DudeAsInCool

James Garfunkel on changing his name to "Art Jr.," being huge in Germany, and why he's hopeful that Simon and Garfunkel will tour again: "They are in touch. Things are going in a good direction"View the full article

Happy The Smile album release day. View the full article

Kelly Clarkson is on a U2 kick. Two weeks ago Clarkson sang “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” for her talk show’s recurring Kellyoke segment. Today she’s back with another classic from Bono and the boys. This time it’s “Mysterious Ways” from U2’s 1991 creative pinnacle Achtung Baby. Let ‘er rip, Kelly: View the full article

In 2021, Ben Braunagel and Dylan Bender created Helko Spillovey, a North Dakota-based indie rock project whose name is a nod to Bender’s great-grandfather. With Braunagel on vocals and rhythm guitar and Bender on drums, the pair was later joined by Sky Froelich on lead guitar and Ansen Boehm on bass. Today, they’re sharing their debut EP I think of you too much. View the full article

Well, that didn’t last long. In December, the pop-punky, new-wavey post-Y2K yelpers Hot Hot Heat released “Shock Me,” their first activity as a band since breaking up in 2016. Now, before taking the stage together or releasing any more music, the band has ended its reunion as abruptly as it began. View the full article

Enlarge / The Chrome nightly download page with an important section highlighted. (credit: Ron Amadeo) Chrome is landing on a new platform: Windows on Arm. We don't have an official announcement yet, but X user Pedro Justo was the first to spot that the Chrome Canary page now quietly hosts binaries for "Windows 11 Arm." Chrome has run on Windows for a long time, but that's the x86 version. It also supports various Arm OSes, like Android, Chrome OS, and Mac OS. There's also Chromium, the open source codebase on Chrome, which has run on Windows Arm for a while now, thanks mostly to Microsoft's Edge browser being a Chromium derivative. The official "Google Chrome" has never been supported on Windows on Arm until now, though. Windows may be a huge platform, but "Windows on Arm" is not. Apple's switch to the Arm architecture has been a battery life revelation for laptops, and in the wake of that, interest in Windows on Arm has picked up. A big inflection point will be the release of laptops with the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC in mid-2024. Assuming Qualcomm's pre-launch hype pans out, this will be the first Arm on Windows chip to be in the same class as Apple Silicon. Previously, Windows on Arm could only run Chrome as an x86 app via a slow translation layer, so getting the world's most popular browser to a native quality level in time for launch will be a big deal for Qualcomm. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / Ish is on fire, yo. (credit: Tim Macpherson / Getty Images) Since 2017, in what spare time I have (ha!), I help my colleague Eric Berger host his Houston-area weather forecasting site, Space City Weather. It’s an interesting hosting challenge—on a typical day, SCW does maybe 20,000–30,000 page views to 10,000–15,000 unique visitors, which is a relatively easy load to handle with minimal work. But when severe weather events happen—especially in the summer, when hurricanes lurk in the Gulf of Mexico—the site’s traffic can spike to more than a million page views in 12 hours. That level of traffic requires a bit more prep to handle. Hey, it's Space City Weather! (credit: Lee Hutchinson) For a very long time, I ran SCW on a backend stack made up of HAProxy for SSL termination, Varnish Cache for on-box caching, and Nginx for the actual web server application—all fronted by Cloudflare to absorb the majority of the load. (I wrote about this setup at length on Ars a few years ago for folks who want some more in-depth details.) This stack was fully battle-tested and ready to devour whatever traffic we threw at it, but it was also annoyingly complex, with multiple cache layers to contend with, and that complexity made troubleshooting issues more difficult than I would have liked. So during some winter downtime two years ago, I took the opportunity to jettison some complexity and reduce the hosting stack down to a single monolithic web server application: OpenLiteSpeed. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / The iPhone 15 lineup. To comply with European Union regulations, Apple has introduced sweeping changes that make iOS and Apple's other operating systems more open. The changes are far-reaching and touch many parts of the user experience on the iPhone. They'll be coming as part of iOS 17.4 in March. Apple will introduce "new APIs and tools that enable developers to offer their iOS apps for download from alternative app marketplaces," as well as a new framework and set of APIs that allow third parties to set up and manage those stores—essentially new forms of apps that can download other apps without going through the App Store. That includes the ability to manage updates for other developers' apps that are distributed through the marketplaces. The company will also offer APIs and a new framework for third-party web browsers to use browser engines other than Safari's WebKit. Until now, browsers like Chrome and Firefox were still built on top of Apple's tech. They essentially were mobile Safari, but with bookmarks and other features tied to alternative desktop browsers. Read 27 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Step 1: get the phone as close to your face as possible. [credit: Google ] Most Pixel 8 Pro owners have probably forgotten that there's an infrared temperature sensor on the back of the phone next to the LED camera flash. But it's still there, and almost four months after launch, it's getting a new feature: body temperature measurement. The four-month hold-up is because body temperature sensors are regulated as medical devices, so Google needed FDA approval to enable the feature. The company has a blog post detailing the feature, which says: "In clinical trials, our software algorithm was able to calculate body temperature in the range of 96.9°F–104°F (36.1°C–40°C) to within ±0.3°C when compared with an FDA-cleared temporal artery thermometer. In layman's terms, this means the Pixel body temperature feature is about as accurate as other temporal artery thermometers." The feature only works in the US. Like everything about the Pixel 8 Pro's temperature sensor, the basic feature idea sounds fine (if not several years late), but the execution leaves much to be desired. Google has a support page detailing how to use the body temperature sensor, and you'll need to slowly swipe the phone across your entire face over four seconds to get a reading. The sensor needs to be extremely close to your face to work; Google says it wants the phone "as close as possible to the skin without touching." If you wear glasses, you'll need to take them off, because the phone needs to be so close to your face it will hit them. If you manage all that, you'll get a body temperature reading that you can save to your Fitbit profile. We found the temperature sensor to be the biggest negative mark in our Pixel 8 Pro review. I'm not entirely sure a well-executed temperature sensor would be a useful feature on a phone, but the Pixel 8's temperature sensor is just such a hassle to use. Besides forehead measuring, it can also check the temperature of objects, but it only has a range of two inches. There's also no camera feed or any targeting system to be sure of what you're measuring—you get a blank screen with a "measure" button, you press it, and a number appears. Temperature sensing also stops the instant it reads any single temperature—it's not continuous. All the user experience problems made the temperature sensor instantly forgettable. The body temperature addition isn't helping and feels like a feature that would be better suited for a smartwatch. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Our specific RTX 4070 Ti Super is a PNY model, the RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB Verto. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ] Of all of Nvidia's current-generation GPU launches, there hasn't been one that's been quite as weird as the case of the "GeForce RTX 4080 12GB." It was the third and slowest of the graphics cards Nvidia announced at the onset of the RTX 40-series, and at first blush it just sounded like a version of the second-fastest RTX 4080 but with less RAM. But spec sheets and Nvidia's own performance estimates showed that there was a deceptively huge performance gap between the two 4080 cards, enough that calling them both "4080" could have lead to confusion and upset among buyers. Taking the hint, Nvidia reversed course, "unlaunching" the 4080 12GB because it was "not named right." This decision came late enough in the launch process that a whole bunch of existing packaging had to be trashed and that new BIOSes with new GPU named needed to be flashed to the cards before they could be sold. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson) It's almost hard to believe this is happening again, but Pixel users are reporting that an OS update has locked them out of their phones' internal storage, causing app crashes, non-functional phones, and a real possibility of data loss. Over in the Google Pixel subreddit, user "Liv-Lyf" compiled a dozen posts that complain of an "internal storage access issue" and blame the January 2024 Google Play system update. In October, Pixel phones faced a nightmare storage bug that caused bootlooping, inaccessible devices, and data loss. The recent post says, "The symptoms are all the same" as that October bug, with "internal storage not getting mounted, camera crashes, Files app shows no files, screenshots not getting saved, internal storage shows up empty in ADB Shell, etc." When asked for a comment, Google told Ars, "We're aware of this issue and are looking into it," and a Google rep posted effectively the same statement in the comments. In the October bug, users were locked out of their system storage due to a strange permissions issue. Having a phone try to run without any user access to your own storage is a mess. It breaks the camera and screenshots because you can't write media. File Managers read "0 bytes" for every file and folder. Nothing works over USB, and some phones, understandably, just fail to boot. The issue in October arrived as part of the initial Android 14 release and only affected devices that had multiple users set up. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge / Jason Bateman and Laura Linney in the Netflix original series Ozark. (credit: Netflix/YouTube) Netflix subscribers can expect more price hikes as the company looks to grow revenue in 2024. In its Q4 2023 letter to shareholders, Netflix also revealed plans to eliminate the cheapest ad-free plan available to users. In the January 23 letter (PDF), Netflix said: As we invest in and improve Netflix, we’ll occasionally ask our members to pay a little extra to reflect those improvements, which in turn helps drive the positive flywheel of additional investment to further improve and grow our service. The statement will be unsavory for frugal streamers who have recently endured price hikes from Netflix and other streaming services. In January 2022, Netflix increased the price of its Basic no-ads tier from $8.99 per month to $9.99/month. In October 2023, that same plan went up to $11.99/month. Meanwhile, Netflix's Premium ad-free plan increased from $17.99/month to $19.99/month in January 2022 and then to $22.99/month in October. Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

Enlarge If Google sticks to the usual cadence of device releases, the Google Pixel 9 will come out in around nine months. That's a long way away, but still not so far away that it can't be leaked: the ever-reliable Steve Hemmerstoffer, aka OnLeaks, has a set of Pixel 9 Pro renders up over at MySmartPrice. Usually, these renders are based on the CAD files that accessory designers need before they can begin making products, so while all the major components should be correct down to the millimeter, the materials, colors, and some small details may be speculative. There are a lot of differences in these renders. First, the renders show a flat metal band around the sides, making it look a lot like an iPhone. Samsung also adopted this design for the Galaxy S24 and S24 Plus, so everyone seems to want to look just like their biggest rival. This allows the front and back of the phone to be completely flat slabs of glass, instead of the rounded glass back of the Pixel 8. The screen is also completely flat again. Check out the new camera bar design. (credit: OnLeaks and MySmartPrice) The other major visible difference is the camera bar, which used to stretch from side to side across the back of the phone, but now is a floating bar that isn't connected to the sides. That makes the camera bar closer to the Pixel Fold design. The Pixel Fold camera bar was a rounded rectangle, but this is a full-on pill shape, which, in these renders, follows the shape of the camera glass cover. Besides the camera lenses, the bar has an LED flash and a second mystery sensor circle. On the Pixel 8, the circle under the LED is a temperature sensor. I feel like the temperature sensor has been either panned or forgotten about, so it wouldn't surprise me to see it cut, but the realities of the smartphone development cycle might make it too early for that. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ] We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year's RX 7600, but with a mild bump to the GPU's clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600. It's a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren't worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It's priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you generally need to jump into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond. RX 7700 XT RX 7600 RX 7600 XT RX 6600 RX 6600 XT RX 6650 XT RX 6750 XT Compute units (Stream processors) 54 (3,456) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 28 (1,792) 32 (2,048) 32 (2,048) 40 (2,560) Boost Clock 2,544 MHz 2,600 MHz 2,760 MHz 2,490 MHz 2,589 MHz 2,635 MHz 2,600 MHz Memory Bus Width 192-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 128-bit 192-bit Memory Clock 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 2,250 MHz 1,750 MHz 2,000 MHz 2,190 MHz 2,250 MHz Memory size 12GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 8GB GDDR6 12GB GDDR6 Total board power (TBP) 245 W 165 W 190 W 132 W 160 W 180 W 250 W The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we've already seen. The clock speed bumps provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM becomes apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn't fundamentally alter the AMD-vs.-Nvidia-vs.-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600's most glaring weaknesses. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

The move comes over two years after the company first launched Spatial Audio on the platform View the full article

A few weeks ago, Ludacris addressed illuminati accusations, which is not how most rappers want to start off their year. However, there’s good news for Ludacris: A half-hour dramedy about him is in the works for BET+. View the full article

William Orbit said he dreams of making another album with the dance pop legendView the full article

Forty years ago this week, Bon Jovi released their eponymous debut album. And this spring the band will be celebrated with a four-part Hulu docu-series made “with full cooperation from all past and present members.” View the full article

Gotham Chopra-directed series will feature interviews with all of the group's original membersView the full article

It was oxycodone for which Black had a prescription at the time of his arrest, defense lawyer Brad Cohen says in sworn motion filed Monday View the full article

Enlarge / Exterior view of a Googleplex building, the corporate headquarters of Google and parent company Alphabet, May 2018. (credit: Getty Images | zphotos) Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wasn't kidding when, earlier this month, he said more layoffs are coming. The latest group to be hit is Alphabet's X Lab, which is losing "dozens of employees," according to a new report from Bloomberg. This is something like the 11th Google layoff announcement we've covered in the past 12 months and the fourth one this month. The X Lab is Alphabet's "moonshot" experimental group, which is responsible for wild concepts like a wearable head-up display, a self-driving car, smart contact lenses, flying Internet balloons, and delivery drones. This is the age of Google cost-cutting, and you'll notice none of those projects is a rip-roaring commercial success. On Google's financials, the X Lab is part of Alphabet's "Other Bets" group, which burns through around a billion dollars every quarter. It's a research arm, so the hope is that spending all this money will someday lead to new revenue streams. For the short-term Wall Street types, though, it's a money loser, quarter to quarter, and that makes it a prime candidate for cuts. Bloomberg has a copy of the memo announcing the cuts to the X Labs staff, and there's more in there than just layoffs. X Lab CEO Astro Teller writes: "We’re expanding our approach to focus on spinning out more projects as independent companies funded through market-based capital. We’ll do this by opening our scope to collaborate with a broader base of industry and financial partners, and by continuing to emphasize lean teams and capital efficiency." Basically, Google wants these money losers to find their own funding somewhere else, at least partially. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments View the full article

"Hi, my name is Elle King and I'm fucking hammered," the "Drunk (And I Don't Wanna Go Home)" vocalist told the audience before admitting to not knowing the words to a songView the full article

More than three years ago, around the time of its 20th anniversary, a YouTube account called POPBOX uploaded an 86-minute compilation of unreleased outtakes from Madonna’s sessions for her 2000 album Music. Now the set, titled Almost Gone: The Unreleased Songs From “Music,” has made its way to William Orbit, the producer who was working closely with Madonna in those days. On his social accounts, including Instagram and Twitter/X, Orbit has shared a lengthy statement commenting on the leaked material. View the full article

Music artwork is in the midst of a renaissance, thanks to the vinyl boom and pioneering artists from Lil Uzi Vert to the 1975View the full article

The one-day festival takes place May 18 at Brookside at The Rose Bowl.View the full article