Hasta La Gadget!

Ahead of E3, Samsung has announced several wide-screen monitors, and the most interesting one is the Samsung CHG90. At 49-inch wide, this monitor is the largest curved (1800R) gaming PC monitor out there (TVs aside). It spans almost across a normal desk and looks more than impressive, even to jaded tech journalists.

The display uses Samsung’s QLED LCD-based technology introduced in fanfare with the 2017 Televisions at CES 2017. The display’s specifications say that it can reproduce ~1.07 Billion colors, which is a far cry from the 16.7M colors standard still in place for many monitors today. QLED is based on Quantum Dot technology, which consists of using small crystals to control light waves and boost color/saturation more efficiently.

There’s support for HDR (high-dynamic range) for supporting content, either games or movies. This is extremely useful for high-contrast scenes that would otherwise produce saturated colors. As a result, details in both very bright and very dark areas of the image are improved significantly. HDR is something that virtually everyone can “see” when the content supports it.

With a resolution of 3840×1080 ( think (2×1920) x 1080), it is a standard PPI display, but for gaming purposes that remain the preferred standard because many gamers favor high FPS (frames per second), instead of sheer resolution (details). This is particularly true for first-person shooter games (also “FPS”) and action games in general. The 1 ms (millisecond) response time is one of they key metrics that gamers will like. If you are curious, the aspect ratio is 32:9.

Moreover, the Samsung CHG90 can deliver the high-framerates: it clocks at a maximum of 144 Hz or 144 frames per second. It is compatible with AMD’s FreeSync  2, which is a technology that enables an AMD graphics processor (GPU) to synchronize the display’s refresh to the current game speed. The result is the total absence of visible “tearing” in the image, and the perception of the game running smoothly even though the framerate is constantly changing.

Samsung did not say why there isn’t an NVIDIA G-Sync version, which is a competing technology that delivers the same kind of benefits. I think that the licensing fee of G-Sync is higher; and that is the main reason why many OEMs choose Free Sync.

“THE SAMSUNG CHG90 IS A RADICALLY MORE ELEGANT SOLUTION”The main reason of being of this monitor is that it provides unparalleled gaming immersion, in addition to being conveniently tuned and optimized for gaming, down to the menu interface. It can increase your field of vision dramatically. Obviously, you could achieve something remotely similar (even wider) with three 24” monitors in front of you, but the Samsung CHG90 is a radically more elegant solution, if you can afford it ($1499).

However, you do not need to be an avid gamer to enjoy the benefits of this monitor. Anyone who handles a lot of multi-tasking/multi-window could find themselves working in a whole new world after installing this monitor. There are higher PPI alternatives if you want fine text rendering and don’t mind going back to 32”, but I bet that for many users, this is the only monitor that can accommodate their massive multi-tabs web browsing habits – you know who you are!

Alternatively, I have seen some pictures of this monitor with Excel opened in full screen. It is ridiculously large, but for some users who export massive amounts of analytics, that might be the only screen where they can look at their data without horizontal scrolling.

For legacy games/apps that aren’t quite ready for the extremely wide resolution, it is, of course, possible to run them in “normal” 1080p mode with black borders on either side.

Samsung has utilities that help partition the screen in ways that Windows 10 just didn’t foresee. In Windows, it is easy to split things up in the middle, but Samsung pushes desktop surface management to the extreme and lets the user build and select dozens of different options. I wish that Microsoft came up with this!

Connectivity includes DisplayPort, mini-DisplayPort, 2x HDMI, 1x 3.5mm audio and 3x USB 3.0. There’s no Thunderbolt and no USB-C connectivity. It is a pity for USB-C Thunderbolt laptop users, but the gaming world can do without that, for now. It is possible to adjust height, tilt, and swivel.

Although $1499 isn’t cheap, the massive size and the lack of peer-competitors still make this an interesting product to look at. If your budget cannot quite stretch to that level, Samsung also launched the CHG70 in 32” and 27” ($699 and $599 – all ship can be ordered now, and will ship “this summer”). Official product page

Samsung CHG90: A Monster 49-inch Gaming Monitor , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

WASHINGTON – With a possible obstruction-of-justice probe on the line that could determine the future of his presidency, Donald Trump Friday set the terms: It will be his word against that of the FBI director he fired.

It’s a match-up Trump may come to regret.

James Comey is a 30-year career law enforcement officer and prosecutor with a reputation as straight shooter. Trump has been known for decades for unhesitatingly dispensing falsehoods – a habit that has not diminished with his taking of the Oval Office.

“It’s difficult to look at Comey and besmirch his reputation,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican consultant who worked for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz during the 2016 GOP primaries. “I don’t think Trump would recognize the truth if he stumbled across it.”

Comey on Thursday testified under oath that Trump had asked him for his personal loyalty and pressured him into dropping an investigation into Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, over his undisclosed discussions with Russian officials.

Comey had already been conducting an investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence agencies, which the U.S. intelligence community concluded worked to help Trump win the presidency.

Over the course of two-and-a-half hours before the Senate Intelligence Committee, Comey matter-of-factly called the president a liar. Asked why he took such detailed notes about his meetings with Trump, when he hadn’t done so after meetings with former presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama, Comey answered that it was “the nature of the person.”

“I was honestly concerned that he might lie about the nature of our meeting, and so I thought it really important to document,” Comey testified.

On Friday, during a warm afternoon in the White House Rose Garden, Trump followed up on a earlier statement on Twitter and claimed it was Comey who was lying.

“I didn’t say that,” Trump said about asking Comey to drop the Flynn probe at a private White House meeting – as visiting Romanian President Klaus Iohannis stood a few feet away at their joint news conference.

“I hardly know the man. I’m not going to say, ‘I want you to pledge allegiance,’” Trump said about asking Comey for his loyalty. “Who would do that? Who would ask a man to pledge allegiance under oath? I mean ― think of it, I hardly know the man. It doesn’t make sense. No, I didn’t say that and I didn’t say the other.”

Trump went on to say that he would provide those answers under oath: “One hundred percent.”

Whether he ever gives a full statement to special counsel Robert Mueller is unclear. Trump frequently promises things but then reneges – he promised, for example, to release his tax returns if he ran for president, which he has subsequently refused to do. 

In any event, the veracity of any such statements is also unclear. Trump has been known for decades for his willingness to say false things to advance his interests, including in legal depositions taken under oath. In the 1990s, he was even known for calling reporters and pretending to be non-existent Trump Organization subordinates to plant favorable stories about himself.

He called People Magazine once posing as “John Barron” to claim that his employer ― that is, Trump himself ― was dating Italian model Carla Bruni. (Bruni denied she’d had anything to do with Trump and called him a “lunatic.”)

His readiness to deliver falsehoods to his audiences and journalists frustrated his primary campaign rivals, who saw GOP voters seem to accept Trump at his word, regardless of evidence to the contrary.

One of Trump’s last opponents to drop out was Ted Cruz, who on the morning of the pivotal Indiana primary let loose a three-minute tirade about Trump’s lack of honesty.

“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies,” Cruz told reporters. “He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth. And he had a pattern that I think is straight out of a psychology textbook. His response is to accuse everybody else of lying…. I say pathological because I actually think Donald—if you hooked him up to a lie-detector pass, he could say one thing in the morning, one thing at noon, and one thing in the evening, all contradictory, and he’d pass the lie-detector test each time. Whatever lie he’s telling, at that minute he believes it, but the man is utterly amoral.”

Trump won the Indiana primary, the GOP nomination and then, against improbable odds, the presidency with the assistance of Russian intelligence agencies working to sabotage his Democratic rival, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

The false statements, though, have continued, right from his first full day on the job when he told CIA employees that some 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, when the actual number had been a fraction of that.

The fact-checking site PolitiFact showed Trump with the highest rate of false statements of any candidate in the 2016 campaign. As of Friday, of the 410 Trump statements PolitiFact has analyzed since he entered the race in 2015 through this week, a full 69 percent are rated “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire.”

Trump’s long and troubled history with the truth may overwhelm whatever advantage the imprimatur of the White House might otherwise afford. Polling shows that a majority of Americans find Trump dishonest – an impression that his staff is unlikely to be able to counter.

Thursday, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, asked about Comey’s testimony calling Trump a liar, responded: “I can definitively say the president is not a liar. I think it is frankly insulting that question would be asked.”

That kind of answer, said Tyler, was not helpful, given Trump’s long and storied record of untruths through the years. All she had to do was answer that she wasn’t going to dignify that sort of question and to move on, rather than defend Trump so combatively and damage her own credibility.

“It’s the most fundamental mistake you can make in communications,” Tyler said. “And she went and did it.”

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Brooke Guinan, New York City’s first openly transgender firefighter, is about to take on another inspiring role: a grand marshal in this year’s NYC Pride march.

The 29-year-old Brooklyn native has marched in the event every year since coming out as a trans woman nearly eight years ago while working as a firefighter for the New York City Fire Department.

Guinan native said was “shocked” when she received an email from NYC Pride asking her to take on the position. In fact, she thought she was sent the offer by accident.

“I didn’t expect it,” said Guinan, noting that her main responsibility as grand marshal is to be a good representative for the event. “I am super flattered. It’s an amazing honor.”

“It’s very rare in the everyday life of a trans person to feel valued or to feel appreciated in society,” she added. “I looked forward to the pride march every year. It’s nice to be around your people, your LGBTQ family ― to really feel like you can let loose and not have to worry about judgment.”

Guinan, a third generation FDNY firefighter, said coming out in her 20s while working in a profession with a “very macho culture” was nerve-wracking.

“There have been certain points in time where things were difficult,” she said. “But I’ve never felt a lack of support from my family … [FDNY], in general, has been very supportive of me and a lot of the visibility campaigns that I’ve done.”

Guinan came out as gay when she was 11 or 12. But it wasn’t until taking gender studies courses in college that she gained a deeper understanding of her gender identity.

After graduating from Wagner College in Staten Island with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, she decided to change course and pursue a career in firefighting. 

Her family’s firefighting legacy and the opportunity to provide a public service were only two factors behind her decision.

“Joining the fire department was sort of a last ditch effort to prove my masculinity and that I could be a man,” said Guinan. “That didn’t work very well seeing as how I finally came out as trans.”

“I think joining the fire department may have actually worked out in the opposite way,” she added. “And been like the last straw for me to finally accept my identity.

Guinan said her mother and father, who has worked for the FDNY for nearly 40 years, will attend the pride parade for the first time this year. Her husband and best friend will also be there to support her.

While she doesn’t currently put out any fires in her current position as LGBTQ outreach coordinator for the FDNY, Guinan still feels she can make a huge impact in the lives of so many people.

“At the end of the day, I really just feel like I’m living my life,” she said. “I don’t necessarily understand why it gets so much attention. But if that attention can be used for good … and can be used to promote the education and betterment of other trans people then I feel like it’s my responsibility to do that.”

Guinan’s journey becoming the city’s first openly trans firefighter is the subject of an award-winning 2016 documentary called “Woman On Fire.” Learn more about the film here.

The NYC Pride march is scheduled for June 25.

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In early April, it was revealed that GameStop’s website may have fallen prey to hackers, and now the company has confirmed the report. Some GameStop customers are receiving notices from the company advising them of a ‘security incident’ that affected its website. Customers may have been affected by this security breach, assuming they placed orders on the website during the … Continue reading

A lot of us are gearing up for summer weather, but if you were living on the newly discovered planet designated KELT-9b, no amount of sun protection products would be able to help you.

Astronomers at Ohio State and Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University have found the hottest-ever planet, whose surface temperature ― at 7,800 degrees Fahrenheit ― is more scorching than most stars.

Located 650 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, and almost twice the size of our own giant Jupiter, KELT-9b orbits around its parent sun, KELT-9, in a “yearly” circuit that takes place every 1.5 days.

“It’s a gas giant 2.8 times more massive than Jupiter but only half as dense, because the extreme radiation from its host star has caused its atmosphere to puff up like a balloon. And because it is tidally locked to its star ― as the Moon is to Earth ― the day side of the planet is perpetually bombarded by stellar radiation, and as a result is so hot that molecules, such as water, carbon dioxide and methane can’t form there,” according to The Ohio State University.

“It’s a planet by any of the typical definitions based on mass, but its atmosphere is almost certainly unlike any other planet we’ve ever seen just because of the temperature of its day side,” said Scott Gaudi, OSU astronomy professor and co-leader of the discovery.

KELT stands for Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope, which refers to two small robotic telescopes ― in Arizona and South Africa ― that scan the night sky, looking at 5 million stars. Researchers look for stars whose light becomes dimmer at regular intervals. This dimming effect is a possible indication of a planet crossing the star.

These KELT telescopes were recently used to confirm another exoplanet that has the density of Styrofoam.

KELT-9b’s future isn’t so hot, despite its extreme heat.

“KELT-9 radiates so much ultraviolet radiation that it may completely evaporate the planet,” Keivan Stassun, a Vanderbilt professor of physics and astronomy, said in a statement. “Or, if gas giant planets like KELT-9b possess solid rocky cores as some theories suggest, the planet may be boiled down to a barren rock, like Mercury.”

The discovery of this exoplanet is presented in the scientific journal Nature.

KELT-9b’s orbit is so close to its sun that, if the star eventually expands, it will consume the planet.

“KELT-9 will swell to become a red giant star in about a billion years,” said Stassun, one of the co-directors of this study. “The long-term prospects for life, or real estate for that matter, on KELT-9b are not looking good.”

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