Welcome to the 330th consecutive day it has felt like March. Here are a few of the few stories I’ve found interesting over the past couple days.
DJI Releases New Drone That Offers First Person Viewing experiences
This is wild to me. DJI’s new FPV drone has one extremely notable feature. When paired with the company’s FPV googles, it will allow owners to actually control the drone in VR from a first person perspective. There is software to assist in actually handling the drone, but the idea here is that you can actually fly the drone while looking through a live view of what the camera sees.
At $1200 USD I’m not buying this, but I want to at least experience this.
https://www.engadget.com/dji-cinematic-fpv-drone-first-person-view-price-release-date-140032533.html
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Uses a Custom Processor from 1998
This just shows how much harder it is to do things in space. Perseverance, the car sized rover that NASA landed last week using a heat shield, parachutes, and a rocket crane, is actually powered by a custom version of the same processor that Apple used in the iMac G3 in 1998. This is by choice, as developing a processor that can handle the harsh elements of space, or another planet, is a completely different animal than developing something to run in the laptop you use to work from home. This custom processor that is built for this purpose costs about $200,000 USD, and is shielded against radiation and sun flares. Since replacing parts on a computer on Mars is impossible, Perseverance also has two of these, one as a backup in case the first one fails.
https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2021/3/2/22309412/nasa-perseverance-mars-rover-processor-cpu-imac-1998
Volvo Plans to Stop Selling Gas Powered Vehicles by 2030
In the 2349273t5th sign of the future of personal transportation, Volvo has announced plans to move its entire lineup to electric vehicles by 2030, cutting gas powered cars from its inventory entirely. Other manufacturers are investing heavily in electric vehicles, but not many have committed to a hard date of when they will stop selling gas vehicles altogether. Volvo is among the first I what I expect will be many.
https://www.engadget.com/volvo-will-go-all-electric-by-2030-and-move-all-sales-online-091653396.html
Sony Will Stop Selling Movies and TV Shows Digitally in August
I’m not sure how many people were actually purchasing or renting movies from Sony, which is probably why this announcement has been made, but the company has announced that it will stop selling video content in August of this year. The company states that customers preference for media streaming fueled this decision, and it is likely that Sony just decided it wasn’t worth the cost to continue to offer the feature. Users who have purchased content will still be able to access that content after August, but after that no one will be able to make new purchases.
https://mobilesyrup.com/2021/03/02/playstation-store-movie-tv-rentals-purchases-discontinued/
Microsoft Continues to Fight The War on Passwords
This one isn’t for consumers… yet. But it does show where the future may lead. At Microsoft’s Ignite conference this week the company showed off several new tools in its Azure cloud service that aim to eliminate passwords. These include things like passwordless logins, temporary access accounts that don’t have passwords, and more.
While not terribly exciting for most people, I think we can all agree that passwords suck, and Microsoft is one of the few companies that is publicly working on ways to allow secure access to services without a password. Most other services use multi factor authentication which use a password along with another method to authenticate, but Microsoft is slowly working on getting rid of passwords.
It can’t come soon enough.