Less than two months ago, Tesla announced it would accept Bitcoins as payment for vehicles in lieu of cash. Now, the company has halted those plans, citing fears that continuing with them could cause environmental damage. Here’s the statement from CEO Elon Musk. The embed may be a bit clipped below for some reason; the tweet begins: “Tesla has suspended vehicle purchases using Bitcoin.” It then continues with “We are concerned,” as below: Tesla & Bitcoin — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) All cryptocurrency mining is inefficient to one degree or another, but Bitcoin’s transaction costs, in terms of electricity, are staggeringly inefficient.
HTC has announced the details on its new Vive Pro 2, a headset that seems destined to improve everything about your virtual reality experience with their hardware except the price you pay for it. The new Vive Pro 2 will offer a 5K resolution, with 2448×2448 pixels per eye (4896×2448 combined). I’m not sure how 2448×2448 winds up being called 5K, especially since it’s actually 6MP. But it’s a substantial upgrade in resolution over the original Vive and the later Vive Pro. The FOV on the new Vive Pro 2 is supposed to be larger (120 degrees, up from 110) and the panel supports up to 120Hz refresh rates, instead of the 90Hz found on the Vive and Vive Pro.
NASA has been working on the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) for the better part of two decades, and it’s almost ready for launch. When operating in space, the JWST will be the most powerful telescope ever built, but it’ll all be for naught if the giant segmented mirror cannot deploy correctly. NASA has . The next time it deploys, the JWST will be hanging in the inky blackness of space. The Webb telescope is the long-awaited follow-up to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, which saw its final service mission in 2009 just before the end of the Shuttle program.
The NAND manufacturer Phison has warned that SSD prices are likely to rise in the near future, thanks to the newly-launched, storage-focused cryptocurrency, Chia. The good news is that the impact isn’t expected to be huge — at least not yet. Phison reported Q1 2021 profits of $60.6 million, setting a record for the best first quarter ever, DigiTimes . The company expects Q2 to be an equally strong quarter — silicon manufacturers are doing very well right now — but believes NAND quotes could rise by 10 percent in Q3 as Chia has more of an impact on storage sales.
Some interesting AMD market share data has emerged over the past few days. A new report indicated AMD lost an additional point of the x86 market for laptops and desktops in Q1 2021. This is the second time AMD has lost market share relative to Intel. AMD doesn’t appear to have a demand problem; the company is selling every chip it can make. The problem is that TSMC can’t keep enough chips in-market to feed demand. This allowed Intel to claw back a point of market share, raising it to 79.3 percent. AMD’s market share has increased 5.9 percentage points since Q2 2020.
Keeping your data and files secure is more important than ever. And with the proliferation of digital documents and internet connectivity, finding the best way to digitally store your information and files is of even more significance. While keeping files online exposes information to data theft and hacking, it’s an unavoidable fact of life that we’re living our lives increasingly online, and digital storage is of paramount concern. So what services can be used to securely store data digitally? Right now, a is just $19.99, a significant discount of 79 percent off the full purchase price of $99. Store your data online securely and with minimal cost with a subscription to the cloud storage service.
AMD’s Ryzen 6000 APU products will reportedly feature RDNA2-derived GPUs with up to 12 compute units (CUs) per CPU. These new cores would offer a substantial improvement in performance per cycle and feature up to 768 cores. This rumor comes from @ExecutableFix, who has stated on other tweets that he expects AMD’s Rembrandt to be a 6nm Zen 3+ core built at TSMC. The laptop variant of the CPU would offer an x8 PCIe 4.0 connection for dGPU performance, which is equivalent to x16 PCIe 3.0. Rembrandt is RDNA 2 based with a maximum of 12 CUs ?
Apple’s MacBook Air laptops equipped with the company’s revolutionary M1 chip offer excellent performance for a wide range of tasks, and you can get one now with an $100 discount. M1 Chip 13.3-Inch Laptop w/ 8GB RAM and 256GB SSD for $899.00 from Amazon (List price $999.00) Intel Core i7-1165G7 14.5-Inch 2K Laptop w/ Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 8GB LPDDR4x RAM and 512GB NVMe SSD for $679.99 from Dell with promo code 50OFF699 (List price $1,049.99) 32-Inch 4K FreeSync Monitor for $279.99 from Newegg (List price $379.99) + Blink Mini Indoor Security Camera for $59.99 from Amazon (List price $124.98) Intel Core i5-1135G7 1080p 15.6-Inch Laptop w/ Intel Iris Xe Graphics, 8GB DDR4 RAM and 256GB NVMe SSD for $669.00 from Dell (List price $1,141.43) 12.9-Inch Tablet 2020 Version for $899.00 from Amazon (List price $1,099.00)
Apple has made a lot of noise about its commitment to privacy, hoping to draw a distinction between it and Google, which thrives on your data. The new Apple AirTag is not the first smart tracker, but it’s so good at what it does that it . This is an even greater concern now that a security researcher has shown that it’s possible to “jailbreak” an AirTag and change how the firmware works. The AirTag is a low-power item tracker akin to a Tile or Chipolo. The idea is you attach an AirTag to something important, and you can find its approximate location from your phone.
