Today I’m testing the S95 Pro from Doogee, an impressive rugged Android smartphone that's also modular and features a 48-megapixel triple camera, a long-lasting 5,150mAh battery, a fast CPU and external accessories like a Hi-Fi speaker and a battery pack.

Type a query into the Google search bar on a smartphone and there's a good chance the results will be dominated by advertising. From a report: That stems from a decision in 2015 to test a fourth ad, rather than three, at the top of search results. Some employees opposed the move at the time, saying it could reduce the quality of Google's responses, according to people familiar with the deliberations. But the company brushed aside those concerns because it was under pressure to meet Wall Street growth expectations, one of the people said. By 2016, the extra marketing slot was a regular feature. It's one of the many ways the search leader has altered how it presents results since its early days. Another example is the pre-packaged information Google often displays in a box at the top of a page, rather than sending users to other websites. Phased in gradually over years, changes like these have gone largely unnoticed by legions of consumers who regularly turn to Google to call up information and hunt for bargains. The company says these changes support its mission to organize the world's information and make it useful and accessible to everyone. But to many web publishers and other businesses that have historically relied on the internet giant to send users to their sites, Google's subtle tweaks have siphoned off vital traffic and made it harder -- and costlier -- to reach customers online.

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Eligible iPhone owners impacted by the battery-throttling issues in older models can now submit claims to get up to $25 from Apple’s settlement.

Hammeh writes: Semiconductor maker Analog Devices said on Monday it would buy rival Maxim Integrated Products for about $21 billion in the largest U.S. deal this year, aiming to boost its market share in automotive and 5G chipmaking. The deal, which is also Analog's biggest, will create a chipmaking force with a combined enterprise value of about $68 billion that will compete with larger rivals including Texas Instruments). Analog Devices Chief Executive Vincent Roche told Reuters in an interview that the combined engineering teams would help the resulting company design more specialized, higher-margin chips for customers such as automakers. "If you're doing commodities, you're at the mercy of the of the heavy hammer of the procurement folks," Roche said. "But our game is about getting there first, getting out on the edge and making a real impact at the application level for our customers." The companies said the deal added Maxim's strength in automotive and data center markets to ADI's broad industrial, communications and digital healthcare segments.

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The Democratic and Republican national committees have warned their staffs about using the Chinese-owned app TikTok. From a report: The Democratic National Committee warned Democratic campaigns, committees and state parties Friday to take additional security precautions when using TikTok. In the email, the DNC security team wrote, "We continue to advise campaign staff to refrain from using TikTok on personal devices. If you are using TikTok for campaign work, we recommend using a separate phone and account." Republican National Committee national press secretary Mandi Merritt said Saturday the RNC had longstanding guidance on TikTok. "The RNC has advised employees and stakeholders to not download the TikTok app on their personal devices," she said, citing "security concerns." The DNC had suggested to campaigns in a memo in December not to use TikTok, citing concerns about the app's "Chinese ties and potentially sending data back to the Chinese government."

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Microsoft has been collaborating with Google to ensure that their tools interoperate and can help developers get their Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) into the Play Store. From a report: "We're glad to announce a new collaboration between Microsoft and Google for the benefit of the web developer community," Microsoft's Judah Gabriel Himango announced. "Microsoft's PWABuilder and Google's Bubblewrap are now working together to help developers publish PWAs in the Google Play Store." As Himango explains, PWABuilder is a Microsoft tool that helps developers build PWAs from existing websites and publish them in app stores, while Bubblewrap is a Google tool and library used to generate and sign Google Play Store packages from PWAs. After months of collaboration, the two firms have made some interesting progress towards integrating the tools. Now, PWABuilder utilizes Bubblewrap "under the hood," as Himango puts it, allowing developers to package PWAs for the Play Store with PWABuilder that support the new web shortcuts standard. (On Windows 10, web shortcuts appear as jump lists.)

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Apple has released a new short film starring The Underdogs, but this time it's all about working from home.

Apple announced Monday that it is allocating $400 million toward affordable housing and homeowner assistance programs in California this year, as part of the $2.5 billion commitment announced in November. From a report: The housing crisis has worsened in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, forcing states and cities to pause spending on affordable housing projects. Big Tech's wealth has been blamed by some for driving up housing prices in the San Francisco Bay Area and making it unaffordable for teachers, firefighters and other workers who support the region. Apple, along with Facebook, Google and Microsoft, committed a collective $5 billion to support affordable housing initiatives, but it ran into the reality that money alone can't solve the problem without changes to zoning and financing restrictions.

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Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation's largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine. From a report: The machine at the Harris County Public Health department in Houston recently became overwhelmed when one laboratory sent a large batch of test results, spraying hundreds of pages all over the floor. "Picture the image of hundreds of faxes coming through, and the machine just shooting out paper," said Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of the department. The county has so far recorded more than 40,000 coronavirus cases. Some doctors fax coronavirus tests to Dr. Shah's personal number, too. Those papers are put in an envelope marked "confidential" and walked to the epidemiology department. As hard as the United States works to control coronavirus, it keeps running into problems caused by its fragmented health system, a jumble of old and new technology, and data standards that don't meet epidemiologists' needs. Public health officials and private laboratories have managed to expand testing to more than half a million performed daily, but they do not have a system that can smoothly handle that avalanche of results.

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Idris Elba, and his production company Green Door Pictures, has signed a first-look deal with Apple to bring new content to Apple TV+.

America's studios, creators and marketers are relying, more than ever, on digital platforms that allow them to gauge what audiences like-- and would like to see more of. From a report: They're not just looking for test screenings, either. They're looking to check in with potential audiences at every stage of production, from before a script is written until the moment their new TV show, film or music video debuts. Ever since George Lucas ushered in the era of endless sequels (and prequels), Hollywood executives have tried to capitalize on the success of the Last Big Thing by churning out more of it. But content budgets are increasing far faster than established franchises can keep up. Netflix is projected to spend more on new and acquired content in 2020 -- $17 billion -- than Apple spent on research and development in 2019. With stakes that high, minimizing risk when creating new content "at scale" means treating it like any other mass-market product. Executives, producers, writers, directors and marketers need to be able to consistently craft programs that are more likely than not to find their target audiences. Critical approval and industry awards -- even box-office blowouts -- while nice, aren't the endgame for most.

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Google said today it'll invest about $10 billion in India over the next five to seven years. The company's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said that money will be divided into investment equity investments, partnerships, and operational, infrastructure, and ecosystem investments. Investments will focus on four main areas: Information access in Indian languages. Building products for the Indian market. Empowering local businesses. Leveraging AI for good in areas such as agriculture and education.

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The iPhone maker will be reporting its third fiscal quarter earnings, impacted by the coronavirus epidemic and global health situation, on Thursday, July 30.

If you’re looking for another way to quickly find files and folders on your Mac, we’ll show you how to use groups for easier sorting.

Apple has committed $400+ million toward its its $2.5 billion commitment to combat California’s housing crisis.

If you want to view your data in different ways, this tutorial shows you how to use basic categories in Numbers on your Mac.

navindra (Slashdot reader #7,571) is a professional coder and an amateur musician. He writes: Music and technology have always been intertwined and this has never been truer with computer technology. I set out on a simple quest to find a better metronome, settled for a digital sample sequencer, but ended up fascinated by the Organelle music computer running Pure Data on a Raspberry Pi and Linux. "The entire system runs open source software and may be customized at every level," explains its web page. From navindra's article: [T]he Organelle is hard to define, but it is nothing less than a music computer, almost demanding that one ascend from mere musician to virtual instrument designer. Organelle patches are readily available for beat-making purposes, including sample sequencer or drum machine functions, multi-dimensional sequencers, and, yes, even a straight up metronome. Beyond the factory patches, the user community contribute their own creations... Pure Data code initially looks like low-level symbolic code — fortunately, it is easy to make something musical in short order, if one has a handle on sound synthesis and MIDI concepts. The Organelle runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi with everything that entails — it has a boot up time of 12 seconds, yields a 6 hour battery life on 4 AA batteries (roughly proportional to the volca power draw), and things like swapping samples is trivially done with a file manager, eliminating the need for special software. Similarly, adding or modifying patches is just as easy — modifying the existing Metronome patch with a new sound could be as easy as dropping in a new .wav file. Needless to say, the Organelle is constantly evolving and improving...

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A new jailbreak tweak called FastAppLS lets users add app shortcuts directly to the Lock Screen with a unique wheel-shaped interface.

It's frustrating when you accidentally force-quit the Now Playing app from your App Switcher, and this tweak can help prevent you from doing that.

The world's fastest computer is now part of "a vast supercomputer-powered search for new findings pertaining to the novel coronavirus' spread" and "how to effectively treat and mitigate it," according to an emerging tech journalist at Nextgov. It's part of a consortium currently facilitating over 65 active research projects, for which "Dozens of national and international members are volunteering free compute time...providing at least 485 petaflops of capacity and steadily growing, to more rapidly generate new solutions against COVID-19." "What started as a simple concept has grown to span three continents with over 40 supercomputer providers," Dario Gil, director of IBM Research and consortium co-chair, told Nextgov last week. "In the face of a global pandemic like COVID-19, hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event, the speed at which researchers can drive discovery is a critical factor in the search for a cure and it is essential that we combine forces...." [I]ts resources have been used to sort through billions of molecules to identify promising compounds that can be manufactured quickly and tested for potency to target the novel coronavirus, produce large data sets to study variations in patient responses, perform airflow simulations on a new device that will allow doctors to use one ventilator to support multiple patients — and more. The complex systems are powering calculations, simulations and results in a matter of days that several scientists have noted would take a matter of months on traditional computers. The Undersecretary for Science at America's Energy Department said "What's really interesting about this from an organizational point of view is that it's basically a volunteer organization." The article identifies some of the notable participants: IBM was part of the joint launch with America's Office of Science and Technology Policy and its Energy Department.The chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing says they're "making the full reserve portion of NASA supercomputing resources available to researchers working on the COVID-19 response, along with providing our expertise and support to port and run their applications on NASA systems."Amazon Web Services "saw a clear opportunity to bring the benefits of cloud... to bear in the race for treatments and a vaccine," according to a company executive.Japan's Fugaku — "which surpassed leading U.S. machines on the Top 500 list of global supercomputers in late June" — also joined the consortium in June. Other consortium members: Google CloudMicrosoftMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyRensselaer Polytechnic InstituteThe National Science FoundationArgonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National laboratories.National Center for Atmospheric Research's Wyoming Supercomputing CenterAMDNVIDIADell Technologies. ("The company is now donating cycles from the Zenith supercomputer and other resources.")

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