Jordan Peele discusses how The Twilight Zone inspired Us. The Babadook’s Jennifer Kent is working on something scary with Guillermo del Toro. Donna Troy could be getting a costume on Titans. Plush, what’s to come on The Flash and Supergirl, and Billy Eichner talks Lion King duets. To me, my spoilers!
Source: Gizmodo – New Birds of Prey Set Pictures, Plus Updates From Avengers: Endgame and Titans
Nvidia RTX-equipped gaming laptops are out, and both Nvidia and their retail partners are heavily promoting them. But before you jump on one, remember that Nvidia (and AMD) have a long-running habit of using somewhat deceptive branding for their laptop GPUs. As TechSpot points out, the mobile RTX 2080, 2070, and 2060 are not necessarily equivalent to their desktop counterparts. While they appear to use the same silicon as the desktop variants this time around, which hasn’t always been the case, mobile RTX GPUs ship with significantly lower clockspeeds than desktop cards. The desktop RTX 2080, for example, features a base clock of 1,515 Mhz, while the standard mobile version runs at 1,380 Mhz. Meanwhile, the RTX 2080 “Max-Q” variant only runs at a base speed of at 735 MHz and boosts to 1095 Mhz under ideal conditions, which a laptop isn’t necessarily going to have. Nvidia’s Turing architecture is relatively power efficient, meaning these laptops are likely to perform well, but don’t expect desktop performance from a laptop graphics card carrying the same name. Thanks to tordogs for the tip.
With so much leeway in terms of what speed to clock cards at, it’s easy to see how performance could vary across different laptops with Nvidia’s RTX series cards. The lesson here, again, is to pay close attention to the actual clock speed of the GPU in the machine you’re considering purchasing.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Check Clockspeeds and Benchmarks Before Buying a Gaming Laptop
Today, Samsung announced that smartphones with 1TB of flash storage are just over the horizon. While smaller companies like Smartisan have technically have technically beaten Samsung to the punch, the Korean tech giant says their fifth generation V-NAND now allows them to cram 1TB of storage into a single eUFS 2.1 package. Samsung also notes that their 1TB eUFS package is “exceptionally” fast, with sequential and random specifications that are closer to a desktop NVMe SSD than smartphone with eMMC storage. While 1TB storage configurations should be possible in current phones with 512GB or 1TB microSD cards, even the fastest cards are at least an order of magnitude slower than Samsung’s new eUFS module.
The 1TB eUFS also possesses exceptional speed, allowing users to transfer large amounts of multimedia content in significantly reduced time. At up to 1,000 megabytes per second (MB/s), the new eUFS features approximately twice the sequential read speed of a typical 2.5-inch SATA solid state drive (SSD). This means that 5GB-sized full HD videos can be offloaded to an NVMe SSD in as fast as five seconds, which is 10 times the speed of a typical microSD card. Furthermore, the random read speed has increased by up to 38 percent over the 512GB version, clocking in at up to 58,000 IOPS. Random writes are 500 times faster than a high-performance microSD card (100 IOPS), coming in at up to 50,000 IOPS. The random speeds allow for high-speed continuous shooting at 960 frames per second and will enable smartphone users to take full advantage of the multi-camera capabilities in today and tomorrow’s flagship models.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Samsung Says Phones with 1TB of Flash are Coming Soon
When GoPro launched Plus — it’s subscription service for cloud storage — it was a modest offering. For $5 a month, you could store a bunch of your photos and videos online, access a library of music to use in your edits, and a get a 20 percent disc…
Source: Engadget – GoPro Plus now offers unlimited uncompressed video storage
Hopefully, the first cyber-attack that MacKenzie Brown helps you survive will be a fake one. Otherwise you’ll end up calling her and her colleagues at Optiv Security when you’ve already been compromised by a hack. As an incident response consultant, Brown helps clients prepare for, or recover from, intrusions from…
Source: LifeHacker – I’m Cybersecurity Consultant MacKenzie Brown, and This Is How I Work
In October of last year, when Intel officially unveiled its 9th Generation Core series processors, the company also took the opportunity to announce a semi-new breed of workstation processor, namely the Xeon W-3175X. Technically speaking, the architecture at the heart of the Xeon W-3175X isn’t new – the monstrous 28-core / 56-thread…
Source: Hot Hardware – Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: Supercharged 28-Core Skylake-SP
The lowkey best part about the Apple Watch is that it’s incredibly easy to change bands, and you can get extras for very cheap, as long as you aren’t buying them in the Apple Store. This leather band comes in a ton of different colors (choose from the dropdown), and is available in both 42/44mm and 38/40mm sizes. Get…
Source: io9 – Take Your Pick of Leather Apple Watch Bands For Just
Bluetooth speaker design has moved beyond basic rectangles of varying sizes of yesteryear: Anker’s new SoundCore speakers are as beautiful as they are functional, and two of them are on sale for the best prices we’ve seen today.
Source: Kotaku – Save On Two of Anker’s Newest, Most Advanced Bluetooth Speakers
Facebook just can’t put itself in a good light lately. A new report has shined a bright light on a Facebook policy that was paying people to install something called the Facebook Research VPN. Facebook allegedly paid teens and and adult users to install the VPN, which allowed the company to collect all the user’s phone and web activity at
Source: Hot Hardware – Facebook Paid Teens To Install Spyware VPN App That Monitored Their Every Move
Enlarge / Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Nate Cardozo speaks onstage during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2016 at Brooklyn Cruise Terminal on May 9, 2016 in New York City. (credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
At a time when Facebook has been under increased public scrutiny like never before, the company is now hiring at least one of its fiercest antagonists.
On Tuesday, Facebook acknowledged that it had hired three veteran privacy law activists, including Nate Cardozo, an attorney formerly of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who has been very publicly critical of the company in recent years.
In 2015, Cardozo once wrote in an op-ed that Facebook’s “business model depends on our collective confusion and apathy about privacy.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Facebook just hired a handful of its toughest privacy critics
Intel has always ensured that its high-end server platforms, one where multiple CPUs can act as a single system, have the highest core count processors. These servers go into the most expensive deployments, so they can afford the most expensive silicon to produce. The consumer market by contrast is very price sensitive by comparison, so consumers get fewer cores. However, consumers have always asked for a way of getting all of those cores, preferably in an overclockable chip, at more reasonable prices. Intel has answered your call, with the Xeon W-3175X. All 28-cores, all the time. This is our review.
Source: AnandTech – The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, 99
The Hanford Vit Plant in Washington state, a $17 billion federal facility for treating and immobilizing radioactive waste, is now on track to begin “glassifying” low-activity nuclear waste as soon as 2022, reports IEEE Spectrum. This is “a year ahead of a court-mandated deadline.” From the report: Still, an air of uncertainty surrounds the project. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has proposed reclassifying some of the nation’s radioactive waste as less dangerous, and it’s unclear how that could affect the Hanford facility’s long-term prospects. Hanford houses about 212 million liters of high-level waste, the leftovers of the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
However, higher-level waste has a longer timeline. Separate pretreatment and vitrification facilities aren’t slated for commissioning until 2033. All parts of the Vit Plant are legally required to begin fully operating by 2036, under a consent decree between Washington, Oregon, and the federal government. The DOE hasn’t said whether, or how, its proposal to reclassify nuclear waste would affect existing plans at Hanford if adopted. The agency is not making any decisions on the classification or disposal of any particular waste stream at this time, a DOE official said by email. […] Though current law defines high-level radioactive waste as the sludge that results from processing highly radioactive nuclear fuel, the DOE is considering slapping a new, potentially less expensive label on it if it can meet the radioactive concentration limits for Class C low-level radioactive waste. Reclassifying nuclear waste would allow the federal government to sidestep decades of cleanup work, saving it billions of dollars. The relabeling might even enable the DOE to bypass costly vitrification and instead contain tank waste by covering it with concrete-like grout, as the agency does at other decommissioned nuclear sites. Officials and citizens in Washington and Oregon oppose this method for Hanford, “citing the risk of long-term soil and groundwater contamination and the challenges of moving and storing voluminous grout blocks,” reports IEEE Spectrum. “Earlier federal studies found that grout ‘actually performed the worst of all the supplemental treatment options considered.’ (A 2017 report to Congress, however, suggested both vitrification and grout could effectively treat Hanford’s low-activity waste.)”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Makes Progress, But Questions Loom
After years of public mistrust, the US government has finally, officially laid out its cases against tech giant Huawei. The Chinese company stands accused of a laundry list crimes ranging from wire fraud to trade-secret theft to violating Iranian san…
Source: Engadget – How screwed is Huawei?
Enlarge / A person uses an iPad for a FaceTime conversation, on January 29, 2019 in Rome. (credit: VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)
A Houston attorney has sued Apple over the recently disclosed FaceTime bug, which can allow third parties to surreptitiously listen to FaceTime calls via an iPhone microphone.
In a lawsuit filed Monday evening in Harris County District Court, Larry Williams claimed the company was negligent when it allowed the microphone to be used in this way.
“Plaintiff was undergoing a private deposition with a client when this defective product breach allowed for the recording of a private deposition,” he wrote.
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Source: Ars Technica – Lawyer sues Apple, claims FaceTime bug “allowed” recording of deposition
I’m not sure if you’re aware, but it’s cold as hell outside, and I can’t think of a better time for a weighted blanket. In addition to keeping you warm, a weighted blanket can work wonders for your anxiety, and several different models are on sale today for the first time since the holiday shopping season, including a…
Source: Gizmodo – Burrow Into a Warm and Anxiety-Smothering Weighted Blanket With a Trio of Deals
You probably keep a lot of charging cables, battery packs, hard drives, and other sundry tech accessories rattling around in your bag, and your collection is unlikely to shrink any time soon. But it’s easy to keep them organized and untangled with this $9 organizer (with promo code MRTH3G5W), which is big enough to…
Source: Kotaku – Keep Your Gadgets Organized While You Travel With This Case
The new Gmail. It’s very white. [credit:
Ron Amadeo ]
Google is pushing a big redesign to the mobile Gmail app on Android and iOS. The update was announced yesterday, and after spending some time with the new app, we’re going to comb through the finer details and see what has changed between New Gmail and Old Gmail.
For now the release is only out on Android, but like the old Gmail design, it should look identical on iOS. If you’re on Android, you want Gmail version 9.x (the old design is Gmail 8). If the Play Store isn’t serving you the update and you’re into sideloading, APKMirror has a safe download. The iOS version is still wending its way through the App Store approval process, and should be out sometime this week.
The new design is a good match for the new desktop Gmail design that came out in April, along with all the other apps using the “Google Material Theme” design language. Everything is really white—an homage to the Google homepage—and everything uses rounded corners. The horizontal line dividers are gone, leaving nothing but white space to separate your messages. Control iconography is changed to Google’s new outline style, and while message text remains in the Roboto font, everything else now uses Product Sans (the same typeface as the Google logo).
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Source: Ars Technica – Hands-on with the new Gmail for Android (and iOS)
Now TV, the UK video streaming service owned by Sky that lets users purchase premium channels, has added offline downloading to its iOS app. The update brings it up to speed with its parent’s Sky Go service, giving customers the option to download fi…
Source: Engadget – Sky adds offline viewing to Now TV app for iPhone and iPad
This is the all-new Mazda 3, which uses the company’s new Skyactiv-Vehicle architecture. [credit:
Mazda ]
LOS ANGELES—I’ll admit it, I always look forward to the launch of a new Mazda. Other brands might give you ten minutes of Cliff’s Notes on the car before throwing you the keys and pointing you at the nearest twisty ribbon of tarmac; by contrast, the Hiroshima-based OEM’s events always feel more like a grad school seminar. (I think that’s a good thing, but that’s probably why I have this job.)
In this regard, the launch of the brand-new Mazda 3 did not disappoint. The car is a clean-sheet design, the first to use the all-new Skyactiv-Vehicle architecture. And before we got to try it out in a mix of LA traffic and the Angeles Crest Highway, the engineers and designers responsible gave us plenty of insight into how they went about updating Mazda’s best-selling car. The result is a refreshingly human-centered vehicle from an OEM that continues to live up to Jinba Ittai—its internal philosophy of making a car and its driver feel as one.
As with previous generations, the new Mazda 3—which goes on sale in March—will be available as a sedan (starting at $21,000) or a five-door hatchback (starting at $23,600). Eventually, you’ll be able to option one with Mazda’s clever new Skyactiv-X spark-controlled compression ignition engine, but at launch all US cars will come equipped with the same 2.5L four-cylinder Skyactiv-G power unit. There is a choice between front- and all-wheel drive, though, and at least some cars will even be available with a manual transmission.
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Source: Ars Technica – The all-new 2019 Mazda 3 punches far above its weight for under ,000
Fox News is no longer tweeting from the cable network’s main account, but that doesn’t mean that President Trump’s favorite channel has abandoned Twitter altogether. In fact, Fox News still relies on Twitter to harvest free content that airs on its network all day long.
Source: Gizmodo – Fox News Is Boycotting Twitter But The Network Still Loves Social Media’s Free Content
