Month: March 2022

Florida health official put on 2-month leave after urging staff to get vaccine

“I have a hard time understanding how we can be in public health and not practice it,” the official wrote.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference before newly appointed state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo at Neo City Academy in Kissimmee, Florida.

Enlarge / Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a press conference before newly appointed state Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo at Neo City Academy in Kissimmee, Florida. (credit: Getty | SOPA images)

Florida is allowing its top public health official in Orlando to return to work after a two-month suspension related to an email he sent to his staff noting their abysmal COVID-19 vaccination rate and urging them to get vaccinated.

Dr. Raul Pino, the health administrator for Florida's Orange County, sent the email to public health employees on January 4 as the state was seeing a surge of COVID-19 cases amid the omicron wave of the pandemic. The email noted that less than half of the 568 employees at the county's public health office were fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Only 77 of them had gotten a booster shot, Pino added. He called the staff's vaccination rate "pathetic" and wrote that it was "irresponsible" not to be vaccinated at that point.

“I have a hard time understanding how we can be in public health and not practice it,” he wrote, according to Click Orlando.

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Google announces Steam Alpha for Chrome OS, bringing the game client to Chromebooks

We’ve known it was coming for a while, but now Google has officially confirmed it’s bringing support for the Steam game client to Chromebooks. In a blink and you’ll miss it moment during the company’s Game Developer Summit keynote, Google announced that it’s launched an alpha of Steam for Chrome OS, available on “select Chromebooks.” […]

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We’ve known it was coming for a while, but now Google has officially confirmed it’s bringing support for the Steam game client to Chromebooks. In a blink and you’ll miss it moment during the company’s Game Developer Summit keynote, Google announced that it’s launched an alpha of Steam for Chrome OS, available on “select Chromebooks.”

It’s just one of several announcements the company made related to gaming on Chromebooks.

Google hasn’t publicly spelled out many details about the new Steam Alpha for Chromebooks yet. It’s not even clear how uses can sign up to join the alpha test and install Steam.

But according to Chrome OS code uncovered recently by the folks at 9to5Google, you’ll need a fairly powerful, fairly recent Chromebook with an 11th-gen Intel Core i5 or better processor and at least 7GB of RAM. That excludes most entry-level Chromebooks… which makes sense, as gaming tends to be a resource-intensive task on any computer.

On a Chromebook, it will most likely take advantage of the fact that Steam offers a Linux version of its game client (and tools that let many games that would otherwise be Windows-only run on Linux as well), and that Chrome OS has an optional feature that allows you to run some native Linux applications.

But if you have a Chromebook that doesn’t meet the minimum specs, there may be other ways to play games. Google notes that Android usage on Chromebooks is up 50% year-over-year, and that’s driven largely be people installing optional Android support in order to run mobile games on Chromebooks.

Later this year Google also plans to launch a public beta of a new overlay that will work with some Android games, allowing users to create their own custom keyboard & mouse control schemes without any need for developers to specifically optimize their Android games for Chromebooks.

And, of course, there’s game streaming. Google notes that between services like NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and Google’s Stadia, you can stream over 1,400 PC games to a Chromebook over the internet.

via Mishaal Rahman

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Ukraine-Krieg: E-Auto-Akkus werden teurer

Durch stark steigende Rohstoffpreise würden auch die Preise für Elektroauto-Akkus massiv steigen, warnt der Hersteller Northvolt. (Elektroauto, Technologie)

Durch stark steigende Rohstoffpreise würden auch die Preise für Elektroauto-Akkus massiv steigen, warnt der Hersteller Northvolt. (Elektroauto, Technologie)

Deutschland, Maßnahmenwunderland?

Corona: Mehrere Bundesländer schrecken vor einem Freedom Day zurück und gehen in die Verlängerung

Corona: Mehrere Bundesländer schrecken vor einem Freedom Day zurück und gehen in die Verlängerung

Tesla hikes prices on all cars, with cheapest Model 3 now nearing $50K

Automaker increases prices—again—as its order book continues to grow.

Tesla Model 3.

Enlarge / Tesla Model 3. (credit: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Tesla raised prices last night on every model it sells. The move comes just a week after the company increased prices for its long-range battery packs by $1,000. The new increase means that the cheapest Tesla, a Model 3 with rear-wheel drive, now costs $46,990 before taxes and fees, a jump of $2,000.

CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company is “seeing significant recent inflation pressure in raw materials and logistics.” Prices are up in several sectors of the economy, of course, though economists are debating what is driving them higher. For electric vehicles like Teslas, the main culprits today could be nickel and cobalt prices, which have shot through the roof in recent weeks, though Tesla has also made a habit of increasing prices in recent months.

Both nickel and cobalt are key elements in the lithium-ion batteries commonly used in today’s EVs. Nickel helps boost a cell's energy density, while cobalt stabilizes the microscopic structure. Battery chemistries that use the metals are often referred to according to the proportion of metals they use. A common one is NMC, which stands for nickel, manganese, and cobalt, while Teslas often use NCA, or nickel-cobalt-aluminum. Tesla doesn't disclose its NCA ratio, but other companies use NMC chemistries with ratios of 8-1-1, 6-2-2, or 5-3-2.

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Illegales Streaming: Lookmovie und andere verlieren .io-Domain

Der Registrar der .io-Domain hat ohne Warnung mehrere große illegale Angebote gesperrt. Die illegalen Anbieter warnen vor anderen illegalen Anbietern, die ihren Namen benutzen. (Filesharing, Tauschbörse)

Der Registrar der .io-Domain hat ohne Warnung mehrere große illegale Angebote gesperrt. Die illegalen Anbieter warnen vor anderen illegalen Anbietern, die ihren Namen benutzen. (Filesharing, Tauschbörse)

E Ink’s Digital paper Tablet is a white-label Android tablet with an ePaper display and pen support

E Ink is probably best known for making the displays that power Amazon’s Kindle eReaders and similar devices, as well as screens for digital signage and price tags. But now the company has announced what appears to be a white label Android tablet designed for use in classroom or professional use. The new Digital Paper […]

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E Ink is probably best known for making the displays that power Amazon’s Kindle eReaders and similar devices, as well as screens for digital signage and price tags. But now the company has announced what appears to be a white label Android tablet designed for use in classroom or professional use.

The new Digital Paper Tablet Solution comes in a choice of 10.3 inch or 13.3 inch sizes, runs Android 9 software, and supports capacitive touch input as well as pressure-sensitive input from a Wacom EMR pen. But you probably won’t find this tablet in online stores anytime soon.

That’s because E Ink is partnering with Avalue Technology to offer the Digital Paper tablet as a customizable tool for use in education, training, healthcare, science, legal, or other industries. Avalue provides tech support and logistics, while the tablet’s hardware was developed by Linify, a partnership between E Ink and Sony (one of the first companies to produce Digital Paper tablets).

Specs for the tablet include:

Digital Paper Tablet Solution specs
Display 13.3 inches / 1650 x 2200 pixels / 207 dpi
or
10.3 inches / 1404 x 1872 pixels / 226 dpi
Display features E Ink Carta 1250
16-shades of gray
Capacitive Touch Panel
EMR sensor (4096 levels pressure sensitivity with Wacom pen)
Processor NXP i.MX 8M mini
4 x ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores @ 1.8 GHz
Storage 32GB eMMC
Ports USB 2.0 Type-C
Wireless WiFi 5
Bluetooth 5.0
NFC
Battery 2,000 mAh
Dimensions 301.1 x 222.8 x 5.7mm (13.3 inch display)
244.2 x 175.5 x 5.85mm (10.3 inch display)
Weight 368 grams (13.3 inch display)
261 grams (10.3 inch display)

E Ink says you can expect up to 3 weeks of battery life from light usage or up to 5 days under heavy use thanks to its low-power display technology.

Other advantages to E Ink include screens that are easy to view indoors or outdoors using ambient lighting and which offer paper-like contrast and reduced eye strain. Of course the down side is that color content won’t display at all, and videos or animations that require a high screen refresh rate may not be displayed properly.

Since the Digital Paper Tablet runs Google Android (albeit an aging version of the operating system), it should also be relatively easy for corporate users to develop custom applications that meet their specific needs. E Ink and Avalue say they’ll also provide “Digital Paper Control Server Software (DCSS) which includes APIs for securely transferring documents to and from the tablets.

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