To celebrate the release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 on May 5, merch worthy of a collector’s fortress is out there for the hunting. Now is the perfect time to find space loot featuring your favorite misfit heroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Source: Gizmodo – Rock This Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 Gear
Sony says it sold a total of 38.4 million PlayStation 5 consoles, according to the company’s latest earnings release. In the first three months of the year, it shipped 6.3 million units — “more than triple what the company shipped in the same quarter the previous year (2 million),” reports The Verge. From the report: On the software side things were more mixed, Bloomberg notes. Revenue from game software was up overall, but units shipped fell from 70.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 to 68 million in the same quarter of 2022. PlayStation Network monthly active users were up slightly from 106 million to 108 million, but the number of PlayStation Plus subscribers were flat at 47.4 million.
This disparity partly reflects the lack of major first-party games releases in the quarter. But there are also concerns that the PS5’s earlier hardware supply issues are having a knock on effect on software sales and subscriptions, which are important if the company wants to build a “virtuous cycle” of mutually reinforcing console and game sales. CNBC notes that the company reported an operating profit of a record 1.21 trillion yen (around $8.9 billion) for the year, with revenue in the quarter rising 35 percent to 3.06 trillion yen (around $22.5 billion).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Sony Closes In On 40 Million PS5s Sold
Enlarge / Siri, Apple’s sort-of-AI assistant, pops up in iOS. (credit: Samuel Axon)
A new behind-the-scenes report in The Information details Apple’s struggles to keep up with AI features and innovation amid the rise of large language models (LLMs) that drive groundbreaking tools like ChatGPT.
The article focuses on the efforts by the company’s AI chief since 2018, John Giannandrea, to bring order to a fragmented AI group and make Apple more competitive with companies like Google, from which Giannandrea defected.
In some ways, The Information’s piece is a roundup or a confirmation of what we already know—like Apple employees’ frustrations with the limitations of Siri’s underlying technology, which had been previously reported—but it calls on new sources to add additional context and depth to the narrative.
Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Report describes Apple’s “organizational dysfunction” and “lack of ambition” in AI
Uri Herrera announced today the release and general availability of Nitrux 2.8 as a major update to this Debian-based and systemd-free GNU/Linux distribution with a focus on the KDE software and the Plasma desktop.
Source: LXer – Nitrux 2.8 Released with Linux 6.2, Zswap, Support for Android Apps, and More
It started so simply. In 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, Dom Toretto’s crew of street racers/thieves were stealing combination DVD/VCR players. In 2021’s F9: The Fast Saga, Dom and his friends—excuse me, Dom and his family—had to save the world by recovering a device that could hack into every computer on the planet.…
Source: Gizmodo – The io9 Guide to Fast & Furious
In a highly anticipated report on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the Federal Reserve admits that it should’ve been paying slightly closer attention to the tech-centric bank before it unceremoniously collapsed last month. At the same time, the Fed’s report also reveals what everybody already could’ve guessed: SVB…
Source: Gizmodo – The Fed on Silicon Valley Bank Collapse: We May Have Dropped the Ball There
According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, Chinese hackers vastly outnumber U.S. cyber intelligence staff “by at least 50 to 1.” CNBC reports: “To give you a sense of what we’re up against, if each one of the FBI’s cyber agents and intel analysts focused exclusively on the China threat, Chinese hackers would still outnumber FBI Cyber personnel by at least 50 to 1,” Wray said in prepared remarks for a budget hearing before a House Appropriations subcommittee on Thursday. The disclosure highlights the massive scale of cyber threats the U.S. is facing, particularly from China. Wray said the country has “a bigger hacking program than every other major nation combined and have stolen more of our personal and corporate data than all other nations — big or small — combined.”
The agency is requesting about $63 million to help it beef up its cyber staff with 192 new positions. Wray said this would also help the FBI put more cyber staff in field offices to be closer to where victims of cyber crimes actually are.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Chinese Hackers Outnumber FBI Cyber Staff 50 To 1, Bureau Director Says
Version
4.9 of the SystemTap tracing tool has been released. The headline
changes this time include a new, Jupyter-based frontend and a
language-server-protocol interface for name completion.
Source: LWN.net – SystemTap 4.9 released
Enlarge / A health care worker in a medical intensive care unit. (credit: Getty | BSIP)
Diagnosing medical conditions is not easy. Patients can have nondescript symptoms that could point to common problems as easily as rare or poorly understood ones. They can sprinkle in irrelevant details while forgetting crucial ones. And they can have complex medical histories and multiple conditions that can muddy the diagnostic waters.
But then, there are the rare cases of pure deception. Such was the case of an old woman seen at Massachusetts General Hospital for intense pain and jerking movements. The woman’s case record, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, documents the thorough investigation of her dramatic condition. Doctors’ initial alarm at her symptoms led to puzzlement as inconsistencies and oddities piled up.
It began when the woman presented to another hospital complaining of abdominal pain, jerking motions in her right arm and leg that she worried were seizures, as well as confusion, agitation, a rash on her chest, and a dislocated jaw bone. She told doctors at that hospital that she had a history of acute intermittent porphyria and that her symptoms matched previous flares of the condition.
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Source: Ars Technica – Woman faked elaborate illness, doctors say in report on “factitious disorder”
Fox’s long-running animated sitcom, The Simpsons, has seen its share of amazing, truly wonderful episodes. But lurking below those high points are also some horrendous misfires, misbegotten episodes that are just downright awful and unfunny.
Source: Kotaku – The 10 Worst Simpsons Episodes, Ever
In this article, we’ll explain how to install Node Version Manager (NVM) to manage multiple active node.js versions on your Linux distribution.
The post NVM: Install Multiple Node.js Versions in Linux appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – NVM: Install Multiple Node.js Versions in Linux
While they’ve long since given up developing GPUs, Matrox has remained a notable player in the video card industry for over four decades. These days, the company has settled into a modest role of providing graphics cards based on other vendors’ GPUs for use in niche or boutique use cases, where Matrox can differentiate based on their software and support. And while their sales volume as a whole is limited, there’s a certain degree of validation that comes from Matrox tapping a vendor’s GPUs for their latest video cards.
To that end, Intel this week has finally earned their tip of the hat from the oldest of the video card vendors, with the announcement of a new series of multi-monitor display cards built around Intel’s Alchemist architecture GPUs. Matrox’s new Luma series graphics cards are based on Intel’s Arc A310 and A380 graphics hardware, with the niche video card maker looking to tap into the Alchemist’s class-leading video decoding and encoding capabilities, as well as the display output features and flexibility that are critical for a multi-display card.
Matrox Video’s Luma family of graphics boards includes three products: the full-sized single-slot Luma A380 based on the Arc A380 (ACM-G11 with 1024 stream processors) with 6GB of memory; the low-profile single-slot fanless Luma A310 based on the Arc A310 (ACM-G11 with 768 stream processors) with 4GB of memory; and the low-profile single-slot Luma A310F that is equipped with a active cooling system.
All three Matrox Luma graphics cards have four DisplayPort 2.1 UHBR10 (40Gbps) outputs and thus can drive four 4Kp144/5Kp60 monitors (uncompressed, 4:4:4) or two 8Kp60 or 5Kp120 displays using two of such ports for each displays. As for features, they offer the same capabilities as other Intel Arc A310/A380-based offerings, including support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.3, and OpenCL 3.0 APIs, as well as encoding and decoding of H.264, H.265, VP9, and AV1 video streams. As an added bonus, they retain support for Intel’s oneAPI for compute tasks, as well as the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO toolkit for AI development.
All of the Luma graphics cards consume no more than 75W and can be powered entirely via a PCIe slot without any auxiliary power connectors, and the A310-based offerings are intended to fit into the most compact PCs that are out there. Furthermore, their single-slot design means that upwards of several cards can be installed into a single desktop PC for systems that need to drive eight, 12, or more monitors.
Meanwhile, it’s interesting to note that while Matrox has not announced the discontinuation of their previous generation cards for these product segments – the NVIDIA based D-series and AMD-based M-series – in terms of specifications these new Intel cards should supplant the older cards in every way. Intel’s DisplayPort 2.1 capabilities are likely the driving factor given Matrox’s intended niche, with NVIDIA in particular being boxed out by not including DisplayPort 2.1 functionality with their Ada Lovelace generation GPU architecture.
Matrox Video’s Luma boards are aimed primarily at the medical, digital signage, control room, video wall, and industrial markets. The cards come with a base three-year warranty, which can be further extended and a guaranteed lifecycle of seven years, which is important for some of the markets that they are intended for.
Other advantages Matrox’s Luma board offer include support for Matrox’s PowerDesk software developed to handle exotic multi-display configurations.
Matrox did not announce prices of the boards, though given their orientation on commercial, professional, and industrial applications, they will be priced accordingly.
Source: AnandTech – Matrox Adopts Intel Alchemist GPUs for New Luma Graphics Cards
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is something of a rarity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While several heroes have gotten film trilogies in the saga, with the exception of Spider-Man, none of those trilogies have felt like one complete story. Stories with endings. Stories where, if the filmmaker wanted, they…
Source: Gizmodo – Kevin Feige Didn’t Hold James Gunn Back in Deciding the Fate of the Guardians of the Galaxy
Whether you love it or hate it, the end of Abby’s third day in The Last of Us Part II is one of the sequel’s most memorable moments. While playing as Abby, the secret second main character of the game, the player is forced into a brutal fight with long-time protagonist Ellie in a Seattle theater. If you would like to…
Source: Kotaku – ,000 The Last Of Us Part II Statue Set Recreates One Of The Game’s Best Fights
Enlarge / So they put a Tile tracker on a cat… now what? (credit: Tile)
Did you know Tile sells Bluetooth trackers for your cat? Why don’t you just stick a small tracker on something cheap and attach it to your cat’s collar, you say? Well, that’s exactly what Tile did. At a time when Bluetooth-tracking companies should be rethinking their approach and reputation among shoppers, a Tile Sticker slapped on a cheap collar attachment feels like a wasted opportunity.
It took a surprisingly long time for Tile to release an official pet tracker, but Tile for Cats finally became available Wednesday for $40—$10 more than a Tile Sticker’s solo MSRP. Tile’s announcement describes the product as the simplistic solution it is. It merely “combines Tile Sticker with a silicone collar attachment.”
And that’s the first reason why Tile for Cats doesn’t feel like an exciting new product—and it doesn’t look like one either. If someone wanted something that looked like a DIY pet tracker, they’d probably make one. That device would also probably have something cuter written on it than “Tile,” like this GPS pet tracker on Hackaday that says “Squeak.”
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Source: Ars Technica – Tile should—and needs to—do better than the DIY-looking “Tile for Cats”
The European Space Agency appears to have a slight problem: a critical antenna is jammed on their Jupiter-bound spacecraft launched two weeks ago. From the Associated Press: The 52-foot (16-meter) radar antenna on Juice unfolded only one-third of the way following liftoff, according to the space agency. Engineers suspect a tiny pin may be protruding. Flight controllers in Germany plan to fire the spacecraft’s engine in hopes of shaking the pin loose. If that doesn’t work, they said they have plenty of time to solve the problem.
Juice, short for Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer, won’t reach the giant planet until 2031. It’s taking a roundabout path to get there, including gravity-assist flybys of Earth and our moon, and Venus. The radar antenna is needed to peer beneath the icy crust of three Jupiter moons suspected of harboring underground oceans and possibly life, a major goal of the nearly $1.8 billion mission. Its targets include Callisto, Europa and Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Key Radar Antenna Stuck On Europe’s Jupiter-Bound Spacecraft
As Bungie continues on its warpath against Destiny 2 cheaters, the studio has won $12 million in the lawsuit against Romanian cheat seller Mihai Claudiu-Florentin that began back in 2021.
Source: Kotaku – Bungie Wins Million In Destiny 2 Anti-Cheat Lawsuit
Linux Kernel 6.2.13, Plasma 5.27.4, and WayDroid in default installation are just some of the new features offered by Nitrux 2.8.0.
Source: LXer – Nitrux 2.8.0 Brings a Host of System Improvements and Android Support
The JUICE mission is at the very beginning of its eight-year journey to Jupiter and its moons, but one of its science instruments is already misbehaving.
Source: Gizmodo – Key Instrument on Newly Launched Jupiter Probe Is Already Exhibiting Problems
