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Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance On A $199 AMD Ryzen Laptop

This $210 AMD Ryzen laptop may well be the best-value business notebook ever

Motile 14" Laptop: Ryzen 3, 1080p, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD ($199)
Motile 14" Laptop: AMD Ryzen 5, 14" 1080p, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD ($299)

MOTILE 14 Review $299 RYZEN 5 3500U Performance Laptop Amazing Value! (10m40s video)
$299 MOTILE 14" Performance Laptop Emulation Test - RYZEN 5 3500U (11m50s video)
External GPU On A $300 Walmart Laptop! MOTILE 14 + Radeon RX590 (10m52s video) (lol)

These $200-$300 laptops have a stellar reputation compared to the $80 landfill-tier EVOO 10.1 tablet that Walmart is associated with.

The main problems are probably single-channel RAM (although at least it can be upgraded), apparently a crappy Wi-Fi card, no USB-C charging, and they are Zen+. It's possible that Zen 2 "Renoir" could allow 4 or 6 cores in place of what is currently 2 or 4 cores, although it would take a while for prices to drop down to these levels.

Personally, I might take a break from laptops and try building a small form factor PC using Zen 4 (AM5 socket), which may be released in 2021. AM5 should support "mainstream" CPUs with at least 24 cores, possibly 32 cores.

Also, @krishnoid, Lenovo 100e is at $99.

SpaceX Starship just aced another explosive tank test and Elon Musk has the results [video]

SpaceX has successfully repaired a leak in a Starship prototype, filled the giant tank with an ultra-cold liquid, and pressurized it until it (spectacularly) popped — and Elon Musk has the preliminary results.

[...] Musk recently revealed that the new steel Starship and Super Heavy designs will require tanks pressures of at least 6 bar (90 psi) to survive the stresses of orbital flight.

[...] We’ll have to wait for dawn tomorrow to see the extent of the damage, but it appears that Test Tank #2’s demise was dramatically more violent than its predecessor — a largely expected side effect of performing the pressure test with a cryogenic liquid. In fact, just minutes after it appeared to fail, Elon Musk revealed that the second test tank had burst around 8.5 bar (~125 psi), soundly trouncing all records set by earlier tests and suggesting SpaceX is unequivocally ready to begin building the first orbital Starships. Critically, Musk had previously indicated that if Starship’s tanks could survive up to 8.5 bar, SpaceX would have the minimum safety margins it needs to deem Starship safe enough for astronauts.

SpaceX is ready to build the first Starship destined for space after latest tests

As Musk himself noted on Monday, he is now confident that SpaceX can immediately start building the first Starship destined for spaceflight and further revealed that two of that particular Starship’s three tank domes are already nearing completion.

Known as Starship SN01 (serial number 01), there’s a strong possibility that the massive spacecraft will never reach higher than a 20 km (12.5 mi) flight test SpaceX intends to perform. The company’s rapidly changing strategy may very well mean that SN01 – now ‘go’ for production – could also support suborbital spaceflight testing and maybe even the first orbital Starship launch, although orbital launches will require a Super Heavy booster. Elon Musk, for one, has already christened Starship SN01 an “orbital vehicle”.

CES 2020: Analogix Announces ANX2187 TCON With Gamut Rotation

We haven’t talked about Analogix in a few years, and we certainly haven’t talked about TCON announcements much at all. At CES 2020 Analogix announced the new ANX2187 TCON chip with little fanfare, but it could drastically change the way PC displays are manufactured and how end products end up in terms of their colour accuracy.

Analogix has been a leader in delivering TCON solutions to the PC and laptop market for many years, and the market has been relatively speaking quite boring when it comes to new developments. Analogix wants to modernise the display panel experience for monitors and laptops with the introduction of the new ANX2186 which promises to bring 3D Colour Gamut rotation to the PC market.

Display makers usually have a quite hard time in terms of producing accurate display panels using the “traditional” manufacturing methods. In the old way of doing things, a panel’s colour accuracy is largely dependent upon its manufacturing and if it comes out matching the target specifications, with it being very hard for display vendors to individually adjust the display controller firmware on each panel in order to achieve better calibrations and accuracy.

The ANX2186 is a TCON that features gamut manipulation in the optical domain – in essence it’s a calibration engine that sits at the TCON level between the display input and the DDIC and is able to transparently manipulate the gamut in its 3D space. This technology isn’t inherently new, one area it’s been present for years has been in the mobile space (Samsung’s mDNIe was first as far as I know) as well as in TVs by various TV SoC vendors.

What this allows is for calibration and manipulation of the colours fully independent of the DDIC firmware of a display panel. Display manufacturers can now very quickly with help of automatic tooling calibrate each individual panel in a product line, write the compensation/calibration factors as ROM data to the TCON, and not have to worry about fiddling with the much more complex firmware data on the side of the DDIC.

TCON = timing controller.

Clinton says 'nobody likes' Sanders and won't commit to backing him if he's the Democratic nominee

Hillary Clinton blasts Sen. Bernie Sanders in a new documentary, saying "nobody likes him" and declining in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter to say whether she would endorse and campaign for him if he's the Democratic 2020 nominee.

"He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done," Clinton says in the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter. "He was a career politician. It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it."

[...] In the THR interview, Clinton also pointedly questions the "culture" around Sanders' campaign, from "his leadership team" to "his online Bernie Bros."

"It's not only him, it's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women," Clinton said, before suggesting that Sanders himself was complicit in promoting those voices.

#ILikeBernie Trends After Hillary Clinton Says 'Nobody Likes' Bernie Sanders

Despite Clinton's criticism, Sanders is a clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination, with the latest data from Morning Consult showing that he has the highest favorability of all candidates in the primary race. Sanders is viewed positively by 76 percent of voters, while former Vice President Joe Biden is viewed favorably by 71 percent. Senator Elizabeth Warren comes in third at 65 percent.

Meanwhile, only 17 percent of respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Sanders, while 22 percent had an unfavorable view of Biden. Warren was viewed unfavorably by 18 percent.

Hillary Clinton Defends Harvey Weinstein Association: 'How Could We Have Known?'

Hillary Clinton has defended her years-long association with disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, saying it was "something that everybody thought made sense."

Weinstein has long been a major donor and fundraiser for the Democratic Party and reportedly brought in over $1.4 million to Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.

Clinton has since disavowed Weinstein, saying she was "shocked and appalled" following the publication of numerous claims of sexual assault and harassment against him in 2017 that led to his fall and the rise of the #MeToo movement.

It could be a moot point. FiveThirtyEight forecasts a 45% chance for Biden to win the nomination, and just 18% for Sanders.

Quibi Versus the World: Can Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman change everything about video on your phone?

Jeffrey Katzenberg insists that his new video-streaming service Quibi isn’t competing against Netflix, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, or any of the other streaming services that have launched or are launching soon. You’ve got it all wrong. You’re not even asking the right questions.

“We don’t think we’re in the streaming wars,” Katzenberg, the former boss of Walt Disney Studios and founder of DreamWorks, tells The Verge in a closed-door meeting the day before the company’s grand reveal at a CES keynote. “They’re all battling for this,” he says as he thrusts his arm toward a TV in the room. “We’re going for this,” he says, gesturing toward his phone. “Don’t tell them!”

Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman, who is best known as the CEO of HP and eBay, are publicly announcing Quibi at CES — but not quite unveiling it — after having raised $1 billion on the promise of a roster of Hollywood stars and supposedly revolutionary video-streaming technology that delivers portrait and landscape video at the same time. Everything on Quibi is designed for viewing on a phone, on the go, in 10 minutes or less. These chunks of video are called “quick bites” — hence, “Quibi.”

A streaming service for millennial goldfish. Should be about as successful as Meg Whitman's campaign for Governor of California.

CES 2020: Innogrit SSD Controllers Score Multiple Design Wins

Phison At CES 2020: Preparing For QLC To Go Mainstream

NAND flash memory prices are projected to climb in 2020. The manufacturing transitions to 96-layer 3D NAND and beyond are not going to increase bit output as quickly as demand will be growing. This will be a major change from the NAND oversupply that caused price crashes in 2018 and into 2019.

SSD controller vendor Phison is betting that increasing prices will finally push the consumer SSD market to embrace 4 bit per cell QLC NAND flash memory, which thus far has seen only limited success in the retail SSD market and virtually no adoption from PC OEMs. The price premium for SSDs with 3 bit per cell TLC NAND has been small or non-existent across all market segments, so the performance and endurance advantages of sticking with TLC NAND have been worthwhile. Those days may be coming to an end. Phison expects—quite reasonably—that when NAND flash memory supplies are constrained the bulk of the TLC NAND manufactured will be snatched up by the higher-paying enterprise SSD customers, more or less forcing the consumer SSD market to start shifting toward using QLC as the mainstream option.

QLC data retention, write endurance, and speed drop-offs: manageable?

CES 2020: Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 SSD Makes An Appearance

OWC Releases Accelsior 4M2 SSD: Quad-M.2 For Over 6000 MB/s

CES 2020: ADATA Preparing Three PCIe 4.0 Consumer SSDs

The next-gen consoles due for release in late 2020 have been rumored to use faster-than-typical SSDs.

Black Shark 3 could be the first phone with 16GB of RAM

The most RAM you can get in a smartphone right now is 12GB, but that could soon change, as the Black Shark 3 gaming phone from Xiaomi is rumored to boost that spec to 16GB.

That’s according to Sudhanshu (a leaker on Twitter with a reasonable track record). Of course, whether the Black Shark 3 will be the first phone to arrive with that much RAM depends on when it launches, but with the phone having been rumored for a while – and given that the Black Shark 2 launched in March 2019 – it’s likely that it will arrive soon, possibly at MWC 2020.

Whether or not the Black Shark 3 is first to 16GB, it should make good use of it, as gaming phones need all the power they can get – and with that much RAM, coupled with a top-end chipset (the Snapdragon 865 is likely), it could take us another step closer to console-type power on a phone.

All Galaxy S20 Models Rumored to Feature 12GB LPDDR5 RAM as Part of Their Base Configuration

The tip comes from Ice Universe who claims that the base Galaxy S20 memory configuration will start from 12GB RAM, and it’s not just any other RAM; it’s likely the 12GB LPDDR5 DRAM Samsung announced in July last year. Thanks to a higher data rate, the new mobile memory is 1.5 times faster than LPDDR4x which was featured in previous phones. A new circuit design also makes the new chip more power-efficient as it needs 30 percent less power than its predecessor. With these features, 12GB LPDDR5 RAM will be able to make the best use of the speeds offered by 5G.

Samsung had already announced that the production of 16GB LPDDR5 RAM will begin in 2020, and thus it’s entirely possible that Galaxy S20 memory configuration will go as high as the aforementioned capacity.

Leak Suggests Top Galaxy S20 Ultra Model Will Have 16GB of RAM, Only Variant to Have microSD Card Slot

This is DOA. I need 1,280 GB of RAM in my next smartphone.

Previously: Samsung Begins Mass Producing 12 GB DRAM Packages for Smartphones
Samsung Mass Producing LPDDR5 DRAM (12 Gb x 8 for 12 GB Packages)
Get Ready for Smartphones with 16 GB of RAM

It’s Bernie’s moment. But it’s Bloomberg’s race. (archive)

If it can be summed up, then, the Democratic “mood” is basically this: “We like Bernie. He’s a warrior. But we’re afraid if we nominate him, he’ll lose in the fall. We need someone to get the job done.”

If the two men who might be that someone — former vice president Joe Biden and former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg — lose to Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire, that would make their “electability” somewhat less convincing. Defeat can be contagious. There are not many voters who say: “I like him — he loses a lot.”

So it’s Bernie’s moment, which has sent a wave of panic through the Democratic ecosystem. It’s like waking up from a nightmare, only to realize that you’re waking up in a nightmare.

Which helps explain why Democrats across the country will soon find themselves with a newfound appreciation for the virtues of one Mike Bloomberg, former Republican mayor of New York and billionaire founder of a financial data services empire. He might not have been exactly what they had in mind, but by Super Tuesday he’ll look like Brad Pitt.

Two b(m)illionaires competing for the Presidency is the kaiju battle we need right now. So let's repeat the mistake success of 2016 and finally send Bernie to a retirement home.

Could Earth’s entire population live in one mega-city? (4m38s video)

Liam Young

The handwritten note found in Jeffrey Epstein's jail cell

In the course of a five-month investigation, 60 Minutes obtained photos of Epstein's cell after his apparent suicide. Also found was a note, giving the world a look into what Jeffrey Epstein may have been thinking in his final days.

The note was written on yellow lined paper with a blue ballpoint pen and there were complaints about jail conditions.

The note says that one guard "kept me in a locked shower stall for 1 hour." "[Another prison guard] sent me burnt food." "Giant bugs crawling over my hands. No fun!!"

I do not like them on suicide watch.
I do not like them crawling on my crotch.
I do not like them in my cell.
I do not like them down in hell.
I do not like burnt food and bugs.

60 Minutes investigates the death of Jeffrey Epstein (show transcript)

5 Takeaways From the 60 Minutes Jeffrey Epstein Report

Ricky Gervais slams Hollywood stars in scathing Golden Globes speech

Ricky Gervais Calls Hollywood Stars Jeffrey Epstein's Friends During Golden Globes Opening Monologue