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NVIDIA proves the cloud can replace a high-end gaming rig

A year ago, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now game-streaming service let me play The Witcher 3 , a notoriously demanding PC-only title, on a MacBook Air. This year, NVIDIA finally unveiled the Windows version of the service, and it was even more impressive. I was able to play Rainbow Six: Siege and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on underpowered PCs that sell for $200 to $300. If NVIDIA’s Mac demo was a revelation, playing high-end PC games on discount hardware felt like a miracle. Now, after testing the GeForce Now beta release on PCs for a week, I’m even more intrigued by the possibilities of game streaming. To put it simply, the service lets you remotely tap into the power of an expensive gaming rig from any computer. It runs on remote servers powered by NVIDIA’s GTX 1080Ti GPUs. While the company isn’t divulging further specifications, you can bet they’re also stuffed with more than enough RAM and CPU horsepower. (NVIDIA claimed they were the equivalent of a $1, 500 gaming PC a year ago.) When you launch GeForce Now, you’re actually watching a video streaming to your PC. But since there’s very little latency between what you’re seeing and your keyboard and mouse inputs, it feels as if the games are running right on your computer. You don’t need a very powerful PC to run the GeForce Now client. At the minimum, NVIDIA recommends using a 3.1GHz Core i3 processor and 4GB RAM, along with either Intel HD 2000, GeForce 600 series or Radeon HD 3000 graphics. Those are all specs you’ll find in PCs four to six years old. But of course, solid internet access is a must. You’ll need speeds of at least 25Mbps, but NVIDIA advises a 50Mbps connection for the best experience. You’ll also have to make sure your computer has a reliable link to your router — which means you’ll either need to use an Ethernet cable or a 5GHz Wi-Fi network. At the moment, GeForce Now on Macs and PCs only lets you play games you already own on Steam, Blizzard’s Battle.net or Ubisoft’s Uplay. Anything you don’t own can be purchased through the streaming platform. That’s a major difference from GeForce Now on NVIDIA’s SHIELD tablet and set-top box , which includes a handful of titles as part of its $7.99 monthly fee as well as games for purchase. Both versions of the service support popular titles like Overwatch, Call of Duty WWII and The Witcher 3 , but you’ll probably have to wait a bit for them to work with lesser-known games. NVIDIA isn’t specifying what it takes to make a game compatible with the service, but I’d wager it has to test them out to make sure nothing breaks in the streaming process. Setting up GeForce Now is as easy as downloading and installing the client and choosing a title to play. Then you just need to provide your login information for whichever service hosts the game. If you’re launching a Steam title, you’ll end up seeing the service’s familiar Windows interface, where you can either buy the game or download it to your library. One big downside with GeForce Now is that you’ll have to install games every time you want to play them, since you’re thrown onto a different server whenever you log in. It’s not a huge problem, though, since the remote machines are plugged into a fat network pipe and offer unlimited storage. PUBG , which weighs in at 12GB, installed in around four minutes, while The Witcher 3 (31.7GB) took over ten minutes. Devindra Hardawar/AOL On the Surface Laptop — a great ultrabook marred only by its weak integrated graphics — running over our office’s WiFi, PUBG felt almost as smooth as it does on my dedicated gaming rig. It ran at a steady 60 frames per second, even though I cranked the graphics settings to “Ultra” and the resolution to 2, 560 by 1, 400. After a few minutes of running around the game’s apocalyptic European town and taking out other players, I almost forgot I was playing something that was running on a server hundreds of miles away. The game’s excellent audio design also survived — I had no trouble pinpointing people sneaking around a house while wearing headphones, and the bomb strikes in “Red Zones” still rattled my skull. Mostly, though, I was surprised that I didn’t feel any lag while I was using the Surface Laptop’s keyboard and a Logitech wireless G903 gaming mouse. Moving the camera around and aiming my weapons felt incredibly responsive, and I was surprised that I was able to outgun some players in some heated shootouts. That lack of latency as even more impressive with Overwatch , an even faster-paced game. Characters like Tracer and Genji, both of whom would be tough to play with any noticeable lag, felt as nimble as they do on my desktop. I didn’t even have trouble landing shots with snipers like Hanzo and Ana. I was simply able to enjoy playing the game as I normally do. And, even more so than PUBG , I was impressed by how well GeForce Now handled Overwatch’s vibrant and colorful graphics. Gorgeous maps like Ilios and Dorado appeared as detailed as ever, and the same goes for the game’s imaginative character models and costumes. GeForce Now easily handled graphically intensive titles like Destiny 2 and The Witcher 3 , which felt even more impressive to play on the Surface Laptop. Both games managed to run at 60 FPS at a 2, 560 by 1, 400 resolution (the service supports up to 2, 560 by 1, 600), with all of their graphics settings turned all the way up. Even though Destiny 2 isn’t exactly a fast-paced shooter, it still benefited from the service’s low latency, which helped me mow down waves of enemies without much trouble. And with the Witcher 3 , I was impressed that its graphically rich world didn’t lose any fidelity while being streamed. Perhaps because these games are particularly demanding, I occasionally experienced connection hiccups while playing them. They only lasted a few seconds, but if I were fighting against tough bosses, they could have easily led to my doom. Those disruptions also made it clear that your experience with GeForce Now will depend largely on your internet connection. I had a mostly trouble-free experience in our office and at home, where I have 100 Mbps cable service. But if you don’t have a steady 25 Mbps connection, Ethernet access or strong wireless reception, you’ll likely see more gameplay-disrupting issues. I wasn’t able to run any games at Starbucks locations around NYC, and based on my terrible experiences with hotel WiFi, I’d wager you’d have trouble using GeForce Now while traveling, too. (The service is only supported in the US and Europe, at the moment.) Devindra Hardawar/AOL The big problem with GeForce Now? We don’t know what the service will look like once it leaves beta. You can request access now , and if you’re lucky enough to get in, you can test the service for free. NVIDIA isn’t giving us a timeframe for an official release, or how much it’ll eventually cost. Based on what we typically see with streaming services, I’d also expect GeForce Now’s smooth performance to take a hit once it’s open to the hordes of frag-happy gamers. For now, though, it’s a glimpse at the true future of gaming — a world where we don’t have to worry if our video cards are fast enough, or if we have enough hard drive space for a massive open world game. Well, as long as you have an internet connection fast enough to handle all of that gaming goodness.

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NVIDIA proves the cloud can replace a high-end gaming rig

How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA

dmoberhaus writes: A 26-year-old Belgian PhD student named Sander Wuytz recently solved a 3-year-old puzzle that had locked the private key to 1 Bitcoin in a strand of synthetic DNA. Motherboard spoke with the student about how they managed to crack the puzzle, just days before it was set to expire. From the report: “As detailed by Nick Goldman, a researcher at the European Bioinformatics Institute, in his pioneering Nature paper on DNA storage, to encode information into DNA you take a text or binary file and rewrite it in base-3 (so rather than just ones and zeroes, there are zeroes, ones, and twos). This is then used to encode the data in the building blocks of life, the four nucleobases cytosine, thymine, adenine and guanine. As Wuyts explained to me, coding the data as nucleobases depended upon which nucleobase came before. So, for instance, if the previous base was adenine and the next pieces of data is a 0, it is coded as cytosine. If the next piece of data is a 1, it’s coded as guanine, and so on. After the data is encoded as synthetic DNA fragments, these fragments are used to identify and read the actual files stored in the DNA. In the case of the Bitcoin challenge, there were a total of nine files contained in the DNA fragments. The files were encrypted with a keystream, which is a random series of characters that is included with the actual plain text message to obfuscate its meaning. The keystream code had been provided by Goldman in a document explaining the competition. After running the code, Wuyts was able to combine the DNA fragments in the correct order to form one long piece of DNA. After working out some technical kinks, Wuyts was able to convert the DNA sequence into plain text, revealing the private key and unlocking the bitcoin (as well as some artefacts, including a drawing of James Joyce and the logo for the European Bioinformatics Institute). He had cracked the puzzle just five days before it was set to expire.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How a PhD Student Unlocked 1 Bitcoin Hidden In DNA

Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Britain’s homes could be lit and powered by wind farms surrounding an artificial island deep out in the North Sea, under advanced plans by a Dutch energy network. The radical proposal envisages an island being built to act as a hub for vast offshore wind farms that would eclipse today’s facilities in scale. Dogger Bank, 125km (78 miles) off the East Yorkshire coast, has been identified as a potentially windy and shallow site. The power hub would send electricity over a long-distance cable to the UK and Netherlands, and possibly later to Belgium, Germany, and Denmark. TenneT, the project’s backer and Dutch equivalent of the UK’s National Grid, recently shared early findings of a study that said its plan could be billions of euros cheaper than conventional wind farms and international power cables. The sci-fi-sounding proposal is sold as an innovative answer to industry’s challenge of continuing to make offshore wind cheaper, as turbines are pushed ever further off the coast to more expensive sites as the best spots closer to land fill up. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Dutch Utility Plans Massive Wind Farm Island In North Sea

Every iPhone X Is Not Created Equal

According to a PC Magazine report that uses data from Cellular Insights, the Qualcomm-powered iPhone X has better LTE performance than the Intel-powered model. From the report: There are three iPhone X models sold globally. Using lab equipment, Cellular Insights tested two of them: the Qualcomm-powered A1865, sold by Sprint, Verizon, and U.S. Cellular and in Australia, China, and India; and the Intel-powered A1901, sold by most other global carriers including AT&T and T-Mobile. (The third model, A1902, is only sold in Japan.) Here in the U.S., we anticipate that the SIM-free model sold directly by Apple will be the A1865, as that’s the model that supports all four U.S. carriers. For this test, Cellular Insights looked at performance on LTE Band 4, which is used by every major U.S. carrier except Sprint, as well as in Canada and parts of Latin America. Cellular Insights attenuated an LTE signal from a strong -85dBm until the modems showed no performance. While both modems started out with 195Mbps of download throughput on a 20MHz carrier, the Qualcomm difference appeared quickly, as the Intel modem dropped to 169Mbps at -87dBm. The Qualcomm modem took an additional -6dBm of attenuation to get to that speed. Most consumers will feel the difference in very weak signal conditions, where every dBm of signal matters, so we zoomed in on that in the chart below. At very weak signal strength, below -120dBm, the Qualcomm modem got speeds on average 67 percent faster than the Intel modem. The Intel modem finally died at -129dBm and the Qualcomm modem died at -130dBm, so we didn’t find a lot of difference in when the modems finally gave out. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Every iPhone X Is Not Created Equal

First Class Travel, 1930s-Style: What Were the Interiors/Floorplan Like Inside the Hindenburg?

In the 1920s, if you wanted to cross the Atlantic you got on a ship. Then Germany set up the world’s first transatlantic air service for passengers, launching the Graf Zeppelin , the world’s largest airship at the time. In 1930 it could fly you all the way from Germany to Brazil. You’d leave Friedrichshafen on Saturday night and arrive in Rio de Janeiro on Thursday morning. By 1936 Germany had produced an even bigger blimp, the Hindenburg , which began shuttling passengers, cargo and mail from Frankfurt to New Jersey and back. The ship could carry 50 (later 72) passengers and had a crew of 40 to 60 people. The trip took about four days in each direction, and make no mistake, it was for rich passengers only; a one-way ticket was $400, which translates to about $7, 050 in 2017 dollars. It’s bizarre seeing the swastika flying over New York City. 1937, folks. So what did you get for your money? First off, the travel time was almost a day faster than going by ship, plus there was no chance you’d get seasick. The lift-off procedure was so gentle that passengers who weren’t paying attention reportedly didn’t realize that they’d left the ground. Once in flight, the voyage was said to be so smooth that you could balance a pencil on a table. Speaking of tables, you ate the kind of luxury chow that “one might find at a traditional, high-end European hotel, ” according to Atlas Obscura , pointing out that the chef on the final Hindenburg voyage was from the Ritz in Paris. NPR lists “Beef Broth with Marrow Dumplings and Rhine Salmon a la Graf Zeppelin” as an example of a typical Hindenburg meal. The tables could alternatively be arranged in banquet style The tables could alternatively be arranged in banquet style If you had a European palate, the food probably tasted delicious. Airplane food sucks because the high altitudes deaden our taste buds. But the Hindenburg flew just 330 to 650 feet off of the ground! The passenger areas were not pressurized (except for a single room, we’ll get to that in a moment) and you could even open the windows. Those windows were on the promenades locating on the port and starboard sides, inbound of which were a lounge and the dining room. The lounge even contained a grand piano, made from aluminum to save weight. The lounge The lounge Downside of being in the lounge: Portrait of Hitler on the wall Although weight was spared wherever possible–you’ll note further down that they’re using ladders perforated with holes–it wasn’t to keep the blimp in the air, it was presumably so that they could haul more cargo. The lifting capacity of the blimp was such that they could even transport cars. The kitchen was downstairs, and all heat sources were electric. Food was shuttled upstairs by a dumbwaiter that led to a pantry off of the dining room. The passenger cabins were pretty tight and utilitarian, featuring two bunks, like in the sleeper compartment of a train. Each room did, however, have its own sink with both hot and cold running water. The toilets and a shower were downstairs, as was the bar. Yes, you could booze on this baby. The bar The bar Beyond the bar was a two-door airlock that led to the single pressurized room. This was, incredibly, a smoking room where you could puff on cigarettes, cigars or pipes–while riding in something that was kept aloft by 5, 000, 000 cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen. The room was pressurized so that hydrogen could not enter it. Even still, the lighters provided were electric, as they didn’t want to risk open flame. The smoking room The smoking room The smoking room The Hindenburg’s operators were experimenting with a very cool feature: They rigged up a trapeze-like aircraft hook-on point. The idea was that as they approached their destination, customs officials would fly out to them, board, and process the passengers in the air, so that the passengers wouldn’t have to wait to do it on the ground. Two experiments with the aircraft hook-up, in March and April of 1937, ran into problems with turbulence. Then, before they had a chance to iron those kinks out, this happened in May: The ship was carrying 36 passengers and 61 crew members; what’s amazing is that 23 passengers and 39 crew members actually survived that. To this day, no one knows precisely what caused the initial explosion. The Hindenburg Disaster, as it came to be known, put an end to the era of blimp passenger flights. But for a short while you could cruise a couple of hundred feet above the Atlantic Ocean at 80 miles per hour, chowing down on marrow dumplings and salmon. See Also: What You Didn’t Know About Dirigibles

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First Class Travel, 1930s-Style: What Were the Interiors/Floorplan Like Inside the Hindenburg?

First Floating Wind Farm Delivers Electricity

The world’s first floating offshore wind farm began delivering electricity to the Scottish grid today. “The 30MW installation, situated 25km (15.5mi) from Peterhead in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, will demonstrate that offshore wind energy can be harvested in deep waters, miles away from land, where installing giant turbines was once impractical or impossible, ” reports Ars Technica. “At peak capacity, the wind farm will produce enough electricity to power 20, 000 Scottish homes.” From the report: The installation, called Hywind Scotland, is also interesting because it was built by Statoil, a Norwegian mega-corporation known for offshore oil drilling. Statoil has pursued offshore wind projects in recent years, using the companyâ(TM)s experience building and managing infrastructure in difficult open sea conditions to its advantage. Hywind Scotland began producing power in September, and today it starts delivering electricity to the Scottish grid. Now, all that’s left is for Statoil and its partner company Masdar to install a 1MWh lithium-ion battery, charmingly called âoeBatwind, â on shore. Batwind will help the offshore system regulate power delivery and optimize output. After a number of small demonstration projects, the five 6MW turbines are the first commercial turbines to lack a firm attachment to the seafloor. They’re held in place using three giant suction anchors, which are commonly used in offshore oil drilling. Essentially, an enormous, empty, upside-down âoebucketâ is placed on the seafloor, and air is sucked out of the bucket, which forces the bucket downward, further into the seafloor sediment. The report mentions a 2013 video that shows how offshore wind farms work. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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First Floating Wind Farm Delivers Electricity

Neanderthals were distilling tar 200 thousand years ago in Europe

Paul Kozowyk Despite many recent discoveries that show Neanderthals were technologically and socially sophisticated, there’s still a popular idea that these heavy-browed, pale-skinned early humans were mentally inferior to modern Homo sapiens . Now we have even more corroboration that they were pretty sharp. A fascinating new study reveals that Neanderthals were distilling tar for tool-making 200 thousand years ago—long before evidence of tar-making among Homo sapiens . And an experimental anthropologist has some good hypotheses for how they did it, too. One of humanity’s earliest technological breakthroughs was learning to distill tar from tree bark. It was key to making compound tools with two or more parts; adhesives could keep a stone blade nicely fitted into a wooden handle for use as a hoe, an axe, or even a spear. Scientists have discovered ancient beads of tar in Italy, Germany, and several other European sites dating back as much as 200 thousand years, which is about 150 thousand years before modern Homo sapiens arrived in Western Europe. That means the people who distilled that tar had to be Neanderthals. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Neanderthals were distilling tar 200 thousand years ago in Europe

The Oldest Known Human Remains In the Americas Have Been Found In a Mexican Cave

schwit1 shares a report from Seeker: An ice-free corridor between the Americas and Asia opened up about 12, 500 years ago, allowing humans to cross over the Bering land bridge to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south. History books have conveyed that information for years to explain how the Americas were supposedly first settled by people, such as those from the Clovis culture. At least one part of the Americas was already occupied by humans before that time, however, says new research on the skeleton of a male youth found in Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Mexico. Dubbed the Young Man of Chan Hol, the remains date to 13, 000 years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4, 000 miles away from the Bering land crossing. For the new study, Gonzalez, Stinnesbeck, and their colleagues dated the Young Man of Chan Hol’s remains by analyzing the bones’ uranium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes, which were also found in stalagmite that had grown through the pelvic bone. The scientists believe that the resulting age of 13, 000 years could apply to at least two other skeletons found in caves around Tulum: a teenage female named Naia and a 25-30-year-old female named Eve of Naharon. Gonzalez said that the shape of the skulls suggests that Eve and the others “have more of an affinity with people from Southeast Asia.” He and his team further speculated that the individuals could have originated in Indonesia. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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The Oldest Known Human Remains In the Americas Have Been Found In a Mexican Cave

A nearby Sun-like star hosts four Earth-sized planets

Exoplanet discoveries are getting pretty common , so it takes something special to catch our attention. A star called Tau Ceti fits the bill, as it’s just 12 light years away and unlike the Trappist-1 red dwarf, is very similar to our own yellow dwarf (G-type) sun. Researchers have determined that it probably hosts planets like Earth that sit in its habitable zone. The only hitch is that the star is known to have a massive debris disk that probably bombards its worlds with asteroids, so living there would be a pretty big challenge. Four rocky worlds were found, with two in the habitable zone, about 0.5 and 1.25 times as far from their star as the Earth is from the Sun. That works out well, as Tau Ceti is a bit smaller (78 percent) than the Sun, and is correspondingly less intense. The smallest of the worlds is about 1.7 times the size of Earth, but the habitable zone planets are much larger “super Earths” that could potentially support life. However, Tau Ceti is known to have a big debris disk that probably produces far more impact events via comets and asteroids than we have on Earth. While that makes life improbable, the discovery is still important because of the techniques used. On smaller stars, planets can be detected by the “transit method, ” observing the dimming of light as planets pass in front. That doesn’t work as well for bigger stars like Tau Ceti though, as the light levels drown out any dimming. The W.M. Keck HIRES-MAGIQ detector Instead, the team observed wobbles in the star’s movement as small as 30 centimeters (one foot) per second. That has only become possible recently by combining multiple observations from different instruments and sophisticated modeling. In this case, the team obtained observations from the HARPS spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory in Chile, and Keck HIRES (above) on the W.M. Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. “We can [now] disentangle the noise due to stellar surface activity from the very tiny signals generated by the gravitational tugs from Earth-sized orbiting planets, ” said UC Santa Cruz Professor and co-author Steven Vogt. “Our detection of such weak wobbles is a milestone in the search for Earth analogs.” Using the new techniques, the same team actually ruled out two planets they previously identified in 2013 as planets. “But no matter how we look at the star, there seem to be at least four rocky planets orbiting it, ” said coauthor Mikko Tuomi. We can disentangle the noise due to stellar surface activity from the very tiny signals generated by the gravitational tugs from Earth-sized orbiting planets. Our detection of such weak wobbles is a milestone in the search for Earth analogs. The team hopes to refine the techniques to find wobbles as small as 10 cm (4 inches) per second, small enough to detect Earth-sized planets. That could be crucial, because while its easier to spot exoplanets around dim red dwarf stars like Trappist-1 using the transit method, astronomers are beginning to wonder if such stars can actually support life. Planets tend to get tidally locked to red dwarf stars early in their life because their years are so short — often a week or less. As a result, much like our moon is to the Earth, one side is constantly exposed to radiation and the other is in the dark. “Because of the onslaught by the star’s radiation, our results suggest the atmosphere on planets in the Trappist-1 system would largely be destroyed, ” said researcher Avi Loeb . That makes the likelihood of life just one percent compared to Earth. Since life has enough challenges already, it’s probably got a much better shot on a planet around a type-G, main sequence star. We know for a fact that those can support life, as here we are. Via: CNET Source: UC Santa Cruz

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A nearby Sun-like star hosts four Earth-sized planets

Germany Sets New National Record With 85 Percent of Its Electricity Sourced From Renewables

Germany was able to set a new national record for the last weekend of April with 85 percent of all electricity consumed in the country being produced from renewables — wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power. Digital Trends reports: Aided by a seasonal combination of windy but sunny weather, during that weekend the majority of Germany’s coal-fired power stations weren’t even operating, while nuclear power stations (which the country plans to phase out by the year 2022) were massively reduced in output. To be clear, this is impressive even by Germany’s progressive standards. By comparison, in March just over 40 percent of all electricity consumed in the country came from renewable sources. However, while the end-of-April weekend was an aberration, the hope is that it won’t be for too much longer. According to Patrick Graichen of the country’s sustainability-focused Agora Energiewende Initiative, German renewable energy percentages in the mid-80s should be “completely normal” by the year 2030. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Germany Sets New National Record With 85 Percent of Its Electricity Sourced From Renewables