Month: April 2020

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  The OnePlus 8 Pro. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Today, OnePlus is launching its flagship smartphones for 2020, the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro. OnePlus made a name for itself in the smartphone industry with great value-for-money offerings, but this year, get ready for some sticker shock. The OnePlus 8 is $699, a $100 increase over the $599 OnePlus 7T, and the OnePlus 8 Pro is $899, a whopping $230 increase over the $669 OnePlus 7 Pro. Welcome to 2020: the year of the super-expensive smartphone.

Since these phones are just being introduced today, we should talk about what's new for this price. At first blush, the OnePlus 8 Pro is about what you would expect from a 2020 smartphone. There's a Snapdragon 865, a 6.78-inch, 3168×1440 120Hz OLED display, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 4510mAh battery. There's also a higher spec version with 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage (for $100 more, so $999). The 8 Pro is much more expensive than previous years, but with the bigger price comes fixes for long-standing omissions from OnePlus' typical phones: the 8 Pro has wireless charging—a speedy 30W wireless charging system—and an IP68 water-resistance rating. The other big OnePlus omission we've complained about year after year—the lack of an always-on display mode—still hasn't been addressed here, though OnePlus says it is working on it.

The cheaper OnePlus 8 is basically the 7 Pro with updated specs—it comes without the pop-up camera and with a lower-quality rear camera system. Compared to the 8 Pro, there's still a Snapdragon 865, there's still 8 or 12GB of RAM (albeit with slower LPDDR4X instead of the DDR5 in the 8 Pro), and still 128 or 256GB of UFS 3.0 storage. The higher-spec tier of 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage is still $100 more, so $799. The big downgrades come in the display, which drops down to 90Hz instead of 120Hz and uses a slightly smaller 6.55-inch display plus a totally fine 1080p resolution instead of 1440p. The cameras get cheaper sensors, the battery is a smaller 4300mAh, and the big additions to the 8 Pro—wireless charging and IP68 water resistance—aren't on the OnePlus 8, though OnePlus says the phone is still somewhat water-resistant.

Enlarge (credit: Man Sun)

And now for a bit of research that is suddenly highly relevant in today’s locked-up and closed-in world: noise reduction. Does air-conditioning drive you mad? The constant hiss of sterile air?

The average building designer doesn’t seem to give a damn about it. As long as water doesn’t drip out of the vents and the dust is kinda-sorta-filtered out… well, you’ve got headphones don’t you?

Don’t stop the hiss

It is actually surprisingly difficult to get rid of ventilation noises. Fans and airflow are noisy, and the very ducting that allows the air to flow into your office space also allows the sound in. Therefore, the easiest way to get rid of ventilation noises is to just close the air duct. More realistically, you need a baffle that damps the sound waves over a wide range of frequencies but doesn’t restrict air flow.

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Almost 20 years ago, faculty in the chemistry department of Stanford University launched a distributed computing project called Folding@Home (F@H). They sought to understand how proteins self-organize and why this process sometimes goes wrong, causing issues such as cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease.

F@H hit its pinnacle of mindshare—and performance—in 2007, when Sony added it to the PlayStation 3. But like many other projects, it saw a gradual decline in its popularity since. This past March, however, F@H saw a sudden resurgence. Thanks to a confluence of events, notably including the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, Folding@Home broke the exaFLOP barrier at least one or two years before Intel, AMD, IBM, or Cray could do it. Here’s how those events played out.

In distribution

Distributed computing projects partition a massive processing job out to individual computers, with each doing a small slice of the job. You can set the most distributed computing apps to run only when your PC is idle or let it run in the background while using it.