Month: August 2022

Enlarge / It's quiet... too quiet...

Over the weekend, players in the Destiny 2 community started to notice a game-breaking bug that could be activated just by sending in-game chat messages to other players. Bungie responded on Saturday by temporarily disabling all in-game chat while it investigates the issue.

"The team is aware of the exploit right now that is causing some players to be kicked and are actively working on identifying what’s causing the issue and addressing it," Destiny 2 Community Manager Liana Rupert wrote on Twitter just before chat was disabled across the game.

Scrub those inputs

The damaging exploit involved a string over 200 characters long, composed mostly of Chinese characters, according to multiple players who came across it over the weekend (and who shared the forbidden text with Ars Technica). The specific way those Chinese characters are encoded in Unicode means each one can take up more memory space than a single-byte ASCII character.

Enlarge (credit: Sean Gallup | Getty Images)

Google CEO Sundar Pichai apparently thinks Google has room to be a more focused company. CNBC reports the executive recently called an all-hands meeting and—after saying the company is "not currently" planning layoffs—said he wants a more efficient Google.

"There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the headcount we have," the report quotes Pichai as saying. The CEO added that he wants to "create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity."

The call for more focus came after Google's Q2 earnings report last week, where Google's parent company, Alphabet, missed revenue expectations amid what CFO Ruth Porat said was "uncertainty in the global economic environment." Last month, Pichai also announced plans to slow hiring for the rest of the year. Google also revamped its performance evaluation process this year with the goal of "creating an easier path to promotions" and "busting bureaucracy." A 2021 New York Times exposé on Pichai's management style described Google as a declining, indecisive company in "a paralyzing bureaucracy."

Enlarge / Slowly but surely, the Asahi Linux team is getting Linux up and running on Apple Silicon Macs. (credit: Apple/Asahi Linux)

We don't normally cover individual releases of the Linux kernel, partly because most updates are pretty routine. Any given Linux kernel update resolves some bugs, improves support for existing hardware, and makes some forward-looking changes in anticipation of new hardware, and kernel version 5.19 is no exception. Phoronix and OMG! Ubuntu! both have good overviews of the changes.

But there's one interesting note about this release that Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds mentions in his release notes: The kernel update is being released using an Arm-powered laptop, specifically the M2-powered version of Apple's MacBook Air.

"It's something I've been waiting for for a loong [sic] time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team," Torvalds writes. "We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now."

Enlarge / Charter CEO Tom Rutledge speaks during The New York Times DealBook conference in New York on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The two largest home Internet providers in the US both lost subscribers in the second quarter of 2022.

On Friday, Charter Communications reported a loss of 42,000 residential Internet customers, leaving it with 28,259,000 households buying Spectrum Internet service. Charter also gained 21,000 small and medium business (SMB) customers, bringing it up to 1,994,000 in that category.

Charter is the second biggest Internet provider after Comcast. Last week, Comcast reported a loss of 10,000 residential broadband customers, leaving it with 29,826,000 Internet-subscribing households. Comcast also gained 10,000 business broadband customers, giving it 2,337,000 business subscribers.

Enlarge / Employees wearing cleanroom suits monitor chemical vapor deposition operations inside the GlobalFoundries semiconductor manufacturing facility in Malta, New York. Production plants for semiconductors have become a focal point as the economic recovery from the pandemic is held back in areas by a shortage of some of the critical electronic components necessary.

The long wait for legislation to boost the US’s position in global semiconductor manufacturing is almost over. The scramble among companies to get their hands on the billions of dollars it unleashes is only just beginning.

The House of Representatives last week followed the Senate in passing a broad law to counter China’s rise as a technology power, including $52 billion in grants to support advanced chip manufacturing and research and development in the US. The law, which has yet to be signed, unlocks an estimated $24 billion more in investment tax credits for chipmakers by letting them write off 25 percent of the cost of new factories, or fabs, against their profits in the first year.

Pat Gelsinger, CEO of Intel, said the act may be “the most important piece of industrial policy” in the US since World War II. It is designed to reverse a decline in the US share of global chip manufacturing to 10 percent from 38 percent in 1990.

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A recently published Dell patent, spotted by Patently Apple, shows the company exploring the ability to wirelessly charge devices on a laptop's surface. We've seen similar concepts from Apple, which has already won patents for similar technologies. However, instead of simply dropping your iPhone on the laptop's surface and letting it charge, Dell's patent application describes a "wireless charging clip" that can attach to the PC and then be used to charge devices placed on top of it.

The clip would attach to the computer, giving it the ability to wirelessly charge other devices. (credit: Dell)

The patent (number 20220239124) was filed in early 2021 and was published Thursday. It doesn't guarantee a future product or feature, but it gives us a peek into what the company is considering.

The diagram shows a smartphone charging on a Dell laptop. (credit: Dell)

The wireless charging clip has a surface with a charging coil and a ferrite sheet beneath. The clip would be connected to the PC by magnets.

Enlarge / Many people still find this large kidney grille to be too big, but some of us are starting to come around. (credit: BMW)

As a late Gen Xer, I grew up in an era when BMW's cars were pretty easy to understand based solely on their model names. A 325i was a 3 Series with a 2.5 L engine, for example; a 540i was a 5 Series with a 4.0 L engine, and so on. BMW left that common-sense naming approach in the dust quite some time before it set a goal to have sold 2 million plugins by 2025, but even the new nomenclature gives some clues about where a new model fits in the range.

For example, the newly announced i4 eDrive35 is the company's new entry-level EV sedan, slotting in underneath the i4 eDrive40 and the i4 M50.

With a starting price of $51,400, the new i4 configuration undercuts the existing eDrive40 by $4,500. It also uses a single synchronous electric motor driving the rear wheels, although in the eDrive35, it has been derated to 281 hp (207 kW) and 295 lb-ft (400 Nm). That's still sufficient to endow the i4 eDrive35 with a sub-6-second 0–60 time, and there's a decent chance this might actually be the best driver's car from the range.