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AUSTIN, Texas—"You have got to be kidding me."

Alarms and flashing lights have begun blaring in a hotel meeting room, much to the chagrin of CIA Senior Collection Analyst David Clopper. The officer, along with a team of his colleagues, is in the middle of demonstrating his department's training materials, and he has to account for these materials before leaving the room. In some cases, this might require picking up a few stacks of paper, or some pamphlets and flyers.

Clopper, on the other hand, has to pick up dozens of 10-sided dice, over 100 colored gems, and hundreds of custom-printed cards that describe hypothetical crises across the globe. That's nothing compared to the mess of cards on the other side of the room, which, moments ago, were being used to track and capture the elusive drug kingpin El Chapo.

Enlarge / Early versions of the Machines from The Animatrix. (credit: The Animatrix)

Blade Runner and Mad Max are back, so why not The Matrix? The Hollywood Reporter says sources have confirmed that Warner Bros is starting work on a reboot of The Matrix, and it even has a star in mind: Michael B. Jordan, who recently broke out as the star of Creed. Zak Penn (Alphas, X-Men: The Last Stand, The Incredible Hulk) is currently writing a treatment.

The Matrix was not expected to be a blockbuster when Warners released it in March 1999. At the time, writer/director siblings the Wachowskis were best known for an indie film noir called Bound about lesbian lovers plotting the ultimate crime. But the innovative camera effects (bullet time!) and futuristic originality of The Matrix blew audiences away, rocketing it to the fourth-highest box office on Earth that year. Who could forget badass Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus, offering the blue and red pills, or Carrie Ann Moss as Trinity, using nmap when she wasn't doing gun ballet. And then there was Keanu Reeves as Neo, downloading data over his brain port and intoning gravely, "I know kung-fu."

Though the sequels never lived up to the promise of the first film, the franchise was a game changer, influencing science fiction to this day. Everything from Inception to Mr. Robot owes something to the style and themes that the Wachowskis popularized. Plus, bullet time has forever left its mark on action scenes, both technologically and stylistically. Any time you see a fight scene that moves between fast and slow motion, viewed in 360 degrees, you are looking at a special effect that the Wachowskis invented.

Enlarge (credit: Sebastian Anthony)

Rejoice, Chrome users! With Chrome 57, released this week, your laptop might soon get more than three hours of battery life when you have multiple tabs open.

In September last year the Chromium team said changes were coming to Chrome's handling of background tabs, but they've landed in the stable branch of Chrome a little sooner than expected. Basically, from now on, background tabs will be limited to an average CPU load of just 1 percent on a single core.

Chrome 57's actual mechanism for background tab throttling is a little more complex. After 10 seconds of being in the background (i.e. not in focus), each tab has a budget (in seconds) for how much CPU wall time it can use. (Wall time is the actual real-world time it takes for a process to start and complete.) The background tab is only allowed to use the CPU if it hasn't consumed its entire budget. Here's the kicker: the budget constantly regenerates, but only at a rate of 0.01 seconds per second.