has long been playing defense against the unstoppable juggernaut of Google Chrome (to be fair, Microsoft isn’t in much better shape). Over the past year, we’ve reported on Mozilla’s attempts to add to its existing browser, and yes, the rather silly new logo that the organization came up with for itself: “,” if you’ve been trying to forget it. Now the organization apparently has a new plan to create a browser with more fine-grained controls to reduce how much load it places on a system. The idea behind the project is to give end-users much more visibility into various settings, so they can make their own decisions about where to prioritize performance and where it makes sense not to.
Life as we know it requires liquid water, and until recently that seemed to be in short supply outside of Earth. However, recent studies of Mars and several moons have pointed to the presence of water. In fact, some moons may contain subsurface oceans with a larger total volume of water than Earth has. In the latest revelation, NASA announced strong evidence for in the subsurface oceans of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. Scientists have known that Enceladus harbors a liquid ocean under its surface since 2005. That’s when the probe spotted the now-famous water plumes erupting from the moon’s surface.
Quality cameras, as we’ve written before, are essential to any self-driving car. There are certain crucial tasks, including lane line detection, reading street signs, and accurately interpreting street lights, that only a camera can make possible. Until now, companies working on autonomous vehicles have mostly been limited to using either small cameras similar to those in smartphones, or standard industrial cameras designed for other applications. Now Sony has produced what might be the first commercially available sensor that is designed specifically for self-driving vehicle projects. HDR is a must-have, and this sensor makes it a lot simpler The contrast in a street scene — especially at night — can be more than a standard camera’s sensor can handle.
So you want to give a gift card to a gamer. How do you know which gift card is the best one to get for your giftee? Whether you’re considering a present well in advance or standing in Best Buy scratching your head, ExtremeTech is here to cut through the confusion. We’ll start with general-purpose gift cards that can be used across platforms, and then discuss options for specific platforms and games. Chances are very good that your lucky giftee’s favorite game is part of a gaming ecosystem that accepts VISA or MasterCard in exchange for game time, DLC, characters, skins or other such content.
Roughly five weeks ago, AMD launched its processor family. While the new chips are extremely powerful, they’re not particularly cheap. Today, AMD released its new Ryzen 5 midrange CPU family, aimed squarely at Intel’s desktop Core i5 and Core i7 SKUs. Can AMD pull a win out of its hat two months in a row? AMD is launching multiple Ryzen 5 processors today, from the Ryzen 5 1400 (quad-core, SMT, 3.2GHz base, 3.4GHz turbo) to the Ryzen 5 1600X (six-core, SMT, 3.6GHz base, 4GHz turbo). We have two of the new parts on-tap today — the Ryzen 5 1500X, with an MSRP of $189, and the Ryzen 5 1600X, with an MSRP of $249.
The Orion Molecular Cloud Complex is a group of nebulae and stellar nurseries positioned some 1,500 light years away from Earth. This is a place where new stars are born, but . New observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile reveal a giant fireworks display in Orion Molecular Cloud 1 (OMC-1) that was caused by two young stars colliding. The ALMA data was processed and released by scientists working with the National Radio Observatory (NRO). The NRO timeline for the explosion is a bit vague. It says the collision took place 500 years ago, but it takes light from OMC-1 1,500 years to reach us.
The gas giants Jupiter and Saturn have garnered more attention over the years because they’re closer, and let’s face it, they look cool. Uranus is easy to overlook out there in the outer solar system, but there are some newly released images from and the ESA that might make you notice it again. The images are a showing aurora activity in the planet’s atmosphere. Uranus is the third largest planet in the solar system after Jupiter and Saturn. It’s quite a bit smaller than Saturn, actually, with a diameter of 15,759 miles (25,362 km). Saturn is more than twice as large, but you could still fit 63 Earths inside Uranus.
Earlier this year, I declared the Internet of Things had officially hit , courtesy of a new smart toaster being shown at CES. I should have known better. What’s even more useless than a smart toaster? A smart toaster that’s been hacked to mine Bitcoin. It’s a concept as incomprehensible as it is stupid. Seven years ago, mining Bitcoins on CPUs was Totally A Thing people did. Six years ago, GPUs like AMD’s HD 5000 series were tearing up the hash charts. Four to five years ago, you could still earn some money mining on GPUs, but the specter of custom-built ASICs was rising, and those offer performance benefits no GPU could compete with.
The best seat in the Nissan Rogue SUV “Rogue Dogue” special edition is the padded cargo compartment for carrying your dog comfortably. It has been outfitted with a safety harness, non-spill water bowl, pull-out ramp for loading and unloading, a doggie shower and dryer, and even a video camera for capturing your dog’s head-out-side-window experiences. It’s all feasible for production, Nissan says. But for now it’s a one-off project on display at the New York International Auto Show () running Friday through Sunday, April 23.
