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Some of the USB Type-C ports on modern computers will let you charge your PC with up to a 240W power supply, transfer data at speeds as high as 80 Gbps, or connect multiple 4K displays. Others… do not. That’s because some USB Type-C ports a…
Some of the USB Type-C ports on modern computers will let you charge your PC with up to a 240W power supply, transfer data at speeds as high as 80 Gbps, or connect multiple 4K displays. Others… do not. That’s because some USB Type-C ports are USB 2.0 or USB 3.x ports, while others support […]
The post Microsoft is setting minimum USB Type-C capabilities for Windows 11 PCs appeared first on Liliputing.
“We went from the atomic bomb in 1945 to laying the keel on the Nautilus in 1951.”
In a revealing interview published by the All-In Podcast on Wednesday, the private astronaut nominated to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, spoke at length on what he thought about the nomination process, how he would have led NASA, and the factors that led to the abrupt rescission of his nomination by President Trump.
"I got a call Friday, of last week, that the president has decided to go in a different direction," Isaacman said. "It was a real bummer."
It was a real bummer for most of the space community, myself included. To be clear, I am biased. I have gotten to know Isaacman over the last five years rather well, talking with him about his passion for spaceflight, what is working, and what is not. What I have discovered in Isaacman is a person who cares deeply about the future of US spaceflight and wants to make a meaningful contribution to its advancement. To see him done wrong like this, well, it's a very sordid affair.
FCC Republican Nathan Simington resigns along with Democrat Geoffrey Starks.
Two commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission are resigning at the end of this week. For at least a little while, the FCC will have just two members: Chairman Brendan Carr, a Republican chosen by Trump to lead the agency, and Anna Gomez, a Democratic commissioner.
Democrat Geoffrey Starks announced in March that he would leave in the near future, and today he said that Friday will be his final day. Starks' departure could have given Carr a 2-1 Republican majority, but it turns out Republican Commissioner Nathan Simington will leave at the same time as Starks.
"I will be concluding my tenure at the Federal Communications Commission at the end of this week," Simington announced today. "It has been the greatest honor of my professional life to serve the American people as a Commissioner. I am deeply honored to have been entrusted with this responsibility by President Donald J. Trump during his first term."
OpenAI defends privacy of hundreds of millions of ChatGPT users.
OpenAI is now fighting a court order to preserve all ChatGPT user logs—including deleted chats and sensitive chats logged through its API business offering—after news organizations suing over copyright claims accused the AI company of destroying evidence.
"Before OpenAI had an opportunity to respond to those unfounded accusations, the court ordered OpenAI to 'preserve and segregate all output log data that would otherwise be deleted on a going forward basis until further order of the Court (in essence, the output log data that OpenAI has been destroying)," OpenAI explained in a court filing demanding oral arguments in a bid to block the controversial order.
In the filing, OpenAI alleged that the court rushed the order based only on a hunch raised by The New York Times and other news plaintiffs. And now, without "any just cause," OpenAI argued, the order "continues to prevent OpenAI from respecting its users’ privacy decisions." That risk extended to users of ChatGPT Free, Plus, and Pro, as well as users of OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), OpenAI said.
Part science outlet, part Radio Shack, part curio cabinet—American Science & Surplus is unique.
It was shortly after moving into Chicago's Jefferson Park neighborhood that I saw the sign for the first time: American Science & Surplus. My curiosity piqued, I pulled into the strip mall and walked into a store filled with an unimaginable variety of lab equipment, military surplus, tools, electronics, toys, and so much more.
Now, nearly 90 years after its launch selling "reject lenses" as American Lens & Photo, American Science & Surplus is facing an existential threat. The COVID-19 pandemic and increased costs hit the business hard, so the store has launched a GoFundMe campaign looking to raise $200,000 from customers and fans alike. What's happening in suburban Chicago is a microcosm of the challenges facing local retail, with big-box retailers and online behemoths overwhelming beloved local institutions. It's a story that has played out countless times in the last two-plus decades, and owner Pat Meyer is hoping this tale has a different ending.
American Science & Surplus owner Pat Meyer holds the two most popular items in the store: $4 solenoid switches that are used to repair a well-known brand of single-cup coffee makers.
Credit:
Eric Bangeman
Launching a fundraiser was a tough choice for Meyer. "I don't like asking people for money," he said.
Our Switch got here 14 hours early—here’s what early adopters will see.
As we've mentioned previously, Nintendo did not see fit to provide press with early review hardware for the Switch 2. Today, though, with the June 5 launch of the Switch 2 having already arrived in regions like Japan and Australia, the ever-efficient UPS driver delivered final retail hardware straight from Nintendo of America to the Ars Orbiting HQ.
The 14-hour lead time between our receipt of the hardware and the midnight launch of the Switch 2 on the US East Coast isn't close to enough time to put together a comprehensive review. For now, though, we thought we'd take you through a pictorial journey of our unboxing and initial setup process, ahead of much more coverage to come.
And while you peruse the images, we recommend listening to the absolute bop that is the Switch 2 setup music, which we've embedded below:
Firing spree allegedly based on incorrect employee scores and other basic errors.
The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) teamed up with DOGE to fire 10,000 employees while relying on "hopelessly error-ridden" personnel records, a class action complaint filed yesterday alleged. The lawsuit said the HHS terminated thousands of workers on April 1, shortly after sharing the flawed personnel records with the US DOGE Service, Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
"These agencies knew that the records were hopelessly error-ridden, and that the records should have been used, if at all, with great caution," said the lawsuit filed in US District Court for the District of Columbia. "Instead of taking steps to verify the contents of the records and correct the systemic inaccuracies, the agencies promptly used them to fire 10,000 employees."
The case was filed by a law firm founded by former Justice Department attorneys on behalf of seven named plaintiffs and all others who were laid off as part of the April 1 Reduction in Force (RIF). It alleges that the government violated the Privacy Act, which requires agencies to verify the accuracy of information used as the basis for adverse actions against employees.
Combining radiocarbon dating and a new AI program called Enoch yields surprising results.
Over the years, scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls have analyzed the ancient parchments with various methods: for example, X-rays, multispectral imaging, "virtual unfolding," and paleography, i.e., studying elements in their writing styles. The scrolls are believed to date back to between the third century BCE and the first century CE, but those dates rely largely on paleography, since only a handful of the scrolls have calendar dates written on them.
However, the traditional paleographic method is inherently subjective and based on a given scholar's experience. A team of scientists has combined radiocarbon dating from 24 scroll samples and machine-learning-based handwriting analysis to create their own AI program—dubbed Enoch. The objective was to achieve more accurate date estimates, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. Among the findings: Many of the scrolls are older than previously thought.
As reported earlier, these ancient Hebrew texts—roughly 900 full and partial scrolls in all, stored in clay jars—were first discovered scattered in various caves near what was once the settlement of Qumran, just north of the Dead Sea, by Bedouin shepherds in 1946–1947. (Apparently, a shepherd threw a rock while searching for a lost member of his flock and accidentally shattered one of the clay jars, leading to the discovery.) Qumran was destroyed by the Romans, circa 73 CE, and historians believe the scrolls were hidden in the caves by a sect called the Essenes to protect them from being destroyed. The natural limestone and conditions within the caves helped preserve the scrolls for millennia.
If that $349 price is real then it’s a great deal; if it’s not real, it depends.
Now that most of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have been released, it's clear that they give AMD and Intel their best opportunity this decade to claw back some market share and make the dedicated graphics card business a little less lopsided.
It's not that the 50-series GPUs have been bad cards, but a focus on sometimes-useful, sometimes-not AI-generated frames and a lack of major manufacturing advancements relative to the 40-series have eroded Nvidia's usual lead in performance and power efficiency.
That's the advantage AMD is trying to press with the new Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics cards, which at $299 and $349 for 8GB and 16GB are both priced and configured to comprehensively undercut Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti. As with the RX 9070 series earlier this year, the RDNA 4 architecture goes a long way toward addressing the RX 6000 and RX 7000-series' lackluster ray-tracing performance and mediocre power efficiency, and a relatively affordable 16GB version will help insulate buyers from the RAM limitations that are slowly but surely becoming more of a problem for 8GB cards.
Laut einer Anga-Expertin hat die Telekom kaum Kooperationspartner in ihrem Glasfasernetz. Zugleich verliert Vectoring langsam an Ansehen. (Anga Com, DSL)
Laut einer Anga-Expertin hat die Telekom kaum Kooperationspartner in ihrem Glasfasernetz. Zugleich verliert Vectoring langsam an Ansehen. (