Month: June 2022

Enlarge / Cars parked at the Tesla Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, on February 10, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Josh Edelson)

A lawsuit filed by laid-off Tesla workers accused the company of violating federal law by failing to provide notice before the layoffs and said the former employees are entitled to 60 days of pay and benefits. Tesla's actions violated the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act, claimed the lawsuit filed Sunday in US District Court for the Western District of Texas.

"Pursuant to the WARN Act, Tesla is required to provide Plaintiffs and Class Members with the required sixty (60) days advance written notice of a mass layoff," the lawsuit said. "However, in connection with the recent mass layoffs... Tesla has failed to give Plaintiffs and the Class Members any advance written notice of their terminations."

"Instead, Tesla has simply notified the employees that their terminations would be effective immediately," the lawsuit continued.

Enlarge / Lenovo's P360 Ultra is a mini-workstation with a lot of power. (credit: Lenovo)

You'll never find a high-end workstation or a gaming PC that's quite as small as Intel's original NUC lineup, but there are options if you want a tiny but high-performance desktop. One of those is Lenovo's new ThinkStation P360 Ultra, a mini desktop that crams Intel's 12th-generation Alder Lake desktop CPUs, Nvidia RTX A2000 and A5000 GPUs with up to 16GB of RAM and a surprising amount of expandability into a small enclosure that's just 3.9 liters in volume.

The ThinkStation has lots of ports for a system its size, with a total of seven DisplayPort outputs in back (three full-size ports wired to the integrated Intel GPU, and four mini DisplayPorts connected to the dedicated GPU), one 2.5Gbps Ethernet port, another 1Gbps Ethernet port, and four rear USB-A ports on the back. On the front you'll find a headphone jack, another USB-A port, and a pair of Thunderbolt 4 ports.

The P360 Ultra's port selection is a lot like what you'd get in a good mini ITX motherboard, including lots of display outputs from both the integrated and dedicated GPUs. (credit: Lenovo)

Internal expandability is good, too. The ThinkStation can fit a total of two M.2 SSDs and a single 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD and up to four DDR5 RAM modules. The 12GB RTX A2000 GPU option should perform somewhere in between an RTX 3050 and an RTX 3060, while the RTX A5000 mobile GPU should perform more like the laptop version of the RTX 3080 GPU. Lenovo offers Alder Lake CPUs from the quad-core Core i3 all the way up to a Core i9 with a total of 16 cores (eight P-cores and eight E-cores—our CPU reviews show the benefits of these smaller cores for workloads that distribute well across many CPU cores).

It was admittedly an odd creative decision to split the fourth season of Stranger Things into two unequal parts. While Part 1 (consisting of the first seven episodes) was a bit bloated, it nonetheless told a compelling story, set up some very real stakes, and left viewers mulling over multiple cliffhangers. Fortunately, we don't have long to wait to see what happens next, and Netflix just dropped an exciting new trailer foreshadowing what we can expect from the final two episodes, each of which clocks in at well over an hour's run time. And things look pretty bleak for the Hawkins gang.

(Some spoilers for S4 Part 1 below, but we've tried to avoid revealing the biggest plot twists.)

Ever since the official trailer for Part 1 dropped in May, we've known that this season's big bad hails straight from classic D&D lore. It's Vecna, a once-powerful wizard who first became undead and then became a lich. Although Vecna (in the lore, at least) was destroyed, over time he achieved godhood. His left hand and left eye survived his bodily death and became powerful relics.

Enlarge / NASA's Space Launch System rocket, reflected in the turn basin at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, rolls out for a fourth attempt at a wet dress rehearsal on June 6, 2022. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

NASA tried three times during the month of April to complete a critical fueling test of its large Space Launch System rocket. And three times, due to about half a dozen technical problems, the space agency failed.

And so NASA made the difficult decision to roll the large rocket back into the Vehicle Assembly Building for repairs, adding a couple of months of delays to a program already years behind schedule. After this work was complete in early June, NASA rolled the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft back out to the launch pad for a fourth try.

The painful decision turned out to be the correct one. Over the course of more than 14 hours on Monday, NASA largely succeeded in completing this fueling test, loading hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid oxygen and hydrogen into the first and second stages of the SLS rocket.

Enlarge / Airbus 320 cockpit. (credit: Getty Images | Skyhobo)

The Federal Aviation Administration says it finally has a plan for the industry to replace or retrofit airplane altimeters that can't filter out transmissions from outside their allotted frequencies. The altimeter problem has prevented AT&T and Verizon from fully deploying 5G on the C-Band spectrum licenses the wireless carriers purchased for a combined $69 billion.

The FAA was urging airlines to retrofit or replace altimeters in recent months and now says it has finalized a plan. An FAA statement on Friday said that "airlines and other operators of aircraft equipped with the affected radio altimeters must install filters or other enhancements as soon as possible."

AT&T and Verizon said they will be able to accelerate 5G deployments near airports in the coming months, but the carriers agreed to continue some level of "voluntary mitigations" in the airport areas until July 2023.

Enlarge / SteelSeries' Apex Pro Mini Wireless keyboard connects via 2.4 GHz dongle or Bluetooth. (credit: SteelSeries)

Adjustable mechanical switches are a simple way to customize the feel of different keys in a keyboard. These switches let you choose their actuation point, or how far you press the key before it registers an input, for sensitivity that you can vary based on the key or the application you're using.

Peripherals-maker SteelSeries today announced new wireless and wired mechanical keyboards with mechanical switches that let you adjust each key's actuation point. The compact SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini Wireless and Apex Pro Mini also let you program the keys so that a keypress will register two inputs if you press the key down far enough.

Adjustable mechanical switches

SteelSeries first started selling its adjustable OmniPoint mechanical switches in its SteelSeries Apex Pro keyboard in 2019. The OmniPoint 2.0 switches debuting in the Apex Pro Mini Wireless and Apex Pro Mini 60 percent keyboards released today are even more adjustable.