Tag: TechTips

Enlarge / This is your brain on NFTs. We have a lot of questions. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

Ubisoft’s first experiment with non-fungible tokens (called “Quartz Digits”) in Ghost Recon Breakpoint is already winding down just four months after it started. The short saga serves as a prime example of the problems that can arise when a company just throws “the blockchain” into its plans without thinking about why it’s doing so.

Ubisoft announced on Twitter on Tuesday that the company has released “our final piece of content” for Ghost Recon Breakpoint after rolling out 11 updates since the game’s 2019 launch. While Ubisoft says it will “continue to maintain our servers” for Breakpoint and 2017’s Ghost Recon Wildlands for the time being, Breakpoint‘s relatively limited player base means that online multiplayer support probably won’t last that much longer. (Ubisoft will shut down the gameplay servers for battle royale shooter Hyper Scape later this month).

On the Ubisoft Quartz website, the company confirmed that “the last Digit for Ghost Recon Breakpoint was released on 3/17/2022.”

Enlarge / Forthcoming “Edit Tweet” option as seen in a post by Twitter’s communications team. (credit: Twitter)

Twitter is adding an edit button, the company said yesterday. The “Edit Tweet” option will become available “in the coming months” to users of the paid Twitter Blue subscription, with a potential rollout to other users later on.

The announcement came shortly after Elon Musk joined the Twitter board of directors and polled users about whether they want an edit button. But Twitter said the edit button has been in the works for months.

“Now that everyone is asking… yes, we’ve been working on an edit feature since last year!” Twitter’s communications team wrote in a tweet. “No, we didn’t get the idea from a poll . We’re kicking off testing within @TwitterBlue Labs in the coming months to learn what works, what doesn’t, and what’s possible.” Twitter Blue currently has an “Undo Tweet” option that delays sending tweets for up to 60 seconds, but the planned edit button would be the first feature to let users change a tweet after it has been posted. Twitter Blue costs $2.99 a month in the US.

Enlarge / Water levels at the Hoover Dam are well below capacity. (credit: Jorge Villalba)

News that Arizona’s Lake Powell is slowly but surely drying up has spread far and wide. The reservoir behind the 1,320-megawatt Glen Canyon Dam and power station, Lake Powell plays an important role in providing power for some 3 million customers in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.

But this year, the reservoir has hit a historic low, due to ongoing drought conditions in the region that have been attributed, at least in part, to climate change. The dam may even stop producing power if the situation continues to worsen, and this issue is not an isolated one in the American Southwest.

The Colorado River, an important source for many dams and power plants in the region, has been wracked by drought for the past 22 years—some research even suggests that it is subject to the worst drought the area has seen in 1,200 years. Further, according to the US Drought Monitor, as of March 29, 88.75 percent of the Western US has been experiencing a moderate drought or worse. According to staff members at the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), other dams in this be-droughted part of the country are seeing similar effects—though the officials also noted that each case is different.

Enlarge (credit: AMD)

In September, AMD added support for simple CPU overclocking to its graphics drivers. If you had a Ryzen 5000-series CPU and wanted to benefit from the extra performance, this auto-overclocking function could save you from needing to download the more complex Ryzen Master utility. The overclock would also be conservative enough that it probably wouldn’t cause system instability or other issues.

The problem for some users is that this auto-overclocking feature has become too automated—that is, it’s changing systems’ overclocking settings whether users want it to or not.

An AMD representative told Tom’s Hardware that “an issue in the AMD software suite” caused the feature to begin “adjusting certain AMD processor settings for some users.” Because the CPU overclocking feature is actually changing settings in your system’s BIOS, that means it can change overclocking settings that users have changed themselves and apply an overclock where there was no overclock before. That second bit could be especially problematic since overclocking processors generally voids AMD’s CPU warranty, even when you’re using AMD-provided tools like Ryzen Master or using AMD-advertised features like Precision Boost Overdrive (though, anecdotally, this policy isn’t consistently enforced).

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Intel, one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies, is suspending business operations in Russia “effective immediately,” the company announced on Tuesday.

“Intel continues to join the global community in condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine,” the company said in a statement. Intel stopped shipping chips to customers in Russia and Belarus in early March.

Intel said that it is “working to support all of our employees through this difficult situation, including our 1,200 employees in Russia.”

Enlarge / 70 percent of the cars Porsche has ever built are still on the road. Since it wants to keep it that way, it’s developing a synthetic fuel that emits 90 percent less CO₂ than gasoline derived from fossil fuels. (credit: Porsche)

In 2021, Porsche announced that it was starting to work with synthetic fuels. The company is rather proud that so many of the cars it has built over the decades are still on the road and recognizes that the only way to maintain that in an increasingly climate-blighted future will be with synthetic gasoline that’s made with carbon sucked from the air.

In September last year, the Haru Oni pilot plant, built for that purpose, broke ground in Punta Arenas in Chile. That plant was funded in part by Porsche as well as Siemens Energy and ExxonMobil but is being built and will be operated by a Chilean startup called HIF Global. On Wednesday Porsche announced that it was investing $75 million to buy a 12.5 percent stake in the startup.

The efuel-making process at Haru Oni starts by capturing CO₂ from the air and using wind power to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen. The carbon and hydrogen are used to synthesize methanol, and the methanol is then turned into longer hydrocarbons using ExxonMobil’s methanol-to-gasoline process.