Month: January 2017

Enlarge / Shkreli's apparent shrine to Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca after trying, and failing, to invite her to Donald Trump's inauguration ceremony. (credit: Twitter)

Martin Shkreli's Twitter account was temporarily suspended on Sunday morning. Ars has confirmed that Twitter suspended the account after the reviled pharmaceutical executive targeted Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca on the social media platform.

Shkreli's posts about and to Duca apparently began on Thursday in the form of a private, direct message sent by Shkreli, inviting her to be his date for president-elect Donald Trump's impending inauguration ceremony. Shkreli, a professed Trump supporter, may have specifically targeted Duca due to her articles about Trump at Teen Vogue, including her December editorial titled "Donald Trump is gaslighting America."

Shkreli followed Duca's public decline of the invite ("I would rather eat my own organs") by turning his Twitter profile into an apparent Duca shrine. His "header" image became a collage of various photos of Duca, covered with apparently romantic lyrics from the ballad "I Swear" ("For better or worse / 'til death do us part / I'll love you with every beat of my heart"), while his profile image was changed to a photo of Duca with her husband, only with Shkreli's face digitally inserted where the husband's should be.

Enlarge / Behold, Dell's seventh edition of the XPS 13 DE. (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

Over the course of its four-year lifespan, Dell's extremely popular XPS 13 Developer Edition line has become known for one thing—bringing a "just works" Linux experience to the company's Ultrabooks.

Of course, today Dell is just one of many manufacturers producing great Linux machines. System76 makes the Oryx Pro (still my top pick for anyone who needs massive power), and companies like Purism and ZaReason produce solid offerings that also work with Linux out of the box. Even hardware not explicitly made for Linux tends to work out of the box these days. I recently installed Fedora on a Sony Vaio and was shocked that the only problem I encountered was that the default trackpad configuration was terribly slow.

Admittedly, the Vaio is a few years old, which means there has been time for hardware issues to be addressed. Getting Linux to run on bleeding edge hardware in 2017 remains tricky—or it requires running a bleeding edge distro like Arch. That's where efforts like Dell's Project Sputnik, led by developer Barton George, come in handy. With the XPS 13 Developers Edition, the hardware is already vetted. Drivers are pre-installed and configured for a great out-of-the-box experience.

An example of the wonderful renderings you can expect in Viva Amiga. (credit: Zach Weddington)

Many years ago when I began writing the History of the Amiga, I was surprised there were so few accounts of what was truly a remarkable computing platform. Fortunately, time, nostalgia, and Kickstarter have combined to make many more recollections possible. Case in point: director Zach Weddington was able to raise funds in 2011 to make a documentary called Viva Amiga, and it’s now available to watch in 12 languages and several streaming formats. The movie premiered at this week's MAGfest, an annual games and music celebration outside of DC.

Viva Amiga is a wonderful look at the the history of the platform, the people who built it, and the users who loved it. The opening title says it all: "One Amazing Computer. One chance to save the company. One chance to win the PC wars." This message sets the stage nicely for a dramatic and passionate tale.

Viva Amiga starts with the dramatic launch party for the Amiga 1000 at Lincoln Center in 1985, next jumping back in time to cover how Jay Miner and his colleagues started the Amiga project. It highlights the Amiga’s strengths in graphics and video, saving a special mention for the Video Toaster. The excitement of Amiga developers and users at the time comes through clearly in the documentary. One of them describes the most passionate users as "people who weren’t striving to be millionaires. [They were] people who were striving to express themselves in new and creative ways."

Enlarge / The Core i7-7700K. Underwhelming? Maybe. Harbinger of death for the desktop CPU? Probably not.

Our review of Intel’s new flagship consumer desktop CPU, the Kaby Lake-based Core i7-7700K, was less-than-favorable. Out of the box, the chip runs faster than the i7-6700K that preceded it, but that’s just because it ships at a higher default clock speed. When running at the same clock speed—something easily achievable because these chips are specifically intended for overclocking—CPU and GPU performance is identical.

This feeds into a growing perception that, after several years of modest-at-best performance improvements, Intel is having trouble making its processors faster. Granted, that's not a problem for many casual-to-moderate PC users, and it's not like Intel's chips haven't improved in other big ways in the last half-decade. Power consumption is down, battery life is up, and integrated graphics performance isn't nearly as laughable as it was ten years ago. But for high-end pro users who don't want to spend $1,000 or more on a processor, the lack of performance improvements in Intel's mainstream quad-core desktop processors in particular has been frustrating.

This is an unfortunate reality brought on by the difficulties Intel is having switching to new process architectures. Moving from the 22nm process to the 14nm process in 2013 and 2014 caused several delays that pushed back the launch of the Broadwell architecture and protracted its rollout. The move from 14nm to 10nm is proving even more difficult, breaking Intel's longstanding “tick-tock” development model in which it changed manufacturing processes every two years. If leaked roadmaps are correct, “Cannonlake” laptop chips may move to the 10nm process at the tail end of 2017. But the “Coffee Lake” desktop chips will remain on the 14nm process until well into 2018.