Author: easyfilo

Enlarge / Samsung’s Galaxy Book2 series of laptops. (credit: Samsung)

Samsung will refresh its Galaxy Book line of thin-and-light laptops with the help of Intel’s long-awaited Arc graphics, the company announced this week. It’ll join the likes of Acer, whose Swift X laptop is one of the first to use the Arc mobile GPU.

We’re still waiting to hear more about Arc, but this month, Team Blue promised to ship its GPUs in Q1 of this year, with desktop Arc graphics cards to ship in Q2 and workstation GPUs in Q3.

That puts Samsung’s newly announced 15.6-inch Galaxy Book2 Pro right on schedule and should make it one of the first Arc-based laptops when it comes out on April 1. This is a thin-and-light laptop, not a gaming one, measuring just 0.52 inches thick and weighing 2.58 pounds, so we wouldn’t expect it to show the full capabilities of Intel’s Alchemist architecture.

Enlarge / OK, open your eyes. Surprise! Now you have to pay local sales taxes on your virtual land purchase! (credit: Linden Labs)

Second Life, the long-lived online metaverse that still attracts nearly a million monthly active users, has announced it will start charging US users local sales tax on many in-game purchases for the first time since its launch in 2003. That could be a significant drag on the online universe’s robust in-game economy and serve as a warning for other nascent metaverse efforts hoping to sell virtual goods to US residents.

In announcing the move Monday, Second Life developer Linden Labs cited the 2018 Supreme Court decision South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., Et Al. That decision established that states and localities could charge sales tax even for products sold by online companies that don’t have a physical presence in that state. Following that decision, Linden Labs says it has “done our best to shield our residents from these taxes as long as possible, but we are no longer able to absorb them.”

As such, starting March 31, Second Life users will be billed for local taxes on recurring billings such as subscriptions and land fees. Linden Labs will continue to absorb any taxes charged on one-time purchases like name changes and purchases of L$ in-game currency. But those costs will be passed on to users “at some point in the future” Linden Labs writes.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Late last night, an Airbus A340-300 took off from Munich International Airport in Germany. It’s possible that the plane was empty apart from the crew, though it may have been carrying a passenger who was looking to get out of town quickly. The brown-and-white jet, named “Bourkhan,” is owned by Alisher Usmanov, who has been known to visit spas in the Bavarian Alps. At the time of the takeoff, the Russian oligarch had been banned from travel in the European Union five hours earlier. 

Twenty minutes later, a Twitter bot created by a college student dutifully fired off a tweet notifying anyone who was watching that Usmanov’s plane was headed east. Hours later, it touched down in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, Usmanov’s hometown.

Usmanov’s plane isn’t the only one tracked by @RUOligarchJets. The bot is tweeting updates whenever the movements of 46 jets owned or leased by more than 20 Russian oligarchs hit ADS-B Exchange, a site that collects data from aviation enthusiasts who run their own equipment to monitor airplane movements. Many of the oligarchs have been hit with sanctions and travel bans.

Enlarge / One of Waymo’s Jaguar I-Paces on the streets of San Francisco. (credit: Waymo)

Waymo rides in San Francisco will start costing money soon, according to TechCrunch. The robotaxi spinoff from Alphabet has obtained a necessary permit from the California Public Utilities Commission that allows it to charge customers for their trips, something that should start happening later in March.

Originally, Waymo started teaching its robotaxis to drive in the flat, sunny expanse of Chandler, Arizona. And in October 2020, the company finally started offering an actual commercial ride-hailing service in the area.

Ironically, there are limits to the lessons you can learn in such a car-centric environment. Training an autonomous vehicle is all about mastering the edge cases, and there are many more of those in the dense, chaotic, pedestrian-filled environment of San Francisco than an Arizona suburb.

Enlarge (credit: Sala et al. 2022)

Early humans suffered frequent head injuries but often lived long enough for those injuries to heal. That’s the result of a study that analyzed twenty 350,000-year-old skulls from a cave in Spain. The study also found that recovery wasn’t inevitable—several of the individuals in the cave apparently died from violent blows to the head.

Welcome to the Pit of Bones

About 350,000 years ago, deep in a cave network in what is now northern Spain, the remains of at least 29 people somehow ended up at the bottom of a 13-meter-deep shaft. Paleoanthropologists have unearthed thousands of broken pieces of bone, which add up to the partial skeletons of at least 29 members of a hominin species called Homo heidelbergensis, which may have been a common ancestor of our species and Neanderthals.

The pit, called Sima de los Huesos, contains a mix of ages and genders. Paleoanthropologists are still debating whether the pit was a burial site or just a place where bones washed in with floodwaters.

Enlarge / Apple’s 2021 iPad—sans futuristic folding capability, of course. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Two different sources are now saying Apple plans to introduce a foldable iPad and MacBook hybrid product, though the release date for such a device would likely be a few years away.

The rumors first began to swirl when DSCC analyst Ross Young published a report claiming that Apple has been discussing a 20-inch foldable computing device with suppliers.

The device could be used in multiple ways. When it’s folded into a laptop-like shape, the hybrid’s bottom half could be used as a keyboard. When it’s unfolded, the device could be treated like a large tablet computer. Further, the hybrid could be used with an external keyboard to work as a portable monitor and all-in-one computer.