Parents today are stressed. They’ve lost old friends. They miss their old hobbies. They’re too tired for sex. They feel judged. A few years ago, one study reported that the drop in happiness after having a first kid was larger than when experiencing unemployment, divorce or the death of a partner. Yes, unemployment, …
Source: LifeHacker – Put Your Needs Before Your Kid’s Wants
Uber’s piloting a new service in San Francisco alongside dockless bike-sharing startup Jump. Uber Bike will let users rent one of Jump’s 250 bikes, charging $2 for the first 30 minutes and an additional per-minute fee thereafter. Jump was granted a p…
Source: Engadget – Uber’s latest venture is a bike-sharing service in San Francisco
Even a heavily discounted ocean cruise is still going to cost you a few hundred dollars, which is money you don’t have to spend thanks to Fran Garcia, who mounted a GoPro camera to the freighter he was working on as it sailed back and forth across the Mediterranean Sea.
Source: Gizmodo – This Two-Month Timelapse Gives You a Free Front Row Seat on a Mediterranean Cruise
Artificial intelligence is already everywhere, so it’s inevitable that it would invade the arts. Yahama showed a new kind of AI tech that translated the movements of renowned dancer Kaiji Moriyama into musical notes on a piano, “a form of expression…
Source: Engadget – Yamaha’s AI transformed a dancer into a pianist
There’s a killer whale in France that apparently has a special talent: It sounds like it can mimic human words. That certainly would be impressive and an exciting advancement of human-orca relations, but to my ears, the “words” sound a whole lot like fart noises.
Source: Gizmodo – Everyone Is Saying This Whale Is ‘Talking,’ but IDK, Sounds More Like Farting to Me
This is an inappropriately vertical video of a group of four (and briefly five) very pretty kitties trying to play a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos. They aren’t very good at it, and that one creamsicle cat on the right repeatedly cheats by putting his paw on the playfield. Man, if I were one of those other cats I would have flipped the game and stormed out to poop in that cat’s litterbox. “Meow.” What do you mean we all share one litterbox?! Just what sort of cut-rate cat hostel is our owner running here? I demand privacy.
Keep going for the video.
Source: Geekologie – Video Of Four Cats Playing A Game Of Hungry Hungry Hippos
Samsung Electronics just knocked Intel off its perch as the world’s biggest chipmaker by revenue, a spot the U.S. company has held since 1992. From a report: On Tuesday, Samsung reported 2017 chip sales of $69 billion, blowing past Intel’s $63 billion from last year. The switch underlines how Samsung has transformed itself from a maker of cheap televisions into a pervasive supplier of key components in smartphones and other modern computing devices. It’s also a testament to the growth of memory chips, Samsung’s main market. Intel, whose processors are the heart of about 90 percent of the world’s computers, didn’t have a bad year. Sales grew 6 percent. Success in computers is no longer enough, though. Memory chips, a market Intel only recently got back into, are now crucial parts of smartphones, which easily outsell PCs these days. Memory chips are also finding their way into a range of new devices such as cars. One of the ironies of Samsungâ(TM)s success in memory is that itâ(TM)s a business Intel created in the 1960s.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Samsung Surpasses Intel To Become the World’s Largest Chipmaker
Samsung has a chip designed specifically for mining cryptocurrency. Rather than repurpose a GPU to do the dirty work, Samsung made an Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), which is a specialized processor that is more efficient at mining th…
Source: Engadget – Samsung made a special chip for mining cryptocurrency
You’ve been waiting at the airport for two hours, you’ve had your Cinnabon fix, and you’re ready to board the plane. There’s just one problem: there is no plane. We’ve all been there. Flight delays are a massive headache, and Google Flights just updated with some features to help ease the pain.
Source: LifeHacker – Google Flights Now Predicts Flight Delays
Perhaps we’re not alone but instead reside in a multiverse stocked with all sorts of fantastical realms. These other universes are somewhat—but not exactly—like our own. Maybe gravity acts differently, or particles come in different shapes and sizes. Could life still exist in any of these bubbles?
Source: Gizmodo – Multiverse Thought Experiment Suggests Life Could Still Exist Under Different Laws of Physics
This is the best thing I have heard all year when it comes to mining! Samsung is now in the mix with TSMC and GloFlo when it comes to making mining ASICs. I hope we see more specialized chip production for mining-specific applications to ease some of the burden on the dwindling GPU supply that is screwing every PC gamer and enthusiast on the planet. It however does not seem that Samsung is deadset on providing a lot of capacity or what other products this might take volume from. You will need to use a translator to read this page for the details. Thanks cageymaru.
According to Samsung Electronics and related industries on the 29th, Samsung Electronics completed the process development of semiconductor ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) for bit coin mining last year, and started mass production from January.
The ASIC, which Samsung Electronics began mass production, is an on-demand semiconductor designed in a way optimized for bit coin mining. Bit coin mining requires high-speed, energy-efficient hardware. As a result, companies that mined bit coins in large quantities have commissioned dedicated ASIC chips customized for their mining operations and installed them in mining equipment.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Samsung Building Mining Chips
This is one of those times when you need to put your inexpensively configured HardOCP Spec Bookshelf Speaker Setup and your 4K display to good use. It does however suck knowing that a robot can deliver a much cleaner bass-line than most folks on the planet, and then beat you to death with the instrument and never feel bad about either. You can hit up Nigel Stanford’s site should you want to purchase the album. Thanks Joe!!
Robots rock, they were fun to work with. My favorite is the robotic drummer. More work to be done, and maybe I could play with them live.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Robots are Going to Kill Us ALL Theme Music
We have a first entry into our annual Top 10 Worst Named Products for 2018. I present to you, the GooBang Doo ET-8178. For some reason, “robust,” is not what comes to mind when I start fingering my GooBang. Please let us know how your GooBang feels after fingering it all day at the link below. Did I mention GooBang?”
I can tell you that the GooBang Doo has, in comparison, a surprisingly robust feel.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Fingering Your Own GooBang
Jezebel United Airlines Prevents Woman From Traveling With Emotional Support Peacock | Splinter Everyone Loved Trump’s Horrifying Story About the Nice White Couple Taking a Homeless Addict’s Baby | Deadspin The Hurricanes Are Finally Ready To Embrace Their Hartford Whaler Past | Earther Invasive Pine-Killing Wasps…
Source: LifeHacker – Jezebel United Airlines Prevents Woman From Traveling With Emotional Support Peacock | Splinter Eve
JEDEC this week published their UFS 3.0 specification, which is intended to bring numerous performance, power and feature set-related improvements to the standard. The version 3.0 of the spec doubles the per-lane performance of an eUFS device to 11.6 Gbps, which increases the peak data transfer rate of a storage device to 23.2 Gbps. At the same time, the new standard introduces a 2.5 V VCC power supply mode that enables lower power consumption and support for the latest types of NAND. Finally, the UFS 3.0 spec contains features designed specifically for automotive applications that enable standard support for extended temperature ranges as well as “refresh” operation to boost reliability.
One of the key improvements of the UFS 3.0 (JESD220D) specification is the usage of MIPI’s M-PHY 4.1 physical layer as well as the recently released MIPI UniPro 1.8 protocol to form the interconnect layer (IL). The new IL supports data rates of up to 11.6 Gbps (HS-Gear4) per lane as well as QoS features to enable a more reliable link through monitoring and training of the communication channel. All UFS 3.0-compatible devices are required to support HS-G4 (11.6 Gbps) and HS-G4 (5.8 Gbps), which means that they all will be faster than UFS 2.0/2.1-compliant devices that do not necessarily support HS-G3. UFS 3.0 storage devices will continue to feature up to two full-duplex lanes, which means a theoretical maximum bandwidth of up to 23.2 Gbps (2.9 GB/s) when HS-G4 is used. The MIPI M-PHY 4.1 standard continues to use 8b10b line encoding, so accounting for the encoding overhead, the actual achievable bandwidth by an embedded UFS device will be considerably lower than the theoretical one — 15 Gbps (1.875 GB/s) is something that is reasonable to expect.
The upcoming eUFS 3.0 storage devices will require three different power rails: 1.2 V for VCCQ, 1.8 V for VCCQ2, as well as 2.5 V/3.3 V for VCC. The addition of 2.5 V for VCC is to enable support for the latest and upcoming generations of NAND flash with higher bit densities (including 3D NAND with higher amounts of layers as well as 3D TLC NAND).
The UFS 3.0 standard also supports a number of features particularly suitable for the automotive industry. UFS 3.0 devices may support a native predefined low/high temperature event notification which will simplify development of UFS-based automotive applications. Extended temperature ranges (-40°C, 105°C) will be optionally supported by host controllers. Furthermore, the latter might also adopt a standard “refresh” function to extend data retention by moving data from cell to cell to keep charges at sufficient levels.
Another important innovation of the UFS 3.0 spec is enhanced support for RPMBs (replay protected memory block). The new standard supports multiple RPMBs with multiple RPMB keys. Furthermore, RPMB regions can now be configured at manufacturing, simplifying their usage for device makers.
To simplify development of UFS-based applications going forward, JEDEC also released JESD223D — a functional specification of a UFS host controller interface (UFSHCI). This spec defines features and registers that have to be supported by UFS 3.0 host controllers and enable usage of a standard driver for all applications featuring UFS 3.0-compatible storage devices.
The UFS 3.0 standard greatly speeds up performance and capacity of storage subsystems inside smartphones, tablets, media players, VR headsets, automotive and other applications that are going to use it. Meanwhile, it is not clear when this might happen. There is at least one company who has been offering UFS 3.0 controllers since Q2 2017, but it looks like the latest mobile SoCs from Qualcomm, HiSilicon, MediaTek and Samsung do not support the new spec. That said, expect applications based on the new standard to be released in the coming years, just not in 2018.
Related Reading:
Source: AnandTech – JEDEC Publishes UFS 3.0 Spec: Up to 2.9 GB/s, Lower Voltage, New Features
On a rainy September day in Frankfurt Germany, Mercedes-Benz executives and I got in a specially built semi-automated S-Class to track our drive to Stuttgart. It was the first leg in a five-month, five continent training of the automaker’s self-drivi…
Source: Engadget – Mercedes drove around the globe to train its autonomous cars
Non-dairy milks aren’t perfect fill-ins for cow squeezings. They’re made by watering down various plant products, and their nutrition facts are nothing like dairy milks—or each other. A pair of scientists recently declared soy milk to be the most nutritious non-dairy milk. It doesn’t really matter which one you put…
Source: LifeHacker – Here’s How Soy Milk Stacks Up Against Other Plant-Based Milks
Many of us are more security savvy than ever when it comes to our phones and laptops, but there’s one threat you might not be protecting against—the people inside your own home. Whether you’re worried about nosey housemates, clumsy kids, or horrible siblings, these are the steps to take to make sure your stuff stays…
Source: Gizmodo – How to Keep Your Family and Friends From Snooping on Your Laptop and Phone
London’s cramped City Airport, located in the heart of the city, is undergoing a massive upgrade, including the addition of a fancy new air traffic control tower. But to maximize the airport’s limited space, that tower is actually being built 80 miles away, and will rely on 14 high-def cameras to give remote ATC crews…
Source: Gizmodo – A London Airport Is Getting an Upgraded Air Traffic Control Tower—80 Miles Away From All the Planes
When it comes to the overall cost of a vehicle, the sale price is only part of the equation. You need to factor in resale, and how much value your car will lose. Some drop slower than others, and according to Kelly Blue Book, these 2018 trucks, SUVs, and an all-wheel-drive sedan will be your best bets to minimize…
Source: LifeHacker – The Best Resale List For 2018 Is Basically All Trucks And A Rally Car