Month: October 2022

Enlarge / Arc is Intel's attempt to shake up the GPU market. (credit: Intel)

Intel's Arc A750 and A770 GPUs were finally released earlier this month after years of teases, announcements, and delays, and the end result is a pair of GPUs that generally offer respectable performance for the price. But Intel's first true gaming-focused dedicated GPU architecture has also had lots of first-generation jitters, including glitchy drivers and performance issues in games that don't use modern DirectX 12 or Vulkan graphics APIs.

Another early issue may be idle power consumption—the amount of power these GPUs consume when they aren't being actively used or when they're only rendering your desktop. Intel published a troubleshooting article late last week that acknowledged that Arc desktop GPUs could suffer from "high idle power consumption," along with steps for remediating the issue.

Users will need to go into their PC's BIOS and configure a pair of advanced PCI Express power management settings—the "Native ASPM" (or Active State Power Management) setting should be enabled, and the "PCI Express root port ASPM" setting should be enabled and set to "L1 Substates." You'll also need to set the PCI Express Link State Power Management setting to "maximum power savings" in Windows' advanced power options settings.

Enlarge (credit: Serhej Calka | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

This week, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin announced he had surveyed the state’s extreme weather damage caused by climate change and decided that it shouldn’t be residents or even the state shouldering “the enormous costs of rebuilding.”

Filing a lawsuit in the Superior Court of New Jersey, Platkin—joined by the New Jersey Division of Consumer Affairs and the Department of Environmental Protection—suggested that this burden should belong to oil and gas companies. These companies, Platkin alleged in a press release, “knowingly made false claims to deceive the public about the existence of climate change and the degree to which their fossil fuels products have been [exacerbating] anthropogenic global warming.”

Platkin’s lawsuit targets five major global oil and gas companies—ExxonMobil Corp., Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp., BP Plc, and ConocoPhillips—and the trade group that all those companies belong to, the American Petroleum Institute (API). It’s similar, Platkin said in his press release, to lawsuits still pending in other states, including Rhode Island, Delaware, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont.

Enlarge / BMW's factory in South Carolina builds its X models—SUVs and crossovers—and now it's going to build electric ones. (credit: BMW)

Domestic lithium-ion battery manufacturing has received quite a shot in the arm in 2022. In May, the Department of Energy announced it would spend $3 billion to increase battery-making here in the US. But perhaps more consequentially, in August the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act now ties an electric vehicle's tax credit to local battery production. As a result, automakers have been scrambling to build new battery factories in North America.

Now BMW is the latest OEM to join the list. On Wednesday, BMW Chairman Oliver Zipse announced that the company, which wants to have sold 2 million EVs by the end of 2025, is going to invest $1.7 billion in US EV manufacturing. $1 billion of that will be used to build out EV production lines at BMW's factory in Spartanburg, South Carolina. The remaining $700 million will go toward a new battery assembly plant in Woodruff, South Carolina.

And BMW also announced a partnership with Envision AESC, which is going to build a lithium-ion cell-manufacturing plant with an annual capacity of 30 GWh/year, also in South Carolina. BMW says that this plant will produce newly developed round cells, specifically designed for BMW's sixth-generation EVs. (The recently introduced iX and i4 are its fifth-gen EVs.)

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  The inside is a far cry from the color-coded Apple products iFixit usually looks at. [credit: iFixit ]

What secrets does the inside of the Pixel Watch hold? iFixit—Google's new repair partner—tore down Google's first self-branded smartwatch to see exactly how this thing was put together. Like us, iFixit came away with strong "first generation" vibes.

The good news is that it does not look impossible to replace the display. The usual bit of heat and prying pops the top off, but the less-than-ideal layout means you'll have to remove the battery, too, since the connector is buried under the soft battery pouch. A display replacement is a real concern here, considering the entire top half of the watch is glass. If you bang the watch against something or drop it, there's a good chance you'll shatter the all-glass corners. A few people have already done this, with one user reporting Google will not fix the Pixel Watch for any amount of money, so you're on your own! If you're worried about the display, one company is already selling a bumper case for the Pixel Watch.

iFixit took a good amount of time in the four-minute video to call Google's internal construction "ugly." After cracking open the front, iFixit's Sam Goldheart noted, "Right away, it's obvious we're in Android country. The silver battery pouch and Kapton tape are almost a shock after all our Apple teardowns," later adding that the welds holding together the haptic feedback buzzer were "kind of ugly." Apple's "paint the back of the fence" design philosophy means even the insides of Apple products look good, usually with color-matched, lovingly labeled components. Google, especially in the first generation, isn't there yet.

Enlarge / A peacock butterfly (Aglais io) has eyespots on the upper surface of each forewing and hindwing that appear to look you in the eyes—a perceptual phenomenon known as the "Mona Lisa effect." (credit: Hannah Rowland/CC BY-SA)

Visitors to the Louvre have long reported that the woman in Leonardo da Vinci's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa (aka La Gioconda), has eyes that seem to follow one around the room. A small 2019 study found that this perceptual "Mona Lisa effect" is indeed real—it just doesn't apply to the famous painting. As we reported at the time, she's actually "looking" to the right-hand side of her audience. But that type of effect does seem to play a significant role in the animal kingdom, according to a new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution—specifically in warding off potential predators.

"Eyespots with concentric circles seem to stare at potential predators from many directions, just like portraits that seem to maintain eye contact no matter where you are in the room," said co-author Hannah Rowland, who heads an independent research group on predators and toxic prey at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. "This probably also explains why, in nature, eyespots have evolved independently in different animals to successfully deter enemies."

Since the 1960s, perceptual psychologists have known that we're very good at sensing when someone is looking at us. That includes the eerie sensation of being watched by the subjects of paintings or photographs, which typically occurs when the subject is looking straight ahead out of the image, at an angle between 0 and 5 degrees. There are also multiple species of fish, butterflies, moths, beetles, and praying mantids that boast circular markings on their bodies that look a lot like eyes—hence they're often called "eyespots." It's believed that these eyespots deflect the attention of predators to non-vital body parts, and/or intimidate or ward off attacks entirely, and there is scientific evidence that this is indeed the case.

Enlarge / If you want me to talk, you need to provide a much more valuable bauble...

Voice actress Hellena Taylor caused a bit of a social media firestorm over the weekend, calling for players to boycott the upcoming Bayonetta 3 over what she called an "insulting" and "immoral" low payment offer to reprise her role as the title character. And while reports have disputed some of the specifics of Taylor's allegations, that he-said-she-said drama obscures just how little power video game voice actors have to demand a higher share of the revenues from bestselling titles.

The barest sliver of the pie

Earlier this month, Bayonetta 3 director Yusuke Miyata cited "various overlapping circumstances [that] made it difficult for Hellena Taylor to reprise her role," in an interview with Game Informer. But Taylor, in an October 15 Twitter video message that has been viewed over 9 million times as of this writing, alleges that she was offered a "buyout" price of just $4,000 to once again play Bayonetta for the upcoming game. That's a rate Taylor said was "an insult to me, the amount of time that I took to work on my talent and everything that I have given to this game and to the fans."

"I didn't want the world, I didn't ask for too much. I was just asking for a decent, dignified living wage," Taylor said, urging viewers to boycott the game and use the money to donate to charities instead. "What they did was legal, but it was immoral."

Enlarge / An airplane with a Starlink Aviation terminal installed. (credit: Starlink)

Close-up view of the Starlink Aviation terminal. (credit: Starlink)

SpaceX is now advertising Starlink Aviation, promising 350Mbps broadband with unlimited data for each airplane it's installed in.

"Starlink can deliver up to 350Mbps to each plane, enabling all passengers to access streaming-capable Internet at the same time," the company said. "With latency as low as 20 ms, passengers can engage in activities previously not functional in flight, including video calls, online gaming, virtual private networks and other high data rate activities."

Starlink said the airplane service will use a "low-profile Aero Terminal" with "an electronically steered phased array antenna, which enables new levels of reliability, redundancy and performance." It has a "simplified design" that "enables installations during minimal downtime and combines well with other routine maintenance checks," Starlink says. The service hardware also includes two wireless access points.