Latest News - Page 923

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today confirmed plans to lay off 9,000 more workers, bringing Amazon's total mass layoff count to 27,000.

Pandemic spending has dried up, replaced in just a few short years by inflation-driven recessing spending. Consumers are tightening their belts to weather higher prices and corporations are fighting rising costs in one of the only ways they know how: job reduction.

Amazon has already displaced the jobs of18,000 people, but now it will also lay off 9,000 more people in the next few weeks. Divisions like Amazon Web Services and Twitch, the popular game streaming service, will be affected. Twitch is going to lose 400 jobs

CD Projekt may have reset development on one of its new Witcher games, a new investor filing indicates.

It appears that CD Projekt has made the decision to reboot development of one of its new Witcher games. The publisher currently has five separate Witcher projects in various stages of development, including Canis Majoris (Witcher 1 remake), the new Witcher mainline trilogy codenamed Project Polaris, and Project Sirius, a new experimental game from The Molasses Flood, a previously independent studio that made The Flame in the Flood.

This lineup may not be going according to plan. A new investor report confirms that CD Projekt has created an impairment allowance for Project Sirius, which indicates the game has been scrapped in its current statement. CD Projekt intends to charge the current amount of Project Sirius' development costs of 42.9 million PLN (about $9.7 million) to its 2022 and 2023 impairment allowance. CD Projekt will recognize these charges as a loss and write them off.

After 16 years of streaming innovation, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear is leaving the company.

In a shocking announcement, Twitch CEO Emmett Shear confirmed he will be leaving the company and will no longer lead the billion-dollar streaming service into the future. The CEO, who started working at Twitch in 2006, says the he'd like to spend more time with his family: "Twitch is ready to move out of the house and venture alone."

Current Twitch President Dan Clancy will now take over for Shear as Twitch's new CEO, and Shear will stay on as an advisor for the company.

The NBA has warned about a data breach that has resulted in the theft of some personal details.

That personal data was stolen from what's described as a third-party newsletter service. Those affected have reportedly been contacted by the NBA and notified of the breach, and that some personal info was leaked, including names and email addresses.

However, the NBA clarified that its own systems had not been hacked, and that usernames, passwords, and suchlike have not been compromised.

Microsoft's Edge browser has been on a run of adding various bits and pieces of functionality of late, and the firm isn't letting up, with another new feature having been spotted: a crypto wallet.

The Edge team might be introducing a built-in way of managing your crypto assets right in the browser, as flagged up in a tweet by well-known leaker Albacore on Twitter (spotted by Bleeping Computer).

This feature consists of a 'non-custodial' crypto wallet (meaning you, not Microsoft, are in complete control of the funds within), supporting multiple Ethereum accounts (and maybe Bitcoin in the future).

Windows 11 can be run on unsupported PCs, but Microsoft isn't keen on you doing this and has recently doubled-down on a policy of shaming systems that don't meet the official spec requirements.

As you may have noticed in the past, Microsoft's method of shaming such PCs is to put an annoying watermark on the desktop which is permanently there, stating 'System requirements not met' and telling the user to head to the Settings panel to find out more.

As Windows Latest reports, while this used to be a problem with PCs running preview (test) versions of Windows 11, it's increasingly being rolled out to devices in production, or in other words, those running the release version of the OS.

With releases around the corner, it looks like we've got that final confirmation on the memory makeup for the GeForce RTX 4070 and GeForce RTX 4060 - with an accidental leak coming via GIGABYTE.

It looks like version "23.03.02.01" of the company's GIGABYTE Control Center software for managing motherboards and graphics cards adds support for two new GPUs that haven't been announced. The GIGABYTE RTX 4070 AERO OC 12GB (GV-N4070AERO OC-12G), and the GIGABYTE RTX 4060 GAMING OC 8GB (GV-N4060GAMING OC-8GD).

There's been a little bit of a debate and back and forth relating to the VRAM capacities of what many see as the two mid-range options from NVIDIA, and with this, we now know that the baseline GeForce RTX 4070 will feature 12 GB of VRAM just like the GeForce RTX 4070 Ti. This is good news because, much like its predecessor, the RTX 3070, it's set to be a high-performance 1440p option.

ChatGPT has just recovered from a major global outage, with the chatbot now back online and ready to roll.

Earlier today, plenty of people complained that they couldn't use ChatGPT, across various social media sites and elsewhere. Report numbers peaked at over 1,000 on Downdetector, a useful site for checking when services are experiencing issues.

The problem began at 3:45am CDT, and now appears largely resolved at the time of writing (just after 7am CDT), going by Downdetector.

A new patent application filed by Apple shows the company is looking for new ways to prevent iPhone screens from being damaged when the device is dropped.

The new patent application details a new self-retracting technology that would be capable of detecting when the device is dropped and immediately initiating the closure of the screen to protect it from any potential impact. This drop detection technology, paired with what the patent describes as a release mechanism that can "automatically retract the foldable display," would give iPhone users an increased chance at keeping their phone screen from being damaged as the screen wouldn't be exposed to any surface.

Apple releasing a foldable iPhone has been rumored for several years now, with swirling's of the unconfirmed product being first reported back in 2016. Since then, Apple enthusiasts have speculated that the company is inching closer to the release of its first foldable device, especially after Samsung proved there is demand for such devices in the mobile market with its now growing range of foldable smartphones.

NASA has taken to its blog to share a new image captured by the famous Hubble Space Telescope, which honed its sensitive instruments on the globular star cluster known as Messier 55.

NASA took to its social channels to share the image and explained that Messier 55 (M55) is a loosely concentrated globular cluster that's located approximately 20,000 light years away from Earth within the constellation Sagittarius. The above image snapped by Hubble shows just a portion of M55, which stretches some 100 light years and contains an estimated 100,000 stars of 55 various types and brightness. The large collection of stars forms a spherical shape that can be traced back to the intense gravitational pull of each of the stars.

Notably, ground-based telescopes struggle to observe globular clusters such as M55 as they are hindered by light pollution. Hubble's safe position in low Earth orbit, above Earth's atmosphere, allows for the space telescope and, by extension, astronomers and scientists, to capture the globular cluster in all its glory, leading to a deeper understanding of the globular cluster itself and the stars that it contains. In particular, astronomers are interested in learning more about the evolution of stars by studying globular clusters, as the knowledge gained will translate to the star we call the Sun.

The divide between low-budget and high-budget filmmaking just got a whole lot smaller with the unveiling of Wonder Studio, a new AI-powered tool that allows filmmakers to simply replace real-life actors with CGI characters.

The new tool was recently unveiled by Wonder Dynamics founders Nikola Todorovic, and Tye Sheridan, star of Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One. The above video showcases the capabilities of Wonder Studio, where an amateur filmmaker can use their footage of an individual and replace them with a variety of different CGI characters.

The video shows Wonder Studio is as simple as dragging and dropping different CGI characters into real-life actors within the footage, while also having more in-depth options for lighting, motion, grain, color, and more. Todorovic explains that Wonder Studio has been in development for three years and is designed to automate the parts of VFX that are a necessity but don't impact the overall expression intended by the artist.

The emergence of artificial intelligence has shaken up many different industries, but one, in particular, will definitely never be the same again once the right tools are developed.

The success of OpenAI's ChatGPT, which Microsoft quickly adopted for its Bing search engine, demonstrates an immediate demand for easy-to-use machine learning technology. The various application of such a technology can't go understated, and Chinese gaming companies see the extreme value in developing AI-powered tools to generate content within their games, speeding up the overall development of each title while also reducing costs through the firing of staff that an AI has now replaced.

According to a recent article by South China Morning Post, companies such as Tencent, Giant Network, NetEase, Leihuo, and more are posting job listings for various AI-centered positions. Notably, Giant Network is offering $1.1 million yuan, or $167,000, for an AI team leader, while Leihuo and NetEase will be injecting a ChatGPT-like system into the upcoming title Justice Online, slated to launch this June.

Secure Data Recovery has posted an in-depth report on HDD reliability and durability covering all the major brands. A sample size of over 2,000 hard drives covering six manufacturers - Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi, Toshiba, Samsung, and Maxtor - shows that, on average hard drives spun for 25,233 hours before failing, which is just under three years.

To borrow a line from a movie, failure is not an option, and these results cover those drives that fail - which also interestingly indicates which HDD brands might be more reliable than others. Of the five brands tested, Maxtor and Toshiba drives offered the most "power-on" hours before failing, with the worst being Hitachi and Samsung.

The number of drives tested was also weighted based on popularity, with 47% of HDDs being Western Digital, followed by 28% of drives being Seagate. These results are for traditional platter-based HDDs, too - and not SSDs. The manufacturer breakdown is interesting because it reflects what most of us are used to seeing when buying a traditional HDD - choosing something from WD or Seagate.

The age of PCIe Gen 5 SSDs is almost upon us, even though it still feels like PCIe Gen 4 SSDs have finally hit their stride in terms of affordability and pushing the tech and speed as far as they can go. But that's the thing, in the world of PC hardware, if you can go faster - you should.

This is why we're seemingly in the midst of a PCIe Gen 5 SSD arms race, where hardware makers are looking to push read and write speeds to levels that would have seemed impossible a few short years ago. Recently, Linus Tech Tips got their hands-on such a device - the Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD, based around the Phison PS5026-E26 controller and Micron 3D NAND chips.

As expected for high-speed M2 storage, the sample featured a Crucial-branded heatsink - but the real kicker comes with preliminary results via Crystal Disk Mark storage benchmark software. Here the Crucial T700 PCIe 5.0 SSD manages to hit an impressive read speed of 12,422.43 MB/s with a write speed not that far behind at 11,857.50 MB/s.

Razer's Focus Pro 30K Optical Sensor, created in collaboration with PixArt, is one of the most impressive currently out there - which we covered in our full review of the ultralight Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro.

One of the sensor's features that Razer clearly pointed out was that surface compatibility extended to glass. A surface we don't normally associate with a high-performance gaming mouse, but hey.

This brings us to the launch of the new Razer Atlas gaming mouse mat (which retails for USD 99.99), the company's first glass gaming pad optimized for optical sensors like the one found in the DeathAdder V3 Pro. A built-to-last gaming pad made up of "premium tempered glass" that delivers an ultra-smooth surface with little to no resistance - according to Razer.

MaxSun has lifted the lid on its new MGG "Mega Gamer GPU" range, a lineup of custom GeForce RTX 4070 Ti and RTX 4080 graphics cards that up the number of fans from the usual two or three to an impressive five. And this is backed up by a funky design with an aRGB light strip or LED matrix display.

These custom cards aren't just a case of increasing the number of fans, and at a glance, they do look like they feature the standard triple-fan design seen in custom GPUs built for cooling and overclocking. You've got two additional - and small - fans on either edge of the heatsink, which we assume would make a difference in cooling the GPU hardware, and you might have to look closely to spot them.

The fans are placed on either side of a stylish ARGB strip or matrix LED display, with the overall look of the GPU featuring a very cool all-enclosed design.

Storage maker Sabrent has some great deals for its current range of SSD storage. Per the headline, the smaller 2230 form factor Sabrent Rocket 2230 1TB SSD -a size perfect for Steam Deck, Surface Pro, and NUC systems - is currently on sale via Amazon at a 41% off discount.

We reviewed this in February, dubbing it "a small form-factor powerhouse that can deliver all the performance of similarly configured SSDs three times its size." Check out our full review here.

Sabrent notes that stock is limited, and 41% equates to a sale price of USD 159.99 compared to the original price of USD 269.99. With the largest off-the-shelf Steam Deck coming in at 512GB, this is a great option to double your internal game storage using the faster read and write speeds of PCIe 4.0 M.2 - up to 5GB/s. Check out our link at the end of the article for that deal.

Square Enix is bringing its latest Final Fantasy game to Steam in an effort to sell more PC copies.

Square Enix's exclusivity contract with the Epic Games Store is now up, and Stranger of Paradise Final Fantasy Origin is coming to Steam next month. The Team Ninja-developed action RPG had been a one-year exclusive to the Epic Games Store on PC and will soon jump over to Steam, where it can sell many more copies.

The Japanese publisher has also lowered the base price of Stranger of Paradise to $39.99 on all platforms. The current-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions of the game also have the same price.

When Google's Pixel 8 smartphone rolls around, it might just come with a feature that lets you unblur videos, which would be pretty nifty.

As you're likely aware, the ability to unblur photos is something Google has provided to buyers of its latest handsets, the Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro.

It's a logical step, then, that such a feature might be extended to cover video, despite that being a clearly more complex endeavor - and clues unearthed in a freshly released APK for Google Photos suggest this ability could be inbound.

AMD's Ryzen 9 7950X processor reportedly suffers from a bug we've seen in the past with Team Red's CPUs, whereby the silicon appears to be boosting much faster than it should.

In reality, though, the RTC (Real Time Clock) bug simply means that the CPU is having the speed it's running at misrepresented, when in fact, it's actually at lower (normal) clock frequencies.

This is a problem that has dogged AMD (and Intel) processors in the past, causing trouble with Ryzen 3000 models for Team Red, with fresh evidence of the bug affecting the Ryzen 9 7950X having been provided by a Russian tech blogger.