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The National Recording Registry announced its 2025 inductees, and there are some geeky sounds that will be immortalized in the Library of Congress. The Microsoft Windows 95 reboot chime was selected to be a part of the registry, as was the Minecraft soundtrack. "These are the sounds of America our wide-ranging history and culture. The National Recording Registry is our evolving nations playlist," Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said. "The Library of Congress is proud and honored to select these audio treasures worthy of preservation, including iconic music across a variety of genres, field recordings, sports history and even the sounds of our daily lives with technology." The Windows 95 start-up audio was composed by ambient music pioneer Brian Eno. According to the blurb from the Library of Congress, the final sound clip was twice as long as Microsoft's engineers had requested of the composer. But they went ahead with the chime because they felt it "conveyed the sense of welcome, hopefulness and progress that they envisioned" for this era of personal computing. The Volume Alpha soundtrack to Minecraft is only the second piece of gaming music to be added to the registry. It joins the iconic theme for Super Mario Bros, which was inducted in 2023. The launch audio for the popular sandbox game (which just got its own movie) was composed and performed by Daniel Rosenfeld under stage name C418. The 2025 inductees include music from across the genre spectrum. Some of the other selections include the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton, Miles Davis album Bitches Brew, and Celine Dion's single "My Heart Will Go On."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/the-windows-95-start-up-chime-has-been-added-to-the-library-of-congress-203909673.html?src=rss
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President Donald Trump has announced a 90-day pause on the sweeping tariff plan that went into effect on Wednesday, April 9, and an increase to 125 percent on the tariff on imports from China. Even with the 90-day pause, there's still also a 10 percent tariff on all other imports to the US. "Based on the lack of respect that China has shown to the Worlds Markets, I am hereby raising the Tariff charged to China by the United States of America to 125 percent, effective immediately, " Trump posted on Truth Social. For not retaliating, and attempting to "negotiate a solution," the president says he also "authorized a 90 day PAUSE, and a substantially lowered Reciprocal Tariff during this period, of 10 percent" on trade with countries other than China. China originally announced its own 50 percent tariff on US imports on April 8, The New York Times reports, before raising the tariff to 84 percent when Trump's plan went into effect. The European Union recently approved its own set of tariffs to go into effect on April 15. Besides negatively impacting global trade, Trump's tariffs have already had an immediate effect on companies offering consumer products partially or completely manufactured outside of the US. Many companies can no longer afford to pay the tariff to get their products to US customers, or are considering raising prices to account for their losses. For example, Nintendo attributed the pause on Switch 2 pre-orders in the US and Canada to the tariffs. The new import restrictions have also temporarily limited the sales of some products: Both Razer and Framework are no longer selling certain laptops in the US. Framework also delayed pre-orders on its new 2-in-1 convertible laptop and announced that it would be raising prices by 10 percent on the devices that remain for sale.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/trump-announces-90-day-pause-on-tariffs-excluding-china-195630212.html?src=rss
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Google has used AI to revamp one of the most beloved films of all time for a 360-degree Sin City screen with the highest resolution in the world. The rerolled version of The Wizard of Oz will debut this August at The Sphere, the Las Vegas entertainment venue with a famously globular LED screen. Whether a technical marvel, dystopian nightmare fuel or some combination, the project will surely continue The Sphere's penchant for extravagant spectacles that persuade tourists to plunk down hundreds of dollars to sit for a few hours in one of its 17,600 seats. Sphere Entertainment, the company behind the venue, worked on the project with Google, Magnopus and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns The Wizard of Oz rights. Google describes it as an "epic undertaking of creativity and technology," humbly likening it to the cinematic boundaries broken by the acclaimed Technicolor original. "We're taking a beloved movie, but we are re-creating it," Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian told The Wall Street Journal. "The only other way you could do it is to go back [in time] and film it with the cameras that the Sphere uses." The 1939 original.Warner Bros. Discovery Google used generative AI models from its Gemini family on the project, most notably Veo 2 and Imagen 3. The company not only had to magnify the original 35mm film for a 160,000-square-foot screen composed of 16,000 LEDs but also had to account for camera cuts that removed characters from the frame. For example, in a Kansas scene between Dorothy, Auntie Em and Miss Gulch, Uncle Henry (who was also in the room but off-camera) will be visible on the much wider screen. It did so primarily through an AI super-resolution tool (generating new pixels to fit the much higher-res screen), AI outpainting (generating new parts of a scene stretching beyond the original celluloid) and performance generation (incorporating composites of the actors into these expanded environments). To help fine-tune the AI models, Google didn't limit the models' training to the original footage. It also fed them supplementary material like the shooting script, production illustrations, photographs, set plans and scores teaching them about characters' and environmental details and production elements like camera focal lengths. The company also consulted with professional filmmakers for character actions, expressions and performance. "Now, Dorothy's freckles snap into focus, and Toto can scamper more seamlessly through more scenes," Google claimed. The companies behind the project (perhaps contradictorily) claim that, despite AI touching "over 90 percent of the movie," it "respects the original in every way." Google says no new dialogue lines were added, and there isn't a note of new music sung. If the glimpse shown in the preview below (via tabGeeks) is any indication, Dorothy has all the overly smoothed-out hallmarks we've come to expect from AI-upscaled faces. But we'll leave final judgment for the sun-drenched Sin City tourists who spend their hard-earned (or hard-won) cash on following the Gemini-infused road beginning on August 28. This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/google-used-ai-to-reconceptualize-the-wizard-of-oz-for-the-las-vegas-sphere-194504769.html?src=rss
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