DudeAsInCool
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HP has used its "Dynamic Security" firmware updates to "create a monopoly" of replacement printer ink cartridges, a lawsuit filed against the company on January 5 claims. The lawsuit, which is seeking class-action certification, represents yet another form of litigation against HP for bricking printers when they try to use ink that doesn't bear an HP logo.
The lawsuit (PDF), which was filed in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, names 11 plaintiffs and seeks an injunction against HP requiring the company to disable its printer firmware updates from preventing the use of non-HP branded ink. The lawsuit also seeks monetary damages greater than $5,000,000 and a trial by jury.
The lawsuit focuses on HP printer firmware updates issued in late 2022 and early 2023 that left users seeing this message on their printers when they tried to print with non-HP ink:
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Ballie is now the size of a bowling ball. [credit: Samsung ]
Four years ago at CES 2020, one of Samsung's quirkier little projects was "Ballie," a cute little ball robot that would wheel around the house, stream camera footage, and act as a roving smart speaker. The coolest thing about 2020 Ballie was that it would have looked right at home on the set of a Star Wars movie—it was a ball droid, where the wheels were integrated into the spherical body. At CES 2024, Ballie is back with a new design, and according to a report from The Washington Post, it will puportedly hit the market sometime this year. Although much like a concept car being watered down to make it to production, the 2024 Ballie lost much of the prototype's cute appeal.
The 2024 Ballie is no longer a ball droid, and instead is a sphere mounted on three wheels, giving it basically the same locomotion as a robot vacuum. The new Ballie is also bigger, growing from about the size of a softball to the size of a bowling ball, and it's now a two-handed lift. This bigger size can give production Ballie a more practical battery size and make room for a projector. It looks like the sides of the sphere body are stationary (that's where the wheels are mounted), while the sphere's center can still rotate up or down, allowing Ballie to aim the camera/projector mounted on the front.
Take a guess at how Ballie sees the world. I see two cameras, a big projector in the center, and two other mystery sensors. (credit: Samsung)
It looks like there are five sensor windows on Ballie's front visor. The big center rectangle is the projector, with a camera on the left and right side, giving the bot stereo vision. The other sensors are a mystery. Maybe they are robot navigation sensors like time-of-flight. The back features a lot of openings, which probably include a speaker. A robot vacuum would have visible metal contacts for autonomous docking and charging, but there are no clear ports, connectors, or a dock for charging.
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Enlarge / None of this would be necessary if it weren't for your inferior eyes, which retain the colors of pixels for fractions of a second longer than is optimal for shooting dudes. (credit: Nvidia)
Gaming hardware has done a lot in the last decade to push a lot of pixels very quickly across screens. But one piece of hardware has always led to complications: the eyeball. Nvidia is targeting that last part of the visual quality chain with its newest G-Sync offering, Pulsar.
Motion blur, when it's not caused by slow LCD pixel transitions, is caused by "the persistence of an image on the retina, as our eyes track movement on-screen," as Nvidia explains it. Prior improvements in display tech, like variable rate refresh, Ultra Low Motion Blur, and Variable Overdrive have helped with the hardware causes of this deficiency. The eyes and their object permanence, however, can only be addressed by strobing a monitor's backlight.
You can't just set that light blinking, however. Variable strobing frequencies causes flicker, and timing the strobe to the monitor refresh rate—itself also tied to the graphics card output—was tricky. Nvidia says it has solved that issue with its G-Sync Pulsar tech, employing "a novel algorithm" in "synergizing" its variable refresh smoothing and monitor pulsing. The result is that pixels are transitioned from one color to another at a rate that reduces motion blur and pixel ghosting.
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Enlarge / Intel's Core chips are here, and they have dropped the i and the 14th-generation branding. But unlike the Core Ultra, they are fundamentally "14th-generation" processors. (credit: Intel)
Intel usually uses CES to fill out the processor lineups that it launched late the year before, and that hasn't changed this year. The company has announced a full range of 14th-generation Core desktop CPUs, some new 14th-generation Core CPUs for high-end gaming and workstation laptops, and the first non-Ultra chips to bear the new "Core 3/5/7" branding that sheds the generational branding entirely. We'll go over the updates shortly.
But my main takeaway, as a long-time observer of processor branding, is that Intel had made its new naming system even more confusing for people who actually want to know what kind of processor they're getting.
Intel said in October that it was sticking with the 14th-generation branding for its new desktop CPUs because they were so similar to the 13th-generation chips (they all use the same underlying Raptor Lake architecture, itself a minor revision of the 12th-gen Alder Lake). It makes some degree of sense that it's being extended to the HX-series laptop chips, because these have always been desktop silicon repackaged for laptop use. So far so good.
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Enlarge (credit: Canonical/Ubuntu)
Snaps, the self-contained application packages that Ubuntu has long seen as a simpler app store and a potential solution to dependency hell, could be getting better support outside Ubuntu itself, based on one recent hire and potentially more.
As spotted by the Phoronix blog, developer Zygmunt Krynicki, who worked at Ubuntu distributor Canonical from 2012 through 2020, posted Friday on Mastodon that he was "returning as a snap developer later this month." His main focus would be "cross-distribution support," Krynicki wrote, and "unlike in the past this will be my full time job. I'm very excited for what is ahead for snaps." He also noted, in a later reply, that he was "not coming back alone."
Krynicki, reached Monday on Mastodon, noted that he was at a very early stage in his work. But he intended to look at the state of support across distributions, determine which long-term and short-term work to focus on, and "work on the internals and get things progressively better, even if that is not flashy."
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Enlarge / LG's OLED T TV with its contrast film rolled down partially, enabling you to see what's behind the TV's upper area. (credit: LG전자 뉴스룸 LiVE LG/YouTube)
LG today announced plans to sell a TV with transparent-display technology that has almost exclusively been relegated to commercial applications and demonstrations at tech shows.
LG is showing off the Signature OLED T at CES 2024 (which officially starts tomorrow). LG says the see-through TV will be available this year but hasn't shared pricing. Still, it's remarkable to see transparent tech make its way into a consumer TV, even if it is expected to be extremely expensive. Other groundbreaking, Signauture-branded OLED designs from LG have cost six figures.
During a press event today, LG executives discussed the OLED T as a way to satisfy customer demand for bigger TVs without those mammoth displays always dominating the living room.
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Enlarge / The tilt of the numerical right-most block may not accurately reflect the degree to which we, collectively, are upgraded to Wi-Fi 7 at this stage. (credit: Getty Images)
Wi-Fi 7 devices can now be certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance. The new standard can provide higher throughput, linked wireless bands for better stability, and reduced latency. It also can make people who skipped over Wi-Fi 6E feel like they made the smart move.
Wi-Fi 7 has already existed as a thing that expensive, new routers claimed to offer, but now it's a certification they can claim. Wi-Fi 7 devices can use 320 MHz of channel bandwidth, compared to the typical 160 MHz used by Wi-Fi 5, 6, and 6E gear. The new standard is the first to offer Multi-Link Operation, which can bond a connection across 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz connections, offering greater speed and more reliable connections when moving in and out of range of various bands.
Intel's explainer for what Wi-Fi 7 means, compared to prior generations. (credit: Intel)
As Intel puts it in its explainer, earlier Wi-Fi channels were like moving vans that could "only take one highway at a time and choose alternate routes if they run into traffic. However, Wi-Fi 7 semi-trucks will simultaneously operate across two highways to get more boxes to the destination more quickly."
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The Oppo Find X7 Ultra features some faux leather and a really big camera bump. [credit: Oppo ]
Oppo's newest flagship is the Find X7 Ultra. This phone's claim to fame is having two periscope camera lenses on the back. Like most Oppo phones, this will land in China first, probably Europe later, and won't come to the US.
The X7 Ultra is all about photography, with four 50 MP sensors on the back. Periscope camera No. 1 is a 50 MP 3x telephoto that uses a 1/1.56-inch Sony IMX890 sensor. Oppo says "this sensor is roughly three times larger than the equivalent cameras in key competitor systems, and is the biggest telephoto sensor in any smartphone." Periscope No. 2 is a 6x telephoto with a 50 MP, 1/2.51-inch Sony IMX858 sensor—so more zoom, but less image quality. The main camera is Sony's top-of-the-line LYT-900 1-inch sensor, and the wide-angle is a 50 MP Sony LYT-600 sensor.
Packing all these large cameras onto the back results in a big camera bump. Despite the phone being a normal-sized 6.8-inch device, the camera takes up about a third of the back, and it almost looks like you'll be touching it when you're naturally holding the phone.
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New track marks the rap stars' fourth collaboration, following "Fein" from Utopia last year
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New year, new Playboi Carti. “BACKR00MS,” the influential Atlanta rapper’s new single out tonight, is a collaboration with fellow brand-name star Travis Scott plus two lesser known names, SEXISDEATH and Indiana420Bitch. Context clues suggest SEXISDEATH is the producer and Indiana420Bitch directed the video. The lyric social media users are fixating on so far is the one about how he needs an Ice Spice.
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A deadly car crash and fire outside a moe. concert in Rochester, NY last night is being investigated as a possible terrorist attack, an officer told local ABC affiliate WABC. At about 12:50AM, while some of the 1,000-strong crowd was filing out of the jam band’s show at the Kodak Center, a Ford Explorer heading eastbound struck a Mitsubishi Outlander, carrying the vehicles into oncoming pedestrians and two other vehicles. Two people in the Outlander were killed. Firefighters took an hour to extinguish the fire that resulted from the crash. First responders found at least a dozen gasoline canisters in and around the Expedition.
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Musician developed pneumonia a week before his death, according to his manager
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A.G. Cook was pretty busy last year with the release of the Another Pobbles Christmas EP under the name Pobbles, as well as his project Thy Slaughter with Easyfun sharing the album Soft Rock. The prolific producer is kicking off 2024 with the enveloping song “Silver Thread Gold Needle,” which sputters and buzzes unpredictably for nearly 10 minutes — an enthusiastic entrance into the new year. Hear it below.
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The couple, Marcello and Brian, shared that they've been together for 14 years and hoped to tie the knot with the "Stronger" singer present
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They’re just messing around. That’s a good thing. The freedom to explore without the burden of expectations is healthy — enjoyable for the listener, too, if you have interest in hearing some of music’s most singular talents hard at play.
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New York indie rockers Lightning Bug released their gauzy, intimate, spectacular 2021 album A Color Of The Sky through Fat Possum, but they’re going truly independent for their next LP. The band revealed as much today while sharing two demos from the forthcoming set on Bandcamp, the Stereolab-esque keyboard-led psych-pop tune “Just Above My Head” and the lovely guitar ballad “No Paradise.”
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Les McCann, a legendary soul-jazz pianist and singer whose work was often sampled by hip-hop producers, has died. McCann’s manager told NBC News he died Friday at a Los Angeles-area hospital after contracting pneumonia a week before. He was 88.
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Chicagoans and anyone with access to Chicago’s WGN-TV growing up likely remember Bozo The Clown, the longstanding children’s TV character popularized by the late Larry Harmon. Real Bozo heads will also remember Wizzo The Wizard, a side character portrayed by Marshall Brodien. Among those heads is Chicago native Billy Corgan, who once again performed live from his Highland Park tea shop Madame ZuZu’s for NBC Chicago’s A Very Chicago New Year broadcast this year.
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Mayer, meanwhile, was totally straight-faced as a bunch of tabbies crawled all over him at a Tokyo bar
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Trey Anastasio’s senior project at Goddard College in 1987 was a song cycle called The Man Who Stepped Into Yesterday. The music tells the story of a retired Long Island military man named Colonel Forbin who enters the mythical land of Gamehendge and rescues the Helping Friendly Book from an evil dictator named Wilson. Phish performed some version of the Gamehendge saga several times in the ’80s and ’90s, most recently a July 8, 1994 show that saw official release through Phish’s Dinner And A Movie webcast series in July 2020. Last night, at their New Year’s Eve show at Madison Square Garden, Phish went back to Gamehendge.
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The band changed the lyrics to their 2004 song "American Idiot" while performing on ABC’s Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest
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In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
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The singer kicked off 2024 with a brand-new, Burlesque-celebrating show at the Venetian Las Vegas' Voltaire Belle de Nuit
Country Music 2024 Preview: 10 Burning Questions
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