Month: July 2022

Enlarge / A vial of the Monkeypox vaccine is displayed by a medical professional at a vaccination site at the Northwell Health offices at Cherry Grove on Fire Island, New York, on July 13, 2022. (credit: Getty | James Carbone)

US monkeypox cases hit 1,470 this week, and federal officials reported Friday that they expect the tally to continue rising amid expanded testing, continued community transmission, and a current shortage of vaccines. The federal update comes as officials face growing criticism over their handling of the outbreak, and experts fear it may already be too late to contain the virus.

Overall, the multinational monkeypox outbreak has tallied nearly 13,000 cases, with the largest counts in Spain (2,835), Germany (1,859), and the UK (1,856). The US now ranks fourth worldwide. But, it could potentially move up in the ranks quickly.

"We anticipate an increase in cases in the coming weeks," Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a press briefing Friday. Walensky laid out three reasons why they are expecting an upcoming rise.

Enlarge / Apple's App Store. (credit: Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

Throughout the short history of smartphone apps, games have consistently driven more revenue than non-gaming app categories. But that has finally changed in the United States, according to new data from app intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

The shift began in May 2022. By June, 50.3 percent of US consumer spending on apps was on non-game apps like TikTok, Netflix, and Tinder. Spending on non-game apps has recently grown at twice the rate as spending on games. Game spending was exploding at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 and early 2020, but by late 2020, non-gaming apps caught up, and they surpassed games in 2021.

This has been driven in part by the shift so many apps have made to a subscription-based model of late. For years, games generated more revenue not necessarily because they got more downloads (though they often did) but because their long-term monetization was clearer, more consistent, and more robust thanks to in-app transactions. Other types of apps didn't have that going for them, and many were sold for one-time purchase prices or offered a limited number of premium upgrades.

Enlarge (credit: MONEY SHARMA / Contributor | AFP)

Throughout the pandemic, the world’s richest men added about a trillion dollars to their net worth. The Washington Post reported that SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos pocketed a fifth of that. But while some billionaires spent the pandemic getting richer, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates looked at the world crumbling around him and decided to make a different business plan.

“I will move down and eventually off of the list of the world’s richest people,” Gates declared in a blog, announcing his plan to personally donate funds that will dramatically increase the annual amount that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation pays out to support global initiatives in the name of progress.

To address global crises that Gates says have been profoundly exacerbated by the pandemic, “the Gates Foundation intends to increase spending from nearly $6 billion per year before COVID to $9 billion per year by 2026.” The proposed 50 percent annual budget increase has already been unanimously agreed upon “in principle” by the foundation's formal board members.

Enlarge / Intel's 12th-generation Core CPUs use different types of CPU cores for different tasks. That hybrid architecture continues to cause problems for some software. (credit: Intel)

Earlier this week, some people waiting to take the bar exam received a message from ExamSoft, the company that makes the Examplify software that many states use to administer the exam: PCs with Intel's latest 12th-generation Core processors are "not currently supported" because they were "triggering Examplify's automatic virtual machine check." The company's suggested solution was that people find another device to take the test with, a frustrating and unhelpful "workaround" for anyone with a new computer.

As pointed out by The Verge, Examsoft's system requirements page for its software provides no additional detail, simply reiterating that 12th-gen CPUs aren't currently supported and that you aren't allowed to run the Examplify software within a virtual machine. But it's not the first time a problem like this has surfaced, and the culprit is almost certainly the hybrid CPU architecture that Intel is using in most 12th-gen chips.

In previous generations, all of the cores in a given Intel CPU have been identical to one another: same design, same performance, same features. Clock speed and power usage would ramp up and down based on what the computer was doing at any given time, but the cores themselves were all the same and could be treated that way by the operating system. In 12th-gen chips, CPUs come with a mix of completely different processor cores: large, fast performance cores (or P-cores) handle the heavy lifting, while smaller, low-power efficiency cores (or E-cores) handle lighter tasks. But because operating systems and most apps are used to assuming that all CPU cores in a given system are the same, software has needed to be modified to tell the difference between the two.

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  How do I do this without a touchscreen? [credit: NYT / Hasbro ]

On Thursday, The New York Times and Hasbro announced Wordle: The Party Game, a $20 physical version of the viral web game hit that will be available starting in October. But this new game is far from the first to allow players to essentially "play Wordle in real life," as the marketing copy promises.

Aside from the obvious change in medium, Wordle: The Party Game differentiates itself from its digital inspiration mainly through multiplayer gameplay designed for two to four players (recommended for ages 14 and up, according to the manufacturer). The most basic play mode has players alternating as the "host" who gets to choose a secret five-letter word—don't worry, CNN reports the game will come packaged with "an official word list to use, compiled by the Times" if you can't think of your own.

The non-host player then uses an included dry-erase game board to guess at the host's secret word. After that, the host marks letters using translucent green and yellow tiles—patterned after the digital game—to indicate letters that are in the correct spot and letters that are present somewhere else in the secret word, respectively. Players receive points based on how many guesses it takes to home in on the secret word.

Enlarge / Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel during a House Energy and Commerce Committee Subcommittee hearing on March 31, 2022, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )

Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel is aiming to increase the agency's broadband speed standard from 25Mbps to 100Mbps on the download side and from 3Mbps to 20Mbps for uploads.

Rosenworcel's "Notice of Inquiry proposes to increase the national broadband standard to 100 megabits per second for download and 20 megabits per second for upload and discusses a range of evidence supporting this standard, including the requirements for new networks funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act," the FCC said in an announcement today. Rosenworcel is also proposing "a separate national goal of 1Gbps/500Mbps for the future."

The 25/3Mbps metric was adopted in January 2015 under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler and was never updated by former Chairman Ajit Pai during his four-year term leading the commission. Pai decided in January 2021 that 25Mbps download and 3Mbps upload speeds were still fast enough for home Internet users.