Month: May 2019

Marshmallows, rejoice, for Hulu has dropped the first teaser for its miniseries revival of Veronica Mars. Based on the footage, it looks like a return to peak form for our favorite sassy, taser-wielding, crime-fighting heroine.

(Spoilers for first three seasons and the 2014 film below.)

The cult-classic crime drama premiered on UPN in 2004 and continued for three seasons. The last season ran on UPN's successor network, The CW, and despite some improvement in the ratings, the series was officially canceled in June 2007. As my Ars colleague Sam Axon wrote last fall, "Between its ties to struggling new broadcast networks and the fact that it was way too smart and had way too much social commentary for its own good—especially for a series that was framed as a teen show but that in a lot of ways really wasn't—the series met an early mid-season demise with low ratings."

Enlarge / The entrance of the cave is relatively flat with a gentle slope up to the inside, where two small trenches were plotted in 2018. (credit: Dongju Zhang, Lanzhou University)

Denisovans, an extinct group of hominins that once walked alongside (and had sex with) Neanderthals and modern humans, are an enigmatic branch of our family tree. They left fragments of their DNA behind in modern human genomes across Asia, Australia, and Melanesia. But their only physical remains seem have been left in Denisova Cave in Siberia: just a finger, a few molars, a fragment of arm or leg bone, and a small chunk of skull.

But we’re starting to piece together a little more of our mysterious cousins’ story. A team of paleoanthropologists recently identified a new Denisovan fossil—half of an entire jaw. And it comes from the high altitude of the Tibetan Plateau in northern China, nearly 2,000km (1,200 miles) from Denisova Cave.

An accidental find

Half a lower jaw and a few teeth may not sound like much, but it’s one of the largest pieces of a Denisovan skeleton that we know of so far. Its owner died at least 160,000 years ago, according to uranium-series dating of a thin crust of carbonate on the fossil, so the Denisovan from Tibet is about the same age as the oldest Denisovan unearthed so far at Denisova Cave.

Enlarge / AMD CEO Lisa Su, holding a Rome processor. The large chip in the middle is the 14nm I/O chip; around it are pairs of 7nm chiplets containing the CPU cores. (credit: AMD)

In its earnings call, AMD offered a little more detail about the launch of its next-generation processors, built using the Zen 2 architecture and TSMC's 7nm manufacturing process, and new GPU architecture, Navi, again built on 7nm. Server-oriented EPYC-branded chips (codenamed Rome) should be shipping to customers in the third quarter of this year, and so too will Navi-based video cards.

In November last year, AMD outlined the details of the Zen 2 design. It makes a number of architectural improvements to shore up some of Zen's weaker areas (for example, it now has native 256-bit floating point units to handle AVX2 instructions; the original Zen only had 128-bit units, so it had to split AVX2 workloads up into pieces). But perhaps more significant is the new approach to building the processors. Zen used modules of four cores (handling eight threads), with two such modules per chip. Mainstream Ryzen processors used one chip; the enthusiast Threadripper range used two chips (first generation) or four chips (second generation), and the server-oriented Epyc range used four chips. Each die is a full processor, containing the cores, cache, memory controllers, PCIe and Infinity Fabric connections for I/O, integrated SATA and USB controllers, and so on and so forth.

Zen 2 will continue to use multiple chips, but this time the chips will be more specialized. There will be 7nm chiplets, each containing CPU cores, cache, and Infinity Fabric links, and a 14nm I/O die, containing memory controllers, Infinity Fabric connections, and SATA and USB controllers. The 7nm parts should be able to achieve higher clock speeds and lower power consumption than their 14nm predecessors. The parts on the I/O die, however, generally don't benefit from higher clock speeds. In fact, they can't—PCIe, USB, SATA, and even memory, all need to run at predetermined speeds, because their performance is governed by the bus specification. The extra performance headroom that 7nm would offer is wasted. By keeping these parts on 14nm, AMD is likely able to cut costs (because well-established 14nm manufacturing should be cheaper than the newer, more advanced 7nm).

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum vehicle. (credit: Charter)

Charter cable Internet customers who don't subscribe to Charter's TV service are using an average of more than 400GB of data a month, the company said yesterday.

While Charter doesn't impose data caps on its Spectrum Internet service, the newly released stat helps illustrate how ditching cable TV and relying on streaming services can push customers closer to incurring data overage fees. Comcast and other ISPs impose monthly caps of 1TB.

"The demand for both speed and throughput on our network continues to increase," Charter CEO Tom Rutledge told investors in an earnings call yesterday. "Monthly data usage by our residential Internet customers is rising rapidly and monthly median data usage is over 200GB per customer. When you look at average monthly usage for customers that don't subscribe to our traditional video product, usage climbs to over 400GB per month, which compares to an average mobile usage of well under 10GB a month." (Charter also offers mobile service through a reseller agreement with Verizon.)

Last week, developer Amir Rajan revealed an interesting Easter egg hidden in the Switch version of A Dark Room, an inventive text-based adventure that was ported to the console early last month. If you plug a USB keyboard into the system and hit the "~" key while the game is running, you get a functional Ruby interpreter suitable for coding simple programs directly on the console.

This weekend, though, Nintendo decided to remove the game from the Switch eShop, leading Rajan to tell Eurogamer he "deeply regret[s] how this has blown up."

In a Mastodon thread revealing the Easter egg, Rajan said the hidden in-game coding environment was "an attempt to capture the magic of coding in its purest form." In a world of complicated, Internet-connected, IDE-based game engines, he writes that he wanted to "show the next generation that magic does exist in this world. That you can create something from nothing."

Enlarge / Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange leaves Southwark Crown Court in a security van after being sentenced on May 1, 2019 in London. (credit: Jack Taylor/Getty Images)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been sentenced to 50 weeks in prison for fleeing to the Ecuadorian embassy in London while on bail in 2012. At the time, he was facing possible extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges.

Assange remained in the embassy until last month, when he was evicted by his Ecuadorian hosts and re-arrested by British authorities.

Wednesday's sentencing is unlikely to be the end of Assange's legal problems. Shortly after he was re-arrested last month, US authorities unsealed an indictment charging him with conspiring with Chelsea Manning to crack a hashed password belonging to a Pentagon computer in 2010. At the time, Manning was an Army private leaking confidential military documents to WikiLeaks. Assange was unable to learn the password, but the US argues that his attempt is sufficient to charge him with conspiracy.