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Mit 57 Zoll ist der Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 einfach riesig. Bei zweifachem 4K und 240 Hz sollte die Grafikkarte aber ebenso beeindrucken. Ein Hands-on von Oliver Nickel (Samsung, Display)
The Wheel turns, and new seasons come and pass, leaving reviews that become legend.
Enlarge / A face only a darkfriend could love. (credit: Amazon Studios)
Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode of Amazon's new WoT TV series. Now they're doing it again for season two—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recaps won't cover every element of every episode, but they will contain major spoilers for the show and the book series. We're going to do our best to not spoil major future events from the books, but there's always the danger that something might slip out. If you want to stay completely unspoiled and haven't read the books, these recaps aren't for you.
New episodes of The Wheel of Time season two will be posted for Amazon Prime subscribers every Friday. This write-up covers the first three episodes, which were released on September 1.
I say "technically" not to be disparaging but to set expectations: by the standards of, say, Game of Thrones, we are miles away from the events of the book on this one, basically right from the jump.
Like, there is a LOT going on here that isn't in the books, and honestly, I'm here for it.
Egwene al'Vere(Madeleine Madden), Nynaeve al'Meara (Zoë Robins), and Elayne Trakand (Ceara Coveney), sneaking about. (credit: Amazon Studios)
The biggest change at, like, a production level is that the original Mat, played by Barney Harris, has been recast. The circumstances of Harris' departure have never been fully spelled out anywhere that I can find—"something something COVID" is usually the gist—but Harris didn't even make it to the end of the first season, leaving one of our main characters mostly sidelined for the season's climax. Mat is now played by Dónal Finn, who can't grow as good a beard but does manage to capture Mat's charm and charisma pretty much instantly. He's stuck in the White Tower with Liandrin (Kate Fleetwood), a vaguely menacing Aes Sedai.
Narratively, the bigger changes are that most people think Rand al'Thor (Josha Stradowski) is dead, and Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) has been cut off from the One Power, following their confrontations with what they believed to be the Dark One at the end of the season. Rand is alone(ish!) in the city of Cairhien, trying to hide from everyone he loves following the revelation that he's a Man Who Can Channel, Doomed To Madness. Moiraine and Lan (Daniel Henney) are off regrouping with other Aes Sedai, including newcomer Verin (Meera Syal).
Mat Cauthon, looking much more Dónal Finn-like than last season. (credit: Amazon Studios)
For book readers, Rand's fate might be most jarring: his friends all think he's dead, and he seems to have moved in with a girlfriend in Cairhien's Foregate (sort of a shantytown built outside the gates of Cairhien) and gotten himself a job in the local sanitarium, caring for madmen. It seems odd at first, but Rand isn't just attempting some charity service—he knows that as a man who can touch the True Source and channel the One Power, he's cursed to inevitably go as mad as the people he's taking care of.
We find out by the third episode what Rand's goal truly is, because this is not just any sanitarium—it's a sanitarium that houses Logain Ablar, former self-proclaimed Dragon Reborn and now a trembling shell of a man suffering from being cut off from the Power. Rand wants Logain to tell him how to get himself out of this channeling mess—how to avoid going mad. Logain, of course, has some bad news for Rand on that front: he tells Rand that he won't be able to stop channeling, and he won't be able to avoid madness. Sucks for Rand.
(I also really do appreciate that there are finally characters on screen saying "Cairhien" out loud. I've been struggling with that city's name since 1997.)
Nynaeve's arc, and one of the strongest arcs across these three episodes, is that Liandrin is pushing her to take the test to become an Accepted, the middle tier in the White Tower hierarchy between novice and full Aes Sedai. Liandrin seems to have an ulterior motive that is only hinted at, but headstrong Nynaeve never met an obstacle that she didn't think she could bypass by sheer force of will. The deal, basically unchanged from the books, is that you walk through an arch that spits you out into a holodeck where every simulation is out to seriously mess with your head; at some point during this test, the arch reappears within the simulation, and you need to walk back through it, away from whatever is happening. If you don't go back through, you fail the test (and also you are probably dead).
I don't want to get too far into the details of these tests because I would like to keep this spoiler-light, but suffice it to say that Nynaeve is still a standout character and Robins is still giving a standout performance. She was one of the better parts of the first season and that continues to be the case here.
Rand al'Thor, played by Josha Stradowski (credit: Amazon Studios)
In the look-and-feel department, season two feels vastly improved. (I'm sure relaxed COVID restrictions on production played a huge role!) I'd complained multiple times last season about the show's odd composition, the flat "digital" feel to the shots, the styrofoam sets, and the camera that refused to hold still no matter what the scene; this time around, none of those things are jumping out at me at all. The lighting feels organic and natural. The cinematography feels much more like proper prestige TV (which is to say, it looks like a movie). I don't know if the problem was me or the production, but whatever it was, it's fine now!
And I wanted to also make sure to call out the music—though, again, I'm not sure if it's the production or just me. It feels like there's a more unified musical "language" being employed in season two. The palette with which the music is painted feels much more focused and consistent. I feel like I'm beginning to know what the music in the show is going to feel like, much like how GoT or Westworld or other shows have their distinct musical language and colors.
Through the first season, the show gradually rose to the level of "this is working better than I expected it to." The second season, so far, still has a ton of stuff going on, and (personally) I would take a larger number of shorter episodes rather than eight that all seem to run an hour-plus. But I was just straightforwardly enjoying myself with this pretty much the entire time? Which is never a place I got to with season one, or with the Amazon Lord of the Rings show.
Speaking of big exposition dumps, what else do we really need to make sure we address? There's the onscreen revelation that "the Dark One" from last season was just one of the Dark One's top guys, a Forsaken by the name of Ishamael who has been fully freed from a weakened prison by Rand and Moiraine. There's the introduction of Elyas Machera (Gary Beadle), a character from the book (though a composite character in the show) who will be important for Perrin's (Marcus Rutherford) story. And then there's the Seanchan, the big baddies from book two who show up for real in the show's second episode.
A glimpse of the Seanchan, among others. High Lady Suroth (Karima McAdams) stands flanked by her servant Alwhin (Jessica Boone) at left and a certain other dark gentleman (Fares Fares) at right. (credit: Amazon Studios)
I loved watching our Shienaran squad dance the blades with the Seanchan—in fact, heck, every single bit of swordplay we got in these first three episodes was excellent. (My wife's notes for this watch-through included the phrase, "UNO IS A STONE COLD BADASS," in all caps). Lan squaring off against the Fades was also excellent, and it shows just how far Rand has to go if he wants to actually be worthy of that heron-mark sword.
There was another really interesting bit my wife caught that I didn't: There's a moment in episode three where Egwene channels to stop another character from leaving the room, and Egwene does so without any of the crowd-pleasing gestures that the other Aes Sedai use. We know from the books that channeling has nothing to do with physical movements, but many channelers learn the motions with the weaves and can't do one without the other. She seems to have learned a valuable lesson from her time tied to a chair in Eamon Valda's tent.
Two things about being a book reader who didn't go back and watch the first season before jumping into the second: First, it's easy to lose track of who has been introduced and who hasn't, who is a composite character, and who has been invented to elide some of the book's convoluted plotting. Second, let's just say that there is a shortage of plot armor for secondary and tertiary characters.
Jordan was known for introducing reams and reams of named characters to help flesh out each of the book's locations and to give PoV characters someone to talk to once they had been flung to opposite edges of the map. An improbable number of these characters survive right up until the series-ending confrontation at the Last Battle. Bad news, book readers—I can basically guarantee that this show will end up killing one or more of your faves before you're ready.
Lan Mandragoran (Daniel Henney). Tall, dark, brooding, deadly. Who wouldn't want a warder like him? (credit: Amazon Studios)
I'll end my own side of this with the observation that so far, with these three episodes, it feels to me like the scenes the show does best are the wholly original ones. I wasn't super thrilled with how the gathering of evil (referred to by book readers as "the Darkfriend Social") played out, and the twist to Nynaeve's Accepted testing and how long that situation draws out compared to the books felt cheap and unnecessary. On the other hand, Min hanging out with Mat in their cells was fun—far more fun than the brief meeting between Min and Rand in the first season. Most of the other places where we've swerved from the text—especially Rand talking with Logain in the sanitarium—also felt solidly done. When the show is free to find its own way, it stops being so self-conscious and actually becomes enjoyable.
Maybe that's just the nature of adapted works. If so, I'm not a book purist—the show needs to stand on its own, just like any other adaptation. Changes are to be expected. It's a good thing.
(credit: WoT Wiki)
After an extraordinary run, torrent site RARBG shut itself down in May with no advance warning. With no time to prepare for the site’s disappearance and no obvious ability to proactively take up the slack, users would simply have to stand by and let nature take its course. Three months later it appears that numerous well-known torrent sites have turned RARBG’s loss into healthy wins.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
The sudden closure of torrent site RARBG three months ago will be remembered as one of the most significant since the invention of the protocol, and despite competition from a laundry list of candidates.
Operating a large public torrent site for 15 years is a considerable feat. Doing so in an incredibly hostile environment, as one of the world’s most recognizable ‘pirate’ brands, is certainly unusual. Doing so with virtually no downtime and without any assistance (or protection) from Cloudflare is absolutely unprecedented.
RARBG made everything look effortless. Then just like that, RARBG was gone. For reasons highlighted earlier, a site like RARBG isn’t easily replaced. The combination of content, stability, reliability, branding, and visibility was rare in a public site, and trying to replicate the formula would require motivation and the secret sauce that somehow kept RARBG online.
Just over 90 days have passed since RARBG disappeared, a short lifetime in the online piracy world. The hole RARBG left behind in the public ecosystem may not ever be fully repaired, but traffic blackholes are much more quickly and readily consumed.
Over the past three months nearly all major torrent sites offering the same types of content as RARBG have seen impressive gains. Sites targeting different regions, and/or carrying content not previously offered by RARBG, have shown no obvious shifts in traffic.
With no surprise newcomers to the public torrent site scene, it’s likely that many of the leading sites now enjoy an increased market share (SimilarWeb data).
RARBG shut down on the last day of May so traffic data for that month (blue) is not distorted in any meaningful way and can be compared to traffic generated by the other sites in the same period. As the chart shows, RARBG’s traffic fell off the edge of a cliff in the two months that followed (June/red, July/yellow), with the other sites all showing gains.
An interesting observation is that despite widespread reporting of RARBG’s shutdown, in July the domain still received an impressive 4.6m visits. It would’ve been trivial to place a few ads on the page to make some easy pocket money but for their own reasons, the site’s operators haven’t done that.
In overall visitor numbers, YTS has obviously done very well. Before RARBG’s shutdown in May, YTS was receiving around 86.7m visits per month. At the end of July, that already impressive figure had increased to 102.3m, which may be one of the highest totals ever achieved by a torrent site in a single month.
Between May and July, torrent site 1337x also picked up significant traffic; around 16m more visits in July than May according to SimilarWeb. The Pirate Bay enjoyed a smaller boost, around 4 million extra by July, but one site in particular seems to have really struck gold.
According to SimilarWeb, TorrentGalaxy received around 18 million visits in May. The next month that had risen to 34.8m but in July, the number of visits reached 40 million, just a million or so fewer visits than RARBG enjoyed in May before it shut down.
While the loss of RARBG is more than just traffic, it’s safe to conclude that supply easily kept up with demand in the face of an unexpected crisis.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
Enzymes that break down a polymer in wood can also handle polyethylene.
Enlarge (credit: Anton Petrus)
Plastic is becoming a plague on Earth. Not only are landfills bursting with it, but it has also polluted our oceans to the point that a tiny creature that had apparently made microplastics part of its diet was named Eurythenes plasticus. Can we possibly hold back the spread of a material that piles up faster than it could ever decay?
There might be an answer, and that answer is fungus. Researchers from the University of Kelaniya and the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka have discovered species of fungi that can break down polyethylene—the same type of plastic used for bags, bottles, cling wrap, takeout containers, and more. These fungi have one thing in common: They normally break down hardwood, which otherwise does not decay quickly. While hundreds of fungi and other microorganisms are known to break down various plastics, it was previously unknown that these particular hardwood-eating species could degrade polyethylene.
“Microbial biodegradation of plastics is a promising strategy to depolymerize petroleum-based plastics into monomers or mineralize them into carbon dioxide and water,” the researchers said in a study recently published in PLOS ONE.
Study claims 99% of human ancestors died off 930,000 years ago.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
Multiple lines of evidence indicate that modern humans evolved within the last 200,000 years and spread out of Africa starting about 60,000 years ago. Before that, however, the details get a bit complicated. We're still arguing about which ancestral population might have given rise to our lineage. Somewhere about 600,000 years ago, that lineage split off Neanderthals and Denisovans, and both of those lineages later interbred with modern humans after some of them left Africa.
Figuring out as much as we currently know has required a mix of fossils, ancient DNA, and modern genomes. A new study argues there is another complicating event in humanity's past: a near-extinction period where almost 99 percent of our ancestral lineage died. However, the finding is based on a completely new approach to analyzing modern genomes, and so it may be difficult to validate.
Unless a population is small and inbred, they will have genetic diversity: a collection of differences in their DNA ranging from individual bases up to large rearrangements of chromosomes. These differences are tracked when testing services estimate where your ancestors were likely to originate. Some genetic differences arose recently, while others have been floating around our lineage since before modern humans existed.
We’ve said it before; we’ll say it again: Don’t put credentials in publicly available code.
Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)
An unknown hacker gained administrative control of Sourcegraph, an AI-driven service used by developers at Uber, Reddit, Dropbox, and other companies, and used it to provide free access to resources that normally would have required payment.
In the process, the hacker(s) may have accessed personal information belonging to Sourcegraph users, Diego Comas, Sourcegraph’s head of security, said in a post on Wednesday. For paid users, the information exposed included license keys and the names and email addresses of license key holders. For non-paying users, it was limited to email addresses associated with their accounts. Private code, emails, passwords, usernames, or other personal information were inaccessible.
The hacker gained administrative access by obtaining an authentication key a Sourcegraph developer accidentally included in a code published to a public Sourcegraph instance hosted on Sourcegraph.com. After creating a normal user Sourcegraph account, the hacker used the token to elevate the account privileges to those of an administrator. The access token appeared in a pull request posted on July 14, the user account was created on August 28, and the elevation to admin occurred on August 30.
It was the most serious cheating scandal since 2006 World Chess Championship (“Toiletgate”).
Enlarge / US international grandmaster Hans Niemann at the second day of the Saint Louis Chess Club Fall Chess Classic in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 6, 2022. (credit: Tim Vizer / AFP)
Last September, the Internet was abuzz for weeks about a chess cheating controversy that erupted during the third round of the Sinquefield Cup. The reigning chess world champion, Magnus Carlsen, lost to a 19-year-old upstart named Hans Niemann in what was widely considered a shocking upset. Carlsen withdrew from the tournament the next day—an incident considered "virtually unprecedented' at such a high level of chess—and his cryptic comments on Twitter fueled rampant speculation that Niemann had cheated.
Things snowballed from there, with a full investigation and a $100 million lawsuit filed by Niemann in October. A judge dismissed the lawsuit in June. Now, Niemann and Chess.com have finally "resolved their differences" and settled the matter. Niemann can now return to Chess.com and is eligible to play in any event. All the parties involved are free to voice their opinions about the controversy.
The Carlsen/Niemann dustup is considered the most serious chess cheating scandal since the 2006 World Chess Championship, dubbed "Toiletgate" because Veselin Topalov accused his opponent, Vladimir Kramnik, of going to the bathroom too often. (Topalov thought Kramnik was getting computer assistance during the match via these bathroom breaks, later insisting that network cables had been found in the bathroom ceiling.) Anti-cheating measures have since been upgraded for future chess events in response. Those measures include nonlinear junction detectors to detect electronics, an RF machine to detect infrared signals, confiscating electronics from spectators, a 30-minute broadcast delay for US chess championships, and even retaining a medical doctor to inspect players' ears for hidden transmitters.
$50 price cut only makes the 16GB 4060 Ti marginally more palatable than before.
Enlarge / The RTX 4060 Ti Founders Edition. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)
Last week, AMD announced what are probably the last major GPU launches of this generation of graphics cards: the $449 Radeon RX 7700 XT and $499 Radeon RX 7800 XT. AMD's pricing and performance numbers pit the cards against Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (specifically the $499 16GB version) and the $599 RTX 4070.
AMD's pricing is aggressive enough that Nvidia is quietly cutting the prices of some 16GB RTX 4060 Ti cards to $449, to match the RX 7700 XT. The announcement about the $50 reduction was buried toward the bottom of an email that Nvidia sent to GPU reviewers ahead of AMD's launch next week; it also drew attention to Nvidia-specific features like DLSS upscaling and frame generation, which compete with AMD's GPU-agnostic FSR, plus recent DLSS improvements that improve ray-tracing performance.
"Finally, as a reminder, market prices can vary from the original launch MSRPs," Nvidia's Brian Burke wrote. "Today, GeForce RTX 4070 is widely available at $599, and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB is now available at $449. Both of these GPUs are great upgrade choices for gamers seeking their next GPU for the upcoming 2 to 3 years."
A few years after launching the ZimaBoard single-board computer with an Intel Apollo Lake processor, IceWhale Technology is back with a new device called the ZimaBlade. It’s… also a small computer with an Intel Apollo Lake processor. But t…
A few years after launching the ZimaBoard single-board computer with an Intel Apollo Lake processor, IceWhale Technology is back with a new device called the ZimaBlade. It’s… also a small computer with an Intel Apollo Lake processor. But this time the company is offering more connection options and positioning the ZimaBlade as a compact computer that […]
The post ZimaBlade is a compact server board with Intel Apollo Lake for $64 and up (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
For workers who need to go from 4K to 3D.
Lenovo's depiction of the 3D effect on its ThinkVision 27 3D Monitor. [credit: Lenovo ]
Lenovo's next 27-inch 4K monitor is unlike any display it has released before. Featuring a lenticular lens and real-time eye-tracking, it's a 3D monitor that doesn't require any glasses. Other companies are already pushing stereoscopic products, but Lenovo's ThinkVision 27 3D Monitor, announced at the IFA conference today, takes the glasses-free experience to a bigger screen.
The technology behind Lenovo's 3D monitor and the accompanying software, 3D Explorer, are proprietary, a Lenovo spokesperson confirmed to Ars. 3D Explorer includes a 3D player and SDK for building 3D apps. Lenovo is targeting the monitor and app at content creators, like 3D graphic designers and developers.
Like other glasses-less 3D screens, the ThinkVision works by projecting two different images to each of your eyes, resulting in a 3D effect where, as PR images would have you believe, it appears that the images are popping out of the screen. Lenovo says the monitor's 3D resolution is 1920×2160. The lenticular lens in the monitor is switchable, allowing for normal, 2D viewing at 3840×2160, too.
Mit 57 Zoll ist der Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 einfach riesig. Bei zweifachem 4K und 240 Hz sollte die Grafikkarte aber ebenso beeindrucken. Ein Hands-on von Oliver Nickel (
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