Month: February 2022

Enlarge / Gigi Sohn testifies during a Senate committee hearing on June 21, 2012. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )

Although the Senate Commerce Committee was scheduled to vote yesterday on the nomination of Gigi Sohn to the Federal Communications Commission, it didn’t happen. The vote on President Joe Biden’s nomination of Sohn was delayed even as the committee voted to approve 10 other Biden nominations to various positions.

Yesterday’s delay has a logical explanation: Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) suffered a stroke last week, and Sohn’s confirmation needs his vote because of Republican opposition to the long-time consumer advocate who strongly supports reimposing net neutrality rules on broadband providers. Luján is expected to make a full recovery, but his absence could further delay Sohn’s nomination and other Democratic priorities in the 50-50 Senate. “On Wednesday an aide said that the New Mexico senator could return to work in four to six weeks, barring any complications,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

But Sohn’s nomination was already in trouble even though the Senate had plenty of time to vote on it before Luján’s health emergency. Biden nominated Sohn on October 26. The president made two other telecom choices on the same day, nominating FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel for a new term and picking Alan Davidson to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Nintendo)

Nintendo’s latest financial report to investors, issued as an overview of its fiscal year’s third quarter, came with a momentous announcement for the veteran video game and console producer: Switch has joined the 100 million-worldwide-sales club.

What’s more, Switch’s current tally of 103.5 million means the device has leapfrogged over both the PlayStation 1 and Nintendo Wii in terms of sales. The count makes the Switch Nintendo’s highest-selling home console of all time. While Sony’s PS4 and PS2 console families continue to hold higher sales counts, neither got to the 100 million mark as quickly as Switch, which only needed 57 months to do so (March 2017 to December 2021).

Nintendo Switch’s 57 months to reach 100 million units sold, as compared to other members of the 100 million club. (credit: Kyle Orland)

The only console family to get to the 100 million-global-sales mark faster is Nintendo’s own portable DS platform, which needed only 51 months. The DS, which came out in 2004, launched at a lower $149 price point and went lower from there, while Switch has never sold for less than $199.

Enlarge / The proposed replacement USPS mail truck got a lot of attention for its odd looks, but the real crime is a pathetic 8.6 mpg fuel efficiency—barely any improvement on the current vehicles.

The United States Post Office’s plan to replace its aging delivery vehicles has been heavily criticized by the Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality. The letters, first published by The Washington Post on Tuesday, excoriate the decision to award a $482 million contract to Oshkosh Defense without properly examining the environmental impact, as required by law.

Specifically, the EPA says that the USPS’s required environmental impact report “does not disclose essential information underlying the key analysis of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), underestimates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, fails to consider more environmentally protective feasible alternatives, and inadequately considers impacts on communities with environmental justice concerns.”

Or, as the Chair of the CEQ wrote in a letter to Postmaster Louis DeJoy, his “agency committed to walk down a path before looking to see where the path was leading,” in contravention of longstanding practices and laws.

Enlarge (credit: Silicon Motion)

Most companies still haven’t shifted their entire NVMe SSD lineups to use PCI Express 4.0, but PCIe 5.0 SSDs for PCs are already on the horizon.

Storage company Silicon Motion said in a recent earnings call that it expects its PCIe 5.0-capable SSD controllers for consumer SSDs will be available sometime in 2024, opening the door to a wide variety of high-performance drives from different manufacturers. SSD manufacturer ADATA teased some PCIe 5.0 SSDs at CES last month (albeit without an expected release date), boasting of read speeds up to 14GB/s and write speeds of up to 12GB/s using a Silicon Motion SM2508 controller. Current high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs like Samsung’s 980 Pro top out at roughly half those speeds.

Other reports have suggested that these PCIe 5.0 consumer SSDs are coming later in 2022, but according to the call transcript, that only applies to the latest version of Silicon Motion’s PCIe 5.0 controller for enterprise SSDs—the products that end up in servers and data centers, not what typically ends up in the PC on your desk or lap. Early PCIe 4.0 SSDs for consumer PCs were also demonstrated at CES a couple of years before they became products that you could actually buy.

Enlarge / The patterns of the ocellated lizard are predictable by a mathematical model for phase transitions. (credit: UNIGE / Michel Milinkovitch)

Zebras and tigers have stripes, cheetahs and leopards have spots, and the ocellated lizard (Timon lepidus) boasts a labyrinthine pattern of black-and-green chains of scales. Now researchers from the University of Geneva in Switzerland have demonstrated with a simple mathematical equation the lizard’s complex patterns, according to a recent paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

“These labyrinthine patterns, which provide ocellated lizards with an optimal camouflage, have been selected in the course of evolution,” said co-author Michel Milinkovitch, a theoretical physicist at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. “These patterns are generated by a complex system, that yet can be simplified as a single equation, where what matters is not the precise location of the green and black scales, but the general appearance of the final patterns.”

As we’ve reported previously, a common popular (though hotly debated) hypothesis for the formation of these kinds of animal patterns was proposed by Alan Turing in 1952, which is why they are sometimes referred to as “Turing patterns.” Turing’s seminal paper focused on chemicals known as morphogens. His proposed mechanism involved the interaction between an activator chemical that expresses a unique characteristic (like a tiger’s stripe) and an inhibitor chemical that periodically kicks in to shut down the activator’s expression. The key is that the inhibitor diffuses at a faster rate than the activator, creating periodic patterning.