• Chiplets!  Confirmed exactly as per the earlier leaks, it has an I/O die built on Global Foundries' 14nm process, a smaller version of the one on the new EPYC processors, and one of the standard 8 core CPU chiplets built on TSMC's 7nm process.
  
  
• Cores!  The chip used in the demo had one CPU chiplet and thus 8 cores, but it very clearly has room reserved for a second chiplet - CPU or GPU.  AnandTech got a good photo of the package showing that it's obviously designed for two chiplets.
  
  
• I/O!  PCIe 4.0 is confirmed.  It might even work on existing motherboards, at least for the primary PCI slot.  (Tom's Hardware)  PCIe 4.0 needs a buffer chip for board traces longer than 7 inches, but the first slot will always be well within that.
  
  The 500 generation chipsets will be PCIe 4.0 as well, so you could get 8 lanes of PCIe 3.0 off the chipset, all running at full speed.
  
  
• Speed!  On stage and off-stage, it scored within 1% of a power-unrestricted Core i9 9900K on Cinebench R15 multi-core.
  
  
• Efficiency!  It tied for performance with the 9900K while using about 40% less power.  System power was shown as around 130W vs. 180W for the 9900K, on systems matched as closely as possible.
  
  That means that the chip itself was running at 75W vs. 125W for the Intel chip.  The 9900K is rated at 95W TDP but most motherboards don't enforce that as a limit, and it runs noticeably hotter by default.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 10 2019 12:29 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 10 2019 01:26 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 10 2019 02:55 PM (Iwkd4)

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• AMD's CES keynote is at 4AM for me, the worst time in the world.  Can't stay up that late, can't get up that early.
  
  
• Toshiba announced their BG4 NVME SSD.  (AnandTech)
  
  With speeds of 2250MB/s read, 1700MB/s write (about 50% faster than the BG3), it's a middle-of-the-pack contender.  Its secret is that it packs up to 1TB of fast storage into just 16x20 mm (about half a square inch).
  
  
  
  
• Zotac's MEK Mini is eye-wateringly ugly.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's all but non-Euclidean.  Not shown because it might break the blog.
  
  Their Magnus E is a normal-looking mini PC with the latest Nvidia RTX mobile graphics, so here's a picture of that instead.
  
  
  
  
• Samsung's Notebook 9 Pro is a fairly nice business laptop, though it doesn't have dedicated pgup/pgdn/home/end keys.  Does have a pen.  Only 1080p display.
  
  The low-end Notebook Flash looks like a second more talented team of designers was shown a picture of the Notebook 9 Pro and told to make the same thing, only entirely out of recycled milk crates.
  
  
  
  
• Asus' TUF Gaming FX505 and FX705DY laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Apparently there's a shortage of Intel laptop parts, so first-tier manufacturers (Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo) get their pick and everyone else (Acer, Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) gets to wait.
  
  These models have the new Ryzen 5 3350H - a 35W part - and Radeon RX 560X graphics.  They dynamically switch from the integrated graphics to dedicated graphics when you start up a game.  It's the same driver so hopefully that will be smoother than on some pervious attempts.
  
  
• ASRock announced the DeskMini A300 including the world's first STX format AM4 motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is a big deal because STX doesn't have room for a graphics card, so AMD's superior integrated graphics make for a much more useful mini system.  These are smaller than a Mac Mini, though not quite as tiny as a NUC.  And a barebones system will cost just $119.
  
  Connectivity is a bit limited - only one Ethernet port, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort, but understandable at the price.
  
  
• Intel's Optane caching solutions for hard drives were dead in the water with the recent fall in price of SSDs, so they've come up with something new.  The Optane Memory H10 has up to 1TB of QLC flash and up to 32GB of Optane cache.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  There's one giant fly in the ointment, though: It's not actually a device.  It's a single M.2 card with a x4 connector, but the Optane and QLC storage are presented as two separate x2 drives that are then managed by Intel's RST software.
  
  So it requires an Intel processor and chipset, and a motherboard and BIOS supporting PCIe channel bifurcation.  Or you could just use regular QLC flash with its much larger pseudo-SLC cache and have a proper x4 SSD that works with anything.
  
  
• Alienware's Area 51m supports a socketed CPU and GPU so in theory you can swap them out when better parts arrive.  (WCCFTech)
  
  At least the GPU.  Maybe.  CPU sockets change often enough that you're likely to end up stuck with whatever you got.
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga A940 is a Surface Studioesque desktop system.  (ZDNet)
  
  A hinged mount can bring the 27" 4K screen forward and down to a 28° angle for drawing or design, and it has a dial for twiddling.  Core i7-8700 CPU, Radeon RX 560 graphics (so you certainly won't be gaming at 4K), four speakers, a couple of cameras, multiple microphones, pen, mouse, wireless charging pad, convenient keyboard tray, carry handle, and, mirroring the original Surface Studio, a ludicrous 1TB hard disk.
  
  As for the design...  Um.  It's not ugly, as such, but it sure is awkward.
  
  
  
  
• Continental is planning to deliver packages to your door with a driverless miniature bus full of robot dogs.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  No, really.
  
  
  
  I for one welcome our new robotic underdogs.
  
  
• Wait, Google is at CES?  Everything Google announced at CES.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Basically all just marketing for Google Assistant.  No new products or even new features, which is why I didn't notice they were even present.
  
  
• Dell showed off a 55" 4K 120Hz HDR OLED Freesync gaming monitor.  (Engadget)
  
  Pricing not yet announced, and it won't ship until the second half of the year, but a single screen that ticks so many boxes isn't likely to be cheap.
  
  
• Dell also, after years of everyone in the world telling them they are terrible people and deserve to Burn in Heck, moved the camera on the XPS 13 back up to the top bezel.  (HotHardware)
  
  It even has dedicated pgup/pgdn/home/end keys.  Not in my ideal layout, unfortunately, but they are there, and not combined with F11 and F12 or any such nonsense.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 10 2019 03:06 AM (Q/JG2)

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• LaCie has new mobile hard disks and SSDs.  (AnandTech)
  
  LaCie are famous for using Porsche Design.  These look more like Chrysler circa 1982.
  
  
• Huawei showed off the Mediapad M5 Lite.  (AnandTech)
  
  I like my M3, but this is bigger, heavier, has a lower resolution screen and a slower processor, less memory and storage, and is only slightly cheaper.
  
  
• Huawei also launched their 2019 Matebook 13 which is mysteriously half a pound heavier than the 2017 model.  (AnandTech)
  
  But also hundreds of dollars cheaper.  So maybe they took out the Cavorite.
  
  
• Intel announced that Ice Like will arrive at some point, probably.  (AnandTech)
  
  No date.  No specs.  No prices.  25 hours of battery life, but only if you leave it turned off most of the time.  Or maybe not, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
  
  
• Intel also launched their Nerdvana neural network processor which can do neural network stuff.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yeah, not a lot of technical detail in the Intel event.
  
  
• GitHub now offers unlimited private repositories to free users.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Private repositories on free accounts can only have three contributors, but that will be fine for many small projects.  And there's always GitLab.
  
  
• IBM announced the Q System One quantum computer.  (ZDNet)
  
  You can't have one.  It's nine feet tall and nine feet wide, encased in airtight half-inch high-tech borosilicate glass, cooled by liquid helium, and takes 36 hours to cool down from room temperature to operating conditions.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: No, you can't swap your iPad Pro for an iPad Mini edition.  (ZDNet)

• LinkedIn is scanning your browser for extensions.
  
  For a reason, though: They've shut off access to their API, so the only way to find out what's going on inside LinkedIn is by screen-scraping, and these extensions do exactly that.  Of course, the data isn't actually private, or LinkedIn itself couldn't function.  The point is that LinkedIn owns your data, not you.
  
  This is security through being a pain in the bum.
  
  I do social network stuff in my day job, and we occasionally still get requests filtering down asking if we can retrieve certain data from LinkedIn for some project or other.  As soon as the name "LinkedIn" is mentioned we pass the request back with a one-word answer.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 09 2019 12:37 AM (Q/JG2)

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• AMD has announced the Ryzen 3000 mobile family.  (AnandTech)
  
  Points of interest:
  
  
• These are the 12nm second-generation parts, not the exciting 7nm third-generation parts we're all waiting for.  (There were no Ryzen 1000 mobile parts.)
  
  
• But AMD announced this as just an oh-by-the-way, not even counting it as worth mentioning in their big keynote address on Wednesday.
  
  
• There are now both U-series 15W parts and H-series 35W parts.  The specs are basically the same; the H series just has much more thermal headroom and actually achieves the peak clocks rather than throttling.
  
  
• Two new 6W parts.... Oh, they're Excavator, not Zen.  Never mind.
  
  
• Nvidia announced the RTX 2060, launching on January 15 for $349.  (AnandTech)
  
  It delivers GTX 1070 performance for GTX 1070 prices.  It has more memory bandwidth but less memory.  It's decidedly unexciting given that it competes on a level footing on price and performance with a 2016 card, but Nvidia are clearly thinking "What are you going to do, buy AMD?  Wait, come back!"
  
  
• Nvidia also announced RTX Mobile providing lower-power versions of the 2060, 2070, and 2080.  (PC Perspective)
  
  First products expected by the end of this month.
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia, they just adopted Freesync.  (AnandTech)
  
  Cheap wins every time.  One of the reasons behind this is that game consoles and televisions have adopted Freesync.  There's no market for the added cost of G-Sync in the living room, but Freesync has basically no unit cost, just a design cost, so why not?  If Nvidia want to sell into that market, Freesync is the only option.
  
  Intel have also announced their upcoming GPUs will support Freesync.
  
  
• HP's Spectre x360 15 has an AMOLED display.  (AnandTech)
  
  100% DCI-P3 colour space and 100,000:1 contrast, but what about the panel life?
  
  Like all the Spectre range, it's quite pretty in an angular way.  I prefer the ash grey and copper accents of 2017 over the newer midnight blue and gold, but it's still a work of art.
  
  
  
  
• HP's Omen 15 has a 240Hz display and GTX 1070 graphics and looks like a...  (AnandTech)
  
  Okay, it's not awful.  But for comparison:
  
  
  
  
• Acer's 2019 Swift 7 is 92% screen and weighs under 2 pounds.  (AnandTech)
  
  
  
  But only 1080p, Y-series CPU, and no home/end keys.  And expensive at $1699.  But it's fanless, and there are limits to what you can do if you want that and don't want an extra pound of heatsink.
  
  
• Acer also announced some rather larger laptops with Nvidia GPUs and 15" or 17" screens.  (AnandTech)
  
  These start at a hefty 4.6 pounds and $1799, but at least the 17" model has an interesting flippy hinge thing.
  
  
  
  
• Seagate announced new BarraCude and FireCuda SSDs.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're almost the same, with the BarraCuda coming in 256MB and 512MB and the FireCuda at 1TB and 2TB.  The larger models have better performance and endurance, but even the smallest model can deliver 3.4GB/s, effectively maxing out a PCIe 3.0 x4 link.
  
  The IronWolf range meanwhile are SATA drives for NAS use.  (AnandTech)
  
  Since two SATA SSDs can already fill a 10GbE connection, there's no real need for NVMe in the NAS market.
  
  
• Asus' ZenBook S13 has bezels so small that it has a notch.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fortunately in the name of sanity it's not really a notch, but a notch-shaped extension that goes the other way, a little lip to the top bezel.
  
  Full U-series CPU on this one, 13.9" screen so it's really a 14" model, claimed 97% screen-to-body ratio, up to 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD.
  
  No dedicated home/end though, not even dedicated pgup/pgdn from what I can see.
  
  
• Alienware announced their "thin" and "light" m17 which DON'T SHAPE THE SCREEN LIKE THAT IT LOOKS LIKE IT ESCAPED FROM 1976 AND NOT IN A GOOD WAY.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Asus launched their Mothership a sort of 17" 10 pounds Surface Pro for gaming.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, they didn't launch it - it will be out later in Q1 - but I had to say that.
  
  Other Linus got his hands on a pre-release model.
  
  
  
  
• Razer's Blade 15 is getting RTZ graphics - your choice of 2060, 2070, or 2080.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I thought the Blade 15 was ligher than that - the article lists it at 4.7 pounds.
  
  
• Samsung showed off a 219" LED TV and also a smaller 75" model.  (WCCFTech)
  
  These are "microLED" panels using more conventional inorganic components (WCCFTech) and according to Samsung are much less prone to burn-in than OLED / AMOLED displays.
  
  The price, however, is in "if you have to ask" territory.
  
  
• Huawei announced their most powerful Arm CPU yet, the Kunpeng 920.  (ZDNet)
  
  Kirin was a good name.  It's in the Monster Manual.  Kunpeng is less good.
  
  Anyway, it's a 64 core server CPU running at 2.6GHz, with 8 channel memory and dual 100GbE ports.  Huawei has also announced servers based on the new chips, which no-one outside China will touch with a barge pole.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: Don't worry Apple, we haven't forgotten you!
  
  The Phone That's Failing Apple: iPhone XR  (Wall Street Journal)
  
  It's the best selling of the new models.  It's just not best-selling enough.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: You need to go on a diet.  (ZDNet)
  
  A good argument that Apple needs a new low-end device rather than simply continuing to sell outdated models at reduced prices.
  
  
• Original Linus has announced Linux 5.0.  (Phoronix)
  
  Basically Original Linus sometimes just wakes up and says "we're going to change the major version number".  This was called 4.21 up until Saturday.  Which doesn't mean that there isn't a ton of new stuff, just that there's always a ton of new stuff.
  
  
• Samsung is now iTunes and AirPlay compatible for people stuck with orphaned Apple devices now that that company is doomed.  (Six Colors)
  
  Doomed, I say.
  
  
• Speaking of doomed, Apple are describing noticeably crooked devices costing  thousands of dollars as having "subtle deviations in flatness".  (ZDNet)
  
  Like Florida.
  
  
• Finland says Microsoft should pay the costs for fucking up people's computers with forced upgrades.  (ZDNet)
  
  I had to re-install Skype this morning after updating to 1809.  That's $3.70 you owe me for my time, Microsoft!

• A former Grindr user is suing the platform over what seems to be a straightforward case of criminal harassment by another Grindr user, not really involving the company at all.  (NBC)
  
  The case has already been thrown out once, but the claimant is appealing that decision.
  
  
• A photographer licensed a photo to a stock photo company and was shocked to find out that someone used it.  (TechDirt)

  Walmart is selling my picture without my permission throughout all New Brunswick...

  (Actually, they're not.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 08 2019 02:29 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 08 2019 02:31 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 08 2019 02:49 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 08 2019 02:51 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, January 08 2019 03:02 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, January 08 2019 09:14 AM (PiXy!)

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• Apple Death Watch, Bloomberg Edition
  
  Apple's iPhone Warning Comes Years Too Late  (Bloomberg)
  
  Tim Cook Needs Better Ideas Than This for Apple  (Bloomberg)
  
  Apple Had Five Ways to Fuel Earnings.  Only One Still Works  (Bloomberg)
  
  Apple's China iPhone Woes Were Foretold in Japan  (Bloomberg)
  
  Apple Comes Clean, Leaves Investors Stuck in the Mud  (Bloomberg)
  
  
• On a more positive note, everyone else is doomed too.
  
  Apple Sales Shock Isn't the Worst of Tech's Troubles  (Bloomberg)
  
  
• All MSI Z390 motherboards now support 128GB of RAM.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Neither the article nor MSI's announcement specifies which CPUs support 128GB of RAM, though.  Intel has mentioned only their 9th generation chips, but I've seen systems with 8th generation chips listed as supporting 128GB RAM.  Which should be no surprise as 8th and 9th generation chips are all but identical.

Social Media News

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, January 07 2019 07:37 AM (LMsTt)

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• Nvidia's Jetson AGX has a chewy caramel center. (AnandTech)
  
  I think that's right. It's an embedded controller for cars and other robots, so I'm not sure why they needed to make it edible.
  
  
• Samsung's Space Monitor is a regular monitor with a desk mount. (Tech Crunch)
  
  You can do that with any monitor with a standard VESA mount, but whatever.
  
  
• How does the Delusional Dirigible compare with the Zoonotic Zoetrope on a Ryzen 1800X? (Phoronix)
  
  (I think whenever I mention Ubuntu in the future I'm just going to make up the code names.)
  
  New kernel, new compiler. A few regressions, possibly because of security patches, but nice performance improvements in some cases. Python is nearly 40% faster on PyBench, and PHP scores 30% better on PHPBench. I should look for a similar article on Intel, and see how much of that is tuning for Ryzen since it launched, and how much is just general compiler improvement.
  
  
• You've been in that garage for fifteen years! (Six Colors)
  
  
• In the market for an 8TB enterprise TLC SSD? Not sure which brand to buy? Here's a review. (AnandTech)
  
  No prices though, because enterprise.
  
  
• The internet of litter boxes: The dumbest gadgets of CES. (Quartz)
  
  One of these is not actually dumb. It's a great idea, though the first versions will be expensive and buggy. Another is a USB coffee blender.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: Pay no attention to the sales figures behind the curtain. (Wired)
  
  Apple is a services company now.
  
  Best evidence yet that Apple is screwed. Their services suck.

Social Media News

Video of the Day

Picture of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, January 06 2019 02:00 AM (tgyIO)

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• OWC has bought AKiTiO.  (AnandTech)
  
  If you've ever needed a weird overpriced (but generally well-designed) peripheral for a Mac, this creates a one-stop shop.
  
  
• Samsung has announced its most powerful Arm CPU to date.  (AnandTech)
  
  Eight A76 cores, three independent Mali G76 GPUs (not specified how many shaders each one contains), support for up to six displays and twelve cameras, oh, and it's for cars.
  
  Looks like a good robotics CPU generally.
  
  
• The USB IF has proposed using DRM to prevent dodgy cables destroying your equipment.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Dodgy cables will be restricted to safe operations and not allowed, for example, to run in power delivery mode.
  
  This is a genuine problem.  A Google engineer reviewed dozens of USB cables and chargers after a cheap cable destroyed his laptop.  (Amazon)
  
  
• Apple stock is in free-fall after the company announced that its quarterly profit was down to $916 quadrillion, 0.013% off earlier guidelines.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• The Universe has ECC, so you can stop fretting about that false vacuum state collapse.  (Quanta)
  
  Also, if you fall into a black hole, you can be restored from redundant packets by scanning three quarters of the rest of the Universe.  Like a RAR file downloaded from Usenet.
  
  
• Asus has announced the ProArt PA90, a cheap knock-off of the despised Mac Pro Trashbin.  (Overclock3d)
  
  It appears they managed to make it almost as expensive as the Mac Pro.  Starts at just £2499.  It does at least have Thunderbolt.
  
  
• The Microsoft Store finally has a purpose: You can download Python.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And it updates itself automatically.  Not sure how they're addressing the problem with distributing C extensions.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: The Ride Is Over.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  This is a shocking development for any idiots who didn't pay attention when Apple stopped disclosing unit sales figures in their quarterly reports.

• This one is not Facebook's fault.  (TechDirt)
  
  When you have over a billion users, statistically some of them will commit suicide.  And then well-meaning people idiots will demand you "do something".

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, January 05 2019 05:18 AM (TWAZc)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 05 2019 06:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 05 2019 02:49 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 05 2019 03:54 PM (Iwkd4)

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• Apple Death Watch: Apple reported only $84 billion in sales for the first quarter of their 2019 fiscal year (whenever that is), short of their guidance of $89 to $93 billion.  (Six Colors)
  
  Apple stock actually halted trading temporarily.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Even given Apple's cash reserves, they can only withstand...  Wait, they still made how much profit?  Never mind.
  
  Tim Cook blames the trade war with China.  Customers blame the fact that the A$2389 iPhone XS Max lacks features found in a A$159 Android blue-light special.
  
  On the other hand, the iPhone XR, the cheapest of the new models, is selling very well in the US.  (ZDNet)
  
  On the third hand, the news that their cheapest model is selling well is less than ideal for Apple.  With unit shipments stagnating, they need to push up either pricing or margins (or better yet, both) to get any growth.  Or create a new product...
  
  
• AMD's 2019 CPU lineup has leaked again.  (VideoCardz)
  
  Though frankly this looks like someone took the earlier leak and entered into their website database and that's now being treated as confirmation of the original leak.  Washington DC political analysis comes to the tech world.
  
  
• Star Control: Origins is half price on Stardock.  Or if you prefer, you can pick up the Stardock Humble Bundle (GalCiv I, II, and III, Sins of a Solar Empire, Ashes of the Singularity, and Offworld Trading Company) and get a 33% discount coupon for Star Control: Origins on the Humble Store.
  
  Either way you get a Steam key.  Although the game is not currently listed for sale on Steam due to the DMCA nonsense, keys activate fine.
  
  Reviews are mixed, there is that DMCA nonsense going on, and I haven't played it yet myself, so please take this as a news item and not a personal recommendation.  I did buy it myself though.

Social Media News

• Is Obama's blatantly unconstitutional Operation Choke Point responsible for the recent rash of payment deplatforming?  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  Originally aimed at illegally stamping out the Second Amendment, claims are that it is still alive and being used to target the First.
  
  I'm skeptical, but Operation Choke Point was real, has not so far as I know been verified as having been dismantled, and worked in precisely this way, so I'm not dismissing this either.
  
  (Remember Rule One.)
  
  

Tech News

• California could soon have its own version of the internet.  (Wired)
  
  That is to say, the internet, only fucked it gives you cancer.
  
  
• DBS Bank in Singapore is using AI and big data in a way that is NOT AT ALL CREEPY.  (ZDNet)
  
  The way AI personal assistants work at the moment is completely messed up and counterproductive.
  
  
• Ten predictions about the media for 2019.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Summary: Everyone will be trying to buy everyone else and/or stab everyone else in the back, while violating customer privacy and making a whole lot of crap.  Also blockchain.
  
  
• Ultima Thule is shaped like a peanut.  The first high-resolution images should be received tomorrow, but it will take until September 2020 for all the flyby data to be received.
  
  I know how that feels, New Horizons.  I've been waiting for my fibre internet connection nearly as long as you've been alive.
  
  Update: I looked up Ultima Thule on Twitter to see if the first high-res images have come in yet and instead I find idiots bitching about Space Nazis. (Newsweek)
  
  Update: Had better luck on Ars Technica.
  
  
  
  
  

Social Media News

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, January 02 2019 05:17 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 03 2019 02:01 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Ed Hering at Thursday, January 03 2019 04:54 AM (/cXdK)

Posted by: cxt217 at Friday, January 04 2019 09:37 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 04 2019 07:23 PM (PiXy!)

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• Star Control: Origins has been removed from Steam because - as far as I can tell - the designers of Star Control II are jerks.  (OC3D)
  
  Those same jerks are why you can't get Star Control I and II on GOG at the moment, even though they were earning royalties on the sales.
  
  Right now Star Control: Origins is still available on GOG though that may change at any moment.  Oh, and also on Stardock's own site, which is less likely to change, since Stardock has already countersued over the DMCA notices.
  
  
• Netflix has told Apple to go bite itself.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Apple made around $250 million as its cut of Netflix purchases through Netflix's iOS app in 2018 alone.  
  
  
• Swarm has been fined nearly a million dollars by the FCC for launching unlicensed space bees.  (MIT Technology Review)
  
  What it says.
  
  
• First leak of 2019 looks like Nvidia's RTX 2060.  (PC Perspective)
  
  I'm not sure what the point of a low-end RTX card is, exactly.  The big new feature is ray tracing, and even the 2080 Ti is too slow to do that usefully.  But now might be a good time to grab a GTX 1070 or 1070 Ti.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Five tech stories you're already sick of hearing about.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• China's Chang'e 4 probe is set to land on the far side of the moon in the next couple of days.  (South China Morning Post)
  
  Despite the fact that the Soviet probe Luna 2 first landed - rather hard - on the Moon all the way back in 1959, this will be the first probe to make a landing on the far side.  
  
  The Chang'e rover - China's second Moon rover after 2013's Jade Rabbit - will communicate with Earth via a dedicated satellite called Queqiao, or Magpie Bridge.
  
  This being a Chinese mission, many details remain undisclosed, but it has been confirmed that yes, there are silkworms aboard.
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Pictures of the Day

Posted by: cxt217 at Wednesday, January 02 2019 01:04 PM (LMsTt)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, January 02 2019 02:55 PM (PiXy!)

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