Micmonster’s voiceover tool offers access to an enormous voiceover library available in more than 140 languages, and a lifetime subscription is on sale for $59.99 right now (reg. $119). Micmonster turns text into one of over 600 different voices to help bring your project to life, whether you create content for a…
Source: LifeHacker – Content Creators Can Get Micmonster’s Voice Library for Right Now
There are fewer than 100 wild ocelots left in Texas, and it’s no wonder: their habitats have been broken up by highways and other human infrastructure. Conservationists in the state set up gated areas along the busy State Highway 100 in hopes of protecting these special cats, and images from camera traps now reveal…
Source: Gizmodo – See All the Texas Creatures Using Special Wildlife Highway Exits
Intel’s latest 14th-gen Core desktop processors, “Raptor Lake Refresh,” do away with the AI NPU and complex tiling system inside the recent 14th-gen “Meteor Lake” mobile chips. But AI is being used here, specifically to assist what gamers care about: improving game performance and CPU clock speeds. From a report: As expected, Intel’s “refreshed” Raptor Lake chips offer modest performance improvements over their predecessors, while ushering in eventual platform upgrades like Thunderbolt 5. But there are boosts, such as a tweaked Intel 7 process that pushes turbo clock speeds up to 6GHz with the new Core i9-14900K and a new “Application Performance Optimization (APO)” feature that appears to optimize the CPU for a particular game.
But — and this is important, given inflation — Intel is holding pricing (almost) steady. Prices in Intel’s 14th-gen Core desktop S-series line will range from $589 for the 24-core, 32-thread Core i9-14900K down to the $294 14-core, 20-thread Core i5-1400KF, for a total of six new processors. This is the third straight generation in which Intel has left its processor prices virtually unchanged, including the 13th-gen Raptor Lake and the 12th-gen Alder Lake chip, whose slowest chip was priced at $264. Perhaps not surprisingly, Intel’s not offering many direct generation-over-generation comparisons with its own processors, though it selected a few content-creation benchmarks to highlight with its Core i7-14700K. There, performance improvements range from 3 percent (Adobe Lightroom) to 18 percent (Autodesk). According to Roger Chandler, vice president and general manager of Intel’s enthusiast PC and workstation business, the Core i7 features the best multithreaded performance on a Core i7 ever. Intel executives said the chipmaker had about 130 partners and customers for the 13th-gen launch, and expect the same for the debut of the 14th-gen Raptor Lake Refresh chips.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Intel Unveils 14th-gen ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ CPUs With Speeds Up To 6GHz
NASA is considering reducing the budget for the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope as the space agency grapples with its spending for the upcoming year.
Source: Gizmodo – Two Iconic NASA Space Telescopes Could Get Their Funding Slashed
With near seamlessness, Ian Cardoni and Harry Belden have taken over the voices of Rick and Morty. Justin Roiland, the co-creator of the show and the former voice actor for both characters, was fired last year after accusations of domestic abuse and engendering a toxic workplace. The two voice actors were kept a…
Source: Gizmodo – Rick and Morty Finally Reveals Who’s Performing Its Main Characters’ New Voices
Surprise, surprise: an upcoming first-party Nintendo game has leaked to the internet ahead of its launch date. Super Mario Bros. Wonder, the long-awaited new traditional-style side-scrolling title in the famous franchise of everyone’s favorite video-game plumber, has found its way to pirates through the usual channels.
As you could probably
Source: Hot Hardware – Super Mario Bros. Wonder Running At 4K On PC Leaks Online But Beware Of Spoilers
LinkedIn has announced its second round of layoffs this year. The Microsoft division is shedding around 668 workers from across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams.
“While we are adapting our organizational structures and streamlining our decision making, we are continuing to invest in strategic priorities for our future and to ensure we continue to deliver value for our members and customers,” LinkedIn said in its announcement. “We are committed to providing our full support to all impacted employees during this transition and ensuring that they are treated with care and respect.”
In May, LinkedIn revealed plans to lay off 716 people and close its job search app in China. As such, LinkedIn will have cut nearly 1,400 jobs this year amid widespread layoffs across the tech industry in 2023. Microsoft, which just bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion, laid off around 10,000 workers in the first few months of 2023.
In Microsoft’s most recent earnings report (which covers April to June), the company said that LinkedIn’s earnings had increased by five percent year-over-year. It noted that membership growth had “accelerated for eight quarters in a row” and that the platform had more than 950 million users. Microsoft is set to announce financial results for the July-September period, the first quarter of its fiscal year, on October 24.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/linkedin-lays-off-600-workers-in-second-round-of-cuts-this-year-154223614.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – LinkedIn lays off 600+ workers in second round of cuts this year
This generation of graphics cards calls for some insanely powerful behemoths, like the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080. With great power, usually comes great heat, too. That will mean beefy coolers that are typically large will be the modus operandi – especially since the RTX 4080 shares a lot of designs with the RTX 4090. If you can’t fit it, you’ll
Source: Hot Hardware – GeForce RTX 4080 Mod Drastically Reduces Footprint To Inside An SFF Gaming PC
Enlarge / The back of the 2019 iPad Air. (credit: Samuel Axon)
Whether you’re shopping for a new laptop or you’re looking to build your own PC, we found some great savings for you with some post-Prime Day sales. Many of the items on our list, from Vitamix blenders to Dyson vacuums, from headphones to USB-C chargers, from Tempur-pedic office chairs to tools and games, have been popular with Amazon shoppers and Ars readers. There’s plenty to choose from in our curated selection of deals.
DeWalt drill kit with carrying bag. (credit: DEWALT)
Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.
Read on Ars Technica | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Dealmaster: Save on laptops, Lego, CPUs, GPUs, and more
This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here. This story is the second in a four-part Grist series examining how climate change is destabilizing the global insurance market. It is published in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Source: Gizmodo – What Happens When the Flood Insurance Market Goes Underwater?
No matter how careful you are with your DIY paint job, there’s a good chance a few drops will end up where you don’t want them, such as on your tile floor or dripping down a glass window pane. While this can certainly be annoying, and potentially require a few extra hours of labor, with the right knowhow, paint…
Source: LifeHacker – The Best Ways to Remove Paint Splatters From Any Surface
It seems like it was just yesterday that Minecraft hit 10 years old, but that was actually a half a decade ago. Since then, much has changed as the popular block-based game has continued to grow in popularity. However, with those changes come more eyes on the game overall and recent events surrounding Minecraft certainly highlight that. Though,
Source: Hot Hardware – Minecraft Crosses 300M Copies Sold As The Best-Selling Game Of All Time
LinkedIn plans to lay off more than 660 people across its engineering, product, talent and finance teams, it announced Monday — representing more than 3% of the company’s global workforce. From a report: LinkedIn has now seen two major rounds of layoffs this year following its cutting in May of 716 jobs and shuttering of its Chinese app InCareer. Those cuts were announced alongside a broader restructuring of the firm’s Global Business Organization. The job positions are being eliminated as part of broader efforts at the company to optimize around artificial intelligence. LinkedIn released a slew of new AI product features earlier this month, including an AI-assisted candidate discovery for recruiters, and AI-powered coaching for LinkedIn’s premium subscribers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – LinkedIn To Lay Off Hundreds of People Amid Broader Restructuring
Following up from last year’s first Image-Based
Linux Summit), a second meeting was held in Berlin on September 12th,
2023, the day before All Systems Go!
2023, at the Microsoft office. The goal of these summits is to find
common ground among stakeholders from various engineering groups around the
topic of image-based Linux distributions, communicate progress, and attempt
to build a strategy to tackle shared problems together. The organizers —
Luca Boccassi, Lennart Poettering, and Christian Brauner — welcomed
participants from the UAPI Group,
which draws developers from a long list of companies with an interest in
this area, and spent the full day discussing a variety of topics. Full
minutes have been published on the UAPI Group’s web site.
Source: LWN.net – [$] The 2023 Image-Based Linux Summit
Apple is making progress on a cheaper version of the Vision Pro according to Bloomberg’s reliable leaker Mark Gurman. We also got some new rumors about the upcoming M3-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air as well as the possibility that the release of the Apple Pencil 3 is imminent.
Source: Gizmodo – Apple’s Reportedly Making Progress on a Cheaper Vision Pro and We May Be Getting Apple Pencil 3
Analogue, maker of retro consoles for games from the SNES to the Game Boy, are back with their most ambitious project yet: a Nintendo 64-compatible machine called the Analogue 3D.
Source: Kotaku – The Best Retro Console Creators Are Making A Nintendo 64
The Google Camera app has been quietly replaced with the Pixel Camera app in the Google Play Store. The Pixel-exclusive app also received a new app description with a few hints at what Pixel owners will be able to do with the newly labeled app, suggesting there’s more than just a name change afoot.
One of the greatest battlefields among
Source: Hot Hardware – Pixel Camera Quietly Replaces Google Camera In Play Store With Key Changes
Matthew Vaughn, the guy who brought us comic book adaptations like X-Men: First Class, Kick-Ass and Kingsmen: The Secret Service, has a new movie that seems akin to Stranger Than Fiction if it were directed by, well, Matthew Vaughn. At least, that’s what it seems on its face.
Source: Gizmodo – Matthew Vaughn is Still Being Coy About What the Hell’s Happening in Argylle
Google had a fairly generous offer for those who pre-ordered a Pixel 8 device: the company tossed in a Pixel Watch 2 or Pixel Buds Pro for free. While the new handsets are now on the market and that offer is no longer available, you haven’t necessarily missed out.
A bundle of the Pixel 8 Pro and Pixel Watch 2 has dropped from $1,349 to $999 at Amazon. Given that the Pixel Watch 2 costs $349, you’ll effectively be getting the wearable for free.
Along with the Tensor G3 chip and new displays, the Pixel 8 lineup offers genuinely useful AI features. Intuitive photo editing, the ability to generate a custom wallpaper and being able to remove distracting ambient noises using Audio Magic Eraser are all major plus points. We gave the Pixel 8 Pro a score of 93 in our review thanks to these factors along with others such as a major improvement to battery life, the addition of a temperature sensor and a very welcome extension of software support to seven years.
As for the Pixel Watch 2, we feel that it’s a worthy improvement over the original model that’s helping Google catch up to rival smartwatches. We gave it a score of 79 in our review, highlighting aspects such as far better battery life (which was the major drawback of the original Pixel Watch), a great heart-rate sensor and the slick design. We took issue with some of the software quirks though, along with the lack of wireless charging and the fact you need to connect to Wi-Fi to sync the device.
That’s not the only bundle Amazon has on sale. You can effectively get a set of Pixel Buds Pro for free when you buy a Pixel 8 bundle, which is currently $200 off at $699.
We gave the Pixel 8 a score of 90. Storage tops out at 256GB (you can deck out the Pixel 8 Pro with up to 1TB of storage, by comparison), the lack of mmWave 5G support and no pro camera controls were our major negatives. That said, while it doesn’t have quite as many bells and whistles as the Pixel 8 Pro, it’s still a great smartphone.
Meanwhile, we feel that the Pixel Buds Pro are Google’s best earbuds to date. In our review last year, we gave them a score of 87. They deliver solid bass and good active noise cancellation performance, but at the time of our review we felt that the call quality and transparency mode were lacking.
Google has been improving the earbuds over time with software updates. It recently upgraded them with call quality enhancements and a feature that pauses music and activates transparency mode when the Pixel Buds Pro detect that you’re speaking.
These bundles should help to offset the $100 Google tacked onto the price of each phone compared with the Pixel 7 lineup. You can check out the full Pixel 8 sale at Amazon, but you’ll need to act quickly if you’re interested in either of bundle we’ve highlighted here. The deals are only available until 11:59PM PT on October 16 or while stocks last.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-pixel-8-bundles-are-up-to-25-percent-off-at-amazon-151431384.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Google Pixel 8 bundles are up to 25 percent off at Amazon
