Month: March 2017

Sam Machkovech

SAN FRANCISCO—The Game Developers Conference has always offered dedicated panels and stages for the biggest mobile games of the moment, so it was no surprise that Pokémon Go, which didn't even exist last March, made an appearance. The game's single panel at this year's event may not have been ripe with tell-alls and behind-the-scenes looks at its every facet, but it still proved a solid look at the phenomenon's early stages.

Niantic visual design director Dennis Hwang was on hand to recall the successes of the developer's prior augmented-reality game, Ingress. That included thousands-strong user meetups organized by players themselves, along with users posting GPS-tracked walks to Ingress points of interest (and saying they lost weight as a result of all that walking). "Our goals initially were modest," Hwang said. "If [our players] just walked a few extra blocks, we would have been totally happy, because we knew how hard it was to motivate someone to get off a chair and move due to some app or game."

Offshore wind turbines in the Irish Sea, in calm weather. (credit: Photograph by Andy Dingley/Wikimedia Commons)

How much wind power a system can incorporate is a significant problem in power grid management. At a basic level, grid operators can’t control when the wind blows, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that more traditional generators can’t always be ramped up quickly if the wind suddenly cuts out. If gusts unexpectedly stop gusting on a hot July day and everyone on the east coast reaches to turn on their air-conditioning at the same time, grid operators can neither generate electricity from the wind, nor can they always immediately generate electricity from more traditional sources, because those need time to ramp up. Thus a generation shortage occurs—and that can lead to a power outage.

A recent pair of studies conducted by the University of Delaware and Princeton University tried to asses how much wind power PJM Interconnection, an East Coast-based grid operator that serves 60 million people in 14 states, could incorporate before the wind's unpredictability might put grid reliability at risk.

The researchers ran hundreds of simulations to see how well the grid could adjust to five levels of offshore wind farm build-out along the US Atlantic coast: level 1 added 7 gigawatts of installed capacity and level 5 added 70 gigawatts of installed capacity.

Enlarge / The launch of India's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle on Feb. 15th. (credit: ISRO)

The Director of National Intelligence oversees the US intelligence community of 16 different organizations, including the CIA, FBI, National Security Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office. A key component of the job involves ensuring that US spy satellite assets remain peerless in their capability to observe activities on Earth.

During his confirmation hearing this week the Trump administration's nominee for this cabinet level position, former Senator Dan Coats, assured the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that he would remain vigilant in keeping the nation's reconnaissance satellites ahead of the global curve. The United States would also speed up the process by which it gets new technologies into space, he said.

However, when citing an example to make this point, Coats pointed toward the launch of the Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle earlier this month and its deployment of 104 satellites. “I was shocked the other day to read that the nation of India, on one rocket launch, deposited more than a hundred satellites in space,” he said, according to Space News. “They may be small in size with different functions and so forth, but one rocket can send up [more than 100] platforms…We’ve seen now 11 nations that have the capacity to launch instruments into space.”

AMD

It's fair to say that AMD's last attempt at building a performance desktop processor was not tremendously successful.

The Bulldozer core released in 2011 had a design that can, at best, be described as idiosyncratic. AMD made three bets with Bulldozer: that general purpose workloads would become increasingly multithreaded, that floating point intensive workloads would become increasingly GPU-driven, and that it would be able to aggressively scale clock speeds.

Sebastian Anthony

It's finally happened. Over a decade after Intel's Core architecture launched and began a period of market domination that few would have predicted, competition at the high end of the desktop market is back.

AMD Ryzen—a line of desktop CPUs that will soon range from four-core lightweights to eight-core monsters like the Ryzen 7 1800X—aren't the fastest processors in terms of pure instructions per clock (IPC). Nor does every application take full advantage of their multicore prowess. And if you're a gamer, Ryzen in its current state is not the CPU to buy.

Enlarge / Laid-off unionized IT workers at the University of California's San Francisco campus protested and spoke to the media on their last day of work. (credit: IDG News Service)

At the University of California's San Francisco campus, 79 IT employees lost their jobs this week, some of them after explaining to their replacements at Indian outsourcing firm HCL how to do their jobs.

The union representing the employees, University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119, says it's the first time a public university has offshored American IT jobs.

In a statement sent yesterday, UPTE-CWA says the layoffs could spread, since the HCL contract can be utilized by any of the 10 campuses in the University of California system, the nation's largest public university. "US taxes should be used to create jobs in the US, not in other countries," said Kurt Ho, a systems administrator who was quoted in the union's press release. Ho was required to train his replacement as a condition of getting his severance pay.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | mediaphotos)

Another replacement chemical intended to skirt BPA’s hormone-disrupting potential may itself have troubling hormone-disrupting ways, a new study suggests.

Fluorene-9-bisphenol (BHPF), a bisphenol A-alternative used in a wide variety of products, interfered with estrogen signaling in yeast and mouse experiments, researchers reported in Nature Communications. In a yeast assay, BHPF proved capable of blocking estrogen—a female sex hormone involved in reproductive system development and pregnancy. In mice, high doses of the chemical caused pregnant females to have smaller wombs, litters, and pups.

The study provides yet another example of a BPA-alternative chemical displaying similar hormone-disrupting potential to BPA, which Ars has reported on previously.