Valve has announced its Steam Deck, a gaming handheld device shipping in December. The device is intended as a Switch-style competitor and would draw attention in this context no matter what. Various companies have attempted to launch a console-style PC — Steam Machines were an arguable attempt to fit into this category, along with various vaporware systems of the past like the Phantom — but no top-tier gaming company or major OEM has built this kind of handheld before. The Steam Deck at $399 for a 64GB option, with a 256GB system available for $529 and a 512GB system for $649.
Today you can take home one of Dell’s Vostro 15 5502 laptops with an Intel Core i5 processor and a remarkable discount that drops its price by nearly half. Intel Core i5-1135G7 1080p 15.6-Inch Laptop w/ Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe SSD for $649.00 from Dell (List price $1,170.00) 240Hz 1080p 24.5-Inch Gaming Monitor for $269.99 from Dell (List price $509.99) Intel Core i5-10400 Desktop w/ Intel UHD Graphics 630, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe SSD for $549.00 from Dell (List price $998.57) 43-inch 4K UHD HDR Fire TV Edition Smart TV for $239.99 from Amazon (List price $319.99) Chip 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for $1,099.99 from Amazon (List price $1,299.00) 27-Inch 4K IPS Monitor for $299.99 from Dell (List price $489.99)
Data science is an increasingly important career path to many industries, and data scientists are in demand. Making sense of the masses of data available – whether it’s product performance, market reports, database administration, or commercial data – helps companies to improve what they do, raise profits, and react more quickly, efficiently, and effectively to market changes. Managing and processing the data available to a business is an invaluable role, and data scientists frequently make use of tools such as structured query language (SQL) to manage the huge amounts of data available. Any data analyst or software engineer would do well to master and review their knowledge of such tools in order to remain on the front foot in the industry.
ExtremeTech is hiring freelance writers, each for five stories per week. You would find, write, and produce these posts yourself, so experience writing tech news and working in a CMS is a must. You enjoy writing, love to research, have a passion for technology, and are committed to a deeper understanding of what’s happening in the world around you — as well as what’s on the horizon. You have strong news judgment and technical chops, and can not only identify the most important stories of the day but provide some level of context or analysis. We don’t “re-news” on ExtremeTech; every one of our stories adds something to the conversation.
The billionaire space race is over, and the winner is founder Richard Branson. The flamboyant 70-year-old billionaire boarded one of his SpaceShipTwo-class vessels on Sunday, July 11th at Spaceport America in New Mexico. With the help of a carrier aircraft, the VSS Unity , giving Branson and his fellow passengers a few precious minutes of weightlessness before their safe return to Earth. This marked the first fully crewed flight for Virgin. In some ways, this is just another rich person doing something almost no one else can afford to do. Tickets on Virgin Galactic flights are going to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that’s still a big discount compared with what it used to cost to get into space as a tourist.
Gaming is at an all time high in terms of popularity right now with gaming hardware becoming increasingly hard to find. Today for just $1,499 you can buy one of Dell’s new Alienware M15 R4 that has all the hardware you need to run games with blistering speed and with high quality graphics settings. Intel Core i7-10870H 15.6-Inch 1080p 144Hz Gaming Laptop w/ Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 512GB M.2 PCI-E SSD for $1,499.99 from Dell (List price $1,849.99) AMD Ryzen 5 4500U 14-Inch 1080p 2-in-1 Touchscreen Laptop w/ AMD Radeon Graphics, 16GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB SSD for $600.48 from Amazon (List price $649.99) Fitness and Activity Tracker for $98.95 from Amazon (List price $149.95) 1536×1536 Wired for $114.77 from Amazon (List price $149.99) 40mm GPS Smartwatch for $319.00 from Amazon (List price $399.00) 27-Inch 1080p 144Hz VA Curved Gaming Monitor for $229.99 from Dell (List price $299.99)
Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop doing if we wanted. We can’t just decide not to get wiped out by an asteroid. Stopping a big space rock from colliding with Earth would be a tall order with our current level of technology, but scientists now believe if an asteroid has Earth in its sights. Ideally, astronomers would see an asteroid collision coming many years in advance, giving us time to develop a strategy for deflecting it.
When the storage-based cryptocurrency Chia came out, hard drive prices shot up as a surge of demand took scarce product away from store shelves. SSDs turned out to be pretty minimally impacted — Chia plotting eats consumer drives like candy — but large-capacity HDD prices were definitely affected. The bulk storage provider and backup company Backblaze has published its own evaluation of whether the company could make money mining Chia. We’ve seen companies take advantage of unique positioning to earn a lot more money via cryptocurrency than you’d typically expect. The Greenridge Power Plant near Seneca Lake, NY is currently using 87 percent of its power-generating capacity to mine cryptocurrency and making a great deal of money in the process.
Some days, it feels like humanity is doing everything it can to hasten the end of the world, from creating weapons that can turn Earth into a nuclear hellscape to pumping formerly sequestered carbon into the atmosphere at ever-increasing rates. Still, these are things we as a species could stop doing if we wanted. We can’t just decide not to get wiped out by an asteroid. Stopping a big space rock from colliding with Earth would be a tall order with our current level of technology, but scientists now believe if an asteroid has Earth in its sights. Ideally, astronomers would see an asteroid collision coming many years in advance, giving us time to develop a strategy for deflecting it.
