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Today’s topics include Apple’s report that several iPhone 7 models are already sold out, Qualcomm’s initiative to accelerate the development of dual-camera smartphones, Uber’s initiation of testing for autonomous cars and the addition of the R Server Developer Edition to Microsoft’s Linux Data Science Virtual Machine.
Apple’s new iPhone 7 flagship smartphones have been in such demand during the preorder phase that the company has already sold out its initial opening-day supplies of the jet black iPhone 7 and all colors of its larger iPhone 7 Plus handsets in advance of the Sept. 16 release date.
The company announced the thinning supplies of some of the phone models in a statement released Sept. 14, according to BGR.com. “We couldn’t be happier with the initial response to iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus and we are looking forward to beginning sales through our retail stores and partners around the world,” Apple said in its statement.
“Beginning Friday, limited quantities of iPhone 7 in silver, gold, rose gold, and black will be available for walk-in customers at Apple retail stores,” the statement said.
Qualcomm officials want to accelerate the development of dual-camera smartphones powered by the vendor’s Snapdragon 820 and 821 chips with the introduction of a new technology package called Clear Sight.
According to company officials, Clear Sight takes advantage of the Spectra image signal processor in the Snapdragon system-on-a-chip to offer a technique that they said will produce better images than single camera smartphones by mimicking the human eye.
The goal is to enable Android smartphones powered by the Snapdragon SoCs to create photos that are sharper, have greater dynamic range and can operate well in low-light environments.
Uber, the ride-sharing company has started testing its first four self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh’s challenging urban streets.
Uber chose Pittsburgh as the location of its testing program mainly because its Advanced Technology Center is located there. It’s not a coincidence that Carnegie–Mellon University, a center for some of the most innovative research on artificial intelligence, machine learning and now autonomous vehicles, is also located in Pittsburgh.
The first four self-driving test vehicles are modified Ford Fusion hybrid cars that include a variety of sensors, including 20 cameras, seven lasers and three inertial measurement units.
Microsoft R Server Developer Edition is now available on the Linux version of the company’s Data Science Virtual Machine, enabling users to build models using Microsoft’s ScaleR libraries.
In January, Microsoft launched R Server Developer Edition, a free version of the analytics platform for developers, students and for experimental, nonproduction deployments.
The offering arrived nearly a year after the software maker announced it was acquiring Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial supporter of R, the popular open-source statistical computing language.
Making Microsoft R Server Developer available on the Linux flavor of the DSVM offers a major bump in big data processing capabilities. Prior to the release, it only supported Microsoft R Open, which could only process as much data as would fit in memory, according to the company.