Month: January 2025

AYANEO 3 handheld gaming PC with modular controllers hits Indiegogo for $700 and up (way up)

The AYANEO 3 is a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch display that comes with a choice of OLED or LCD display panels, AMD Ryzen 7 8840U or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor options, and memory and storage options ranging from 16GB/512GB to 64GB/4TB. But what re…

The AYANEO 3 is a handheld gaming PC with a 7 inch display that comes with a choice of OLED or LCD display panels, AMD Ryzen 7 8840U or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor options, and memory and storage options ranging from 16GB/512GB to 64GB/4TB. But what really makes this handheld stand out is its […]

The post AYANEO 3 handheld gaming PC with modular controllers hits Indiegogo for $700 and up (way up) appeared first on Liliputing.

For real, we may be taking blood pressure readings all wrong

Blood pressure readings while lying down beat seated readings at predicting heart risks.

Last year, a study highlighted that your doctor's office might be taking your blood pressure wrong. The current best practice is to take seated blood pressure readings with a detailed protocol: Patients must not eat, drink, or exercise for 30 minutes prior; they must have an empty bladder and sit calmly for five minutes prior to the first reading; they must sit with their feet uncrossed and flat on the floor; their back should be supported; and—a big one that's often overlooked—they must keep the arm to be measured resting on a flat surface at the height of their heart, not higher or lower.

While the setup is often different from what happens in a bustling medical office, a new study blows away quibbles over protocol and suggests that even when done perfectly, the method is second-rate. We shouldn't be sitting at all when we take our blood pressure—we should be lying down.

According to the study, published in JAMA Cardiology and led by researchers at Harvard, blood pressure readings measured while lying down were significantly better at indicating risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, heart failure, and death than were seated blood pressure readings alone.

Read full article

Comments

ISP failed to comply with New York’s $15 broadband law—until Ars got involved

Optimum wasn’t ready to comply with law, rejected low-income man’s request twice.

When New York's law requiring $15 or $20 broadband plans for people with low incomes took effect last week, Optimum customer William O'Brien tried to sign up for the cheap Internet service. Since O'Brien is in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), he qualifies for one of the affordable plans that Internet service providers must offer New Yorkers who meet income eligibility requirements.

O'Brien has been paying Optimum $111.20 a month for broadband—$89.99 for the broadband service, $14 in equipment rental fees, a $6 "Network Enhancement Fee," and $1.21 in tax. He was due for a big discount under the New York Affordable Broadband Act (ABA), which says that any ISP with over 20,000 customers must offer either a $15 plan with download speeds of at least 25Mbps or a $20 plan with at least 200Mbps speeds, and that the price must include "any recurring taxes and fees such as recurring rental fees for service provider equipment required to obtain broadband service and usage fees."

Despite qualifying for a low-income plan under the law's criteria, O'Brien's request was denied by Optimum. He reached out to Ars, just like many other people who have read our articles about bad telecom customer service. Usually, these problems are fixed quickly after we reach out to an Internet provider's public relations department on the customer's behalf.

Read full article

Comments

Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 costs as much as a whole gaming PC—but it sure is fast

Even setting aside Frame Generation, this is a fast, power-hungry $2,000 GPU.

Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090 starts at $1,999 before you factor in upsells from the company's partners or price increases driven by scalpers and/or genuine demand. It costs more than my entire gaming PC.

The new GPU is so expensive that you could build an entire well-specced gaming PC with Nvidia's next-fastest GPU in it—the $999 RTX 5080, which we don't have in hand yet—for the same money, or maybe even a little less with judicious component selection. It's not the most expensive GPU that Nvidia has ever launched—2018's $2,499 Titan RTX has it beat, and 2022's RTX 3090 Ti also cost $2,000—but it's safe to say it's not really a GPU intended for the masses.

At least as far as gaming is concerned, the 5090 is the very definition of a halo product; it's for people who demand the best and newest thing regardless of what it costs (the calculus is probably different for deep-pocketed people and companies who want to use them as some kind of generative AI accelerator). And on this front, at least, the 5090 is successful. It's the newest and fastest GPU you can buy, and the competition is not particularly close. It's also a showcase for DLSS Multi-Frame Generation, a new feature unique to the 50-series cards that Nvidia is leaning on heavily to make its new GPUs look better than they already are.

Read full article

Comments

Researchers optimize simulations of molecules on quantum computers

A new approach to simulating the electrons of small molecules like catalysts.

One of the most frequently asked questions about quantum computers is a simple one: When will they be useful?

If you talk to people in the field, you'll generally get a response in the form of another question: useful for what? Quantum computing can be applied to a large range of problems, some of them considerably more complex than others. Utility will come for some of the simpler problems first, but further hardware progress is needed before we can begin tackling some of the more complex ones.

One that should be easiest to solve involves modeling the behavior of some simple catalysts. The electrons of these catalysts, which are critical for their chemical activity, obey the rules of quantum mechanics, which makes it relatively easy to explore them with a quantum computer.

Read full article

Comments