Month: April 2019

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Update (2:37pm ET 04/11/2019): Shortly after this article was published, Walmart lowered the price of our featured deal by another $50 to $799. We've updated our headline and the article below to reflect this.

Original article: Greetings, Arsians! The Dealmaster is back with another round of deals to share. Today's list is headlined by a deal on Dell's G5 15 gaming laptop—a configuration with Intel's Core i5-8300H CPU, 16GB of RAM, and Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU is down to $799 at Walmart. Dell usually sells this model for $1,100, so this is about a $300 discount.

To be clear, this is technically Dell's last-gen G5 15—the company slightly refreshed most of its gaming lineup earlier this year—and the notebook isn't without flaws. The chassis is mostly plastic, the 15.6-inch 1080p display isn't exactly high-end, and, this being a gaming laptop, the whole thing isn't very thin (0.98 in.) or light (5.76 lbs.). Its fans will make some noise, too. But such is life with a budget gaming laptop. What you're really paying for here is the ability to play newer games in 1080p—preferably on high, not ultra, settings—on the (relative) cheap. The 6GB GTX 1060 is Nvidia's lower-powered Max-Q variant, and it's not the most cutting-edge card these days, but until notebooks with newer GPUs like the GTX 1660 become more prevalent, it's still powerful enough to get the job done. The laptop itself includes a Thunderbolt 3 port and should get about five hours of battery through Web browsing. All told, it feels like a good value at this price.

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  Here's the new Currents logo. [credit: Google ]

Google+ may have shut down its consumer side earlier this month, but the code base still lives on at Google. After diving into the social media wars and getting routed, Google+ will live out its retirement as "Google Currents"—it's the Google+ code base, but with an enterprise focus. The reborn Google+/Currents will now do battle with Facebook again, this time with the enterprise version of Facebook, called "Workplace," and also Microsoft's Yammer. Surely things will go differently this time.

Google Currents is uh, currently launching as a beta service that G Suite admins can request access to. The enterprise focus means it's for paying G Suite customers only. Google's blog post says Currents "enables people to have meaningful discussions and interactions across your organization, helping keep everyone in the know and giving leaders the opportunity to connect with their employees." Currents looks exactly like Google+, but with a new logo and maybe a slightly whiter color scheme.

Currents is now the second big enterprise communication tool from Google. The other is Google Hangouts Chat, which is a Google's version of a Slack clone. Just like Currents, Hangouts Chat is closely associated with a dying consumer Google product, Google Hangouts. (Why does it seem like G Suite is getting all the consumer leftovers?) Both products will greatly benefit from their association with G Suite, which pulls in enterprise customers with killer apps like Gmail, Calendar, Docs, and Drive. The sales pitch is basically "Since you're already paying for that sweet Gmail account with a custom domain, why not try out these social apps, too?"

Enlarge / Interstate 55, Dixie Truck Stop, parking lot. (credit: Photo by: Jeffrey Greenberg/UIG via Getty Images)

Transportation is one of the major causes of greenhouse gas emissions in the US, and medium- and heavy-duty trucks account for about a quarter of all transportation-related emissions. At present, semis and other long-haul trucks are mostly diesel-powered, so they emit nitrogen oxides and particulates that aren't just bad for the climate; they're bad for human health as well.

Tesla made a splash in 2017 when it introduced its all-electric semi truck, and announcements from other trucking companies followed. Daimler sold small electric delivery trucks and has an electric Cascadia in development, Nikola announced a hydrogen-powered fuel cell truck, and Siemens debuted a catenary system for freight. Yet two years later, trucking in the US is still driven by diesel-fueled, compression-ignition (CI), internal combustion engines.

Daniel Cohn and Leslie Bromberg, a pair of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a paper with the Society of Automotive Engineers, suggesting that the best way forward is not to wait for all-electric or hydrogen-powered semis, but to build a plug-in hybrid electric (PHEV) truck with an internal combustion engine/generator that can burn either gasoline or renewable ethanol or methanol.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Roberto Machado Noa)

A decade-long observational study of more than 30,000 people finds that certain vitamins and minerals may help extend your life and keep you from dying of cardiovascular disease—but only if you get those beneficial nutrients from foods, not supplements.

The study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is yet another to find that taking supplemental vitamins and minerals—either individually or in multivitamins—offers no discernible benefits in terms of reducing risks of death generally or death from cardiovascular disease and cancers, specifically. Simply put, popping pills can’t take the place of eating a healthy diet—an unflashy takeaway that likely won’t please the massive, $30 billion supplement industry.

Moreover, the study didn’t just find a lack of benefits from supplements. It also found potential harms. Getting high doses of calcium (1,000 mg or more per day) from supplements—but not from foods—was linked to higher cancer mortality risks in the study. Likewise, people taking vitamin D supplements who didn’t have vitamin D deficiencies may have higher risks of all-cause mortality and death from cancers.

Enlarge / This is a 10-core Skylake-X processor. It uses the low core count (LCC) version of the Skylake-SP die. (credit: Fritzchens Fritz / Flickr)

We learned in January that Intel was planning a new top-end Core i9 Extreme Edition processor: the i9-9990XE. Though it would have fewer cores than the previous top—14 cores and 28 threads compared to the i9-9980XE's 18 cores and 36 threads—it would make up for this in clock speed. The i9-9990XE is clocked at 4.0 to 5.0GHz, compared to 3.0 to 4.5GHz. Power consumption has increased as well, to 255W, 95W more than the 160W i9-9980XE. The price of the new chip? Undetermined. Instead of selling them to end users, Intel's plan was to auction them to high-end system builders, such that the chips would only be sold in complete systems.

But now we have a price. Anandtech reports that one of those high-end system builders, CaseKing.de, has decided to sell the bare chip anyway. The price of this monster? €2,999 (about $3,400).

The bespoke, high-end computer market is a slightly strange one. These systems, often water cooled and factory overclocked, typically have all the trappings of a gamer system, including windowed cases and multicolored lights. Wealthy gamers and streamers are certainly part of their audience. However, another significant market is much less interested in the lights and colors—the systems are sold to high-frequency traders and others within the finance world. These groups put a high premium on single-threaded performance and large caches, and they will spend large sums to be slightly faster than their competitors.