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Weekly Tech Recap - № 192 - Pi 3 Model A+, PlayFab Multiplayer, Windows 10 1809, HTTP/3, toilet cleaning robot

November 16, 2018.

A more affordable Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. © Raspberry Pi Foundation.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, a single-board nanocomputer using an ARM processor. Its goal is to offer something more affordable and less cumbersome than its Pi 3 Model B+. Introduced at US$ 25, it’s 10 bucks less than the Model B+ and its footprint is also smaller (56 x 35 mm vs 85 x 56 mm). As with the Model B+, it uses the same quad-core Broadcom 1.4 GHz processor and is compatible with Bluetooth 4.2 as well as with Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. Cutting corners was inevitable to get to a smaller and less costly card. Gone is the ethernet port (Wi-Fi is now your only option to connect to the internet), the RAM is cut in half (522 MB instead of one GB), and there is now just one USB port where there were four.

Raspberry Pi Foundation, “New product: Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ on sale now at $25.”

 

Azure, the multiplayer game platform

PlayFab Multiplayer.

PlayFab Multiplayer. © Microsoft.

Microsoft launched a preview of PlayFab Multiplayer Servers, a new Azure-based service that gives game developers tools that ease many things that are normally a tedious aspect of multiplayer game development: managing players’ identities and profiles, matchmaking (pairing similarly skilled players — based on the same algorithms as Xbox Live), rankings, statistics, etc. The service also offers dynamic cloud-based infrastructure: you can assign a number of servers by geographical area and set limits to stop things from getting too expensive. Earlier this year, Microsoft bought PlayFab, a Seattle-based company developing cloud-based tools to support game developers, which at the time were AWS-based.

Ars Technica, “Microsoft wants Azure to be the multiplayer server solution for every platform.”

 

“October 2018” in November

Windows 10 update.

Made-in-Microsoft humor? © Microsoft.

Just over a month since its initial release, Microsoft is making the Windows 10 October Update (the new name for the old “Fall Creators Update”) once again available, but only for select customers (those skilled users who manually tell their system to check for updates). The update was withdrawn shortly after its initial release due to the discovery of a major bug causing data loss for some users: the program could erase gigabytes of personal documents, images, and music files without warning. This panic-inducing event led some to doubt Microsoft’s QA and testing procedures. The mishap is all the more surprising because pre-release users repeatedly alerted the company about the problem on its Feedback Hub. Here’s hoping that this update of “October 2018 Update” will be more reliable. This whole affair is a reminder of the importance of doing backups.

Computerworld, “Microsoft takes second swing at Windows 10 1809, re-issues troubled upgrade.”

 

HTTP ditches TCP

HTTP/3.

Fortunately, this is not the HTTP/3 logo. © Mike Bishop, via Daniel Stenberg.

HTTP, aka Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the foundation of the World Wide Web, will abandon its TCP data transport layer. Since the TCP/IP Model has been fundamental to the Internet since its inception, the change is significant. In its next version, called HTTP/3, the hypertext transfer protocol will use QUIC as a transport layer, a protocol based on UDP created by Google and released in 2013. TCP is a very reliable protocol that ensures perfect data-packet transmission between servers and clients. The flipside is the substantial back-and-forth between the client and the server to make sure that the data is correctly transmitted—a task that weighs down the server and slows transmission speeds. UDP is a communication protocol defined in 1980 that is simpler and lighter than TCP, but also less reliable (no handshaking or error correction among other things). Google’s QUIC enhances UDP with new functions to improve its performance and reliability, without the TCP’s constraints.

Ars Technica, “The next version of HTTP won’t be using TCP.”

 

Toilet cleaning robot

TIAGo.

TIAGo. © University of Koblenz and Landau.

I can’t stand scrubbing the tub. For others, it’s cleaning the toilet. Now there’s a robot for that. In a competition at the World Robot Summit in Tokyo, Team Homer’s version of the PAL Robotics TIAGo mobile manipulator showed off its mad skills in both wiping and tidying. The engineers from the University of Koblenz and Landau, Germany, designed an end effector made of a thick sponge-sandwich to soak up water and rub surfaces. The robot can separate the two sponge slices to soggily clamp light objects such as discarded toilet paper rolls. It’s slow, but it’s not like it has anything better to do when you’re at work. Actually, this will probably not see much adoption for domestic use, but it’s the right thing for cleaning toilets at the gym or in the dorms, where there are serial tasks and similarly-sized objects. With any luck, bathroom stalls will need to be retrofitted with a little more room to accommodate the robot.

IEEE Spectrum, “Robots finally learning to clean the bathroom.”