Are you a server’s worst nightmare without even knowing it? We’re here to help. The Salty Waitress is The Takeout’s advice column from a real-life waitress that will teach you how not to behave like a garbage person while dining out—and maybe in real life.
Source: LifeHacker – Ask The Salty Waitress: What should I do if my food just doesn’t taste good?
I have a Google Doc page always open on my browser. On it are headers marked “pizza,” “burgers,” “casseroles,” “pies,” dips,” on and on. Under each section, I list established dishes and imagine how those flavors might taste in an alternate form. Such as: Korean fried chicken pizza. Carne asada ramen. Caramelized…
Source: LifeHacker – Make New Mexico green chile cheeseburgers in queso form
Netflix may be have ushered in the era of streaming, but it is not a completely benevolent savior. Though Netflix does giveth, it also cancels away the underperforming. So the throwback sequel series Fuller House must be doing something right, becaus…
Source: Engadget – Netflix renews ‘Fuller House’ for fourth season
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Americans are saving energy because they don’t go outside as much anymore, researchers say. It’s a plus for the environment, though in another light (no pun intended), it’s just sad. In 2012, Americans spent an extra eight days at home compared to 2003, according to the American Time Use Surveys. Being at home means using more energy by keeping the lights on and watching TV. But it also means less travel, and it means that fewer people are outside operating offices and stores. So overall in 2012, we saved 1,700 trillion British thermal units (BTU) of heat, or 1.8 percent of the national total, according to an analysis published today in the journal Joule. That’s about how much energy Kentucky produced in all of 2015. Specifically in 2012, Americans spent one day less traveling and one week less in buildings other than their homes when compared to a decade earlier. The trend of staying indoors is especially strong for those ages 18 to 24: the youths spent 70 percent more time at home than the general population. At the other end of the age spectrum, those 65 and older were the only group that spent more time outside the home compared to 2003. Next, the researchers want to look at energy consumption changes in other countries as a result of lifestyle changes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Americans Are Saving Energy Because Fewer People Go Outside
Rich Gouge (our new HSF/AIO cooler engineer) and I were sitting here chatting over IM and editing his latest cooler review, and I went looking for an example of an old cooler review of HardOCP’s. If you think we write crappy nowadays, check out how bad it was about 20 years ago. Bad, but still entertaining. Not every day you get to work a Ginger Lynn reference into a hardware “review.”
Always wear your protective gear. I have on a beautiful hardhat, safety glasses, and condom combo. (no silly, no pics of the schlong!) Remember Kids, Danger is my Bidness.
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Source: [H]ardOCP – Flashback Dual Celeron Cooler Circa 1998
The government of China has long held an interest in building bridges with countries across Africa, which it sees as both a major opportunity for economic investment and a chance to project geopolitical power. But while mutual solidarity is nice and all, the Chinese want to leave as little to chance as possible in…
Source: Gizmodo – China Denies That It Gifted the African Union an HQ Building Stuffed Full of Surveillance Devices
Faraday Future’s executive exodus last fall was bad enough, but the departure of one exec may have been particularly troublesome. The electric car startup has filed a lawsuit alleging that former CFO Stefan Krause stole trade secrets and poached sta…
Source: Engadget – Faraday Future lawsuit claims former exec stole trade secrets
The Btrfs file-system updates were mailed in and subsequently pulled today to the mainline tree for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window…
Source: Phoronix – Btrfs Gets More RAID 5/6 Fixes In Linux 4.16
A mom, her little daughter, and Grandma’s vintage, romance-themed board game. What could possibly go wrong in this scenario… unless it turns out that the seemingly innocent game is actually a million times spookier than an Ouija board?
Source: Gizmodo – Game Night Brings Unexpected Terror in Horror Short Your Date Is Here
CaptainDork shares a report from Motherboard: An Ethereum startup called Prodeum disappeared from the web on Sunday after raising a grand total of $11 USD from investors in a crowdsale. Shortly after the website disappeared, a message appeared on its homepage: “penis.” Prodeum’s website now redirects visitors to the Twitter account of a cryptocurrency trader (they did not immediately respond to our request for comment), and its Twitter account has been deactivated. Prodeum is at least the second Ethereum startup to pull up stakes after raising money from people in events called Initial Coin Offerings, or ICOs, in which a startup funds their enterprise by taking cryptocurrency from people in exchange for digital tokens. Some ICOs have managed to raise millions of dollars, and the last startup to vanish after conducting an ICO — Confido, which disappeared from the internet in late 2017 — made off with roughly $374,000. (A message later appeared on Confido’s site stating that it would buy back investors’ tokens, but it’s unclear if that took place.) Prodeum, by comparison, only seems to have raised $11 based on the Ethereum address that was advertised on Prodeum’s site as being the ICO address. (Update: After this article was published the contents of the ICO wallet were sent to another wallet. That wallet contains roughly $100, with the other funds all coming from a single wallet that predates the Prodeum ICO and contains 46 cents.) Prodeum’s pitch, according to a cached version of its webpage, was to track vegetables in a supply chain using digital addresses on a blockchain — a decentralized ledger at the heart of Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. As for why the “penis” message was left on its homepage, it may have something to do with the name of the startup. Prodeum is a medication that treats urinary tract infections and other urinary problems…
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Ethereum Startup Vanishes After Seemingly Making , Leaves Message: ‘Penis’
This week the Super Bowl dominates the weekend, but before the game kicks off we’ll be watching Netflix’s next big sci-fi show, Altered Carbon. It’s a mystery series where a dead-for-centuries detective has been resurrected to investigate a murder….
Source: Engadget – What’s on TV: ‘Altered Carbon,’ ‘Super Bowl LII’ and ‘UFC 3’
Samsung announced today that they are officially launching their first Z-SSD product, the SZ985. The Z-SSD uses Samsung’s Z-NAND memory, a high-performance derivative of their 3D NAND flash memory and Samsung’s intended competition for Intel’s 3D XPoint memory. The SZ985 is a high-performance, high-endurance enterprise NVMe SSD.
Samsung has been talking about Z-NAND and the SZ985 for quite a while, including showing off prototypes at several trade shows and conferences. Their initial announcement in 2016 of Z-NAND memory and Z-SSD drives promised 1TB drives in 2016 to be followed by 2TB and 4TB drives in 2017. Today’s launch of 800GB and 240GB models is far behind that initial timeline, but the Z-SSD is finally ready for broad release, almost a year after Intel’s Optane products first hit the shelves. Samsung hasn’t provided much new information about how the Z-SSD works under the hood, but they have disclosed that the drive includes 1.5GB of LPDDR4 DRAM. This suggests that the Z-SSD either has huge overprovisioning with as much as 1.5TB or Z-NAND memory for the 800GB model, or that the Z-NAND is being managed in a way that requires more than the usual 1GB of DRAM per TB of NAND flash used by most SSDs.
Samsung has not provided full performance specifications for the SZ985, but they have highlighted several key metrics that put the Z-SSD in the top performance tier. The SZ985 can deliver up to 750k random read IOPS, well above the 550k IOPS that Intel’s Optane SSD DC P4800X is rated for. Write performance from the SZ985 is much less impressive at only 170k random write IOPS. The random write speed rating on Intel’s P4800X is only 9% slower than the random read speed, while the Samsung SZ985 will have a random write speed that is 77% slower than random reads. Samsung has not been able to overcome all of the limitations of flash memory, but they have produced some impressive improvements.
Samsung also makes a few comparisons against more mainstream enterprise SSDs based on 3D TLC NAND flash memory. The memory cell read performance of their Z-NAND is ten times higher than their 3D TLC NAND, leading to 70% higher random read throughput than their PM963 NVMe SSD. Exact read latency isn’t specified, but write latency on the SZ985 is quoted as 16 µs.
Despite not having record-setting write performance, the SZ985 is still designed to handle very write-intensive workloads. The endurance rating is 30 drive writes per day for five years, matching Intel’s Optane SSD. However, both drives still fall short of the long-gone Micron P320h SLC NAND SSD, in both performance and endurance (though Intel has at least exceeded the random write speed of the P320h). Samsung’s most significant accomplishment with the Z-SSS SZ985 is likely that they can offer the performance of planar SLC at much lower cost thanks to their 3D NAND structure.
Samsung will be presenting the Z-SSD SZ985 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, February 11-15.
At Flash Memory Summit last year, Samsung announced a second generation of Z-NAND memory. The SZ985 is still a first-generation product, and drives with the second-generation Z-NAND could still be a long way from launching.
Source: AnandTech – Samsung Launches Z-SSD SZ985: Up To 800GB Of Z-NAND
Enlarge / A screenshot showing a keylogger extracting user names and passwords. It’s currently infecting more than 2,000 WordPress websites. (credit: Sucuri)
More than 2,000 websites running the open-source WordPress content management system are infected with malware, researchers warned late last week. The malware in question logs passwords and just about anything else an administrator or visitor types.
The keylogger is part of a malicious package that also installs an in-browser cryptocurrency miner that’s surreptitiously run on the computers of people visiting the infected sites. Data provided here, here, and here by website search service PublicWWW showed that, as of Monday afternoon, the package was running on 2,092 sites.
Website security firm Sucuri said this is the same malicious code it found running on almost 5,500 WordPress sites in December. Those infections were cleaned up after cloudflare[.]solutions—the site used to host the malicious scripts—was taken down. The new infections are hosted on three new sites, msdns[.]online, cdns[.]ws, and cdjs[.]online. None of the sites hosting the code has any relation to Cloudflare or any other legitimate company.
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Source: Ars Technica – More than 2,000 WordPress websites are infected with a keylogger
Tyson Foods, the world’s second largest processor and marketer of chicken, beef, and pork, announced it has invested in Silicon Valley startup Memphis Meats, a company that makes lab-grown meat using animal cells. The investment amount was not disclosed, but it follows a slew of other high-profile backers including Cargill Inc., Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Fox Business reports: Last December, Tyson made a similar investment in another meatless startup called Beyond Meat, investing a roughly 5% stake in the company that produces plant-based meat alternatives. Tyson CEO Tom Hayes told FOX Business in March of last year that he sees plant-based protein as a big part of the company’s future. “If you take a look at the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) stats, protein consumption is growing around the world — and it continues to grow. It’s not just hot in the U.S.; it’s hot everywhere, people want protein, so whether it’s animal-based protein or plant-based protein, they have an appetite for it. Plant-based protein is growing almost, at this point, a little faster than animal-based, so I think the migration may continue in that direction,” Hayes told FOX Business. Memphis Meats, which debuted its first animal-free meatball in 2016, followed by the world’s first chicken strip in 2017, said customers should expect to see these products on store shelves by 2021 or 2022.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – World’s Second Largest Meat Processor Invests In Lab-Grown Meat Startup
Regulators may have had a change of heart about the danger of using e-cigarettes, but scientists would beg to differ. A newly published New York University School of Medicine study indicates that vaping may put you at a “higher risk” of cancer and he…
Source: Engadget – Study says e-cigarettes may lead to cancer and heart disease
When you really think about it, it makes perfect sense. Of course Jessica Jones would eventually end up in jail. How could she not? Some new images from Netflix’s second season of the highly-acclaimed Marvel show have given us some interesting things to ponder.
Source: Gizmodo – From the Looks of It, Jessica Jones Is in for a Wild Second Season
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: In what seems like a John Henry versus the steam shovel-style competition to dig diesel’s grave, Volkswagen has admitted to funding (and subsequently cheating on) animal testing to prove the relative safety of diesel exhaust fumes, according to findings by the New York Times. The tests, which were undertaken at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque in 2014, involved as many as 10 monkeys and had them sitting in airtight containers as they breathed exhaust fumes from a diesel-powered Volkswagen Beetle while they watched cartoons for entertainment. The tests went on for 4 hours. “We apologize for the misconduct and the lack of judgment of individuals,” said a Volkswagen representative in a statement. “We’re convinced the scientific methods chosen then were wrong. It would have been better to do without such a study in the first place.” The Volkswagen Beetle used in the test was equipped with the same compromised emissions software that could detect when the car was being tested in a lab environment so it was running as cleanly as it could, which I guess proves that Volkswagen will waste no opportunity to be hoisted by its own oil-burning petard.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Volkswagen Admits To Testing Diesel Fumes On Monkeys
Earlier this week, the eagle-eyed VR Focus caught wind of two patents filed by Sony Interactive Entertainment, which look suspiciously like motion controllers. It’s too early to tell whether these are our first looks at an entirely new one for PlaySt…
Source: Engadget – Sony patents detail VR motion controller concepts
Universal Pictures and Skybound Entertainment just announced they’re teaming up to bring Image’s comic Birthright to the big screen.
Source: Gizmodo – Universal and Robert Kirkman Are Bringing the Image Comic Birthright to the Big Screen
The growing popularity of electronic cigarettes has led to an increasingly fierce public health dispute—the great vape debate, if you will. On the one hand, there are doctors and advocates who insist that vaping is a relatively safe, appealing way for smokers to wean themselves off much more dangerous tobacco…
Source: Gizmodo – E-Cig Vapor Might Be Carcinogenic, Mice Study Suggests
