Dec 12
An online petition posted by students demanding Rittenhouse be barred from attending Arizona State University has been signed by nearly 17,000 people.
Dec 12
Megan Thee Stallion Graduates From College, Walks Stage At Texas Southern University
Posted in: Today's Chili“Good morning hotties !!! It’s graduation dayyyy,” the “Hot Girl Summer” rapper tweeted.
Dec 12
As many as 20 journalists were investigated using a sensitive government database.
Dec 11
A whale named Snow Cone has surprised scientists by giving birth to a healthy calf despite being encumbered by heavy fishing rope.
Dec 11
Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed and director Joel Souza was wounded in the Oct. 21 shooting
Dec 11
Zendaya And Tom Holland Don’t Get The Fuss Over Their Heights: ‘This Is Normal, Too’
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe “Spider-Man” stars addressed the “stupid assumption” that men should be taller than women.
Dec 11
IBM and Samsung claim they’ve made a breakthrough in semiconductor design. On day one of the IEDM conference in San Francisco, the two companies unveiled a new design for stacking transistors vertically on a chip. With current processors and SoCs, transistors lie flat on the surface of the silicon, and then electric current flows from side-to-side. By contrast, Vertical Transport Field Effect Transistors (VTFET) sit perpendicular to one another and current flows vertically.
According to IBM and Samsung, this design has two advantages. First, it will allow them to bypass many performance limitations to extend Moore’s Law beyond the 1-nanometer threshold. More importantly, the design leads to less wasted energy thanks to greater current flow. They estimate VTFET will lead to processors that are twice as fast and use 85 percent less power than chips designed with FinFET transistors. IBM and Samsung claim the process may one day allow for phones that go a full week on a single charge. They say it could also make certain energy-intensive tasks, including cryptomining, more power-efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment.
IBM and Samsung haven’t said when they plan to commercialize the design. They’re not the only companies attempting to push beyond the 1-nanometer barrier. In July, Intel said it aims to finalize the design for angstrom-scale chips by 2024. The company plans to accomplish the feat using its new “Intel 20A” node and RibbonFET transistors.
Dec 11
Amazon has explained the Web Services outage that knocked parts of the internet offline for several hours on December 7th — and promised more clarity if this happens in the future. As CNBCreports, Amazon revealed an automated capacity scaling feature led to “unexpected behavior” from internal network clients. Devices connecting that internal network to AWS were swamped, stalling communications.
The nature of the failure prevented teams from pinpointing and fixing the problem, Amazon added. They had to use logs to find out what happened, and internal tools were also affected. The rescuers were “extremely deliberate” in restoring service to avoid breaking still-functional workloads, and had to contend with a “latent issue” that prevented networking clients from backing off and giving systems a chance to recover.
The AWS division has temporarily disabled the scaling that led to the problem, and won’t switch it back on until there are solutions in place. A fix for the latent glitch is coming within two weeks, Amazon said. There’s also an extra network configuration to shield devices in the event of a repeat failure.
You might have an easier time understanding crises the next time around. A new version of AWS’ service status dashboard is due in early 2022 to provide a clearer view of any outages, and a multi-region support system will help Amazon get in touch with customers that much sooner. These won’t bring AWS back any faster during an incident, but they may eliminate some of the mystery when services go dark — important when victims include everything from Disney+ to Roomba vacuums.
Dec 11
Survivors Recount Horror Of Destructive Storm System That Hit Several States
Posted in: Today's Chili Dec 11
You’ll want to quickly update Microsoft Teams if you’re an Android phone user. According to former XDA editor-in-chief Mishaal Rahman, Microsoft has fixed a Teams bug that led to failed 911 calls on devices using Android 10 or later. Reddit user KitchenPicture5849 discovered that having Teams installed, but not signed in, would prevent emergency calls from going through. The phone would say a call was active and ring once, but never properly initiate the connection — call logs would show nothing.
Rahman and friend Kuba Wojciechowski pinpointed the cause. While all Android calling apps will try to create a PhoneAccount class instance in the operating system, Teams was creating instances every time a user started the app “cold” — that increased the chances of a sorting problem that stopped calls from going through.
Google talked to the Reddit user and revealed that both the company and Microsoft were planning fixes. In addition to the Microsoft patch, Google is delivering an Android platform update on January 4th that should address its side of the problem. You can delete and reinstall Teams to clear any excess PhoneAccount instances, and staying logged in should prevent any mishaps.
Google said this only affected a “small number of devices.” The issue, however, was the severity. This could have blocked someone from making a life-saving call through no fault of their own.
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