Google discontinues its flagship smartphones, residents in eastern Canada were hit with a cell service outage yesterday, scientists renamed 27 human genes to appease Excel.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending. It’s Friday, Aug. 7 and I’m your host, Alex Coop.
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https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/06/google-discontinues-the-pixel-4-nine-months-after-release/
Google has ended its flagship Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL smartphones less than a year after launch. Although the phones brought an extra telephoto camera and a high refresh rate display, the Google Pixel 4 series suffered from mediocre battery life. Google had also attempted to differentiate the Pixels with a Soli radar sensor with only limited success. With the release of the more affordable Pixel 4a, Google no longer has any reason to keep the flagship Pixel 4 series, especially when it’s already planning on launching the Pixel 5 this fall.\
Canadians in eastern Canada may have been perplexed by a cell signal outage yesterday. The outage only lasted for about an hour, but its effect was wide-reaching, affecting all three major carriers. By 12:30PM yesterday, 15,000 Bell users have reported service issues on Downdetector. Rogers and Telus also had around 2,000 reports each. In an email, Telus only said that the issue was swiftly resolved but did not clarify the source of the outage.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
It turns out that human genes and Excel spreadsheets don’t mix. Over the past year, 27 human genes have been renamed because Excel would automatically format them into dates. Whenever it happened, scientists would have to correct the errors by hand. You can see how frustrating this can be when you’re dealing with a large spreadsheet. Because Excel also doesn’t provide a way to disable automatic date formatting, scientists have conceded to their fate and began renaming the genes in a never-ending struggle with technology.
That’s all the tech news that’s trending right now. Hashtag Trending is a part of the ITWC Podcast network. Add us to your Alexa Flash Briefing or your Google Home daily briefing.I’m Baneet Braich, thanks for listening
