Jump to content

DudeAsInCool

Admin
  • Posts

    93,214
  • Joined

  • Last visited

  • Days Won

    10

Posts posted by DudeAsInCool

  1. The Framework Laptop 16.

    Enlarge / The Framework Laptop 16. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

    Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 16
    OS Windows 11 23H2
    CPU AMD Ryzen 7 7940HS (8-cores)
    RAM 32GB DDR5-5600 (upgradeable)
    GPU AMD Radeon 780M (integrated)/AMD Radeon RX 7700S (dedicated)
    SSD 1TB Western Digital Black SN770
    Battery 85 WHr
    Display 16-inch 2560x1600 165 Hz matte non-touchscreen
    Connectivity 6x recessed USB-C ports (2x USB 4, 4x USB 3.2) with customizable "Expansion Card" dongles
    Weight 4.63 pounds (2.1 kg) without GPU, 5.29 pounds (2.4 kg) with GPU
    Price as tested $2,499 pre-built, $2,421 DIY edition with no OS

    Now that the Framework Laptop 13 has been through three refresh cycles—including one that swapped from Intel's CPUs to AMD's within the exact same body—the company is setting its sights on something bigger.

    Today, we're taking an extended look at the first Framework Laptop 16, which wants to do for a workstation/gaming laptop what the Framework Laptop 13 did for thin-and-light ultraportables. In some ways, the people who use these kinds of systems need a Framework Laptop most of all; they're an even bigger investment than a thin-and-light laptop, and a single CPU, GPU, memory, or storage upgrade can extend the useful life of the system for years, just like upgrading a desktop.

    The Laptop 16 melds ideas from the original Framework Laptop with some all-new mechanisms for customizing the device's keyboard, adding and upgrading a dedicated GPU, and installing other modules. The result is a relatively bulky and heavy laptop compared to many of its non-upgradeable alternatives. And you'll need to trust that Framework delivers on its upgradeability promises somewhere down the line since the current options for upgrading and expanding the laptop are fairly limited.

    Read 52 remaining paragraphs | Comments

    View the full article

  2. justin-timberlake-snl-1706450823.jpeg

    Justin Timberlake was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live this weekend. He recently announced a new album called Everything I Thought I Was and shared its lead single “Seflish.” He performed that song on the show last night and he debuted a new one called “Sanctified” with Tobe Nwigwe — “Sanctified” was previewed in an ESPN commercial earlier this month.

    View the full article

  3. The Chrome nightly download page with an important section highlighted.

    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

  4. Ish is on fire, yo.

    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 <a href="https://spacecityweather.com">Space City Weather</a>!

    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

  5. iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max lined up on a table

    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

  6. 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

×
×
  • Create New...