Month: July 2019

Enlarge / Lombard Street in San Francisco. (credit: Getty Images | Michael Lee)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to preempt part of a San Francisco ordinance that promotes broadband competition in apartment buildings and other multi-tenant structures. But it's not clear exactly what effect the preemption will have, because San Francisco says the FCC's Republican majority has misinterpreted what the law does.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's plan partially overturns San Francisco's Article 52, which lets Internet service providers use the existing wiring inside multi-unit buildings even if another ISP already serves the building. The FCC said it's preempting the law "to the extent it requires the sharing of in-use wiring." But Pai's proposal admits the FCC doesn't know whether the San Francisco law actually requires sharing of in-use wiring, which makes it difficult to understand whether the FCC preemption will change anything in practice.

San Francisco itself told the FCC that its law doesn't apply to in-use wiring, and the law's text never uses the phrase "in-use." Instead, it applies to "any existing wiring," which the FCC says could be interpreted to include wiring that's actively being used by another ISP.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

AMD debuted its new Ryzen 3000 desktop CPU line a few weeks ago at E3, and it looked fantastic. For the first time in 20 years, it looked like AMD could go head to head with Intel's desktop CPU line-up across the board. The question: would independent, third-party testing back up AMD's assertions?

When comparing two CPUs, you should generally be looking at three golden criteria: price, performance, and power consumption. It's fairly easy to win on a single criterion—for example, even in the Piledriver era, comparing an FX-9590 to an i7-4770 could get you an anemic multi-threaded performance win. But the Piledriver part cost more than the Intel one and consumed tremendously more power. Moving forward to the Ryzen 2 era, things got much closer to even: when comparing a Ryzen 7 2700 vs an Intel i7-8700, the Intel CPU takes the performance win, and power consumption is relatively even, but the AMD part has a big price advantage. This is arguably an even heat for that particular lineup—but if you care more about performance, moving the AMD side up to a Threadripper 2950x brings you to an enormous win for Intel on both power consumption and price.

With the Ryzen 3000 series, this dynamic changes. AMD's new 7nm process technology allows it to ramp up the performance to challenge Intel's higher-end lineup without veering into power consumption profiles that look more like a welder than a CPU, and it's already shipping the CPUs retail. So in addition to coverage from professional reviewers at Tom's Hardware, PCworld, Gizmodo, and more, end-user benchmarks are showing up at aggregators like cpubenchmark.net. All of them bear out AMD's E3 show numbers in broad strokes—if you're looking for a Ryzen 3000 series CPU to meet or beat any given Intel CPU on performance while beating it on price and power consumption, you can find one.

Enlarge / A view of the Apidima 1 skull from behind (left), above (center), and below (right). The scale bar represents 5 cm. (credit: Harvati et al. 2019)

A few fossilized bones from the back of a skull may prove that our species spread into Eurasia much earlier than previously suspected. A new study of the partial skull, which was excavated from Apidima Cave in southern Greece 40 years ago, suggests that the fossil is Homo sapiens and that it’s roughly 210,000 years old. That makes it the oldest member of our species ever found outside of Africa.

The fossil, known as Apidima 1, is likely the remains of a member of an early wave of humans who spread into Eurasia. Based on genetic studies and the fossil record, anthropologists think these early pioneers failed to gain a successful foothold and ended up being replaced by Neanderthals (for a while, at least).

A new look at an old skull

Archaeologists excavating Apidima Cave in the 1970s found the partial skull lodged in a chunk of breccia, just a few centimeters away from a broken and distorted Neanderthal skull called Apidima 2, which dated to 170,000 years old. For decades, archaeologists assumed Apidima 1 was a Neanderthal, too. But Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati and her colleagues recently took a second look at Apidima 1. The partial skull included just the right pieces of bone to reveal something important: the skull was rounded at the back—a feature that’s unique to Homo sapiens.

Enlarge (credit: Android)

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  We don't have any Beta 5 pictures yet, but here's what the gesture navigation system looked like in earlier builds. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Today Google is launching Android Q beta 5, the fifth of six beta releases before we get the final version of Android Q, version 10. Google already finalized the Android Q APIs in Beta 4, so what does that leave for this release? Apparently lots of changes to gesture navigation.

To recap: with Android Q Google is introducing a brand new "Fully gestural" navigation system, which eschews Android's traditional three-button navigation system for a gesture system that enables all three functions (Back, Home, and Recent Apps) to be triggered with swipes. The new navigation system saves a ton of space, with only a transparent gesture bar at the bottom of the screen, just like on an iPhone X.

Three functions do not quite cover all of the functionality of the old three-button bar, however. You could also long press on the home button to summon the Google Assistant, and in previous betas, this feature didn't make it to the gesture-navigation system. For Beta 5, Google is introducing a new gesture for the Google Assistant—swipe up from the corner. Dragging in from either bottom corner of the screen will now open the Google Assistant, and Google says "you’ll notice ‘handles’ that serve as a visual affordance that we’re continuing to tune."