Month: April 2022

(credit: Getty Images | eccolo74)

Elon Musk is facing a shareholder lawsuit over his failure to reveal his investment in Twitter until 11 days after a deadline set by federal law.

Musk started buying Twitter stock in January and acquired more than 5 percent of all shares by March 14, the lawsuit said. Under US law, “Musk was required to file a Schedule 13 with the SEC within 10 days of passing the 5 percent ownership threshold in Twitter, or March 24, 2022,” said the complaint filed yesterday in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

Twitter’s stock rose 27 percent on April 4 when Musk revealed his 9.2 percent stake. This means that investors who sold before April 4 missed out on the gains and that Musk was able to keep buying shares at artificially low prices, the class action complaint said:

Enlarge / OnLeaks’ render of the Pixel 6a. Here you can see the flat screen and the low-profile camera bump. (credit: OnLeaks x 91Mobiles)

As pointed out by Droid-Life, Google’s next midrange phone, the Pixel 6a, has popped up at the FCC.

What’s most surprising about the listing is the timing. The Pixel 6a’s April FCC arrival is the earliest we’ve seen for the A series in a long time. The Pixel 5a was listed at the FCC in July 2021 and launched a month later in August, while the Pixel 4a hit the FCC in June 2020 and was also released in August. The first Pixel A phone, the Pixel 3a, had a February FCC listing and launched at Google I/O in May. This year, Google’s (virtual) I/O event is May 11, 2022, so that day is currently the odds-on favorite release date for the phone.

There are four different models at the FCC, with only one unit having mmWave functionality. mmWave adds $50-$100 to the price of a phone and has almost no real-world use because carriers haven’t rolled out mmWave to many places. Given the immense cost of mmWave, we’d rather save the money.

Enlarge (credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus)

More than 200 long-time Wikipedia editors have requested that the Wikimedia Foundation stop accepting cryptocurrency donations. The foundation received crypto donations worth about $130,000 in the most recent fiscal year—less than 0.1 percent of the foundation’s revenue, which topped $150 million last year.

Debate on the proposal has raged over the last three months.

“Cryptocurrencies are extremely risky investments that have only been gaining popularity among retail investors,” wrote Wikipedia user GorillaWarfare, the original author of the proposal, back in January. “I do not think we should be endorsing their use in this way.”

Enlarge / Quake II RTX and other games that support ray tracing have finally been confirmed as working on Steam Deck, both at 30 and 60 fps refresh rates. But the fancy-looking option could be better—if Valve steps up to finish the job for its default SteamOS. (credit: Valve / Sam Machkovech)

In the weeks since Valve’s Steam Deck release, fans and critics alike have been poring through the device’s possibilities, stymied in part by near-daily software and OS updates. I previously posited in my review that Steam Deck was not “finished,” and while the device has become much more stable, its full potential remains unclear.

Perhaps that’s why the latest Steam Deck analysis from the hardware geniuses at Digital Foundry has struck gold. On Tuesday, site founder Richard Leadbetter unearthed something that the community at large appears to have missed up until now: The portable, 15 W-maximum Steam Deck is capable of ray tracing.

The (R)DNA was in Steam Deck the whole time

The proof, as seen in a video on DF’s YouTube channel, required an overkill testing scenario. Leadbetter wiped the system’s default OS, installed Windows 10, and retested ray tracing-compatible software before wiping the system again to get SteamOS back on there. This obnoxious process was required during Leadbetter’s testing period because Steam Deck does not officially support a dual-boot option for multiple OS installs, even though fans have more recently come up with methods to do that.