Enlarge / Flight Director James M. (Milt) Heflin, in Mission Control during the flight of STS-26 in 1988. (credit: NASA)
The phone call from the "Mountain" to Mission Control in Houston came at just about the worst possible time. It was the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning in 1991. Up in space, the crew members on board space shuttle Atlantis were sleeping. Now all of a sudden, Lead Flight Director Milt Heflin faced a crisis.
The flight dynamics officer in Mission Control informed Heflin that the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, which tracked orbital traffic, had called to warn that a dormant Turkish satellite had a potential conjunction with the space shuttle in only 15 minutes. Moreover, this potential debris strike was due to occur in the middle of a communications blackout with the crew, as the spacecraft passed over the southern tip of Africa.
There was no way for Heflin's engineers to calculate an avoidance maneuver, wake the crew, and communicate with them before the blackout period began. Heflin was livid—why had the Air Force not given more warning about a potential collision? Typically, they provided about 24 hours' notice. By God, if that satellite hit Atlantis, they could very well lose the astronauts as they slept. The crew of STS-44 might never awaken.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.
I bloody love Hearthstone. Every time a collectible card game comes out, people come together to agree that this one, absolutely, definitely, is The Hearthstone Killer. But it never is. The ease with which you can pick up Hearthstone and understand the basic mechanics, win conditions, and strategies makes it the most welcoming CCG for those new to the genre. Honestly though, the potential depth the game has for extremely high level big brain plays is there for those of us who want to test the limits of our card playing and deckbuilding ability.
Enlarge / When it's on battery, your new Ryzen 4000 series laptop doesn't deliver its true performance until about 10 seconds into a full-throttle workload. (credit: Aurich Lawson / AMD)
In an embargoed presentation Friday morning, Intel Chief Performance Strategist Ryan Shrout walked a group of tech journalists through a presentation aimed at taking AMD's Zen 2 (Ryzen 4000 series) laptop CPUs down a peg.
Intel's newest laptop CPU design, Tiger Lake, is a genuinely compelling release—but it comes on the heels of some crushing upsets in that space, leaving Intel looking for an angle to prevent hemorrhaging market share to its rival. Early Tiger Lake systems performed incredibly well—but they were configured for a 28W cTDP, instead of the far more common 15W TDP seen in production laptop systems—and reviewers were barred from testing battery life.
This left reviewers like yours truly comparing Intel's i7-1185G7 at 28W cTDP to AMD Ryzen 7 systems at half the power consumption—and although Tiger Lake did come out generally on top, the power discrepancy kept it from being a conclusive or crushing blow to AMD's increasing market share with the OEM vendors who are actually buying laptop CPUs in the first place.
