Month: April 2020

Enlarge / Despite the name, you don't actually need an RTX-branded card like this one to run "RTX Voice" background noise cancellation. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Earlier this month, Nvidia launched RTX Voice, a beta plugin that "leverages NVIDIA RTX GPUs and their AI capabilities to remove distracting background noise from your broadcasts and voice chats," as Nvidia put it in its announcement. But despite the "RTX" branding, Ars testing confirms that the feature also works perfectly well on older GTX-level graphics cards. And despite that finding, Nvidia's installer refuses to allow the app on systems with non-RTX cards, unless the user performs some unintended config-file tinkering.

First, the good news: Nvidia's GTX Voice technology actually works really well. As you can hear in the test sample below, turning on the feature filters out almost all of the mechanical keyboard clicking picked up by a standard webcam microphone. That's likely to be an especially useful feature for anyone who has tried typing notes during a Zoom video call or dealt with kids screaming in other rooms during the same.

Now for the more questionable news: the "RTX" in "RTX Voice" seems to be a marketing misnomer. We know this only because of a workaround (seemingly first disclosed publicly by a Guru3D forum poster) that tricks the RTX Voice installer into working on a system with an older Nvidia graphics card. The process is as simple as running the installer, editing out a few lines from a temporary configuration file it creates, and then running the installer again without the "constraint" check active.

Enlarge / Economic activity vs. social distancing is a careful balancing act. (credit: Mata Hitij)

As Ars reported recently, evidence from the 1918 flu pandemic suggests that cities with more aggressive lockdown responses had stronger economic recoveries.

There’s more than one way to think about the economics of lockdowns, and a paper due to be published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis has an entirely different approach. It accepts that lockdowns will hurt the economy compared to business-as-usual but calculates whether that cost is outweighed by the lives that will be saved by social-distancing measures.

The answer is yes—by $5.2 trillion. That’s an estimate that changes based on a range of different assumptions, but it represents what the authors consider the most realistic scenario.

Enlarge / An AT&T sign outside a company office in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

AT&T lost another 897,000 premium TV subscribers in Q1 2020, as the DirecTV owner's string of massive customer losses continued. An AT&T executive today said the company is moving ahead with a company-wide cost-cutting program.

AT&T's earnings announcement today said the 897,000-customer net loss reduced the total number of premium TV subscribers to 18.6 million. AT&T said the latest customer loss was "due to competition and customers rolling off promotional discounts as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."

AT&T's premium TV category includes DirecTV, U-verse TV, and the new AT&T TV online offering that mimics cable and satellite services by imposing contracts, hidden fees, and a big second-year price hike. In 2019, AT&T lost 3.43 million premium TV customers, an average of nearly 860,000 per quarter.

Enlarge / Milwaukee voters wait in line at Riverside High School on April 7, 2020. (credit: Sara Stathas for the Washington Post)

Wisconsin's controversial decision to hold a primary election in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic has led to the infection of at least seven people, Milwaukee health officials say.

According to officials, six voters and one poll worker have tested positive for COVID-19. They added that more cases could emerge in the coming days. It's also not known how many infections may have happened in other parts of the state.

Fears of the coronavirus caused drastic shortfalls in volunteers to be poll workers for the April 7 election. That, in turn, forced officials to reduce the number of polling sites. Milwaukee was one of the hardest-hit parts of the state, with the number of voting locations falling from 180 to five. That forced some voters to wait in line for hours if they wanted to cast a vote.

Enlarge (credit: Nuro)

Nuro, one of the nation's best-funded self-driving vehicle startups, has begun using its robots to ferry food and medical supplies around a California stadium that has been converted into a coronavirus treatment facility, CEO Dave Ferguson announced on Wednesday.

"We realized that we could potentially use our R2 unmanned vehicles to provide truly contactless delivery of goods, where we remove any possible interaction between a driver dropping off goods and a person picking them up," Ferguson wrote. Contactless delivery could reduce the spread of COVID-19.

In a Tuesday phone interview, Nuro policy chief David Estrada told Ars that the robots are ferrying food, supplies, and medical equipment from the parking lot of Sleep Train Arena, home of the Sacramento Kings, into the stadium itself. Human workers at designated locations load the vehicles at one end of a trip and unload them at the other. The vehicles open and close their cargo doors automatically based on hand signals from the workers so they don't have to touch the vehicle.