Bitcoin might not be worth as much as it was at the beginning of the year, but miners are still operating at a phenomenal rate. A new calculation from analyst Alex de Vries says those mining operations are using a stupendous amount of energy. At current levels, de Vries estimates Bitcoin mining uses , and that number could grow to as much as 7.7GW by the end of the year, an astounding half a percent of the entire world’s electricity consumption. Anyone can mine Bitcoins by contributing computing power to the network, but mining isn’t as easy as it used to be.
Google Chrome has won the lion’s share of the browser market with about 57 percent usage, blowing away runner-up Safari at just 14 percent. This gives Google the power to encourage change on the web just by tweaking the way works. That’s what it did over the last few years by making it clear when a site was lacking an HTTPS secure connection. Now that most sites have moved to HTTPS, Google is looking to change the way those warnings appear to . Using HTTPS encrypts the connection between you and a website, which prevents someone from intercepting your traffic or impersonating the site.
A few weeks ago, at Google I/O, company CEO Sundar Pichai demoed an incredible advance in AI and voice technology. The demo involved a new AI assistant making phone calls to two businesses — a hairdresser and a restaurant — to make an appointment and book a reservation, respectively. You can see the original demo below, but for those of you who don’t have access to video, the calls are impressive because the AI responds (and sounds) far more human than your typical voice assistant. It pauses. It says “Umm,” in the same way a human might, while considering options.
Halo has been a flagship Xbox franchise since the original Halo: Combat Evolved debuted on the original console back in 2001. It’s been about 2.5 years since the last flagship Halo title appeared, and plenty of game publications have bet on seeing Halo at E3 this year. We still don’t know if there’s going to be a console Halo title in the works for E3, but Microsoft does have a Halo game to talk about — it’s just not one you’ll be playing in your living room. Halo: Fireteam Raven is a four-person team-up that you play at an arcade on a 130-inch 4K panel.
Late last year, the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) put in place during the Obama administration. The US Senate has now that would overturn the FCC vote and keep net neutrality in place. However, the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution still has a long way to go before it becomes law. After gaining enough support to force a vote, every member of the Senate’s Democratic caucus voted in favor of preserving net neutrality. They were joined by three Republican Senators: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John Kennedy. The CRA passed the upper chamber 52 to 47 (Senator McCain was not present for the vote).
Interest in cryptocurrency and blockchain technology has been skyrocketing lately. It got to the point that companies could simply by adding the word “blockchain” to their name. HTC is looking to cash in with its latest smartphone, the . It’s the only smartphone from an established device maker with dedicated blockchain encryption. However, there are many unanswered questions about the Exodus, including when you can get one. At its most basic level, a blockchain is merely a list of records secured with cryptography. Digital currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum use blockchains to keep track of transactions in a “proof of work” system.
Ever since 3dfx debuted the original Voodoo accelerator, no single piece of equipment in a PC has had as much of an impact on whether your machine could game as the humble graphics card. While other components absolutely matter, a top-end PC with 32GB of RAM, a $500 CPU, and PCIe-based storage will choke and die if asked to run modern AAA titles on a ten year-old card at modern resolutions and detail levels. Graphics cards (also commonly referred to as GPUs, or graphics processing units) are critical to game performance and we cover them extensively. But we don’t often dive into what makes a GPU tick and how the cards function.
NASA’s InSight Mars mission launched on May 5, but it wasn’t the only piece of equipment that began its journey to the red planet. The agency also sent two small cubesats along with InSight, and one of them just snapped its first photo. It’s a long way from getting any snapshots of Mars, so NASA and got a nice “pale blue dot” homage. InSight is a lander that will by taking seismic readings. That’s a first for scientists studying Mars. The two Mars Cube One (or just MarCO) satellites will swing by the planet to act as communication platforms for InSight.
Microsoft may be working on a new, low-cost Surface with introductions planned for as soon as the back half of this year. When Redmond first introduced Surface it offered two options — a lower-cost tablet with an ARM (Surface RT, Surface 2) or Intel Atom processor (Surface 3), and a high-end device outfitted with an Intel Core CPU. This worked well until Intel canceled its tablet and smartphone line of Atom products and chose to limit the new Goldmont core to laptops and desktops. The Surface 3 is still powerful enough to be useful as a lower-end device, but it hasn’t been refreshed since 2015 and Atom was never a bruiser.
