Month: December 2017

(credit: Brittgow)

A 23-year-old man in Chicago developed a rare, festering fungal lesion on his lower lip after he reportedly “snipped a pimple” with a woodworking blade.

Doctors at the John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County treated the man, who was an otherwise healthy construction worker. In a case report, recently published in The Journal of Emergency Medicine, the doctors described the lesion as a blood-crusted, warty plaque with a hardened boarder. It spanned the width of his mouth and had erupted just below his lips. You can see it here, but warning: it’s really gross.

The man reported that it had developed over the course of seven months, after he took the woodworking tools to what he called a pimple (although it’s possible it was any type of skin lesion, including a canker or cold sore).

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On Wednesday, a US District judge in Detroit sentenced Oliver Schmidt, a former Volkswagen executive, to seven years in prison for his role in the Volkswagen diesel emissions scandal of 2015. Schmidt was also ordered to pay a criminal penalty of $400,000, according to a US Department of Justice (DOJ) press release. The prison term and the fine together represent the maximum sentence that Schmidt could have received under the plea deal he signed in August.

Schmidt, a German citizen who lived in Detroit as an emissions compliance executive for VW, was arrested in Miami on vacation last January. In August, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy and to making a false statement under the Clean Air Act. Schmidt’s plea deal stated that the former executive could face up to seven years in prison and between $40,000 and $400,000 in fines.

Last week, Schmidt’s attorneys made a last-minute bid requesting a lighter sentence for Schmidt: 40 months of supervised release and a $100,000 fine. Schmidt also wrote a letter to the judge, which surfaced over the weekend, in which the executive said he felt “misused” by his own company and claimed that higher-ranked VW executives coached him on a script to help him lie to a California Air Resources Board (CARB) official.

Enlarge / High Sierra wallpaper. The low-hanging clouds in the background may or may not be related to the name. (credit: Apple)

Rounding out several days of OS updates that included iOS 11.2, tvOS 11.2, and watchOS 4.2, Apple today rolled out macOS High Sierra 10.13.2 for supported Macs. You can download the update now from the Mac App Store.

The update offers no new features; rather, it is focused mostly on enterprise and security updates. Consumer-facing changes include improved compatibility with some third-party USB devices and accessibility changes like improved VoiceOver navigation in Preview and Braille in the Mail app. The enterprise updates improve keychain performance and fix a few bugs.

As for the security updates, macOS 10.13.2 includes a permanent fix for the widely reported and previously addressed root user credentials bug, several issues related to the Intel graphics driver, the Mail app (S/MIME encryption issues), and more.

The beauty of comics may be the infinite range of stories they can tell. Unlike film and television—with the accompanying restraints of those media due to production costs, broadcast standards, ratings potential, etc.—comics can simply get as crazy and imaginative as a writer wants.

Happy, SyFy's new series drawing upon the Grant Morrison comic of the same name, is the kind of comic-inspired adaptation that may not have existed a few years back. The violence can be extreme, the concept itself (a twisted buddy-cop caper involving a disgraced hitman and an imaginary unicorn) is absurd, and the humor and situations definitely exist in the high-end of the TV-MA range. But as the array of content-hungry providers has diversified and comics as varied as The Walking Dead, Legion, and Preacher paved the way, a show like Happy can finally exist on television, too.

We've collectively come a long, long way from Adam West's Batman or even the more recent Dean Cain in Lois & Clark. And for a certain type of fan, that's a very welcome development.

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm is hosting the "Snapdragon Technology Summit" in Hawaii this week, where it unveiled its flagship system-on-a-chip (SoC) for 2018: the Snapdragon 845. Qualcomm has a near-monopoly on the high-end smartphone SoC market, so unless you're buying an iPhone or non-US Samsung phone, you can expect most 2018 flagship smartphones to be powered by Qualcomm's latest. You might even see the chip in your next laptop, with Qualcomm breaking into the Windows 10 market.

The SoC is manufactured by Samsung on the company's 10nm process, just like the Snapdragon 835. The Kryo 385 is once again a derivative of ARM's Cortex CPU, with four "performance" cores (based on the Cortex A75) clocked at up to 2.8GHz and four "efficiency" cores (based on the Cortex A55) that run at up to 1.8GHz. Qualcomm is boosting the performance core clock speeds by 19 percent over the Snapdragon 835, but thanks to a CPU redesign, Qualcomm is promising a "25-percent performance uplift" over the previous generation. The CPU also gets a new 2MB L3 cache and 3MB of system cache.

The GPU is now the Adreno 630, and Qualcomm is promising "30-percent faster graphics" and "30-percent better power efficiency." The company says a 2.5×-faster display throughput will allow for a 2K×2K display at 120Hz. Qualcomm is really pushing AR and VR with the Snapdragon 845, promising out-of-the-box support for eye tracking, hand tracking, foveated rendering (adding more detail to the part of the screen you're looking at), multiview rendering (great for rendering the left and right eyes in VR goggles), and HTC Vive-style six degree of freedom (6DoF) tracking for headsets and controllers. In fact, the Adreno 630 GPU isn't even called a "GPU" anymore—now it's a "Visual Processing Subsystem." It's not that any of this was impossible before, but now Qualcomm is officially supporting all of these VR/AR use cases out of the box.