“Role-players, boardgamers, writers, coders, artists, graphic designers, teachers, house-cleaners, lucid dreamers, gym-rats, distance runners, commuters” can enjoy over 100 ambient atmospheric loops with names like “Orbital Promenade,” “Lunar Outpost,” “Testing Chamber” and so on. (more…)
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Tabletop Audio: ambient loops for your RPGs
Hard disk specialist Western Digital (WD) acquired SSD maker SanDisk last year for a colossal $19 billion, and now we’re getting some idea as to its strategy. The company unveiled two new lineups — branded under each company’s names — that feature the first SSDs to use 64-layer 3D NAND chips developed by SanDisk. The new, higher capacity chips will allow for “lower power consumption and higher performance, endurance and capacities, ” Western Digital wrote in its press release . The two lines, WD Blue and SanDisk Ultra 3D, are identical capacity-wise, use the same controllers and have identical performance specs — though WD Blue also offers a M.2 2280 device that SanDisk doesn’t. All of the 256GB drives, both in 2.5-inch and M.2 formats, start at a very reasonable $100. They also come in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB sizes, but WD hasn’t listed prices for those items yet. That information will be particularly interesting, since the drives require fewer chips than rival SSDs, which will hopefully drive down the prices. As for the performance, it’s pretty, pretty good. The larger capacity devices can read at 550 MB/s and write 560 MB/s, and the 256GB SSD is just a touch slower (550 MB/s and 525 MB/s). Perhaps more importantly, all products have a mean time to failure (MTTF) of 1.75 million hours. WD says that’s “industry-leading, ” but it falls behind some products, including Samsung’s (more expensive) 850 Pro , which sports a two million hour MTBF. WD gave a pretty good clue as to why it’s offering identical products under different labels. “Between our two strong brands in SanDisk and WD, and their respective loyal customer bases and distribution channels, these advanced SSDs will appeal to a very broad [range of consumers], ” said WD CEO Mike Cordano. In other words, WD has huge stores of goodwill in both brands, and it’s not willing to give that up to save some marketing costs. Source: Western Digital
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WD’s next-gen SSDs add even more speed and capacity
From Tallahassee, Florida’s Lofty Pursuits who offer these “handmade artisinal candies” at $6 for a 2.75oz bag: A new technique for a new effect in our image candies. These Crystal Roses are formed from nothing but hot sugar, and flavors. This is the first in a series of candies using this kind of design.
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How it’s made: hard crystal candies with cherry-flavored roses inside
Ridley Scott pauses his iconic in-camera chestburster scene in several places to show the tricks he used to make it so memorable. (more…)
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Ridley Scott unpacks the original Alien chestburster scene
Determining how to prevent acts of censorship has long been a priority for the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, and thanks to new research from the Harvard Center for Internet and Society, the foundation seems to have found a solution: encryption. From a report: HTTPS prevents governments and others from seeing the specific page users are visiting. For example, a government could tell that a user is browsing Wikipedia, but couldn’t tell that the user is specifically reading the page about Tiananmen Square. Up until 2015, Wikipedia offered its service using both HTTP and HTTPS, which meant that when countries like Pakistan or Iran blocked the certain articles on the HTTP version of Wikipedia, the full version would still be available using HTTPS. But in June 2015, Wikipedia decided to axe HTTP access and only offer access to its site with HTTPS. The Harvard researchers began by deploying an algorithm which detected unusual changes in Wikipedia’s global server traffic for a year beginning in May 2015. This data was then combined with a historical analysis of the daily request histories for some 1.7 million articles in 286 different languages from 2011 to 2016 in order to determine possible censorship events. After a painstakingly long process of manual analysis of potential censorship events, the researchers found that, globally, Wikipedia’s switch to HTTPS had a positive effect on the number censorship events by comparing server traffic from before and after the switch in June of 2015. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Wikipedia’s Switch To HTTPS Has Successfully Fought Government Censorship
Based on NVIDIA’s 2017 Computex announcements, PC gamers won’t have to choose between bulky gaming laptops and desktop-level processing power for much longer. A new design called “Max-Q” is arriving in new laptops that it claims are both 3x thinner and 3x more powerful than their predecessors — think 18mm thick, 5 pounds and with the power of NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 inside. Plus, there’s “WhisperMode, ” which can pace the game’s framerate to keep the laptop cool and quiet during a plugged-in gaming session. When the new laptops roll out beginning June 27th , the top of the line options well outpace current options like Razer’s GTX 1060-powered 4K Blade . There aren’t specific benchmarks listed, but a graph on the official website claims an average 1.8x performance increase over GTX1060 when running “AAA” titles at 4K. During the demo, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed off a 5-lb laptop running Project Cars 2 , saying it was 60 percent faster than the PS4 Pro. NVIDIA says that they’re not only engineered to be thin and light across the “chip, drivers, thermal and electrical components, ” but that its software optimizes settings and the workload across CPU/GPU to regulate power and heat. They aren’t all super powerful however, with models on the way from “Acer, Aftershock, Alienware, ASUS, Clevo, Dream Machine, ECT, Gigabyte, Hasee, HP, LDLC, Lenovo, Machenike, Maingear, Mechrevo, MSI, Multicom, Origin PC, PC Specialist, Sager, Scan, Terrans Force, Tronic’5, and XoticPC, ” they will include GTX 1060, 1070 and 1080 level GPUs inside. Source: NVIDIA Blog , NVIDIA
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NVIDIA ‘Max-Q’ gaming laptops are ultrabooks with GTX 1080 power
Last year at Computex, Intel unveiled its first 10-core consumer CPU , the company’s move into the world of a “megatasking.” It was a pricey chip, launching at around $1, 700, but it satisfied the needs for users who needed to juggle several intensive tasks at once. Now, Intel is upping the ante with a whole new family of processors for enthusiasts, the Core X-series, and it’s spearheaded by its first 18-core CPU, the i9-7980XE. Priced at $1, 999, the 7980XE is clearly not a chip you’d see in an average desktop. Instead, it’s more of a statement from Intel. It beats out AMD’s 16-core Threadripper CPU , which was slated to be that company’s most powerful consumer processor for 2017. And it gives Intel yet another way to satisfy the demands of power-hungry users who might want to do things like play games in 4K while broadcasting them in HD over Twitch. And as if its massive core count wasn’t enough, the i9-7980XE is also the first Intel consumer chip that packs in over a teraflop worth of computing power. If 18 cores is a bit too rich for you, Intel also has other Core i9 Extreme Edition chips in 10, 12, 14 and 16-core variants. Perhaps the best news for hardware geeks: the 10 core i9-7900X will retail for $999, a significant discount from last year’s version. All of the i9 chips feature base clock speeds of 3.3GHz, reaching up to 4.3GHz dual-core speeds with Turbo Boost 2.0 and 4.5GHz with Turbo Boost 3.0. And speaking of Turbo Boost 3.0, its performance has also been improved in the new Extreme Edition chips to increase both single and dual-core speeds. Rounding out the X-Series family are the quad-core i5-7640X and i7 models in 4, 6 and 8-core models. While it might all seem like overkill, Intel says its Core i9 lineup was driven by the surprising demand for last year’s 10-core chip. “Broadwell-E was kind of an experiment, ” an Intel rep said. “It sold… Proving that our enthusiast community will go after the best of the best… Yes we’re adding higher core count, but we’re also introducing lower core counts. Scalability on both ends are what we went after.” As you can imagine, stuffing more cores into a processor leads to some significant heat issues. For that reason, Intel developed its own liquid cooling solution, which will work across these new chips, as well as some previous generations. All of the new Core i9 processors, along with the 6 and 8-core i7 chips, feature scorching hot 140W thermal design points (TDPs), the maximum amount of power that they’ll draw. That’s the same as last year’s 10-core CPU, but it’s still well above the 91W TDP from Intel’s more affordable i7-7700K. Over the past few years, Intel’s laptop chips have been far more interesting than its desktop CPUs. Partially, that’s because the rise of ultraportables and convertible laptops have shifted its focus away from delivering as much computing power as possible, to offering a reasonable amount of processing power efficiently. The new Core i9 X-series processors might not be feasible for most consumers, but for the hardware geeks who treat their rigs like hot rods, they’re a dream come true.
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Intel’s Core i9 Extreme Edition CPU is an 18-core beast
For most people, Zephyrus is the Greek god of the west wind, gently bringing spring, and fruit, to the peoples of the world. For gamers, you can be damn sure that definition is going to be quickly supplanted by the one created by ASUS’ Republic of Gamers today. Now, Zephyrus means a pretty damn powerful gaming laptop in a surprisingly slender body, measuring in at just 16.9mm thick when closed, making it the “world’s slimmest.” By way of comparison, Razer’s latest Blade Pro , a high water mark for such laptops, stands at 22.5mm. It appears that ASUS has been one of the principal beneficiaries of NVIDIA’s Max-Q design program that shrinks high-powered gaming laptops. The initiative was announced earlier today, with NVIDIA promising to help laptop makers build devices with top-end internals like the GTX 1080 without the heft. In fact, NVIDIA’s promise is that the first generation of Max-Q laptops will be three times as fast as their immediate predecessors while being three times as thin. Part of that thinness is down to a new thermal design that, when the laptop is open, opens an exhaust port on the underside. That, the company promises, will ensure that your lap won’t get fried when you’re using this on the go. Since Zephyrus ships with the Windows 10 Creators Update, it will take advantage of both Windows Game Mode and Beam’s streaming service. In addition, the device has a new type of trackpad that sits to the right of the keyboard to make life easier for gamers. That trackpad also, apparently, pulls double duty as a numeric keypad for when you need to type out large numbers. Oh, and you’ll be able to customize the keyboard’s lighting scheme that will even let you single out the WASD and QWER keys for night-time fragging sessions. ASUS ROG also wanted to talk about how its laptops aren’t simply for gamers with large wallets when fans of different genres have different needs. A MOBA gamer, for instance, may not need as fast a display as one who’s seriously into FPS. Which is why the company has unveiled a pair of Strix laptops that are tailored specifically to the needs of those two genres. The ROG Strix SCAR Edition is engineered to give FPS gamers a vital edge, with Intel Core i7 processors, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series and an ultrafast, 120Hz, 5ms display. Meanwhile, the ROG Strix Hero Edition is designed for MOBA fans who are geared towards eSports, packing Intel Core i7 processors, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 Series graphics and a 120Hz wide-view display with rich color fidelity. This breaking news story is developing, please refresh for more information. Click here to catch up on the latest news from Computex 2017!
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ASUS crams a GTX 1080 into a 16.9mm-thick laptop
After several years of planning and no shortage of financial anxiety , construction has officially started on the Extremely Large Telescope. Contractors are now building the main structure and dome of the Chile-based observer ahead of its initial service in 2024. That’s a long time to wait, but this is no mean feat. With a 43-yard aperture, this promises to be the world’s largest optical telescope for sometime, even compared to future or in-limbo projects like the Thirty Meter Telescope . Those gigantic dimensions will help it capture far more light, giving astronomers the chance to spot particularly distant galaxies, find small planets and capture more details of larger planets. The ELT’s full capabilities won’t come until sometime after 2024, when the ESO starts a second construction phase. It could easily be another few years after that before the telescope lives up to its expectations. However, it’s having some positive side effects right now: the start of construction also marks the connection of its home, the Paranal Observatory (where the Very Large Telescope resides) to the Chilean electrical grid. That simple addition promises more reliability, lower costs and a reduced environmental footprint. Don’t be shocked if more modest telescopes like the VLT benefit well before their larger sibling is ready for action. Via: Reuters Source: ESO
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Construction starts on the world’s largest optical telescope
Did you see Sony’s second-generation Digital Paper and realize you found your dream e-reader? If so, you’ll get to do something about it very soon. Sony has announced that its latest 13.3-inch E Ink tablet (the DPT-RP1) will reach the US sometime in June, when it will sell for the previously announced $700. As mentioned in April, it’s really about a lot of incremental improvements: you’re most likely to notice the higher resolution (1, 650 x 2, 200), but the thinner, lighter design and NFC unlocking will also be helpful. The centerpiece remains the ability to read and annotate documents in exceptional detail — this is aimed at pros and students who need to plow through complex documents like research papers. It’s doubtful that you’ll see the new Digital Paper sitting at your local big-box store. You’ll likely have to go straight to the source or find a specialized reseller. We’ve asked Sony if it has plans for mainstream sales and will let you know if it has something to add. The $700 price makes this latest model considerably more accessible than the original Digital Paper , whose $1, 100 cost was eye-watering for just about anyone, including pros. Still, this definitely isn’t an impulse purchase in any field — you could easily get a more conventional tablet that won’t be as easy on the eyes, but should be much more than a one-trick pony. Source: Sony