Looking for a nice mobile machine that won’t stretch your wallet to its breaking point? Right now, you can pick up a six-core MSI GV62 gaming laptop for $699, a 9.7-inch 32GB iPad for $250, and a 7.9-inch 128GB iPad Mini 4 for $250. Check out even more Green Monday deals below courtesy of our partners at … Featured Deals $100 Price Drop: Intel Core i5-8300H Quad-Core 15.6-inch 1920×1080 Gaming Laptop with 3GB GTX 1060, 256GB SSD, Fortnite Bundle for $699 at Walmart (List price: $1099.99). $20 Price Drop: 9.7-inch Retina Wi-Fi Tablet (2018 Model) for $249.99 at Amazon (List price: $329).
Google had to face reality earlier this year when it announced that its Google+ social network for consumers. It said usage of G+ had fallen to basically zero, and a security review had found a nasty API bug. Now, Google has accelerated plans to close the site down after discovering another critical vulnerability. In October, Google explained that G+ had failed to gain momentum, which you’d have no trouble seeing for yourself if you used the site. It’s probably better that no one was using it because Google also uncovered an API bug that could have allowed a third-party to scrape user data.
The team at the Yogcast put together a fundraising event every year, and by partnering with Humble Bundle and gamedevs, the Yogscast Jingle Jam has become a top-notch way to pick up games while helping charity. As long as you pay a threshold amount, you’ll end up with over $800 worth of Steam games with every dollar going to non-profits. • Of course, charitable organizations will appreciate any amount you can give. However, if you drop $5, you’ll unlock some Black Ops 4 salutes and a text shout-out on a Yogcast stream. Spend at least $5Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 C.O.D.E.
The BepiColombo Mercury probe is a joint mission between the European Space Agency (ESA) and Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA). The probe is intended to study Mercury’s magnetic field, magnetosphere, interior, and surface structures. It consists of two vehicles — the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the Mercury Magnetosphere Orbiter (MMO). No word yet on how many simultaneous logins the MMO will support, or whether it will support PvP. Repeated complaints to the ESA about this missing information have resulted in our emails being blocked. (This did not actually happen -Ed). It also packs the most powerful set of ion engines we’ve ever built into a spacecraft.
In the wake of Intel’s 10nm delay(s), it makes sense to wonder what this means for the company’s 7nm node. We’ve seen reports that Intel has canceled its 10nm node altogether, with strong pushback from the company on those rumors. At the same time, it’s true that there’s typically a progression to these things, with new nodes only arriving a few years after each other. At the 39th Nasdaq Investors Conference, Murthy Renduchintala, Intel’s CEO and group president, spoke and shared details both on what went wrong with 10nm and the company’s roadmap to 7nm. According to Renduchintala, the problems with 10nm are directly related to the fact that Intel chose not to introduce EUV at that node, but instead pushed for an incredibly aggressive 2.7x scaling factor.
At this point, Facebook’s fundamentally bankrupt behavior isn’t a contested point — just an established fact. That viewpoint, cynical as it may sound, was fundamentally confirmed by the release of 250 pages worth of emails from the UK Parliament, which collectively demonstrate that yes, the company engages in the bad behavior we’ve suspected that it does. Specifically, that FB used preferential whitelists to determine which companies would receive access to data and which would not, that it made these arrangements based on how much value the developer brought to the relationship, that it collected data on who Android users were calling even though it knew that Android users would not respond well to this if it should ever become public, and that it used its VPN service, Onavo, to gather information on which applications Facebook users were using on mobile devices, with an overall goal of determining which services it should attempt to acquire to prevent any companies from becoming a threat to Facebook’s dominance.
RISC-V hasn’t been a huge topic for us at ExtremeTech, but the fully open-source CPU instruction set architecture (ISA) has been building momentum in the industry over the past few years as more companies have signed on to build RISC V-compatible processors. While it’s not the first open-source ISA, RISC-V is designed to be used in a wider range of devices than some of the previous work in this space. Now, Western Digital has announced that it intends to build its own RISC-V processor, in what could be a major breakthrough moment for the ISA as a whole. RISC-V has been under development for years and is intended to be a practical ISA for CPU development rather than strictly an academic exercise.
We often hear about the dust storms and wind on Mars, but it’s hard to visualize conditions on the ground when the planet’s only inhabitants are robots. Today, the Curiosity rover has provided a of how the wind blows on the red planet. The record consists of two images of a penny, one before the windy season and one after. You probably didn’t know there was a penny on Mars, but NASA didn’t send Curiosity out into the solar system without a little walking around (or rolling around) money. The penny was minted in 1909, the first year the coin depicted president Abraham Lincoln.
The 2018 LA Auto Show is so broad, expansive, and exciting, it was no problem picking a dozen . Now, here are our favorite different cars — weird cars, to put a finer point on it — from LA 2018. These are the vehicles with oddly creased surface detailing, massive grilles, or wrongly sized rims for the vehicles riding on them. Weird doesn’t always mean bad. There’s a Mitsubishi with unusual character lines, a lot of them, and it’s an important and probably successful car. On the other hand, when you take a Ford F-350 chassis and turn into a $2.5 million rolling pleasure palace and game-station (main photo), it’s more than just “unusual.
