Ardour 7.4 introduces support for MIDI subgroup buses, support for the Lua DSP processor to downmix 5.1 audio to stereo, and more.
The post Ardour 7.4 Released With Support for MIDI Subgroup Buses appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Ardour 7.4 Released With Support for MIDI Subgroup Buses
Crypto exchange Coinbase offered a fiery response on Thursday to last month’s Wells notice from the SEC, telling the federal regulator that an enforcement action against the crypto exchange would pose “major programmatic risks” to the SEC that would “fail on the merits.” From a report: “Coinbase does not list, clear, or effect trading in securities,” the company’s response said. The analysis SEC did staffers to justify an enforcement action “appears to rest on superficial and incorrect analogies to products and services offered by others,” Coinbase wrote in a blog post from chief legal officer Paul Grewal. Separately, Grewal told CNBC, “At the time when we went public we had detailed discussions with the SEC about the very aspects of our business that are now — two years later — the subject of the Wells notice. Nothing has changed.”
The SEC indicated to Coinbase in a March wells notice that its spot trading, staking, custody and institutional trading businesses were at risk. The SEC’s warning to Coinbase noted that the regulator would allege Coinbase was offering and selling unregistered securities, in violation of federal law. The SEC has used unregistered offering and sale violations to force other crypto exchanges to close services in the U.S., including the crypto exchange Kraken’s staking-as-a-service product.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Coinbase Offers a Fiery Response To SEC’s Threat of Enforcement Action
The restoration of the Enterprise-D, long thought lost since it was broken up and crash-landed decades prior in Star Trek: Generations, was one of the biggest surprises of Picard’s final season. But now we know that parts of the ship made their way back home to be restored, this touching new short imagines just how.
Source: Gizmodo – This Bittersweet Star Trek Short Imagines the Rebirth of the Enterprise-D
If you want the perfect example of the divide between so-called mainstream (or “casual”) gamers and the more “hardcore” gamers, look no further than the reaction to the announcement of Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon at the Game Awards last year. Armored Core is a game franchise deeply beloved by hardcore gamers, but basically unknown outside
Source: Hot Hardware – Armored Core VI: Fires Of Rubicon Gets An Exciting Gameplay Trailer And Release Date
Review of Voyager Linux 23.04, which brings an updated Ubuntu Lunar Lobster base, stunning GNOME and more apps.
Source: LXer – Voyager Linux 23.04: Snap-free Ubuntu Experience with A Gorgeous Look
Clubhouse, the once hyped audio app that took off during the height of the pandemic, is laying off staff as part of a company “reset,” the startup announced. In a letter to staff shared by the company, founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth said they were “scaling back our org by over 50% and saying goodbye to many talented, dedicated teammates.”
Interestingly, Davison and Seth said that the company, which was reportedly valued at $4 billion in 2021, was still well-funded, with “years of runway remaining.” They added that they “do not feel immediate pressure to reduce costs.”
Clubhouse exploded in popularity early in 2021 at a time when many people were feeling socially isolated due to the pandemic. The app was able to draw in big names like Elon Musk and Oprah for its live audio chats, which helped further fuel its early success. But Davison would later acknowledge that growth came “way too fast,” and usage dropped off amid competitors cloning the service and more people returning to their normal activities as the pandemic eased.
In their letter to staff, Davison and Seth alluded to these issues. “But as the world has opened up post-Covid, it’s become harder for many people to find their friends on Clubhouse and to fit long conversations into their daily lives,” they wrote. “To find its role in the world, the product needs to evolve. In order to fix this we need to reset the company, eliminate roles and take it down to a smaller, product-focused team.”
The founders went on to say that they will be focusing on “Clubhouse 2.0,” though they didn’t elaborate on what the service may look like going forward, just that it would be built by a “smaller team.”
Clubhouse isn’t the only live audio service to struggle. Spotify recently shut down its standalone live audio app, Greenroom. And Reddit closed its take on live audio, Reddit Talk, in March. Even Amazon and Meta have struggled to keep some of their audio projects going.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/clubhouse-is-laying-off-employees-and-resetting-the-company-213429978.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Clubhouse is laying off employees and ‘resetting’ the company
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is almost here. The highly anticipated sequel arrives April 28, and to help you all get more excited (and to help Survivor lead Cameron Monaghan), Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker himself, is here to offer some advice on how to be a Jedi. I’d listen to the man. He has some experience with…
Source: Kotaku – Luke Skywalker Himself Is Hyping Star Wars Jedi: Survivor
A new set of patches have been released for the Intel Linux graphics driver that “can provide 10-15% better performance when operating in the tuned mode,” reports Phoronix. From the report: The set of Intel i915 Linux kernel graphics driver patches are about exposing the Intel RPS (Requested Power State) up/down thresholds. Right now the Intel Linux kernel driver has static values set for the up/down thresholds between power states while these patches would make them dynamically configurable by user-space. Google engineer Syed Faaiz Hussain raised the issue that they experimented with the Intel RPS tuning and were able to manage up to 15% better performance. With Counter-Strike: Global Offensive with OpenGL was a 14.5% boost, CS:GO with Vulkan was 12.9% faster, and Civilization VI with OpenGL was 11% faster while Strange Brigade was unchanged. No other game numbers were provided.
But as this is about changing the threshold for how aggressively the Intel graphics hardware switches power states, the proposed patches leave it up to user-space to adjust the thresholds as they wish. Google engineers are interested in hooking this into Feral’s GameMode so that the values could be automatically tuned when launching games and then returning to their former state when done gaming, in order to maximize battery life / power efficiency. The only downside with these current patches are that they work only for non-GuC based platforms… So the latest Alder/Raptor Lake notebooks as well as Intel DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics currently aren’t able to make use of this tuning option.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – New Intel Linux Graphics Driver Patches Released, Up To 10-15% Better Performance
SpaceX is getting ready to launch its super heavy-lift rocket for the second time this year, carrying a hefty broadband satellite to a distant orbit above Earth’s equator, as well as a pair of smaller satellites, before being disposed entirely.
Source: Gizmodo – Watch Live as a SpaceX Falcon Heavy Attempts First Fully Expendable Mission
With a trailer that’s been out in the world for almost a year now, expectations couldn’t be any higher for Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Except they can go higher, now that Paramount’s screened 20 minutes of breathtaking footage at CinemaCon 2023.
Source: Gizmodo – We Saw One of Mission: Impossible 7’s Most Epic Action Scenes
Clubhouse is downsizing, big time. The company, which launched its audio-based social platform in the early pandemic days of April 2020, is now laying off more than half of all of its workers.
Source: Gizmodo – Clubhouse Slashes More Than Half Its Staff
Retailers have revealed the memory specifications of NVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, in correlation with several new MSI S3 Gaming Prebuilts that are housing the new GPUs. Sadly, the listed VRAM specifications sit at just 8GB, as rumors have been pointing to for months.
The leaked system specs come by way of two retailers,
Source: Hot Hardware – GeForce RTX 4060 Ti And Non-Ti VRAM Specs Break Cover In MSI Gaming Desktop Listings
Meta will soon start rolling out its latest Quest firmware, and there’s a particularly handy feature for Meta Quest Pro owners. The company’s highest-end VR headset is gaining WiFi 6E support. So, if you have a compatible router and a fast enough internet connection, your headset will supports speeds of up to 1.6Gbps.
Faster downloads could come in useful for those who try another new feature, which will be available on all models (except the first one, unfortunately). After you install the v53 firmware, you’ll have the option to automatically update all of your apps before the headset shuts down. Meta says this should help avoid having to wait for an app update when you pick up your headset again. This might only be truly effective for more ardent Quest users, though. If you tend to go a few weeks between VR sessions, you might still end up having to update apps when you put your headset on again. You can opt out of this feature from the power off dialog.
Elsewhere, there’s another tool to help parents and guardians manage what teens can access in the Quest browser. The Quest Browser Website Category Filter is fairly self-explanatory. It can be used to block websites that fall under certain categories, such as gambling or hate and terrorism. The filters are tied to accounts, not devices, and can be set up from the parental supervision tab in the Quest mobile app.
Speaking of the Meta Quest Browser, it’ll possible to watch Twitch there (unless perhaps a parent or guardian says otherwise). On top of that, Meta is moving some advanced camera settings it has been testing from the Experimental Settings panel into the core camera settings. Finally, users will at last have the option to record video with stereo audio instead of only mono.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/meta-quest-pro-will-soon-support-wifi-6e-210046900.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Meta Quest Pro will soon support WiFi 6E
As part of today’s Q1’2023 earnings announcement from Intel, the company is offering a brief update on the state of its upcoming chips and manufacturing nodes. Key among these disclosures is a status update on Meteor Lake, Intel’s next-generation client processor (and first disaggregated chiplet CPU), as well as the Intel 4 process node that it will be built upon.
According to Intel, the company is on track to launch Meteor Lake in the second half of the year. And more specifically, at this point Meteor Lake is now in production and ramping alongside the new Intel 4 process.
The basis of what we expect will be sold as Intel’s 14th generation of Core processors, Meteor Lake is a critical part for Intel that represents several firsts for the company. It’ll be the first client CPU using chiplets, but also the first heterogenous chiplet CPU from the company, using different chiplets for I/O, CPU cores, graphics, and more. And on the manufacturing side of matters, it’s going to be the lead product for Intel’s next-generation EUV-based Intel 4 process node, as well as Intel’s biggest use of Foveros 3D die stacking technology yet – and the first attempt to do so for a relatively cheap, mass-market processor.
Intel’s last significant update on Meteor Lake came almost exactly a year ago, when the company announced during their Q1’2022 earnings report that it had been successfully powered on for testing. So at a year later, Intel is now making final preparations for a product launch later this year. The official launch window is still in the second half of the year – Intel client processor ramp-ups take several months even without all-new manufacturing technologies in play – so we expect Intel will announce more concrete details on that launch some time in the third quarter.
Source: AnandTech – Intel: Meteor Lake & Intel 4 Process Now Ramping for Production
The low-profile firm that has become crucial to a half-trillion-dollar global industry. From a report: In 1984, Martin van den Brink, a young Dutch engineer, joined a newly created venture in a quiet corner of the Netherlands. Little did he know then that about 40 years on the company would be so crucial to the $580 billion semiconductor industry that it would be the epicenter of a US-China chip war. ASML Holding NV, where Van den Brink is now the chief technology officer, practically owns the market for a critical piece of equipment needed to produce the brains of everything that makes modern life possible — from cars and smartphones to computers, microwaves and airplanes. With the company’s high-end machines churning out chips that can also go into state-of-the-art weapons and artificial intelligence devices, ASML is effectively being treated as critical infrastructure for US national security and has become a target of industrial espionage for China. “I never expected to be where we are today,” said Van den Brink.
Over his nearly four decades at the company, ASML has gone from a bit player competing with the likes of Nikon, Canon and Ultratech to the world’s only maker of very high-end semiconductor lithography equipment. Its ascent has made it Europe’s most valuable technology company, with a market capitalization of over $247 billion — more than twice that of its customer Intel. In an industry where devices typically cost $10 million, ASML commands about $180 million for its current top-end machine. And although the chip market has softened recently, ASML is still growing and its long-term outlook seems intact, thanks to the insatiable demand for computing power.
“This is a company that the world can’t exist without,” said Jon Bathgate, a fund manager at NZS Capital in Denver, which has about $2 billion under management, with ASML as one of its biggest holdings. “They’ve got a 20-year head start… Investors have clearly realized how important ASML is as a company and how difficult it would be to replicate. It’s a natural monopoly with secular growth winds. That’s unique.” As chips become for geopolitics in the 21st century what oil was in the last one, ASML’s singular success has thrust it squarely in the crosshairs of the intensifying tensions between the US and China. With the US focused on the strategic importance of semiconductors, Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have done everything to ensure that China is a couple of generations behind in chips. No company is more critical to that effort than ASML.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ASML, Europe’s Most Valuable Tech Firm, Is at the Heart of the US-China Chip War
Human remains unveiled in Lake Mead’s low water levels last year have finally been identified as a Las Vegas man who went missing years ago, local authorities said this week.
Source: Gizmodo – Bones Found in Lake Mead Finally Identified as Missing Man
Microsoft will no longer manufacture mice, keyboards, and webcams that are Microsoft-branded. Instead, Microsoft is now focusing on its Surface-branded PC accessories, which include mice, keyboards, pens, and more. From a report: It brings an end to the legacy of Microsoft-branded PC hardware after the company first launched its first mouse in 1983 and bundled it with Microsoft Word and Notepad. “Going forward, we are focusing on our Windows PC accessories portfolio under the Surface brand,” says Dan Laycock, senior communications manager at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. “We will continue to offer a range of Surface branded PC Accessories — including mice, keyboards, pens, docks, adaptive accessories, and more. Existing Microsoft branded PC accessories like mice, keyboards, and webcams will continue to be sold in existing markets at existing sell-in prices while supplies last.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Microsoft’s Mice, Keyboards, and Webcams Are Being Discontinued in Favor of Surface Accessories
As promised, YouTube Music now offers podcasts. In the US, you can launch the Android or iOS app to stream audio or video podcasts without a Premium or Music Premium subscription. Shows will play in the background, and you can cast them to other devices like speakers.
The feature is reaching American users “gradually,” YouTube says, so don’t be surprised if you have to wait a little while to see the podcast section. The format is coming to other regions, although YouTube hasn’t provided a timeline. And before you ask: paying members will still have to listen to host-read ads.
The addition may seem odd when Google already has a Podcasts app. This unifies listening for YouTube Music subscribers, though — and, of course, theoretically entices you to sign up. This could make the app a more viable alternative to Spotify if you’re paying for on-demand music and want everything in one place.
YouTube has been ramping up its podcast efforts across the board, including an Explore page for non-Music users. Just don’t count on the service producing a swath of originals like Spotify. The rival has dropped some of its originals, and has been expanding distribution of Gimlet shows to other platforms. The podcast industry isn’t as hot as it once was, even if there’s still plenty of demand.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/youtube-music-adds-podcasts-in-the-us-203332932.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – YouTube Music adds podcasts in the US
Artificial intelligence and the music industry are having a moment, and it’s unclear at this point whether it’s a great one. As AI generators like ChatGPT and DALL-E get better and better, so too do AI voice generators—and that’s no better exemplified than the rise of completely fabricated songs from major artists.
Source: Gizmodo – Watch Taylor Swift Sing Kanye’s ‘Heartless’ and 14 Other AI Covers
