News: Technology News

Intel launches its next-generation neuromorphic processor—so, what’s that again?

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 23:54:13 +0000

Intel's Loihi processors have electronics that behave a lot like neurons.

Mike Davies, director of Intel's Neuromorphic Computing Lab, explains the company's efforts in this area. And with the launch of a new neuromorphic chip this week, he talked Ars through the updates.

Despite their name, neural networks are only distantly related to the sorts of things you'd find in a brain. While their organization and the way they transfer data through layers of processing may share some rough similarities to networks of actual neurons, the data and the computations performed on it would look very familiar to a standard CPU.

But neural networks aren't the only way that people have tried to take lessons from the nervous system. There's a separate discipline called neuromorphic computing that's based on approximating the behavior of individual neurons in hardware. In neuromorphic hardware, calculations are performed by lots of small units that communicate with each other through bursts of activity called spikes and adjust their behavior based on the spikes they receive from others.

On Thursday, Intel released the newest iteration of its neuromorphic hardware, called Loihi. The new release comes with the sorts of things you'd expect from Intel: a better processor and some basic computational enhancements. But it also comes with some fundamental hardware changes that will allow it to run entirely new classes of algorithms. And while Loihi remains a research-focused product for now, Intel is also releasing a compiler that it hopes will drive wider adoption.

To make sense out of Loihi and what's new in this version, let's back up and start by looking at a bit of neurobiology, then build up from there.

From neurons to computation

The foundation of the nervous system is the cell type called a neuron. All neurons share a few common functional features. At one end of the cell is a structure called a dendrite, which you can think of as a receiver. This is where the neuron receives inputs from other cells. Nerve cells also have axons, which act as transmitters, connecting with other cells to pass along signals.

The signals take the form of what are called "spikes," which are brief changes in the voltage across the neuron's cell membrane. Spikes travel down axons until they reach the junctions with other cells (called synapses), at which point they're converted to a chemical signal that travels to the nearby dendrite. This chemical signal opens up channels that allow ions to flow into the cell, starting a new spike on the receiving cell.

The receiving cell integrates a variety of information—how many spikes it has seen, whether any neurons are signaling that it should be quiet, how active it was in the past, etc.—and uses that to determine its own activity state. Once a threshold is crossed, it'll trigger a spike down its own axons and potentially trigger activity in other cells.

Typically, this results in sporadic, randomly spaced spikes of activity when the neuron isn't receiving much input. Once it starts receiving signals, however, it'll switch to an active state and fire off a bunch of spikes in rapid succession.

A neuron, with the dendrites (spiky protrusions at top) and part of the axon (long extension at bottom right) visible.

NIH

How does this process encode and manipulate information? That's an interesting and important question, and one we're only just starting to answer.

One of the ways we've gone about answering it was via what has been called theoretical neurobiology (or computational neurobiology). This has involved attempts to build mathematical models that reflected the behavior of nervous systems and neurons in the hope that this would allow us to identify some underlying principles. Neural networks, which focused on the organizational principles of the nervous system, were one of the efforts that came out of this field. Spiking neural networks, which attempt to build up from the behavior of individual neurons, is another.

Spiking neural networks can be implemented in software on traditional processors. But it's also possible to implement them through hardware, as Intel is doing with Loihi. The result is a processor very much unlike anything you're likely to be familiar with.

Spiking in silicon

The previous-generation Loihi chip contains 128 individual cores connected by a communication network. Each of those cores has a large number of individual "neurons," or execution units. Each of these neurons can receive input in the form of spikes from any other neuron—a neighbor in the same core, a unit in a different core on the same chip or from another chip entirely. The neuron integrates the spikes it receives over time and, based on the behavior it's programmed with, uses that to determine when to send spikes of its own to whatever neurons it's connected with.

All of the spike signaling happens asynchronously. At set time intervals, embedded x86 cores on the same chip force a synchronization. At that point, the neuron will redo the weights of its various connections—essentially, how much attention to pay to all the individual neurons that send signals to it.

Put in terms of an actual neuron, part of the execution unit on the chip acts as a dendrite, processing incoming signals from the communication network based in part on the weight derived from past behavior. A mathematical formula was then used to determine when activity had crossed a critical threshold and to trigger spikes of its own when it does. The "axon" of the execution unit then looks up which other execution units it communicates with, and it sends a spike to each.

In the earlier iteration of Loihi, a spike simply carried a single bit of information. A neuron only registered when it received one.

Unlike a normal processor, there's no external RAM. Instead, each neuron has a small cache of memory dedicated to its use. This includes the weights it assigns to the inputs from different neurons, a cache of recent activity, and a list of all the other neurons that spikes are sent to.

One of the other big differences between neuromorphic chips and traditional processors is energy efficiency, where neuromorphic chips come out well ahead. IBM, which introduced its TrueNorth chip in 2014, was able to get useful work out of it even though it was clocked at a leisurely kiloHertz, and it used less than .0001 percent of the power that would be required to emulate a spiking neural network on traditional processors. Mike Davies, director of Intel's Neuromorphic Computing Lab, said Loihi can beat traditional processors by a factor of 2,000 on some specific workloads. "We're routinely finding 100 times [less energy] for SLAM and other robotic workloads," he added.

What’s new in neuromorphics

We'll get back to how asynchronous electronic spikes can actually solve useful problems in a bit. First, we'll take a look at what has changed between Loihi (which we'll call "the original processor" for clarity's sake) and Loihi 2. The difference is informative, because Intel has had hardware in the hands of the research community for a few years, and the company was able to incorporate their feedback into the design decisions. So, the differences between the two, in part, reflect what the people who actually use neuromorphic processors have found is holding them back.

Some of the changes are the obvious things you'd expect in the transition between two generations of chips. Intel's using a more up-to-date manufacturing process, and it can now fit each core in roughly half the space needed in the original processor. Rather than being able to communicate with separate chips via a two-dimensional grid of connections, Loihi 2 can do so in three dimensions, allowing a stack of processing boards to greatly increase the total number of neurons. The number of embedded processors per chip, which help coordinate all the activity, has gone from three to six, and there are eight times as many neurons per chip.

Despite containing thousands of individual neurons, Loihi chips aren't especially large.

Intel

But there are also some differences that are specific to Loihi's needs. Intel says it has gone through and optimized all the asynchronous hardware, giving Loihi 2 double the performance when updating a neuron's state and boosting the performance of spike generation ten-fold.

Other changes are very specific to spiking neural networks. The original processor's spikes, as mentioned above, only carried a single bit of information. In Loihi 2, a spike is an integer, allowing it to carry far more information and to influence how the recipient neuron sends spikes. (This is a case where Loihi 2 might be somewhat less like the neurons it's mimicking in order to perform calculations better.)

Another major change is in the part of the processor that evaluates the neuron's state in order to determine whether to send a spike. In the original processor, users could perform a simple bit of math to make that determination. In Loihi 2, they now have access to a simplified programmable pipeline, allowing them to perform comparisons and control the flow of instructions. Intel's Davies told Ars that you can specify these programs down to the per-neuron level, meaning that two neighboring neurons could be running completely different software.

Davies also said that the way each neuron handles its internal memory is more flexible. Rather than specific aspects—like the list of neurons spikes should be sent to—having a fixed allocation, there's a pool of memory that can be divided up more dynamically.

These changes do far more than let Loihi 2 execute existing algorithms more efficiently; they actually let the chip run algorithms that were a poor fit for the original processor.

And that brings us back to the question of how neuromorphic computing gets anything done.

From spikes to solutions

How do you actually solve problems using something like a Loihi chip? You can make some parallels to quantum computing. There, the problem you want to solve gets converted into a combination of how you configure a set of qubits and the manipulations you perform on them. The rules of the system—the physics, in the case of quantum computing—then determine the final state of the system. That final state can then be read out and translated into a solution.

For neuromorphic computing, the problem is set up by configuring the axons, which determine what neurons signal to what targets, as well as the code that determines when a neuron sends spikes. From there, the rules of the system determine how the spiking behavior evolves, either from the initial state or in response to further input. The solution can then be read out by examining the spiking behavior of different neurons. "Computation emerges from the interactions of the neurons," is how Davies put it.

Intel provided a concrete example of this in a paper it published back in 2018. The example problem it used is finding a set of features that can be used to approximate the content of an image, in the same way that a series of circles can approximate the head of Mickey Mouse. This can be done on Loihi by assigning each neuron a feature that it represents and then having its spiking activity influenced by whether it recognizes that feature in an image. As things proceed, the neurons signal to each other in a way that tones down the activity of anything that isn't recognizing a feature.

The end result of this competition is that the neurons that represent features present in the image will be actively spiking, while those that don't are relatively quiet. This can be read out as a feature list and the process started over again by feeding the system a new image. While it might be faster to reset the whole processor to its initial state before showing a second image, it shouldn't be necessary—the system is dynamic, so changing the input will mean changing the spiking behavior, allowing a new population of neurons to gradually assert itself.

Learning on the fly and more

This dynamic behavior makes for a contrast with trained neural networks, which are very good at recognizing what they've been trained on but not flexible enough to recognize something they weren't trained on. Davies described work they've done with Loihi to recognize gestures based on video input. He said that it's possible to get the system to recognize new gestures, training it on the fly without altering its ability to recognize gestures it was previously trained on. (This training won't tie the gesture to a specific action; the Loihi system just does the recognition and relies on other hardware to take actions based on that recognition.)

Davies says these sorts of abilities have a lot of potential applications in robotics. Mobile robots have to be flexible enough to recognize and adjust to new circumstances when they find themselves facing a new environment. And any robot will see its behavior change as its parts wear down or get dirty, meaning their control systems have to adjust to new performance parameters.

Intel

Those are the sorts of things that are traditionally associated with AI systems (whether they involve spiking neurons or not). But Davies also said that there are some very different use cases where spiking systems also perform well. One he mentioned was quadratic optimizations, which help with things like managing complex scheduling constraints (think of a nationwide rail system).

These can be solved using traditional computers, but the processing resources rise rapidly with the number of constraints. Loihi has shown promising results on finding optimized solutions with a fraction of the computational resources, and Davies said it's flexible enough to be configured to either find the optimal solution or more quickly find a solution that's within 1 percent of the best.

(Intriguingly, these are the same types of problems that run well on D-Wave's quantum annealing hardware. Davies said that Los Alamos was preparing a paper comparing the two.)

Waiting for the software

While spiking neural networks can be very effective at solving these sorts of problems, the challenge has often been finding the people who understand how to use them. It is a very different type of programming and requires an equally different way of thinking about algorithm development. Davies said that most of the people who are currently adept in it come from a theoretical neurobiology background (or are still in the field). So far, this has meant that Intel has mostly pushed Loihi into the research community, something that has limited its ability to sell the processor more widely.

But long term, Intel hopes to see Loihi derivatives end up in a broad range of systems, from acting as a co-processor in embedded systems to large Loihi clusters in the data center. For that, however, it will need to be easy for companies to find people who can program for it.

To that end, Intel is coupling the release of Loihi 2 with the release of an open source software framework called Lava. "LAVA is meant to help get neuromorphic [programming] to spread to the wider computer science community," Davies told Ars. He went on to say that, in the past, Intel hasn't provided enough abstraction from the inner workings of Loihi. If you wanted to run software on it, you had to understand spiking systems in detail. LAVA is a way of giving people the ability to work with Loihi-based systems without having to know the details.

LAVA should be accessible today, and the first Loihi 2 boards will be made available to the research community via a cloud service shortly. A board with a single chip is being made available for evaluation purposes, and it will be followed by an eight-chip system called Kapoho point later this year.

Listing image by Aurich Lawson | Getty Images | Intel

Intel launches its next-generation neuromorphic processor—so, what’s that again?

Amazon’s indoor camera drone is ready to fly around your house

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 05:47:02 +0000

Amazon announces a million smart home devices.

Amazon unloaded an entire delivery truck's worth of products at a private event today. Here are some of the many, many smart home products that were announced.

Lookout Nest! Amazon is stepping on Google's turf (and its old thermostat partner, Ecobee) with the Amazon Smart Thermostat. Nest thermostats are a circle, so this thing is a square, with the usual touch controls on the front and an app (the Alexa app) for remote control and usage tracking. "Thermostat Hunches" will let Alexa control the thermostat based on your location, and of course there are Alexa voice commands. Amazon partnered with Honeywell spinoff company Resideo to develop the thermostat, and says the device is "made with Honeywell Home Thermostat Technology." Between Amazon's Echo smarts and Honeywell's thermostat experience, there is plenty of expertise here.

Amazon's thermostat.

The app.

How the touch controls work.

A cartoon rendering of the wire mount.

The device is $59.99, and for $16 more you can get a bundle with a C-Wire Power Adapter, which you might need if your existing thermostat wiring isn't putting out enough power. That is dramatically cheaper than Nest, whose cheapest thermostat is $129.99. Amazon is also undercutting its biggest thermostat partner, Ecobee, which ships a thermostat with an entire Alexa speaker and microphone integrated into it, the $229.99 Ecobee 4. This is just a thermostat—but wow is it cheap.

Some cameras, including that drone indoor camera

Amazon really wants you to just fly this drone around the house.

Docked and undocked.

A mesh on the top and bottom should stop it from chopping off any fingers.

The app.

Next up: cameras. Amazon's crazy indoor, flying drone camera—the ambiguously named "Ring Always Home Cam"—is actually for sale now in the US. This was announced a full year ago, but now it's available "exclusively by invitation" for $249.99. This is a "Day 1 Edition" (read: a beta product). So Amazon isn't letting just anyone buy it. You can request an invitation to give Amazon money on the product page.

Like every other Ring camera, you can access the camera feed remotely, via the Ring app. You'll get a 1440 × 1440 video feed that you can zoom in to. You can train the drone with custom flight paths by just holding it up in the air and walking it throughout the house. There will probably be manual remote controls, too, but I get the feeling they will be very limited.

It doesn't sound like much is going on in the navigation stack. Amazon notes that "If Always Home Cam encounters an unexpected obstacle, it will pause and return to the charging dock." The drone is also limited to a single story of the house. If you have multiple stories, Amazon recommends multiple drones.

The drone lives in a little dock when it's not running, and Amazon says it will only record video when it's flying. The dock also covers the camera, so it couldn't record much while it's not flying, even if it wanted to. It has a flight time of five minutes before it has to recharge, and it should auto-dock itself when you are done with it.

This is a quadcopter, so like every other quadcopter, it will be slightly quieter than a flying chainsaw—but not by much. The announcement video did not include a sound recording of the drone, but on Amazon's product page, there's a video that hints at how much sound this thing will make. Ring President Leila Rouhi explained to the BBC last year that, in addition to covering the camera while it's in the dock, the quadcopter is "built to be loud, so it's really privacy that you can hear."

If you have any pets, Amazon admits they "may need time to adjust to the noise and motion of Always Home Cam." If your dog is still scared of the vacuum cleaner, imagine if that vacuum cleaner magically came to life when you weren't home and started flying around the room.

The Blink Doorbell camera.

The solar mount for the Blink Outdoor camera.

The floodlight mount for the Blink Outdoor camera.

In other camera news, there is also a doorbell: the Blink Doorbell. For $49.99, this doorbell camera does 30 fps, 1080p video with IR night vision and two-way audio. It runs on 2.4 GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, and if you don't want to power it with a doorbell wire, it can take two AA batteries. Like all the other Blink cameras, this is meant to be simple, cheap, and compatible with the Amazon Alexa ecosystem. There are some local storage capabilities via the Blink Sync Module 2, or you can pay a monthly fee for cloud storage.

There are also two accessories for the Blink Outdoor camera: a $39.99 Floodlight mount (it adds a motion sensor) and two LEDs (they add 700 lumens of power and motion-activated recording). There's also a $129.98 Solar Panel Mount for the Blink Outdoor camera, freeing you from having to run rely on the usual AAs. The solar mount has a single "pre-installed" 18650 battery. Whether or not the battery is user-replaceable is unclear, and how long of a runtime that battery gives you is equally vague.

The Ring + eero Security System

The Ring Alarm Pro base station. It's so big because it has a battery backup.

One of the door/window sensors.

The 8-piece kit.

One more product before we go: the Ring Alarm Pro. This is a follow-up to the Ring Alarm home security system from last year. The main difference is that the Alarm Pro combines two of Amazon's acquisitions: a Ring alarm system and an eero WiFi 6 mesh router. This will wirelessly wire up your home with Internet and protect it, all in one big box. The starter kit is $299.99 and gets you eight items: one Alarm Pro Base Station, one Keypad, four Contact Sensors, one Motion Detector, and one Alarm Range Extender.

The Base Station seems to be the only different item from last year, with the eero Wi-Fi 6 router functionality as the only new addition. It's fully compatible with the eero mesh system, so just add another mesh point if you need one. The other widgets still use Z-Wave for low-power connectivity. If you have last year's version of the Ring Alarm and want to upgrade to the Wi-Fi version, that'll cost $249 for just the base station. The new Alarm Pro comes out November 3.

Note: Ars Technica may earn compensation for sales from links on this post through affiliate programs.

Listing image by Amazon

Amazon’s indoor camera drone is ready to fly around your house

Amazon Astro is ‘terrible’ and will ‘throw itself down’ stairs, developers reportedly claim

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 23:23:56 +0000

Documents about how it works have also leaked

When you see a flight of stairs.

Photo by Dan Seifert / The Verge

Some of the people building Amazon’s Astro home robot are not impressed with it, according to a report by Vice. One person who worked on the robot, which was announced today, reportedly called it a “disaster that’s not ready for release,” while another said it was “terrible,” and the idea that it’d be a useful accessibility device (part of Amazon’s pitch is that Astro can help with elder care) was “absurdist nonsense.” The sources also mentioned that the bot doesn’t handle stairs well, with one even saying that it would “throw itself down” them “if presented the opportunity.”

To make matters worse, Vice also reports that the robot is fragile and that several devices had broken. That’s not great news for a $1,000 (or $1,449) robot that lives on the floor, where it’s prone to being stepped on by children, kicked by inattentive adults, or attacked by pets displeased with its presence.

Leaked documents and videos of developer meetings obtained by Vice also show that Astro is doing a lot of surveillance with its facial recognition systems, and the feature where it follows people around if it doesn’t recognize them. Vice’s sources say that it’s not great at actually figuring out who people are, which could lead to Astro annoyingly nipping at the heels of people it should know. One of the people who worked on it called its data collection “a privacy nightmare.”

It’s not necessarily surprising that Astro is always watching, though — it comes with a Ring Protect Pro subscription, and Amazon’s own marketing for the robot shows off that it can be used as a security device (but in the context of wild animals entering your home rather than people). The most surprising thing is that we’re seeing leaked documents, videos, and hearing from grudging developers on the same day the device was announced. Someone, or multiple someones, inside Amazon must not be swayed by the robot’s charms.

The leak also somewhat recontextualizes Amazon’s invite-based rollout. You currently can’t just buy the robot, you have to request an invite, a process which requires filling out a survey to indicate whether your house would be a good fit for Astro (which includes a question about what style stairs you have). It’s possible Amazon is trying to put these bots into the best case scenario, to see if they can even survive that.

Amazon Astro is ‘terrible’ and will ‘throw itself down’ stairs, developers reportedly claim

Amazon’s Astro Is a Robot Without a Cause

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 23:20:57 +0000

It’s the company’s first foray into mobile robots for the home, and likely not its last.

Photograph: Collin Hughes/Amazon

What do you get when you mix Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant with an Echo Show tablet, give it a hefty dose of artificial intelligence, integrate it all with Ring’s home security system, and let it roll around your home autonomously? You get a robot for the sake of a robot.

Actually, you get Astro, Amazon’s long-rumored home robot. The company has been working on this for nearly four years, and it has plans for Astro. It’s just not quite sure exactly what those are yet, so it’s offering the robot by invitation only, hoping thousands of early customers can help define what it’s for. The 2-foot-tall, 20-pound robot has a 10-inch touchscreen; includes an array of sensors, cameras, and microphones; and can wheel, multi-directionally, around your home. It costs $1,000.

Astro underscores Amazon’s seriousness about robotics, an area the company has invested heavily in for years as part of its warehouse network. It also shows how serious Amazon is about getting its devices—and its services—into every corner of our homes. But Astro, as adorable as it is, is a robot without a cause, at least for now. Amazon’s hardware chief Dave Limp identified a few potential use cases in an interview with WIRED, including eldercare and home security. But ultimately, Limp says, the company wants to get it into customers’ hands so it can identify “unique use cases” for the bot.

Robot Rock

Video: Amazon

The Astro bot is powered by two Qualcomm chips, with artificial intelligence processing built into the chipset. Its operating system is based on FireOS and Linux. It has five motors to give it some oomph, and it can carry a small payload on the back (anything that weighs less than 5 pounds).

Its face is a plain-looking tablet, but this is where you can swipe or tap your way through commands or video chats without having to rely on voice control. It's also where you'll find Astro's eyes, which are meant to give it more life than the cold, glass screens we're used to. Alexa is built into Astro too, so you can also dad-joke with it to your heart’s content.

Early reports have likened this to a robot vacuum cleaner, and they’re not wrong, minus the whole clean-your-house part. Astro is battery operated and, when it’s depleted, finds its way back to a fixed charging dock. Even more akin to a robot vacuum cleaner are the array of sensors in the bot: Astro is packed with “ultrasonic sensors, time-of-flight cameras, and other imaging tools that let the robot know what’s around it and where it’s going,” according to The Verge. It also has a periscope camera that extends from the top of the bot.

This begs the inevitable question of what Astro’s purpose is, and the answer seems to be a little bit of everything. Its 5-megapixel video calling camera can be used for chats with the grandparents. You can teach it to follow you around while it plays music from its tiny speakers. You can use it to transport small goods to someone else on the same floor—Astro doesn’t go up or down stairs—or you can use it to monitor your Ring home security cameras. You can socially engage with it or treat it like another pet.

Limp says that over the past year, while he's had Astro in his own home, he's grown accustomed to Astro waiting at the door for him. Astro may not have the humanoid characteristics that catapult it into uncanny valley territory, but Amazon believes it can still be like family.

Beta Test

Limp wouldn’t say exactly how many robot units the company plans to make available to early customers, or what Amazon's timeline is for a wider release of Astro. He says the team plans to build a “meaningful number” of robots—not millions, but not just hundreds, either.

“I don’t think we know what the upper bound of what we’re going to build is, either,” Limp says. “It’s a little bit like when we launched the Echo; we really under-forecasted that.”

Limp acknowledges that it’s not an exact parallel. The Echo speakers are much cheaper than Astro and primarily process voice commands (though some devices also have screens). The challenges with Astro are in some ways more complex; it has to map and navigate physical spaces in addition to processing voice commands and supporting video streams.

And, as with other devices Amazon has designed for the home, products like Astro raise questions about user privacy and consent around recording devices. Another Amazon venture into home robotics, the Ring Always Home Cam was first announced last September and was met with a backlash from privacy advocates. Amazon and Ring delayed the product by a year—Limp says he sometimes has to adopt the role of “chief slowdown officer”—until the company felt it was ready to ship to customers. Even still, the home drone is also available by invite only.

With Astro, all of the map processing and storage is supposed to happen locally on the robot. Facial recognition data is also stored locally. Limp insists that early users will have the ability to delete their voice data, or a map made of their home, daily. “If they receive an invite, it’s not like we’re asking them to sign a document saying they won’t delete their data,” Limp says.

But he also hopes some customers will opt to not delete their data, because “that would defeat some of the help in making the product better.” Beta testers, activated.

Amazon’s Astro Is a Robot Without a Cause

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Amazon announces Echo Show 15, a 15-inch smart display powered by Alexa

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 23:15:22 +0000

Amazon today announced Echo Show 15, a 15.6-inch, 1080p Full HD smart display, powered by Alexa. Echo Show 15 comes with Amazon AZ2 Neural Edge processor, a redesigned home screen with more customization features, new personalization features with visual ID, and several new Alexa experiences.

Visual ID enables Alexa to recognize you and personalize the information displayed. If you walk in front of Echo Show 15, Alexa will recognize you and the screen will automatically update to show you a custom greeting, your personal reminders, calendar events, recently played music, or personal notes from others in your home.

Echo Show 15 features:

Alexa can show you even more – With a 15.6” Full HD (1080p) smart display and 5 MP camera, family organization and entertainment will look brilliant. You can choose portrait or landscape orientation.
At-a-glance organization – Use Alexa-powered widgets to keep the family on track with shared calendars, personal sticky notes, to-do lists, shopping lists, and assigned reminders.
Alexa can help feed the fam – Get daily recipe ideas, cook along hands-free with step-by-step instructions, add ingredients to your shopping cart, or simply order meal kits or takeout.
Your smart home at your fingertips – Add your most-used smart devices to the home screen for quick access, and see all compatible devices together on one dashboard.
So much entertainment – Catch up on your favorites with Prime Video, Netflix, and more. Or stream radio stations, podcasts, and audiobooks with Amazon Music, Spotify, and Audible.
Your memories in full-screen – With the Photo Frame feature, you can use your Echo Show 15 to display your albums from Amazon Photos or Facebook.
Your day, your way – Family members can create personal profiles and use visual ID and voice ID to see their specific appointments, reminders, recently played music, and more.
Designed to protect your privacy – Amazon is not in the business of selling your personal information to others. Built with multiple layers of privacy controls including a mic/camera off button and a built-in camera shutter.

You can pre-order it here for $249.

Amazon announces Echo Show 15, a 15-inch smart display powered by Alexa

Logitech’s MX Keys Mini ditches the numpad for other useful keys

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 07:16:07 +0000

A more compact option that costs the same $99.99 price as the full-sized MX Keys

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The function row has dedicated emoji, voice dictation and mic mute keys.

Image: Logitech

Logitech’s MX Keys Mini is a compact, platform-agnostic wireless keyboard that lacks the numpad found on the standard MX Keys. It costs the same amount at $99.99 despite its smaller size, yet there might be enough additions to make this one the preferable option (you know, if spending $100 on a keyboard is feasible).

Logitech added a dedicated emoji key to the top row of Mini’s function keys that lets you add some personality to your messages, in addition to a voice dictation key and a mic mute key that mutes on a system level, not per application. Joining them on the function row are media and volume keys, along with an option to adjust the brightness of the keyboard backlighting.

The MX Keys Mini charges via USB-C and can flip between three Bluetooth devices via keys that easily let you switch. But something you should know about this model is that it doesn’t ship with Logitech’s unifying USB receiver, and it won’t work with one you might already have. It’s a Bluetooth-only affair, though it is compatible with Logitech’s new $14.99 Bolt USB receiver that lowers latency and adds more security.

The MX Keys Mini shares a number of other features in common with the MX Keys. Its concave, matte-textured keys offer a pretty great typing experience. It also has backlighting that kicks on automatically when your hands appear over the keyboard, turning off a few seconds after you pull away.

Available in three colorways. The MX Keys Mini for Mac comes only in the leftmost grey and white option.

The default version of the MX Keys Mini shows both Windows and macOS commands, and it’s also compatible with Chrome OS, Linux, Android, iOS, and iPadOS. It comes in three colorways: rose, pale gray, and graphite. If you’re a dedicated Apple user who’d rather not have start and alt buttons, Logitech makes a version that’s just for macOS and other Apple products. It’s the same price, but it comes in just the pale grey colorway, which resembles Apple’s older desktop keyboards.

Logitech claims that the MX Keys Mini can deliver up to 10 days of battery life with the backlighting turned on, as it is by default. Though, it can apparently last up to five months with the backlighting off.

You certainly don’t need to spend $99.99 to get a decent wireless keyboard with scissor switches. But the price for the MX Keys Mini might be easier to justify if you use multiple devices at your setup, and especially if you use the MX Master or Anywhere mouse. When used alongside one of those, Logitech’s Flow feature lets you move files between macOS and Windows PCs.

Logitech’s MX Keys Mini ditches the numpad for other useful keys

AMD CEO Lisa Su downplays the company’s role in crypto mining

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 05:18:05 +0000

‘Dear Lisa, can you help me get a gaming card?’

Can’t get a new graphics card for your PC? You might be tempted to blame bots, scalpers or cryptocurrency miners for that — but AMD CEO Lisa Su is downplaying the impact of crypto at the 2021 Code Conference today. When asked about how big a deal crypto is for the chipmaker, she told the audience that it’s a rather small part of AMD’s business, called it “a pretty volatile space,” and suggested that it shouldn’t be a focus for AMD going forward either.

That’s not a particularly surprising stance for several reasons. First, what upside there was for GPU makers like AMD and Nvidia has drastically shrunk — GPU prices have slowly been dropping amidst China’s cryptocurrency crackdown, which only got stronger this past week as China’s central bank officially banned cryptocurrency transactions entirely. There have been reports of mass GPU sell-offs from mining regions going back months, although prices are still quite high.

Second, if she were to publicly say she supports AMD chasing crypto sales, that could be a really unpopular look when it comes to AMD’s hyper-vocal audience of gamers who believe that every sale to a crypto miner is a sale at their expense — and who also drive purchases of desktop CPUs and motherboards for AMD.

Su made it very clear in her reply at the Code Conference that gamers are top of mind: “We are trying really hard to get more products to gamers; I get so many ‘Dear Lisa, can you help me get a gaming card?’” she said. AMD already took some flak from gamers when it revealed it wouldn’t block mining workloads with its new GPUs, unlike Nvidia. “At the end of the day we’re building for sort of consumer applications, and that’s where the focus is.”

But third, AMD may just not have a large enough supply of GPUs to tempt miners to begin with. While we don’t know how many current-gen GPUs the company has actually shipped, there are many signs that the company has sold precious few of them compared to its rival Nvidia.

It’s far rarer to see an AMD GPU in stock, there are far fewer of them changing hands on sites like eBay, and not even one AMD GPU has broken into Steam’s Hardware Survey, which provides a rough glimpse at how many of them have made it into PC gamers’ hands. Over 6 percent of gaming PCs included in the survey have one of the Nvidia 3000-series GPUs, but there isn’t a single recent AMD GPU on the list, which suggests none of them have accumulated more than a 0.15 percent share of Steam gamers. When Su says that crypto is “not a large piece of our business,” it’s possible she also means that new desktop GPUs are not a large piece of AMD’s business. Su did say in May that AMD was having to prioritize some components over others, though she didn’t mention GPUs specifically.

Speaking of shortages, Su also addressed the ongoing global chip shortage onstage, reiterating that supplies will be “tight” this year and “likely tight” the first half of next year, but that “it’ll get better in 2022” as additional production capacity comes online. “It gets better next year, not immediately, but it’ll gradually get better as more plants come up,” she told the attendees at Code Conference.

Additional reporting by Dieter Bohn

AMD CEO Lisa Su downplays the company’s role in crypto mining

Need a new monitor for your computer? You can wear one on your face

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 17:07:17 +0000

Forget settling down in front of a computer monitor at work — someday, you might strap on a headset instead.

That might sound a bit like a ’90s cyberpunk fantasy, but it’s not really all that outlandish.

Beyond having more screens to work with for multi-tasking, there’s another benefit to wearing your computer’s screen(s) on your face: no one else can look at them. If you frequently work with sensitive files or data, the last thing you’d want is for a nosy neighbor on a plane or at a coffee shop peering over your shoulder. But these kinds of headsets can be cumbersome and in some cases could leave you feeling queasy.

More than a few tech companies are convinced that sophisticated screens shoved into glasses could represent the future of work. But they have different visions for how a screen you wear on your face should work.

Microsoft has built a chunk of its business around the HoloLens, which can display 2-D or 3-D content in the physical space workers occupy. Facebook is pushing new tools to turn virtual reality headsets like the Oculus Quest into tools employees can use to meet and collaborate in a virtual world. Meanwhile, a crop of headsets from companies like Lenovo and TCL are trying something a little more practical. Rather than thrust you into a world of conferences populated by 3-D avatars, these smart glasses try to replicate the experience of sitting in front of a computer monitor. (Or in some cases, lots of computer monitors.)

To be clear, these kinds of specialized gadgets are still far from hitting the mainstream.

“The people who are getting these now are technophiles who are willing to say ‘Hey, I’m going to take it, warts and all,’” said Ramon Llamas, a research director at market research firm IDC. “It’s probably not going to be until the third or fourth revision that we start seeing more mass-market interest.”

They might not look like it, but these glasses can act like a full-size computer monitor.

How do they work?

Most of the headsets that fall into this category have a lot in common. They generally don’t have any processing power of their own, so they need to be connected to a proper computer — or a smartphone — to get anything done. So far, that means they rely on long USB cables, though companies like chipmaker Qualcomm are working to embed powerful mobile processors directly in these glasses so future models can go cord-free.

But what makes these headsets interesting are how they show you your work. Essentially, they put a tiny screen in front of each your eyes, positioned in just the right way to make each little display look like one big one. (If you’ve ever gone birdwatching with a pair of binoculars, you’ve seen this technique in action!) Assuming everything is plugged in correctly and working the way it’s supposed to, you’re able to just pop those glasses on and have a look around.

What can you do with them?

These headsets aren’t meant to lock you in some strange virtual conference room — instead, they basically act as secondary screens you wear instead of putting them on your desk.

TCL, a Chinese company best known for producing televisions, makes one such headset. Its Nxtwear glasses can connect to one of the company’s compatible smartphones, which offers a view of a familiar, desktop-like interface where you can browse the Web, watch videos, or fire off emails. (If you do that, the phone’s screen also becomes a big trackpad for moving a mouse cursor around.)

When connected to a computer, like a MacBook Pro, the glasses effectively become a replacement monitor that looks much bigger than a typical laptop screen. You could certainly make it your main display, but because the glasses are screens propped up to the top of your line of sight by a set of big nose pads, you’d still be able to easily glance at your laptop.

Lenovo's smart glasses let you display up to 5 virtual monitors in front of you.

Some models like Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 PC Edition, offer a more immersive approach. Hooking it up to a compatible computer with a USB-C cable lets you view and rearrange up to five different screens in a sort of virtual “space” in front of you. As you move your head around, each of those monitors will come into view depending on how you’ve configured them. It’s as though you’re sitting in front of a desk you’ve meticulously arranged multiple monitors on, except you didn’t have to lug those monitors around in the first place.

The catch? Because the Lenovo’s headset is designed to show you multiple screens at the same time, it requires a lot more horsepower to work correctly, and not every computer will do. For now at least, you would have to already own — or buy — a compatible, Lenovo Thinkpad laptop if you ever wanted to try building a virtual workstation with the ThinkReality glasses.

Where do we go from here?

These headsets are here, and they work, but let’s be honest: they’re still far from ideal.

For one, the companies that make these headsets haven’t completely conquered the issue of comfort. Because they have so many components and sensors packed into them, this current generation of smart glasses just can’t be nearly as flexible as, say, a regular pair of glasses. That could mean people with bigger heads may literally feel the pinch when they try to strap on a wearable display.

And while these headsets aren’t all that heavy — Lenovo’s is about a third of a pound — they can still feel cumbersome to use. But as the constellation of component makers continues to shrink their parts, that may change before too long.

“If these can be lightweight and comfortable and offer sufficient image quality where I can be productive on multiple screens, that’s the litmus test,” said Ross Rubin, principal analyst at market research firm Reticle Research. “I could see a path to that in the next maybe three years.”

Until then, headset makers have something else to tackle: price. Lenovo’s headset costs about $1,500, which is a big ask even if it’s meant for work — and especially one that requires other equipment to work. (Then again, maybe companies will eat the cost to make its workforce more productive; we’ll have to see.) Meanwhile, TCL’s glasses aren’t on sale in the U.S. yet, but models available elsewhere cost the equivalent of about $680.

That will change over time, too, as the technology matures and the cost of parts become more reasonable. Until then, though, many of us will just have to make do with the computer monitors we have now.

Source

The Cybernetics Scare And The Origins Of The Internet

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 16:07:20 +0000

Published in the printed edition of Baltic Worlds page 32-38, vol II:1, 2009
Published on Balticworlds.Com on February 11, 2010

In the late 1950s, as Soviet society began to shed the legacy of Stalinism, science and engineering became new cultural icons. The new, post-Stalin generation was fascinated with Sputnik, nuclear power stations, and electronic digital computers. The popular image of an objective, truth-telling computer became a vehicle for a broad movement among scientists and engineers calling for reform in science and in society at large. Under the banner of cybernetics, this movement attacked the dogmatic notions of Stalinist science and the ideology-laden discourse of the Soviet social sciences.

Proposed originally in 1948 by the American mathematician Norbert Wiener as a science of control and communication in the animal and the machine,1 cybernetics acquired a much wider interpretation in the Soviet context. Soviet cyberneticians aspired to unify diverse cybernetic theories elaborated in the West — control theory, information theory, automata studies and others — in a single overarching conceptual framework, which would serve as the foundation for a general methodology applicable to a wide range of natural and social sciences and engineering.2

The more Soviet society departed from Stalinism, the more radical the cybernetic project became. Step by step, Soviet cyberneticians overturned earlier ideological criticism of mathematical methods in various disciplines, and put forward the goal of “cybernetization” of the entire science enterprise. Under the umbrella of cybernetics, scientific trends that had been suppressed under Stalin began to emerge under new, cybernetic names, and began to defy the Stalin-era orthodoxy. “Biological cybernetics” (genetics) challenged the Lysenkoites in biology, “physiological cybernetics” opposed the Pavlovian school in physiology, and “cybernetic linguistics” (structuralism) confronted traditional comparative philology and historical linguistics. Soviet cybernetics enthusiasts set the goal of achieving a comprehensive “cybernetization” of modern science by representing the subject of every discipline in a unified, formalized way and by moving toward a synthesis of the sciences. They aspired to translate all scientific knowledge into computer models and to replace the ideology-laden, “vague” language of the social and life sciences with the “precise” language of cybernetics.

The global aspirations of Soviet cybernetics drew on the rich and seemingly universal cybernetic language, which I call “cyberspeak”. It emerged in the “cybernetics circle” of Wiener and his colleagues, as they met regularly over the course of ten meetings sponsored by the Macy Foundation in 1946–1953. The participants of these meetings included mathematicians, engineers, philosophers, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, biologists, linguists, and social scientists, among them Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, Warren McCulloch, William Ross Ashby, Roman Jakobson, and Gregory Bateson.3

The cyberneticians putforward a wide range of human-machine analogies: the body as a feedback-operated servomechanism, life as an entropy-reducing device, man as an information source, human communication as transmission of encoded messages, the human brain as a logical network, and the human mind as a computer. This assembly of mathematical models, explanatory frameworks, and appealing metaphors presented a rather chaotic and eclectic picture. What held it together was a set of interdisciplinary connections: the same mathematical theory described feedback in control engineering and noise reduction in communication engineering; information theory was linked to thermodynamics, as information was equated with “negative entropy”; information was interpreted as a measure of order, organization, and certainty, while entropy was associated with chaos, noise, and uncertainty; brain neurons were modeled as logical elements; and thinking was likened to computation.

Cyberneticians combined concepts from physiology (homeostasis), psychology (behavior and goal), control engineering (control and feedback), thermodynamics (entropy and order), and communication engineering (code, information, signal, and noise), and generalized each of them to be equally applicable to living organisms, self-regulating machines (such as servomechanisms and computers), and human society. In their view, machines, organisms, and human society were all seen as self-organizing control systems, which, operating in a certain environment, pursued their goals (hitting a target, increasing order, achieving better organization, or reaching the state of equilibrium) by communicating with this environment, that is, sending signals and receiving information about the results of their actions through feedback loops.

Upon its publication in 1948, Wiener’s Cybernetics gained enormous popularity. The New York Times called it one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, comparable in significance to the works of Galileo, Malthus, Mill, or Rousseau. Cybernetics promised solutions to a wide range of social, biological, and technological problems through information processing and feedback control. Complex social and biological phenomena looked simpler and more manageable when described in cybernetic terms. Masking the differences in the nature and scale of those phenomena, the common cybernetic language allowed one to use the same mathematical techniques across a wide range of disciplines. When translated into cyberspeak, biological, technological, and social problems all seemed to have similar — cybernetic — solutions. Taking cybernetic metaphors literally, many biologists and social scientists pushed the boundaries of cybernetics even further than Wiener and his colleagues originally envisioned.

With the wide introduction of electronic digital computers, Wiener’s original parallels between thinking and analog computing expanded to include digital computers. Speaking of human thought as computation and describing digital computers in anthropomorphic terms as “giant brains”4 became two sides of the same coin, brought into wide circulation by cybernetics. Scientific American published an accessible account of cybernetics under the provocative title “Man Viewed as a Machine”5; and philosopher Frank H. George threw a challenge to the readers of the English journal Philosophy: “you can’t tell me anything that your wife can do that a machine can’t (in principle)”.6 Political scientists spoke of the cybernetic “nerves of government”,7 engineers, economists, and journalists described the bright technological future populated with intelligent robots,8 and business consultants began to sell “management cybernetics”.9

Ironically, Wiener, who was hailed as a prophet of the new age of automatic machinery, held ambivalent views about the social implications of cybernetics. He regarded automatic machines as both “threat and promise”.10 Wiener proclaimed the advent of the “second industrial revolution”, which would bring about fully automated factories running without human agency. This revolution, in his view, carried “great possibilities for good and for evil”.11 Cybernetic techniques and technologies, he argued, “open to us vistas of a period of greater plenty than the human race has ever known, although they create at the same time the possibility of a more devastating level of social ruin and perversion than any we have yet known”.12 Wiener warned that automation was “bound to devalue the human brain”.13 “The skilled scientist and the skilled administrator may survive”, he wrote, but “the average human being of mediocre attainments or less has nothing to sell that it is worth anyone’s money to buy.”14 Wiener was deeply critical of capitalist America. He did not believe in the ability of the “invisible hand” of free market to establish an economic and social equilibrium, or homeostasis in cybernetic terms. His social outlook was overtly pessimistic: “There is no homeostasis whatever. We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses.”15

Cybernetics, in Wiener’s view, provided hope for social change. Two years after Cybernetics, he published the book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cyber-netics and Society, in which he developed a cybernetic critique of the pervasive controls over social communication under McCarthyism in America and under Stalinism in Russia. He believed that describing society in cybernetic terms as a self-regulating device would make it clear that controlling the means of communication was “the most effective and most important” anti-homeostatic factor, which could drive society out of equilibrium.16 Wiener noted that on both sides of the Atlantic “political leaders may attempt to control their populations” by manipulating information flows, and argued that “it is no accident that Russia has had its Berias and that we have our McCarthys”.17 His views of capitalism and communism were best summarized by his colleague and friend Dirk Struik: “plague on both your houses”.18

It was profoundly ironic — and illustrated the limited power of the creator over his creation — that both of these “houses” became fascinated with cybernetics. The promise of universality of the cybernetic approach was alluring; the unlimited applicability of cybernetics evoked the image of unlimited power. But even greater than the allure of cybernetics was the fear that cybernetics might become a weapon in the hands of the other side in the Cold War.

In the early 1950s, on the wave of Stalinist ideological campaigns against Western influence in Soviet science, the Soviet academic and popular press attacked cybernetics as “a modish pseudo-science” and “a reactionary imperialist utopia”. Soviet critics used all tools in their rhetorical arsenal: philosophical arguments (accusing cybernetics of both idealistic and mechanistic deviations from dialectical materialism), sociological analysis (labeling cybernetics “a technocratic theory” whose goal was to replace striking workers with obedient machines), and moral invectives (alleging that cyberneticians aspired to replace conscience-laden soldiers with “indifferent metallic monsters”). Like any propaganda, the anti-cybernetics discourse was full of contradictions. Critics called cybernetics “not only an ideological weapon of imperialist reaction but also a tool for accomplishing its aggressive military plans”, thus portraying it both as a pseudo-science and as an efficient tool in the construction of modern automated weapons.

Khrushchev’s political “thaw” after years of Stalin’s rule opened the gates for liberalization in the scientific community, and cybernetics was quickly rehabilitated. Soviet cyberneticians radically expanded the bound-aries of cybernetics to include all sorts of mathematical models and digital computer simulations. Cybernetics became synonymous with computers, and computers synonymous with progress. In October 1961, just in time for the opening of the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party, the Cybernetics Council of the Soviet Academy of Sciences published a volume appropriately entitled Cybernetics in the Service of Communism. This book outlined the great potential benefits of applying computers and cybernetic models to problems in a wide range of fields, from biology and medicine to production control, transportation, and economics.

A large number of previously marginalized research trends found a niche for themselves under the aegis of the Academy Council on Cybernetics, including mathematical economics, which was refashioned into “economic cybernetics”. The entire Soviet economy was interpreted as “a complex cybernetic system, which incorporates an enormous number of various interconnected control loops”. Conceptualizing the Soviet economy in cybernetic terms, economic cyberneticians regarded economic planning as a giant feedback system of control. Economic cyberneticians aspired to turn the Soviet economy into a fully controllable and optimally functioning system by managing its information flows. Soviet cyberneticians proposed to optimize the functioning of this system by creating a large number of regional computer centers to collect, process, and redistribute economic data for efficient planning and management. Connecting all these centers into a nationwide network would lead to the creation of “a single automated system of control of the national economy”.19

The new Party Program adopted at the Twenty-Second Congress included cybernetics among the sciences that were called upon to play a crucial role in the construction of the material and technical basis of communism. The new Program vigorously asserted that cybernetics, electronic computers, and control systems “will be widely applied in production pro-cesses in industry, building, and transport, in scientific research, planning, designing, accounting, statistics, and management”. The popular press began to call computers “machines of communism”.

“However unusual this may sound to some conservatives who do not wish to comprehend elementary truths, we will be building communism on the basis of the most broad use of electronic machines, capable of processing enormous amounts of technological, economic, and biological information in the shortest time”, proclaimed Engineer Admiral Aksel’ Berg, Chairman of the Academy Council on Cybernetics in 1962. “These machines, aptly called ‘cybernetic machines’, will solve the problem of continuous optimal planning and control.”20

Despite the lofty rhetoric of cybernetics enthusiasts, Soviet government officials remained skeptical about the prospects for a radical nationwide reform of economic management. The potential computerization of economic decision-making threatened the established power hierarchy and faced stubborn opposition at all levels of Soviet bureaucracy. Through an endless process of reviews, revisions, and reorganizations,
Soviet government agencies were able to slow down the cybernetic reform and eventually brought it to a halt.21 As the idea of an overall economic reform withered away, so did the plans for a nationwide computer network, which no longer had a definite purpose.22

Yet the vociferous media campaign launched by Soviet cybernetics advocates caused serious concern in Washington. “If any country were to achieve a completely integrated and controlled economy in which ‘cybernetic’ principles were applied to achieve various goals, the Soviet Union would be ahead of the United States in reaching such a state”, wrote an American reviewer of Cybernetics in the Service of Communism. He warned that cybernetics “may be one of the weapons Khrushchev had in mind when he threatened to ‘bury’ the West”.23 The CIA set up a special branch to study the Soviet cybernetics menace.24

CIA analysts apparently confused Soviet cyberneticians’ unbridled enthusiasm with actual government policy. The CIA task force on Soviet cybernetics reported that “Soviet policy makers took up the cybernetic methodology on an unprecedented scale”. The task force warned that “tremendous increments in economic productivity as the result of cybernetization of production may permit disruption of world markets” on an unprecedented scale. In August 1961, senior CIA research staff reported that the Soviets were ready to apply cybernetic control techniques “not only for the natural sciences and the economy but for the shaping of society as a whole”.25 The cybernetic methodology of automated education was aimed at bringing up the “New Communist Man”. “The creation of a model society and the socio-economic demoralization of the West will be the added ideological weapon”, concluded CIA analysts.26

On October 15, 1962, John J. Ford, head of the special CIA task force on Soviet cybernetics, made an informal presentation to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and other top government officials at the house of
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara. Ford captivated the audience by touting “the serious threat to the United States and Western Society posed by increasing Soviet commitment to a fundamentally cybernetic strategy in the construction of communism”. Everything went well until the presentation was interrupted by the news of Soviet missiles discovered in Cuba.

Even as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded, top Kennedy administration officials requested more information from Ford on Soviet cybernetics. On October 17, Ford submitted a summary of his unfinished talk to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., President Kennedy’s Special Assistant. Speaking as a private citizen (the CIA did not take an official position on Soviet cybernetics), Ford warned that “the Communists have a Bloc-wide program devoted to research, development and application of cybernetics to insure the outcome of the East-West conflict in their favor, whereas the U.S. has neither a program, nor a philosophy for developing cybernetics toward attainment of national objectives”. “Persistent disregard of this aspect of Soviet strategy”, concluded Ford, “amounts to arbitrary neglect of the central intentions of the enemy and unwitting compliance with his principal strategy for world communization.”27

Three days later, with the missile crisis in full swing, the cybernetics scare crept up the ladder of the Kennedy administration. Schlesinger wrote to Robert F. Kennedy that the “all-out Soviet commitment to cybernetics” would give the Soviets “a tremendous advantage”. Schlesinger warned that “by 1970 the USSR may have a radically new production technology, involving total enterprises or complexes of industries, managed by closed-loop, feedback control employing self-teaching computers”. If the American negligence of cybernetics continues, he concluded, “we are
finished”.28

In November 1962, as soon as the missile crisis abated, Schlesinger raised the Soviet cybernetics issue with the President himself. President Kennedy then asked his Science Advisor Jerome Wiesner to set up a cybernetics panel to “take a look at what we’re doing compared to what they’re doing, and what this means for the future”.29

Wiesner had headed the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT; he was well familiar with cybernetics, and regarded Norbert Wiener as his mentor. Wiesner gathered top experts in the field. The prominent MIT biophysicist Walter Rosenblith chaired the panel, which also included physiologist William Ross Adey, psychologist George Miller, electronics engineer John Pierce, mathematician John Tukey, computer scientists Peter Elias and Willis Ware, and mathematical economists Leonid Hurwicz and Kenneth Arrow. The panel met several times in 1963 until the Kennedy
assassination and Wiesner’s subsequent resignation put an end to this study.30

An apocalyptic vision of a fundamental transformation of the Soviet system along the lines of cybernetics was expressed in a manuscript entitled “The Communist Reformation”, which Wiesner received in February 1963. “Cybernetics became officially the primary science in the Soviet Union” and “the veritable spearhead of ‘Communist Reformation’”, claimed the author, the Hungarian émigré George Paloczi-Horvath. “The rise of primacy of cybernetics in all branches of Soviet administration, economy, industry and science started to change the Communist system of governing and control itself.” “If a new crash programme is not adopted very soon”, warned Paloczi-Horvath, “in the late nineteen sixties and the early nineteen seventies instead of the missile gap, American and Western public opinion will be worried by the ‘computer-gap’, and the ‘programmer-gap’.”31 Although Wiesner believed that the idea of an emerging “cybernetics gap” was “ridiculous in the extreme”,32 he did sponsor Paloczi-Horvath’s further research and the publication of his revised manuscript.33

In the meantime, the CIA continued to sound the alarm. In February 1964, the CIA issued a secret report on Soviet cybernetics, mentioning, among other strategic threats, the Soviet plans to build a “Unified Information Net”. The CIA circulated the report to a hundred people in the Defense Department, the State Department, the Atomic Energy Commission, the National Security Agency, NASA, and other government agencies.34 In November 1964, at a conference at Georgetown University, Ford publicly presented a paper surveying Soviet cybernetics and predicting that the development of new information techniques in government might become the battlefield for “a new kind of international competition during the next 15 years”.35 His public call seriously alarmed some military officials. The Commander of the Foreign Technology Division of the U.S. Air Force Systems Command concluded:

“Unless we Americans as a people, and we in the Air Force in particular, understand these momentous trends, we may not have much choice. The system could be imposed upon us from an authoritarian, centralized, cybernated, world-powerful command and control center in Moscow.”36

CIA analysts wildly overestimated the Soviet cyber-netics threat. A 1964 CIA report suggested that “archi-tects and engineers are now drawing up technical plans for the center of the USSR’s ‘automated economic information system’ to be located in Moscow on a site already selected”.37 Indeed, the Central Economic Mathematical Institute, created in Moscow in 1963 to develop the concept of a computerized nationwide economic management system, had no building of its own, and its staff was crammed in a few rooms with no computer facilities. The construction of a new building took more than 10 years; it was completed only in the mid-1970s. A 1965 report warned that a decentralized network of “satellite” computer centers was being created, in which the output of information processing in one center was cross-fed into other satellite centers and into a central computer. The report alleged that these satellite centers would be interconnected on a regional basis by 1967.38 A 1966 report claimed that “the Unified Information Network was the most significant planned application of cybernetics discussed during 1965”. The CIA identified 350 computer centers that “might become nodes” in the “‘nervous system’ of the Soviet Government”.39

In fact, the Soviet Union suffered from acute shortage of computers. In 1968 there were only 9 computers in the entirety of Lithuania.40 The few lucky organizations that managed to obtain a computer held tight control over its use and had no intention to share it with outsiders. The so-called computer centers rarely had more than one machine and were not linked to any network. In 1967 the Central Economic Mathematical Institute received its very first computer, Ural-14B, a slow, unreliable machine with small memory, totally unsuitable for large-scale information processing. Lacking its own building, the Institute installed the computer in a local high school. The first “network” the Institute developed consisted of two computers. This was a forced measure: since the capabilities of Ural-14B were so limited, the Institute linked it to the more powerful BESM-6 computer, located at the Institute’s Leningrad branch, to enable running a few experimental simulations. In the mid-1960s, Soviet cybernetic economists tried to persuade the leadership of the Ministry of Defense, which was building its own network, to convert it to dual use. The reply was curt: “We are getting as much money for technological development as we ask for. You are getting nothing. If we cooperate, neither of us will get any money.”41 With the lack of political and financial support, the Institute soon dropped the
automated economic management information system from its research agenda and focused on the development of optimal mathematical models. Practical
reform was supplanted by optimization on paper.

Though short-lived, the Wiesner panel made a sober evaluation of Soviet cybernetics. The leading economist on the panel, the future Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, dismissed Soviet efforts at mathematical economic planning as “no more that the aggregate of operations research work being done in the United States by industrial corporations”. He stressed that even though the Soviets were collecting extensive economic data, “nobody has really been able to figure out how to make good use of this enormous pile of material”. Arrow was highly skeptical of the claims of computer-based ratio-nality and argued that even if the United States could “computerize our political decision-making”, the
economy would not achieve “perfect stability”. He concluded that a much more efficient economic policy could be worked out simply by improving intelligence, while computers might serve merely as “a mystical symbol of accuracy”.42 In 1964, soon after leaving his position as President’s Science Advisor, Wiesner visited the Soviet Union to see the fruits of what he called the “cybernetics binge”43 for himself. The only modern automated production facility he could find was a champagne bottling plant.44

Herbert Simon, another future Nobel laureate in economics and a leading artificial intelligence expert, was also involved in the work of the cybernetics panel. He later recalled how the CIA had submitted a thick report to President Kennedy about an alleged “great Soviet plot to conquer the world with cybernetics. […] Alas, our panel was too honest. If we had reported back to Wiesner that the Soviet cybernetics project was
genuinely dangerous, American research in artificial intelligence would have had all the funding it could possibly use for years to come. Putting temptation behind us, we reported that the CIA document was a fairy story — as events proved it to be.”45

Whether the panelists were able to put the temptation behind or not, U.S. research in artificial intelligence did receive a very significant boost at the time. Starting in 1963, the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) at the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) lavishly funded Project MAC at MIT and other artificial intelligence initiatives. “It was heaven”, MIT’s Marvin Minsky recalled. “It was your philanthropic institute run by your students with no constraints and no committees. Of course there was no way to spend that much money, so we built some machines and for the next few years I never had to make any hard decisions whether to fund one project or another because we could just do both.”46

The head of IPTO,MIT psychologist J. C. R. Licklider, had a longtime interest in cybernetics. “There was tremendous intellectual ferment in Cambridge after World War II”, he recalled. “Norbert Wiener ran a weekly circle of 40 or 50 people who got together. They would gather together and talk for a couple of hours. I was a faithful adherent to that.” Licklider audited Wiener’s lectures and became part of a faculty group at MIT that “got together and talked about cybernetics”. “I was always hanging onto that”, he remembered. Licklider closely collaborated with George Miller and Walter Rosenblith, future members of Wiesner’s cybernetics panel. While at MIT, Licklider was also very close to Wiesner, and when the latter became President Kennedy’s Science Advisor, Licklider was appointed the head of a panel on scientific and technical communications. Licklider thus divided his time between ARPA and Wiesner’s Office of Science and Technology, to some chagrin on the part of his Pentagon bosses.47

Licklider’s combined interest in psychology, computing, and communications helped him conceptualize the computer as a communication device, rather than merely a big calculator. In his 1960 article, “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, he outlined his vision of a network of “thinking centers”, multi-user computer timesharing systems, which would “incorporate the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [man-computer] symbiotic functions”.48 Licklider’s biological metaphor of “symbiosis” echoed the cybernetic blurring of human-machine boundaries. As Licklider’s article achieved the status of a “unifying reference point” in computer science and artificial intelligence, it spread the cybernetic vision (without using the term) throughout these disciplines.49

The cybernetic concept of communication transcended the boundary between human and machine. In the cybernetic world, people could communicate via and with computers, eventually forming seamless human-computer communication networks. Licklider vigorously promoted human-computer interaction to Pentagon officials. “The problems of command and control were essentially problems of man-computer interaction. I thought it was just ridiculous to be having command control systems based on batch processing”, he recalled. “Every time I had the chance to talk, I said the mission is interactive computing.”50 The IPTO funded a plethora of projects around the United States, and each group developed its own time-sharing computing system, incompatible with others. Licklider jokingly named this conglomerate of research groups the Intergalactic Computer Network. In 1963, he sent a memo to members of this informal social network, urging them to standardize their systems so that data could be communicated from one system to another. “Consider the situation in which several different centers are netted together”, he wrote, arguing that it was important “to develop a capability for integrated network operation”.51

In 1968, Licklider co-authored the article “The Computer as a Communication Device” with Robert Taylor, the head of IPTO in 1965–69. Under Taylor, the IPTO took practical steps to unite “digitally isolated” research groups into a “supercommunity” by developing the ARPANET, which eventually evolved into the Internet.52

Historian Paul Edwards has argued that “cyborg discourse”, which blurred the boundary between human and machine, blended with the Cold War “closed world” discourse, which represented the world as amenable to computer simulation, manipulation, and control. “Cyborg discourse functioned as the psychological/subjective counterpart of closed-world politics”, he writes. “Where closed-world discourse defined the architectures of a political narrative and a technological system, cyborg discourse molded culture and subjectivity for the information age.”53

Ironically, cyborg discourse achieved its triumph at the cost of erasing its roots in Wiener’s cybernetic vision. Wiener’s resolute pacifist stance after Hiroshima brought him under close FBI watch and cast a shadow of suspicion over his ideas. The subsequent cybernetics scare in the United States further tinged this field with the red of communism, and set hurdles for federal funding of cybernetics research. “They wanted to chase out cybernetics as fast as they could”, recalled the leading cybernetician Heinz von Foerster. “It was not suppressed, but they neglected it.”54 Although the ARPANET originated in the context of cybernetic analogies between human and computer communication, its cybernetic genealogy was obliterated.

While in the Soviet Union cyberspeak dominated scientific discussions, cyborg discourse in the United States seeped through culture and became universally accepted to the point of being invisible. American
scientists talked in cyberspeak and didn’t even realize it, just as Monsieur Jourdain in Molière’s play did not realize he was speaking in prose. The initial ARPANET goals were very humble — to share computing resources among research groups — and dissociated from the explicit cybernetic vision of society as a feedback-regulated mechanism. Perhaps precisely for this reason it proved feasible, while the grand designs of Soviet cyberneticians to build a nationwide computer network to regulate the entire national economy ran into insurmountable political obstacles.

The Internet — the ultimate cybernetic machine — has weaved together humans and computers, control and communication, information and free speech. Just as Wiener envisioned, digital communication can be used both to liberate and to control, and authoritarian governments still try to limit free circulation of information. Artificial organs, online avatars, and ubiquitous computing have made cybernetic human-machine metaphors almost literal. Wiener’s cybernetic vision of society based on free exchange of information has become (cyber)reality on the World Wide Web.

This story is profoundly ironic: America rejected cybernetics but implemented the cybernetic vision, while the Soviet Union did just the opposite: it paid lip service to cybernetics and stalled practical cybernetic projects. The cybernetics scare both focused the attention of U.S. science administrators on human-machine interaction and made explicit cybernetic references ideologically suspect. As a result, Americans pursued a narrowly defined but viable technical project, while the Soviets aimed at a utopian grand reform. This teaches us something about the power of discourse: it resides not so much in overt declarations but in subtle metaphors that change our mode of thinking and ultimately reshape our world. ≈

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the organizers of the 2008 conference “Thinking and Making Connections: Cybernetic Heritage in the Social and Human Sciences” at the Nobel Museum and Södertörn University, where an early version of this paper was presented. I am very grateful to Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman, and Ben Peters for kindly sharing their archival findings with me. I also appreciate the helpful comments and suggestions by Rebecka Letteval and an anonymous reviewer of Baltic Worlds.

Slava Gerovitch

REFERENCES

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, Mass. 1948.
See Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics, Cambridge, Mass. 2002.
See Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group, 1946–1953, Cambridge, Mass. 1993.
See Edmund C. Berkeley, Giant Brains, or Machines that Think, New York 1949.
See John G. Kemeny, “Man Viewed as a Machine”, Scientific American, vol. 192 (April 1955), pp. 58–67.
Frank H. George, “Could Machines Be Made to Think?”, Philosophy, vol. XXXI, no. 118 (July 1956), p. 252.
See Karl W. Deutsch, The Nerves of Government: Models of Political Communication and Control, London 1963.
See Automatic Control, New York 1955.
See Stafford Beer, Cybernetics and Management, New York 1959, and Decision and Control: The Meaning of Operational Research and Management Cybernetics, London 1966.
Norbert Wiener, “The Machine as Threat and Promise” (1953), in Wiener, Collected Works, vol. IV, pp. 673–78.
Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 28.
Wiener, “The Machine as Threat and Promise”, p. 677.
Wiener, Cybernetics, p. 27.
Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., p. 159.
Ibid., p. 160.
Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society [1950, 1954], New York, pp. 181, 192.
Quoted in Steve J. Heims, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Cambridge, Mass., p. 311.
Anatolii Kitov, “Kibernetika i upravlenie narodnym khoziaistvom”, in Aksel’ Berg, ed., Kibernetiku — na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. 1, Moscow and Leningrad: Gosenergoizdat, 1961, pp. 207, 216.
Aksel’ Berg, “Kibernetika i nauchno-tekhnicheskii progress”, in Aleksandr Kuzin, ed., Biologicheskie aspekty kibernetiki, Moscow 1962, p. 14 (emphasis in original).
Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, chap. 6. — On the frustrated attempts to introduce automated management systems into economic governance in Lithuania, see Egle Rindzevičiute, Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy: Cybernetics and Governance in Lithuania after World War II, Ph.D. dissertation, Linköping University, Sweden, 2008, pp. 125–148.
Slava Gerovitch, “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network”, History and Technology 24:4 (December 2008), pp.335–350.
D.G. Malcolm, Review of Cybernetics at Service of Communism, vol. 1, Operations Research 11 (1963), p. 1012.
Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics, New York, p. 391.
CIA, Senior Research Staff on International Communism, “Soviet Communism in the Sixties: Some Notes on Its New Dimensions”, 1 August 1961, p. 8.
John J. Ford to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 17 October 1962; Schlesinger Personal Papers, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass., box WH-7, “Cybernetics”.
Ibid.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to Robert F. Kennedy, 20 October 1962; Schlesinger Personal Papers, box WH-7, “Cybernetics”.
John F. Kennedy, Dictating Memorandum, 28 November 1962; Presidential Recordings, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass., cassette J, dictabelt XXX.A.
1963 reports; Office of Science and Technology Papers, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Mass., roll 64.
György Pálóczi-Horváth, “The Communist Reformation”, unpublished manuscript; Schlesinger Personal Papers, box WH-7, “Cybernetics”.
Spurgeon Keeny, Jr., “The Search for Soviet Cybernetics”, in Jerry Wiesner: Scientist, Statesman, Humanist: Memories and Memoirs, ed. Walter Rosenblith, Cambridge, Mass. 2003, p. 84.
George Paloczi-Horvath, The Facts Rebel: The Future of Russia and the West, London 1964.
Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, pp. 318, 330.
John J. Ford, “Soviet Cybernetics and International Development”, in The Social Impact of Cybernetics, ed. Charles R. Dechert, New York 1966, p. 189.
Colonel Raymond S. Sleeper, “Cybernetics in the Service of Communism”, Air University Review (March-April 1967) (http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1967/mar-apr/sleeper.html).
CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence, “The Meaning of Cybernetics in the USSR”, Intelligence Memorandum No. 0757/64, 26 February 1964, p. 9.
CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence, “The Features of the Soviet Cybernetics Program Through 1963”, Research Source Book No. OSI-RA/65-2, 5 January 1965, p. 13.
CIA Office of Scientific Intelligence, “Major Developments in the SovBloc Cybernetics Programs in 1965”, Scientific and Technical Intelligence Report No. OSI-RA/66-29, 3 October 1966, pp. 2, 24.
Rindzeviciute, Constructing Soviet Cultural Policy, p. 146.
Nikolai Fedorenko, Vspominaia proshloe, zagliadyvaiu v budushchee, Moscow 1999, pp. 179, 228.
Kenneth J. Arrow to Walter W. Heller, 1 November 1962; Schlesinger Personal Papers, box WH-7, “Cybernetics”.
Jerome Wiesner to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., 25 February 1963; Schlesinger Personal Papers, box WH-7, “Cybernetics”.
Keeny, Jr., “Search for Soviet Cybernetics”, p. 86.
Herbert A. Simon, Models of My Life, New York 1991, pp. 295–296.
Quoted in Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, p. 321. — On IPTO funding of AI, see Arthur Norberg and Judy O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986, Baltimore, Md. 1996.
J.C.R. Licklider, OH 150. Oral history interview by William Aspray and Arthur L. Norberg, 28 October 1988, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. (http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/pdf.phtml?id=180).
J.C.R. Licklider, “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, IRE Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, vol. HFE-1 (March 1960), p. 7.
Paul N. Edwards, Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge, Mass. 1996, p. 266.
J.C.R. Licklider, OH 150.
Quoted in Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. New York 1996, p. 38.
Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass. 1999, p. 44; J.C.R. Licklider and Robert W. Taylor, “The Computer as a Communication Device”, Science and Technology (April 1968), p. 31 (http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/publications/taylor/licklider-taylor.pdf).
Edwards, Closed World, pp. 2–3.
Quoted in Conway and Siegelman, Dark Hero, p. 321.

Source

Some students don't understand the concept of computer files and folders

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:59:04 +0000

Thanks to modern technology

WTF?! To readers of this site, the idea that some students on courses ranging from engineering to physics don’t know what files and folders are might seem strange, but it’s true. According to a new report, the fault lies with popular modern operating systems and devices that include all-encompassing search functions or hide file structures from plain view.

Those of us of a certain age will be familiar with maintaining a nested hierarchy of files, having grown up with the likes of Windows 3.1 and relying on MS-DOS. But as highlighted in a new report by The Verge, the advent of smartphones, tablets, search functions, and cloud storage made the need to understand what a directory is less critical.

“The first internet search engines were used around 1990, but features like Windows Search and Spotlight on macOS are both products of the early 2000s. Most of 2017’s college freshmen were born in the very late ‘90s,” writes the publication. “While many of today’s professors grew up without search functions on their phones and computers, today’s students increasingly don’t remember a world without them.”

Saavik Ford, a professor of astronomy at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, said it best: “I grew up when you had to have a file; you had to save it; you had to know where it was saved. There was no search function.” She added that among her students, “There’s not a conception that there’s a place where files live. They just search for it and bring it up. They have a laundry basket full of laundry, and they have a robot who will fetch them every piece of clothing they want on demand.”

Generational issues are not something new, of course. Peter Plavchan, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at George Mason University, noted that while some of his students have over 1,000 files in the same directory, one of his own professors was amazed that people didn’t know how to solder a chip onto a motherboard. This writer, meanwhile, recalls a 1990's lecturer who thought all GUIs were the devil's work.

Plavchan is considering offering an entire course based solely on directory structure, but is such a thing even worth it? “I imagine what’s going to happen is our generation of students [...] they’re going to grow up and become professors, they’re going to write their own tools, and they’re going to be based on a completely different approach from what we use today.”

Addressing fellow educators who look on aghast at students unable to comprehend filing systems, Plavchan warns, “This is not gonna go away. You’re not gonna go back to the way things were. You have to accept it. The sooner that you accept that things change, the better.”

Source

Microsoft Weekly: New Surface hardware, Windows 11 in Release Preview, and gaming

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 02:05:54 +0000

It’s been an eventful week in the world of Microsoft. There is a new Windows 11 build for the Dev channel with a bunch of bug fixes, Release Preview Insiders received their first taste of Windows 11 in the way of an optional update to the new OS, the Redmond company announced a bunch of new Surface hardware bringing much-needed upgrades to most of the product line, and much more. Check all this out and more in our weekly Microsoft digest for the week of September 19 – September 25.

Windows 11 in Release Preview, new Dev channel build, more

As is now the case every week, there was a new Dev channel build. Build 22463 brought a bunch of bug fixes, including a fix for the issue that caused the taskbar icons to align incorrectly. While the branch from which new Dev channel builds are being served is not tied to a specific Windows 11 version, the firm has said that many fixes being made will also be brought to the Windows 11 version releasing next month. It does note that newer features for the Dev channel are a while away.

As the OS begins to near its October 5 rollout date, Release Preview Insiders finally got their first taste of Windows 11, thanks to the rollout of build 22000.194. The rollout, just like how recent feature updates have been, is currently optional for eligible users. It will not be surprising to see mainstream users begin receiving the same build when the OS launches on October 5, with there being a few day-one updates bringing bug fixes. Considering that the rollout is staggered, not many eligible users will see the update on day one, which gives the firm time to polish the offering further before expanding the rollout. For those who want to perform a fresh install, the firm also released ISO images for this build.

However, for those trying to install the new OS on unsupported hardware, the company is supposedly planning to get those users to sign an acknowledgment, agreeing that they are installing the OS with the knowledge that they might not receive critical security updates or support. There has been an ongoing discussion about whether the firm will serve updates to users running its latest OS on unsupported hardware. Talking about hardware compatibility, the firm also released the updated PC Health Check app for Insiders, bringing much-needed improvements to the Windows 11 compatibility checking tool.

Continuing the topic of updates, Edge Dev users received their final Edge 95 build which brought the new Windows 11-style visual updates by default. As expected, some elements such as the Mica material are exclusive to those running the offering on Windows 11. Another significant addition was the ability to pick up PDF documents where users last left them.

The Microsoft Teams desktop client is also slated to receive a new capability that will allow adding anonymous users to Teams meetings. This brings another way for users to conduct meetings with vendors or users from different organizations. The rollout of the feature is slated for October, as spotted on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

Brand new Surface hardware

Source: Microsoft

Microsoft held its much-awaited hardware event this week, announcing a bunch of new hardware. The Surface Pro 8 brought the first major redesign for the 2-in-1 in over five years. The display is now a 13-inch unit that sports a 120Hz high refresh rate. The device sports two Thunderbolt 4 ports, making it the first Surface PC to support a Thunderbolt port. There is also a new Slim Pen 2 that brings haptic feedback and a new design. The stylus can is housed in the new carbon-fiber sporting Signature keyboard.

As for internals, the device sports Intel’s 11th-gen Tiger Lake chips and can be configured with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of removable SSD storage. The Surface Laptop Studio is available in "select markets" for an asking price starting at $1599.99.

The Android-powered Surface Duo 2 also brings welcome improvements. These include slightly larger 5.8-inch displays that now curve into the hinge area, making for a glanceable notifications panel when the device is closed. There is now a new triple-camera array at the back, bringing ultra-wide, wide, and telephoto lenses, improving greatly on its predecessor. The phone also features support for the Surface Slim pen that can be magnetically attached to the back.

Internals have also seen a significant upgrade, with the top-tier Snapdragon 888 SoC bringing 5G support. NFC is also being added. The Surface Duo 2 is priced at $1499.99 and is available for pre-order in select markets.

The star of the show, however, was the Surface Laptop Studio, a new device in the Surface lineup that replaces the Surface Book brand. Unlike the Book’s detachable top section, the Laptop Studio features a swiveling display that can be placed in Laptop or Studio modes, mimicking devices like the Acer ConceptD Ezel laptops.

The offering features Intel 11th-gen H35 chips and RTX graphics, making it the most powerful Surface device to date. Just like the Surface Pro 8, the Laptop Studio comes with a high refresh rate display and Thunderbolt 4 ports. The stepped design also allows for the Slim Pen 2 to be attached – and charged – magnetically under the keyboard deck. The laptop can be maxed out with 32GB of RAM and 2TB of SSD storage. The Surface Laptop Studio is available for “select markets" for an asking price starting at $1599.99.

There were a few minor upgrades to some devices as well. The Surface Go 3 was updated with new Intel chips, with the tablet now available with a 10th-gen Core i3 processor. The ARM-powered Surface Pro X, on the other hand, can now be had in Wifi-only flavor for a lower asking price. There were also new peripherals like the Ocean Plastic Mouse made from 20% recycled ocean plastic.

Halo Infinite preview, Sea of Thieves Season Four, and more

Starting off this week’s gaming news is – unsurprisingly – Halo Infinite. As announced earlier this week, 343 Industries opened the next round of technical tests for its upcoming title. The first weekend of the double Technical Preview drop this week brings access to player versus player Arena from the get-go, including Bot Arena from the previous flights. However, Social Arena playlist opens matchmaking only at pre-set times to stress test the servers. You can find the schedule in the news article here.

The first preview closes on Tuesday, the 27th of September, and opens back up on Friday, October 1. The second drop will contain the overhauled 12 versus 12 Big Team Battle (BTB) mode. It must be noted that Bot Arena, Training Mode, Weapon Drills, and Battle Pass elements are accessible through both weekends.

Moving on, Rare announced this week the next major content update for Sea of Thieves, Season Four, which began rolling out on September 23. The update takes players under the waves this time around, bringing new undersea adventures such as new Siren Shrine and Siren Treasury destinations. The studio is also introducing a treasure storage method to transport entire loot stacks from the bottom of the sea to save players from taking multiple trips to transport their loot. The new season also brings 100-level battle pass levels to climb for free and a refreshed premium Plunder Pas.

Those waiting for Alan Wake Remastered were also treated to a comparison trailer showing off the visual upgrades made to the title against the original Xbox 360 version. Unsurprisingly, there is higher resolution rendering, accompanied by better textures, lighting, and more. The title launches on October 5, 2021, and features the base game and The Signal and The Writer story expansions.

Rounding off gaming news this week are the Deals with Gold discounts. Titles from the Assassin’s Creed, Halo, Forza, and Star Wars franchises are receiving major discounts. However, some discounts noted in the piece are exclusive to Xbox Live Gold members.

Lastly, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One September update was announced this week. The release notes mention the recently announced support for Remote Play and cloud gaming on PC via the updated Xbox app. The update also brings an update to the new Chromium-based Edge browser to improve performance and more.

Dev channel

Chrome 94 launches on Windows with controversial idle detection API
Xbox 360 Gamerpics available for select Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S users
VaxApp is a new Microsoft Teams app to help organizations manage vaccination attestation
Microsoft and SSE form a partnership to make energy more sustainable
Latest Chrome and Edge updates fix critical memory UAF security vulnerability

Logging off

We continue with the Closer Look series where we provide a detailed view of the various new components in Windows 11, a comparison of the equivalent feature in Windows 11 – where applicable, and a run-down of the good and the bad. This week, we looked at not one but two areas of the OS – the new File Explorer and the updated Context menus. Check out our complete comparison and let us know your thoughts.

Microsoft Weekly: New Surface hardware, Windows 11 in Release Preview, and gaming

More Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K benchmarks leak, splendid performance but maybe not always

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 23:23:22 +0000

Intel's Alder Lake-S and the Z690 platform are probably launching pretty soon which is why we have been having plenty of performance leaks in the last few months.

Back in July, it was reported that Intel's Alder Lake-S flagship SKU, the upcoming Core i9-12900K, was besting AMD's Ryzen 9 5950X in Cinebench R20. Although unconfirmed, this sounded impressive as Cinebench, and rendering in general, has been one of the stronger areas of performance for Ryzen.

Today, a screenshot showing the alleged performance of the i9-12900K in Cinebench R23 has leaked. The image was posted by HXL on Twitter and the processor apparently has scored around ~2,050 points in the single-core test.

That's not all though as another Twitter user REHWK posted another image of an alleged Cinebench R23 run for the Core i9-12900K, though this time, it was showing the performance of the CPU in the multi-core test. Alongside the Cinebench R23 application, this image also has CPU-Z and the Task Manager open, giving the image more credibility.

In terms of how these compare, the single-core number is around 20% faster than the Ryzen 9 5950X while the multi-core score is only slightly better. Since the multi-core number appears to be more believable, it's probably not very wrong to add that the score is indeed impressive as the Core i9-12900K is (8+8) CPU part. The (8+8) indicates eight powerful P-cores and eight smaller E-cores. The design is similar to Arm's big.LITTLE and Chipzilla is calling it the Performance Hybrid architecture.

And since only the P-cores are hyper-threaded, the i9-12900K is essentially a 16-core, 24-thread (16C/24T) SKU and it is able to match a Ryzen 9 5950X that has 32 threads. Gaming performance of the Core i9-12900K is also looking mighty impressive as seen from the recent AotS:E leak.

However, the new Performance Hybrid approach that Intel is going with Alder Lake might have its downsides too in many applications as even Intel's own instructions per clock (IPC) numbers also suggest. The image below shows IPC gains in Alder Lake against last-gen Rocket Lake architecture and it is clear that Alder Lake loses out in quite a few tests despite the overall 19% average improvement.

Also surfacing today was a SiSoft Sandra score of the Core i9-12900K. It was dug up by APISAK from the SiSoftware database and the performance is rather poor as compared to the Ryzen 9 5950X. The i9 has scored 1,414.01Mpix/s overall compared to the 5950X's 2,004.98Mpix/s.

Of course, it is entirely possible that the tested part here wasn't at its best which could explain the especially poor showing in this instance. But this isn't the only time where the Core i9-12900K has performed poorly. Adobe After Effects numbers for the upcoming Intel flagship leaked last month and it too showed lower improvements.

Regardless though, it should always be kept in mind for all such performance leaks that the numbers could be very different from finished retail products as a lot of variables, like clock speeds, active cores, among other things, are often unknown.

Source: SiSoftware (1), (2)

More Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K benchmarks leak, splendid performance but maybe not always

More affordable Alder Lake-S motherboards likely not coming before 2022 suggests EEC leak

Thu, 23 Sep 2021 22:26:17 +0000

Intel's Alder Lake is the company's upcoming 12th gen Core processor family and in the recent few weeks, there have been plenty of performance leaks for the desktop flagship Core i9-12900K Alder Lake-S SKU. It is rumored that Alder Lake-S will be unveiled on November 19 which means Intel, as well as its motherboard partners, are likely testing, validating, and certifying these parts.

Today VideoCardz spotted multiple socket LGA1700-based 600-series chipset entries that will accompany Intel's Alder Lake-S CPUs. They are:

H670
B660
H610,

and will form the more affordable mainstream and entry-level LGA1700 options as opposed to the flagship Z690 chipset.

Interestingly, the filings are very fresh and have been done by Intel itself which means motherboards based on these chipsets are likely still some distance away. That's because chipset and motherboard leaks when they are closer to launch generally involve one or more of Intel's or AMD's vendor partners instead of the companies themselves.

This gives some more credibility to an earlier report which claimed that Intel's plans for the Alder Lake-S launch only involve the top-end Z690-based motherboards. The report also added that these more affordable chipset-based boards are reserved for CES next year.

While this is speculative, H670, B660, and H610 motherboards will likely also have both DDR4 and DDR5 options to choose from, as spotted by @momomo_us in another EEC leak that contains Gigabyte's potential Z690 motherboard lineup.

Source: EEC via VideoCardz (Twitter)

More affordable Alder Lake-S motherboards likely not coming before 2022 suggests EEC leak

Everything Microsoft Announced, Including a Wacky, Flippy Laptop

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 22:22:56 +0000

The new hardware includes an updated Surface Duo 2, which you can finally call a phone, and a cute eco-friendly mouse.

A week has passed since Apple dropped a deluge of hardware, but brace yourselves—it's Microsoft's turn. Today, the company announced new Surface laptops, accessories, and a phone, at a virtual event. From a wacky folding laptop to the new and improved Surface Duo 2, there's plenty to choose from if you've been holding out for an upgrade.

All the hardware below is available for preorder starting today at Microsoft.com, and they'll officially launch on October 5 (except for the Duo 2, which launches October 21). Here's everything Microsoft announced.

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more.

Surface Laptop Studio

Photograph: Microsoft

If the Surface Book and Surface Studio had a baby, it would be the Surface Laptop Studio. The 14.4-inch touchscreen laptop comes with a 120-Hz refresh rate, but the display can adjust depending on what you need to do. There's Laptop Mode, with full access to the keyboard and touchpad; Stage Mode, where you can pull the display toward you to watch movies or play games; and Studio Mode (aka Tablet Mode), for drawing and writing. This is all possible thanks to a dual-hinge design embedded into the center, back behind the display and the base. The screen doesn't fold, but the casing behind it does.

It comes equipped with a 1080p front-facing camera and an 11th-gen Intel processor. (You can choose between Core i5 or Core i7.) It's compatible with Microsoft's new Surface Slim Pen 2, also announced today and sold separately, which adds haptic feedback for a more interactive experience and low latency. The latter means it should feel more responsive when you write or sketch. It attaches magnetically to the bottom edge of the laptop, below the trackpad, similar to Apple's iPad Pro. The Surface Laptop Studio starts at $1,600.

Surface Pro X

Photograph: Microsoft

This time around, Microsoft is offering a Wi-Fi-only model of the Surface Pro X in addition to the LTE version. The starting price has also dipped by $100, making it a bit more affordable at $899. The Surface Pro X comes with improvements to Windows on ARM too, with a variety of optimized apps including Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Teams.

Just like its predecessor, the Surface Pro X includes a 13-inch touchscreen display, up to 15 hours of battery life, up to 16 GB of RAM, and runs on Microsoft's very own custom processors.

Surface Pro 8

Photograph: Microsoft

The Surface Pro 8, on the other hand, brings improvements to both the inside and out. Its 13-inch display is bigger and brighter than the Surface Pro 7. Like the Surface Laptop Studio, it packs a 120 Hz screen, Thunderbolt 4 ports, and works with the Slim Pen 2 (sold separately). You can also charge and store the pen on the detachable keyboard (also not included). Microsoft made some improvements to its cameras too, adding better low-light capabilities for when you're Zooming in the dark.

Internally, Microsoft says the Pro 8 is more than twice as fast as its predecessor, offering 40 percent higher CPU performance and 74 percent faster graphics. That's thanks to the 11th-gen Intel Core i5 processor or i7 processor. It starts at $1,100.

Surface Go 3

Photograph: Microsoft

The Surface Go 3 isn't all that different from last year's model on the outside. It still has the same $400 price, the same 10.5-inch display, a kickstand on the back, a 5-megapixel selfie camera coupled with an 8-megapixel rear camera, and an attachable keyboard (sold separately). The main upgrades can be found under the hood. You now have the choice between a dual-core Intel Pentium Gold 6500Y processor or a 10th-gen Intel Core i3 processor. This tiny laptop/tablet hybrid also gets an additional hour of battery life, bringing the total up to 11 hours.

Surface Duo 2

Photograph: Microsoft

The first Surface Duo, Microsoft's dual-screened portable device, didn't exactly sell like hotcakes. But this time around, the company has leaned into the whole phone element of the Surface Duo (which had phone-call capabilities from the beginning). The Surface Duo 2 has been upgraded to include a rear camera module—with wide, ultrawide, and telephoto cameras—and will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 5G chip platform. That's the top-end smartphone chip found on most flagship Android phones today. It ships with Android 11, and in demonstrations of the foldable, Microsoft eschewed productivity hacks for more fun features: photo snapping, game playing, and TikTok browsing.

No doubt, the Surface Duo 2 is a smartphone. Its starting price of $1,500 might make you wince, though. You can read more about it here.

Additional Accessories

Alongside the new Surface Slim Pen 2 ($130), Microsoft has another new accessory to go along with many of these Surface laptops: an environmentally-friendly mouse. The new Ocean Plastic Mouse is made of 20 percent recycled ocean plastic and 100 percent recyclable packaging. As for its features, it comes equipped with left and right click buttons, a built-in scroll wheel, fast-tracking sensors, and Bluetooth connectivity (with up to a year of battery life). It costs $25.

Microsoft also showed off an inexpensive sticker-and-lanyard pack to help people with disabilities navigate their hardware. Called the Surface Adaptive Kit, the sticker pack includes 16 tactile, adhesive buttons. There are also high-contrast keycap labels for people with low vision, as well as port labels that can be applied to both a cable and corresponding port on a laptop. And a lanyard tab offers an attachable loop that helps people with limited motor skills open up laptops more easily.

Windows 11 Is Coming

Windows 11 will be free to everyone who owns Windows 10, this fall.Photograph: Microsoft

Wednesday's event was extremely hardware-focused, but most of the devices revealed today are premium vehicles for Microsoft's newest operating system: Windows 11. First revealed this past June and shipping on October 5, Windows 11 is Microsoft's first major OS update in several years. Its notable features include a repositioned Start button (which can be moved back to its traditional placement if you prefer), a new Windows Store, and support for Android apps, among other things. Some of these features will be rolled out in phases, and beta versions of Win11 have been buggy. But you can bet that Microsoft—and other PC makers who license the company's OS—will be racing to get their machines buyer-ready by the holiday season.

Everything Microsoft Announced, Including a Wacky, Flippy Laptop

Flying cars could soon be ready for take off

Wed, 22 Sep 2021 14:47:17 +0000

While the idea of hovering motor vehicles might once have been considered farfetched, it's certainly not the case today.

Companies around the world are reaching new heights to develop flying cars that could one day be flown by commuters to work or even over longer distances for leisure travel.

UNSW aerospace design expert, Dr. Sonya Brown from the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, says the aim of these vehicles is to eventually provide another means of urban air mobility to help reduce congestion on the road.

"Long-term, flying cars will offer us another means for short and personalized travel," she says.

"We're starting to see an emergence of flying car variants in development around the world, and even here in Australia, as more companies are investing in these vehicles.

"Some early adopters of this technology include rideshare companies and emergency services, given some vehicles are being designed to be more versatile than traditional aircraft and helicopters."

What exactly are they?

Flying cars resemble a cross between a drone and a small aircraft, so most will have wings and typically include between four to eight rotors.

They can fly a few hundred to a few thousand meters above the ground, occupying the air space above where you'd expect to see drones flying but below standard flying commercial aircrafts.

While it probably won't get someone from Sydney to Melbourne on one battery charge, flying cars could potentially travel up to 250 kilometers in one ride.

"The underlying technology that's so important with flying cars is the ability to both take off and land vertically and fly horizontally as well. This makes the mechanics much more complex than a helicopter which primarily has vertical propulsion," says Dr. Brown.

"And that's why we're calling them flying cars because they resemble the type of travel we would do with cars."

A win for the environment

Prototypes of flying cars are currently being designed with electrically powered rotors meaning they can be battery operated. As long as the batteries are recharged in a sustainable manner, for example using wind or solar energy, the flying cars won't emit any harmful emissions into the environment.

"Ideally, the aim is to design these green vehicles so that they reduce emissions whilst reducing traffic congestion on the ground as well," says Dr. Brown.

"With growing research in the renewable energy sector, I think there's huge potential to consider other alternative energy sources, such as hydrogen, to power the flying cars in the future."

Keeping the hand brake up for now

Slow down—flying cars won't take off just yet. There are a few bumps to get over first.

Some of the challenges the industry is looking to solve are around regulation and traffic control. Similar to commercial flights, flying cars will need traffic control rules, corridors and flight paths to establish right of way to avoid any potential collisions.

"There's a lot of work going into developing collision avoidance systems, particularly focusing on how these vehicles are going to communicate with each other to make real-time decisions on things such as right of way," says Dr. Brown.

"There's also an appetite from industry to make them pilotless or remotely piloted."

She says even though future flying car models could be autonomous, users may need much more experience than a simple driver's license to get behind the wheel of one.

"If we take a closer look at some of the flying cars in development, they are flown by highly trained and qualified pilots. But if we want to make them more accessible, then we need to bring the licensing requirements down," says Dr. Brown.

"It will be up to regulators and managing Government bodies around the world to work out what licensing category it fits into it—because currently there isn't one."

Flying cars also bring technical challenges such as battery life, particularly how many times it can be recharged before the battery duration starts to decline. Also, many of these vehicles can have up to eight rotors—which can be very noisy.

"More acoustic studies need to be done to try to minimize the noise of the propeller inside these rotors," says Dr. Brown.

"In the future, if there are going to be hundreds or even thousands of these occupying the skies above highly populated areas, it's important that we consider the impact the noise will have for people in their homes below."

Source

Intel Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K trounces the Ryzen 9 5950X in AotS with ease

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 22:57:17 +0000

Multiple Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation (AotS:E) benchmarks have leaked in the past few hours for Intel's upcoming Alder Lake-S flagship Core i9-12900K SKU. The processor is a 16 core, 24 thread (16C/24T) part, and it seems Intel or its motherboard vendor partners have been testing these upcoming processors.

One such benchmark run has been done using the 1440p High preset paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, and a comparable system with a 16C/32T AMD Ryzen 9 5950X is easily defeated by the upcoming Intel desktop CPU.

The i9-12900K appears to be around ~40% faster than the AMD flagship SKU on average across all batches as it hits 146.6 fps against the Ryzen 9 5950X's 104.6. The latter is one of the fastest CPUs in AotS:E currently available for purchase.

It is noteworthy here that the title recently received an update with v3.1 that now allows the game to utilize up to 24 threads whereas previously, it was limited to 16 threads. This means the Core i9-12900K was likely fully saturated if the new optimization works as it says. And the Ryzen 9 5950X probably had some gas left in its tank as it is a 32 thread processor.

There are also plenty of other new feature additions to AotS:E with update v3.1 that you can read about here.

Source: AoTS:E benchmark database (1), (2) via HXL (Twitter)

Intel Alder Lake-S Core i9-12900K trounces the Ryzen 9 5950X in AotS with ease

HP takes on Microsoft Surface Go with the new 11-inch Tablet PC

Tue, 21 Sep 2021 22:54:27 +0000

HP today revealed the new HP 11 inch Tablet PC, a thin and light PC that will compete with devices like Microsoft Surface Go. The main highlight of the HP 11 inch Tablet PC is its rotatable 13 MP camera. You can go from selfie mode to a world-view mode in an instant. It also comes with an innovative built-in kickstand. With the optional detachable magnetic keyboard, you can work in portrait and landscape mode. This Tablet PC also supports HP Rechargeable Tilt Pen and HP Palette software. It also comes with SuperSpeed USB Type-C port for seamless connectivity. This device will be powered by an Intel Pentium Silver N6000 processor and 4GB RAM.

The HP 11 inch Tablet PC will be available in December at HP.com for $599. It is also expected to be available at Best Buy in December.

Source: HP

HP takes on Microsoft Surface Go with the new 11-inch Tablet PC

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 gets September 2021 firmware update

Thu, 01 Jan 1970 00:00:00 +0000

Microsoft is now pushing the September 2021 firmware update to Surface Pro 7 devices. The new firmware update adds no new features, as you’d expect. But it does addresses system hang and shut down issues, and unfortunately, that’s all you’ve got in the latest firmware update. You can read the full official changelog below.

Changelog

Windows Update History	Device Manager
Surface – Firmware – 13.0.1763.7	Surface ME – Firmware

The September 2021 update has recently been rolled out to Surface Go 2 and Surface Book 3, adding fixes for the critical security vulnerabilities, improvements to the USB-C and system performance and stability.

The September update is now rolling out and should be available for your Surface Pro 7. You can go to Settings>Update and Security>Windows Update to download and install the update.

Microsoft Surface Pro 7 gets September 2021 firmware update

Microsoft’s Surface hardware event: rumors, news, and announcements

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 21:25:36 +0000

The event kicks off at 11AM ET / 8AM PT on September 22nd

September 22nd officially marks the first day of fall, and with it gadget season. Like in previous years, Microsoft is getting into the mix with its forthcoming Surface event, where we anticipate the company will announce a slew of products during its livestream presentation on Wednesday at 11AM ET / 8AM PT.

Microsoft has been building up plenty of momentum recently with the impending launch of Windows 11. And with the new operating system set to launch on October 5th, it’s only natural to showcase it with new devices.

The reports and leaks seem to indicate that we may see updates to Microsoft’s Surface Pro, Surface Book, Surface Go, and Surface Duo lines. Many details of the Surface Pro 8 have already leaked, including its new Intel 11th Gen processor, 120Hz display, and switch to Thunderbolt ports. While less early info has surfaced on the Book and Go refreshes, the former is slotted to have a significant design overhaul while the latter will most likely see its changes happen on the inside.

Beyond Windows 11 devices, Microsoft is expected to announce a successor to the dual-screen Surface Duo. The leaks for the Duo 2 began earlier in the summer, promising an internal spec bump and a new triple-camera setup in addition to some smaller design tweaks. The big questions around the Duo 2 are in software and support, as the original Duo’s stagnation — it’s still stuck on Android 10 when Android 12 is around the corner — and slow sales have landed it in the clearance sections of many retailers.

Regardless of whether Microsoft actually proves its Android chops with the Duo 2 or launches any surprises with its new flagships for Windows 11, we’ll be watching live and keeping you updated here as new products are announced.

Microsoft’s Surface hardware event: rumors, news, and announcements

Report: GPU prices creeping back up after a promising dip in cost last quarter

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 21:23:19 +0000

Last quarter, we reported that the prices for graphics cards were coming down as the trend showed an apparent downward movement of retail GPU prices. Sadly, however, it seems things haven't quite materialized the way it was thought.

Latest pricing data from 3DCenter gathered from the same major German retail outlets are now showing a slow but steady rise in the asking price of the graphics cards from both the Green (Nvidia) and Red (AMD) camps.

In fact, after the last quarterly report, there was an even steeper decline in prices during late June and early July. This trend however did not continue as the prices settled for around this level for the next month. Since August though, the retail GPU prices have started to creep back up slowly.

Currently, the average pricing for AMD Radeon and Nvidia GeForce cards are 74% and 70% above their respective official MSRPs.

Multiple factors could be affecting the prices of the GPUs. First, there is the existing global chip shortage crisis which has also started to adversely influence GDDR6 memory chip prices as well, which is in turn affecting the prices of the graphics cards for this generation.

There are also reports of fresh COVID outbreaks in China that are seemingly affecting the factory production output levels of GPUs.

Source and image: 3DCenter

Report: GPU prices creeping back up after a promising dip in cost last quarter

Microsoft maybe readying a new Windows 11-powered Surface Pro X

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 21:18:09 +0000

Microsoft is confirmed to hold its Surface event on September 22, and we might see some surprise announcements at the event. One of the surprise announcements could be the launch of a new Surface Pro X device, designed to run Windows 11.

A new Surface Pro X with model number 2010 has recently been spotted on the Energy Star certifications website, hinting that the launch could be imminent. The certification site reveals some information about the processor it’ll use and the RAM. According to the listing, the new Pro X will feature 16GB of RAM and will be based on Snapdragon SQ 2 processor. For the sake of comparison, last year’s Surface Pro X is also based on the SQ2 processor. Unfortunately, the certification site doesn’t reveal anything exciting beyond RAM and processor.

A few days ago, a new Surface device with model number 2010 cleared the FCC certification, but little did we know that it’s the new Surface Pro X. But thanks to the new Energy Star Certification site, we not only know about the existence of the new Pro X but also can safely assume that it’ll launch very soon, probably at the upcoming Surface event.

Meanwhile, the September 22 event will see a new Surface Pro 8, Surface Laptop 5, Surface Duo 2, Surface Go 3, and the rumored Surface Book “studio,” the cost of which could exceed the $3,000 price mark. You will be able to watch the Surface event live here.

via Windows Latest

Microsoft maybe readying a new Windows 11-powered Surface Pro X

More specs of Microsoft Surface Pro 8 leaked by retailer

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 22:59:48 +0000

Microsoft will be launching their new Surface line in 3 days, on the 22nd of September. This meant more retailers have had their hands on the specs of the device, inevitably resulting in leaks.

The latest has been Twitter user Sam, who came across hero display for the Surface Pro 8.

Some of the specs were expected, such as the Intel’s 11th-generation Core processor, but having the 120Hz High Refresh Rate Narrow Border Screen, Dual Thunderbolt Interfaces and Replaceable SSD Hard Drives confirmed is very good news.

The FCC had earlier confirmed the device will have WIFI 6.

The rumoured line-up is as follows:

Core i3, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD OR Core i3, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD.
Core i5, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD / 256GB SSD
Core i7, 16 GB RAM – 32GB RAM and 256 GB SSD, 512 GB SSD or 1TB SSD storage

We should have a lot more details in the next few days, so keep an eye on the site.

via the Verge

More specs of Microsoft Surface Pro 8 leaked by retailer

Microsoft Weekly: Patch Tuesday, Windows 11 update blocks for VMs, and Office 2021

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 22:57:14 +0000

With the passage of another week, it’s time to look at all the Microsoft stories that happened September 12 through September 18. As usual, there were new Windows 11 builds for the Dev and Beta channels, but they came with them some bad news for users running the OS on certain VMs. Considering that this week brought the second Tuesday of the month, Microsoft also released the monthly Patch Tuesday updates for all supported Windows versions. These updates were accompanied with new apps, Office LTSC and Office 2021 release dates, and much more.

Windows 11 builds, update blocks for VMs, Patch Tuesday, more

As is the case every second Tuesday of the month, Microsoft released cumulative updates for all supported Windows versions. These included supported Windows 10 versions – including for specific SKUs, Windows 8.1 users and those on Windows 7 that opted for Extended Security Updates (ESUs). The updates fixed a Windows zero-day vulnerability discovered earlier this month and brought other quality improvements. While the improvements were welcome for most users, the firm posted an advisory acknowledging that the August patches that contained fixes for the PrintNightmare vulnerability were breaking the ability for some users to print without admin credentials. This impacts commercial customers than any other, considering end users do not have access to admin credentials.

As for Windows 11, new builds were released for both Dev and Beta channel Insiders. The Dev channel was served build 22458 that brought a few fixes. While a new ‘Sign-in options’ link in the power menu was mentioned, it was made available with build 22454, but missed being noted in the changelog. Beta channel users received build 22000.194 that brought a bunch of new in-box apps that Dev channel users have been testing. These include the new Clock app with Focus Sessions, Calculator, and the unified Snipping Tool experience. More are on the way, though, such as the new Paint and Photos apps.

What did come as a surprise for Insiders was the inability for those running these builds in certain VMs – including on supported hardware – to update to the new builds, thanks to the enforcement of TPM requirements for virtual machines as well. This means that those running Windows 11 preview builds on anything but VMWare Workstation Pro or Hyper-V Manager included with Pro and Enterprise editions of Windows will be blocked from receiving future updates. Currently, Oracle seems to be readying a passthrough driver for TPM for VirtualBox, making its offering suitable to run Windows 11 builds.

Additionally, there was some news concerning those that were running Windows 11 builds on M1-powered MacBooks through solutions like Parallels Desktop. The Redmond giant has said to The Register that running Windows 11 on M1 Macs is not a “supported scenario”, casting doubt on whether there will be future blocks that render it difficult to run Microsoft’s latest OS on M1-powered machines.

Lastly, Microsoft announced that users can now delete their Microsoft account passwords to completely rely on alternate forms of authentication, further making the case for a password-less world. While the ability is available for consumer accounts now, the company aims to bring it to accounts that use Azure Active Directory (AAD) as well.

Office 2021, Office LTSC, new apps, and app updates

The biggest news this week relating to new apps came in the way of the announcement of Office 2021’s release date. The perpetual version of Microsoft’s productivity suite of offerings for consumers will be made available starting October 5, coinciding with the release of Windows 11. The version for commercial customers, Office LTSC, is now generally available. The LTSC versions differs from the consumer variant in some ways, one of which includes the support lifecycle. What both have in common though, is that they will not receive new features like the Microsoft 365 versions.

The start of the week also saw the arrival of the Movies Anywhere app for Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One users, bringing a native solution for watching purchased Movies Anywhere content in addition to the Movies & TV app. Another potential app expected to make it to the Microsoft Store is the firm’s own PowerToys suite, a listing for which was spotted this week. However, it seems like the listing will only introduce an installer for the app that then pulls in the suite of tools. PowerToys experimental version 0.46 also made it to testers, bringing a bunch of fixes. Another Microsoft app to receive an update was Edge, as Edge Dev users received a new build that brought a quick way to hide the extensions button from the menu from the address bar along with a bunch of bug fixes.

Talking about browsers, it was discovered that the latest version of Firefox allows users to directly change their default browser preference without going through the cumbersome steps to do so, which is a welcome change. It is not clear if this will be mirrored by more apps and browsers going forward, but the Redmond company has received backlash from browser rivals for making the process complicated and less user-friendly.

Mozilla also announced that it will begin setting Bing as the default search engine on Firefox as part of a test. This will apply to just one percent of desktop users and the test is expected to conclude in early 2022.

Xbox Game Pass additions, Remote Play on Windows, and more

This week, Microsoft announced the titles being added for Xbox Game Pass subscribers, which is the second drop for the month. There are 13 games being added, with eight of them being day-one launches. The list includes Aragami 2, Sable, SkateBird, I Am Fish, and many more. Additionally, there are 11 more games that have touch controls enabled when they are streamed through the cloud. There are five titles leaving the service, which happens on September 31.

If those wanting to run these games on Xbox Series X|S consoles are looking for additional storage and do not want to shell upwards of $200 on an expansion card, a 500GB option might be on its way, at least if a listing spotted in France is to be believed. However, if you have one of those consoles and wish to stream it to your PC, you can now do so using the updated Xbox app on Windows. The app also brings cloud gaming, giving users another way to use the service in addition to doing so from the web.

Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Live Gold members are also receiving a second round of games for the month, with Games with Gold bringing Mulaka for Xbox One and Samurai Shodown II for Xbox 360. Lastly, there are a bunch of discounts as part of Deals with Gold, bringing discounts for titles from the Assassin's Creed, Halo, Forza, and other franchises.

There doesn’t seem a week that goes by without Halo Infinite news. While minor, this week brought leaked images of Craig the Brute, showing off some visual improvements. This also hints towards the possible arrival of new gameplay that might show off the visual improvements being made.

Moving on, Call of Duty fans might be interested to learn that Call of Duty 2022 – possible called Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 – might launch next year. Call of Duty: Vanguard, on the other hand, is slated to launch in November this year.

Rounding off gaming news is the announcement of a new beta build of Age of Empires IV being made available this weekend. The invites for the beta included almost anyone who wished to try it out. Improvements made thanks to feedback from testers include a further zoom out distance, balance tweaks for English and Chinese civilizations, and a bunch of bug fixes.

Microsoft Weekly: Patch Tuesday, Windows 11 update blocks for VMs, and Office 2021

What is Proton?

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 15:11:42 +0000

You may have seen lots of mentions of Proton with the upcoming launch of the Steam Deck handheld game console, but what is it, and how does it work?

Proton is a piece of software created by Valve and CodeWeavers that acts as a compatibility layer that allows games designed for the Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems to run in Linux with a minimal impact on performance. Proton is based on the existing WINE tool, which allowed Windows applications to run in Linux, with Valve and CodeWeavers taking the tech and using it to specifically run games.

This is incredibly useful, as the vast majority of games are coded for Windows, due to the sheer popularity of Microsoft’s operating system.

Linux, a free and open-source operating system, is relatively niche, which meant that many game developers couldn’t – or wouldn’t – spend resources on making a port of their games to run natively on Linux.

With Proton, the idea is that they don’t have to, as it will allow those games to run in Linux without any extra work from developers. This has resulted in a huge boost to the number of games that can be run in Linux, and makes the operating system a much more viable alternative to Windows.

(Image credit: Image Credit: Pixabay)

Why does Valve care about Linux?

Valve’s been one of the biggest proponents of gaming on Linux for a while now, with many titles in Steam, including its own, running natively in the open-source operating system. Back in 2013, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell attended LinuxCon, where he said that “Linux and open source are the future of gaming.”

Not only did Valve commit to releasing its games on Linux, and encouraging other developers to do the same, but it also released SteamOS, a Linux distribution based on Debian. Valve hoped by developing its own operating system, it could move away from what it felt was Microsoft’s increasingly controlling behavior over Windows, including the launch of the Windows Store (now known as the Microsoft Store), which sold games – putting it in competition with Steam, Valve’s own store for selling games.

For PC gamers, the appeal of SteamOS was that they could build a PC and use that as the operating system for free, rather than paying for a Windows license. The money you saved could be spent on games, instead. Linux, including SteamOS, is less demanding on hardware than Windows, so there would be less overhead, giving games a performance boost.

(Image credit: Future)

Around this time, Valve also started selling Steam Machines, which were gaming PCs that ran SteamOS. However, both Steam Machines and SteamOS failed to take off. A big reason for this was because, despite Valve’s push, game devs simply didn’t port their games in large enough numbers, so PC gamers stuck with the operating system that would let them play the most games possible: Windows.

So, Steam Machines and SteamOS faded into obscurity somewhat, but Valve didn’t give up. If devs weren’t going to port their games, Valve would bring those games to Linux another way – via Proton.

With the announcement of the Steam Deck, Valve’s continued work with Proton makes sense. The handheld console will run on SteamOS 3.0, which is now based on Arch Linux, and to avoid the problems Steam Machines had, Valve will be relying on Proton to ensure it can run almost any game.

(Image credit: Valve/Future)

Does this mean any game can run on Linux?

Unfortunately not. While Proton has done a great job of bringing games that would likely never have appeared on Linux to the operating system, there are still a substantial number of games that can’t run on it (or don’t run very well).

We recently reported that only 72% of the top 50 games in Steam can run via Proton, including big names such as PUGB: Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, Rust and Apex Legends. The ProtonDB site is a good resource tracking what games are compatible, and how well they run. According to the site, 16,190 games work well with Proton, which is a pretty decent amount, but if your favorite game isn’t included, then it doesn’t really matter how many games are supported.

One of the biggest issues is with anti-cheat software that’s used by some competitive online games, as this often prevents the titles from running via Proton.

The good news is that Proton is continually being worked on, and new titles are regularly being made compatible. Valve has also stated that it’s working with some of the teams behind the anti-cheat software to help games using them to run via Proton (while continuing to prevent cheaters).

Proton is a great piece of software, then, and when it works well, you shouldn’t even know that it’s running. It’s made gaming on Linux a much more viable option for many people, and with the Steam Deck, we should see even more people see the benefit.

Source

Here are the biggest games from THQ Nordic's September 2021 showcase

Sat, 18 Sep 2021 10:07:38 +0000

On Friday, publisher THQ Nordic hosted its first-ever digital showcase where it revealed a slew of new games and provided gameplay footage for others. While more than half a dozen titles were highlighted, we're going to focus on the major releases like Destroy All Humans 2 - Reprobed and SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake. You can learn more about them below.

Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed

Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed was leaked a few days ago by PlayStation and many gamers assumed that it was a PlayStation 5 exclusive. Luckily, that's not the case and it's coming to Microsoft's platforms as well.

That's right, earthlings, Crypto is back and this time, he's invading the swinging sixties! After the KGB blew up his mothership, Crypto seeks revenge and travels to iconic places in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, Japan, and even to the Moon! Destroy All Humans! 2 is a full remake of the original game, adding and improving features while building the game from scratch in shiny Unreal Engine 4 visuals.

Destroy All Humans! 2 - Reprobed is in development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. It doesn't seem like it's coming to last-generation consoles.

Elex II

Of course, this is not a new announcement, but no less exciting: open-world role-playing game Elex II shows off its new story-trailer, explaining what drove Jax, the Beast of Xacor into isolation, and why the time has come for him to leave his exile.

Elex II is coming to last-generation and current-generation consoles. It should be available on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.

Outcast 2: A New Beginning

Your friendly neighborhood invader-slayer is back: Cutter Slade returns to the spectacular alien world of Adelpha in Outcast 2: A New Beginning. Twenty years after the events of the first game, Adelpha finds itself under threat of invasion: ruthless corporations are exploiting the planet and are enslaving and even killing the people. Cutter's mission is clear: organize a resistance, rescue the people, and get rid of the invaders.

Outcast 2: A New Beginning was announced a while back, and it's currently in development for PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. The in-engine gameplay trailer finally showcases the visuals we can expect from the project.

SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake

Everything is possible in the infinite expanses of the cosmos. There might even be a reality where mayonnaise isn't an instrument! When the mysterious fortune teller Kassandra grants SpongeBob and Patrick wishes, the two buddies unintentionally open up portals to strange Wishworlds. It's all 'F.U.N.' and games until their friends get lost in the portals! Explore seven distinct worlds and don more than thirty cosmic skins.

SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake is coming to PC, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One soon.

Here are the biggest games from THQ Nordic's September 2021 showcase