Building a high-refresh rate gaming PC needn’t cost the earth. If you know which components to pick and are willing to sacrifice a few settings here and there, you can make a high-refresh rate gaming PC build for under $1,000.
The post High-refresh rate gaming PC build for under $1,000 appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends
Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham take on Idris Elba in an action spin-off that looks like fast, furious fun.
Source: CNET
You can livestream Super Bowl 53 for free — here’s how.
Source: CNET
Another year, another batch of Super Bowl commercials from tech giants like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
In fact, Amazon will have different ads focusing on different areas of the business: one highlighting products that won’t be taking advantage of its voice-powered assistant Alexa, and another previewing “Hanna,” an upcoming show on Amazon Prime.
Microsoft, meanwhile, is highlighting some of the ways technology can actually make people’s lives better — perhaps as a corrective to the ongoing backlash against the tech industry.
There will be star-studded spots from somewhat less ubiquitous companies too, with Bumble enlisting Serena Williams to deliver a message of empowerment and Squarespace depicting Idris Elba’s attempts to build his own website.
This year, we’ve also got commercials from non-tech companies like Pringles that place voice assistants and robots front-and-center. And while there are plenty of car commercials, I tried to stick to the ones that actually focused on new tech.
I’ve rounded up the tech-related ads that were released before the game below. Some companies are holding back until the actual Super Bowl, so if necessary, I’ll update this post after the game.
Amazon Alexa
Amazon Prime/”Hanna”
Audi
Bumble
Expensify
Michelob Ultra
Microsoft
Pringles
Squarespace
TurboTax (teaser)
Source: TechCrunch
Whether you’re just in it for the commercials or you’re a hardcore fan of the Rams or Patriots, here’s a few ideas to improve your big game experience.
Source: CNET
Early-stage startups throughout much of the U.S. are able to raise larger sums today than any other point in at least a decade, and there are more early-stage rounds than ever, both in North America and globally. (Note: “Early-stage” is defined here as Series A and Series B rounds, plus smaller rounds from several other round types, including equity crowdfunding and convertible notes.)
In analysis published earlier this week, we found that the nationwide average early-stage deal grew more than 20 percent between 2017 and 2018. We quantified that companies on the coasts raise more than their inland counterparts and found some indications that the Midwest lags the rest of the nation.
To find this and more, we aggregated round size data for more than 30,000 early-stage venture rounds struck with U.S.-based companies between the start of 2008 and the end of 2018. We segmented the data by the U.S. Census Bureau’s map of regions and “divisions” (basically, subregions by a different label), took the mean (average) early-stage deal size for each calendar quarter and displayed each region against the national average.
Below, you can see how early-stage rounds around the country compare to the national average. To make it easier to see trends, we display a two-period simple moving average line alongside individual data points.
Although the average has certainly crept up, part of that is attributable to a newer trend in companies raising huge sums of money. In the report, we indicated that many of the largest early-stage rounds were raised by companies in the West and Northeast. But startups in these regions don’t hold a monopoly on raising lots of money from venture capitalists.
Here, we wanted to highlight some of the biggest early-stage rounds struck by Midwestern and Southern companies. After all, the coasts tend to dominate the media’s conversation concerning tech. So, here’s some love for the middle of the country, and its biggest deals:
It’s true that the Bay Area is responsible for a huge chunk of the supergiant venture market, but it by no means accounts for all of it. The above should lay to rest the idea that there’s no tech in between EWR and SFO.
Source: TechCrunch
A look at Facebook’s strong results and Samsung’s not-so-strong results.
Source: CNET
Here’s a timeline that breaks down the whole saga.
Source: CNET
I’m flying back to the USA today, and as an infrastructure aficionado, it’s nice to be going home, but I’m dreading the disappointment. I just spent two weeks in Singapore and Thailand; last year I spent time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen; and compared to modern Asia, so much American infrastructure is now so contemptible that it’s hard not to wince when I see it.
The USA is nine times wealthier than Thailand, per capita, but I’d far rather ride Bangkok’s SkyTrain than deal with NYC’s subway nowadays. I’d much prefer to fly into Don Muang, Bangkok’s ancient second-tier airport — which was actually closed for years, before being reopened to handle domestic flights and low-cost airlines — than the hostile nightmare that is LAX. And those are America’s two primary gateway cities!
So imagine what it’s like coming to America from wealthy Asian nations, and their gleaming, polished, metronomically reliable subways, trains, and airports. I don’t think Americans understand just how that comparison has become a quiet ongoing national humiliation. If they did, sheer national (and civic) pride would make them want to do something about it. Instead there’s a learned helplessness about most American infrastructure nowadays, a wrong but certain belief that it’s unrealistic to dream of anything better.
It’s not just those two cities. Compare Boston’s T to, say, Taipei, or San Francisco’s mishmash of messed-up systems — Muni, where I have waited 45 minutes for a T-Third; CalTrain, which only runs every 90 minutes on weekends; BART, which squandered millions on its useless white-elephant Millbrae station — to Shenzhen. And it’s not just age; Paris’s metro was inaugurated in 1900, but its well-maintained system continues to run excellently and expand continuously.
Americans still tend to think of themselves as an example to other nations. Ha. I assure you, over the last few years nobody has flown from Seoul or Taipei or Tokyo or Singapore or Hong Kong or Shenzhen into Newark Airport; taken the AirTrain to the NJ Transit station; waited for the rattling, decrepit train into the city; walked through the repellent ugliness of Penn Station to the subway; waited for its ever-increasing delays; ridden to their destination; and finally emerged into New York City — the nation’s alpha city! — still thinking of the USA as anything other than a counterexample, or maybe a cautionary tale.
This goes beyond transport infrastructure. Airport security measures are much more sensible in Asia. Payments are increasingly separately structured, and better, too — in many places, credit cards (which already barely exist as a concept in China) are beginning to slowly wither away, replaced by Alipay and to a lesser extent WeChat Pay. (Not least because an ever-growing proportion of the tourist population is Chinese rather than Western, nowadays.)
That’s admittedly an example of leapfrogging, not decay, and American infrastructure does still have some bright spots. American roads are mostly still superb. Lyft and Uber are much better than their Southeast Asian equivalent Grab, which, whenever I checked it during this latest trip, was invariably both slower and more expensive than a taxi (never mind a tuk-tuk) despite the infamous Thai taxi mafias. International mobile connectivity is excellent and user-friendly and reasonably priced, at least if you’re on T-Mobile like me, and as an added bonus, due to a technical quirk, mobile data roaming bypasses China’s Great Firewall.
But that doesn’t change the fact that the state of much of America’s infrastructure is appalling on its face, and even moreso when compared to nations which are on paper nowhere near as rich. The money other nations spend on urban infrastructure (don’t even get me started on intercity trains) is instead siphoned off to somewhere else. It makes the USA — still by far the wealthiest country in the world! — seem like an dying empire, one beginning to visibly crack and crumble as it is slowly hollowed out from within.
What happened? A cascading series of failures of imagination; failures to invest in the future; paralyzed or ideologically blinkered or simply idiotic governance; and, perhaps most of all, cost disease. (It frequently costs a whopping 4x as much per mile to build a subway in the USA as it costs in, say, Paris or Seoul. Sometimes even more.) What can be done? I’m pretty sure the first step is for Americans to believe that something can be done. Clearly it can. Just look across the Pacific.
Source: TechCrunch
Dark Mode is known to improve battery life for certain devices, like a smartphone with an OLED screen. Does that apply to laptops, as well? To find out we tested two laptops, one running Windows and one running MacOS.
The post Debunking Dark Mode: Here’s why it won’t improve your laptop’s battery life appeared first on Digital Trends.
Source: Digital trends