A new study suggests that the Earth’s inner core recently stopped spinning and is changing its direction. The changing spin may be behind slight fluctuations in the length of a day from year to year. In the January 2023 issue of the science journal Nature Geoscience, researchers Xiaodong Song and Yi Yang of China’s Peking University claimed the planet’s inner core stopped spinning relative to the other layers around 2009....
Bloomberg reports that Chen Wenling, chief economist at the government-run China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said, “If the US and the West impose destructive sanctions on China like sanctions against Russia, we must recover Taiwan.” Chen singled out TSMC in the speech at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University last month. “Especially in the reconstruction of the industrial chain and supply chain, we must seize TSMC,” she added....
A two-year-old post on the Google Operating System blog offers the easiest. Simply add this bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks, load a YouTube page with a video, and then clicking the bookmarklet will provide you a direct download of the video in various qualities including 720p/1080p and in the MP4 format. This method should work just fine for Internet Explorer 8, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. Here’s a short video showing how it works (ironically hosted at competing service vimeo): Many popular media players can handle MP4 files, such as Windows Media Player, VLC, MPlayer, iTunes, QuickTime, and my personal favorite, Zoom Player....
On Friday, Elon Musk confirmed that he confronted Bill Gates about shorting Tesla stock. The leaked screenshots of texts between the two billionaires were shared on Twitter, asking Musk if they were genuine. In these screenshots, the Tesla CEO openly asked Gates if he still held a $500 million short position against Tesla. Gates admitted that he hadn’t closed it out, adding that he would like to discuss philanthropic possibilities....
PC Gamer reports that the Fortnite Token first appeared at the end of last year. Given its name and the big F it uses for a logo, you’d be forgiven for thinking there was an official affiliation with the game itself. But no; the creators describe it as a fan-created project “with no specified owner or company structure behind it.” On May 29, the Fortnite Token team invited people to mint NFT tokens to sell on the OpenSea site....
The European Commission confirms that the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) will go into effect on November 1. Under the new law, the EU could force Apple to open iOS’s walled garden by mid-2024. The DMA aims to keep “gatekeepers” from unfairly stifling businesses and competition in EU countries. The law defines gatekeepers as entities that form a significant enough link between companies and consumers to set the rules for those businesses....
But why would you go with a small form factor? SFF builds have plenty of advantages, but they may not be the perfect solution for your needs. Let’s go through some pros and cons… Pro: Perfect for a media unit For those looking to supercharge their entertainment system, a smaller computer would be a perfect fit to be used while you’re lounging on a couch. Pro: Takes up less desk or floor space Those with a small desk or limited floor space would benefit from a small build that would help to maximize available space without sacrificing power....
Things get ugly at 4K – even the mighty GTX 980 Ti struggles to provide perfectly smooth gameplay. While some would argue that an average of 45fps and a minimum of 34fps is perfectly fine, we noticed plenty of input lag that made the game feel much worse than it does at say 60fps. As usual, we’d say 4K demands multi-GPU technology for acceptable performance.
Today, things are different. There are a vast number of quality gaming laptops available that can not only match most home rigs but occasionally outperform them. Additionally, many companies now give buyers the freedom to pick and choose what goes inside their machines. If you’re thinking about going down this customizable route and want to know what components will give you a well-rounded gaming laptop, here’s a breakdown of what’s on offer....
As with Hard Reset, Dirt 3 prefers Nvidia GPUs. The GTX 670 averaged 72fps at 2560x1600, 5% slower than the GTX 680, 44% faster than the HD 7950 and GTX 580, and 16% quicker than the HD 7970. The GTX 670 averaged 46fps when testing Just Cause 2 at 2560x1600, setting it 4% behind the GTX 680 and 2% lower than the HD 7970, as well as 15% ahead of the GTX 580 and 28% beyond the HD 7950....
Once again we see that the GTX 760 is 6% slower than Gainward’s customized offering while also being 2% slower than the HD 7950, just 2% faster than the GTX 660 Ti and 4% faster than the 7870. Dirt 3’s 1920x1200 frame time performance saw the GTX 760 take 14.1ms between frames on average, making it 3% slower than the HD 7870, 9% slower than the 7950 and on par with the GTX 660 Ti....
The overclocked GTX 970 SLI cards delivered a breathtaking 89fps at 2560x1600 in Sleeping Dogs, but at 3840x2160 we received less than half that with just 41fps. This was still enough to beat the overclocked R9 290s by a 24% margin. When not overclocking, you can expect 23% more performance from the GTX 970s as they delivered a playable 37fps. Sleeping Dogs’ frame time data matches the performance trends seen when looking at the frames per second data....
The GTX 960 SLI cards again display excellent SLI scaling, this time in Sleeping Dogs. Whereas a single GTX 960 averaged just 24fps at 2560x1600, adding a second increased performance by 96% to 47fps. The dual GTX 960s were 18% faster than a GTX 970 and just 2% slower than the GTX 980 while they were 9% faster than the R9 290X but 18% slower than the R9 280X Crossfire cards....
If you happen to be tossing up between an overpriced 3080 Ti and 6800 XT, this benchmark review should be helpful. This also gives us a chance to look at another board partner version of the 3080 Ti and this one comes for a company we’ve had a lot of good experiences with in the past, but haven’t checked out anything new for quite some time, that company is Gainward....
The Brix’s HandBrake encoding performance was quite poor at just 95.2fps, almost 10fps slower than the Pentium G2020. Still, the Brix’s i5 was much faster than other low-powered processors such as the AMD A4-5300, A4-4000 and Celeron G1610. When running x264 HD Benchmark, the i5-3337U was much slower than even the Celeron G1610, only managing to best AMD’s A4-5300 and A4-4000 desktop processors. The TMPGEnc Video Master Works performance margins were similar to HandBrake’s with the Brix ranking lower than the Pentium G2020 while just outdoing the Celeron G1610....
To get a fuller picture, it’s increasingly apparent that you need to factor in a card’s frame latency, which looks at how quickly each frame is delivered. Regardless of how many frames a graphics card produces on average in 60 seconds, if it can’t deliver them all at roughly the same speed, you might see more brief jittery points with one GPU over another – something we’ve witnessed but didn’t fully understand....
I’ll start with the positives, which mostly concern the laptop’s hardware. The choice to use an Intel Core i7-6700HQ paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970M, up to 16 GB of RAM, and ultra-fast solid state storage was a good one at this laptop’s price point. This hardware combination is capable of playing today’s high-end PC games at 1440p using high or very high quality settings, which is exactly what you’d want out of a gaming laptop with these internals....
The gap between overclocked and non-overclocked HD 7950s closed to only 5% when testing Just Cause 2 at 2560x1600 and Gigabyte’s card slipped behind the GTX 580 for the first time in our testing – if only by 5%. It was also 19% slower than the HD 7970.
As expected, when at idle Gigabyte’s overclocked Radeon R9 290X and R9 290 graphics cards provided the same 62W system consumption figures as AMD’s reference cards. Our first load test was conducted using Crysis 3 and along with consuming roughly as much power as their AMD reference equivalents, Gigabyte’s R9 290 OC and R9 290X OC consumed roughly as much power as one another while using almost 10W less than Palit’s GTX 780 Ti JetStream....
