willing to merge with it, according to insider news site, Puck. The video game company reportedly held talks with several potential buyers or partners, including major players Disney, Apple and Amazon.
EA remains a company of its own for now, but Puck said it’s more proactive in its quest to find a sale since Microsoft announced it's snapping up Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. In short, it shows that some companies are willing to throw around enough money to buy a gaming giant like EA.
The company, arguably best known for its legion of sports games, recently parted ways with FIFA for its soccer/football series. It’ll be called EA Sports FC going forward. No, it is not catchy.
Xiaomi finally confirmed its "long-term strategic cooperation" with Leica, and that they've been co-developing a flagship smartphone for launch in July 2022. Teaming up with camera companies has been done several times over – especially by Chinese phone manufacturers trying to stand out from the crowd. In 2020, Vivo joined forces with Zeiss, while Oppo and OnePlus started releasing handsets jointly developed with Hasselblad, including the Find X5 series and the OnePlus 10 Pro.
Harder to stand out when everyone is doing the same thing, though.
Amazon beamed the first episode of sci-fi series Night Sky out of Earth's atmosphere. It’s calling it "the first-ever intergalactic premiere for a TV series."
Prime Video’s press release said the transmission won't be caught by broadcast satellites and sent back to terra firma, as is usually the case. "Theoretically, this makes the broadcast available to anyone open to receiving satellite signals 384,000 kilometers away from Earth and beyond — the equivalent distance from Earth to the Moon."
Netflix is trying to build up hype for Stranger Things season four in a not-so-subtle way: sharing the first eight minutes of the introductory episode. It’s heavy on the flashback, but there should be enough to hook intrigued parties.
The FCC wants to boost rural broadband internet speeds through proposed changes to the Alternative Connect America Cost Model (A-CAM) program. It wants to crank up download and upload speeds to 100/20 Mbps in areas served by carriers that receive A-CAM support. The current baseline is 25/3 Mbps.
Last week, the Biden administration launched a $45 billion project to bring all Americans online by 2030.
Clearview AI has been fined £7.55 million ($9.5 million) by the UK's privacy watchdog for illegally scraping the facial images of UK residents from social media and the web. It was also ordered to stop obtaining the data of UK residents and to delete any it has already collected. "The company not only enables identification of those people, but effectively monitors their behavior and offers it as a commercial service. That is unacceptable," said UK information commissioner John Edwards in a statement.
The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) opened a joint investigation with Australia into Clearview AI back in 2020, and issued a preliminary fine of £17 million ($21.4 million) against the company late last year. At the time, the office noted that "Clearview AI Inc’s database are likely to include the data of a substantial number of people from the UK and may have been gathered without people’s knowledge from publicly available information online, including social media platforms."
In issuing a final injunction, the ICO noted that globally, the company illegally collected more than 20 billion facial images for its database. "Although Clearview AI no longer offers its services to UK organizations, the company has customers in other countries, so the company is still using personal data of UK residents," it said.
Clearview AI sells an app that can be used to upload a photo of someone, then try to identify them by check its database. The data has been used by thousands of public law enforcement agencies, despite the technology being in a legal grey area.
Twitter, Google and YouTube have all sent cease-and-desist letters to the company, alleging that it violates their terms of service. Facebook has also demanded that Clearview stop scraping its data. The company has received complaints from privacy groups in Europe, and was hit with a €20 million fine in Italy.
In the US, the ACLU sued Clearview for violating Illinois state laws. The company recently settled that lawsuit by agreeing to restrict the use of its database in Illinois, though it will still supply it to federal agencies and other states.
Time is vital in today's society, and when it comes to certain electronics, timing is crucial; just like us, they require a means to keep track of time, and precise time. So, how do electronics accomplish this? A Real-Time Clock, or RTC, is a timekeeping device embedded inside an Integrated Circuit, or IC. The answer is DS1307. Many time-critical applications and devices rely on it, including servers, GPS, and data loggers.
London has the oldest underground railway in the world, and on May 24th, it will welcome its newest addition to the family. Crossrail is the realization of a dream first mooted in 1941, but one that would only start being built in 2009. It is one of the biggest infrastructure projects in the western world, arriving several years late and several more billion pounds over budget. But it’s hoped that this gigantic system will spur growth, relieve congestion on its Victorian-era network and remind the world of what Britain can do when it puts its mind to something. No pressure, then.
The London Underground as it exists today was borne out of a historical railway boom, with competing companies building routes to serve the city’s major economic hubs. Its many quirks are a consequence of nearly 200 years of politics, commerce, geography and geology shaping how things work. It comprises eleven lines, 272 stations and 250 miles of track, which is now under the aegis of a dedicated body, Transport for London.
Despite the wealth of transport links, many of the lines were built to serve a city far smaller than its present population. Not to mention that London is the center of gravity for far more than just the people living within its metropolitan area – it dominates much of the southeast of the country. It’s for this reason that Crossrail was given the green light, as both a way to relieve congestion on its tiny, Victorian-era tunnels, and to recognize just how broad London’s influence had become.
Crossrail Ltd.
Crossrail runs from Shenfield, a commuter suburb 35 miles northeast of London in the neighboring county of Essex, via the Great Eastern Main Line. It then runs through the city, connecting to the Great Western Main Line and then on to Reading, a large town 40 miles west of London. When fully running, it is expected to serve 200 million passengers a year, increasing London and the south east’s total rail capacity by around 10 percent in total. Crossrail is primarily an above-ground line, aside from the Central Operating Section (COS); the tunnels that run through London itself.
“It’s hard to fathom how there is space in this city to put in new stations, new infrastructure,” says Olga Konopka, Principal Delivery Engineer at Crossrail. She cited an example of how when the new Crossrail tunnels pass existing Jubilee line tunnels, the gap between them is just two meters (6.5 feet). A fleet of eight 1,000-ton Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) were tasked with weaving a new route through some of the most congested soil anywhere in the world. It’s one of the reasons that Crossrail’s birth hasn’t been an easy one – since you’ve got hundreds of years worth of infrastructure that you can’t touch during the construction process.
The TBMs pulled around seven million tonnes of material out of the ground, but Crossrail’s leaders said that almost all of it was re-used. For instance, around three million tonnes of soil was donated to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. This was used to construct a new wetland nature reserve at Wallasea Island in neighboring Essex. The rest of the clay soil was used to restore landfill, raise land and, in one instance, help build a golf course.
Luca Marino / Crossrail Ltd.
Some 26 miles of tunnels have been dug below the city, which took between May 2012 and May 2015 to complete. Konopka explained that as well as being “the biggest civil engineering project in Europe,” it also produced the largest tunnels dug for the London underground. The Central Line, for instance, has a diameter of roughly 3.5 meters (around 11.5 feet), while Crossrail tunnels are 6.2 meters (around 20 feet) wide. “Crossrail tunnels have an emergency walkway in them, which is a massive improvement to health and safety from the current infrastructure,” she said.
Konopka explained that there was some art and artistry baked into the system to help things run smoother and smarter. For instance, the gradient of the railway line gently inclines in the tunnel sections approaching a station. That way, a train slows down more efficiently since some of its forward motion is being sapped by the hill it has to climb. The situation is reversed when you pull out of a station, the track sloping almost imperceptibly downward in order to give the train a speedy departure.
It should be clear by now that Crossrail, despite the fact that it is an electric railway running under a city, is not a regular subway. It may feature on the Underground Map, and even has a line name – The Elizabeth line – but it’s not an official part of the underground itself. (Pedants beware: Crossrail denotes the project, the Elizabeth line is the thing you’ll actually be riding.) Because it connects to mainline stations at either end, and uses full-size mainline trains, it is a railway unlike anything else in the UK. In fact, the closest comparator is Paris’ Réseau Express Régional (RER), a series of lines that connect commuter suburbs to the city itself, and then moves people between stops in the city – a railway that acts like a subway when it’s in the middle of a city.
Crossrail Ltd.
One thing that was often repeated was the fact that Crossrail was a project designed to marry the very old and the very new into one seamless whole. “Farringdon was the first part of the Underground,” said Konopka, “we need[ed] to somehow marry up the old and the new, and that’s been the biggest struggle.” And making a 21st century railway run in perfect harmony with a pair of railways built in the Victorian era is one of the reasons that Crossrail’s deadline slipped from 2018 to 2022. (COVID-19, of course, was the other.)
“Conceptually, the project is brilliant,” says Colin Brown, Technical Director of the Crossrail project, but “it joins up to railways that were built in Victorian times, and that’s where your problem starts,” he said. “The Great Western was built by [Legendary engineering pioneer Isembard Kingdom] Brunel,” he explained, “and the Great Eastern wasn’t far behind it.” “The technology on those two railways has evolved over many years,” he said “but hasn’t been changed since the ‘60s or ‘70s.”
Britain’s railways, including the two main lines that Crossrail connects, use an antiquated, analog signaling system to communicate hazard warnings to drivers. This system, after a series of fatal train disasters in the ‘90s, was updated slightly to improve safety, but remains a 20th century tool. The digital replacement is ETCS (European Train Control System), which brings digital technology into the railways and promises a much safer network overall. While Crossrail was built with ETCS as standard, it also had to play nice with its analog predecessors.
Subway systems, however, use an entirely different signaling system called Communications Based Train Control (CTBC). Given the density of trains using tunnels under cities, and the need for accurate location data, CBTC is key to run services with small gaps between each train. Crossrail may not be a subway, but it will run 24 trains per hour inside the tunnels, and so needs to behave like one while it’s underground. Not to mention that CBTC is the only system that can also run the more subway-esque functions, like platform screen doors and tunnel vent interfaces.
Brown explained his dismay at the patchwork of systems and why it wouldn’t have been simpler just to pay to standardize the technology. For a variety of reasons, it wasn’t deemed feasible, and so engineers have spent years finding ways to make the old and new, analog and digital, above-ground and below-ground systems work as one cohesive whole. “You’ve [never had] a mainline train morphing into a metro train and then morphing back out again,” said Brown – at least not in the UK.
CBTC is also predominantly automatic, with drivers acting in a more supervisory role while the trains are underground.This automatic system will even operate the train when it needs to reorient itself ready for its next leg of the journey. “When it gets to Paddington,” said Pradeep Vasudev, Head of System Integration, “the driver pushes a button and then he walks from one cab to the other [at the other end of the train] while the train drives itself.” This system is also sufficiently smart that it can help find ways for the timetable to recover when a train breaks down or an incident causes a delay elsewhere on the line.
And because the system is now so much more complex, and broad, means that the timetabling systems are paramount. “For the first time, a train in Bristol [120 miles west of London] breaking down could affect a train on the Great Eastern [Main Line] in Shenfield [Crossrail’s Eastern Terminus, 35 miles northeast of London],” said Vasudev. And, of course, on the software engineering side, all of this information, and calculation, needs to be boiled down to a series of simple commands that a staffer can use to recover the service when things go awry.
One problem that Crossrail was also forced to address was the privatization of Britain’s railways in the early ‘90s. Rather than a centrally-planned and operated railway, the then Government decided to franchise each region’s railway operator. Consequently the Crossrail project had to engage with a variety of operators running different lines and find some happy harmony. “We have MTR driving, we have RFLI who owns the central section of the railway, we have London Underground, who operates a lot of the stations, we have Network Rail on either side, when we go into Heathrow, we’ve got Heathrow Express which is a different operator,” said Vasudev.
“Some of that, you’ll never get away from the fact that an operator is key, regardless of how much information the system can give you,” said Vasudev. Lee Price is one such operator, a former personal trainer and badminton coach who joined the company in 2016. Price’s story is common among new Crossrail drivers, coming from outside the train driving fraternity rather than within. This was because the project opted not to poach drivers from other underground or mainline services to avoid denting staffing levels elsewhere. (Not to mention that it helps bring the economic benefits of the system to more people, creating training and job opportunities.)
Andrew Parish / Crossrail Ltd.
Price is now a veteran of the service, and trains other drivers, although he too isn’t yet rated for the entire route. Since it’s being used as three separate railways, it will only be after the central section is opened that drivers will be running back and forth on a regular basis.
Unlike a mainline train, or a subway, the role shifts depending on where along the route the train is. “On the East and the West, you’ll be physically driving [the train],” he said, while in the COS, “in theory, the train is automatic, but we’re there for more of a safety [role].” “Although you’re doing less, you still have to remain alert,” he added, especially in the dark tunnels that require drivers to “keep their awareness up.”
Crossrail opens to the public on May 24th, with services running between Paddington and Abbey Wood. On the day, the various arms of the service will be rebranded from TFL Rail – a placeholder name – to the Elizabeth line. 12 trains per hour will run along the line, starting at 6:30am and ending at 11:00pm each weekday, with a fuller service ramping up over time. One of the new mainline stations, Bond Street, has yet to open thanks to service delays.
Work on the project is not likely to be complete for a long while yet, but if the railway does help boost London’s fortunes, it won’t be long before eyes look forward to the next project. Crossrail 2 is a proposed line running from Broxbourne and Cheshunt in London’s northeast down to Chessington, southwest of the city. It is designed to join up routes north and south of the city, and relieve congestion on those journeys as much as Crossrail is expected to do from east to west.
Unfortunately, COVID-19 and government funding cuts have put the project on ice for the foreseeable future. But one thing that is clear, is that the expertise, the lessons learned from Crossrail’s slower-than-expected birth, are currently embedded in the team that’s just finishing their work. To let all of that experience wither on the vine would seem like a criminal waste of resources. Then again, there will be voices asking why London deserves yet another expansion of its public transport network when other major cities have nothing. As always, politics, economics, geography and geology will determine the future of the most famous tube in the world.
PC accessory manufacturer Corsair has unveiled its first laptop, the 16-inch Voyager AMD Advantage Edition, that's unabashedly designed for gamers and streamers. It's an all-AMD affair, packing both Ryzen 6000-series processors and an AMD Radeon RX 6800M GPU. It appears to be some of the first fruit from its 2019 purchase of gaming PC manufacturer Origin.
The highlight feature is a 10-key LCD macro bar above the keyboard that's powered by Elgato, allowing streamers to customize controls using Stream Deck software. At the same time, you don't have a MacBook Pro touch bar situation where the function keys have been replaced, as it has those, too. And because of the laptop's unusual clamshell design, you can access the macro bar even when the laptop is closed.
Corsair
You'll be able to customize the keys to different live streaming controls like switching scenes, adjusting audio and loading videos or photos. That way, you could presumably control streaming from your laptop, and the keys could also be used with video conferencing apps like Zoom.
The 16-inch 2,560 x 1,600 240Hz display (16:10) looks ideal for gaming with a good blend of resolution and speed. Other features aimed at gamers and streamers include a full-sized keyboard with Cherry MX ultra-low profile mechanical switches (in conjunction with membrane for half-height keys), and a 1080p30 webcam with a physical privacy shutter.
Corsair
Corsair is offering two versions with either a Ryzen 7 6800HS or Ryzen 9 6900HS CPU, along with a Radeon RX 6800M GPU for both. Both versions are well-equipped for gaming or creative work, with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD on the Ryzen 7 version, and 64GB GB of DDR RAM and a 2TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD on the Ryzen 9 model. Both include a pair of Thunderbolt 3-enabled USB 4.0 ports, a USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C port and a USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A port, along with an SDXC 7.0 card reader, 3.5mm combo audio jack, WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.
The design is certainly different from other gaming laptops, but it looks sleek with a 19.9mm tapered design and thin display section. It weighs in at 2.4kg (5.3 pounds), a bit heavier than the 16-inch HP Omen 16 gaming laptop (5.03 pounds). The bottom bezel is fairly chunky, likely to accommodate the extra space required for the touch bar.
With the Voyager AMD Advantage Edition, Corsair appears to be taking on Razer in the enthusiast gaming segment. Corsair's press release shows $2,700 and $3,000 price tags for the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 models, respectively, though the company also said that "availability and pricing will be announced at a later date."
Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 Combo Module with High Performance Capabilities for Industrial IoT and Smart Home
Murata has announced its collaboration with NXP Semiconductors to develop the Type 1XL high-performance Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 module. Based on the NXP 88W9098 combo chipset, this ultra-small dual-band module supports IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax 2×2 multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output (MU-MIMO) and Bluetooth 5.3 Low Energy (LE).
AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7000 chips will mark another major milestone for the company: they'll be the first desktop processors running 5 nanometer cores. During her Computex keynote presentation today, AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that Ryzen 7000 chips will launch this fall. Under the hood, they'll feature dual 5nm Zen 4 cores, as well as a redesigned 6nm I/O core (which includes RDNA2 graphics, DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 controllers and a low-power architecture). Earlier this month, the company teased its plans for high-end "Dragon Range" Ryzen 7000 laptop chips, which are expected to launch in 2023.
Since this is just a Computex glimpse, AMD isn't giving us many other details about the Ryzen 7000 yet. The company says it will offer a 15 percent performance jump in Cinebench's single-threaded benchmark compared to the Ryzen 5950X. Still, it'd be more interesting to hear about multi-threaded performance, especially given the progress Intel has made with its 12th-gen CPUs. You can expect 1MB of L2 cache per core, as well as maximum boost speeds beyond 5GHz and better hardware acceleration for AI tasks.
AMD is also debuting Socket AM5 motherboards alongside its new flagship processor. The company is moving towards a 1718-pin LGA socket, but it will still support AM4 coolers. That's a big deal if you've already invested a ton into your cooling setup. The new motherboards will offer up to 24 channels of PCIe 5.0 split across storage and graphics, up to 14 USB SuperSpeed ports running at 20 Gbps, and up to 4 HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 2 ports. You'll find them in three different flavors: B650 for mainstream systems, X650 for enthusiasts who want PCIe 5.0 for storage and graphics and X650 Extreme for the most demanding folks.
Given that Intel still won't have a 7nm desktop chip until next year (barring any additional delays), AMD seems poised to once again take the performance lead for another generation. But given just how well Intel's hybrid process for its 12th-gen chips has worked out, it'll be interesting to see how it plans to respond. If anything, it sure is nice to see genuine competition in the CPU space again.
While Ryzen 7000 will be AMD's main focus for the rest of the year, the company is also throwing a bone to mainstream laptops in the fourth quarter with its upcoming 6nm "Mendocino" CPUs. They'll sport four 6nm Zen 2 cores, as well as RDNA 2 graphics, making them ideal for systems priced between $399 and $699. Sure, that's not much to get excited about, but even basic machines like Lenovo's Ideapad 1 deserve decent performance. And for many office drones, it could mean having work-issued machines that finally don't stink.
After some earlier rumors, today Xiaomi finally confirmed its "long-term strategic cooperation" with Leica, and that they've been co-developing a flagship smartphone ahead of its July 2022 launch. This will be the German camera firm's latest mobile imaging collaboration after Sharp, Huawei and Panasonic.
Xiaomi hasn't shared much else about this upcoming product, but our money's on a "Xiaomi 13" label and Qualcomm's brand new Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor, along with some classic imaging aesthetics and filters from Leica's side. In the press release, CEO Lei Jun added that "this cooperation will provide a strong boost to Xiaomi's imaging strategy."
Xiaomi isn't the first Chinese phone maker to leverage the photography know-how from a renowned camera brand. In late 2020, Vivo followed the footsteps of Sony plus Nokia and joined forces with Zeiss. More recently, Oppo (and OnePlus) started launching handsets jointly developed with Hasselblad.
WhatsApp plans to end support for iOS 10 and 11. A new notification spotted by WABetaInfo prompts iPhone users to install the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system supported by their device to continue using the app after October 24th. A support article from WhatsApp notes the company recommends iOS 12 as a baseline for iPhone owners. If you’re still holding on to an iPhone 5s, iPhone 6 or iPhone 6s, you’ll be able to continue using WhatsApp on your device, but iPhone 5 and 5c owners will need to consider upgrading to a new handset.
With the iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c nearly a decade old at this point, chances are the move won’t affect too many people. When you do see an iPhone 5 out in the wild, it’s usually a hand-me-down. Still, millions of people around the world depend on WhatsApp to communicate with their friends and family, and there are bound to be at least a few iPhone 5 and iPhone 5c owners among that group.
Hyundai will allocate an additional $5 billion toward investments in the US, the automaker announced on Sunday. The funds will support the company’s work in electric vehicles, robotics, air taxis, self-driving cars and artificial intelligence. The announcement follows the recent news that Hyundai plans to build a $5.54 billion electric vehicle plant in Georgia. With that facility included, the automaker intends to invest $10 billion in the US by 2025.
Some of the money will go toward supporting Boston Dynamics, which Hyundai acquired in 2021. The automaker said it is committed to growing the robotics firm by expanding its manufacturing capabilities and product lineup. The company will also support Motional, its Boston-based self-driving unit, by working to make its driverless technology safer and more accessible to customers in the US and other parts of the world.
“The move supports carbon neutrality goals with new technologies and contributes to manufacturing in the US,” Hyundai said in a statement. According to the automaker, its new Georgia plant will produce 300,000 EVs per year once production starts sometime in the first half of 2025. Construction on the facility will begin in early 2023.
