Month: September 2024

Ford starts deliveries of enhanced-range E-Transit electric vans

The new battery charges at a higher rate, and onboard power can be used in motion.

A woman loads things into the side of a Ford E-Transit that's been uplifted as a refrigerated van

Enlarge / Refrigerated delivery with an E-Transit is now feasible, as the onboard power is now available while the van is in motion. (credit: Ford)

America's tradespeople have steadily been getting more van-curious over the years, helped no doubt by Ford beginning local production of the already Euro-popular Transit in Kansas City in 2014. In 2022 Ford debuted the E-Transit, which has been steadily growing in sales over the past few quarters. Now the Blue Oval has started deliveries of the model-year 2024 E-Transit, and there are some worthwhile improvements compared to the MY23 van.

The opprobrium that is now starting to stick to supersized pickup trucks has mostly ignored the humble van. It's contradictory, on the face of it; even a low-roof Transit takes up more volume on the road than most pickups. But then, there aren't leather-and-chrome special edition Transit vans driven more as commuter cars or weekend toys like there are pickups—at least for now.

EV vans ought to be even more immune, for they maintain their working class credentials and burnish them with a side helping of environmentalism. For example, Ford says that data from its telematics show that since its introduction in 2022 until the end of Q2 2024, E-Transit customers in the US and Canada had avoided burning more than 3 million gallons of gas (11.3 million L) and reduced their output of CO2 by 25 million kg.

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Acer’s Project DualPlay gaming laptop concept has detachable controllers for 2-player gaming

The Acer Project DualPlay is a concept gaming laptop designed for multiplayer gaming. Designed to be part of the Acer Predator line of premium gaming notebooks, the laptop has a modular design that allows the computer’s large touchpad to be detac…

The Acer Project DualPlay is a concept gaming laptop designed for multiplayer gaming. Designed to be part of the Acer Predator line of premium gaming notebooks, the laptop has a modular design that allows the computer’s large touchpad to be detached and used as a wireless controller… or separated into two joysticks that allow two […]

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Acer’s new Swift 14 laptops come with a choice of Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chips

Acer is debuting three new laptops with 14 inch displays and support for Microsoft Copilot+ features at IFA this week. What’s a little unusual is that customers have a choice of three different processors. The Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) comes wit…

Acer is debuting three new laptops with 14 inch displays and support for Microsoft Copilot+ features at IFA this week. What’s a little unusual is that customers have a choice of three different processors. The Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) comes with Intel Lunar Lake processor options, while the Swift 14 AI (SF14-61) is powered by an AMD […]

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Acer’s new Swift 14 laptops come with a choice of Intel, AMD, or Qualcomm chips

Acer is debuting three new laptops with 14 inch displays and support for Microsoft Copilot+ features at IFA this week. What’s a little unusual is that customers have a choice of three different processors. The Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) comes wit…

Acer is debuting three new laptops with 14 inch displays and support for Microsoft Copilot+ features at IFA this week. What’s a little unusual is that customers have a choice of three different processors. The Acer Swift 14 AI (SF14-51) comes with Intel Lunar Lake processor options, while the Swift 14 AI (SF14-61) is powered by an AMD […]

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Acer’s first handheld gaming PC is the Nitro Blaze 7 with a Ryzen 8845HS chip and 144 Hz display

Acer is making a play for the ever-expanding handheld gaming PC space. The new Acer Nitro Blaze 7 (GN771) is the company’s first handheld and one of the first from any company to feature a 35+ watt AMD Ryzen 8040HS series processor. The handheld …

Acer is making a play for the ever-expanding handheld gaming PC space. The new Acer Nitro Blaze 7 (GN771) is the company’s first handheld and one of the first from any company to feature a 35+ watt AMD Ryzen 8040HS series processor. The handheld also features a 7 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD touchscreen […]

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Acer’s first handheld gaming PC is the Nitro Blaze 7 with a Ryzen 8845HS chip and 144 Hz display

Acer is making a play for the ever-expanding handheld gaming PC space. The new Acer Nitro Blaze 7 (GN771) is the company’s first handheld and one of the first from any company to feature a 35+ watt AMD Ryzen 8040HS series processor. The handheld …

Acer is making a play for the ever-expanding handheld gaming PC space. The new Acer Nitro Blaze 7 (GN771) is the company’s first handheld and one of the first from any company to feature a 35+ watt AMD Ryzen 8040HS series processor. The handheld also features a 7 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD touchscreen […]

The post Acer’s first handheld gaming PC is the Nitro Blaze 7 with a Ryzen 8845HS chip and 144 Hz display appeared first on Liliputing.

TorrentGalaxy is Back Online & Uploads Resume

This weekend, popular torrent site TorrentGalaxy went ‘offline’ displaying an image that some interpreted as a farewell message. Today the site returned and uploads at third-party sites resumed simultaneously. This is the second time in a few weeks that the site has gone through this mysterious cycle. The main question that remains: Why?

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

torrentgalaxyFor a torrent site, TorrentGalaxy is still a relative newcomer. The site is barely seven years of age while others have been around for over two decades.

In that timespan, however, TorrentGalaxy secured a key place in the torrent ecosystem. Not only does it serve millions of users directly, its ‘release’ groups also distribute torrents across other popular sites, including The Pirate Bay and 1337x.

This role has been challenged over the past few days. On Sunday, the site replaced its usual appearance with a cryptic message, “TGX Forever”, without any further explanation. Meanwhile, the site’s health status page was replaced by an even more ominous note: “Executing End-Program.exe…,” it read.

TorrentGalaxy health status / proxy page

end program

Without a word from the site’s operators or moderators, users were left guessing. Was this just a temporary ‘outage’, similar to the one a few weeks earlier, or were there serious issues behind the scenes?

TorrentGalaxy Returns

Today, after three days, the site reappeared in its usual form, as if nothing ever happened. TorrentGalaxy.to works just fine, and the same is true for the status page, which makes no mention of the recent drama.

TGx Returns

tgx latest

In addition to the websites, the TGx upload bots have also resumed their normal operation, it seems. The TGxGoodies account on 1337x uploaded more than a dozen new torrents in the past hour.

Over the past days, we have received multiple reports citing unconfirmed “moderators” who claimed that the site had indeed shut down. These conclusions were premature, it seems.

Why?

The main question is why TorrentGalaxy’s operators have spooked users. It’s clear that they fancy this ‘mystery’ approach, but they wouldn’t take the site offline without a reason either.

Legal issues and hosting problems are often a reason for outages, but we have seen no signs of either. Maintenance or other technical problems could also offer an explanation. For example, it appears that one of TorrentGalaxy’s SSL certificates expired on August 31, after which it went offline.

Whatever the reason, the next time the site puts up a “TGx Forever” banner, it’s likely not the end of the site. Until it is, of course.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Qualcomm’s new 8-core Snapdragon chip is aimed at cheaper Arm Windows PCs

Windows-on-Arm has gotten better, but we’re still waiting for good budget PCs.

Qualcomm’s new 8-core Snapdragon chip is aimed at cheaper Arm Windows PCs

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

Windows-on-Arm is finally just about good enough to serve as your main PC, thanks to a combination of long-awaited Snapdragon X-series silicon from Qualcomm, Arm-specific improvements in the Windows 11 24H2 update, and third-party software developers that are slowly but surely putting out Arm-native versions of their most popular apps.

So far, those Snapdragon X chips have been confined mostly to $1,000-and-up premium PCs like the Surface Pro and Surface Laptop. But Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon has said that he wants to get better hardware into midrange laptops in the $700 range, and today the company took a concrete step toward making that happen: a new version of the Snapdragon X with 8 CPU cores instead of 10, but the same Oryon CPU architecture (a neural processing unit [NPU] that still meets Microsoft's requirements for Copilot+ PCs) and the same Snapdragon X Plus branding as the faster 10-core versions.

There are two separate versions of the 8-core Snapdragon X Plus. The X1P-46-100 version allows its CPU to boost up to 4.0 GHz for single-core tasks and has a GPU capable of 2.1 TFLOPS of performance (compared to 3.8 for the 10-core X plus, and 4.6 for the fastest Snapdragon X Elite variants). The X1P-42-100 version only boosts up to 3.4 GHz in single-core mode and has a 1.7 TFLOPS GPU. All of Qualcomm's NPUs are the same, offering 45 trillion operations per second (TOPS).

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