If you want to see the future of Apple displays, you don&t need to look far as the company prepares to introduce its reference monitor for the rest of us & the Pro Display XDR.
After its introduction at WWDC, I was fortunate enough to look at the Pro Display XDR in real-world use as a photography tool, for video editing, music creation and in other professional workflow scenarios.I also got to see the display in use beside a range of reference rivals from other manufacturers, some of which cost almost 10 times as much as Applefar more affordable $5,000 price tag for the system.
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Read more: Apple’s Pro Display XDR sets the bar for pro displays
Write comment (92 Comments)Carbon dioxide emissions, one of the main contributors to the climate changes bringing extreme weather, rising oceans, and more frequent fires that have killed hundreds of Americans and cost the U.S. billions of dollars, are set to reach another record high in 2019.
Thatthe word from theGlobal Carbon Project, an initiative of researchers around the world led by Stanford University scientist Rob Jackson.
The new projections from the Global Carbon Project are set out in a trio of papers published in &Earth System Science Data&, &Environmental Research Letters&, and &Nature Climate Change&.
Thatthe bad news. The good news (if you want to take a glass half-full view) is that the rate of growth has slowed dramatically from the previous two years. However, researchers are warning that emissions could keep increasing for another decade unless nations around the globe take dramatic action to change their approach to energy, transportation and industry, according to a statement from Jackson.
&When the good news is that emissions growth is slower than last year, we need help,& said Jackson, a professor of Earth system science in Stanford&sSchool of Earth, Energy - Environmental Sciences (Stanford Earth), in a statement. &When will emissions start to drop?&
Globally, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel sources (which are over 90 percent of all emissions) are expected to grow 0.6 percent over the 2018 emissions. In 2018 that figure was 2.1 percent above the 2017 figure, which was, itself, a 1.5 percent increase over 2016 emissions figures.
Even as the use of coal is in drastic decline around the world, natural gas and oil use is climbing, according to researchers, and stubbornly high per capita emissions in affluent countries mean that reductions won&t be enough to offset the emissions from developing countries as they turn to natural gas and gasoline for their energy and transportation needs.
&Emissions cuts in wealthier nations must outpace increases in poorer countries where access to energy is still needed,& said Pierre Friedlingstein, a mathematics professor at the University of Exeter and lead author of the Global Carbon Budget paper inEarth System Science Data, in a statement.
Some countries are making progress. Both the UK and Denmark have managed to achieve economic growth while simultaneously reducing their carbon emissions. In the third quarter of the year, renewable power supplied more energy to homes and businesses in the United Kingdom than fossil fuels for the first time in the nationhistory, according to a report cited by &The Economist&.
Costs of wind and solar power are declining so dramatically that they are cost competitive with natural gas in many parts of the wealthy world and cheaper than coal, according to a study earlier in the year from the International Monetary Fund.
Still, the U.S., the European Union and China account for more than half of all carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. did decrease year-on-year — projected to decline by 1.7 percent — but itnot enough to counteract the rising demand from countries like China, where carbon dioxide emissions are expected to rise by 2.6 percent.
And the U.S. has yet to find a way to wean itself off of its addiction to cheap gasoline and big cars. It hasn&t helped that the country is throwing out emissions requirements for passenger vehicles that would have helped to reduce its contribution to climate change even further. Even so, at current ownership rates, therea need to radically reinvent transportation given what U.S. car ownership rates mean for the world.
U.S. oil consumption per person is 16 times greater than in India and six times greater than in China, according to the reports. And the United States has roughly one car per-person while those numbers are roughly one for every 40 people in India and one for every 6 in China. If ownership rates in either country were to rise to similar levels as the U.S. that would put 1 billion cars on the road in either country.
About 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions were attributable to coal use, 34 percent from oil, 20 percent from natural gas, and the remaining 6 percent from cement production and other sources, according to a Stanford University statement on the Global Carbon Project report.
&Declining coal use in the U.S. and Europe is reducing emissions, creating jobs and saving lives through cleaner air,& said Jackson, who is also a senior fellow at theStanford Woods Institute for the Environmentand thePrecourt Institute for Energy, in a statement. &More consumers are demanding cheaper alternatives such as solar and wind power.&
Therehope that a combination of policy, technology and changing social habits can still work to reverse course. The adoption of new low-emission vehicles, the development of new energy storage technologies, continued advancements in energy efficiency, and renewable power generation in a variety of new applications holds some promise. As does the social adoption of alternatives to emissions intensive animal farming and crop cultivation.
&We need every arrow in our climate quiver,& Jackson said, in a statement. &That means stricter fuel efficiency standards, stronger policy incentives for renewables, even dietary changes and carbon capture and storage technologies.&
AWS today quietly brought spot capacity to Fargate, its serverless compute engine for containers that supports both the companyElastic Container Service and, now, its Elastic Kubernetes service.
Like spot instances for the EC2 compute platform, Fargate Spot pricing is significantly cheaper, both for storage and compute, than regular Fargate pricing. In return, though, you have to be able to accept the fact that your instance may get terminated when AWS needs additional capacity. While that means Fargate Spot may not be perfect for every workload, there are plenty of applications that can easily handle an interruption.
&Fargate now has on-demand, savings plan, spot,& AWS VP of Compute Services Deepak Singh told me. &If you think about Fargate as a compute layer for, as we call it, serverless compute for containers, you now have the pricing worked out and you now have both orchestrators on top of it.&
He also noted that containers already drive a significant percentage of spot usage on AWS in general, so adding this functionality to Fargate makes a lot of sense (and may save users a few dollars here and there). Pricing, of course, is the major draw here, and an hour of CPU time on Fargate Spot will only cost $0.01245364 (yes, AWS is pretty precise there) compared to $0.04048 for the on-demand price,
With this, AWS is also launching another important new feature: capacity providers. The idea here is to automate capacity provisioning for Fargate and EC2, both of which now offer on-demand and spot instances, after all. You simply write a config file that, for example, says you want to run 70% of your capacity on EC2 and the rest on spot instances. The scheduler will then keep that capacity on spot as instances come and go, and if there are no spot instances available, it will move it to on-demand instances and back to spot once instances are available again.
In the future, you will also be able to mix and match EC2 and Fargate. &You can say, I want some of my services running on EC2 on demand, some running on Fargate on demand, and the rest running on Fargate Spot,& Singh explained. &And the scheduler manages it for you. You squint hard, capacity is capacity. We can attach other capacity providers.& Outpost, AWS& fully managed service for running AWS services in your data center, could be a capacity provider, for example.
These new features and prices will be officially announced in Thursdayre:Invent keynote, but the documentation and pricing is already live today.
Read more: AWS launches discounted spot capacity for its Fargate container platform
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Can't get enough Star Wars content on Disney Plus? Well, you're in luck, because the streaming service has announced an exclusive Jedi-themed game show for kids.
Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge will see its prospective Padawans undergo a series of tests in the "Jedi principles of strength, knowledge, and bravery", so we're expecting something in
Read more: Disney Plus announces upcoming Star Wars: Jedi Temple Challenge game show
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Google can't stop adding features to its apps and services it seems, with the latest update coming to its Photos app, on both mobile and on the web.
The search giant has announced that a chat feature is being added to the Google Photos app, so users can share individual stills and videos with contacts quickly, without needing to create a separate
Read more: Google Photos introduces private chat to share photos quickly
Write comment (94 Comments)Rumors that Resident Evil 3 Remake is in development have been swirling for a while now, and thanks to newly leaked cover art it looks like the game is all but confirmed & and we'd expect a reveal soon.
The cover art was spotted on Gamstat (via ResetEra), with Eurogamer sources confirming that it's real. These sources have previously
Read more: Resident Evil 3 Remake art leak suggests a reveal is coming soon
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