Month: September 2021

Enlarge / Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis holds a news conference at the Florida Department of Health office in Viera, Florida, on September 1, 2021. (credit: Getty | SOPA images)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday that the state's new surgeon general will be Joseph Ladapo, a UCLA researcher known for opposing evidence-based mask mandates, vaccine mandates, and lockdowns.

Instead, Dr. Ladapo advocates for the controversial idea of embracing "the reality of viral spread" to achieve herd immunity.

"Florida will completely reject fear as a way of making policies in public health," Ladapo said in a press conference Tuesday after DeSantis announced his appointment. Fear, he said, has "been unfortunately a centerpiece of health policy in the United States ever since the beginning of the pandemic and it's over here. Expiration date: it's done."

Enlarge / Coal plants at the end of the line? (credit: Ryan Pyle / Getty Images)

Chinese President Xi Jinping used his speech to the United Nations General Assembly to announce a major new step towards controlling global emissions. After reiterating his own country's climate pledges, Xi said that China would start making it easier for other countries to keep emissions in check: new support for renewable energy projects and an end to construction of coal plants.

China finances a lot of infrastructure projects in developing economies as part of its foreign policy efforts; these often have the side benefits of involving Chinese companies and engineers. When these projects involved production of electricity, they often involved China's most heavily used source: coal. As such, the number of coal plants slated for construction in the developing world was large and raised legitimate questions about the prospect of meeting any global carbon emissions targets.

China had already committed to having its emissions peak at the end of this decade and to reach carbon neutrality by 2060. But until this point, its development banks were continuing to finance coal plants, and its companies would often construct them. In a recorded speech played at the UN today, however, Xi indicated that this would stop: "China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low-carbon energy and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad."

Enlarge / It probably shouldn't be considered "surprising" when a Linux certification entity reports that Linux certifications are highly desirable. (credit: Linux Foundation)

The Linux Foundation released its 2021 Open Source Jobs Report this month, which aims to inform both sides of the IT hiring process about current trends. The report accurately foreshadows many of its conclusions in the first paragraph, saying "the talent gap that existed before the pandemic has worsened due to an acceleration of cloud-native adoption as remote work has gone mainstream." In other words: job-shopping Kubernetes and AWS experts are in luck.

The Foundation surveyed roughly 200 hiring managers and 750 open source professionals to find out which skills—and HR-friendly resume bullet points—are in the greatest demand. According to the report, college-degree requirements are trending down, but IT-certification requirements and/or preferences are trending up—and for the first time, "cloud-native" skills (such as Kubernetes management) are in higher demand than traditional Linux skills.

The hiring priority shift from traditional Linux to "cloud-native" skill sets implies that it's becoming more possible to live and breathe containers without necessarily understanding what's inside them—but you can't have Kubernetes, Docker, or similar computing stacks without a traditional operating system beneath them. In theory, any traditional operating system could become the foundation of a cloud-native stack—but in practice, Linux is overwhelmingly what clouds are made of.

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  Porsche has always shown a degree of creativity in its ability to tweak and slice the 911 to suit different customers. The new 911 GTS exemplifies that. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

ATLANTA—When it comes to cars that car nerds can obsess about, few cars get close to the Porsche 911. And with good reason: from that first show car in 1963 until today, Porsche has refined and evolved the 911 into a bewildering array of variants and versions. For example, only one turbocharged 911 is called the 911 Turbo, even though today, almost all 911s use turbocharged engines. I find it almost mystifying how well the company is able to tweak the same recipe to make cars that, to the outsider, look identical but drive completely differently and are bought by different customers.

Nothing exemplifies this (or confuses me more) than today's car in question, the 2022 911 GTS. Those three letters usually appear in combination on the back of a 911 in the run-up to the car's midlife refresh, or the change from one generation to another. But the 911 GTS isn't a single variant; it's really a range within a range, with five different 911 GTSes, each with the choice of two transmissions to pick from. See what I mean about confusion?

One engine, two transmissions, three body styles

All 911 GTSes use the same 3.0L turbocharged flat-six engine, mounted behind the rear axle, as is the tradition with the 911. In the GTS it has received a modest increase of 30 hp (22 kW) and 30 lb-ft (41 Nm) over the Carrera S and now outputs 473 hp (353 kW) and 420 lb-ft (570 Nm). The increase is thanks to an increase in boost pressure—18.6 psi (1.3 bar) versus 16 psi (1.1 bar) in lesser 911s—but Porsche has also fitted a new dual-mass flywheel to cope with the added torque.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

After nearly a year of questions and confusion, PlayStation 5 owners can finally add to the console's very high-end storage via Sony's latest firmware update—which is leading to many tests in the wild over the past week. Arguably the biggest test yet has resulting in some potentially great news: you don't need to overspend on compatible SSDs as many had previously feared.

We've pointed to Digital Foundry's coverage of PS5 storage and performance in the past, and founder Richard Leadbetter returned to the topic on Tuesday to confirm that any compatible PS5 drive will deliver apparently identical performance when running native titles for the console (and backwards compatible ones, too).

In order to upgrade the PS5's storage capacity, the minimum requirements for a compatible drive are that it must be NVME M.2 format and PCIe 4.0 speed rated, as well as meeting certain dimensional and technical requirements to slot into the console's storage expansion bay. Beyond those requirements, compatible SSDs have a significant range of storage amounts (as low as 256GB) and speed ratings (in terms of both sequential and random read/write operations, which can significantly impact general-purpose performance on an average computer).