Late last week, reports of Verizon’s incredible 5G speeds came in, with phones hitting performance levels you wouldn’t expect from non-fiber broadband. Today, as deeper coverage has become available, it’s become clear just how tenuous those claims are. PCMag’s Sascha Segan has written an on his experience wandering around Chicago testing Verizon base stations. Doing this is anything but easy — it requires a midrange Motorola device, an add-on for said Motorola device to enable 5G, and companion hardware for measuring 4G performance on a standard phone. Because the Moto Mod doesn’t display the 5G logo except when it’s actually transferring data, it can be quite difficult to determine whether you’re actually within 5G range.
We’ve been tracking the monthly updates of the Steam Hardware Survey to create a more detailed window into the GPU replacement cycle than we’ve typically provided in the past. There are a number of interesting trends currently playing out in the GPU market. Nvidia is the midst of an all-hands-on-deck effort to convince gamers that ray tracing is the Next Big Thing and that its Turing GPUs represent a worthwhile investment, even considering their increased costs relative to previous generations. AMD has aggressively positioned its lower-end GPUs to combat Pascal and Turing, with a lot of market buzz around 7nm and its upcoming Navi family.
TSMC has announced the completion of its 5nm design infrastructure, with support for a wide variety of processor development. The company has finished tool development to support both next-generation low-power SoCs and high-performance computing () applications, as well as specialized products intended for the AI market. While TSMC is about the 5nm node as a major step forward for its entire ecosystem, it’s not entirely clear which products will adopt it outside of the mobile markets. The node is targeting a 45 percent area reduction over 7FF but only promises a 15 percent performance improvement at the same power.
Despite having raised over $70 million and launching a unique and interesting drone, Skydio hasn’t been that well known. Until now. The company apparently showcased a “follow-me” video of a rollerblader on the boardwalk at West Thumb Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park. Drones are not actually illegal in every National Park; I’ve flown one in Red Rock Canyon National Park, where it is allowed except in the Wilderness Area and if you don’t disturb people or animals. But drones are most definitely illegal in Yellowstone. In fact, it was a drone crashing into the fragile Grand Prismatic Spring in 2015 that helped solidify the National Park Service’s position on drones in most parks.
Microsoft announced late last year that its Edge browser was being discontinued in favor of a new Edge browser . We’ve seen a few glimpses of the upcoming Edge refresh, but now Microsoft is rolling out the first official builds of Chromium Edge to testers. Why the delay? It had to . Microsoft isn’t interested in Chrome, just its open source bones. Microsoft is taking a Google-like approach to rolling out the new Edge. There will be three release channels: beta, dev, and canary. Google’s Chrome browser has a fourth “stable” channel that Microsoft will probably add when it’s ready to release the final consumer build.
Despite having raised over $70 million and launching a unique and interesting drone, Skydio hasn’t been that well known. Until now. The company apparently showcased a “follow-me” video of a rollerblader on the boardwalk at West Thumb Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park. Drones are not actually illegal in every National Park; I’ve flown one in Red Rock Canyon National Park, where it is allowed except in the Wilderness Area and if you don’t disturb people or animals. But drones are most definitely illegal in Yellowstone. In fact, it was a drone crashing into the fragile Grand Prismatic Spring in 2015 that helped solidify the National Park Service’s position on drones in most parks.
The annual NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) event is traditionally a showcase for new high-end video and audio editing features, and this year is no exception. Adobe has rolled out a host of new features and performance tweaks to its Creative Suite tools — particularly Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator. Not to be left out Cyberlink is also rolling out updates to PhotoDirector and PowerDirector for subscribers to its 365 Suite. For those who still think of video production as a niche market, Adobe projects that there will be nearly 605 billion minutes of video created every week by 2021.
Earth is currently enjoying the best eons of the sun’s life, but that friendly yellow globe in the sky won’t last forever. No matter what we do, the sun will one day destroy the world, leaving a fractured planetary corpse orbiting a dead star. Astronomers have spotted a distant star system that could . It’s a white dwarf star with a destroyed planetary core spinning around it. Stars like our sun have life spans measured in the billions of years. At 4.6 billion years old, the sun is a middle-aged star. It hasn’t changed dramatically in about 4 billion years and will remain in its current state for another 4-5 billion years.
Few objects in the universe hold the same mystique as a . These collapsed stars distort space and time, pulling in anything nearby with unfathomable gravity. Even light cannot escape their pull. That’s why they’re so mysterious — we can’t see black holes, but a project called the Event Horizon Telescope might be on the verge of producing . Researchers have teased a “groundbreaking result” this week. A black hole is what’s left over after a massive star (at least 10 times larger than the sun) exhausts all its fuel and collapses into a gravitational singularity. Smaller stars end up as neutron stars or white dwarfs (the likely fate of our sun).
