Ronald.phillips

(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)

Humans are social animals, and it seems reasonable to assume that any transhuman condition we can wrap our minds around will also be a social one for most of its participants.

Society implies a social contract, that is: we grant one another rights and in return make the concession of respecting each others' rights, in order that our own rights be observed and respected.

And violations of rights tend to be at the root of our concept of crime and injustice—at least, any modern concept of crime once we discard religious justifications and start trying to figure things out from first principles.

Which leads me to ask: in a transhumanist society—go read Accelerando, or Glasshouse, or The Rapture of the Nerds—what currently recognized crimes need to be re-evaluated because their social impact has changed? And what strange new crimes might universally be recognized by a society with, for example, mind uploading, strong AI, or near-immortality?

SF authors are paid to think our way around the outside of ideas, so it's always worth raiding the used fiction bin for side-effects and consequences. Here's qntm's take on the early years of mind uploading--the process of digitizing the connectome of a human brain in order to treat it as software: I strongly suggest you read Lena (if you haven't previously done so) before continuing. It's a short story, structured as a Wikipedia monograph, and absolutely horrifying by implication, for various reasons.

Let me give you that link again: Lena. (Go read: it's short, good fiction, and the rest of this essay will still be here when you get back.)

Mind uploading makes certain assumptions. (Notably: mind/body dualism is a bust, there is no supernatural element to consciousness, also that we can resolve the structures involved in neurological information processing with sufficient resolution to be useful, and that the connectivity and training of the weighted neural network in the wetware is what consciousness emerges from.)

Uploading also implies that consciousness is replicable and fungible, which in turn implies our legal systems can't cope without extensive modification because we rely on an implicit definition of humanity which at that point will be obsolete, as the treatment of MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo), aka "Miguel" in the story, demonstrates: MMAcevedo is considered by some to be the "first immortal", and by others to be a profound warning of the horrors of immortality.

Historically, our identity has been linear: there is a start, there is a terminus, along the way we are indivisible, although we undergo change over time (and may lose or gain significant portions of our selves—for example, most people retain few or no memories of their life before a point some time between the ages of 3 and 5 years old).

The premature termination of a human life is an irrevocable act, and to deliberately inflict it on someone is seen as a crime (various degrees of murder).

Because our identity is indivisible and of limited duration, time is a rivalrous resource to us: we have to choose what to do with it, or be subject to someone else's choices. (One of the reasons why imprisonment is seen as a punishment—to which we are averse—is the total loss of opportunities to choose what to do with the time we lose. (Yes, there are other reasons: let's ignore them and focus on what this might signify for the posthuman condition.)

There's a fascinating sequence early in Linda Nagata's space opera novel Vast that throws the implications of alienated labour for uploaded minds into stark relief: if you're confronted with a mind-numbingly tedious task that needs human-level cognitive supervision for a period of years or decades, why not divide your time up in chunks and discard the boring ones? You could set up a watchdog timer to reset your uploaded mind to a baseline state every 3 minutes, unless an exception occurs—an emergency that makes you hit the dead man's handle in your environment, at which point the subjective passage of time resumes. In Vast, a human mind is needed to supervise a slower-than-light starship on a voyage that takes centuries during which nothing much happens. The crew use this three minute reset cycle to avoid experiencing tedium: subjectively, they condense the entire voyage into 180 seconds. (If you've driven long distance you'll probably have wished for the ability to push a button and find yourself at your destination. Right?)

Other authors found other angles on this question: the first book in Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean Le Flambeur trilogy (The Quantum Thief starts with the exact opposite—a thief sentenced to spend a subjective eternity in an escape-proof prison, as a punishment of sorts. Spoiler: he escapes. How he does it and why he was there is the start of yet more musing on what might constitute crimes in a realm populated entirely by uploaded minds. In particular Rajaniemi dives headlong into two really disturbing questions: firstly, the potential for eternal enslavement such a setting offers (never mind perpetual torment), and secondly, what it does to the post-Enlightenment social concept of human equality.

We are all living in the afterglow of a sociological big bang that took place in 1649—the execution of Charles I, who was variously King of England and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland at the time of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms: his trial and execution by a court--appointed by a parliament of the people—shattered the then-prevalent understanding among European/Christian communities that Kings were appointed by God to rule on Earth. A corollary of the Divine Right of Kings is that some people really aren't equal--monarchs, and by extension, aristocrats, have more rights (by religious decree) than other people, and some categories (chattel slavery springs to mind: also the status of women and children) have less. But if the People could try the King for crimes against the state, then what next?

"What next" turned out to be a troublesome precedent. Charles I's younger son James II tried to walk back the uneasy settlement with parliament and got yeeted into exile in 1688-90 as a result, with the resounding and lasting outcome that the powers of the Crown in English and Scottish law was now vested in Parliament, and the head beneath the fancy hat was merely a figurehead who could be sacked if he (or she) acted up. If the monarch wasn't divinely appointed, what set him apart? Numerous philosophical maunderings later it was the French king's turn, and also time for the US Bill of Rights--which, while based on the 1698 English Bill of Rights, implicitly adopted the pernicious logic that there could be no king, no nobility, only free citizens. (Pay no attention to the slaves—for now.)

Here's the thing: our current prevailing political philosophy of human rights and constitutional democracy is invalidated if we have mind uploading/replication or super-human intelligence. (The latter need not be AI; it could be uploaded human minds able to monopolize sufficient computing substrate to get more thinking done per unit baseline time than actual humans can achieve.) Some people are, once again, clearly superior in capability to born-humans. And other persons can be ruthlessly exploited for their labour output without reward, and without even being allowed to know that they're being exploited. Again, see also the subtext of Ken MacLeod's The Corporation Wars trilogy: in which the war between the neoreactionaries and the post-Enlightenment democrats has been won ... by the wrong side.

The second book in The Quantum Thief trilogy, The Fractal Prince, gives us a ghastly look at a world where genocide and enslavement are carried out by forcibly abducting and uploading the last born-human survivors—is it actually genocide if the body is dead but the mind is still there? (It's a new version of Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius, of course.) It may not be genocide in the currently accepted legal sense of the term—the forcible extermination of a cultural group or of the people who are members of such a group—but it's certainly a comparable abomination.

Our intuitions about crimes against people (and humanity) are based on a set of assumptions about the parameters of personhood that are going to be completely destroyed if mind uploading turns out to be possible. And the only people I see doing much thinking about this (in public) are either SF authors or people pushing a crankish ideology based on 19th century Russian orthodox theology.

Surely we can do better?

Moving is probably one of the most stressful things you can do, especially when moving across any border. Even more so when you've got a child, a pet, and your relationship with your partner is strained. That's without factoring in being taken hostage by a band of desperate thieves.

As Dusk Falls is an interactive, multiplayer story with a host of characters, choices, and QTEs events that branch the story in a variety of ways. At first, with its constant reminders that you can play on your phone, As Dusk Falls might remind you of the short-lived PlayStation Playlink games that had you voting for outcomes against shoddy, strange, or experimental games. Thankfully, As Dusk Falls has much more than a mobile voting system to keep you invested.

As you may have imagined, the story centers on a family moving across America in the late 90s and taking an unexpected stop at Two Rocks, Arizona, before all hell breaks loose. Whether or not these are accurate portrayals of Arizona or the 90s, neither of these things actually exist. You play as Vince, the father whose life was turned upside down thanks to corporate capitalism, with a strained relationship with your wife, father, and potentially daughter too, trying to survive well outside anyone's comfort zone.

The pace and beats of the story are fantastic and feel like a modern classic thriller. Each time you think you get a handle on the situation, someone throws another wrench, or bullet, into the mix, and you're left reeling again. While some of the decisions you're forced to make throughout the campaign are easy, all of them carry enough weight to grip you as the consequences unfurl.

But the story doesn't entirely play out in the sleepy little motel or with just Vince. Some sections of each chapter are devoted to flashbacks that allow you to discover and develop the characters' relationships. These are often intriguing, subtly or overtly changing the dynamics back in the present of the motel. Other times, you play as Jay, the youngest of the bandits holed up with Vince and his family. What decisions you make during these flashbacks feed into his mood and actions at the motel while you're controlling Vince.

And there are many options for how this will all play out. At the end of each chapter, you're shown the timeline you traversed both in the past and present. It's a meandering weave of choices and consequences, with so many dark spots of undiscovered potential. Most games of this nature have only superficial decisions that don't disembark from the main narrative, but As Dusk Falls is happy to spin you out as far as you can, bringing all the timelines back together for inevitable, unmovable scenes. The nature of the hostage situation works remarkably well, meaning that you're not in control enough to change the big setpieces but still empowered to make some pretty drastic changes. And most of the time is tense and exciting to explore these difficult choices and weigh up survival, loyalty, and trust against each other.

Sometimes though, things don't quite add up as you'll expect. This is a common problem in any game with dialogue choices where nuance can be lost between the player and game. Sometimes you make a choice for a very particular reason, but Vince, or Jay, vocalise something entirely different. It's jarring but almost impossible to avoid and happens surprisingly rarely throughout As Dusk Falls, which almost makes the moments it does occur all the more disjointed. Nevertheless, the story is so well told, intriguing, and varied with each playthrough that these moments are lost to the grand machinations of the narrative.

While the story is a masterpiece of complexity and payoff, the actual gameplay is beautifully simple. As Dusk Falls explains the whole thing in one eager page when you first begin the game: in some cases, you will wheel a cursor around the environment looking for something to interact with; other times, you will choose dialogue or actions from a selection, and in action sequences, you complete quick time events to prevail. The entire game utilizes only the mouse when played on PC.

The dialogue and choice options stand out in the nearly flawless execution of the gameplay. These are nearly always accompanied by a timer and force to make desperate, difficult choices with lightning determination. But sometimes, patience is key. Sometimes, waiting for a moment and collecting your thoughts will reveal another option. It might not be the one you want to choose, but these hidden choices reflect a player and character searching for a better solution. And it feels great when they allow you to take a breath and make a smarter, cleverer, or sneakier move.

If you've seen a trailer for As Dusk Falls, one key aspect has not yet been addressed: the art style. As Dusk Falls utilizes a gorgeous hand-painted effect, allowing for deeply expressive faces, beautiful environments, and generally fantastic snapshots. But that is what most of the game is, snapshots. These portraits and characters and the world don't move fluidly but slide between a series of still images instead. It brilliantly highlights all the essential aspects of the mood and action, but it is hard not to be distracted initially.

For those that fall into the story, you'll quickly get a sense of the rhythm of the showreel and enjoy each change of sense and subtle emotive expression. As Dusk Falls is a fantastic game, filled with secrets and surprises and entirely available to explore. You don't have to master anything to unlock everything As Dusk Falls has to offer, save for a curious mind. More so than that, As Dusk Falls gives you meaningful, varied, and genuinely exciting choices and consequences from beginning to end. And if you want an intriguing adventure, flawed characters, and the chance to repeated drop a pager, you couldn't do much better than this.

Reviewed on PC (code provided by the publisher).

The post As Dusk Falls Review – A Masterpiece Rises by Rosh Kelly appeared first on Wccftech.

Cats are masters of their domain. As an owner of two tortoiseshells myself, they've unlocked routes in our house I never knew existed, using the tiny lip of our fridge as a gateway to the top of our kitchen cupboards, bed frames as launch pads to the middle bar of our sash windows (not even the actual window sill, those daft beasts), and don't even get me started on how they managed to get onto the top of our 2cm wide shower rail that one time.

Stray, BlueTwelve Studio's cat 'em up explorathon, puts you in the paws of a similarly savvy feline protagonist. The cat itself is a marvel of digital observation, fully inhabiting all of the best cat-isms I know and love. You can scratch the backs of sofas and knead and shred carpets with alternate squeezes of the trigger buttons, meow at will, lap from dripping water bowls, topple piles of carefully stacked books and push paint cans off the edge of ledges - and, if you leave them idle long enough, they'll stretch and catch flies too tiny to be caught by the human eye. You can also play a mean game of billiards, much to the annoyance of the local robots. I wouldn't go as far as saying it loosened my jaw quite as much as when I first set eyes on Trico from The Last Guardian, all told, but I reckon if BlueTwelve had the same kind of budget and scale as GenDesign and Sony's Japan Studio did back then, then Stray's cat would be every bit the equal of that famous cat-bird-chimera.

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With speculative execution attacks remaining a stubbornly persistent vulnerability ailing modern processors, new research has highlighted an "industry failure" to adopting mitigations released by AMD and Intel, posing a firmware supply chain threat. Dubbed FirmwareBleed by Binarly, the information leaking assaults stem from the continued exposure of microarchitectural attack surfaces on the part

A prominent cybersecurity executive is calling on the U.S. government to resist the urge to match China's reported mandates around early vulnerability disclosure, warning that such a move would "meaningfully and dramatically increase the risk" of zero-day flaws landing in the wrong hands.

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Netflix has kept its platform ad-free for years, but that might change by the end of 2022. As part of its plans to make the platform more accessible for consumers to stream movies and TV shows, Netflix is working on a more affordable tier with ads.

Apple announced the new M2 MacBook Pro and MacBook Air models at its WWDC 2022 event. While the MacBook Pro was available a few days after the event, the redesigned MacBook Air with an M2 chip was released a few days ago. Last month, it was discovered that the new M2 MacBook Pro featured a single NAND storage chip. Due to this, the MacBook Pro features slower SSD performance in terms of benchmarks. Now, it has been recently discovered in a teardown video that the M2 MacBook Air also features a single NAND storage chip. Scroll down to read more details on the subject.

M2 MacBook Air Features a Single NAND Storage Chip That Slashes SSD Speeds in Benchmark Testing

The teardown of the new M2 MacBook Air is conducted by the YouTube channel Max Tech, showing how Apple has arranged the internals. While the form factor of the new M2 MacBook Air is similar to the previous version, Apple has ditched the wedged design in favor of a rectangular chassis, similar to the M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pro models. Check out more details on the M2 MacBook Air teardown.

It can be seen in the M2 MacBook Air teardown that it features a larger 52.6-watt-hour battery but it has the same 18 hours of battery life per single charge. Other than this, the teardown also reveals the logic board of the machine that houses the M2 processor. It is interesting to note that the base model of the M2 MacBook Air with 256GB of storage features a single NAND storage chip. You can check out the video below for more details.

According to the information provided by the teardown, the M2 MacBook Air features 30 percent to 50 percent slower SSD speeds in benchmark testing compared to the high-end models and the M1 MacBook Air model. Since the SSD and RAM are soldered to the logic board, it can not be upgraded at will, and instead, you will have to spend some extra bucks to get the higher-end model. Apple has shared its side of the story on the MacBook Air's performance, so be sure to check that out as well. You can check out more details on the M2 MacBook Air in our announcement post.

This is all there is to it, folks. What are your thoughts on the single NAND storage chip inside the M2 MacBook Air's base model? Are you looking to get the higher-end variant? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

The post Similar to the MacBook Pro, the M2 MacBook Air Also Features a Single NAND Storage Chip, Reveals Teardown by Ali Salman appeared first on Wccftech.

A remote career allows you to work in your space from anywhere, increasing productivity, saving commute time, work-life balance, and many more benefits. However, if not managed properly, the career choice could lead to stress, burnout, distractions, isolation, and more over-time.

Do you love cheese? Do you love nuggets? Do you love tossing things in your air fryer and seeing what will happen? Well then, let me introduce you to Cheese Nuggets, also known as “air-fried halloumi.”

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Michael Crichton's 1973 film "Westworld," for all its world-building and thematic complexity, is a simple story at its core. Its structure of a guest attending the titular resort where robot facsimiles of people programmed to fulfill the guest's every whim go haywire and start murdering the humans around them is as direct as a slasher movie, and with its technophobia combined with cynicism about humanity skirting responsibility for its actions, it can even be called quintessential Crichton.

HBO's "Westworld" series, however, is a far more complex work. Creators and showrunners Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan have a taste for playing devious games with their audience as much as the characters in the series do with each other. One need look no further than the recently aired fourth episode of season 4, which among its many twists revealed that the first few episodes of the season were not just intercutting between different characters, but different timelines. It's a sneaky trick the show has pulled before, and by this point it's clear Joy and Nolan have made obfuscation and sleight of hand a mainstay of the series.

Yet for all the new characters and ideas "Westworld" the series has dived into, the show continually demonstrates a dedication to mining its source material. In the fourth season alone, the show is drawing inspiration from not just the '73 feature, but the film's sequel (1976's "Futureworld"), a failed 1980 TV series ("Beyond Westworld") and even other works related to the creators of "Westworld."

Beyond Westworld Provides A Loose Template For The First Half Of Westworld Season 4

Airing for just a few weeks on CBS in 1980 with a scant five episodes, "Beyond Westworld" was a failed attempt to serialize the "Westworld" concept. Its place in the continuity of the films was ambiguous from the start, seemingly retconning the events of the first film from being the result of an advanced computer virus to the dastardly deeds of an evil scientist, Simon Quaid (James Wainwright). The series then followed Delos employees John Moore (Jim McMullan) and Pamela Williams (Connie Sellecca) as they attempted to thwart Quaid's plans to take over the world using robot sleeper agents in key positions.

While robot "hosts" not knowing they're really hosts has been a staple of HBO's "Westworld" from the first season, it's in the first few episodes of season 4 where the host version of Charlotte Hale/Dolores (Tessa Thompson) is seen explicitly using sleeper agent hosts to do her bidding, positioning themselves to best achieve her goal: turning the bulk of humanity into programmable and controllable beings, flipping the script and allowing the robot slaves to be the new masters. It's a plan Quaid wouldn't have the vision for in "Beyond Westworld," and the host Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and human Caleb (Aaron Paul) are a far more dynamic pair of investigative heroes than John and Pamela.

Futureworld Expanded The Westworld Concept, Laying The Groundwork For The Series

Of course, Charlotte Hale's sleeper hosts in "Westworld" season 4 aren't just any average people. Hale's plan involves replacing (or reprogramming via a parasite she's engineered within special flies who only attack humans) people of influence and authority. This is almost exactly the endgame of Dr. Morton Schneider (John Ryan) in 1976's "Futureworld."

"Futureworld," despite its flaws (such as a truly bizarre dream sequence that features the "return" of Yul Brynner's Gunslinger character from "Westworld"), is a movie that proved the "Westworld" universe had more stories in it besides technology run amok. In the film, written by Mayo Simon and George Schenck and directed by Richard T. Heffron, Delos has recovered from the "Westworld" disaster and now seeks to use a new version of the resort to lure important and influential people there so they can be scanned, murdered, and replaced with robots, the better for the corporation to literally own and run the world.

In fact, the same villainous plan has already been a part of the "Westworld" series, as seen in season 2, when it was revealed Delos had been secretly collecting and storing information on all its guests for future use. Where that information was first used against the world in the form of season 3's predictive supercomputer Rehoboam, it seems Hale is now using it (or a version of it) as originally intended, to replace and/or control the population.

Westworld Season 4's Flies Have A Possible Ancestor In The Ants Of Phase IV

The "Westworld" series' influences aren't limited to the various spinoffs and sequels to the original film, however. Prior seasons have pulled from a variety of source material for plotlines and visual references, from the works of author Philip K. Dick to the films of Sergio Leone to the "Grand Theft Auto" games, as mentioned in this 2016 New Yorker interview with Christopher Nolan and Lisa Joy.

While the writers haven't confirmed it, season 4's parasite-ridden flies — themselves a clever callback to the inciting incident of the series — may be partially inspired by the 1974 film "Phase IV." The movie — the only to be directed by prolific graphic designer Saul Bass — concerns a pair of scientists investigating a mysterious evolution of the planet's ant population, with the insects building enigmatic structures and attempting to communicate some message while manipulating events toward some unknown goal.

Although the ending of the film is left highly ambiguous, it seems the newly evolved ants are attempting to evolve humanity, too — if they want to accept being changed, that is. Bass' original ending contained a surrealistic sequence in which human beings who seemingly refuse such evolution are reduced to being programmed and experimented on, turned into slaves much like Hale's human victims. In any case, not only are the agents of transformation in "Phase IV" and "Westworld" season 4 both insects, but the screenwriter of "Phase IV" is Mayo Simon, co-writer of "Futureworld."

The Future Of Westworld May Still Lie In The Past

One theme of the "Westworld" series involves humans and hosts stuck in "loops," whether referring to their personalities allowing them to repeat the same mistakes, or history at large repeating itself. It's no surprise to realize the future of the show will likely involve elements from the past, whether it's directly tied to the "Westworld" universe or not.

Fans have name-checked "Futureworld" in their theories before, especially during the second season. At the start of season 4, "Futureworld" made a resurgence on Reddit, with people speculating that the woman known as Christina (Evan Rachel Wood) is secretly living in another park that's meant to emulate a future time period, as in the '76 film.

The fourth episode of season 4 somewhat confirms this, albeit with a nasty twist: Christina's world isn't a Delos park for human guests, but a cage for hapless human beings who've been transformed by Hale's flies and kept under her control. As the first episode of the season hinted at, Hale likely allows free-thinking hosts to visit the city as a similar tourist destination. In this way, this new primary time period for the series is simultaneously "Futureworld" and the plans of its villains made manifest, a future where the world is under the control of the powerful who have access to whatever and whoever they want.

Who knows where the back half of season 4 will take "Westworld" — elements of "Mad Max" and "Matrix" films are in place, with a conflict brewing between a scrappy resistance force and Hale's controlling forces. We'll find out soon enough, but if you're impatient, check out "Futureworld," "Phase IV" or "Beyond Westworld" for potential clues.

Investigate 1996's "Westworld 2000" first-person shooter computer game (complete with FMV!) at your own risk, however.

Read this next: The 14 Best Sci-Fi Shows On Amazon Prime

The post How Westworld Season 4 is Borrowing From the Franchise's Long, Bizarre Past appeared first on /Film.

Spoiler: It's also pretty bleak.

The first gaming and synthetic performance benchmarks of Intel's Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake 5.5 GHz CPU have been leaked by Extreme Player at Bilibili (via HXL).

Intel's Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake Is 5% Faster Than Core i9-12900K Alder Lake on Average In Leaked Gaming Benchmarks

The Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU tested in the leaked benchmarks is a QS sample that features 24 cores and 32 threads in an 8 P-Core and 16 E-Core configuration. The CPU carries a total of 36 MB of L3 cache and 32 MB of L2 cache for a combined 68 MB of 'Smart Cache. It also comes with a base (PL1) TDP of 125W & an MTP of around 250W.

This chip is running around the same 3.0 GHz base and 5.5 GHz boost clocks that we saw in the previous benchmarks by the same leaker. The final chip is expected to hit single-core boost clocks of up to 5.7-5.8 GHz though that remains to be seen till the final variant makes it to the market.

In terms of performance, we have more detailed gaming and synthetic benchmarks with the Intel Core i9-13900K (5.5 GHz) and Core i9-12900K (4.9 GHz) running at their stock frequencies on a Z690 platform with 32 GB of DDR5-6400 memory and a GeForce RTX 3090 Ti graphics card. The Core i9-13900K already has a 12.2% clock speed advantage over the Core i9-12900K so it should be faster by default even if the architecture is the same. The extra uplift comes from the increased cache as it gets over a 50% bump (68 MB vs 44 MB).

Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K vs Alder Lake Core i9-12900K Synthetic Benchmarks (via Extreme Player):

The gaming performance was tested in various titles at 2160p, 1440p, and 1080p resolutions. The average performance improvement seems to be around 5-10% across all three resolutions for the Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU versus its Core i9-12900K Alder Lake predecessors. There are only a few cases where the chip showed huge gains. The cache and higher clocks really seem to be benefitting the minimum frame rate with around 25-30% jumps in a few titles such as PUBG, Forza Horizon 5, and up to 70-80% gains in Red Dead Redemption 2.

The same was the case with the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D which not only saw average performance go up with its extra 3D V-Cache but the minimum FPS numbers also went up quite a bit thanks to the increased cache. Notably, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D offered a much bigger cache size compared to the Raptor Lake cache bump (vs Alder Lake CPUs).

Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K vs Alder Lake Core i9-12900K Gaming Benchmarks (via Extreme Player):

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Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K Full Gaming Benchmark Performance Breakdown:

One interesting comparison that has been made is the power consumption figures where the Intel Core i9-13900K consumes up to 52% higher in games than the Core i9-12900K and an average of 20% higher power consumption across all three resolutions tested. This means that the next-gen Raptor Lake CPU lineup is going to be more power-hungry than Alder Lake, even in games. The breakdown of average FPS at each resolution is as follows:

• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1080p: 4.22% Faster Performance on Average
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1440p: 6.97% Faster Performance on Average
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 2160p: 3.30% Faster Performance on Average
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K All Res Avg - 4.83% Faster

As for the minimum FPS, the breakdown at each resolution is as below:

• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1080p: 27.93% Faster Minimum FPS
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1440p: 21.83% Faster Minimum FPS
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 2160p: 12.82% Faster Minimum FPS
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K All Res Min Avg: 20.86% Faster

And finally, we have the maximum FPS breakdown for each resolution as listed below:

• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1080p: 6.29% Faster Maximum FPS
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1440p: 4.42% Faster Maximum FPS
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 2160p: 2.58% Faster Maximum FPS
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K All Res Max Avg: 4.43% Faster

Following are all of these results as compiled by @Harukaze5719:

Breaking down the power consumption figures for each resolution tested, we get the following results for the Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K:

• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1080p: 19.1% Higher Power Consumption
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1440p: 19.8% Higher Power Consumption
• Intel Core i9-13900K vs Core i9-12900K at 1440p: 26.2% Higher Power Consumption

Intel Raptor Lake Core i9-13900K vs Alder Lake Core i9-12900K Power Consumption (via Extreme Player):

Intel 12th Gen Alder Lake-S & 13th Gen Raptor Lake-S Desktop CPU Comparison (Preliminary):

CPU Name	P-Core Count	E-Core Count	Total Core / Thread	P-Core Base / Boost (Max)	P-Core Boost (All-Core)	E-Core Base / Boost	E-Core Boost (All-Core)	Cache	TDP	MSRP
Intel Core i9-13900K	8	16	24 / 32	TBA / TBA?	TBA	TBA	TBA	68 MB	125W (PL1) 228W (PL2)	TBA
Intel Core i9-12900K	8	8	16 / 24	3.2 / 5.2 GHz	4.9 GHz (All Core)	2.4 / 3.9 GHz	3.7 GHz (All Core)	30 MB	125W (PL1) 241W (PL2)	$599 US
Intel Core i7-13700K	8	8	16 / 24	TBA / TBA?	TBA	TBA	TBA	54 MB	125W (PL1) 228W (PL2)	TBA
Intel Core i7-12700K	8	4	12 / 20	3.6 / 5.0 GHz	4.7 GHz (All Core)	2.7 / 3.8 GHz	3.6 GHz (All Core)	25 MB	125W (PL1) 190W (PL2)	$419 US
Intel Core i5-13600K	6	8	14 / 20	TBA / TBA?	TBA	TBA	TBA	44 MB	125W (PL1) 228W (PL2)	TBA
Intel Core i5-12600K	6	4	10 / 16	3.7 / 4.9 GHz	4.5 GHz (All Core)	2.8 / 3.6 GHz	3.4 GHz (All Core)	20 MB	125W (PL1) 150W (PL2)	$299 US

The Intel Core i9-13900K delivered around 10% faster single-threaded and 35% faster multi-thread performance on average versus the Core i9-12900K in the previously leaked benchmarks. Overall, it looks like the CPU will be faster than the Ryzen 9 7950X in workload-specific tasks while being on par in gaming benchmarks. But with AMD releasing its Ryzen 7000 3D V-Cache chips based on the same Zen 4 core architecture later this year, Intel's gaming crown, if they manage to grab it from Zen 4, will be short-lived.

The Intel 13th Gen Raptor Lake Desktop CPUs including the flagship Core i9-13900K is expected to launch in October on the Z790 platform. The CPUs will be going up against AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPU lineup which also launches in Fall 2022.

The post Intel Core i9-13900K Raptor Lake CPU Gaming & Synthetic Performance Benchmarks Leaked, 5% Faster Than Core i9-12900K On Average by Hassan Mujtaba appeared first on Wccftech.

The National Park Service official twitter just posted this awesome video, taken from a live cam from Brooks Falls, Katmai National Park, Alaska. Watch these bears living their best lives. While a few enjoy standing in the water in the background, one frisky fella does an amazing belly flop from a little ledge into the water below. — Read the rest

This week we're a little all over the place but we've got a lot of games to talk about, including Undergrave, Eyes in the Dark, Stacklands, HYPERCHARGE: Unboxed, Powerwash Simulator, Prey and more, and exactly one email.  This week's music:  Paramore - Misery Business (live at the congress theatre)

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From the striking open credits, where we see a group of giggling children torturing a pair of scorpions with a swarm of angry ants, it's clear that "The Wild Bunch" is a movie on a mission. There is no innocence left in this bug-eat-bug world, it says right off the bat, and the gleeful nastiness of the kids foreshadows the notorious shootouts that will follow.

Sam Peckinpah's bleak, elegiac film hit theaters in June 1969, around the height of the Vietnam War. The director saw his film as an allegory for the conflict beamed into the homes of millions of Americans every night, and he wanted his savage epic to purge audiences of their love for the largely bloodless violence they normally saw on their screens. While the Italian spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci pushed the envelope in terms of bloody shootouts and antiheroic characters, their American counterparts were still largely rooted in the template of classic Hollywood Westerns.

Peckinpah was a fierce, combative, abusive, alcoholic, ultra-macho director, so naturally his idea of curing audiences was by giving them one of the most shockingly violent Hollywood Westerns ever made. At a time when kids not all that much older than the children in the opening sequence were getting shipped off to Vietnam to die, he told it as he saw it: There is nothing fun or glorious about violence, and the real Old West wasn't just games. To hammer the point home, "The Wild Bunch" culminates in a bravura massacre set piece that pushed the director and his crew to the limits of their creativity and patience.

So What Happens In The Wild Bunch Again?

The year is 1913. Gang leader Pike (William Holden) is in town with his bunch of aging outlaws for a classic "one last job." Their target is a railway office and a stash of silver, but the heist is interrupted by Deke (Robert Ryan), Pike's former partner in crime, and his posse of sweaty bounty hunters. A massive firefight breaks out, and many innocent townsfolk are caught in the deadly crossfire before Pike escapes with what's left of his gang amid the chaos.

Discovering that their loot was a worthless decoy, they duck across the border into Mexico and head to the hometown of Angel (Jaime Sánchez), their youngest member. There, they learn of the ruthless General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez), whose troops have been raiding the village for supplies. Pike and the gang cut a deal with Mapache to rob a U.S. munitions train in exchange for gold. The holdup is a success, but Angel is captured and tortured by the general's men for stealing a crate of weapons to help the villagers defend themselves.

When Mapache refuses the gang's offer to buy Angel's freedom, the remaining four men tool up and decide to bust him out of the general's compound by force, striding gravely toward their fate. They know they are doomed, but with their weary sense of honor, they decide to go out with all guns blazing anyway.

The grand finale of "The Wild Bunch" is the appropriately titled "Battle of Bloody Porch" sequence, a cacophonous showdown between the heavily outgunned gang and hundreds of the general's troops. To put it all together, it needed patience, craft, and a ridiculous amount of squibs.

A Symphony Of Carnage

The Battle of Bloody Porch is a dazzling symphony of carnage that spans five brutal minutes and over 300 edits. The sequence took 12 days to film, using around 10,000 squibs packed with blood and raw meat to create the devastating effect of hot lead ripping through vulnerable human flesh. To create the sense of time stretching or contracting, Peckinpah used a multi-camera setup running film at different speeds, from 24 to 120 frames per second (via Cinephilia Beyond). 

Just the sheer logistics of costuming so many extras was mind-boggling, with hundreds of outfits requiring mending, cleaning, and drying before the next take. As costumer Gordon Dawson explained:

"All the blood hits on the wall had to be cleaned up every time. All those people who just ran in and got shot, now we're going to shoot it again, and they're going to get shot again. They've got to come back in, in clean clothes. I don't know. It was like five or six days this way. And then they say, 'OK, boys, turn it around, we're going back the other way.'"

The hard work paid off with one of the greatest shootouts committed to celluloid. "The Wild Bunch" came out a few months before "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," and the films couldn't be more different. While George Roy Hill's crowd-pleaser ends with our lovable rogues freeze-framed in heroic poses, there was nothing left to the imagination in the Wild Bunch's fatalistic blaze of glory. Sam Peckinpah's antiheroes were men out of time as the Old West faded into modernity, cold-blooded killers still bound by tenuous notions of loyalty and honor, and who would die brutally for it.

The Aftermath

"The Wild Bunch" was predictably greeted with hand-wringing in certain quarters due to the extreme violence, but critics largely saw it for the work of art it undoubtedly is. One of the film's harshest critics was Sam Peckinpah himself; despite his reputation for bloodthirsty machismo, he admitted to Barry Norman he had gone too far in pushing his message:

"I made 'The Wild Bunch' because I still believed in the Greek theory of catharsis. That by seeing this we would be purged by pity and fear and get this out of our system. I was wrong."

Afterward, he regretted the decision. While his goal was to make people question their enjoyment of cinematic violence, it troubled him that many viewers were repulsed by it. As he later told Roger Ebert:

"To tell you the truth, I really cannot stand to see the film myself anymore. It is too much an emotional thing. I saw it last night, but I do not want to see it again for perhaps five years."

The legacy of "The Wild Bunch" is a complicated one. If Peckinpah's intention was to turn audiences off to violence by making them sick of it, his film paved the way for even more blood and violence on our screens. Perhaps only the opening battle of "Saving Private Ryan" has matched it for ferocity, virtuosity, and moral purpose since. On the flip side, it's hard to imagine scenes of wanton carnage played for scares, laughs, or pure entertainment value ("Trash," according to Peckinpah) making it to the screen if "The Wild Bunch" hadn't opened the floodgates in the first place.

Read this next: The 20 Best Westerns Of All Time

The post Shooting The Wild Bunch's The Battle of Bloody Porch Scene Was Exhausting appeared first on /Film.

The last few years have been filled with examples of the “Pendulum Effect”, where trends swing from one extreme to another before settling at an equilibrium, somewhere in the middle. Think about it from an IT and security perspective. 

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"Game of Thrones," the HBO adaptation of the popular fantasy series from author George R.R. Martin might have a controversial legacy, but it is undoubtedly a historic triumph in television. The series had a lengthy, tedious journey from book to screen, from a poorly failed pilot to eight successful seasons that earned raucous critical praise. The show paved the way for the careers of its many stars, especially Kit Harington, who had been cast in the role of Jon Snow after he graduated from drama school, at 19 years old.

Today, Harington is easily one of the biggest "Game of Thrones" stars. Painted as the ultimate brooding warrior who dresses in black and wants to be taken seriously, Jon Snow's character was a fan favorite throughout the show, and it's thanks to the actor's terrific efforts. That wasn't always the case, though. Harington didn't always walk around with a solemn look on his face and seriousness in his stride. In the failed, unreleased pilot for "Game of Thrones," Harington wore a wig and sported a clean-shaven "baby" face for his character. 

While we don't know how bad the episode was, it's said to be bad enough for "Game of Thrones" showrunners to have playfully intimidated Harington with it.

The Failed Pilot Is Painful To Watch

Before "Game of Thrones" released the cluttered, unhinged spectacle that is its final season, the show had a failed pilot. And although it was never displayed to the world, showrunners D. B. Weiss and David Benioff aren't afraid of openly commenting on how flawed the episode was. They've even referred to the experience of watching the pilot as "painful." 

While that sounds rather disastrous, D. B. Weiss and David Benioff made the most of it: they used the old pilot tape to keep Kit Harington in line, in case he ever pissed them off.

In an interview with The Guardian, Harington revealed that the co-creators often sent him a "screengrab" from the episode to keep him in check.

"They say, if I ever piss them off too much, they'll release it on YouTube. Every now and then, they send me a screengrab, just as a threat."

Years later, when Weiss and Benioff were done re-working the pilot episode, they had recast characters and filmed most of its content all over again. One of the many changes made to then-23-year-old Harington for his character included him growing out his famous black curls and sprouting a beard.

"Game of Thrones" had been transformed into something darker, grittier, and more violent, all elements critical for it to evolve into a fantasy show for grownups. As the seasons went on, Jon Snow became the soul of the story, with both characters and plotlines revolving around him at the center. The rest is history.

Read this next: 13 Fantasy Films That Never Got Sequels

The post The Game Of Thrones Showrunners Had A Unique Way Of Keeping Kit Harington 'In Line' appeared first on /Film.

Laws might change, but it can takes years, or even generations, to change a society and how it operates. What's bred in the bone cannot be easily overturned, and even as some people might techncially have the hard-fought freedom they are entitled to, old habits can die hard, and take those who seek proper justice with them. And there are forces too invested in the old ways to stand so readily aside. Good Madam (originally titled Mlungu Wam) looks at a deep and dark symbiotic relationship between white employer and black employee, the latest in a long line of generational servitude and its unhealthy effect on all it surrounds, and how it seems only one person can see the truth of its insidious nature. Director and...

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Microsoft seems to be preparing to change the release cadence for new Windows versions, according to a new report by Windows Central‘s Zac Bowden. Microsoft is apparently going back to the old way of releasing new Windows versions, releasing major new Windows versions every three years or so, meaning we could be getting Windows 12 in 2024.

According to the report, Microsoft has seemingly canceled what would have been next year’s major update (known as Sun Valley 3) – and instead will wait for 2024, three years after the original release of Windows 11 – to release the next version of Windows (presumably Windows 12). However, that doesn’t mean Windows 11 users will be left with nothing new to try out in the meantime.

Microsoft is going to be dropping new features for current Windows 11 users, so some of the features Insiders get to try out will make their way to the general public before the next major Windows release. These feature drops will happen every few months, up to four times a year, according to the report. We’ve seen some glimpses of this when Microsoft brought weather information to the taskbar earlier this year. These new features are referred to as “Moments”, and many of the features that were planned for next year’s major update, will be released this way for users running Windows 11 version 22H2.

It’s clear that Microsoft doesn’t always need to release major Windows updates to enable new features. For example, the Windows Subsystem for Android was essentially just an app you can install on Windows 11, and it rolled out a few months after the OS was first launched. At the same time, this new release cadence can make each new version of Windows more exciting, since there’s more time to build new features into each release, plus there’s more time to find and squash any bugs before general availability.

Still, this is a big shift from the path Microsoft has been on for the past few years. Since Windows 10 was introduced in 2015, we generally got two major new versions per year, and with Windows 11, Microsoft said it would release a major new version every year. That was just one year ago, so this is certainly an unexpected change in direction. Either way, Microsoft has yet to officially announce this change, which means internal plans could still change.

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Souce: Windows Central

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My life is a house of carbs. I love them all and I don’t plan on stopping, but sometimes when my precious breads and cakes go stale or boring I try to give them a second life—not just to reduce waste, but because it gives me an excuse to make French toast.

This familiar but versatile breakfast dish is sweet, custardy, and satisfying, and it works best with stale bread. Most types of stale bread, that is. To choose the best bread, cake, or pastry to turn into French toast—oh yeah, this meal goes way beyond just bread, folks—you need to ask yourself a few questions.

How to choose a good French toast bread

Consider the crumb

If you’ve got stale hot dog buns or old Panettone staring at you, then you’re in luck: Both of these can be successfully French-toastified even though they are wildly different in presentation and flavor. They both work because of their “crumb,” or texture.

The crumb of a particular bread or cake refers to its inside structure. If you think of bread with a tight crumb, then it has small holes that are evenly dispersed. Bread with an open crumb, or an open structure, has larger, more irregular air pockets. Since French toast involves soaking up a substantial amount of sweet, eggy custard (or eggnog), the best bread for soaking should have a tight crumb. An open crumb, like the large pockets in ciabatta or a baguette, won't catch as much custard.

What is the crust like?

My least favorite French toast has been with a baguette. The crust of that lean bread is meant to be tough and chewy, and that doesn't change after the custard soak. Similarly, if you have a leftover rustic loaf of sourdough, you need to beware of this. That crust is basically a thick skin around the outside of the bread. Enriched breads—one's with butter, eggs, and sugar in the dough—have a thin, delicate skin, like challah and brioche. These breads are great French toast breads. Loaves that have thick, tough crusts are not ideal. No matter how long you soak the bread for, that skin will always be chewy.

Although a chewy crust definitely interrupts the texture of a soft, custardy bite, you may very well be into that sort of thing. I like to go after a plateful with little else than a fork, and a thick crust is going to require some elbow grease. You can mitigate that, however, by using a serrated knife and sawing the crusts off the slices before the soak, or even scoring the crust.

Will your bread fall apart?

Structure is a big factor when you know the carb in question is about to sit in a puddle of egg and dairy, and then get griddled or even grilled. A good quality French toast needs to be indestructible in the face of liquid and frying, while maintaining its pillowy reputation. Look for breads that have a good gluten structure. This doesn’t necessarily mean tough or chewy, though; brioche is a favorite for this application because it’s soft, enriched, and usually comes in a loaf you can slice as thick as you want. It works because it has a sturdy structure—a solid gluten framework with some extra help from the eggs in the dough.

My favorite types of bread for French toast

My recommendations will always be thick slices of enriched bread, like challah, brioche, milk bread, babka, or Hawaiian rolls. These breads all exhibit the necessary traits of great French toast bread: tight crumb, thin crust, and structural integrity. Store bough loaves may come pre-sliced, which is okay, but a bit more predisposed to falling apart.

My general rule is, the thinner the slice, the faster the soak. If you can, drop by your nearest bread bakery and see if they can give you unsliced loaves of bread. Then you can slice them to your desired thickness at home. Use thicker slices to make stuffed French toast, or explore the textural contrast of crispy and creamy with crème brûlée French toast.

Breads aren’t the only carbs you can use for French toast

Breads with a soft crust are well suited for French toast because they can handle the process without falling apart, but that doesn’t mean breads are the only carbs that work.

Some cakes and pastries are sturdy enough to withstand a quick custard soak and a splash in the frying pan, too. Blueberry muffins and loaf cakes are quick breads that have enough structure to hold up; just do a light soak in the custard or they risk coming apart before they see the griddle.

The post She Will – Movie Review (4/5) appeared first on Heaven of Horror.

This week, NASA released the first images from the Jame Webb Space Telescope, giving us a never-before seen view of the cosmos. This towering achievement for humanity allows us to see further out into space, and further back in time, than we have ever been able to before. We can now see the first stars to ever exist,…

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M. Night Shyamalan's "Old" has a premise bound to creep everyone out — aging a whole lifetime within a single day. It's an amazing set-up, but it fails to stick the landing. The conclusion of "Old" rushes to tie up every unresolved plot point so quickly that none of the explanations feel satisfying. Despite everything that the movie does right, the last twenty minutes ruin what could have been one of the most memorable horror movies of the decade.

In the 2021 thriller, a family facing health and marital troubles takes a vacation at a secluded beach resort. The family — which consists of father Guy, mother Prisca, and children Trent and Maddox — is soon led to a private beach with a small group of other guests, where their aging processes are suddenly accelerated by an unknown force.

As the film progresses, the group realizes that they are unable to surpass the rock barrier that lines the interior edge of the beach. They conclude that the rocks are the cause of their aging. Just when they have lost all hope, Trent remembers an encoded message given to him by the hotel manager's nephew. He decrypts the message and it says "my uncle doesn't like the coral." Trent and his sister Maddox — the only surviving members of the party — take this as a sign and escape to safety through a batch of coral. As the siblings make their escape, a new layer of the movie is revealed.

It Has You On The Edge Of Your Seat — At First

The group was placed on the beach by a group of scientists, with Shyamalan himself playing a guard who watches the folks trapped on the beach. The scientists use the beach to test the life-long effects of medications within a single day. They justify the deaths of their test subjects because they use data to put life-saving drugs onto the market more quickly. Their underground operations are foiled later that same day when Trent and his sister escape. Trent immediately alerts the police to what happened on the beach and the lab is thrown into chaos. Shyamalan is known for his twist endings, but this twist ties every loose end in a far-too-neat bow.

"Old" starts out as an exciting movie with mystical elements and terrifying body horror. A woman with a bone disease becomes a deformed, spidery creature. A little girl becomes a pregnant teenager within a day. A man loses his mind and murders someone. These events all feel virtually inexplicable at first, but the scientific explanation is unraveled slowly. The characters learn that they are each suffering from different health conditions and that the rocks are holding them hostage. When Trent and Maddox are the only two left standing, this steadily-paced storytelling goes into double-time, and every unresolved issue is wrapped up in rapid sequence.

In The Last Twenty Minutes, The Trouble Starts

The ending takes its first turn for the worst when Trent remembers the note that his friend wrote him. His sudden memory feels totally out of the blue. If Trent had decoded this message too early, he may never have been able to deduce its meaning. The note about how the hotel manager "doesn't like the coral" inspires Trent to immediately assume the coral is a path to safety. This feels like a bit of a stretch, even after the rest of the ending is revealed. Maybe the hotel manager didn't like the coral because the test subjects would die swimming out to it, costing him precious data? These narrative conveniences feel lazy, but they definitely could have been overlooked if not for what comes next.

The most mystical elements of "Old" — the powers of the coral and the rocks — remain totally untouched by explanation. Shyamalan keeps the biggest mystery of the film open-ended, chalking it up to the wonders of the natural world. The group of main characters is gathered together and placed on the beach for a scientific reason. This begs a more thorough scientific explanation for the rapid aging effects of the rocks and the purifying effects of the coral. Instead, the director leaves us guessing.

And Just Like That, It's Over

When the scientists are introduced, it opens up a whole new world within the universe of "Old." The lab is intriguing and morally complex, but we see very little of it. It would have been interesting to understand more about the scientists, but they are introduced quickly and rushed offscreen. 

Since over seventy trials are said to have been executed in quick succession, it seems unlikely that the police or even the FBI would not have caught wind of these operations before. At first, the audience might assume that the government has allowed the scientists to conduct their experiments for the greater good. How else would they have managed to kill seventy groups of presumably wealthy people, including full families with young children, without alerting the authorities? 

This possibility is quickly ruled out when Trent alerts a police officer. The scientists abandon the lab and it's clear that they won't be coming back. It's disappointing — and wraps everything up much too quickly. It would have been much more interesting if the nefarious goings-on in the lab were backed by the government. Did the government turn the other way, sacrificing the few to save the many? Did they have a hand in the dealings themselves? Could this have gone all the way to the top? Sadly, the buck stopped with the scientists, condensing what could have been an elaborate global conspiracy into the walls of the hotel. We'll just have to make do with the rest of the movie, which works much better than its clunky, rushed conclusion. 

Read this next: The 50 Best Documentaries You Can Watch On Netflix Right Now (July 2022)

The post Old Wrapped Things Up A Little Too Neatly appeared first on /Film.

Commercial lobster diver Michael Packard claims he was scooped up by a humpback whale while he was out for a dive last summer in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Speaking about his experience, he told a local Boston television station, “I felt this huge bump and everything went dark. Then I felt around, and I realized there…

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Apple's latest and greatest MacBook Air with an M2 chip is finally here as reviews keep coming in with mixed insights. The new MacBook Air with Apple's custom M2 chip comes with a major redesign and a brand-new display housing the notch up top. We have previously seen how the base M2 MacBook Pro model features slower SSD speeds in benchmarks due to the single NAND storage chip. It looks like Apple has stretched the approach to the M2 MacBook Air as well as it also features slower SSD speeds in benchmarks. Scroll down to read more details on the subject.

Apple's Latest M2 MacBook Air With 256GB Storage Features Slower SSD Speeds in Benchmarks Due to a Single NAND Chip

The base model of the M2 MacBook Air with 256GB of storage capacity features a single NAND chip and it will reflect in the benchmarks. However, the real-world performance might vary depending on the type of workload. It was uncovered last month that the base model of the M2 MacBook Pro with 256GB of storage featured up to 50 percent slower read speeds and up to 30 percent slower write speeds compared to the previous model with the same configuration due to a single NAND chip.

While the new M2 MacBook Air shares the same fate as the Pro model when it comes to SSD speeds in benchmarks, Apple has shared its side of the story. In a statement to The Verge, Apple stated that even though the benchmarks show a difference compared to the previous model, the real-world performance is "event faster."

Thanks to the performance increases of M2, the new MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are incredibly fast, even compared to Mac laptops with the powerful M1 chip. These new systems use a new higher density NAND that delivers 256GB storage using a single chip. While benchmarks of the 256GB SSD may show a difference compared to the previous generation, the performance of these M2 based systems for real world activities are even faster.

While Apple shares all glory for the new M2 MacBook Air, we will wait for the relevant tests to see how the machine performs with day-to-day tasks. Previously, we covered how the M2 MacBook Pro is slower than the M1 MacBook Pro with the same 256Gb storage capacity when it comes to real-world usage. Nonetheless, the updated design and form factor of the notebook is a more than welcome addition.

This is all there is to it, folks. Are you planning to get your hands on the base model of the M2 MacBook Air? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

The post Base M2 MacBook Air Features Slower SSD Speeds in Benchmarks, Apple Responds by Ali Salman appeared first on Wccftech.

Earlier this year, Google announced ChromeOS Flex, a tool that lets anyone take an old Windows or Mac laptop and give it new life by installing Chrome OS. After launching ChromeOS Flex in “early access,” Google now says that Flex is ready to “scale broadly” to more Macs and PCs. 

The basics remain the same. You can visit the ChromeOS Flex website to make a bootable Chrome OS installation on a USB drive to ensure that your system works properly, and you can then fully replace your old computer’s OS with Chrome OS if everything checks out. As for what’s new, Google says it has tested compatibility with over 400 different devices. That was part of the intention of the early access program — it let Google gather a ton of user feedback and fix some 600 bugs that were identified over the last few months. 

While anyone can install ChromeOS Flex, Google is mostly positioning this as a tool for businesses or schools to extend the usefulness of older hardware. To that end, IT departments can actually deploy Flex over their networks rather than update every computer with a USB drive. Google also notes that Flex devices can be managed using the Chrome Enterprise Upgrade, which lets departments manage apps and policies across a whole fleet of computers. 

This all comes about a year and a half after Google bought Neverware, a company that first had the idea of letting users take old computers and turn them into Chromebooks. Now that ChromeOS Flex is being deployed widely, Neverware’s CloudReady software will be transitioned to Flex in the coming weeks and the standalone CloudReady product will be shut down. That shouldn’t be a major issue for anyone, though, as Flex is now stable and has some features that CloudReady didn’t, like Google Assistant support. 

In February this year, Google introduced Chrome OS Flex — a modified version of Chrome OS that you can install on most PCs and Macs. At the time, the company offered an early version of the new software experience to select “large customers” and internal employees. Now, Chrome OS Flex is finally available for a broader audience.

Chrome OS Flex offers the same software experience as Chrome OS on Chromebooks. It’s a lightweight operating system that supports the Google Assistant, Family Link accounts, Smart Lock, Instant Tethering, and Nearby Share. Unlike Chrome OS, it’s compatible with a wide range of PCs and Macs, making it the perfect choice for enterprises or anyone with outdated hardware.

The new Chrome OS Flex release also comes with a couple of improvements based on the feedback received during the initial trial run. This includes additional device compatibility, stability improvements, and more.

You only need a USB drive to try out Chrome OS Flex on your device. Simply head over to the Chrome OS Flex support page, create the USB installer and boot your device using the USB installer. On the Welcome to Chrome OS Flex screen, select Get Started and then pick “Try it first” on the following page. Follow the on-screen instructions to try the software experience on your device.

If you end up liking it, you can install Chrome OS Flex on your device using the same USB installer. Select “Install Chrome OS Flex” on the Start using Chrome OS Flex screen instead of “Try it first,” and follow the on-screen instructions to set install it on your machine. Before you do any of that, make sure to check the Chrome OS Flex certified models list to see if your device is compatible or not.

While Google has previously said that it will make Chrome OS Flex available for personal use, we’re not sure if it is available for individuals at the moment. We’ll update this post with more details as soon as we learn more.

The post Chrome OS Flex is finally ready for a wider rollout appeared first on XDA.

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