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Monday, 28 September 2020

Amazon's 48-Hour 'Prime Day' Event Takes Place October 13 and 14

For the last few years, Amazon has been hosting an epic Prime Day sale that offers up deals and discounts on a huge range of products, and like 2019, this year's Prime Day will actually take place over two days, kicking off at midnight on October 13.

As usual, Amazon already has some early Prime Day deals on its website exclusively for Prime subscribers, with early discounts on Alexa devices and other Amazon products. Prime Day itself will include discounts on everything from tech products to home products, clothing, toys, and more.

Prime Day 2020 is a little later in the year than usual because of the ongoing global health crisis, but when it starts, Amazon's website will be filled with lightning deals that kick off at different times over the course of the day, with the available products rotating over time. Lightning deals last for as long as stock lasts, and some of the better deals can go quick.

Last year, we did a live blog covering all of the best Apple-related deals available during Amazon's Prime Day, and we plan to do similar coverage this year so make sure to tune in to MacRumors on October 13 and 14 for help sorting through all of the sales.

Prime Day sales are designed for Amazon Prime members, and a Prime membership is required to get the deals, although non-Prime customers can get access to the deals by signing up for a free 14-day Prime trial in October and then choosing not to continue to paid membership at the end of the trial period.

Prime Day discounts will be available to Amazon customers in the United States, U.K., U.A.E, Spain, Singapore, Netherlands, Mexico, Luxembourg, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, China, Canada, Belgium, Austria, Australia, and – participating for the first time this year – Turkey and Brazil.

Tags: Amazon, Amazon Prime

This article, "Amazon's 48-Hour 'Prime Day' Event Takes Place October 13 and 14" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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You Know Who Else Didn't Pay His Income Taxes?

The New York Times published an explosive new story on Sunday, revealing that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, another $750 in 2017, and didn’t pay a single penny for at least ten other years dating back to 2000. The article also alleges Trump owes over $400 million to unnamed…

Craig Federighi Explains How Scribble Feature in iPadOS 14 Was Developed

Scribble is one of the most notable new features in iPadOS 14, and in a new interview with Popular Mechanics, Apple SVP of software engineering Craig Federighi has revealed more details about how it was developed and how it works on iPad.

With Scribble in ‌iPadOS 14‌, you can use an ‌Apple Pencil‌ to write in any text field, and the written text is then converted to typed text. The feature means you can use the ‌‌Apple Pencil‌‌ without having to swap over to a keyboard when you need to compose an email, write a Calendar event, visit a URL, send an iMessage, or conduct a search.

Federighi explained to Popular Mechanics how Scribble's early development relied on extensive data gathering involving analyzing how people from all over the world write things down.

"When it comes to understanding [handwriting] strokes, we do data-gathering. We find people all over the world, and have them write things," says Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering at Apple. "We give them a Pencil, and we have them write fast, we have them write slow, write at a tilt. All of this variation."

That methodology is distinct from the comparatively simple approach of scanning and analyzing existing handwriting. Federighi says that for Apple's tech, static examples weren't enough. They needed to see the strokes that formed each letter. "If you understand the strokes and how the strokes went down, that can be used to disambiguate what was being written."

The job of integrating stroke-based recognition with character and word prediction is all done on-device, something that machine learning and raw processing power makes possible, explained Apple's software chief.

"It's gotta be happening in real time, right now, on the device that you're holding," Federighi says. "Which means that the computational power of the device has to be such that it can do that level of processing locally."

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Thanks to Scribble and ‌iPadOS 14‌, an ‌iPad‌‌ can be used almost entirely with touch and tools, and there's little need to type. If you're someone who prefers writing by hand, ‌Scribble‌ introduces tools that only enhance the experience. Check out the hands-on video above to learn see Scribble in action.

Related Roundups: iOS 14, iPadOS 14

Tags: Apple Pencil, Scribble

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Judge Temporarily Blocks US Ban on New TikTok Downloads

A federal judge on Sunday granted TikTok a preliminary injunction that temporarily halts an order from the Trump Administration that would have banned new app downloads in the United States beginning on Monday, reports The New York Times.

Should the order have gone into effect, Apple and Google could have been forced to remove TikTok from their respective app stores, and users who already have the app installed would no longer receive updates.

TikTok can avoid a potential ban by selling its United States business to an American-based company. Last week, it was announced that TikTok would be partnering with Oracle and Walmart to form TikTok Global, a new company that would be headquartered in the United States. Under the initial proposal, Oracle would be responsible for storing user data and could also review TikTok's current source code and that of any subsequent updates.

"We're pleased that the court agreed with our legal arguments and issued an injunction preventing the implementation of the TikTok app ban," a spokesman for TikTok said on Sunday after the judge's decision. "We will continue defending our rights for the benefit of our community and employees. At the same time, we will also maintain our ongoing dialogue with the government to turn our proposal, which the president gave his preliminary approval to last weekend, into an agreement."

President Trump signed an executive order in August giving ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, 90 days to sell its U.S. TikTok business due to possible national security threats from the China-based company. The preliminary injunction granted to TikTok, however, does not block additional restrictions set to be imposed in November that would render the app unusable in the country.

Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: TikTok

This article, "Judge Temporarily Blocks US Ban on New TikTok Downloads" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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Sunday, 27 September 2020

This Is the Newest Way to Show Full Stadiums During the Covid-19 Apocalypse

As you all have probably noticed, competitive sports does not like being without fans during covid-19 times. Officials have been racking their brains for ideas—some less strange than others—to deal with empty stadiums for months, and we just got a new one: Fill the stands with South Park residents.