Month: November 2022

Enlarge / Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk presents a vaccine production device during a meeting September 2, 2020, in Berlin, Germany. Musk met with vaccine-maker CureVac, with which Tesla has a cooperation to build devices for producing RNA vaccines. (credit: Getty | Filip Singer)

Under the leadership of billionaire Elon Musk, social media platform Twitter has abandoned its efforts to prevent the spread of dangerous COVID-19 misinformation on its platform, dismaying experts who say false and misleading health information can harm individuals and put lives at risk.

"Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy," the company noted in various places on its website.

From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health responses have been severely stymied by a plague of misinformation, often in digital spaces.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

There was a time when laser printers were a luxury. High prices pushed them out of the budgets of most homes and small businesses decades ago, but they eventually became more affordable. But now, printer-vendor Epson is turning its back on the technology in favor of inkjet alternatives and self-bestowed sustainability cred.

As noted by The Register on Monday, Epson announced last week that it will stop selling and distributing laser printers by 2026, affecting both its consumer and business users. The Seiko-owned company proudly declared that the move is being done in the name of "sustainability," but the company still has a long way to go in that department.

Laser printers and sustainability

Epson's announcement said that its decision to focus completely on inkjet printers over laser ones is about the planet. And this is largely based on how laser printers work compared to inkjet. Laser printers rely on a laser, drum, toner, and heat to print an image. Inkjet printers, meanwhile, use nozzles to deposit ink.

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

There was a time when laser printers were a luxury. High prices pushed them out of the budgets of most homes and small businesses decades ago, but they eventually became more affordable. But now, printer-vendor Epson is turning its back on the technology in favor of inkjet alternatives and self-bestowed sustainability cred.

As noted by The Register on Monday, Epson announced last week that it will stop selling and distributing laser printers by 2026, affecting both its consumer and business users. The Seiko-owned company proudly declared that the move is being done in the name of "sustainability," but the company still has a long way to go in that department.

Laser printers and sustainability

Epson's announcement said that its decision to focus completely on inkjet printers over laser ones is about the planet. And this is largely based on how laser printers work compared to inkjet. Laser printers rely on a laser, drum, toner, and heat to print an image. Inkjet printers, meanwhile, use nozzles to deposit ink.

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  Low-polygon models, blurry textures, and low-resolution effects are replaced with shiny new upgrade in Portal with RTX. [credit: Nvidia ]

Valve's first-person puzzle-platformer Portal was a genuine phenomenon when it was released back in 2007, and its core gameplay mechanics—solving puzzles and thwarting enemies by shooting interconnected portals onto various surfaces—still hold up today. But the game's visuals haven't aged as well, particularly its low-resolution textures; it was built using the same game engine and some of the same assets as 2004's Half-Life 2, and there's only so much that a modern GPU can do to spruce it up.

Enter Portal with RTX, a remastering of the game with ray-tracing effects and other improvements that Nvidia says will be available for free to all Portal owners starting on December 8. The update was originally announced in September alongside the RTX 4000-series GPUs. Developed by Lightspeed Studios, Portal with RTX doesn't just add fancy lighting effects to the original but also includes "hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures" and "enhanced high-poly models" that substantially overhaul the aging game's visuals for the modern era.

As a DirectX 9 game from early in the Xbox 360 lifespan, the original Portal runs well on just about anything, including old Intel-integrated GPUs. But Portal RTX's system requirements are a lot higher; Nvidia lists the RTX 3060 as the minimum recommended GPU and says it can achieve "playable" 30 FPS frame rates at 1080p with DLSS enabled. Jumping to 60 FPS at 1080p requires an RTX 3080 with DLSS enabled, while hitting 60 FPS at 4K will require at least an RTX 4080 with DLSS 3 enabled. The CPU and RAM requirements also climb along with the GPU requirements (check the Nvidia-provided system requirements table below).

• 

  Low-polygon models, blurry textures, and low-resolution effects are replaced with shiny new upgrade in Portal with RTX. [credit: Nvidia ]

Valve's first-person puzzle-platformer Portal was a genuine phenomenon when it was released back in 2007, and its core gameplay mechanics—solving puzzles and thwarting enemies by shooting interconnected portals onto various surfaces—still hold up today. But the game's visuals haven't aged as well, particularly its low-resolution textures; it was built using the same game engine and some of the same assets as 2004's Half-Life 2, and there's only so much that a modern GPU can do to spruce it up.

Enter Portal with RTX, a remastering of the game with ray-tracing effects and other improvements that Nvidia says will be available for free to all Portal owners starting on December 8. The update was originally announced in September alongside the RTX 4000-series GPUs. Developed by Lightspeed Studios, Portal with RTX doesn't just add fancy lighting effects to the original but also includes "hand-crafted hi-res physically-based textures" and "enhanced high-poly models" that substantially overhaul the aging game's visuals for the modern era.

As a DirectX 9 game from early in the Xbox 360 lifespan, the original Portal runs well on just about anything, including old Intel-integrated GPUs. But Portal RTX's system requirements are a lot higher; Nvidia lists the RTX 3060 as the minimum recommended GPU and says it can achieve "playable" 30 FPS frame rates at 1080p with DLSS enabled. Jumping to 60 FPS at 1080p requires an RTX 3080 with DLSS enabled, while hitting 60 FPS at 4K will require at least an RTX 4080 with DLSS 3 enabled. The CPU and RAM requirements also climb along with the GPU requirements (check the Nvidia-provided system requirements table below).

Enlarge / The Pixel 4. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google and iHeartMedia—the US's biggest radio station operator—are being hit with a false advertising lawsuit for ads they ran about the Pixel 4 (which we found to be overpriced and full of half-working experiments). The FTC and four states say the companies aired "nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements by radio personalities" during 2019 and 2020, with Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Samuel Levine saying that “Google and iHeartMedia paid influencers to promote products they never used, showing a blatant disrespect for truth-in-advertising rules.” The two companies have settled the lawsuit and will be required to pay $9.4 million in penalties.

Google's ads had on-air personalities give first-hand accounts of how much they liked the Pixel 4, but, to quote the FTC's press release, "the on-air personalities were not provided with Pixel 4s before recording and airing the majority of the ads and therefore did not own or regularly use the phones." Therefore the first-person claims made in the ads, like, “It’s my favorite phone camera out there, especially in low light, thanks to Night Sight Mode,” “I’ve been taking studio-like photos of everything,” and “It’s also great at helping me get stuff done, thanks to the new voice-activated Google Assistant that can handle multiple tasks at once,” can't be true.

It seems like everything would have been fine if these ads weren't in first-person. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey explains: “It is common sense that people put more stock in first-hand experiences. Consumers expect radio advertisements to be truthful and transparent about products, not misleading with fake endorsements. Today’s settlement holds Google and iHeart accountable for this deceptive ad campaign and ensures compliance with state and federal law moving forward.”

Enlarge (credit: Russell Burden)

Toxoplasma gondii is a ubiquitous protozoan parasite that can infect any warm-blooded species. In lab studies, infection with T. gondii has been shown to increase dopamine and testosterone levels along with risk-taking behaviors in hosts including rodents, chimps, and hyenas. Oh, and humans.

But its effects have not really been studied in the wild, so some researchers decided to assess how infection impacts gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. They found that “the odds that a seropositive [infected] wolf becomes a pack leader is more than 46 times higher than a seronegative wolf becoming a pack leader.”

In the wild

Serum samples have been taken from the wolf packs in Yellowstone since 1995. These scientists assayed samples from 229 individual wolves taken over the years—116 males, 112 females, and one hermaphrodite—to try to correlate the presence of antibodies against the parasite with demographic factors and specific behaviors. (The relationship between antibodies and infection is complicated, given that the parasite can persist at low levels indefinitely after infections.)

Enlarge / This ThinkCentre M90n-1 Nano from 2019, passively cooled with a big heatsink, was $145 when the author last looked on eBay. It's not a Raspberry Pi, and it looks like Batman's reception desk system, but it can do the work. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

"Raspberry Pi boards are hard to get, probably also next year," says Andreas Spiess, single-board enthusiast and YouTuber, in his distinctive Swiss accent. He's not wrong. Spiess says he and his fellow Pi devotees need "a strategy to survive" without new boards, so he suggests looking in one of the least captivating, most overlooked areas of computing: used, corporate-minded thin client PCs.

Spiess' Pi replacements, suggested and refined by many of his YouTube commenters and Patreon subscribers, are Fujitsu Futros, Lenovo ThinkCentres, and other small systems (some or all of which could be semantically considered "thick clients" or simply "mini PCs," depending on your tastes and retro-grouch sensibilities). They're the kind of systems you can easily find used on eBay, refurbished on Amazon Renewed, or through other enterprise and IT asset disposition sources. They're typically in good shape, given their use and environment. And compared to single-board enthusiast systems, many more are being made and replaced each year.

They've always been there, of course, but it makes more sense to take another look at them now. "Back to the future," as Spiess puts it (in an analogy we're not entirely sure works).