Have you ever seen AirPods that look exactly like Apple’s, but the box would say something like ‘Abble AirPods?’ Sometimes, manufacturers of counterfeit products don’t even change the company’s name on the box in an attempt to trick the consumers into thinking that they are genuine products.
Most of us are aware of…
Source: Gizmodo – CT Scans Show Why Fake Apple AirPods Sound So Awful
A new payload has been added to Firefly’s upcoming mission to the far side of the Moon, one that will explore the lunar subsurface to find out if it can support future infrastructure.
Source: Gizmodo – NASA-Funded Mission to the Moon’s Far Side Is Starting to Look Pretty Cool
Nextdoor, a popular neighborhood app, is prioritizing its “commitment to shareholders” over its commitment to employees by eliminating a quarter of its staff to meet shareholder expectations, the company said in a 2023 Q3 report Tuesday. The layoffs are reportedly part of an effort to reduce Nextdoor’s personnel…
Source: Gizmodo – Nextdoor Lays Off 25% of Staff as a ‘Commitment to Shareholders’
No matter what you think about the House of Mouse, the Force, or Marvel’s many assorted heroes and villains, there’s no denying Disney+ has might behind it. According to today’s quarterly report, which you can read here, the streamer now has more than 150 million subscribers worldwide, a number that includes India’s…
Source: Gizmodo – Disney+ Adds Nearly 7 Million Subscribers, Still Loses Money
After an awkward situation with Apple back in 2017, UK-based graphics IP developer Imagination Technologies was in a dire state. The company was quickly snapped up by a state-backed private equity firm from China known as Canyon Bridge. Since then, ImgTec graphics IP has appeared in graphics components offered by multiple Chinese vendors,
Source: Hot Hardware – Imagination Technologies To Make A Triumphant PC Graphics Return?
You’ll soon be able to use the one-app streaming experience Disney is creating between Disney+ and Hulu. On today’s earnings call, CEO Bob Iger announced that the beta version of Hulu on Disney+ will be available in December. The full launch is expected in early spring, though Iger cautioned the company may not see the full benefits of the one-stop shop until 2025. The beta version will allow parents to setup profiles and content controls to ensure viewing remains age appropriate. Disney says a key reason for the beta is to give parents time to do this setup since the library of Hulu content significantly adds to the streaming options.
Disney announced in May that it planned to bring Hulu content into Disney+ before the end of 2023. The company has been clear that both apps will still be available as standalone options. What’s more, Disney said it would purchase Comcast’s remaining stake in Hulu last week, so the entertainment giant will be the sole owner of that service when the deal closes sometime next year. A combined app should be useful to bundle subscribers who are paying for both services in return for a discount on the monthly rate.
Disney added almost seven million Disney+ core subscribers is the fourth quarter of its 2023 fiscal year. The company says that streaming service now counts 112 million total customers. It increased the ad-free price in October and announced a crackdown on password sharing would begin in 2024. Given the higher margins, thanks in part to higher subscription fees across both Disney+ and ESPN+, Disney says it’s still on track for its streaming business to be profitable by this time next year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-merged-disney-and-hulu-app-launches-in-beta-next-month-220306792.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – The merged Disney Plus and Hulu app launches in beta next month
The Spengler family returns to their New York City roots to battle an evil force in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
A mysterious evil force has put New York City into a deadly deep freeze in the first official teaser for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Jason Reitman’s much-anticipated follow-up to his successful 2021 sequel, Ghostbusters: Afterlife. (Jason is the son of the late Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two films in the franchise in the 1980s, so it’s very much a family affair).
(Spoilers for Ghostbusters: Afterlife below.)
Afterlife introduced us to a new generation of ghostbusters descended from Egon Spengler (the late Harold Ramis), namely, the science-loving Phoebe (McKenna Grace) and her mechanically inclined brother Trevor (Finn Wolfhard). Mom Callie (Carrie Coon), aka Egon’s daughter, moved the family out to Oklahoma when she inherited Egon’s old house. The kids discovered their grandfather’s old ghost-busting gear just in time to battle the attempted return of none other than Gozer the Gozerian from the original 1984 film.
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Source: Ars Technica – New York falls under a spectral “death chill” in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire teaser
‘80s horror icon Chucky has a massive kill count—though, that doesn’t stop naysayers from thinking they could easily take the deadly doll down.
Source: Kotaku – It’s Time To Prove You Could Actually Kick Chucky’s Butt
Many people are carrying potentially harmful genes, research out this week has found. Scientists analyzed the genes of people living in Iceland and found that one in 25 people appear to have genetic variations linked to a shorter lifespan. The most dangerous variants were those tied to cancer.
Source: Gizmodo – Lots of People May Carry Life-Shortening Genetic Variants
Next April a new LTS Ubuntu arrives, and alongside it will be a whole new immutable desktop edition. At this year’s Ubuntu conference in Riga, Latvia, Canonical revealed more details about its forthcoming immutable desktop distro. From a report: Core Desktop is not the next version of Ubuntu itself. Ordinary desktop and server Ubuntu aren’t going anywhere, and the next release, numbered 24.04 and codenamed Noble Numbat as we mentioned last month, will be the default and come with all the usual editions and flavors. Nor is this a whole new product: it is a graphical desktop edition of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, as we examined on its release in June last year, a couple of months after 22.04. Ubuntu Core is Canonical’s Internet of Things (IoT) distro, intended to be embedded on edge devices, such as digital signs and smart displays. It is an immutable distro, meaning that the root filesystem is read-only and there’s no conventional package manager.
Rather than being a basis for customization, like a conventional Linux, the idea is that immutable distros are rolled out and updated more like a phone or tablet OS: there’s a single fixed and heavily tested OS image, and it’s deployed onto the devices out in the field without modification. Updates are monolithic: a whole fresh image is pushed out, and all the OS components are upgraded in a single operation to the same combination. That isn’t unique. Most of the major Linux vendors have immutable offerings, and The Reg has looked at several over the years, including MicroOS, the basis of SUSE’s next-gen enterprise OS ALP. As well as the well-known ChromeOS, another immutable desktop is the educational distro Endless OS.
[…] Canonical believes it has some unique new angles. Core Desktop is constructed as additional layers on top of the existing Ubuntu Core distro, and like Core, it’s entirely built with a single packaging system: Ubuntu’s Snap. While Snap remains controversial, it does have some compelling advantages over both SUSE and Red Hat’s tooling. SUSE’s transactional_update tool, while simpler than its rivals in implementation, requires a snapshot-capable filesystem, meaning that its immutable distros must use Btrfs. While it has many admirers, the number and the contents of the orange and red cells in the feature tables here in its own documentation reflect the FOSS desk’s serious reservations about Btrfs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Canonical Reveals More Details About Ubuntu Core Desktop
Laptops might not be as expensive as they used to be, but they can still be pricey. It makes sense to wait to buy a new one until the prices come down, whether that’s because a new model comes out, or when there’s a huge discount event happening.
Source: LifeHacker – These Are Walmart’s Best Early Black Friday Deals on Laptops
Google’s AI ecosystem continues to grow as the company expands its partnership with Anthropic, which will now run on Google Cloud’s fastest AI-accelerating chips. This comes on the same day Google rolled out generative AI search capabilities worldwide, powered by PaLM2, putting AI in front of billions of people who…
Source: Gizmodo – Google Gives ChatGPT Competitor a Boost
Valve is apparently working on a new Steam feature that will allow users to hide their very not-safe-for-work games from their friends. Or, well, whatever games they may want to hide, for whatever reason.
Source: Kotaku – Steam Will Soon Let You Hide The Porn Games You Play
Barbie wielded a lot of box-office power this year, raking in over a billion dollars at the global box office and making history as Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing film of all time. But one monster hit wasn’t enough to bring Warner Bros. Discovery into the realm of profitability, according to today’s company earnings…
Source: Gizmodo – Barbie Helped Mitigate Warner Bros. Discovery’s Losses as It Bleeds Streaming Subscribers
First responders in Texas are fighting a fire from a chemical plant explosion north of Houston on Wednesday morning.
Source: Gizmodo – Chemical Explosion Near Houston Creates Huge Fire, Residents Told to Avoid Area
Activision Blizzard has confirmed the end of the Overwatch League, its massive bet to cash in on the rise of esports with an NFL-style franchise system. It will reportedly pay the 20 teams involved $120 million as everyone quietly parts ways from what was reportedly a financial debacle—despite its cultural impact for…
Source: Kotaku – That’s The End Of Activision Blizzard’s 0 Million Overwatch League
YouTube is adding a new For You section to creator channels. The TikTok-like feature will be personalized to each visitor, recommending content from a channel based on each viewer’s watch history. The company’s support account on X posted (via The Verge) about the upcoming feature, which launches on November 20.
Creators can prepare for the For You section by confirming their options before its release date. You can toggle the feature’s availability and change its settings in YouTube Studio by selecting Customization > Layout and then checking each of the prompts under the For You section. It allows you to toggle whether full-length videos, shorts and livestreams are available for the feature.
✨ introducing the “For you” section of your channel Home tab that recommends a mix of content from your channel to viewers based on their watch history
🚨 creators: review your settings & select formats before we roll out to viewers on 11/20
more: https://t.co/FNZUVWVPEA pic.twitter.com/0ga30rU1JC
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) November 8, 2023
The company had already teased the feature in a May video posted to its Creator Insider channel, a hub where YouTube employees have “direct conversations” with YouTubers. In that clip, product manager Ann Katrin Kuessner framed the feature as an alternative to the static home page. “You’re trying to find a configuration that is one-size-fits-all since the channel page looks the same today for every person that visits it,” Kuessner said, summarizing a problem creators face. She said the feature’s personalization “will be especially effective if your channel has multiple topics, languages, or content formats.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/youtube-will-soon-show-visitors-a-personalized-for-you-section-on-channel-pages-213402443.html?src=rss
In an update posted to its support pages, Intel has disclosed that it had stopped development of its thermoelectric Cryo Cooling Technology that was aimed to provide sub-ambient cooling for its top-of-the-range processors. As a result, the company will not provide Cryo Cooling software support for its latest 14th Generation Core ‘Raptor Lake Refresh’ processors, essentially making units made by EKWB and Cooler Master obsolete for the newest CPUs.
“As of July 1, 2023, development on the Intel Cryo Cooling Technology solution was discontinued,” a statement by Intel reads. “All versions of the software are provided as-is. Functional, Note security, or other updates will not be provided after December 31, 2023. No support for Intel Core processors 14th Gen will be provided. Please check with your auxiliary cooling provider for alternative solutions.”
Intel introduced its Cryo Cooling Technology in 2020 along the 10th Generation Core ‘Comet Lake-S’ processors as it struggled to deliver competitive performance with CPUs made on its dated 14nm-class fabrication technology.
Thermoelectric cooling uses the Peltier effect to transfer heat from one side of a device to the other, creating a cooling effect on one surface. This method is compact, allows to precisely control temperature of the cooling surface, and has no moving parts, which makes it a good fit for CPUs. Thermoelectric cooling has several drawbacks. Firstly, thermoelectric coolers are generally not energy-efficient as they use power to transfer heat from one side to another and the more heat it has to transfer, the more power it consumes. Secondly, the hot part of the surface has can generate condensate and has to be cooled down itself (at least in PC applications).
Intel’s Cryo Cooling Technology used a combination of hardware, software, and firmware technology to precisely control cooling performance and therefore boost performance of the CPU. Without any doubts, Intel’s Peltier effect-based cooling did a fine job in reducing temperature and enabling higher performance at all costs. But at $350 per unit, these cooling systems were very expensive for the vast majority of users. Furthermore, they were also power hungry and not exactly quiet.
And though Intel backing out of officially supporting thermoelectric cooling is a blow to adoption of the tech, Intel’s support is not strictly required to begin with – so we don’t expect the tech to disappear entirely.
Source: Intel (via @momomo_us)
Source: AnandTech – Intel Abandons Development of Phase-Changing Cryo Cooling Tech
We knew earlier this year that Lucasfilm had cooled off on working with Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige for a Star Wars movie project, in the studio’s latest shakeup of killing most of the upcoming movies it announces these days. But now, as The Marvels takes to the big screen, Feige has confirmed that he’s no longer…
Source: Gizmodo – Kevin Feige’s Star Wars Movie Is Really, Really Dead
Black Friday is starting early at Walmart this year. Online deals start today, Nov. 8, and in-store deals kick in Nov. 10 at 6 a.m. local. If you want to take advantage of these deals to pick up a new TV, there are a ton of options during this event. You can scroll through different makes and models, all in different…
Source: LifeHacker – These Are Walmart’s Best Early Black Friday Deals on TVs