Valve recently pulled its home page links to Steam Machine listings, which led many of us to speculate about . Now, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais , and the company has big plans for gaming on Linux and the associated hardware platform. Valve kicked off the Steam Machine initiative in 2013 when it announced SteamOS. Many of the top gaming PC manufacturers intended to launch hardware, but most of those plans fizzled. Developers have been slow to support the Linux-based SteamOS, and Steam Machines have proven too expensive considering the limited game support. Even those games that do work tend to perform poorly compared with the Windows versions.
The federal government has been loath to discuss the use of rogue cell phone surveillance devices in the US. But the Department of Homeland Security has finally acknowledged that such devices are likely in operation in Washington DC. This revelation comes by way of a letter to US Senator Ron Wyden dated March 26. In it, the DHS confirms it has near important government agencies. These eavesdropping devices are technically known as “IMSI-catchers,” but they’re usually just called , after devices from Harris Corporation commonly used by police departments and federal authorities. All IMSI-catchers operate in the same basic fashion — they pretend to be a cell tower, forcing nearby phones to connect before passing the signal along to a real tower.
When Spectre and Meltdown hit just after New Years, it kicked off a flurry of responses from companies like Intel, AMD, ARM, and Microsoft. Patching the flaws, which exploit flaws in branch prediction and , has taken several months, with some high-profile failures: Intel had to yank Spectre patches for certain older systems after it became clear they were causing frequent reboots. Fixes resumed rolling , with plans to patch chips as far back as 2007. Those plans have now been canceled. Previously, we expected Intel would patch Bloomfield (45nm, Core i7), Clarksfield (45nm mobile Core i7), Jasper Forest (45nm Xeon), Penryn (45nm mobile Core 2 Duo), Yorkfield (45nm Core 2 Quad), and Wolfdale (45nm desktop Core 2 Duo).
Ever since the cryptocurrency market heated up again, the video card market has been terrible. Consumers who wanted to buy a GPU have been stuck choosing between paying a 1.5x – 2x cost premium over standard MSRP or simply going without. Investors have been jittery about the end of the boom; AMD and Nvidia stock both took a hit when even rumors of an ASIC from Bitmain that could be used to mine cryptocurrencies might be headed to market. Now that same ASIC is supposedly ready for prime time — but there’s a major caveat attached. To dig into how an ASIC works in this context, we first need to note that the way this topic is framed is often rather messy.
Ever since it launched Ryzen a year ago, AMD’s investors have been pushing for the company to pick up more server customers. It’s not hard to see why — cloud computing, edge computing, data centers, HPC, AI, machine learning, and similar topics are generating most of the buzz and growth in the computer industry, while PC OEMs mostly pray that after years of declines the PC market has finally stopped shrinking. AMD has already won business with two of the major hyperscale providers, Microsoft and Baidu, and launched a new line of servers with Dell. Now it’s adding another customer — Yahoo Japan.
The planet Venus is not usually what you’d think of as “habitable,” with its clouds of sulfuric acid and atmospheric pressure 92 times higher than Earth. The surface temperature is roughly 870 degrees Fahrenheit (465 degrees Celsius), which is hot enough to melt lead, so it’s safe to say life as we know it could not exist. However, a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the journal Astrobiology suggests there could be life on . Well, not directly on it, but . Scientists believe Venus was a very different, when it was younger. However, all its water evaporated into the atmosphere as the temperature shot upward between 650 million and 2 billion years after its formation.
Need a gaming PC on the cheap? You can snag a Dell XPS 8910 tower with 16GB of RAM, a quad-core Intel Core i7-6700 CPU, and a discrete AMD RX 560 graphics card for just $669.99 with today’s coupon. There are also great deals available on smartphone bundles, wireless earbuds, gigabit routers, 4K TVs, and much more in this massive roundup. Featured Deals with 16GB RAM, RX560 2GB GPU for $669.99 at Dell (Coupon code: XPS669 – List price: $1129.99). (16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 2GB GeForce MX150 Graphics) for $949.99 at Dell (Coupon code: 50OFF699 – List price: $1349.99).
The Space Telescope is getting on toward the end of its useful life, but this instrument is still making breakthrough discoveries and setting records. A series of observations in 2016 happened to spot an unexpected object in the sky, and that object turns out to be the most distant star ever observed by at least 100 times. This star appeared , meaning it existed when the universe was just a third of its current age. Astrophysicist Patrick Kelly from the University of Minnesota wasn’t looking for the most distant star ever discovered. Instead, Kelly’s team was conducting observations of an ancient supernova called SN Refsdal.
When Intel launched Coffee Lake last summer, it led with a relatively anemic lineup of desktop and mobile parts. The company is changing that today, and with a vengeance. Starting today, if you like Coffee Lake, there’s a great deal more of Coffee Lake to like, including new Core i9 CPUs available in mobile for the first time ever. All told, Intel is launching 11 new mobile CPUs, new Optane branding, a bevy of new desktop chips, and new chipsets. We’ve rounded the new cores for desktop and mobile up in the slideshow below; you can click on each slide to magnify it.
