Anyone who has ever been to a McDonald’s knows that asking for ice cream is a recipe for disappointment. The restaurant’s soft serve machines are so notoriously finicky that it’s become a meme, and there’s even a . A startup called Kytch hoped to fix this nationwide nightmare with a small internet-connected device that plugged into the machines. Now, Kytch is suing McDonald’s for $900 million after it told franchise owners to remove the devices. At any given moment, about 10 percent of all McDonald’s ice cream machines in the US are broken. That number is higher in some markets like Seattle (about one-third) and New York (a quarter).
After almost two years of writing articles about the chip shortage, scalper pricing, and supply chain issues, there’s finally a ray of sunshine in another otherwise gloomy forecast. AMD has lowered the pricing on its top-shelf 5000-series GPUs across the board. You should see the new pricing reflected any any e-tailer including Amazon, Newegg, Microcenter, etc. Overall the company is slashing prices for six of its high-to-midrange consumer GPUs, then slapping its palm on the hood of your motherboard and saying, “I think this looks good on you.” According to a summary posted by , the company’s flagship 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X gets the biggest cut, going from $799 to $599, with the 12-core, 24-thread 5900X CPU getting a $101 discount, going from $549 to $448.
(Photo: Antonov Company)The ongoing invasion of Ukraine’s many property casualties seems to include that of the largest plane ever built. The Antonov An-225 Mriya, a 276-foot aircraft with a 290-foot wingspan, has been one of Ukraine’s prized possessions since it was built there in 1985. The plane was originally engineered to carry Soviet space orbiters, though only one such mission was ever completed before Antonov Airlines purchased the aircraft and modified it to be used for commercial cargo shipping. It’s since been used to transport heavy cargo loads as well as emergency aid during natural disasters as well as in the initial global outbreak of COVID-19.
For a long time, we’ve been able to say unequivocally that Qualcomm chips power most phones in the US. Now, that’s not so certain. New numbers from sales tracker IDC claim that Taiwan-based MediaTek has , accounting for 48.1 percent of Android phones sold in the US last year, while Qualcomm is just a little behind at 43.9 percent. However, Qualcomm isn’t giving up the crown so easily. It points to Counterpoint’s research, which still shows it with a substantial lead. Device makers don’t release precise sales numbers, so we have to rely on the roundabout analysis from firms like IDC and Counterpoint.
A consortium of Twitter users have been poring over the recently leaked data from the Nvidia hack by the rogue group Lapsus$ and posting their findings online. Thus far, the leaks confirm previous rumors that Nvidia’s next-gen offering will indeed raise the bar. Not only will Nvidia’s upcoming Ada Lovelace GPU field a much larger L2 cache, the flagship chip will also reportedly offer almost double the number of CUDA cores found in the current chip, the GA102. The largest change for Nvidia is a staggering 16x increase in total L2 cache on the AD102 compared to existing Ampere GPUs, from 6MB to 96MB, according to a summary via .
If you grew up checking under your waistband and behind your ears for ticks after a romp outside, you may want to sit down: ticks have been found to have much longer lifespans than previously suspected, even after extended periods of starvation. Julian Shepherd, a biologist and associate professor at Binghamton University in New York, recently recorded the longest known tick lifespan after keeping a few of the critters at his lab. Shepherd had received 13 Argus Brumpti (a species of soft tick native to arid eastern and southern Africa) as a gift back in 1976 and elected to build them a stable habitat he could use to conduct studies.
NASA has been working on the Space Launch System () since it retired the Space Shuttle in 2011. The agency initially hoped to have the mega-rocket flying by 2016, but that proved to be a wildly optimistic estimate. As the delays piled up, so has the cost. In a recent House Science Committee hearing, NASA Inspector General Paul Martin revealed the true cost of an SLS launch, and it’s much higher than the $2 billion target. It’s more like $4.1 billion, but Martin turned things around on the Representatives, reminding them it was Congress that dictated the terms of NASA’s SLS contracts.
Amazon has dipped its toe in gaming over the past few years, . Its cloud service, Luna, seems like an easy win, though. It just needs to remain committed, . The retail giant first as a semi-closed beta. Now, Luna is in the mainland US today. If you’re a Prime Member, you can even play a few games for free. Luna is similar to Google Stadia and Microsoft GamePass in that you don’t need powerful hardware to play high-end games. All the hard work happens in the cloud, and then the video streams to a device like your phone or a TV box — a Fire TV in the case of Luna.
For years now Apple fans have been begging the company to add touchscreen functionality to its MacBook computers, and yet the company has resisted the impulse to match its Windows-based counterparts. Instead, Apple has focused on delivering a touch-based experience on its iPad lineup. Now however, the company looks to be experimenting with a dual-screen, folding tablet hybrid iPad / MacBook that splits the difference between them. Before you get too excited though, two things: this is just a rumor, and the person providing the information doesn’t expect such a device to materialize until 2026, at the earliest. The information comes via notable Apple watcher , who himself is relying on , CEO of Display Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC).
