Month: January 2017

Enlarge (credit: Prayitno)

Cisco is digging deep into its pockets to spend approximately $3.7 billion (£2.94 billion) on business software firm AppDynamics—an apparently bold bid to make the networking giant more attractive to large enterprise customers.

San Francisco-based, privately-held AppDynamics, which describes itself as a "performance management and IT operations analytics company," was a day away from pricing its long-awaited IPO—the first of 2017—which observers suggested might have gone some way to inflating its value.

"The fact that they were in their IPO process represented a window where we needed to make a decision," Cisco's corporate development vice president, Rob Salvagno, said in an interview with Reuters.

Enlarge / Cops. (credit: Erland Grøtberg / Getty Images News)

The New York Civil Liberties Union is pushing a new state bill that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant prior to deploying a cell-site simulator, or stingray. The bill also includes other new restrictions.

Cell-site simulators, or fake cell towers, are often used by police to locate criminal suspects by tricking their phones into giving up their location. In some cases, simulators can also be used to intercept phone calls and text messages. Use of these devices has been heavily scrutinized in recent years—in September 2015, the Department of Justice said it would require its federal agents to seek a warrant before deployment.

The proposed law was inspired by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California’s successful efforts in 2015. The New York law was introduced in 2016, but it didn’t get far. New York Assembly Bill 1895 was re-introduced on January 13, 2017 but hasn’t had any hearings as of yet. To become law, the bill would have to pass the Assembly and the state Senate before being signed by the governor.

Not everyone can make a city of meat.

To build something like this, the weirdness cannot just be an accoutrement, an accessory to a more familiar structure. The idiosyncrasies of biological life must be considered, the fact that we are, underneath our skin, a venous clockwork of offal twitching wetly in its varied cavities. More importantly, there needs to be an understanding of why this terrifies us, and how those fears intersect with our trepidations about urban life.

Luckily, inXile Entertainment are experts.

Enlarge (credit: Mark Walton)

What constitutes a "budget" graphics card? I'd argue that it's anything that costs less than £250/$250. Although—as evidenced by the, uhh, constructive feedback on the Nvidia GTX 1060 and AMD RX 480 reviews—not everyone agrees. Fortunately, both AMD and Nvidia have updated their range of sub-£250 graphics cards in recent months, with their more efficient Polaris and Pascal architectures promising better performance without the need for extravagant cooling and power requirements. The cheapest card of the lot, AMD's RX 460, costs a mere £112/$110.

At this end of the market, where the cheapest cards don't even require an external power connector to function, the target is good quality 1080p gaming above 30FPS, or high frame rates for e-sports players at 720p. These are those modest goals that all the graphics cards on test hit, but what's surprising is just how much performance you get for such a small outlay. No, the RX 470, RX 460, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1050 won't blow your socks off in the same way a GTX 1080 will, but they are all excellent, affordable cards that fill a niche and price point.

The question is, which of these budget wonders offers the most bang for your buck?