OpenAI’s extremely popular ChatGPT service is currently down and non-functional for its 100 million weekly active users. The service went down just before 9AM ET, so it’s been well over an hour. OpenAI has acknowledged the outage and said that it’s also impacting the company’s API services.
Instead of a working platform, ChatGPT users are greeted with a warning message that says it’s “at capacity right now.” OpenAI writes in an error report that it has “identified an issue resulting in high error rates across the API and ChatGPT, and we are working on remediation.” The company hasn’t given a time frame for this remediation.
The services were also impacted for a few hours last night, but this was just a partial outage that didn’t impact all users. OpenAI’s chatbot platform has had very few, if any, operational issues until last night. The service has grown at a steady clip, reaching that aforementioned 100 million weekly user milestone without any hiccups. Also, there are over 2 million developers on the API side of things.
OpenAI has been making announcements left and right, teasing customizable AI bots that anyone can create and even considering making its own chips to power the service. We’ll update this post when we hear more about the outage.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/chatgpt-is-down-after-a-major-openai-outage-154223315.html?src=rss
Google sent a letter to European regulators asking them to free up Apple’s iMessage for all platforms, according to a report from the Financial Times Wednesday. The EU Commission said Apple is gatekeeping iMessage in September, and Google’s letter unnecessarily chimes in to say “we agree.”
It’s rare, but now and then a company will go out on a limb and create a truly cutting-edge device, even if its books take a hit. That’s exactly what HP has done with the Spectre Fold. Despite having the same processor as last year’s ASUS Zenbook 17 OLED, HP’s take on a flexible-screen laptop is thinner, lighter and more polished than anything that’s come before it. The Spectre Fold represents a true leap when it comes to next-gen hybrid design to the point where you might even want to buy one. The issue is that at $5,000, this thing will blow up pretty much anyone’s budget.
Display
The centerpiece of the Spectre Fold is its 17-inch 2,560 x 1,920 OLED panel from LG, which features plenty of brightness (400 nits for SDR content or up to 500 nits with HDR) and an impressive color gamut (99.5 percent of DCI-P3). More importantly, it’s got thin bezels and only the faintest hint of a crease. This means in laptop mode, the Spectre Fold looks almost like any other small ultraportable, with what is effectively a 12.5-inch screen. But at a moment’s notice, you can pull its keyboard down to create what HP calls Expanded mode (which gives you the equivalent of one and a half screens) or prop the system up on its kickstand to use its full 17-inch panel. So depending on your needs, you get the perfect-sized display for your content or working space. And as a kid who grew up watching Transformers, there’s something magical about a portable all-in-one that you can pack up and easily toss in a bag. (I still haven’t decided if the Spectre Fold is more like Perceptor or closer to a bot like Reflector though.)
Design
However, where HP really flexes its skills is with the Spectre Fold’s design. Unlike the Zenbook 17 Fold which had a clunky design and flaky peripherals, it feels like HP has accounted for every detail. There’s a kickstand that folds flush against the body of the system, so it disappears when not in use. And its keyboard fits neatly inside the system when closed, while hidden magnetic charging coils keep both the keyboard and HP’s included stylus topped up so they’re always ready to go. The whole kit weighs just 3.58 pounds and measures 0.84 inches thick (when closed), which is significantly thinner and lighter than ASUS’ flexible Zenbook (4.04 pounds, 1.25 inches).
Also, unlike the ASUS, there was virtually no setup involved. The keyboard automatically paired itself during the Spectre Fold’s initial boot and its Bluetooth connection was rock solid. And while the Spectre’s two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 might seem awkwardly placed at first, having them on opposite sides of the device means there’s always at least one within reach regardless of what mode the system is in. To ensure the Spectre Fold is never short on connectivity, there’s an included dongle that adds two more USB-A ports and an HDMI jack. The result is a device that feels surprisingly polished, especially when you consider that this class of laptop has only existed for just a few years.
Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
The one awkward thing about the Spectre Fold is that, while it has a sharp 5-MP webcam with support for Windows Hello, the orientation of the camera itself can be an issue depending on what mode the laptop is in. When set up as an all-in-one, the webcam is in portrait mode instead of landscape. And when you combine that with a sensor that’s located on the left bezel of its display, it can be difficult to frame yourself properly while keeping the laptop centered.
Performance
The Spectre Fold’s processor is the one part of its spec sheet that doesn’t feel quite as sophisticated. There’s only a single configuration that features an Intel Core i7-1250U chip along with 16GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This isn’t very impressive for a system this pricey, though HP says it chose that chip to ensure it would fit inside the Spectre Fold’s super thin chassis (just 0.33 inches unfolded). Regardless, for general productivity, this thing is speedy enough. Just don’t expect to do any sort of serious gaming or video editing.
Battery Life
Typically on gadgets like this that are basically glorified concept devices, battery life is an afterthought. But the Spectre Fold defies those expectations with longevity that’s on par with more-traditional ultraportables. On PCMark10’s Open Office rundown test, it lasted 10 hours and 29 minutes, which is just 10 minutes shorter than the ASUS Zenbook S13’s time of 10:39. Though that was in laptop mode. With its 17-inch panel fully unfolded, battery life dropped by two hours to 8:31.
Wrap-up
A lot of people remain skeptical about gadgets with flexible displays (for good reason, I might add), but the $5,000 Spectre Fold is the best example yet of what this tech can offer. It’s a sleek machine that fits in tight spaces but also expands when you have more room to work. And when you need to pack up and go, it tucks away neatly in a bag. It gives you all the benefits of carrying around a portable monitor but with practically none of the drawbacks, while also addressing nearly every shortcoming from previous bendy attempts by Lenovo and ASUS.
Photo by Sam Rutherford/Engadget
However, putting a concrete score on something like this feels like it would be missing the point. Sure, it’s insanely expensive, but HP’s goal wasn’t to make something with mass appeal. The mission was to take the most advanced components and design principles available today to showcase the true potential of next-gen hybrid devices. And to that end, I think this device is a success. With the Spectre Fold, HP has made the first flexible-screen laptop you might want to buy. But now comes the hard part: making one that people can actually afford.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/hp-spectre-fold-review-cutting-edge-at-all-costs-specs-price-153025668.html?src=rss
If you’re not on TikTok, you might be surprised at how the smallest game-related thing can grow into a massive, ubiquitous trend that transcends even its own community. That’s what’s happening with Genshin Impact right now, as a line delivery from Neuvillette, one of the playable characters in miHoYo’s RPG, has blown…
Christmas movies have been a tradition for decades, but the days when we had to watch George Bailey try to jump off of a bridge year after year are well past us. Holiday movies are an industry in and of themselves, with dozens, if not hundreds of new seasonal offerings released starting around June. Most of them are…
Enlarge/ SpaceX’s second Starship rocket stands a few feet taller than the first iteration of the full-size vehicle. (credit: SpaceX)
SpaceX will have answers to some burning questions in the first three minutes of the next Starship test flight. Did the upgrades to the Starship launch pad in Texas hold up to the rocket’s powerful thrust? Are the rocket’s Raptor engines more reliable than they were on the first Starship test flight in April? And did the rocket’s Super Heavy booster safely separate from the Starship upper stage?
The answers to these questions will show how quickly SpaceX can move forward with everything else it wants to do with Starship. These next steps include launching Starlink Internet satellites, which will expedite the network’s ability to directly connect with consumer cell phones. SpaceX needs to test in-orbit refueling for Starship flights to the Moon for NASA, and engineers want to demonstrate recovering Starship’s giant booster and upper stage, necessary steps to make the rocket fully reusable.
But first, the rocket needs to make it into space. That didn’t happen during Starship’s first full-scale test flight on April 20, but SpaceX learned a lot from that mission. Engineers learned they needed to beef up the launch mount, which took a beating from the Super Heavy booster as it generated more than 15 million pounds of thrust from its methane-fueled Raptor engines.
LG is expanding its growing gaming monitor portfolio with a couple of large additions, including the UltraGear GR75DC and UltraGear GR65DC. Other than the model numbers and a $100 price difference, the distinguishing trait between these two curved behemoths is USB-C connectivity—the GR75DC boasts a USB-C port while the GR65DC sheds the connector
iMessage serves as “an important gateway between business users and their customers” and should be regulated as a “core” service under the EU’s new Digital Markets Act (DMA), said Google and a group of major European telcos in a letter sent to the European Commission. From a report: Being designated as a “core platform service” would be significant for iMessage, as it could compel Apple to make it interoperable with other messaging services. The letter arrives as the European Commission investigates whether iMessage meets the requirements to be regulated under the bloc’s strict DMA rules. Google has been very vocal about its desire for Apple to adopt RCS, the cross-platform messaging standard pitched as the successor to SMS, with its #GetTheMessage campaign. “Apple’s iMessage lock-in is a documented strategy,” Google senior vice-president Hiroshi Lockheimer posted on X, then known as Twitter, last year. “Using peer pressure and bullying as a way to sell products is disingenuous for a company that has humanity and equity as a core part of its marketing. The standards exist today to fix this.”
Enlarge (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The top US consumer finance regulator is seeking new powers to oversee technology companies that offer digital wallets and payment applications, in a move that would intensify scrutiny over companies such as Google and Apple.
The proposal issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday would subject non-bank companies that offer digital payments to a regulatory scheme similar to that for banks or credit unions.
It aims to ensure that US consumer protection laws are applied to a ballooning sector used by millions of consumers to transfer funds and make retail payment transactions.
GIMP 2.10.36 is here more than eight months after GIMP 2.10.34 and brings support for Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE) and Adobe Color Book (ACB) palettes, as well as a new gradient option called “FG to Transparent (Hardedge)” that generates a gradient from the foreground color to transparency with hard-edge transitions between the two colors.
Hidden deep in Seagate’s financial report released late last month was a brief roadmap update for the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. As noted in the latest update, Seagate is now planning to begin mass production of its 32 TB HAMR in early 2024, which is a slight delay from what the company announced early this year. Meanwhile, the company expects to start production of 40+ TB HDDs in about two years’ time.
“Qualification and revenue ramp plans for our 30-plus terabyte products remain fully on track with high-volume ramp starting early in calendar 2024,” said Dave Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, during conference call with financial analysts and investors. ” These drives deliver capacity starting at 30 terabytes and offer customers the same flexibility to adopt either CMR or SMR configurations to further boost aerial density into the mid-30TB range.”
As noted back in October, Seagate’s Exos X24 series of HDDs will help set the stage for HAMR-based hard drives, as the latter will keep using the same 10-platter platform – albeit with new platters as well as write heads with lasers to heat the media surface. Those Exos drives will use 10 2.4 TB perpendicular magnetic recording disks and will begin shipments in the first half of calendar 2024. Around the same time — in early calendar 2024 — Seagate plans to start volume ramp of 32 TB HAMR HDDs.
Even with the volume ramp and enviable capacity, Seagate is only expecting to sell a modest number of HAMR HDDs in the first quarters of their availability. The company believes that it can move around one million units in the first half of 2024, though the firm does not disclose whether the number is limited by its ability to produce the drives, or by demand from customers who need to qualify such products before deploying them in their datacenters.
“We will start our HAMR revenue fairly strongly in the first six months of the calendar 2024,” said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate. “We think we have about a million unit as opportunity to be sold.”
Another interesting disclosure found in the document is that Seagate intends to start producing HAMR-based HDDs featuring 4+TB platters within the next two years, which would have them arriving sometime in late 2025 or early 2026. This is somewhat is behind the company’s optimistic schedule revealed a few years back, which anticipated 50+TB HDDs in calendar 2026. Though it’s arguably a more realistic schedule that’s in line with the development cadence thus far, especially given how development and deployment of hard drive proceeds these days.
Another noteworthy thing is that Seagate’s brief roadmap update does not mention HDDs with more than 10 platters. Meaning that the company seems to be done adding platters to gain additional capacity, at least for now. Perhaps, the company believes that increased areal density that is enabled by HAMR will enable it to offer competitive capacities and it does not need to throw in any additional disks. Or maybe installing over 10 HAMR platters is risky from yields point of view as of now, so the company prefers not to mention such a technological option.
Millie Bobby Brown will sleuth again in Enola Holmes 3. Hear Alan Tudyk sing about farts in a new clip from Disney’s Wish. Plus, more looks at the return of The Santa Clause. Spoilers get!
For years and years, video games—especially shooters—have gotten faster and faster. RoboCop: Rogue City, out now on Xbox, PlayStation, and PC (see on Amazon), bucks this trend and puts you in the clunky, lumbering metal boots of RoboCop himself. But the real surprise isn’t how much fun it is to be a slow-walking tank,…
Porchetta is perfect. Crackling crisp skin, self-basting pork roast and a magical mélange of fennel, pepper and lemon. It’s no surprise that at some point, someone thought to try and turn turkey (one of Mother Earth’s slights if there ever was one), into this heavenly treasure. But I was perplexed: Reasonable people…
The developers of Home Assistant, which has recently been covered here, have announced
that they will be removing support for Chamberlain and Liftmaster
garage-door openers after being locked out by the company.
Because we cannot continue to work around Chamberlain Group if they
keep blocking access to third parties, the MyQ integration will be
removed from Home Assistant in the upcoming 2023.12 release on
December 6, 2023. We are very disappointed that it has come to this
and sincerely hope that Chamberlain Group is willing to reconsider
its position.
Longtime readers may remember that Chamberlain tried to use the DMCA to block the use of
third-party remotes nearly 20 years ago.
Samsung aims to take a stab directly at the heart of Google’s big AI ambitions with its upcoming phones. The next range of Samsung mobile devices coming next year will be bursting at the seams with generative AI, including a new assistant chatbot.
On Halloween Eve, Apple’s Scary Fast online event ushered in the era of the company’s third-generation Arm64 processors, dubbed the M3 family. The company did hit a number of landmarks with its custom-built Mac processors, including using 3nm lithography, adding real-time ray tracing hardware to its GPU architecture, and hardware graphics
An anonymous reader shares a report: As dawn breaks over Silicon Valley, the world is getting its first look at Pathfinder 1, a prototype electric airship that its maker LTA Research hopes will kickstart a new era in climate-friendly air travel, and accelerate the humanitarian work of its funder, Google co-founder Sergey Brin. The airship — its snow-white steampunk profile visible from the busy 101 highway — has taken drone technology such as fly-by-wire controls, electric motors and lidar sensing, and supersized them to something longer than three Boeing 737s, potentially able to carry tons of cargo over many hundreds of miles.
“It’s been 10 years of blood, sweat and tears,” LTA CEO Alan Weston told TechCrunch on the eve of the unveiling. “Now we must show that this can reliably fly in real-world conditions. And we’re going to do that.” A series of increasingly ambitious flight tests lie ahead, before Pathfinder 1 is moved to Akron, Ohio, where LTA Research is planning an even larger airship, the Pathfinder 3. The company eventually hopes to produce a family of airships to provide disaster relief where roads and airports are damaged, as well as zero-carbon passenger transportation.
For the next year however, the gigantic airship looks set to become a Silicon Valley landmark as its novel materials and systems are methodically put through their paces within shouting distance of companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon. “I’m excited about the potential of not building just one airship, but laying the foundation for many airships to be built,” said Weston. “The innovations and the technologies that we’re about to demonstrate have the potential to lay the foundation for a new industry.”
The Register attended
a talk about Ubuntu’s upcoming Core Desktop immutable distribution.
We suspect that Core Desktop might yet be the tool that validates
Canonical’s Snap format and helps to overcome some of the
resistance it faces. Snap’s single-file distribution format is
simple and enables transactional installation – including,
critically, rollback – without a fancy filesystem underneath, or
elaborate distribution methods such as libostree.
Google gets a lot of traffic around the holidays, and for good reason: We use the search engine to find deals across hundreds of stores and brands, a much more efficient strategy than individually going store to store. Now, when you search for things like “shop deals,” or “shop sneaker deals,” Google will return a…
