ANS_Tech Boss

AMD’s had the world’s eye at COMPUTEX 2017 for its two impending launches - the 16 core / 32 thread ThreadRipper CPUs and Radeon RX Vega graphics cards. Unfortunately, both of these product lines weren’t launched at COMPUTEX 2017. The ThreadRipper CPUs will reportedly launch ‘later this summer’ and Radeon RX Vega will be unveiled at SIGGRAPH 2017 which will be held on 30th July.  AMD Radeon RX Vega SKUs and Pricing The only thing we saw at the AMD COMPUTEX 2017 press conference were demo sessions for the two systems. Two Radeon RX Vega graphics cards in a multi-GPU configuration along with a Ryzen ThreadRipper were shown to play Bethesda’s AAA title Prey at 4K resolution with ease. But the actual graphics card wasn’t showcased. We didn’t see Raja Koduri on the stage either.  As far as rumours go, AMD will have three SKUs for Radeon RX VEGA - Radeon RX Vega Nova, Radeon RX Vega Eclipse and Radeon RX Vega Core. Radeon RX Vega Nova is supposedly the flagship SKU which might

Owners of Android smartphones in India should not download any unknown or suspect apps, even from Google Play India app store, and install anti-virus and anti-malware software to protect their phones from malware Judy, cybersecurity experts have said. The warning came even as Google said it has dealt with the issue. "We can confirm that we have taken action on the policy-violating apps," a Google India spokesperson said Tuesday, indicating that the search giant has taken down most of the apps, which had the Judy malware bug. The bug force-clicks ads on an infected phone, creating nuisance for users while generating gamed revenue for advertisers. More than 90% of smartphones in India run on the open Android OS, leaving them vulnerable to the malware, which security firm Checkpoint said has already infected over 36 million smartphones across the world through 41 apps. The apps by Korean developer Enstudio had beaten Google's own security feature called

At its Computex event in Taipei today, Intel unveiled its new Core X-series of processors. The debut of its latest high-end desktop CPUs wasn’t a surprise after plans were leaked earlier this month, but the series’ flagship model—the 18-core, 36-thread Intel i9-7980XE—still makes a very loud splash. Priced at an eye-watering $1,999, the Intel i9-7980XE will remain aspirational for all but a handful of consumers, but it serves as Intel’s salvo in its ongoing processor battle with AMD. With 16-cores and 32-threads, the AMD Ryzen Threadripper, announced earlier this month, was supposed to be a contender for the world’s most powerful consumer CPU, but it looks like Intel has taken back the mantle for now. Other members of the Core i9 family are more realistically priced and range from $999 for 10 cores to $1,699 for 16 cores (12 and 14 cores are also available). All i9 processors have a base clock speed of 3.3 GHz and go up to 4.3 GHz dual-core frequency with Turbo Boost 2.0 and

People who know Charity Majors describe her as a force of a nature, a combination of smarts, grit, hard work, attitude, wisecracks, and a genuine knack for fixing broken things. They also know she's a secret weapon among the tight-knit community of the Valley's star engineers, those folks that can command salaries of $1 million a year between pay and stock, by helping them find the cool new job openings before anyone else hears of them. Developers all over the tech industry know Majors from her work at Facebook and at Parse before that. Parse is the startup Facebook acquired in 2013 for $85 million. It helped developers run their mobile apps and supported over 500,000 mobile apps at its peak. Majors was running the massive infrastructure for that, managing dozens of people at Facebook. Before that, s  he cut her teeth at Linden Lab, the company that built Second Life, one of the first virtual reality worlds. Majors is so in-the-know that when top engineers decide t

Plenty of tech startups dream of building a new consumer brand that's used and recognized by hundreds of millions of people every day. Few of them get as close as Giphy, the four-year-old GIF search engine that's raised $150 million in funding to date at a $600 million valuation. Giphy's mission is to evangelize and proliferate the world of GIFs - those micro-videos and animations that replay continuously in an endless loop and have become a standard means for expressing humor, shock or affection in news feeds and message threads across the world. What started as a simple web crawler for finding GIFs now serves more than two billion of the auto-looping clips every day to more than 150 million daily users. The company recently started experimenting with standalone apps like  Giphy Cam  , which lets people create their own silly GIFs in seconds. Giphy isn't profitable yet. In fact, the company doesn't even have a reliable means of generating revenue at thi

Apple is likely to unveil the next iteration of iOS  soon   . That means it's "wish list" season, a time for iPhone owners to compile all the things they'd like to see on their devices. (And then whine about if they don't arrive.) For me,   there's one Android-esque bit I've wanted since iOS 8, but remains absent today: a customizable Control Center. For the most part,  the Control Center  - the little settings menu you swipe up from the bottom of the display - is a good thing. It makes it very easy to access commonly used functions; three or four button presses become a swipe and a tap. This is something any OS that sells itself on "simplicity" should strive to do. Apple made the whole thing better-looking and more functional with iOS 10, but also a bit more complicated. One panel became three: one to toggle quick settings like WiFi and Bluetooth, one for music and media playback controls, and one with controls for smart home devi

I didn't worry too much when computers beat humans at checkers, chess, or  Go . It was, after all, only a matter of time before someone built a powerful computer with a vast database of known game situations. But now that machines are beating professionals at poker - a game of imperfect information - a question must be asked: Is artificial intelligence starting to threaten people in creative jobs? In terms of game complexity - the number of allowed positions reachable in the course of a game - no-limit Texas Hold 'em poker, isn't an AI researcher's worst nightmare. The chess game tree has 10 to the 120th degree nodes. The one for Go has 10 to the 170th degree. Two-player, no-limit Texas Hold 'em is in between with 10 to the power of 160 possible decision points. There are methods of making the game-tree complexity manageable in a real-time game, often based on disregarding what led to a particular position and reducing calculation depth for future positions, a

Robots are coming for our jobs. Terminators will soon murder us all. There is no escape. Resistance is futile. These doom-laden predictions probably sound familiar to anyone who's read or seen any movies lately involving artificial intelligence. Sometimes they're invoked with genuine alarm, as in the case of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warning against the danger of killer automatons. Other times, the anxiety comes across as a kind of detached, ironic humor masking the true depths of our dread, as if tweeting nervous jokes about #Skynet will somehow forestall its rise. AI raises unsettling questions about our place in the economy and society; even if by some miracle 99 percent of employers agree not to use robots to automate labor, that still leaves many hardworking people potentially in the lurch. That's why it's important to talk about the impact AI will have on our future now, while we have a chance to do something about it. And the questions are complicated:

A total of 34 artificial intelligence startups were acquired in the first quarter of this year, more than twice the amount of activity in the year-ago quarter, according to the research firm CB Insights. Tech giants seeking to reinforce their leads in artificial intelligence or make up for lost ground have been the most aggressive buyers. Alphabet Inc's Google has acquired 11 AI startups since 2012, the most of any firm, followed by Apple Inc, Facebook Inc and Intel Corp, respectively, according to CB Insights. The companies declined to comment on their acquisition strategies. A spokesman for Apple did confirm the company's recent purchase of Lattice Data, a startup that specialises in working with unstructured data. The first quarter also saw one of the largest deals to date as Ford Motor Co invested $1 billion in Argo AI, founded by former executives on self-driving teams at Google and Uber Technologies Inc. Startups are looking to go deep on applications of artif

Google's artificial intelligence programme,  AlphaGo , beat Chinese Go master Ke Jie for a second time on Thursday, taking an unassailable 2-0 lead in a best of three series meant to test the limits of computers in taking on humans at complex tasks. Go is a highly complex board game dating back thousands of years that involves two contestants placing black and white stones on a grid. It is popular in Asian countries and most top-ranked players hail from China, Japan and South Korea. Ke, the 19-year-old world no. 1, was visibly frustrated, tugging his hair and laying his head on the table during the final moments of the second match against AlphaGo on Thursday. "Last year, I think the way AlphaGo played was pretty close to human beings, but today I think he plays like the God of Go," Ke said after the game. Following his defeat in the first match of the series on Tuesday, Ke said he would not compete against AI again due to its rapid improvement. The victory ov

Rocket Lab , a Silicon Valley-funded space launch company, on Thursday launched the maiden flight of its battery-powered, 3D printed rocket from New Zealand's remote Mahia Peninsula. "Made it to space. Team delighted," Rocket Lab said on its  official Twitter account . The successful launch of a low cost, 3D-printed rocket is an important step in the commercial race to bring down financial and logistical barriers to space while also making New Zealand an unlikely space hub. The Los Angeles and New Zealand-based rocket firm has touted its service as a way for companies to get satellites into orbit regularly. "Our focus with the Electron has been to develop a reliable launch vehicle that can be manufactured in high volumes - our ultimate goal is to make space accessible by providing an unprecedented frequency of launch opportunities," said Peter Beck, Rocket Lab founder and chief executive in a  statement . The firm had spent the past four years prep