Author: News Room

Elon Musk and the plot to hijack America’s broadband

At 9PM ET on the night of May 28th, a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket sat on the launchpad at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The craft was in the middle of a hot-fire test awaiting the arrival of Amazon Leo satellites, the first of 24 batches to be shuttled into low Earth orbit for an ambitious satellite internet venture. The effort was backed by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, leveraging a Biden-era law meant to address America’s digital divide.But before the satellites even reached the launch site, Jeff Bezos’ rocket exploded into a massive fireball, its wreckage…

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Nvidia says its AI data center design runs hotter to use a lot less water

Public pushback against data centers has emphasized their water and energy consumption, and now Nvidia is highlighting its claim that the Rubin generation reference design for a fully liquid-cooled data center has “eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage.” Still, it doesn’t address all of the concerns around AI data centers, including during their construction, and for the power generation requirements of the massive facilities. Also, as Gizmodo points out, Nvidia’s blog post doesn’t mention the cost of building this style of data center vs. one using less efficient air cooling, but claims that “every…

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AMD releases FSR 4.1 upscaling for older graphics cards

AMD is officially launching FSR Upscaling 4.1 for Radeon RX 7000-series GPUs today. The update means that computers with those older graphics cards, which use the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, will be able to see improvements like better image quality and smoother gameplay in their games.AMD had promised in May that it would be bringing support for FSR 4.1 to the RX 7000 series GPUs — though at the time, it said that support would arrive in July, so AMD is a little ahead of schedule. AMD is also planning to bring FSR 4.1 to RDNA 3 APUs; AMD’s Jack…

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Generative AI is cursing renters with the promise of impossible homes

Joyce, a native New Yorker, didn’t think finding her first solo apartment in the city would be easy. But she also didn’t think it’d be “hell.” After looking at a lot of tiny, overpriced places she described as “shitholes,” Joyce found her dream apartment: a reasonably priced studio in Manhattan.“It was big and airy, and there was a fireplace,” she said. The kitchen was small but well equipped and looked like it had been recently renovated. She dropped everything to see the apartment, and when she got there, she learned that five other women, all around her age, had viewings…

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Valve will finally let you build your own Steam Machine with SteamOS for desktop

If you don’t get lucky with Valve’s Steam Machine reservation system, you can make your own Steam Machine instead. Valve says that “starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want.” SteamOS 3.8.10 launched last week with a slew of updates, including “improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms.” Alongside that improved compatibility, Valve is giving gamers the green light to install SteamOS on their own desktops.In an interview with The Verge, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said Valve has been “rolling out improvements to [SteamOS] so it’s more compatible…

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