FUNKY GREEN: 09/27/19

Friday 27 September 2019

The best USB-C PD chargers of 2019 - CNET

Need to charge your phone? Wireless headphones? Laptops? These chargers can do it all.

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The 2020 Audi RS Q3 comes in two flavors video - Roadshow

Fans of the Audi RS Q3 now have a choice of two body types. The regular RS Q3 or the Sportback version.

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'Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order' trailer teases new story details

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Personal info on nearly 5 million DoorDash users, drivers, and merchants exposed

Driver’s licence numbers of approximately 100,000 ‘Dashers’ were also accessed.

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Hand Tracking on Oculus Quest hands on review: Serious immersion, with a caveat

Using the cameras already built into the Quest, the software is able to sense and recreate your hands and individual finger movement in VR. Is it too good to be true?

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Microsoft Surface Event

Microsoft's annual Surface hardware event is upon us, and so far, it's looking like one of the biggest in recent memory. The keynote, starting at 10AM EST on October 2, is Microsoft's chance to focus on its booming hardware business. That includes updates to devices like the Surface Pro 2-in-1 and Surface Laptop, as well […]

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DARPA aims to make networks 100 times speedier with FastNIC

Having a slow connection is always frustrating, but just imagine how supercomputers feel. All those cores doing all kinds of processing at lightning speed, but in the end they’re all waiting on an outdated network interface to stay in sync. DARPA doesn’t like it. So DARPA wants to change it — specifically by making a new network interface a hundred times faster.

The problem is this. As DARPA estimates it, processors and memory on a computer or server can in a general sense work at a speed of roughly 10^14 bits per second — that’s comfortably into the terabit region — and networking hardware like switches and fiber are capable of about the same.

“The true bottleneck for processor throughput is the network interface used to connect a machine to an external network, such as an Ethernet, therefore severely limiting a processor’s data ingest capability,” explained DARPA’s Jonathan Smith in a news post by the agency about the project. (Emphasis mine.)

That network interface usually takes the form of a card (making it a NIC) and handles accepting data from the network and passing it on to the computer’s own systems, or vice versa. Unfortunately its performance is typically more in the gigabit range.

DARPA wants to build an AI to find the patterns hidden in global chaos

That delta between the NIC and the other components of the network means a fundamental limit in how quickly information can be shared between different computing units — like the hundreds or thousands of servers and GPUs that make up supercomputers and datacenters. The faster one unit can share its information with another, the faster they can move on to the next task.

Think of it like this: You run an apple farm, and every apple needs to be inspected and polished. You’ve got people inspecting apples and people polishing apples, and both can do 14 apples a minute. But the conveyor belts between the departments only carry 10 apples per minute. You can see how things would pile up, and how frustrating it would be for everyone involved!

With the FastNIC program, DARPA wants to “reinvent the network stack” and improve throughput by a factor of 100. After all, if they can crack this problem, their supercomputers will be at an immense advantage over others in the world, in particular those in China, which has vied with the U.S. in the high performance computing arena for years. But it’s not going to be easy.

$600M Cray supercomputer will tower above the rest — to build better nukes

“There is a lot of expense and complexity involved in building a network stack,” said Smith, the first of which will be physically redesigning the interface. “It starts with the hardware; if you cannot get that right, you are stuck. Software can’t make things faster than the physical layer will allow so we have to first change the physical layer.”

The other main part will, naturally, be redoing the software side to deal with the immense increase in the scale of the data the interface will have to handle. Even a 2x or 4x change would necessitate systematic improvements; 100x will involve pretty much a ground-up redo of the system.

The agency’s researchers — bolstered, of course, by any private industry folks who want to chip in, so to speak — aim to demonstrate a 10 terabit connection, though there’s no timeline just yet. But the good news for now is that all the software libraries created by FastNIC will be open source, so this standard won’t be limited to the Defense Department’s proprietary systems.

FastNIC is only just getting started, so forget about it for now and we’ll let you know when DARPA cracks the code in a year or three.

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A Maryland gas station owner dumps his pumps for EV chargers - Roadshow

How was this not a thing already?

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Uten Bluetooth Body Fat Scale - Smart Digital BMI Scale, Bathroom Wireless Weight Scale, Body Composition Analyzer with Smartphone App 400 lbs - Black - CNET

Uten Bluetooth Body Fat Scale - Smart Digital BMI Scale, Bathroom Wireless Weight Scale, Body Composition Analyzer with Smartphone App 400 lbs - Black

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Amazon Echo Glow: Hands-on first impressions

Increasingly sensitive to criticism of its privacy practices, Amazon leaves a microphone out of this child-oriented smart lamp.

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Elgato makes an extendable rigging system for streamers and creators

Image: Elgato

Earlier this year, Elgato announced a lighting rig that can attach to a desk so YouTube creators, Twitch streamers, and other online content makers can more easily light their home setups.

Today, Elgato is taking that idea a step further by announcing the Multi Mount, an extendable, multi-purpose rigging system creators can use for their lighting, cameras, mics, or whatever they want to mount.

Image: Elgato

The basic $49.99 Multi Mount can be extended all the way up to 45 inches, clamps to a desk, and has a center ball head with a one-fourth inch screw that you can mount gear on.

If you want to pay for more accessories, you can make the Multi Mount do more: a $39.99 “flex arm” that can bend at three different spots...

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The NBA 2K League expands beyond the NBA with new Shanghai team

Photo by Steven Freeman/NBAE via Getty Images

The NBA 2K League kicked off in 2018 with an interesting premise: a group of professional teams, each affiliated with an NBA squad, playing a virtual rendition of the sport. Now, after two seasons, the league is looking to expand beyond the NBA with a new club based in Shanghai. The Chinese team will be the first in the league based outside of North America and the first not operated by an NBA team.

The currently unnamed squad will be owned and operated by Gen.G, a multigame e-sports organization that currently has teams in PUBG, Fortnite, League of Legends, and also owns the Seoul Dynasty of the Overwatch League. The Shanghai team will join the league in 2020, and it will be based out of Gen.G’s Los Angeles office. Like all other 2K L...

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Why We Upgraded Our Reviews Approach for Apple’s iPhone 11

While tech reviewers last week encouraged people to upgrade to Apple’s newest phones, The New York Times recommended something different: to cherish the phone you have, and upgrade if you must. Here’s why.

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