Geneva was huge this year and ran the gamut from supercars for oil-rich playboys to everyday SUVs to more and better EVs and plug-in hybrids. Geneva has the advantage of being the first major auto show of the year, give or take Detroit. And Detroit is losing cachet as international automakers realize Michigan is not a place where you sell many foreign cars. Mercedes-Benz spent a million dollars, more or less, to launch the new G-Wagen, and then pulled the plug on 2019 participation at Detroit. But you’re not here for the inside baseball — you’re here for the cars.
Many computer enthusiasts care about performance, but some also care about more mundane matters like noise and, well, the size of the heating bill. Now French startup Qarnot thinks it can sell its combination heater/cryptocurrency miner to enthusiasts who want to heat their homes and make money doing it. In the past, has focused on selling computing heaters embedded in commercial buildings. Waste heat from the computers are used to heat the buildings, while the computers themselves are rented to server companies, creating a decentralized server network. It’s not a bad idea, depending on the price of electricity in your area versus the price of heating oil or gas (assuming you don’t use electric heat in the first place, obviously).
Over the past few months we’ve been examining various aspects of the GPU market, and how gamers waiting for prices to calm down can take various steps to improve their situation by or considering a new as an entry-level solution. We’ve also discussed how the inflation , delved into the risks of buying a , and suggested steps readers can take to protect themselves and their investments. Our used GPU advice, however, presupposed that the reader was looking to buy a card of relatively recent vintage — think GPUs from Nvidia’s Maxwell generation (2014), or AMD’s Fury (2015) or first-generation Polaris (2016) product families.
A stupendously rare astronomical event occurred last year when Triton, largest moon, passed in front of a distant star. The extreme distances involved made this event almost impossible to observe, but the European Space Agency (ESA) helped astronomers pin down exactly where they needed to be to observe it. , researchers managed to capture a “central flash” from Triton, carrying important hints about conditions on the moon. Triton is large for a moon at more than 20 percent the diameter of Earth. It has a thin atmosphere composed mostly of nitrogen and methane, but we’ve never been able to study it in detail.
Every smartphone maker is waging war on bezels, but there’s a problem: You still need space for a front-facing camera and sensors. Most OEMs have left the sensors alone and slimmed down the bezel around them. However, Apple has adopted a distinctive solution on the iPhone X known as the “notch.” That missing bit of screen has become an integral piece of Apple’s branding — it embraces the notch. Now, some Android device makers are trying to embrace the notch as well. The notch wasn’t a good idea in the first place, but copying Apple’s notch is even worse.
It’s not unusual for companies in America to be caught between what they view as being in the best interest of their customers and being required to comply with various federal statues. In the immediate aftermath of Edward Snowden’s FBI leaks, we discovered that a number of companies had silently fought against the government’s use of warrantless wiretapping without success. Apple was willing to engage in a high-profile fight with the FBI over user privacy several years ago, and Microsoft is caught in a high stakes battle over whether the US government can compel it to turn over the data of an EU national stored on a server located in the European Union.
We all expected Google to launch the Android P developer preview around the middle of the month, but the latest version of Android dropped a little earlier than that. , which won’t get a real name or version number until later. Still, we’ve got details on the features and improvements Google is building for the next version of Android. You can download the Android P developer preview right now, but it only runs on a handful of Google phones. What’s New Like Android Oreo, the P release doesn’t come with a lot of major feature additions. There are several notable additions, and then a massive number of small tweaks and API changes for developers.
If your Oculus Rift has suddenly quit working, well, we have good news and bad news. The bad news is, your Oculus Rift doesn’t work. The good news is, it’s a temporary problem. The problem, according to Neowin, is an expired certificate in the Oculus Runtime Service, which needs to be updated. The file in question, OculusAppFramework.dll, will throw an error to this effect when the Oculus Store attempts to launch. The simplest way to solve the problem is to set your computer’s date back to a time before March 7. Do that, and the issue will solve itself for the time being.
The first Tesla Model S sedans shipped in 2012. Now with the 2018 Geneva auto show, we’re about to see the luxury carmakers taking Tesla really seriously. Last year, Tesla in both the US and in Europe outsold each of the premium sedans from Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo. With no Frankfurt Auto Show on tap in 2018 (odd years only), the 88th Geneva International Motor Show reigns as the supreme auto show of 2018. It’s also the most neutral since Switzerland doesn’t make a whole lot of cars; there are no hometown-favorite companies. Here’s what to watch for in Geneva this week.
