Last week, news broke that Apple’s most recent MacBook Pro refreshes with top-end Intel Core i7 and Core i9 microprocessors have . These issues are not unique to Apple — and we said as much as in our initial coverage — but Apple’s Core i9 implementation appears particularly egregious. Based on test reports, the CPU often fails to maintain its base clock under load, dropping to 2.2GHz — well below the 2.9GHz minimum speed promised by Intel and by Apple’s own sales pages. Once upon a time, a CPU’s clock speed was a static number that reflected the operating speed of the CPU at all times (unless you deactivated Turbo Mode to drop back to 4.77MHz — but that’s a story for another day and only relevant to a much earlier class of CPUs).
On the surface, Blue Origin and SpaceX have several things in common. They were both founded by technology billionaires, and they both develop reusable rocket technology. However, while Elon Musk’s SpaceX is focused on cargo launches and eventual astronaut transport to the International Space Station (ISS), Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin aims to dominate the potentially lucrative market for space tourism. The company conducted a high-stakes test flight this week, and it . The New Shepard rocket from is nowhere near as powerful as the Falcon 9 we hear about all the time. This vehicle has enough thrust to take its small passenger capsule straight up past the Karman Line (around 60 miles high) that divides Earth from space.
Want a simple video capture solution? What about a potential for improved network performance in online games? Well, the Up Your Game Humble Software Bundle is exactly what you’ll want. With loads of great apps and services aimed at improving your gaming and streaming, you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck here. • Spend a lone clam, and you’ll get a dedicated voice recognition program, a one-year Outfox subscription, and a screen-mirroring app to get your mobile games visible on your capture gear. Better yet, Humble will add in a 10 percent discount for your first month of Humble Monthly.
Google has invested heavily in artificial intelligence to power products like Google Photos and Google Assistant. These applications are impressive in their own right, but they’re not exactly “fun.” Google has just rolled out a new AI experiment that is geared entirely toward fun. The new can identify your pose and match it to more than 80,000 images of other people to show you someone in a similar stance. Why? So you can make GIFs, of course. While this specific Google experiment doesn’t have a practical use, it’s a tour de force of technology buzzwords. Mirror Move utilizes AI, machine learning, neural networks, augmented reality, and more.
We’re coming up on three years since the launch of Windows 10, which was intended as Microsoft’s comeback after the abysmal performance of Windows 8 and 8.1. While Windows 10 does fix a lot of what was wrong with Windows 8, uptake isn’t as robust as the company originally hoped. After months of waffling on install numbers, Microsoft says Windows 10 is still , according to CEO Satya Nadella. So, 700 million computers with sounds like a lot. And indeed, that’s objectively a sizeable user base. However, the way Microsoft describes the total number of Windows 10 devices has been suspicious all through 2018.
Centuries from now, digital anthropologists combing through the remains of our civilization will note a regular sequence of 1’s and 0’s that began appearing on computers in the early 1990s and soon spread across everything from smartwatches to copy machines. They will undoubtedly conclude that this program represents some form of vital information or research that was carefully preserved across many different types of devices to ensure that it remained accessible even as other, incredibly valued works of film, literature, and software languished on obsolete mediums or were lost to the ravages of time. If they’re fortunate enough to stumble across 1337Doom, they’ll likely think an homage to earlier methods of communicating in text, all rendered as part of an art project to recreate one of humanity’s most treasured historical moments known as “Knee Deep in the Dead.
Your dream of a flying car remain unfulfilled, but several companies claim they’re close to making it a reality. We recently heard about , which promises to take you up and away with no pilot’s license needed. Terrafugia is taking a more “conventional” approach to the flying car conundrum. The Terrafugia Transition will take you wherever you want to go with its foldable wings, and . Terrafugia has been showing off prototypes and making vague promises for several years, but this is the first time there’s been anything approaching a release date. We’re also getting more details about the specs of this 2-seater ground and air vehicle.
As SSDs become more popular and prices drop, hard drive manufacturers are adjusting their long-term manufacturing plans and preparing for a future in which fewer and fewer hard drives are built. For Western Digital, that means planning to shut down a factory it’s operated for decades. Western Digital plans to shut down its factory near Kuala Lumpur, then sell the facility, reports. Hard drive shipments have dropped significantly in recent years, after briefly spiking in the aftermath of the 2011 Thailand floods that heavily depressed drive production due to widespread water damage. All three companies have been impacted by the declines, with total capacity falling to around 400 million drives in 2017, down from 550 million in 2014.
Cassini may have burned up in Saturn’s atmosphere almost a year ago, but the probe’s data sets are still transforming our understanding of Saturn and its various moons. In this visible spectrum, Saturn’s moon of Titan doesn’t look like much, mostly resembling a shapeless yellow ball, as shown above. One of the tools was the Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, or VIMS. It’s described on legacy pages as collecting “both light that is visible to humans and infrared light of slightly longer wavelengths. It separated the light into its various wavelengths so scientists could learn about the composition of materials from which the light is reflected or emitted.
