https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/30110...g-to-steam

Quote:Electronic Arts (EA) famously bailed on Valve’s popular Steam platform years ago in favor of its own Origin digital storefront. At the time, EA had some of the most popular gaming franchises like Call of Duty and Mass Effect to lure people over to Origin. Today, EA has given up on keeping its walled garden exclusive and will begin launching games on Steam once again. It starts next month with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

EA has started promoting pre-orders for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, but it’s directing gamers to Steam. That’s quite a change after funneling customers to Origin for the better part of a decade. This is the first major Star Wars release for EA since Battlefront II, which attracted widespread criticism due to its use of loot boxes. Fallen Order is a single-player game, so there are fewer opportunities for EA to nickel and dime players. Although, there are still pre-order bonuses and a “deluxe” edition of the game.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order will run you $60 (or $70 for the deluxe edition) on Steam or EA’s Origin service. Yes, that still exists, but EA is casting its net as wide as possible now. That might have something to do with the launch of the Epic Store, which has the advantage of hosting the massively popular Fortnite. Should you decide to buy Fallen Order from Steam, you’ll still need to run Origin on your PC to authenticate the game’s DRM.
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EA and Valve are still working on the technical details of linking their platforms, so this is not a full list of the games that will come to Steam. While you won’t be able to transfer games purchased on one store to the other, EA confirms that Origin and Steam will support cross-platform multiplayer for titles that are sold on both. Additional integrations may come later.

https://www.techpowerup.com/260575/tsmc-...-than-7-nm

Quote:TSMC vice chairman and CEO C.C. Wei announced the company's plans for 5 nm are on track, which means High Volume manufacturing (HVM) on the node is expected to be achieved by 2Q 2020. The company has increased expenditures in ramping up its various nodes from an initially projected $10 billion to something along the lines of $14 billion - 15 billion; the company is really banking on quick uptake and design wins on its most modern process technologies - and the increased demand that follows.

https://www.techpowerup.com/260464/tsmc-...nstruction

Quote:According to the sources over at DigiTimes, TSMC has acquired as much as 30 hectares of land in the Southern Taiwan Science Park to begin the construction of its fabs that are supposed to start high-volume manufacturing 3 nm node in 2023. Construction of 3 nm manufacturing facilities are set to begin in 2020 when TSMC will lay the groundwork for the new fab. The 3 nm semiconductor node is expected to be TSMC's third attempt at EUV lithography, right after the 7 nm+, and 5 nm nodes which are also based on EUV technology.

10-17-2019

AT&T raises bogus Property Tax Fee to 7%



We’ve been pretty hard on the cable and telecom industries for all the sneaky fees they like to tack onto bills in a variety of ways, such that their inscrutable nature is one reason people so despise the companies and long for a much simpler relationship and pricing structure. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, though, something else comes along to prove you wrong. In this case, it’s a fee AT&T is reportedly charging business Internet customers, and it will definitely elicit some frustrated groans.

The publication cites a bill from Scott Phillips, who owns a business in Santa Clarita, Calif., called Valley View Media. He signed up for AT&T fiber Internet service at a cost of $95/month, with his documentation stating that price “includes taxes and fees.” But then came his first bill back in July, which included a portion that reads:

   Effective October 1, 2019, there will be an increase in the AT&T Cost Assessment Charge used to recover AT&T property taxes. The monthly rate will change from 2.92% to 7.00% of your total AT&T Business Internet, Phone and/or U-verse TV monthly charges. This charge is not a tax or fee that the government requires AT&T to collect from its customers.

Sure enough, once his October bill arrived that 7% increase in the “property tax fee” added another $6.65 to the $95 monthly price he’s paying.

https://www.techpowerup.com/260023/intel...sor-series

Quote:Intel late Thursday, through a product change notification, announced the discontinuation of almost its entire 7th generation Core "Kaby Lake" desktop processor series. This includes most chips across the Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, Pentium, and Celeron desktop chips based on the 14 nm+ "Kaby Lake-S" silicon, across both retail boxed and tray packages. These chips formed Intel's main product lineup through 2017, and had to be quickly succeeded by the 8th generation "Coffee Lake" with the advent of AMD Ryzen. To clear out its inventory, Intel will accept discontinuance orders for these chips until April 2020. A discontinuance order can only be placed by a customer who has previously ordered these exact chips. The last of these orders will be shipped out by October 2020.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/valve-...40438.html

Quote:Jokes about GameStop offering people a fraction of a game's worth during trade-ins aside, one of the clear advantages physical copies of games have had over their digital counterparts is the ability to resell them, allowing players to recoup some of their investment when they're done with a title. But that might change. Earlier this week, the Paris District Court ruled that Steam's restrictions on reselling digital games violate European Union (EU) regulations earlier this week.
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The court gave Steam owner Valve three months to amend Steam's terms of service to comply with EU regulations. The changes will probably take longer to go into effect, however, as the case heads to appeal. A company spokesperson told Polygon: "We disagree with the decision of the Paris Court of First Instance and will appeal it. The decision will have no effect on Steam while the case is on appeal." That process could take years to resolve.
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It's clear that the EU has taken an interest in the way digital games are sold and managed. People can resell their physical games, movies and albums. The only reason they can't do the same for their digital copies is the fact that companies only sell access to the product in question; the idea that someone actually owns the product is an illusion. Arguing in favor of resales is one step closer towards guaranteeing true ownership of digital goods.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/lenovo...40253.html

Quote:Security researchers from Pen Test Partners have found a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Lenovo Solution Centre (LSC) utility that's found on the majority of Lenovo’s Windows laptops. The bug could have allowed anyone with any sort of local or remote access to the machines to gain administrator privileges and take over the systems.
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According to the PTP researchers, when they first reported the vulnerability to Lenovo, the company took the strange action of backdating the end-of-life (EOL) for the LSC tool. The EOL was initially listed as November 30, 2018, but then Lenovo moved it to April 2018, which was right after the PTP researchers revealed the bug to Lenovo.

TheRegister asked Lenovo why it was changing the EOL date "to make it look like they were releasing updates for a product they had already EOL'd."The company’s statement essentially confirmed that Lenovo was interested in making it look like they were updating a product that supposedly had already lost support:

"It’s often the case for applications that reach end of support that we continue to update the applications as we transition to new offerings is to ensure customers that have not transitioned, or choose not to, still have a minimal level of support, a practice that is not uncommon in the industry.”

This isn’t the first time Lenovo has been caught either with spy tools or broken security on its laptops. It seems the company hasn’t improved all that much since the Superfish scandal broke out.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/toshib...40237.html

Quote:The company has also started research into Penta-level cell (PLC) NAND flash and actually verified working five-bit per cell NAND by modifying its current QLC NAND. The new flash provides more density with the ability to store five bits per cell, rather than just four in current QLC. But, to do this, the cell needs to be capable of storing 32 distinct voltage levels, and SSD controllers need to read them back accurately. With so many voltage levels to read to and write at nano-scale, the new technology is very challenging. To get control of the tighter thresholds, the company had to develop some additional processes that may adapt to its current TLC and QLC to boost performance.

QLC is already fairly slow and has lower endurance than other types of flash. PLC will have even less endurance and slower performance. New NVMe protocol features such as Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) should help mitigate some of the issues, however. ZNS by itself aims to reduced write amplification, reduce the need for media over-provisioning and internal controller DRAM usage, and of course, improve throughput and latency.

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/29638...eplacement

Quote:Apple has begun locking its batteries with software to prevent third-party replacements from reporting their status properly. The company is apparently activating a feature that it’s previously built into its products. The message persists, even if you swap in a genuine Apple battery, and it’s an attempt to shove customers towards using Apple and Apple-authorized resellers to the exclusion of third-party stores.
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Apple is far from the only company that’s taken an aggressive stance against customer right-to-repair. Console manufacturers shipped hardware with illegal “You cannot open this enclosure without voiding your warranty” stickers for years. John Deere has refused to allow farmers to repair their own tractors. But this is why right to repair legislation is important. Apple tries to frame this issue as one of consumer trust. That’s deeply ironic, considering Apple has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot be trusted not to sabotage device performance in order to improve its own bottom line. I didn’t used to make that argument, but the company’s conduct during its battery fiasco, combined with Tim Cook’s willingness to blame his own customer base for opting to repair Apple’s screw-up changed my mind.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/userbe...40032.html

Quote:Update, 7/28/29, 11:00 a.m PT: Userbenchmark has seemingly changed course from its previous statements, which have been almost entirely removed from its FAQ. That section of the FAQ is now replaced by a related section on the criticism Userbenchmark received and what will happen moving forward. The overall message isn't totally different, but Userbenchmark is changing its weighting very soon.

Quote:"Following the July 2019 cohort of new CPUs, we noticed that our CPU gaming and desktop indices were overestimating all CPUs with core counts beyond 8 so we updated the index. We estimate that our updated index, is now accurate to around 8% over the entire spectrum of 8500+ CPUs. There was an uproar from certain online communities with accusations of bias. Here are some of the actual outcomes arising from the latest update: The Ryzen 3000 effective speed ranks were impacted as follows: 3900X -2, 3800X +7, 3600X +14, 3600 +13. On the other hand the AMD Threadripper CPUs were demoted and the new top spot for gaming was taken by the Intel 9900K, up from its previous rank of 7."

Userbenchmark still stands by its changes, but does acknowledge the criticism and said "We frequently tune our effective speed indices and expect to add an octa-core component to the index in due course. Replacing our 64 core weight of 2% would be equivalent to, up to a maximum weight of 16% on an octa-core component." That will better reflect the performance gains associated with eight-core CPUs. The company also removed its strongly-worded warning about an "organized army of shills."