Month: April 2022

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

It's time for another Dealmaster! Our latest roundup of the best tech deals from around the web includes a couple of useful offers on Apple gift cards.

Over at Amazon, you can get a bonus $5 store credit when you buy a $50 Apple gift card. The offer applies to both digital and physical versions of the gift card; you'll have to use the code "APPLEDEAL" at checkout to see the deal if you opt for the former, or "APPLEAPRIL" if you go for the latter. Either way, Amazon says it'll apply the credit to your account within three days of your purchase. It'll then automatically be used the next time you buy something on the site sold by Amazon itself.

The promo credit in Amazon's deal doesn't stack, so if you wanted more "Apple money," note that Target is running a similar promotion that gives a $10 store credit when you buy a $100 Apple gift card there. This deal only applies to the digital version of the gift card, though.

(credit: Sican National Museum)

Archaeologists recently unearthed an unusual tomb in a temple complex at the Huaca Las Ventanas archaeological site near Lambaeque, in northern Peru. The site belonged to the Sican culture, one of the several complex societies that flourished prior to the rise of the Inca Empire (around 1400 CE) in northern Peru. The tomb reveals that the Sican—like several other Indigenous cultures spanning the length of Peru and about 4,000 years of history—practiced a type of cranial surgery called trepanation.

The surgeon’s tomb

Trepanation is the delicate art of cutting or drilling a hole in a person’s skull. It sounds brutal, but it can actually help relieve pressure on the brain from inflammation or bleeding, such as might occur after a head injury. Modern surgeons sometimes use a similar procedure, called a craniotomy, to relieve pressure from bleeding under the membrane that surrounds the brain.

Of course, modern craniotomies are guided by CT scans and MRIs. Ancient surgeons just had to go by sight and feel, which makes their success rates pretty remarkable. Archaeologists in Peru have found the remains of about 800 trepanation patients from the last 4,000 years, and the majority of them show signs of bone healing around the edges of the hole—which means they survived serious head trauma and cranial surgery to treat it.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

One of the main lawyers in California's ongoing discrimination and harassment case against Activision Blizzard has resigned, citing "interference" by the office of Governor Gavin Newsom.

Bloomberg reports that Melanie Proctor, the assistant chief counsel for California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH), said in a resignation email Tuesday that Newsom's office "repeatedly demanded advance notice of litigation strategy and of next steps in the litigation." That interference, which Proctor says increased with her agency's "wins" in state court, "mimick[ed] the interests of Activision’s counsel," Proctor wrote.

The resignation letter noted that Chief Counsel Janette Wipper previously combatted this interference by "attempt[ing] to protect" the agency's autonomy to prosecute, but Proctor alleges that her efforts directly led to Wipper being "abruptly terminated." In response, Proctor filed her own resignation notice on Wednesday—which she claims is "in protest of the interference and Janette's termination."

Enlarge (credit: Lambda)

Razer is primarily known for its gaming PCs and peripherals, but the company has also been known to dip its toes into the productivity space from time to time. The Razer x Lambda Tensorbook announced Tuesday sees Razer stepping even further out of its comfort zone. Made in collaboration with Lambda, the Linux-based clamshell focuses on deep-learning development.

Lambda, which has been around since 2012, is a deep learning infrastructure provider used by the US Department of Defense and "97 percent of the top research universities in the US," according to the company's announcement. Lambda's offerings include GPU clusters, servers, workstations, and cloud instances that train neural networks for various use cases, including self-driving cars, cancer detection, and drug discovery.

The laptop wears logos from Lambda and Razer. (credit: Lambda)

Dubbed "The Deep Learning Laptop," the Tensorbook has an Nvidia RTX 3080 Max-Q (16GB) and targets machine learning engineers, especially those who lack a laptop with a discrete GPU and thus have to share a remote machine's resources, which negatively affects development.

(credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

Elon Musk is facing a shareholder lawsuit over his failure to reveal his investment in Twitter until 11 days after a deadline set by federal law.

Musk started buying Twitter stock in January and acquired more than 5 percent of all shares by March 14, the lawsuit said. Under US law, "Musk was required to file a Schedule 13 with the SEC within 10 days of passing the 5 percent ownership threshold in Twitter, or March 24, 2022," said the complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Twitter's stock rose 27 percent on April 4 when Musk revealed his 9.2 percent stake. This means that investors who sold before April 4 missed out on the gains and that Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices, the class-action complaint said:

Enlarge / OnLeaks' render of the Pixel 6a. Here you can see the flat screen and the low-profile camera bump. (credit: OnLeaks x 91Mobiles)

As pointed out by Droid-Life, Google's next midrange phone, the Pixel 6a, has popped up at the FCC.

What's most surprising about the listing is the timing. The Pixel 6a's April FCC arrival is the earliest we've seen for the A series in a long time. The Pixel 5a was listed at the FCC in July 2021 and launched a month later in August, while the Pixel 4a hit the FCC in June 2020 and was also released in August. The first Pixel A phone, the Pixel 3a, had a February FCC listing and launched at Google I/O in May. This year, Google's (virtual) I/O event is May 11, 2022, so that day is currently the odds-on favorite release date for the phone.

There are four different models at the FCC, with only one unit having mmWave functionality. mmWave adds $50-$100 to the price of a phone and has almost no real-world use because carriers haven't rolled out mmWave to many places. Given the immense cost of mmWave, we'd rather save the money.

Enlarge (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus)

More than 200 long-time Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year—less than 0.1 percent of the foundation's revenue, which topped $150 million last year.

Debate on the proposal has raged over the last three months.

"Cryptocurrencies are extremely risky investments that have only been gaining popularity among retail investors," wrote Wikipedia user GorillaWarfare, the original author of the proposal, back in January. "I do not think we should be endorsing their use in this way."

Enlarge / Quake II RTX and other games that support ray tracing have finally been confirmed as working on Steam Deck, both at 30 and 60 fps refresh rates. But the fancy-looking option could be better—if Valve steps up to finish the job for its default SteamOS. (credit: Valve / Sam Machkovech)

In the weeks since Valve's Steam Deck release, fans and critics alike have been poring through the device's possibilities, stymied in part by near-daily software and OS updates. I previously posited in my review that Steam Deck was not "finished," and while the device has become much more stable, its full potential remains unclear.

Perhaps that's why the latest Steam Deck analysis from the hardware geniuses at Digital Foundry has struck gold. On Tuesday, site founder Richard Leadbetter unearthed something that the community at large appears to have missed up until now: The portable, 15 W-maximum Steam Deck is capable of ray tracing.

The (R)DNA was in Steam Deck the whole time

The proof, as seen in a video on DF's YouTube channel, required an overkill testing scenario. Leadbetter wiped the system's default OS, installed Windows 10, and retested ray tracing-compatible software before wiping the system again to get SteamOS back on there. This obnoxious process was required during Leadbetter's testing period because Steam Deck does not officially support a dual-boot option for multiple OS installs, even though fans have more recently come up with methods to do that.