You may not have heard, but Australia is under attack.
While bombs aren’t raining over Brisbane or military forces rolling through Melbourne, the country is currently battling a huge “state-based” cyberattack that’s targeting Australian institutions from universities and hospitals to business and government systems.
Everyone online is vulnerable these days, from one of the world’s largest economies to you. But while Australia’s problem is decidedly multifaceted, yours can generally be handled with much simpler means.
A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is one of the first and best lines of defense against cyberattacks or the general loss of privacy online. Right now, you can defend yourself with a two-year subscription to a MaxiVPN Premium Plan service, a nearly $300 plan now on sale for just $49.
MaxiVPN bills itself as the fastest and most powerful VPN solution on the market — and they seem intent on having the credentials to back up their claim. MaxiVPN offers a strong server network, with over 300 high-speed hubs scattered nearly 50 different countries worldwide, your IP address, your traffic and all your data will remain encrypted and protected globally.
Connect to their network via any location and you’ll remain shrouded from any cyberthieves or online snoops trying to monitor your activities or steal your information.
MaxiVPN’s network also allows for connection speeds that rival your ISP with unlimited bandwidth for all your data usage needs. And if you’re an international traveler or just a fan of world culture, MaxiVPN also makes it possible to watch region-locked content from virtually anywhere you are.
With the premium MaxiVPN plan, their protection extends to an unlimited number of devices, so you can cover all your connected tech at home as well as mobile devices.
To lock in MaxiVPN service for 24 months, you’d usually be looking at a total of nearly $300. But with this limited-time price drop, you can get all that protection for only $49.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
Credit: Feature image by Collins via Wikipedia, image is CC BY-SA 3.0
Microsoft has announced it will close all of its physical store locations. Officially, this is due to COVID-19. The memo announcing the change is long on PR-speak, short on actual information. We are told, for example, that “As we look forward, we start a new chapter for Microsoft Store,” and “As part of our business plan, we announced a strategic change in our retail operations,” — a strategic change, you say? How delightful! — “including closing Microsoft Store physical locations.”
This seems less like a strategic change and more like “quitting the retail business.” Ah well. What can you expect from a company statement released primarily on LinkedIn?
Microsoft is closing all 82 of its retail locations, though four Microsoft Experience centers will stay open and not sell anything. As someone who lived near a Microsoft Store for several years and visited on multiple occasions, I’ve got mixed feelings on this.
Seeing a laptop before you purchase it is always nice, particularly when it’s a system as expensive as the Microsoft Surface. Machines like the Surface Laptop 3 are gorgeous and fully capable of standing up against other luxury hardware, like the MacBook Pro. But while Microsoft has built Surface into a profitable business with $2B in sales, the company hasn’t built the same brand cachet as Apple or won an equivalently-sized fan base. (That’s in comparison with ~$5B-$8B for Apple Mac.) Seeing the hardware always helps, when you’re trying to gain market share against an entrenched, known competitor.
So while I genuinely valued being able to visit a Microsoft Store to see Surface hardware, the company’s decision to kill its phone business and pivot towards the cloud probably played a part in why the Microsoft Store retail idea never caught on. Apple stores carry a wider variety of accessories and products, and they give people more of a reason to stop by even if they aren’t planning on test-driving a laptop. Even when products like the Xbox One had major demo space in my local store, it didn’t feel like Microsoft was all that excited about selling it out of that location, or as if the company had plans to integrate more Xbox products into the overall store lineup.
Image from Wikipedia, 2014. I have never seen this many people in a Microsoft Store.
Microsoft’s decision to pivot away from retail probably makes sense given store traffic and the fact that the company’s business is more corporate than consumer-focused, but it’s unfortunate that Microsoft couldn’t find a model that gave PC owners something closer to an Apple-like experience. The reason Apple Stores generate strong foot traffic is that people like and want to walk into them. Microsoft has often struggled to generate the same interest. In this brave new world of ours, it’s no longer interested in trying.
Microsoft’s decision to close 82 stores isn’t going to be the straw that breaks the economy’s back, but I wish the company had delayed the decision by a year or two. Microsoft, as a giant tech company, is one of the handful of tech employers that provides community retail jobs. Given that tens of thousands of businesses have already closed, permanently, communities are going to need every single job they can get. I won’t pretend the move would make much financial sense, but unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures.
The company has said that its retail employees will be transitioned to other support roles, but I’d be surprised if this extends to all employees. Phone support is a different game from working in a retail store. Microsoft claims “We will make our digital storefronts the best place to learn, buy, and receive support across software and hardware.”
I’d like to think we’ll all be walking past the (digital) Microsoft Store to check out the cool new apps and features in a few months’ time, but I’m not optimistic about it actually happening. As for how this could impact the Xbox Series X launch, I’m not sure it will. If retail stores are open, customers will likely buy from Best Buy, Wal-Mart, GameStop, and the like. If retail stores aren’t open, Microsoft will probably look rather smart for deciding to shut down early as opposed to dragging this out another 4-6 months and then killing them regardless.
The hard work of astronomers around the world using instruments like the Kepler Space Telescope has shown there’s no shortage of planets in the cosmos. Most of those exoplanets are far away, but a handful are right next door (on an astronomical scale). The “RedDots” team from the University of Göttingen has reported the discovery of two new exoplanets just a few stars away orbiting Gliese 887, and they’re of the potentially habitable variety.
Astronomers have devised two ways to reliably detect exoplanets with our current technology. Most exoplanets are discovered by monitoring stars for a small dip in luminance caused by planets passing in front of them. However, this only works with star systems on the same approximate plane as ours. The other method involves measuring tiny countermovements in stars caused by orbiting planets — the radial velocity or “Doppler wobble.” The University of Göttingen team used the latter to identify Gliese 887b and Gliese 887c.
The RedDots project focuses on nearby red dwarf stars like Gliese 887, which is 11 light-years away. These stars are smaller and cooler than the sun, but scientists have had great success finding exoplanets around these objects, and we can learn more from the study of exoplanets closer to Earth. Using the HARPS spectrograph at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, the team has confirmed Gliese 887b and Gliese 887c are in very close orbits around the star. Based on their apparent masses, they’re most like rocky planets somewhat larger than Earth, known as super-Earths.
The radial velocity method to detect exoplanet.
Gliese 887b reportedly has an orbital period of just 9.3 Earth days, and Gliese 887c completes a “year” every 21.8 Earth days. Despite being so close to the star, scientists believe they are in the habitable zone of the cooler red dwarf — measurements of Gliese 887c suggest a surface temperature of 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius). That’s not exactly cozy, but it’s within the range necessary for liquid water. These exoplanets are particularly interesting because Gliese 887 is one of the calmer nearby red dwarfs. Planets tend to orbit these stars so closely, putting them in range of intense solar flares and radiation. Gliese 887 might not have heat-blasted these exoplanets, making them even more interesting objects for study.
The ream believes the nearness and potential habitability of these planets will make them an ideal target for future observations. The upcoming (and frequently delayed) James Webb Space Telescope might be able to determine if Gliese 887b and Gliese 887c have atmospheres, and if so, what it’s like on the surface.
After over a year in beta testing, Cox is rolling out its Elite Gamer add-on for new customers. The ISP claims it can improve your latency by up to 32 percent if you subscribe to the service, though some caveats apply.
Cox’s Elite Gamer service costs $7 per month if you have your own router and $11 per month if you rent its “Panoramic Wi-Fi Gateway.” What Cox is offering is a GPN — Gamers Private Network. If you’ve heard of WTFast, reports a year ago stated Cox was implementing its own version of the technology. Because Cox Elite Gamer is used to optimize public network traffic, this kind of service would have been explicitly legal, even under the old, now-defunct net neutrality rules.
GPNs are conceptually similar to VPNs, in that they create a connection between you and a target server, but they aren’t designed to facilitate encrypted communication. Instead, they improve latency (again, in theory) by ensuring that your packets take the most direct route possible between your PC and the game server.
But therein lies the rub (or the “up to” 32 percent, if you prefer). If you have a great connection and low latency already, this kind of service won’t help you. The degree to which it can improve performance is going to depend on just how bad your ping times are to start with, and whether more direct routing can help you in the first place. I wouldn’t expect a GPN to be able to do much if you’re trying to game from a satellite connection, or if you’ve got a last-mile problem causing your service to slow down.
Also, Elite Gamer really ought to carry an asterisk, because the service apparently requires Cox to perform game-by-game optimization. Right now, there’s a solid set of popular titles — League, FF XIV, Valorant, WoW, CS: Go, Fortnite, PUBG, and Overwatch are all supported, for example. Other games, like No Man’s Sky, Sea of Thieves, Red Dead Online, and Starcraft 2 aren’t listed.
WTFast, in contrast, offers support for over a thousand titles and has an option for you to create a profile for a title that isn’t already listed. Both services are PC-only unless you own a specific Asus router that’s capable of using WTFast when connected to a console.
WTFast supports more games, but Anthem as first-listed under “Most Popular?” Really? And no, I didn’t click “Least Popular” by mistake.
Compared with Cox’s $11 modem rental fee, WTFast is more expensive at $12.49 per month if you buy a year at a time and $15 per month if you pay every four weeks. But it also supports every PC game and isn’t tied to your ISP.
One thing the two services have in common is that they are single-license, per-computer seats. WTFast states that you can install the service on multiple computers, but only one person can be logged in at a time. Cox appears to have copied this trend. Elite Gamer comes with one license, and you can purchase up to three others from the company, for an undisclosed fee. I’m assuming the fee is roughly equivalent to the price of WTFast or the Cox service fee if you already own your router.
Would I try it? Personally, no. Cox sucker-punched its customers recently when it declared it would throttle entire neighborhoods if it decided one person was using too much bandwidth. There is no option to appeal and no way for other affected customers to even determine what happened to their internet service. The idea of paying the company $7-$15 more per month, per account when Cox literally just declared it has no obligation to provide the internet service people are actually paying for is… unappealing.
But, then, I’m not stuck on potentially poor Cox internet, with no choice to use anything else. Given how terrible competition is in the US ISP market, that’s probably the situation at least some gamers are in. And with the pandemic still encouraging people to stick close to home, a lot of folks are putting their home networks through a workout. If you’re stuck on Cox service, you’ve had your lines checked, and you can’t seem to get a decent ping time, a service like this might improve it. Just read the fine print carefully and understand that it might not work.
NASA executive Jim Bridenstine announced this week that the organization would be naming its headquarters after Mary W. Jackson, one of the women whose historic contributions to NASA were explored in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Jackson was portrayed by actress and musician Janelle Monae in the film.
Bridenstine said:
Mary W. Jackson was part of a group of very important women who helped NASA succeed in getting American astronauts into space. Mary never accepted the status quo, she helped break barriers and open opportunities for African Americans and women in the field of engineering and technology. Today, we proudly announce the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters building. It appropriately sits on ‘Hidden Figures Way,’ a reminder that Mary is one of many incredible and talented professionals in NASA’s history who contributed to this agency’s success. Hidden no more, we will continue to recognize the contributions of women, African Americans, and people of all backgrounds who have made NASA’s successful history of exploration possible.
Mary Jackson working. Credit: NASA
In 1958 she became NASA’s first Black engineer, after first obtaining special permission to attend engineering classes at a segregated, all-white school. After working as an engineer at NASA for nearly two decades, she led the Federal Women’s Program and the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity before retiring in 1985. She died in 2005 and was posthumously awarded the Hidden Figures Congressional Gold Medal Act in 2019. Her contributions to science were largely ignored for decades, along with the work done by Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan.
Space and space exploration were huge areas of interest for me growing up. The first encyclopedia entry I ever read was in the “S” volume. “S” — for “Sun.” When I had to write a story in fourth grade, I wrote it about NASA. I still have my battered, ancient copy of We Came in Peace: The Story of Man in Space. My first memory of a national event was seeing the Challenger explosion on live TV. The Right Stuff is one of my all-time favorite movies. I even liked the movie SpaceCamp. Don’t @ me. I like space.
You know who I never heard about, in all the deserved paeans to men with last names like Aldrin, Armstrong, and Collins? I never heard about Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, or any other African-American. Nobody ever told me that African-Americans — much less African-American women — were a critical part of the Apollo moonshot. I daresay none of the people in my life who would have been happy to convey that information knew it themselves. I’m certain they would have told me. Giving me new information and turning me loose on the card catalog was one of the only ways to shut me up.
When the Mercury Seven visit the workshop where their capsule — excuse me, spacecraft — is being constructed in The Right Stuff, there’s not an African-American in sight. I’m not claiming anyone went out of their way to make that happen. It happened, most likely, because nobody thought it mattered in the first place. Either that, or the film’s producers were unaware there were African-Americans who contributed to the science of spaceflight, which is part of the problem.
I’m not literally arguing there should have been African-Americans in this specific scene. I’m using the scene because it’s one of a relative handful of times in the film when you see the astronauts engaging with a group of scientists. If you wanted to show that African-Americans played a role in the engineering and testing of the Mercury spacecraft, you’d have probably done it here.
It’s not uncommon to see people question the need for diverse representation in media or the value of changing a name. The value of these actions is that they create a more accurate picture of who contributed to the successes and achievements of America, and more broadly, the entire human race. It matters that the NASA Headquarters will be known as the Mary W. Jackson building. People look at buildings. Sometimes, they even Google their names to learn about the people they are named for.
When we honor the names and achievements of the formerly hidden, we push back at a historical myth — namely, that the Apollo Program and NASA’s pioneering work in aeronautics in the mid-1960s was entirely the work of white men. Women like Jackson, Johnson, Vaughan, and the other “hidden figures” deserve to be recognized in enduring ways. The phrase, after all, isn’t “We came in peace.” It’s “We came in peace for all mankind.”
While this is a feature image for Ryzen, you can clearly see the pins on the underside of the chip. Intel CPUs don't use this arrangement.
Back in 2014, AMD announced that it would improve the power efficiency of its laptops by 25x by 2020. At the time, this seemed like an incredibly aggressive target, especially given the state of AMD’s Kaveri APU in 2014. Today, AMD announced that it broke its own target goal for energy efficiency. Compared with Kaveri, modern 7nm Ryzen Mobile CPUs are 31.7x more energy efficient by AMD’s estimation.
How’d the company do it? Let’s take a look. AMD’s methodology for calculating power efficiency starts with a 50/50 workload split between Cinebench R15 for CPU cores and 3DMark 11.
First, raw performance. In 2014, a 35W Kaveri FX-7600P scored 232 in Cinebench R15 (single-thread, multi-thread). Today, a Ryzen 4800H running at 35W TDP (aka, a 4800HS) turns in scores of 1727. In 3DMark 11, the 7600P scored 2142, while the 4800HS scores 5546. That’s an increase of 7.44x in Cinebench and 2.59x in 3DMark 11 while remaining within the same TDP factor. AMD claims a 5x performance improvement overall, which is what you get if you average the two individual improvements together.
According to AMD, it stuck with a 35W comparison target because that’s what it had used in 2014 when it had no 15W laptops.
The performance side is straightforward. The power efficiency gains have come from a wider range of places.
First of all, let’s acknowledge the elephant in the room. The largest share of AMD’s improvement comes from shifting to Carrizo from Kaveri. AMD did not disclose all the details of how it measured power efficiency, though this is fairly typical in the industry and the 25×20 initiative as a whole has been more transparent than we typically get.
AMD has said it is factoring in improvements like time-to-idle and that its overall efficiency metrics are weighted towards idle, which makes some sense, but that appears to be where the enormous 1.0 to 0.35 shift is coming from. From 2015 to 2019, AMD improved power efficiency in a modest stepwise fashion until 7nm allowed them to unleash much larger gains. Overall, the company is claiming to have improved its CPU power efficiency by 31.7x. That gain comes from multiplying the total gain in performance (measured in CB15 and 3DMark 11) against the improvement to power efficiency, which has improved by roughly 6x.
Energy Efficiency Doesn’t Necessarily Equate to Battery Life
One question this claim raises is why we haven’t seen a huge improvement in AMD’s battery life. If you don’t read laptop reviews on a regular basis, let me assure you, AMD laptops do not currently offer 12.5 days of battery life.
The Asus ROG Zephyrus has shown that AMD is capable of building a high-powered CPU with a Max-Q Nvidia RTX 2060, while still delivering 10-12 hours of battery life. That’s far better than any result AMD has ever turned in before, particularly when paired with high-end components. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if median AMD battery life has at least doubled from Carrizo to Renoir.
The fact that AMD’s metrics are weighted towards idle and start with Kaveri is part of why the total efficiency gain is so high. If AMD had started counting with Carrizo, the gain would be a little more than 2x. Carrizo introduced some significant power efficiency improvements over Kaveri. As these Anandtech results show, in some cases, idle Carrizo power consumption is literally half of Kaveri’s idle power consumption. The gap isn’t always that large, but AMD’s claim of a threefold improvement from Kaveri to Carrizo doesn’t seem crazy. Neither do the further estimated gains from Carrizo through Renoir.
Another factor to keep in mind is that the CPU isn’t the only device drawing power in the system. The Wi-Fi card, display, RAM, and integrated storage all draw power, as does the onboard cooling solution. According to AMD, power consumption on Ryzen Mobile CPUs is now low enough that the CPU is not a majority of the total system power consumption. Which components a manufacturer chooses, however, still has a major impact on battery life. So does battery size — and manufacturers have been known to reduce battery capacity when more efficient CPUs become available, in order to use the space for other things.
AMD’s improvements to performance and power efficiency actually work against it in a specific way: Building faster APUs encourages OEMs to pair them with high-end components, including high-DPI displays, NVMe-attached storage, and larger RAM loadouts. All of these components have the capacity to draw far more power than the low-end components AMD systems shipped with a few years back.
In 2015, an AMD laptop might have 4-8GB of RAM in a single-channel DDR3L-1600 configuration, dual-channel if you were lucky. DDR4 was designed to use less power than DDR3L, but it also runs at higher RAM clocks. Between capacity improvements and clock increases, RAM might account for a larger amount of absolute power draw.
Making these kinds of improvements is what allows AMD to budget more power for these component upgrades in the first place, but it also means some of the additional battery life we’d get is effectively absorbed. Despite this, AMD battery life and its entire mobile position have improved dramatically in a short period of time.
Overall, well done AMD. The company’s 7nm processors have given it a commanding performance lead across a number of markets and price points, and the huge energy efficiency gains delivered over the past five years helped make that possible.
With COVID-19 spreading again and another period of sheltering at home seemingly just around the corner, it’s never been more important to have a quality computer to help you get work done and stay connected with the outside world. In this article, we have several excellent deals on laptops, including a $300 discount on a lightweight HP notebook with a 4K display.
HP’s premium Envy 13 laptop features a high-quality 4K 13.3-inch display and four Bang & Olufsen speakers that together give the system excellent multimedia capabilities. This laptop is also relatively light at 2.82 pounds, and it is loaded with a powerful Core i7 processor and reasonably strong graphics for such a small and compact system. It’s also currently an extraordinarily good deal, as it’s marked down from $999.99 to just $699.99 from Best Buy.
Razer designed its Blade laptops to be exceedingly slim and lightweight gaming machines. This system is 0.78-inches thin and has an aluminum unibody exterior. The system is also plenty capable of running today’s latest AAA titles with an Nvidia GTX 1660 Ti graphics chip and an Intel Core i7-9750H processor. Today you can get one of these systems from Amazon marked down from $1,599.99 to just $1,099.99.
The Z490 Taichi is one of Asrock’s top-tier motherboards with support for the newest LGA1200 Comet Lake processors from Intel. This board is well-suited to overclocking unlocked CPUs, thanks to beefy heatsinks set over the VRMs that are actively cooled by fans. And the board also comes with support for the latest 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard. Today you can take advantage of the first sale to be placed on the Z490 Taichi to get it from Amazon marked down from $439.99 to just $369.99.
Dell’s G7 15 gaming laptop has an Intel Core i7-8750H processor paired with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q graphics card. Together, they allow the laptop to run modern games with ease. Dell designed the system with a dual-fan thermal solution that uses four heatpipes to keep the CPU and GPU cool. The system comes with a fast 128GB NVMe SSD boot drive and a 1TB HDD for additional file storage. These features, along with the 16GB of DDR4 memory and the 1080p display, make this a well-rounded gaming solution. You can get this system as configured from Dell marked down from $1,5684.98 to just $999.99.
Corsair’s Force MP600 features support for the new PCI-E 4.0 interface, which enables it to transfer data at a blazing fast rate of up to 4,950MB/s — significantly faster than last-gen SSDs. This particular model also has a 1TB capacity, giving it enough space to store several games and numerous applications. For a limited time, you can get one of these drives from Amazon marked down from $249.99 to just $199.99.
Eufy designed this slim robovac with a vacuum capable of 1,300Pa of suction. This gives it the power it needs to help keep your home clean, and it can also last for up to 100 minutes on a single charge. Right now you can get one from Amazon marked down from $229.99 to just $159.99.
Note: Terms and conditions apply. See the relevant retail sites for more information.For more great deals, go to our partners at TechBargains.com.
