Emotions can be hard to manage. We spend a lot of time trying to regulate them with things like yoga, meditation, deep breathing in a locked bathroom, or a good old-fashioned bitch session with our friends. But some new research shows that our inner motivations—how we want to feel—can have a lot of impact on how we’re…
Source: LifeHacker – How You Can ‘Catch’ Other People’s Emotions
The Shape will return for Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. James Wan will direct an episode of the I Know What You Did Last Summer TV series. You’re getting a little more Lucifer than expected heading into its final season. Plus, there’s already good news for Carnival Row, and an incredibly curse-y clip from …
Source: Gizmodo – The Original Red Ranger Teases an Animated Return for the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers
Your bargain phone charger can come with a hidden cost—as one 19-year-old woman unfortunately had to find out. According to her doctors, the woman’s generic phone charger likely started a fire around her neck that left her with serious burns and sent her to the emergency room. Now they’re warning people to be wary of…
Source: Gizmodo – Doctors Warn of Fires Caused by Generic Phone Chargers
Back during the Game Developers Conference was the release of the OpenXR provisional specification by The Khronos Group while today for SIGGRAPH they have formally announced OpenXR 1.0…
Source: Phoronix – Khronos Officially Releases OpenXR 1.0
Kicking off this week is SIGGRAPH, the annual North American professional graphics pow-wow that sees everyone from researchers to hardware vendors come together to show off new ideas and new products. Last year’s show ended up being particularly important, as NVIDIA used the show as a backdrop for the announcement of their Turing graphics architecture. This year’s NVIDIA presence is going to be far more low-key – NVIDIA doesn’t have any new hardware this time – but the company is still at the show with some announcements.
Diving right into matters then, this year NVIDIA has an announcement that all professional and prosumer users will want to take note of. At long last, NVIDIA is dropping the requirement to use a Quadro card to get 30-bit (10bpc) color support on OpenGL applications; the company will finally be extending that feature to GeForce and Titan cards as well.
Dubbed their Studio Driver: SIGGRAPH Edition, NVIDIA’s latest driver will eliminate the artificial restriction that prevented OpenGL applications from drawing in 30-bit color. For essentially all of the company’s existence, NVIDIA has restricted this feature to their professional visualization Quadro cards in order to create a larger degree of product segmentation between the two product families. With OpenGL (still) widely used for professional content creation applications, this restriction didn’t prevent applications like Photoshop from running on GeForce cards, but it kept true professional users from using it with the full, banding-free precision that the program (and their monitors) were capable of. So for the better part of 20 years, it has been one of the most important practical reasons to get a Quadro card over a GeForce card, as while it’s possible to use 30-bit color elsewhere (e.g. DirectX), it was held back in a very specific scenario that impacted content creators.
But with this latest Studio Driver, that’s going away. NVIDIA’s Studio drivers, which can be installed on any GeForce/Titan card, desktop and mobile, will no longer come with this 30-bit restriction. It will be possible to use 30-bit color anywhere that the application supports it, including OpenGL applications.
To be honest, this wasn’t a restriction I was expecting NVIDIA to lift any time soon. Rival AMD has offered unrestricted 30-bit color support for ages, and it has never caused NVIDIA to flinch. NVIDIA’s official rationale for all of this feels kind of thin – it was a commonly requested feature since the launch of the Studio drivers, so they decided to enable it – but as their official press release notes, working with HDR material pretty much requires 30-bit color; so it’s seemingly no longer a feature NVIDIA can justify restricting from Quadro cards. Still, I suppose one shouldn’t look a gift horse too closely in the mouth.
Otherwise, at this point I’m not clear on whether this is going to remain limited to the Studio drivers, or will come to the regular “game ready” GeForce drivers as well. Keeping in mind that both drivers are essentially identical software stacks – the difference being their testing and release cadences – there’s no reason to think it won’t show up in future GeForce drivers as well. But for now, it’s only being mentioned in the Studio drivers.
Meanwhile, the latest Studio driver release, true to its purpose, will also include updated support for several applications, including Cinema 4D and Blender. So while the 30-bit color announcement is likely to overshadow everything else, NVIDIA is continuing to iterate on their software support as previously promised.
Along with their latest Studio drivers, NVIDIA is also using the show to announce their partners latest hardware and software developments.
On the hardware side of matters, another 10 Studio laptops are being announced. The NVIDIA branding program, first launched at Computex earlier this year, set about establishing a minimum standards program for participating laptops. In short, the laptops need to include a 45W Core i7 and a GeForce RTX 2060/Quadro 3000 or better, along with a calibrated display. The latest hardware release cycle will see new laptops from Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Boxx, and will bring the Studio program to 27 laptops in total.
Meanwhile on the software side of matters, NVIDIA is celebrating the adoption of their RTX technology, as well as the additional applications that are adding support for it. According to the company, 40 professional visualization applications already support RTX in some form, with more to come. At this year’s show in particular, Adobe, Autodesk, Daz, and Blender are all showing off new software versions/updates that add support, typically for hardware ray tracing. NVIDIA sees RTX as an important product differentiator for the company, especially as it seems AMD won’t have comparable technology for at least another year, so it’s something the company has continued to invest in and is happy to tout that advantage.
Source: AnandTech – NVIDIA @ SIGGRAPH 2019: NV to Enable 30-bit OpenGL Support on GeForce/Titan Cards
In Scottsboro, Arizona, there’s an “Unclaimed Baggage Center” store full of mink furs and iPads—items left on flights that were never claimed by their owners and now up for sale. As the New York Times writes, these items might have been intentionally ditched, forgotten or just … lost.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Recover Something You Left on a Flight
Yes, the company behind TikTok really is making a smartphone. ByteDance has confirmed that’s producing a handset in a “continuation” of a project from Chinese phone maker Smartisan. Details of the phone itself are scarce, but ByteDance had obtained…
Source: Engadget – TikTok’s parent company confirms plans for a smartphone
Email, which is simple, convenient, and cheap, has a downside: Spam messages continue to bother just about anyone with an inbox to their name. While fighting back against the tide might seem futile, you’d be surprised at just how much you can cut down on unsolicited email without having to dedicate too much time or…
Source: Gizmodo – The Quickest Ways to Cut Down on Spam in Your Inbox
This is the 2020 Cadillac XT6, the brand’s new three-row SUV. [credit:
Jonathan Gitlin ]
The Cadillac Escalade has much to answer for. Would the luxury SUV have become quite such a thing absent that body-on-frame behemoth? Few vehicles have been such cash cows for their makers, either; consider how long ago the R&D for that platform must have been amortized.
But great name recognition and high profit margins will only get you so far. The market for luxury three-row SUVs is a hot one, and Cadillac wants more of it, with a plan to tempt people away from vehicles like the Acura MDX and Infiniti QX60. That plan is the XT6.
The XT6 was first seen at this year’s Detroit auto show in January. I find it handsome; a well-proportioned two-box shape that looks current without being too imposing. That should probably be read as a compliment to the design team, for the XT6 is just over 16.5 feet (5050mm) long. (The vehicle’s full dimensions are 77.3in./1964mm wide, 68.9in./1750mm tall, and a 112.7in./2863mm wheelbase.) The narrow LED headlights contribute to the effect, as do the 21-inch wheels worn by all the media test cars. I’m old enough to remember when 18-inch wheels were the preserve of race cars, considered too big for anything street legal; after talking with the designers, I’m not sure those days are ever coming back.
Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – The 2020 Cadillac XT6: better than an Escalade in every way
Enlarge / Artist’s impression of a cloud service offering. (credit: fancy.yan / Getty Images)
Two or three times per year, Ars runs surveys in order to help us better understand what kinds of stories you all want to read about. ITDMs—that is, “IT decision makers,” the folks in IT who participate in discussions on what technologies companies should invest in—are a particular area of focus for us, because you make up such a large percentage of the Ars audience and because on your shoulders rest a tremendous amount of influence and responsibility.
And it’s that time of year again! We’ve got another survey fresh out of the oven, and if you’re an ITDM, we’d love your input. You can jump right into the survey without even reading any further by clicking right here, or you can read on a bit, and I’ll set the stage.
This time around, I’d like to pick your collective brain on how your company is approaching (or not approaching) transitioning various IT services from old-school centralized datacenter hosting to new-fangled X-as-a-service offerings. Given the breadth of hosted platforms and the rapid infiltration of the hybrid cloud concept into mainstream businesses, the “X” in “X-as-a-service” can at this point stand for almost anything—and I’d like to know your opinions on whether you think your company is striking the right balance between clinging to the datacenter and embracing the quickly growing (for better or worse) standard of anything-as-a-service.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Ars Asks: Do you think your company is on the right things-as-a-service track?
Tecmint: Angular is an open-source, popular and highly-extensible front-end application development framework, used for building mobile and web applications
Source: Linux Today – How to Install Angular CLI on Linux
On top of announcing 10 new RTX Studio laptops, NVIDIA has some news that will make GeForce RTX creators happy. The latest Studio driver, due to be released shortly, will support 10-bit color for all GPUs in Adobe Photoshop CC, Premier CC and other O…
Source: Engadget – NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX GPUs are now even better for creative types
Animated Knots is a perfect site for learning everything about knots: how to tie them, what they’re for, and how to choose the best knot for a specific job.
Source: LifeHacker – Learn How to Tie Knots With ‘Animated Knots’
Just because something is BPA-free doesn’t mean it’s safe.
Source: TreeHugger – BPA substitutes linked to child obesity
The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge popularized the notion of curved displays on smartphones, and the feature has proliferated on Android smartphones in the years that have followed. Oppo is taking the curved display concept to the extreme with what it is calling the Waterfall Screen.
The curve of the display extends much further down along the
Source: Hot Hardware – Oppo Gives Over The Edge With Waterfall Screen Curved Smartphone Display Tech
If there’s a snake in his boots it died a long time ago.
Source: Kotaku – Sekiro Mod Adds Toy Story’s Woody, Turns Him Into A Killer
The Q4OS team announced the released of the Q4OS 3.8 “Centaurus” Linux and Debian-based computer operating system, a major version that adds many new features and improvements.
Source: LXer – Q4OS Operating System Brings the Trinity Desktop to Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster”
It seems like the new motto for Silicon Valley for the last few years has been “Data is the new oil,” and for good reason. The number of companies employing machine learning-based AI technologies has exploded, and even a few years after all of this has kicked off in earnest, those numbers continue to grow. This form of AI is no longer just an academic thesis or curious research project, but instead machine learning has become an important part of the enterprise market, and the impact on enterprise hardware – both purchasing and development – would be difficult to overstate. This is the era of AI.
Today we’re taking a look at what’s perhaps the heart of Intel’s hardware in the AI space, Intel’s second-generation Xeon Scalable processors, better known as “Cascade Lake”. Introduced a bit earlier this year, these new processors are still based on the same core Skylake architecture as the first-generation products, but incorporate a number of instructions and other modifications to speed up AI performance.
Source: AnandTech – Intel’s Xeon Cascade Lake vs. NVIDIA Turing: An Analysis in AI
YAMAZAKI home Plate Toilet Paper Stocker | $38 | Amazon
Source: LifeHacker – Save On the Least Shitty Toilet Paper Storage Solution
Echo Dot (3rd Gen) Two-Pack | $50 | Amazon | Use the code DOT2PACK.
Source: Kotaku – Pick Up Two Amazon Echo Dots for The Price of One
