The 15.6-inch matte screen looks great. The brightness wasn’t quite as high as I would have liked, but viewing angles were much better than some of the more recent systems I have worked with. Lenovo offers a standard HD version of this display, limited to a 1366x768 resolution, while the HD+ model we used is capable of 1600 x 900. The price difference is only $50, so I would definitely recommend shelling out the extra cash for this....

The front door is made of textured aluminum and features a vertical column pattern with two tiny holes near the top right that let the power and HDD activity lights shine through. The lockable door opens to the left revealing a brushed aluminum front bezel with five 5.25" drive bays and a large vented area that hides two 140mm intake fans. A fan controller sits above the top drive bay while the power and reset buttons are below the bottom drive bay....

That closed beta wasn’t available to the public, but now, DuckDuckGo is opening up its browser testing to a larger segment of consumers. macOS users can sign up for a private waitlist which will automatically invite them to the testing phase when a slot opens up. If you’re invited, you’ll be able to download the browser and offer your thoughts on it to the DuckDuckGo team. A Windows version is “coming soon,” but we have no ETA on that right now....

The Booster Course Pass for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe will consist of six waves of content drops, each featuring eight remastered courses from previous Mario Kart games. This works out to 48 additional courses coming to the game by the end of 2023 that can be played locally and online. Nintendo isn’t yet sharing the full list of tracks, but said gamers can expect to see Choco Mountain, Tokyo Blur and Coconut Mall in the first wave....

The Helio P10 is still built using an aging 28nm HPC+ process, but this is no different to Qualcomm’s entire Snapdragon 400 series, which is the main competitor to MediaTek’s entry-level chip. And as you’d expect, the Helio P10 is fully 64-bit capable thanks to ARMv8-A support. While the Helio P10 is an octa-core chip, I basically never saw more than six cores utilized in practice. This includes during benchmark runs, so it seems either MediaTek or Meizu has implemented a CPU governor that prefers to keep two cores inactive most of the time....

An internal email obtained by GeekWire confirms that Microsoft’s HoloLens boss Alex Kipman will soon be parting ways with Redmond. “Over the last several months, Alex Kipman and I have been talking about the team’s path going forward,” said Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s head of Cloud and AI, in the email, noting it was mutually decided that now was the right time for Kipman to “leave the company to pursue other opportunities....

Microsoft Office Professional 2021 (available for Windows and macOS) includes all the essentials like Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, Publisher, and collaboration tools like OneNote and Microsoft Teams. Office 2021 packs a new modern UI, enhancements, and features. One of our favorites, the ability to contribute with your peers in real-time on Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. The current deal gets you Office at over 85% off the regular price for a standalone license – last time we promoted this, it was still an excellent deal at $59....

As MIT PhD student Gabriel Margolis and IAIFI postdoc Ge Yang explained in a recent interview, the traditional paradigm in robotics is for humans to tell a robot what to do and how to do it. The problem with that approach is that it isn’t scalable due to the sheer amount of human hours needed to manually program a robot to operate in many different environments. “A more practical way to build a robot with many diverse skills is to tell the robot what to do and let it figure out the how....

Naturally, you’re getting all the advantages of AMOLED here. Infinite contrast ratio, deep blacks and excellent viewing angles are all part of the experience on the Z2 Play, which leads to a fantastic display for the most part. This AMOLED also hits above 400 nits of peak brightness, which is generally what I consider a good mark for this type of display. Color performance isn’t as strong. The Z2 Play is too cold by default, with an average color temperature around 7200K and a strong overrepresentation of blue throughout most of the grayscale....

In the accelerated version of PCMark, the extra graphics power available in the GS43VR courtesy of the GTX 1060 delivers a decent performance boost in the Home and Creative workloads. The Work benchmark, which rely as much on GPU rendering, doesn’t see a noticeable performance gain over the GS40. Performance in other benchmarks is pretty similar to what we’ve seen before from other Core i7-6700HQ laptops. The GS43VR does boast a particularly good score in the multi-threaded Cinebench workload, but outside of this test, the performance I recorded falls is no better or worse than competing laptops with this CPU....

MSI’s monitor will have a 32:9 aspect ratio and, judging by its name, will measure 49 inches diagonally. This would make it have the same form factor as two 27-inch 16:9 panels placed side by side, with the benefit of not having bezels down the middle. Samsung Display will manufacture the panel, making it the company’s fourth QD-OLED screen size after the 55-inch and 65-inch TV panels and the 34-inch ultrawide panel found in the excellent Alienware AW3423DW....

Data analyzed by the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) team over the last couple of weeks confirms the impact worked as intended. Before DART slammed into the asteroid, it took Dimorphos 11 hours and 55 minutes to orbit its larger parent asteroid, Didymos. It now takes Dimorphos 11 hours and 23 minutes to orbit Didymos, meaning the crash slowed its orbit by approximately 32 minutes. NASA said before impact that a change of 73 seconds or more would be considered successful....

The space agency in a recent thread on Twitter said that for starters, the gold-coated mirrors on Webb were very photogenic here on Earth but the mirror side of Webb is pitch dark in space. The Sun-facing side, meanwhile, is so shiny that cameras would struggle with glare and contrast issues. Cameras would have required NASA to run more cables and allocate power for them. “More cables adds more of a threat of heat and vibration transfer through the wires, which could impact image quality,” NASA said....

Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said Perseverance’s successes in the Red Planet’s Jezero Crater and the performance of the Mars helicopter played a key role in their decision to modify the mission. Perseverance and its accompanying helicopter, Ingenuity, landed on Mars on February 18, 2021, and both have exceeded expectations. Perseverance has already collected nearly a dozen scientifically-compelling rock samples and one atmospheric sample. Ingenuity was expected to fly just five times within a 30-Martian-day demonstration window but has made 29 successful flights as of June 11, 2022....

Since No Man’s Sky’s release in 2016, Hello Games has managed to develop 17 major content updates (not including the Halloween special update), four seasons of its multiplayer side game, Expeditions, and countless bug fixes and quality of life improvements. It has been two months since the last update and the last time fans waited that long for a patch, HG dropped the Frontiers expansion. “Something is coming,” I thought....

In the consumer CPU space, it’s a two-sided fight. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t any other desktop CPUs in existence. Take a closer look and you’ll quickly realize that the CPU space is a lot more diverse. From high-performance Arm designs to specialized Russian government chips, there’s a plethora of non-Intel and non-AMD chips out there powering full-size desktop PCs. In some cases, like the Zhaoxin Kaixian line of chips, you can even get your hands on them through the right channels....

Generative AI models prove helpful for many applications. Machine learning algorithms can create uncanny imagery or predict source code from the future, often negatively swaying public opinion with their “in-the-wrong-hands” capabilities. A new partnership between two of the biggest tech companies out there is promising to accelerate these capabilities, creating an “AI supercomputer” in the cloud. Nvidia and Microsoft announced a “multi-year collaboration” to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer specifically designed to serve as an accelerator for AI and machine learning algorithms....

For the same money on AMD’s camp you get the Radeon R9 295X2, while the single-GPU R9 290X costs as little as $300, or up to $350 depending on the version and cooler used. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti certainly delivers on the performance front. From the 20 games tested, we found it to be a mere 7% slower than the Titan X at 2560x1600 and 3840x2160. Considering that the GTX 980 Ti is 35% cheaper, it’s unequivocally the wiser buy for most....

Today we’re checking out the GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q, Nvidia’s fastest laptop GPU within a 90W power budget. The GPU’s name is a mouthful, no doubt, and we’ve commented several times before how this is a broken naming scheme. We won’t waste more time going about that, but we will explain where the 2080 Super Max-Q stands in the GeForce mobile range. The GeForce 20 series for 2020 is heavily segmented, especially at the top end of the stack....

A few days ago, Nvidia decided that releasing a card with 4GB less VRAM, 25% fewer CUDA cores, and a narrower memory bus than the RTX 4080 16GB while pricing it at $900 was a bad idea. Pretty much everyone agreed this was essentially an RTX 4070 under a different name, one that’s almost twice as expensive as the RTX 3070 that launched for $500 two years ago. It appears the bad publicity had become too much for Nvidia, leading to the card’s so-called unlaunching, which the company blames on consumer confusion over having two cards with the same RTX 4080 designation....