66151195
submission
Lasrick writes:
What a great idea. The Old Weather Project uses old logbooks to study the weather patterns of long ago, providing a trove of archival data to scientists who are trying to fill in the details of our knowledge about the atmosphere and the changing climate. 'Pity the poor navigator who fell asleep on watch and failed to update his ship’s logbook every four hours with details about its geographic position, time, date, wind direction, barometric readings, temperatures, ocean currents, and weather conditions.' As Clive Wilkinson of the UK's National Maritime Museum adds, 'Anything you read in a logbook, you can be sure that it is a true and faithful account.'
The Old Weather Project uses citizen scientists to transcribe and digitize observations that were scrupulously recorded on a clockwork-like basis, and it is one of several that climate scientists are using to create 'a three-dimensional computer simulation that will provide a continuous, century-and-a-half-long profile of the entire planet’s climate over time'--the 20th Century Reanalysis Project. Data is checked and rechecked by 3 different people before entry into the database, and the logbook measurements are especially valuable because it was compiled at sea. Great story.
66106745
submission
samzenpus writes:
Warren Ellis is an acclaimed British author of comics, novels, and television who is well known for his sociocultural commentary. The movies Red, and Iron Man 3 are based on his graphic novels. In addition to numerous other comic titles he started a personal favorite, Transmetropolitan. Ellis has written for Vice, Wired UK and Reuters on technological and cultural matters, and is co-writing a video project called Wastelanders with Joss Whedon. Warren has agreed to give us some of his time to answer any questions you may have. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one per post.
52463191
submission
An anonymous reader writes:
On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until presumably October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?
48802229
submission
Vigile writes:
While 4K displays have been popping up all over the place recently with noticeably lower prices, one thing that kind of limits them all is a 30 Hz refresh rate panel. Sony is selling 4K consumer HDTVs for $5000 and new-comer SEIKI has a 50-in model going for under $1000 but they all share that trait — HDMI 1.4 supporting 3840x2160 at 30 Hz. The new ASUS PQ321Q monitor is a 31.5-in 4K display built on the same platform as the Sharp PN-K321 and utilizes a DisplayPort 1.2 connection capable of MST (multi-stream transport). This allows the screen to include two display heads internally, showing up as two independent monitors to some PCs that can then be merged into a single panel via AMD Eyefinity or NVIDIA Surround. Thus, with dual 1920x2160 60 Hz signals, the PQ321Q can offer 3840x2160 at 60 Hz for a much better viewing experience. PC Perspective got one of the monitors in for testing and review and found that the while there were some hurdles during initial setup (especially with NVIDIA hardware), the advantage of a higher refresh rate made the 4K resolution that much better.
23071092
submission
Vigile writes:
Co-founder of id Software and one of the better interviews in the industry, John Carmack sat down with PC Perspective during Quakecon 2011 to talk about technology for gaming going forward. Collected in this ~30 minute video interview are thoughts on the GPU hardware race (hardware doesn't matter but drivers are REALLY important), integrated graphics solutions on Sandy Bridge and Llano (with a future of shared address spaces they may outperform discrete GPUs) and of course some thoughts on infinite detail engines (uninspired content viewed at the molecular level is still uninspired content). Carmack does mention a new found interest in ray tracing and how it will "eventually win" the battle for rendering in the long run. As usual, there is a lot of information collected in a short time span so pay attention!
13641208
submission
Vigile writes:
Microsoft unveiled a new Xbox 360 S console at E3 this month and without delay the new machine has been dissected and tested. The most dramatic change is the move to a single chip CPU/GPU hybrid processor that is apparently being built on the 45nm process technology from GlobalFoundries, AMD's spun-off production facilities. With the inclusion of the new processor the Xbox 360 S uses much less power (about 30-40%) compared to previous generation machines and also turns out to be much quieter as a result of a single, larger fan. PC Perspective has photographic evidence of the tear down with comparisons between this Valhalla platform and the older Falcon system along with videos of the reconstruction process and noise comparisons.
9428142
submission
Vigile writes:
Transformers jokes aside, NVIDIA's newest technology offering hopes to radically change the way notebook computers are built and how customers use them. The promise of both extended battery life and high performance mobile computing has seemed like a pipe dream and even the most recent updates to "switchable graphics" left much to be desired in terms of the user experience. Having both an integrated and discrete graphics chip in your notebook does little good if you never switch between the two. Optimus allows the system to seamlessly and instantly change between IGP and discrete NVIDIA GPUs based on the task being run including games, GPU encoding or Flash video playback. Using new software and hardware technology notebooks using Optimus can power on and pass control to the GPU in a matter of 300ms and power both the GPU and PCIe lanes completely off when not in use. This can be done without being forced to reboot or even close out your applications making it a hands-free solution for the customer.
8678274
submission
Vigile writes:
The new AMD Radeon HD 5670 launches today and it is the first graphics card to bring DirectX 11 support to the sub-$100 market and offers next-generation features to almost any budget. The Redwood part (as it was codenamed) is nearly 3.5x smaller in die size than the first DX11 GPUs from AMD while still offering support for DirectCompute 5.0, Eyefinity multi-monitor gaming and of course DX11 features (like tessellation) in upcoming Windows gaming titles. Unfortunately, performance on the card is not revolutionary even for the $99 graphics market though power consumption has been noticeably lowered while keeping the card well cooled in a single slot design.
7477476
submission
Vigile writes:
Intel unveiled a completely new processor design today the company is dubbing the "Single-chip Cloud Computer" (but was previously codenamed Bangalore). Justin Rattner, the company's CTO, discussed the new product at a press event in Santa Clara and revealed some interesting information about the goals and design of the new CPU. While terascale processing has been discussed for some time, this new CPU is the first to integrate full IA x86 cores rather than simple floating point units. The 48 cores are set 2 to a "tile" and each tile communicates with others via a 2D mesh networking capable of 256 GB/s rather than a large cache structure. There are more details on the design and its massive die size in this summary at PC Perspective.
4140531
submission
Vigile writes:
In mid-February, news broke about a potential issue with Intel's X25-M mainstream solid state drives involving fragmentation and performance slow downs. At that time, after having the news picked up by everyone from CNet to the Wall Street Journal, Intel stated that it had not seen any of these issues but was working with the source to replicate the problem and find a fix if at all possible. Today Intel has essentially admitted to the problem by releasing a new firmware for the X25-M line that not only fixes the flaws found in the drive initially, but also increases write performance across the board.
3418613
submission
Vigile writes:
When the Intel X25-M series of solid state drives hit the market last year, there was little debate that they were easily the best performing MLC (multi-level cell) offerings to date. The one area they blew away the competition in was with write speeds where initial reviews showed consistent 80MB/s results. However, a new article over at PC Perspective that looks at Intel X25-M performance over a period of time shows that write speeds are dramatically reduced from everyday usage patterns. Average writes speeds are shown to drop to half (40MB/s) or less in the worst cases though the author does describe ways that users can recover some of the original drive speed using standard HDD testing tools.
