Google Assistant Goes to Work for Nvidia's Shield TV

Nvidia on Thursday announced that its Shield TV now includes Google Assistant as part of its Shield Experience Upgrade 6.0 update, which is now available for download. The update also lets the Shield device work as a SmartThings Hub when paired with a SmartThinks Link. The SmartThings Link, which can be used to connect Shield TV as a SmartThings Hub, will be released in the coming months with a promotional launch price of $14.99. Shield TV supports voice commands to search apps, play and pause TV, and seek out particular programs.

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The Rosetta spacecraft was launched in 2004 and arrived at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on August 6, 2014, becoming the first probe to rendezvous with a comet. On November 12, Rosetta dropped its Philae lander to the comet's surface -- another first. But Philae bounced and didn't grab onto the comet in its designated landing spot. After three days, the lander's battery died and it went into hibernation. It woke up and briefly communicated with Rosetta in June and July 2015 as the comet came closer to the sun. Mission scientists weren't sure exactly where the probe had ended up. Until now.

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Digital artist Jan Frojdman spent three weeks shifting through 33,000 images obtained from NASA to create this 3D model of Mars.

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Twitter to Test Drive Double-Wide Tweets

Twitter has announced a limited test to double the maximum tweet size to 280 characters. Twitter has been struggling to boost user engagement, and its tweet character limitation has been the subject of a longstanding debate among customers and company insiders. One reason for the possible change is to correct for the imbalance between applying the maximum character count to Asian characters, which convey more meaning than characters in western languages, noted Twitter Product Manager Aliza Rosen and Senior Software Engineer Ikuhiro Ihara.

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When Quantum Computers Come, They May Speak Microsoft

Microsoft has been working on a language for a computer that doesn't exist. The company unveiled the language -- as yet unnamed -- at its Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida. Part of its Visual Studio product, it will run on a quantum simulator and quantum computer. Microsoft introduced the language during a presentation about the company's progress toward developing a topological qubit and an ecosystem of hardware and software for developers to produce wares using the power of quantum computing.

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SQL Server 2017 Embraces Linux, Docker

Microsoft on Monday announced the general availability of SQL Server 2017, now with support for Linux, at its Ignite conference in Orlando. The company first announced its plans for the newest iteration of its database software a year and a half ago. This is the first version of SQL Server to run on Windows Server, Linux and Docker, noted Scott Guthrie, EVP, cloud and enterprise, at Microsoft. SQL Server offers "mission-critical performance and security," he said. It now has everything built in, including AI, "on the platform of your choice."

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Sony's Foolish Failure to Learn From Microsoft's Mistake

Microsoft has learned a lot of very hard lessons over the last couple of decades, and it continues to surprise and annoy me that other firms seem to have the suicidal tendency to learn the same lessons the hard way. My view is that it is far better and cheaper to avoid the mistakes of others, but firms like Apple, Google and, most recently, Sony seem to want to cherry-pick past Microsoft disasters and experience them first hand. The latest issue has to do with interoperability and millennials.

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Companies Cheer Completion of Open-Design Transatlantic Internet Cable

Microsoft has announced completion of the Marea undersea cable, which stretches 4,400 miles between Virginia, and Bilbao, Spain. A joint project of Microsoft, Facebook and Telxius, the cable lies more than 17,000 feet below the ocean's surface. It is the first cable to link Virginia and Spain. The Bilbao terminus provides access to network hubs in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Marea is located several miles south of the current connection points between the U.S. and Europe, for protection against natural disasters.

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Ford Motor Puts Design Strategy Under the HoloLens

Ford Motor Company has unveiled details about its use of Microsoft's HoloLens augmented reality technology in the automotive design process. Ford's design teams have swapped out their clay-sculpting tools -- a staple of the automotive world since the 1930s, when Harley Earl introduced them at General Motors -- for mixed reality headsets and visualization software. Unlike with the clay models, which can weigh 5,000 or more pounds, designers with HoloLens can make instant changes to side mirrors, grilles, interiors and other vehicle elements.

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Linux: Come for the Kernel, Stay for the Popcorn

Linux offers so much for users to sink their teeth into that even among desktop and more casual users, it's easy to get caught up in the tradecraft. It's only too tempting to put your system's technical capabilities to the test by trying out a new program or practicing a new command. As with any other interest, though, Linux is not much fun unless you can revel in it with fellow fans and enjoy the camaraderie. Here's a short tour of some of the major cultural hallmarks of the vibrant Linux world.

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Apple's Worthy iPhone 8 Models May Languish in X's Shadow

Reviews of Apple's new iPhone 8 and 8 Plus for the most part have been laudatory. However, the reviewers can't seem to get their minds off the jewel of the Apple universe, the iPhone X. Both the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are "awesome" and better than last year's models -- but iPhone shoppers who want to be part of the future will save their money and buy an iPhone X later in the year, suggested reviewer David Pierce. "The iPhones 8 check every box a phone has ever checked before, but they feel like the last of something..."

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Is Packaged Entertainment Media Really on the Way Out?

As home video viewing patterns continue to evolve, one common prediction is that packaged media is on its last legs. Streaming services have been gaining market share at a steady pace. In fact, streaming media sales eclipsed sales of DVDs and Blu-ray discs for the first time in the last quarter of 2016 -- with discs accounting for $5.4 billion in annual U.S. sales compared to the $6.2 billion haul for SVOD providers such as Amazon and Netflix. However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the death of packaged media has been greatly exaggerated.

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The New iPhones: Apple's Strangely Wrongheaded Pivot

It fascinates me that succession from a successful CEO to the chosen successor almost always goes badly. This phenomenon isn't limited to the CEO level -- I've seen highly successful CMOs followed by handpicked successors who also seem to have no clue as to why their predecessor did so well. I think it comes down to a lack of mentoring combined with misconceptions. People with different backgrounds often think their predecessor was lucky rather than smart. With Steve Jobs, it was always known that replacing him would be incredibly difficult.

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reMarkable's Pricey, Paper-Like Tablet Ready to Ship

reMarkable on Monday will begin shipping what might best be described as an "untablet" -- a device that is, essentially, an electronic piece of paper. The company is proud of its paper tablet's simplicity, boasting that no other tablet has fewer functionalities. reMarkable users cannot install apps, watch videos or take photos. What they can do is read, write and sketch on a paper-like surface. reMarkable is about 7x10 inches and a quarter-inch thick. It weighs in at .77 pounds. It has no glass parts and is virtually unbreakable.

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Members of the Cassini mission say goodbye to the spacecraft, their coworkers and some long-held traditions.

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IBM Touts Top-Notch Security in Next-Gen Linux Mainframe

IBM on Tuesday launched LinuxOne Emperor II, the second generation of its open source mainframe computer system. The new model has a layer of security and privacy not seen in a Linux-based platform before, the company said. "We saw in our success stories for Emperor that security was a recurring theme attracting new customers to the platform," noted Mark Figley, director of LinuxOne Offerings at IBM. "Later, our experience with blockchain ... reinforced that lesson for us," he said.

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How Many Ways Might iPhone X's Face ID Go Wrong?

When Apple unveiled its iPhone X on Tuesday, officials highlighted the device's advanced functionality, including what truly could be a game changing feature, its facial recognition technology. The new handset, which will sell for a whopping $1,000, allows users to unlock it simply by looking at it. The 10th anniversary edition of Apple's flagship mobile device is the first Apple handset to utilize Face ID, which works by scanning an owner's face via an array of cameras. Apple touted it as more secure than passwords or even fingerprint sensors.

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First Impressions: iPhone X Garners Lots of Cautious Thumbs Up

Apple on Tuesday raised the curtain on its next-generation iPhone X, and it so far has been greeted with praise -- though tentative -- from early hands-on reviewers. For the most part, they gave the X kudos for design and build, but reserved their unequivocal endorsements until they could spend more time with the phone. A sore point with many reviewers was the mobile's price. A unit with 64 gigabytes of storage costs $999 and one with 256 GB costs $1,146. Not all reviewers were annoyed by the pricing, though.

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Apple Unveils Highly Secure, High-Priced iPhones

Apple has made its long-awaited iPhone splash, accompanied by announcements of major upgrades to Apple Watch and Apple TV. The company launched two new generations of mobile phones -- iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and iPhone X -- with enhancements in photography and device security in all models. The iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are built for durability with a new glass back design and aerospace-grade aluminum bezel. They come in three colors: space gray, silver and gold. The phones feature a powerful new A11 bionic chip.

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Putin: Whoever Rules AI Rules the World

Russian President Vladimir Putin last week poked the nest of anxieties over the use of artificial intelligence to gain power in a video address to students at 16,000 selected schools. "Artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia but for all humankind," he said. "Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Russia isn't alone in viewing AI as the next big thing in military arsenals. Both the United States and China see AI as a key to success in armed conflicts of the future.

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Russia, Fake News and Facebook: 24/7 Manipulation

Back when the Internet first came to be, there was the belief that the result would be more facts, less censorship, more intelligent discourse and less successful manipulation. Being able to converse with each other would lead people to be more honest, and our world increasingly would resemble a utopian ideal of peace and prosperity. Now, decades later, "fake news" has proliferated, censorship is growing stronger, and rather than having politicians who can't handle the truth, we seem to have politicians who have no idea what the truth is.

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Gadget Ogling: Samsung's Return, Ultrasonic Tea, and Roaming Fridges

In 2016, Samsung's smartphone division wasn't so much on the rocks as dangling by a single fingernail, millimeters from plunging into a deep, dark chasm. The Galaxy Note7 had a terrible habit of exploding or catching fire. Not exactly the best look considering people prefer not to be injured while checking Instagram. The Galaxy Note8 is free of those combustible foibles, we've been assured, which is unquestionably the most important development. Of course, it's also bigger, smarter and faster, with a premium price tag to boot.

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Credit Agency Equifax Cracked, 143 Million Consumers Exposed

Consumer credit reporting agency Equifax on Thursday said it suffered a major criminal data breach that exposed personal information of as many as 143 million consumers in the U.S. between mid-May and July of this year. The attack exposed a range of sensitive personal data, including names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, and in some cases driver's license numbers, Equifax said. The attackers also accessed credit card data for about 209,000 consumers and credit dispute information for about 182,000 consumers.

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Next US Elections: Open Source vs. Commercial Software?

San Francisco in January could become the first U.S. city to adopt open source software to run its voting machines. City officials last month authorized consulting group Slalom to prepare a report on the benefits and challenges involved in using an open source voting machine platform. The city voted to pay Slalom $150,000 for its research. Meanwhile, the city this year will pay Dominion Voting Systems $2.3 million to renew its contract for the company's proprietary voting machine software. That system is nearing the end of its life cycle.

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Global Cyberattack on Energy Sector Stokes Deep Fears

The hacker group known as "Dragonfly" is behind sophisticated wave of recent cyberattacks on the energy sectors of Europe and North America, Symantec reported Wednesday. The attacks could provide the group with the means to severely disrupt energy operations on both continents. Dragonfly launched a simililar campaign from 2011 to 2014, but it entered a quiet period in 2014 after Symantec and others exposed its activities. The current campaign began in December 2015, Symantec noted.

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Scientists are rethinking their understanding of Jupiter's powerful auroras after receiving data from NASA's Juno spacecraft.

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Bodhi Linux With Moksha Is Truly Enlightening

Bodhi Linux 4.3.1's implementation of the Enlightenment desktop, released late last month, continues this distro's tradition of providing an awesome desktop computing platform for office or home. When I last reviewed Bodhi Linux, I was attracted to the relatively new desktop environment. When the backup computer that hosted that earlier version of Bodhi finally needed replacement, I installed the latest version on the new hardware, mostly out of curiosity about the current progress of Enlightenment computing. Bodhi Linux did not disappoint.

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Pixelmator Pro Whirlwind Appears on the Horizon

Pixelmator on Tuesday unveiled Pixelmator Pro 1.0 Whirlwind, a high-powered version of its popular photo editing application for macOS. The app's interface has gotten an overhaul -- it's now in a single window with no floating toolbars -- and it boasts new nondestructive, GPU-powered image editing tools and enhanced machine-learning features. Nondestructive tools for color adjustments, effects, styles and layouts give users the freedom to make or remove changes at any point in the workflow of a photo editing project.

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LG Unveils V30 Flagship With Super Camera, Sound Features

LG Electronics last week unveiled its latest flagship smartphone, the LG V30, at IFA 2017 in Berlin. Among the LG V30's innovations: an F1.6 aperture camera lens; a glass Crystal Clear Lens; the first OLED FullVision display; Cine Video mode for producing movie-quality videos; the Point Zoom feature, which lets users zoom in on any subject anywhere in the frame; Cine Effect, which has 15 preset effects to give videos a movie-like look; premium sound with advanced Hi-Fi Quad DAC, sound tuning by B&O Play; and voice recognition.

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Has Google Become a National Threat?

The idea that Google might be becoming a national threat is what struck me when I read a recent column by a law professor making a compelling argument that Google has reached a point where it no longer allows dissent outside the company. Given the recent firing of a Google engineer, that may be true inside the firm as well. Apparently, Google has been funding an organization that is set up to fight monopolies, but when that organization called it out, Google allegedly orchestrated the termination of the group.

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