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Enlarge / iOS 13 on an iPhone 11 Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon) Today, Apple released a minor update for the operating systems running on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices. Labeled iOS 13.2.2 (or iPadOS 13.2.2 for the iPad), the key bullet point in this update is a fix for a widely reported (and apparently RAM-management-related) bug in iOS 13 that saw apps quitting and losing their state while running in the background. All the other changes listed for this update are bug fixes as well. Issues addressed include multiple problems with cellular service and reception, corrupted emails when using S/MIME encryption, a charging problem when using YubiKey accessories, and a bug involving Kerberos authentication in Safari. Here are Apple's release notes for iOS 13.2.2. The iPadOS release notes are the same, except they omit the bullet point about fixing a cellular data bug: Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

So far we've heard two songs from Mura Masa's upcoming album R.Y.C., which stands for Raw Youth Collage. Clairo handled lead vocals on the phenomenal lead single "I Don't Think I Can Do This Again," while Mura Masa himself grabbed the mic on "No Hope Generation." Today, we get to hear … More »View the full article

Enlarge / MLPerf offers detailed, granular benchmarking for a wide array of platforms and architectures. While most ML benchmarking focuses on training, MLPerf focuses on inference—which is to say, the workload you use a neural network for after it's been trained. (credit: MKLPerf) When you want to see whether one CPU is faster than another, you have PassMark. For GPUs, there's Unigine's Superposition. But what do you do when you need to figure out how fast your machine-learning platform is—or how fast a machine-learning platform you're thinking of investing in is? Machine-learning expert David Kanter, along with scientists and engineers from organizations such as Google, Intel, and Microsoft, aims to answer that question with MLPerf, a machine-learning benchmark suite. Measuring the speed of machine-learning platforms is a problem that becomes more complex the longer you examine it, since both problem sets and architectures vary widely across the field of machine learning—and in addition to performance, the inference side of MLPerf must also measure accuracy. Training and inference If you don't work with machine learning directly, it's easy to get confused about the terms. The first thing you must understand is that neural networks aren't really programmed at all: they're given a (hopefully) large set of related data and turned loose upon it to find patterns. This phase of a neural network's existence is called training. The more training a neural network gets, the better it can learn to identify patterns and deduce rules to help it solve problems. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Rumors of a Smiths reunion began swirling this week after a "trusted source" reportedly told Morrissey fan site Morrrissey-Solo that "concert industry insiders, not authorized to speak publicly, say concert giant 'Live Nation' has won the rights" to a planned tour reuniting Moz with guitarist Johnny Marr. Not so, says Johnny Marr. More »View the full article

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We last heard from Fireworks way back in 2014, when the ambitious Detroit pop-punk band released their third album, Oh, Common Life. They announced an indefinite hiatus the following year, but it appears that hiatus is now over, and dramatically so. More »View the full article

The Google Pixel 4. [credit: Ron Amadeo ] There's a growing mountain of evidence that the Pixel 4 was saddled with a battery that's just too small, and Google's road to an acceptable runtime involved slashing the phone's abilities with software limits. The latest discovery comes from XDA Developers' Mishaal Rahman, who found an unused high brightness mode hidden in the Pixel 4's code. A "high brightness mode" has become a typical feature of smartphone display panels. Rather than a dedicated toggle, manufacturers usually enable a high-brightness mode when the user pegs the brightness slider all the way to the max or when the ambient brightness sensor detects sunlight. This usually negatively affects battery life, but when the choice is between seeing your phone or not seeing your phone in direct sunlight, the runtime tradeoff is a welcome option. The Pixel 4 display is not that bright, with a full-screen peak brightness of around 450 nits. The Galaxy S10, on the other hand, has a peak full-screen brightness of 800 nits, and a big difference seems to be the lack of this boosted brightness mode. Rahman found the Pixel 4's high brightness mode hidden in the Pixel 4's kernel, but it's not a mode normal users can freely switch into. It doesn't turn on via the slider or with high ambient brightness. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Anytime Rosalía comes out with a new single, that's good news. It's good news because the Barcelona flameco-pop star is good at making music, obviously. And it's also good news because she's one of the greatest music-video artists to come along in recent memory; her epochal "Malamente" clip is literally one of the More »View the full article

Big Thief are wrapping up an incredible 2019 that has seen them release two of the year's very best albums, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands with one more round of tour dates. Setlists from their recent shows indicate they haven't been playing encores. I don't know if this … More »View the full article

Back in 2014, the gifted and successful Canadian alt-country artist Kathleen Edwards announced that she was leaving music behind completely. Instead, she had other professional plans. Edwards opened up a coffeeshop outside Ottawa, and she called it Quitters. Quitters is still open, and it looks nice. But at least for now, … More »View the full article

After a turbulent and not-especially-productive run on RCA Records -- or at least productive in the years after she released her great 2014 debut Aquarius -- the LA R&B queen Tinashe is now on her own, getting ready to release a new independent album called Songs For You. A couple of weeks ago, … More »View the full article

What constitutes a one-hit wonder? It seems like it should be cut and dry, but the designation can be pretty arbitrary, with gut feelings often trumping objective data. The "one-hit wonder" label can sometimes befall an artist with a robust catalog, whose fans will inevitably insist their fave does not deserve to be categorized as … More »View the full article

"Tommy In The 80s," the new song from James Alex's true-rock-believer project Beach Slang, is about listening to Tommy Stinson in the '80s. It sounds like something Tommy Stinson's old band the Replacements would've made in the '80s. And it features Tommy Stinson -- who is in his fifties, not his eighties. There are levels … More »View the full article

Enlarge / Microsoft Research stored a 75.6GB digital copy of the 1978 movie "Superman" in this small (7.5cm x 7.5cm x 2mm) piece of glass for Warner Bros. (credit: Jonathan Banks / Microsoft) Ars spoke Tuesday with Dr. Ant Rowstron, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, about an innovative cold storage project called Silica. Silica aims to replace both tape and optical archival discs as the media of choice for large-scale, (very) long duration cold storage. Microsoft Research is partnering with film giant Warner Bros., which is directly interested in reducing costs and increasing reliability in its own cold storage programs. The medium in question is a block of high-purity glass, which has voxels etched into it with femtosecond lasers. Each voxel stores multiple bits in two properties, retardance and angle, which may in turn be read using microscope imaging and polarized light. Voxels may be written 100 or more layers deep in a 2mm-deep piece of glass, by focusing the laser to the desired depth within the block itself. The speed of both reads and writes to Silica currently leave something to be desired—it took approximately a week to etch Superman's roughly 76GB of data last year, and Rowstron estimates it would take about three days to re-read the data, with advances made since. The technology is still in its infancy, of course, and large decreases in time required for both writing and reading are expected moving forward. Rowstron says he still doesn't expect anyone is likely to try to actually play Superman directly from its Silica record—but that's not what it's intended for. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

The Xiaomi Mi Watch. [credit: Xiaomi ] Xiaomi has gone back to its roots as a purveyor of shameless Apple ripoffs, and hot off the photocopier is the Xiaomi Mi Watch, a new wearable that is decidedly Cupertino-inspired. The Mi Watch is an Apple Watch clone, but the design is pretty much the only thing that's cloned here. You won't get a good SoC, a good operating system, good battery life, good haptics, or a good app ecosystem. From a distance, though, some people might mistake the Mi Watch for an Apple Watch, and maybe that's enough. The Mi Watch is a Wear OS device powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon Wear 3100, a combination that makes any wearable device pretty much dead on arrival. Qualcomm has been neglecting the smartwatch market since basically its inception and has never produced a serious competitor to the chips Samsung and Apple regularly put out. The Snapdragon Wear 3100 features a quad-core, 1.2GHz Cortex A7 CPU, a CPU design that is just barely from this decade, having been originally introduced in 2011. This 28nm chip doesn't stand a chance against its faster, smaller, more battery-efficient rivals, but Qualcomm's monopoly ensures it is basically the only game in town for smartwatch chips. Surrounding the museum piece of a CPU is a 1.78-inch, 448×368 OLED display, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, and a 570mAh battery. All the usual acronyms are here: NFC, GPS, and LTE, along with a built-in eSIM chip. There is Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.2, and a rear-mounted heart rate sensor. The base model sku has an aluminum watch body for CNY 1,300 ($185), while a more premium model comes in stainless steel and packs a slightly bigger 590 mAh battery for CNY 2,000 ($285). If you haven't guessed from the currency yet, the Mi Watch is only available in China, at least for now. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article