Day 2 of CES 2019:
Toshiba has 16TB HDDs now. The MG08 will go on sale in "several months from now", which will probably translate to showing up at your local MSY's filthy showroom floor in November.
Bose showed off a very cool noise cancellation system for cars, that if it works as advertised, will be a must have for my next ride. The first QuietComfort-enabled cars will hit the road in 2021.
LG have a 49" ultra-wide display with a lovely 5120x1440 resolution. In effect it's the same as two 27" 1440p monitors side by side, but without the bezel in the middle. I hopoe they send me one to review.
Samsung's got a monitor with a built in desk clamp so you can reclaim the space the stand would otherwise use, without needing to buy a janky 3rd party monitor arm. I wish Apple would sell the iMac in this config.
AMD announced 7nm GPUs and CPUs for 2019. The Radeon VII graphics card is coming in early Feb and looks to be a compute-centric banger. 3rd-gen Ryzen desktop CPUs will be out mid-year and will perform around the same as Intel's i9-9900K, but with half the power draw, which is amazing.
Sony & LG will be bringing AirPlay 2 and HomeKit support to some of their 2019 TVs. You'll be able to stream video and audio to the TV and add it to your HomeKit setup so the TV can interact with your other HomeKit stuff.
Telstra announced at CES that it'll have real 5G smartphones (not fake 5G devices like AT&T, fucking idiots) for sale to use on its network "in the first half of this year".
Elon Musk was in China recently to attend the ground breaking ceremony at a new Tesla factory in Shanghai - Gigafactory 3 (Giga 1 is the Nevada factory building batteries, Giga 2 is building photovoltaic cells in Buffalo). This factory will predominately supply the Chinese market with Model 3s and eventually the Model Y (a small SUV based on the 3). It also gets around the high tariffs currently applied to US made cars imported into China, but this factory was probably planned to happen regardless. Oh and Elon entertained the idea of releasing a sex tape of his ex-girlfriend Grimes when someone on Twitter asked. What a nice bloke.
Twitter's throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks again, with some new features like "speech bubbles, indenting, and different colors determined by whether you follow someone or are replying" coming in a beta program via the official Twitter app. They're even considering a "green bubble beside beta users' names when they’re actively online and using the app, similar to Instagram's status indicator". Speaking of Instagram, you'll soon be able to post a photo to multiple accounts at once in the iOS app. Article doesn't mention Android. Android users have to slave away posting the same picture to multiple accounts manually, the poor things.
Research out of New York and Princeton Universities has found that the older someone is, the more likely they are to share "fake news" online. Even when party affiliation or ideology is taken into consideration, "Facebook users ages 65 and older shared more than twice as many fake news articles than the next-oldest age group of 45 to 65, and nearly seven times as many fake news articles as the youngest age group (18 to 29)". The study didn't look into why this is the case, but researchers hypothesise that it's probably one of two reasons - "older people, who came to the internet later, lack the digital literacy skills of their younger counterparts" and "people experience cognitive decline as they age, making them likelier to fall for hoaxes".
Yubico is finally making a YubiKey 2FA device for iOS. "Yubico has received MFi certification, meaning Apple will officially support it as a hardware partner. To that end, the company will finally be able to make a YubiKey that fits into the iPhone and iPad’s proprietary Lightning port, giving those devices the seamless security that already works so well on PCs. On the opposite side, it will offer a USB-C connector for MacBooks". Unfortunately, "Apple does not yet natively support FIDO2, an open source standard that lets you access your online accounts simply by plugging in a hardware token rather than using a password. So if you want to use a Lightning-compatible YubiKey with Gmail, say, Google would have to provide support". Still, good to see a solution for hard 2FA on iOS.
Nvidia still haven't released graphics card drivers for macOS 10.14. According to Nvidia, this is because "Apple fully controls drivers for Mac OS. Unfortunately, NVIDIA currently cannot release a driver unless it is approved by Apple". This sucks not only for those running Hackintoshes with Nvidia GPUs (leaving them stuck on macOS 10.13), but for anyone wanting to use a sweet Nvidia card on their legit Mac via an external GPU adaptor. Nvidia's latest RTX graphics card are great for decoding 8K video in real-time, but Macs can't use them because Apple's holding up the drivers for some reason.
Car racing simulations now look so real that copyright infringement algorithms are flagging them and YouTube taking the videos down. It's mostly happening with Formula 1 videos, as F1 is the strictest on users sharing videos of the real races and the F1 games these days look so damn close to the real thing. Once a human reviews it, common sense prevails, but it's annoying for these YouTubers to have to do argue each time to get their legit content approved. Reading that article also surprised me that there's people who start off as serious simulation drivers, then progress to real racing. I didn't know that the simulation would be anything like the real driving at all.
That's it, see ya tomorrow!
--Anthony
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