Detroit has seen its fair share of environmental disasters from industry pollution to ridiculous water bills. But the city is also building equitable solutions to address these issues, especially as climate change further threatens the health and well-being of Detroiters.
Source: Gizmodo – As Presidential Candidates Descend on Detroit, the City Wants to Be the ‘Engine of the Green New Deal’
The D&D movie rolls for initiative once more, but this time a new Dungeon Master is in charge. Well, Dungeon Masters.
Source: io9 – The Former Flash Directors Make a Saving Throw for the Dungeons & Dragons Movie
Enlarge / A Teva facility in France. (credit: Getty | Fred Dufour)
With four settlement agreements, the state of California will get nearly $70 million from pharmaceutical companies that allegedly cut illegal deals to keep affordable generic drugs off the market, shielding pricey brand-name products from competition.
The settlements also include injunctions that temporarily prevent the drug makers from entering into such “pay-for-delay.”
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra argued that the deals violate antitrust laws and can lead consumers to pay as much as 90% more for prescription drugs.
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Source: Ars Technica – Drug makers to pay million over deals to keep cheap generics off the market
The open source libcurl is client-side URL transfer library which supports a lot of protocols like FTP, HTTP, HTTPS and works on a multitude of platforms.
Source: Linux Today – How to perform web requests with PHP using the cURL extension
Despite repeatedly being called out for the practice, online stores like Amazon are still occasionally getting caught shipping tiny items in comically oversized boxes. It’s wasteful, it reduces the amount of cargo a truck can carry, and it inspired 3M to redesign bubble wrap to greatly reduce the packaging needed to…
Source: Gizmodo – 3M Reinvents Bubble Wrap, Promises to Reduce Shipping Materials By Half
Source: Linux Today – How to manage logs in Linux
“What am I doing with my life?”
These are the ‘Boyfriend Hug Speakers’ created by Japanese company Otome Yusha to promote the release of their mobile game Hero of Maidens, “an RPG targeted at women, about stunningly gorgeous men whose mission is to “save the world through love.”” My my! Fingers crossed it’s available in the US app store. Unfortunately for anybody who wants a pair of the hunky speakers, they’re currently only promotional items available through a giveaway on the company’s website. That’s a shame. It’s also a shame they aren’t waterproof, because they look like the perfect edition to a relaxing night in the bathtub. Just imagine — a glass of wine in hand, candles flickering, a bath bomb fizzing between your feet, some relaxing jams streaming from the soft, muscular arms wrapped around your neck, me about to do a cannonball right on top of you. “Wait, what?” GERONIMO!
Keep going for a couple more shots (including one of the woman trying to intimidate her date with her hunky speaker-man), and a video of this summer’s hottest fashion accessory.
Source: Geekologie – Okaaaaay: ‘Boyfriend Hug Speakers’, Bluetooth Speakers Embedded In Soft, Muscular Looking Arms To Wear Around Your Neck
The original Nintendo 64 Super Smash Bros. has a few challenge modes for players to test their skills. These include a mini-game to break small targets and a movement challenge to touch special platforms in a stage. The world record time for completing Pikachu’s platform challenge has stood since 2005—but after over a…
Source: Kotaku – Nintendo 64 Super Smash Bros. Challenge Record Broken After 14 Years
It’s been nearly three weeks since AMD’s launch of the new Ryzen 3000 series CPUs and our extensive coverage of the new parts. Among one of the things that didn’t quite go as smoothly is AMD’s BIOS and software situation where as things were still very much in flux following the launch.
One issue that was repeatedly brought up by the community over the past weeks was the new CPU’s idle behaviour both in terms of temperature as well as voltages. In particular, the new parts seemingly looked like they rarely idled at lower performance states and instead looked to remain at high frequencies even when not doing much.
While initially appearing as an issue, it really wasn’t one and rather just a side-effect of AMD’s new CPPC2 fast frequency ramp-up behaviour. Monitoring applications that are badly programmed tend to have a too heavy of a monitoring loop that causes load on the CPU – triggering a frequency ramp-up as the CPU is seeing a larger load. Given the new CPU’s sub-1ms ramp-up this meant that it was very hard to actually catch the machine at the lower frequencies – even though it most likely did idle correctly.
AMD has now addressed this concern and tweaked the CPPC2 behaviour in the new Ryzen power plans with the release of a new chipset driver package.
As AMD states in their community brief on the issue, part of the new behaviour change is that the new scheduler settings will now have a much more relaxed ramp-up time compared to the previous versions. In particular, when the chip will be at its base frequency and idling voltage, it will now take a significantly longer load for the chip to ramp up to its boost frequencies.
In our quick A/B testing between the two driver versions, we can see that prior to the update the CPU would ramp up in around 840 microseconds to its boost clocks, whilst on the new power plan in this data-set took it a longer 17.5 milliseconds.
The new behaviour thus should make the CPU ramp-up much less susceptible to smaller transient loads. The new boost duration is still very much adequate and extremely fast – sustained CPU workloads will see largely imperceptible difference, while intermittent workloads such as games also won’t be affected as once the CPU gets over the initial base frequency ramp threshold it maintains the sub-1ms frequency change behaviour.
I also took a look at the Windows power plans if they changed, and it seemed that they indeed did. While on the old version the CPU would idle at ~2.2GHz, the new driver idles at 3GHz. Seemingly the frequency up-scaling has also been slightly slowed down as in my quick testing I saw frequency ramp up half as quickly.
AMD has also addressed concerns about the reported high temperatures of the chip. The company explains that generally the value that most applications are reading out is the maximum of several sensors on the chip. Essentially this acts as the junction temperature of the chip – whilst most of the die would actually be a different/lower temperature.
A new version of Ryzen Master now includes a different temperature readout algorithm that is meant to better represent the “overall” temperature of the die rather than the absolute maximum a sensor reports. AMD says this is a better representation of the temperature of the CPU. Besides averaging across different sensors, it also averages readouts over a small time-window. In my testing the most affected scenarios are idle and low-load scenarios and the new temperature behaviour isn’t nearly as erratic and spiky.
Source: AnandTech – AMD Releases New Chipset Drivers For Ryzen 3000: More Relaxed CPPC2 Upscaling
We’re a month into summer, which means it’s already time to start thinking about vacation-planning for the fall if you want to grab a good deal on a flight. Fortunately, JetBlue is having a major two-day sale on trips departing between August and November—with some one-way tickets costing as little as $44.
Source: LifeHacker – JetBlue Is Having a Sale on One-Way Flights Starting at
Viewnior is an image viewer application, created to be simple, fast and elegant. Its minimalistic interface provides more screen space for your images.
Source: LXer – How to make Viewnior your default Image Viewer in Ubuntu
Apple’s latest earnings report is out, and as many had expected, it’s very much on-trend with the numbers we’ve seen coming out of Cupertino this year. The company managed to grow its overall revenue a little, raking in a total of $53.8 billion compa…
Source: Engadget – Apple’s wearables and services made up for weak iPhone sales
The source of a gigantic, mysterious leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy. From a report: The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe. Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was “stunned” when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different. “The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before,” says Steinhauser. Even so, the radiation level wasn’t high enough to impact human health in Europe, although exposure closer to the site of release would have been far greater.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Gigantic, Mysterious Radiation Leak Traced To Facility in Russia
Enlarge / Georgia State Police and Capitol Police had their laptops taken offline by ransomware in the latest of many attacks on state and local government agencies. (credit: Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Yesterday, the Georgia Department of Public Safety revealed that laptop computers in state police and Capitol police vehicles—as well as laptops used by Georgia’s Motor Carrier Compliance Division (the officers who operate trucking scales and safety spot checks)—had been taken offline by ransomware. The attack comes a week after Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a statewide emergency after “a malware attack on a few North Louisiana school systems,” bringing state resources to assist in the response. And also last week, the city power company in Johannesburg, South Africa, was hit by ransomware, taking down payment systems and causing power outages.
These are just the latest episodes in a long line of state and local government organizations that have fallen to ransomware attacks. As Louisiana was declaring a state of emergency, the Board of Estimates of the City of Baltimore was approving $10 million in spending to recover from the city’s nearly month-long IT outage caused by the RobbinHood ransomware. So today, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC), the National Governors Association (NGA), and the National Association of State Chief Information Officers (NASCIO) issued a warning urging organizations to take immediate steps to protect themselves against ransomware attacks. The hope is that state and local agencies will heed the warning and blunt the damage being done by recent ransomware variants.
The three steps urged by CISA, MS-ISAC, NGA, and NASCIO are fairly basic security hygiene: run daily backups, train staff on “cybersecurity awareness,” and “revisit and refine cyber incident response plans.” Unfortunately, these three steps may be beyond the capabilities of the organizations most likely to be hit by ransomware—school districts, government agencies, and small and mid-sized businesses that have IT budgets that place them below the information security poverty line.
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Source: Ars Technica – Cybersecurity officials warn state and local agencies (again) to fend off ransomware
Either some intern is having the most boring Silicon Valley summer or HP’s YouTube team has gone mad with power. Whatever the reason, the company has been on a YouTube flurry lately, uploading hundreds of detailed technical support videos covering countless ways to disassemble, fix, and otherwise mess with its many…
Source: LifeHacker – HP’s YouTube Channel Is Now a Treasure Trove for Tech Support and Tinkering
Corporate lobbyists have a lot of sway over American politics, but a startup might have a way to bring power back to everyday people: crowdfunding. CrowdLobby’s recently launched platform asks people to back campaigns around community-submitted issu…
Source: Engadget – Startup turns lobbying into crowdfunding campaigns
We see a lot of deals around the web over on Kinja Deals, but these were our ten favorites today.
Source: Kotaku – The 10 Best Deals of July 30, 2019
As end of support for the still-popular Windows 7 draws near, risks of unpatched operating systems are likely to be a significant security concern in the near future. intensivevocoder writes: There is a relatively old — though still fundamentally true — adage about Windows: Microsoft’s biggest competition is Microsoft, as a specific subset of users (and businesses) only upgrade to the latest version of Windows kicking and screaming. According to SpiceWorks’ Future of Network and Endpoint Security report, published Tuesday, 32% of organizations still have at least one Windows XP device connected to their network, despite extended support for XP ending in 2014. (Notably, the last variant of XP, Windows POSReady 2009, reached end of life in April 2019 .)
With the looming end of free support for Windows 7, this reticence of users and enterprises to upgrade to newer versions of Windows is likely to create significant security issues. Presently, 79% of organizations still have at least one Windows 7 system on their network, according to SpiceWorks, which also found that two thirds of businesses plan to migrate all of their machines off Windows 7 prior to the end of support on January 14, 2020, while a quarter will only migrate after that deadline. Separately, a Gartner market forecast from April forecasted that only 75% of professional PCs will be on Windows 10 by 2021.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – It’s 2019, and One Third of Businesses Still Have Active Windows XP Deployments
The blue whale, is the largest animal ever known to have lived on the planet. Here’s what you need to know about the majestic marine mammal.
Source: TreeHugger – 11 facts about blue whales, the largest animals ever on Earth
This is a video of magnet lover and Youtuber Magnetic Games filming the reactions of small magnetic spheres to much more powerful magnetic blocks. According to Magnetic Games, “I assure you that the impact between the Monolith and 2592 magnetic balls scared me. The collision of magnets was violent and the balls were splashed all over the room. I wore protective glasses at every impact, and it served.” Yikes. The result clips, particularly in slow motion, are pretty awesome to watch. Those little balls appear to attack the larger magnets like some sort of unknown strain of alien virus. “You know a lot about alien viruses, GW?” I’ve seen movies. “And?” Not a lot of them were about alien viruses to be honest. So…. “So I still consider myself an expert if that’s what you’re getting at.”
Keep going for the video, but the real fun begins after 1:10.
Source: Geekologie – Cool: Watching Tiny Magnetic Balls React With Ultra-Powerful Block Magnets
