Okay, screenwriters, directors, authors, and production companies — we get it. You have some experience telling stories about Wall Street, the video game industry, or social networks, and you see some mighty big dollar signs in the true tale of how Reddit managed to drive an ailing video game retailer’s stocks to completely ridiculous highs through sheer power of will plus a David versus Goliath narrative that probably doesn’t hold up under close examination.
So you’re making movies — four of them — and a TV show. Why not? It’s not like any one person has the rights to a news event like this!
As of Friday, February 5th:
HBO now has a movie from the guy who wrote Too Big to Fail and co-created Showtime’s Billions
MGM optioned a movie based on a book that hasn’t even been written yetwhose author you’ll probably know from the book that became David Fincher’s The Social Network
Netflix is negotiating with the screenwriter of The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty to write yet another movie, with one of those cute guys from To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before playing a role
The writer and director of Console Wars (a book, also a movie) now have a feature-length documentary that’s “fully financed and already in production”
And yes, a TV show. How can this possibly turn into a TV show?
No. But just in case yes, we imagine this set of completely disparate productions will need some excellent titles going forward. May we humbly suggest:
GameStop: Never Stop Stopping
Uncut GMEs
Meme Streets
Short Stop
From Pre-Order to Stock Order
I Have No Shares, and I Must Sell
Hate the Player, Not the GME
The Weeb of Wall Street
The Game is Up
GameStop Won’t Stop
Diamond Hands
Robinhood and the Men in Gamer Chairs
To The Moon, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and HODL
This Theater Still Exists Because of This Movie’s Events (remember AMC?)
The Bankrupting of the Hedge Fund Melvin Capital by the Internet Message Board WallStreetBets
(Pocket-lint) – For as long as the modern smartphone era has been around, Samsung and Apple have offered flagships phones that seem to be the two default choices for so many buyers. Right now, those two phones are the Galaxy S21 and the iPhone 12.
Design
iPhone: 146.7 x 71.5 x 7.4 mm
Galaxy: 151.7 x 71.2 x 7.9 mm
Both: IP68 water and dust resistant
iPhone: Glass and aluminium build
Galaxy: Plastic, aluminium and glass
If there’s one area these two phones differ the most, it’s in design. Whether you look at them from the front, the side, or the back, there’s no way you’d get them confused with each other. In fact, even if you held them in your hand, they feel nothing alike.
Featuring a frosted plastic back, the Samsung immediately feels warmer and and softer in the hand. That’s further aided by the rounded edges. That makes it the more tactile of the two devices.
For some, featuring plastic on a flagship device is unacceptable, but the way Samsung has utilised the plastic – and the finish it’s achieved with the frosted translucent panel letting through light from the reflective layer beneath – actually looks and feels great.
As for looks, there’s no doubt that the iPhone has that premium appeal. The flat edges and clean lines give it that purposeful look, and the build materials of glass and aluminium in a minimalist blend will appeal to a lot of people. It looks great.
On a more practical note, it feels a lot more solid and durable too. The frame feels practically unbendable, and even after nearly 6 months with it, there’s barely a scratch on the glass. Both phones feature IP68 water and dust resistance, so will survive if you accidentally drop them in the sink or get caught in the rain.
From the front, Samsung seems to make better use of space, by filling as much of it as possible with display. Apple’s notch cuts in considerably at the top, while Samsung only has that tiny hole punch getting in the way. In actual fact, once you load some games and apps – especially in landscape – Samsung tends to black out a portion of it and make an artificial bezel anyway, so the difference once you’re actually doing something, is minimal.
Saying that, Samsung’s bezels do seem a bit skinnier around the sides and at the top. Apple, however, kept them uniform all the way around, avoiding that tiny chin look that Samsung has.
Displays
iPhone: 6.1-inch, 1170 x 2532 resolution OLED display
Galaxy: 6.2-inch, 1080 x 2400 resolution AMOLED display
iPhone: HDR10 and up to 60Hz refresh
Galaxy: HDR10+ and up to 120Hz adaptive refresh
iPhone: 1200 nits peak brightness
Galaxy: 1300 nits peak brightness
Unlike last year, Apple’s is the one with the sharper screen here. Samsung downgraded from QHD to FHD, and while it’s 6.2-inches versus Apple’s 6.1-inches, it packs in fewer pixels than the iPhone. Not that you’d particularly notice.
Both push pixel density past the 400ppi mark, and both seem sharp and clear in daily use. Both even feature similar peak brightness: it’s 1200nits for Apple versus 1300 nits for Samsung. Both are OLED based, and that means you get vivid colours and great contrast regardless of which you go for.
Perhaps the one big difference is Samsung’s adaptive frame rate technology. It goes all the way up to 120Hz when the content on screen requires it. Some will notice it more than others, but it makes general interaction and animation seem really smooth.
Watch the same video or look at the same photo side by side, and you’ll spot other differences too. Even in its ‘natural’ mode, Samsung’s screen seems to boost pink/red/orange colours. White skin tones look a bit pinker, and oranges are fiercer. iPhone is a little bit more muted, but other colours are similar on both. That said, Samsung seems to make stuff look sharper because it boosts contrast.
On the one hand, it’s great because it’s sharp and bright during video, but on the other, there’s the red saturation makes things look less balanced.
The other plus side for Samsung is that you can tune it to your liking if you want to. Using the Vivid mode you can adjust the colour temperature. Whereas Apple likes it a certain way, and that’s pretty much it. Although you can enable True Tone to get it to adjust its white balance to suit the ambient lighting.
In performance and battery just reading the specs would be useless, because comparing those is like comparing Apples with Orang-Utangs.
The real thing to note here is that in every day, day-to-day use, both phones give you fast and reliable performance. Whether you’re loading the latest graphically intense games, browsing the internet or catching up on social media. They’re fast and smooth.
It’s the same with battery life. With our own personal use, using either phone as a daily device – with a 2-3 hours of screen time playing games or watching movies – we’d get to the end of the day with about 40 per cent left over. Not quite two-day batteries, but not far off either.
Both have 5G, wireless charging and fast charging, but neither ships with a charger in the box anymore.
Cameras
iPhone: Dual camera
12MP primary f/1.6 wide camera
12MP f/2.4 ultrawide
4K video up to 60fps
Galaxy: Triple camera
12MP primary f/1.8 camera
12MP f/2.2 ultrawide
64MP f/2.0 telephoto 3x hybrid zoom
8K video at 24fps and 4K up to 60fps
In the camera department, Samsung does have at least one advantage over the iPhone. It’s got three lenses on the back, and that gives you more flexibility when it comes to focal lengths. As well as your primary and ultra-wide lenses – which the iPhone has – Samsung gives you a telephoto zoom lens, with 3x hybrid zoom.
It achieves that partly because that telephoto lens has a 64MP sensor, giving you the ability to crop without losing tonnes of detail. If you want to, you can zoom digitally all the way up to 30x on the Samsung, giving you huge range, even if some of those results at the upper end of the scale are quite ropey.
iPhone will let you do up to 5x zoom, but it uses the primary sensor and uses a digital zoom, losing a bit of detail when it does. Still, results from both cameras are good.
Stick to the standard focal lengths and the two phones will both get you good results, and both offer effective night modes. iPhone’s results seemed cleaner, brighter and sharper than Samsung’s using night mode, like it did a better job of stabilising the image. Samsung’s by comparison was a tiny bit blurrier and didn’t seem to draw in as much light.
In day time there were some differences. iPhone pictures on the whole seemed to up the contrast and saturation by default. Sometimes that means a lovely vibrant and rich picture that looked sharp, with Samsung looking a bit over exposed in the highlights by comparison. Other times, for landscapes, iPhone seemed maybe a tad too dark, with the Samsung offering the better picture without over egging the blue skies and darkening the shadows too much.
The colour difference between the main and ulrawide cameras was noticeable though. As for selfies, yet again, Samsung seemed to do a better job of a natural look. iPhone went a bit aggressive on the HDR completely washing out faces one second, and the next when switched to portrait selfie making it too dark and saturated.
And then there’s the fact that Samsung offers so many additional shooting modes to choose from, if you have the time, that’s a lot of fun to play with.
Both do 4K video at 60fps, with the Galaxy also capable of shooting 8K at 24fps. Samsung looking a little over sharpened, but both are great quality, and offer effective stabilisation.
Price and Conclusion
iPhone: from £799/$799
Galaxy: from £769/$799
In the end, both of these phones offer a great all-round experience and choosing one over the other might just come down to having premium build and a better display, in which case I think the iPhone is the better choice. Or if you’re all about cameras, Samsung has a lot going for it there. But even in that department, it’s not a clear winner. Both have strengths and weaknesses.
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As for software, iPhones benefit is that you get updates as soon as they’re available and will likely be supported for a good number of years before it no longer gets them. Samsung is getting better in that regard – in terms of long term support – but you do have to wait until Samsung tests and releases its own versions of major Android updates.
Senate Democrats unveiled a new bill Friday that could force tech giants like Facebook and Google to be held more accountable for harmful content that leads to real-world violence.
The SAFE TECH Act, introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), and Mazie Hirono (D-HI), would overhaul Section 230 to the Communications Decency Act, a law that protects large tech platforms from liability over the content posted by their users. The Democrats’ bill would open new pathways for users to sue companies if content posted on their platforms threatens them personally with harassment, discrimination, or other forms of abuse.
The bill also prohibits Section 230 from applying to ads or other paid content on platforms, targeting a large source of revenue for companies like Facebook and Google.
“When Section 230 was enacted in 1996, the Internet looked very different than it does today. A law meant to encourage service providers to develop tools and policies to support effective moderation has instead conferred sweeping immunity on online providers even when they do nothing to address foreseeable, obvious and repeated misuse of their products and services to cause harm,” Warner said in a statement Friday.
The SAFE TECH Act is the Democrats’ first big content moderation bill following last month’s deadly attack on the Capitol. Shortly after the riot, tech platforms from Twitter to Parler were targeted for their alleged roles in the violence that transpired in Washington. Parler, the right’s formerly favored free speech platform, was forced offline for weeks after web hosts like AWS pulled their services to the site, alleging that posts on the platform encouraged violence.
Following the Capitol riots, lawmakers looked to Section 230 as a means of addressing misinformation and harmful content that may have led rioters to storm the Capitol. Days after, House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) called on the FBI to open an investigation into Parler for its perceived role in the attack. Other House Democrats, like Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA), signed onto letters to the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube calling on them to audit their algorithms and make changes that could limit virality on harmful content.
With Democrats now in control of Congress and the presidency, previous negotiations on Section 230 have been flipped on their heads. Changing the law was first championed by Republicans who sought to punish tech companies over the lawmakers’ baseless claims that the platforms were biased against conservatives. Now, Democrats are moving to reform 230 in a way that punishes platforms for disinformation and harmful content.
“We need to be asking more from big tech companies, not less. How they operate has a real-life effect on the safety and civil rights of Americans and people around the world, as well as our democracy. Holding these platforms accountable for ads and content that can lead to real-world harm is critical, and this legislation will do just that,” Klobuchar said in a statement Friday.
Along with news, features, opinions, and tech reviews, video has become an increasingly important part of The Verge’s content. But to make great, involving videos, you’ve got to have staff with the expertise to create that video — along with the tools that allow those staff members to let their imaginations soar.
Alix Diaconis is one of the directors who helps make video magic for The Verge. We talked to Alix about what she does and what tools she uses.
Alix, what do you do for The Verge?
I’m one of the video directors for The Verge. I get to work every day with my three co-workers (but really, friends) to create the videos on The Verge’s YouTube channel. Sometimes deadlines are fast because tech and news are fast, but our team has been working together for years, so even live events feel seamless and fun. We each shoot, take photos, and edit; then the video gets treated by our sound and graphics wizards. Then bam, on to the next one!
What hardware and software tools are needed to produce a video for a site like The Verge?
It really varies video to video. For some videos, we’ll pull out all the stops, while for others, we need to do quick and light. Heck, I think we’ve shot videos with just a GoPro.
When we go to a press event, we’ll keep it very light with a monopod, lavalier microphone, and a camera we feel most comfortable with. And then I’ll edit at the event on my MacBook Pro.
But most of the time when we’re shooting on location, we’ll bring a bigger kit with an HD monitor, a slider (which helps you do tracking shots), maybe a drone. And when we’re making the big stuff, like a flagship phone review, we like to bring out everything, including a probe lens like the Venus Optics Laowa to make intro shots like this.
The opening shot on this video was created using a probe lens.
Since we’re uploading videos for our job, good internet upload speeds make life a lot easier. We also have a shared server so we have access to our terabytes and terabytes of footage at all times.
Oh, and also teamwork. Lots and lots of teamwork.
What specific hardware tools do you use for your work?
For shooting, I prefer to use the Canon EOS C200 — I think it looks really cinematic — and my preferred lens is the Canon EF 70-200mm (for B-roll at least). Sometimes I’ll use the Sony A7S II or III, which looks extra crisp, but I’m not a big fan of Sony menus. For sound, I’ll typically use a Sennheiser G3 lavalier or a Zoom H6 recorder. For photos, I use the Canon 50D.
For post-production in The Verge offices, I would edit on a 27-inch iMac, which is due for an upgrade. At home, though, I have a more powerful editing PC that my producer built for me. It has an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core processor, 2TB NVMe drive, a Radeon RX 580 series video card, 32GB RAM, and an Asus 28-inch 4K display. Of course, there are always technical issues — it’s part of editing — but the PC is the best editing machine I’ve personally owned. (Thank you, Phil!) I do miss the beautiful iMac display though.
Also, since video takes up a lot of space, I’ll sometimes use an additional SSD for projects. And as for headphones, I use the Sony MDR-7506, which are the only headphones I can wear comfortably all day.
And then there’s the fun, random gear: a GoPro Hero 8, an Insta360 panoramic video camera (which we recently used for this e-bike video), a Zhiyun Crane, a DJI Mavic Pro drone… and whatever else we can get our hands on.
This video was created using an Insta360 panoramic video camera.
What software tools do you use for your work?
All Adobe everything. Premiere Pro for editing, After Effects for basic graphics, and Photoshop for the video thumbnails. You can do a lot in Premiere, but it does have its bugs, and it’s not always optimized for Apple’s hardware.
What tools do you use for your own projects?
I’ve been teaching myself DaVinci Resolve to color footage. I still barely understand the program, but it makes footage look 100x better than coloring it in Premiere. And purely for fun, I shoot 35mm film on my dad’s old Minolta camera.
What hardware and software tools would you recommend for somebody just starting out?
Premiere is very common for editing. But if you want to try something free and you have an iPhone or iPad, there’s the Splice app. It’s really intuitive, but you’re limited to clips you have on your device. There’s also DaVinci Resolve, which is free and as advanced as most paid editing softwares.
As for cameras, just get one that you feel comfortable using! And for a computer, invest in a good one if you see yourself editing for a long time; iMacs and Windows PCs are both good, and the specs will just depend on how big your projects will be. I haven’t had a chance to use Apple’s new M1 MacBook Air or Pro yet, but both seem like good choices if you’d prefer a laptop.
In an open letter on Thursday, dozens of Democrats called on Federal Communications Commission Acting Chair Jessica Rosenworcel to expand the use of broadband funds for students struggling to stay connected and participate in remote learning.
In a letter to Rosenworcel, signed by over 30 Senate Democrats, including Sens. Ed Markey (D-MA) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), they requested that the FCC use E-Rate program funds to connect students with devices and home internet access who are currently unable to participate in online learning as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. The E-Rate program provides universal service funding to connect schools and libraries to the internet.
“We urge you to now use your new leadership of the FCC to depart from the prior Commission’s erroneous position,” the senators wrote. “Although the funds currently available through the E-Rate will not be enough to connect every student across the country, your prompt action would provide an essential down payment.”
Previous FCC Chair Ajit Pai denied these calls for E-Rate expansion throughout his tenure at the agency during the pandemic. A minority commissioner at the time called on the FCC to use the E-Rate program to ensure students have the devices and connectivity needed to participate in remote learning in an op-ed for The Verge last March.
There are already indications that the FCC will take action on the issue. Earlier this week, Rosenworcel announced that the FCC would seek comment on petitions to open up E-Rate program funds for use in supporting remote learning during the pandemic, a first step in more substantial changes to the program.
“We need to get to work to update E-Rate funding so all our students can be connected to virtual classrooms, no matter who they are or where they live,” Rosenworcel said in a statement Monday. “Kids shouldn’t have to do homework in parking lots because that’s the only place they can get online. We can do better.”
Clearview AI’s facial recognition amounts to mass surveillance and the company should delete the faces of Canadians from its database, Canada’s privacy commissioners said Wednesday.
Commissioner Daniel Therrien said what Clearview does — scraping photos from social media and other public sites for use by law enforcement — is “illegal” and creates a system that “inflicts broad-based harm on all members of society, who find themselves continually in a police lineup.”
The commissioners released a report that follows a yearlong investigation by several Canadian privacy agencies into Clearview’s practices, which found the company had collected highly sensitive biometric information without consent and that it “used and disclosed Canadians’ personal information for inappropriate purposes.”
According to the investigators, the company maintains that Canada’s privacy laws don’t apply to Clearview since it does not have a “real and substantial connection” to the country, and that consent from individuals was not required because the information it collected was publicly available.
Clearview’s database of some 3 billion images was revealed in a New York Times investigation in January 2020. In addition to raising serious concerns about privacy, the company’s practice of taking images from social media violated the platforms’ rules, and tech platforms sent cease-and-desist orders to Clearview in the wake of the report.
Clearview CEO Hoan Ton-That told the Times that the company had ceased operations in Canada last July due to the investigation, and he added that Clearview was not planning to delete Canadians’ images from its database, but that people could request their data be removed by using an opt-out form.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police was among the dozens of law enforcement and other organizations in Canada that had paid for Clearview’s services.
The commissioners don’t have the authority to fine companies or order them to leave Canada, but they sent a letter of intention to Clearview telling the company to stop scraping images of Canadians’ faces, stop offering its facial recognition product in Canada, and to delete previously collected images of Canadians.
It’s not the first time Clearview has been ordered to remove images from its database. The company terminated all its contracts in the state of Illinois last May — the majority of which were with law enforcement agencies — following a lawsuit alleging Clearview had violated the state’s Biometric Information Privacy Act. Clearview also said at the time it was canceling the contracts of any non-law enforcement entities; a report from BuzzFeed News found that Clearview’s list of private clients had included Bank of America, Walmart, and Macy’s.
Clearview did not reply to a request for comment from The Verge, but the company plans to challenge the decision in court. A spokesperson told the Times that Clearview collects “public information from the internet, which is explicitly permitted,” and likened what it does to Google. “Clearview AI is a search engine that collects public data just as much larger companies do, including Google, which is permitted to operate in Canada,” the spokesperson argued.
Use of Clearview AI’s facial recognition among law enforcement spiked 26 percent on January 7th, one day after a mob of rioters attacked the US Capitol, with several police departments using Clearview software to assist the FBI with identifying the rioters. Clearview also has contracts with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security.
Myanmar’s government has blocked access to Facebook in the country, after users turned to the company’s services to protest this week’s military coup. In a statement given to The Wall Street Journal, Facebook confirmedthat the country’s telecoms providers had been ordered to block its services, adding, “We urge authorities to restore connectivity so that people in Myanmar can communicate with family and friends and access important information.” Myanmar’s government has ordered the services to be blocked until Sunday.
The block comes after users reportedly turned to the social network to protest after the military ousted elected leader Aung San Suu Kyi and detained her along with other members of her party. The WSJ notes that users on Facebook were sharing photos of themselves banging pots and pans as a sign of protest, as well as images of a three-fingered salute — a gesture that’s become a sign of resistance in the region.
Telecoms provider Telenor confirmed to Nikkeithat it has followed the government’s orders, saying it has “decided to comply with the directive, while expressing grave concerns regarding breach of human rights.” The WSJ reports that an internet monitoring organization, NetBlocks, confirmed that Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp are all unavailable via the state-owned Myanmar Posts and Telecommunications’ network.
Facebook is an integral part of Myanmar’s internet ecosystem. “For the majority of Myanmar’s 20 million internet-connected citizens, Facebook is the internet” was how a report from 2018 put it, and Nikkei notes that Messenger is the primary communications channel for most of its citizens. It’s believed around half of the country’s population holds a Facebook account, meaning any attempt to block the service is a significant move.
This close relationship between Myanmar’s internet and Facebook has created problems. In 2018, Facebook admitted that it hadn’t done enough “to help prevent our platform from being used to foment division and incite offline violence,” after critics said its platform had played a role in genocidal violence in the country. Facebook said it was investing in “people, technology and partnerships to examine and address the abuse of Facebook in Myanmar.”
After his social media platform was largely wiped off the web, Parler CEO and co-founder John Matze says he has been fired by his company’s own board of directors, according to a memo obtained by Fox News and a text message confirmation he sent to Reuters.
Parler, of course, is the social network that found itself wholly deplatformed after its role in the January 6th riots at the US Capitol. Both Apple and Google removed the app from their app stores after being unsatisfied with the company’s attempts to moderate the spread of calls for violence. Amazon decided to terminate the company’s AWS website hosting completely. And though Parler did try to sue Amazon, a judge denied a demand for its website hosting to be reinstated.
On January 10th, Matze told Fox News that all the company’s vendors — and even its lawyers — had abandoned him.
Today, Matze claims he was terminated by a board led by Rebekah Mercer, and that he had “met constant resistance to my product vision,” according to his memo. It might also have something to do with the company getting run into the ground under his watch. In addition to the difficulties of simply staying up on the internet, it came to light that Parler may have had some privacy issues. Researchers were able to scrape a tremendous amount of users’ content, including their geotagged locations and videos, which were later converted into interactive maps of the Capitol building attack that proved many Parler users were involved.
The House Oversight Committee even called for an FBI investigation into Parler’s involvement in the attack on the Capitol.
Parler does currently have a website again thanks to the hosting services of Epik, a company that also supports controversial websites like Gab and 8chan, and while Parler originally suggested there that it hoped “to welcome all of you back soon,” the website has mostly been a timeline of grievances about how the company has been treated unjustly. Matze hasn’t posted there since Monday, January 26th. His last post was a Bernie Sanders meme:
Parler didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
If you live in one of the twelve states where Comcast is planning to roll out 1.2TB data caps, we have some moderately good news: you won’t have to start monitoring your bill for extra charges until July. The ISP had planned to start charging customers $10-and-up fees for using more than 1.2TB of data starting this March, but the rollout has been delayed (via The Washington Post). This gives us a few more months until the scourge of Comcast home internet data caps are truly nationwide.
The areas affected are in Comcast’s Northeast region: Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Vermont, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia, as well as parts of North Carolina and Ohio. If you live in one of those areas, your bill in August could have up to $100 of overage fees for your July use. That’s a lot of extra money, but at least now you have a bit more time to see if you’ll be affected and to make a plan if you are.
The cap was scheduled to roll out this March, but it’s being delayed after Pennsylvania’s attorney general raised objections, saying that now, when we’re struggling with the pandemic and using the internet for work and school, is “not the time to change the rules when it comes to internet data usage and increase costs.” After negotiations, Comcast has agreed to not only push back the data cap start date, but to also waive early cancellation fees for customers who don’t want to be subjected to the caps, according to a press release from the attorney general’s office.
While Comcast customers in the region are probably happy for the delay, the ability to cancel your service with no fees is only useful if you have another ISP that will provide you service, which many across the US do not. The rest of the country has had data caps for a while, and people haven’t liked them. Yet they’ve rolled out anyway because the ISPs have basically no real competition.
Comcast is, however, giving its low-income customers a bit of a break. It announced that it was doubling the speeds of its Internet Essentials plan yesterday, and it’s apparently not going to be imposing data caps on that plan for the rest of 2021. Comcast confirmed to The Verge that this policy was nationwide.
The 1.2TB-plus overage fees will come to the Northeast in July, showing up on August bills. If you go over the 1.2TB limit, you’ll have to pay $10 for every additional 50GB, with the fees capped at $100. You do get one “courtesy” month, where if you go over you won’t be charged extra, but after that the fees will start rolling in. Of course, if you find yourself going over often, Comcast is happy to upgrade you to unlimited data for only $30 a month or as part of a $25-a-month xFi Complete bundle.
Comcast shows your data usage in its app or on its website.Image: Comcast
If you live in the Northeast and are worried about your bill going up come July, Comcast has a tool to check how much data you use. Since that usage is what they’ll be billing you for, you can see if you’re typically over 1.2TB of usage or not — and now, you’ll have a few more months to figure out what to do if you’re consistently over. It is possible you won’t be, though. Back when I had a data cap, I generally stayed under, and I’m a pretty heavy internet user who backs up a lot of photo and video to the cloud.
Disclosure: Comcast is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company.
Players who have jumped into Sony’s new car-smashing PS5 game Destruction AllStars may have run into a rather obnoxious issue: voice chat in the game’s multiplayer matches is switched on by default.
In one round, I was subjected to somebody’s music blaring in the background for the entirety of the match. In another, I heard every word of someone teaching their friend how to play the game. Kotaku collected many more examples of people being frustrated by the default voice chat, and it sounds like many heard far worse things than I did.
The DualSense’s integrated mic compounds the problem. Unless you proactively hit the mute button, that mic is going to pick up everything going on around you and broadcast it to your fellow players. Voice chats you hear during a match will also play out of the DualSense’s integrated speaker if you don’t have a headset hooked up, much to the potential chagrin of anyone sitting next to you.
Frustratingly, there isn’t an immediately obvious way to turn voice chat off. I couldn’t find any option to do so in the game’s menus, and I only learned through scouring the internet after playing the game on Tuesday that you have to disable voice chat in PS5’s menu.
To do so, while you’re in a match, hit the PlayStation button, scroll up to the Activity Cards above the bottom row of icons, navigate to the voice chat card, and hit the square button. Annoyingly, though, this only disables voice chat for one match — you’ll have to go through the process again every match to mute your fellow players.
Hopefully Sony addresses this issue soon with a patch or fix of some kind. But for now, you’ll be hearing a lot of voice chats unless you turn them off every game. Destruction AllStars is available now as a free download for PlayStation Plus subscribers.
Andy Jassy speaking at the 2019 CERAWeek ConferencePhoto: Getty Images
The exec helped Amazon soar in the cloud, and now he’ll determine the company’s future
Amazon is getting a new CEO for the first time in its 27-year-history: cloud computing chief Andy Jassy, who will be replacing co-founder Jeff Bezos later this year. Jassy, currently the CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), is a core believer in Bezos’ business philosophies and a longtime veteran of the company, having run the cloud division since its inception nearly two decades ago.
Jassy, who turned 53 last year, is now getting the opportunity to make his mark not just on Amazon, but also the world and the major ways the company shaped it, from Whole Foods to a million-person-plus warehouse workforce to massive logistics and AI divisions with far-reaching real-world effects.
Far from a household name, Jassy is still one of the most consequential executives in Amazon’s history. His promotion underscores the importance of cloud computing to the biggest tech titans that now play vital roles in powering the entire internet. In the case of AWS, that includes everything from Netflix and Spotify to the Central Intelligence Agency and the Democratic National Committee.When AWS goes down, huge chunks of the internet go with it.
The transition of power is reminiscent of Satya Nadella’s promotion to the CEO role at Microsoft in 2014, after Nadella spent three years running the company’s Azure cloud business. Nadella modernized many elements of Microsoft’s business and company culture with a focus on the cloud and mobile computing, as well as an excellent eye for major acquisitions. Jassy’s ascent to the top job at Amazon may similarly usher in an era of transformation for the e-commerce giant.
The big question Amazon insiders and those on the outside looking in will try to answer in the next six months, before he takes the job in the third quarter of the year, will be whether Jassy deviates from Bezos’ approach or sticks to business as usual. Yet if Jassy continues to see himself as an acolyte of Bezos and his famous “Day 1” mentality — which argues that companies start to decline and die the moment they rest on their laurels — it will mean plenty of change is on the horizon. For Amazon, change is both the most important survival instinct and its most successful business tool.
Photo by Michele Doying / The Verge
When Jassy joined Amazon in the late ‘90s, the company was years away from thinking about the cloud and still focused solely on e-commerce. Jassy graduated from Harvard Business School in 1997 and joined Amazon soon thereafter as part of a wave of fresh MBAs flocking to the tech industry before the dot-com boom. Jassy moved out West with the intention of one day returning to New York, according to an interview last year on The Disruptive Voice podcast, but he’s never held a job at another company.
Jassy went on to become Bezos’ first “shadow” adviser, something like a corporate chief of staff who followed the CEO every day and sat in on all of his meetings, according to a profile of Jassy published late last month by Insider. Jassy also made a peculiar first impression on his boss by accidentally hitting him in the head with a kayak paddle during a characteristically competitive game of company broomball, as recounted in Brad Stone’s 2013 book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
Bezos and Jassy’s relationship deepened in the years after, with Bezos tasking his younger lieutenant with exploring the then-nascent technology of cloud computing around 2003. The goal was to see whether it made sense for Amazon to offer hosting services to other websites and businesses, back when many of the largest tech companies mainly relied on third-party data centers or had already begun looking into or actively building their own. The idea came from Amazon’s own struggles to build an external development platform for retailers three years earlier, so third-party companies could build their own e-commerce operations.
It was Jassy who helped identify the problem: Amazon’s development tools, frankly, sucked. The company set out to improve them by creating easier-to-use APIs and other technology that would let any one team at Amazon pull from a common pool of resources. “So very quietly around 2000, we became a services company with really no fanfare,” Jassy told a crowd at the re:Invent conference in 2018, according to TechCrunch.
It took Amazon another six years of exploring and experimenting — with the effort to formally develop AWS really taking off after a fateful 2003 executive retreat at Bezos’ house, Jassy recounted — before the company launched its first cloud product in 2006. “In retrospect it [AWS] seems fairly obvious, but at the time I don’t think we had ever really internalized that,” Jassy said at re:Invent. The company’s early investments paid off, as it took competitors years to realize the business opportunity and launch comparable cloud products.
“If you believe companies will build applications from scratch on top of the infrastructure services if the right selection [of services] existed, and we believed they would if the right selection existed, then the operating system becomes the internet, which is really different from what had been the case for the [previous] 30 years,” Jassy explained.
That belief about the future of the internet proved prescient. Today, AWS powers a huge bulk of apps, services, and websites consumers and employees use every day, largely because Amazon has unparalleled resources and developer tools that make building and tapping into its massive resources as easy as using a standard API. It’s why so many companies forgo building their own data center operations and instead choose AWS or one of its competitors. Unless you’re Facebook or Google, both of which built out their own global data center operations, it’s simply easier to use Amazon than to do it yourself.
Photo: Getty Images
Jassy deserves credit for architecting the company’s cloud vision, having run AWS since it was created and becoming its CEO after Bezos promoted him to the position from a senior vice president role back in 2016. His tenure at AWS has also turned cloud computing into the most profitable of Amazon’s divisions, accounting for roughly 63 percent of the company’s profits in 2020 and putting it on track to make more than $50 billion in revenue this year. Amazon now controls about a third of the entire cloud infrastructure market, more than its next closest competitors (Microsoft and Google) combined, according to Synergy Research.
Without AWS’s momentous growth, Amazon may not have had the resources to invest as much money back into its retail, logistics, streaming video, hardware, smart home, AI, and other divisions over the years. That makes AWS effectively the engine of Amazon’s continuous reinvention, and Jassy is the spark that helps drive it.
In recent years, Jassy has clearly fashioned himself as an heir apparent to Bezos, spinning tales of Amazon’s early days and the remarkable beginnings of AWS and how those learnings can be applied to other businesses. He’s a keynote speaker at Amazon’s high-profile re:Invent conference, an industry gathering dedicated to cloud computing, and he’s become a more public face of Amazon in recent years. Last summer, when longtime logistics executive Jeff Wilke, another potential Bezos successor, announced his retirement, the writing was on the wall. Someone would eventually take over from Bezos, and it was looking more likely than ever to be Jassy.
Jassy’s management quirks and persona have also become somewhat legendary within the company, similar to Bezos’ infamous email style and meeting decorum. Jassy is known internally for his exhaustive attention to detail and hands-on approach, his penchant for back-to-back meetings, and his welcoming embrace of social justice issues, according to Insider.
In September, he tweeted publicly about accountability for the killing of Breonna Taylor, and he’s been outspoken in his support for the Black Lives Matter movement and LGBTQ issues. Jassy, however, is also known for having defended controversial decisions, like Amazon’s sale of its flawed facial recognition technology to police departments and the government. (Amazon announced a one-year ban on its sale of the tech to law enforcement starting in June of last year.)
Jassy’s approach is also characterized as one of making tough and unprecedented calls, best exemplified in AWS’ decision to ban social media platform Parler last month following the US Capitol riot. It was a move the company did not take lightly considering its “religious” commitment to maintaining service for customers, Insider reported at the time. But it felt compelled to do so after outcry from employees and because Parler posed “a very real risk to public safety,” Amazon said in a statement at the time.
Jassy will no doubt be in charge of making even tougher calls in the future. But that’s part of both the job and the Amazon culture he’s helped cultivate. “It’s really hard to build a business that sustains for a long period of time,” Jassy told a virtual crowd at the all-digital Amazon re:Invent last December. “To do it, you’re going to reinvent yourself, and often you’re going to have to reinvent yourself many times over.”
That’s precisely what Amazon has done over the years, transforming from an online bookseller into an e-commerce giant and onward into a hardware maker, a major Hollywood and entertainment industry player, and now the second largest employer in the country. All the while, Jassy has worked behind the scenes to ensure AWS was growing into the profit machine it is today.
Now, Jassy appears ready for a reinvention of his own, at a time when Amazon is still at the forefront of so many industries and continuing to explore new territory, all while it faces increasing antitrust pressure in the US and overseas and mounting competition in the AI, cloud, and e-commerce industries.
“Typically, what you see is the desperate kind of reinvention — companies on the verge of falling apart or going bankrupt, deciding they have to reinvent themselves. When you wait until that point, it’s a crapshoot whether you’re going to be successful or not,” Jassy explained. “You want to be reinventing when you’re healthy. You want to be reinventing all the time.”
While we thought its radio sources need a little tonal attention, the highlights here are playback from CD, from streaming music services and Bluetooth.
For
Compact music system
Endless paths to music
CD and streaming
Against
Edgy sound on radio sources
Variable results for ‘3D audio’
Sound+Image mag review
(Image credit: Future)
This review originally appeared in Sound+Image magazine, one of What Hi-Fi?’s Australian sister publications. Click here for more information on Sound+Image, including digital editions and details on how you can subscribe.
We don’t recall a product ever ‘coming good’ during a review to the quite same extent as did the Ruark R3 Compact Music System. It positively alarmed us when we first turned it on. But by the end of our time with this streaming tabletop music system we were using it daily for pleasure as much as for assessment. Join us in our journey with this timeless design from a UK company which has made this genre of smart radiogram-like music system something of a specialty.
Build & facilities
The R3 is a table-top audio system (£629, $790, AU$1299) which stands some 42cm across and 17cm high, bringing together CD replay, reception of DAB+, FM and internet radio, streaming via network and Bluetooth (with aptX), Spotify Connect, Tidal and other music services… pretty much everything, in short, that the modern music world has to offer.
You can plug in additional sources – there’s one optical and one analogue input, also a minijack headphone output and a ‘line out’ at full level, so you could run the whole gamut of sources into a hi-fi amp or a recorder.
Ruark’s great skill is in offering this potentially overwhelming profusion of sources in a friendly box – old-style, you might even call it, with its grey cloth grille and walnut casing, though a more modern-looking soft-grey lacquer finish is also available.
On top is the company’s longstanding Rotodial for control, while a small infrared remote is also included, along with app control from a smart device. And if it’s going bedside, you can avail yourself of the useful alarm clocks, snooze and sleep timer functions.
Ruark’s other skill is sound quality. This is a company we can still remember of old as Ruark Acoustics, making fine British loudspeakers with thrusting names like Sabre and Swordsman through the 1980s and 1990s. Then in the 2000s when digital radio was trending, Ruark developed the little R1, which the UK’s Sunday Telegraph hailed as “the Aston Martin of DAB radios”.
Such was the R1’s success that traditional loudspeakers fell by the wayside (though “never say never”, says owner Alan O’Rourke), and the reinvented Ruark Audio now has a range of radio and streaming solutions, from the latest Mk4 version of the R1 ‘deluxe’ up to a large four-legged radiogram of the future, the highly desirable R7 Mk3.
So Ruark has a heritage of hi-fi sound, and we’ve enjoyed many of its players in the past, so were looking forward to this new R3.
(Image credit: Ruark Audio)
Setting up
We had no problems setting up the R3; we gave it Ethernet and attached the antenna required for radio reception; this may confuse newbies by flopping around loosely, but we knew from previous Ruark visits that there’s a special aerial spanner in the packaging for this very purpose!
We began our listening by sampling its skills with radio. We selected digital radio and, being fresh from the box, the R3 scanned Sydney’s airwaves and found some 70 available DAB+ stations all awaiting selection via a shuttle of the R3’s top Rotodial. And all were sounding pretty unpleasant – very spitty in the treble, artificial-sounding, with voices thin in their midrange content, and music lumpy in the bass.
We changed to internet radio – it was no better, indeed slightly worse on low-resolution stations. We were worried by this, to be honest: it was not the sound we expect from Ruark devices, which normally present a warm friendly radio sound.
We hastened to the tone controls through the menus. There are four elements to the tone controls: bass and treble adjustment, a loudness option which was ‘on’ by default, and – ah! – a ‘3D’ option. This 3D option was also on by default. Switching it off went a long way to removing the artificial spittiness from the radio sources.
We further tamed the treble by a few notches, left the loudness on, and kept the bass in its central position. This brought the radio sections back to what we’d expect from Ruark – full and friendly, just a teeny bit fizzy up top but no longer distractingly so.
The remote control has three large preset buttons, which are available separately for each source, so three for FM, three for DAB+, three for internet radio. You store them by simply pressing and holding the button when listening to a station.
But in fact there are 10 presets for each type of radio; you can access the rest by pressing and holding the ‘preset’ button then pressing the left-right buttons to reach presets 4 to 10. Recall them the same way, without the holding. It’s easy, versatile, and very useful.
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App control
For those with less than 20/20 vision who can’t read the small lettering on the front display across the room for source selection (let alone the tinier menu options), there’s a handy free app available for control. This is Undok, the control app from Frontier Silicon, maker of the smart module within the R3.
We’ve long enjoyed Undok, and are pleased to see it back after an unexplained hiatus. Undok controlled the R3 effectively, though not entirely. For example, there’s access to bass, treble and loudness, but not the all-important ‘3D’ option, for which you’ll need to use the remote and/or Rotodial to switch on or off.
App quirk two: we tried to rename the R3, but it refused to change to ‘Ruark R3’… yet when we jokingly tried ‘Simon’, that was OK. Turns out that you can only pick a one-word name, e.g. Ruark.
App quirk three: the bass slider in the app was glitchy, advancing a few notches, then jumping back again, up then back – very odd.
But otherwise the app is very useful for local control, for switching sources, for saving presets. One tip for internet radio: if there’s a station you can’t find (our local community station, for example, was not listed), you can head to Frontier Silicon’s site https://smartradio.frontier-nuvola.net, set up an account, link your R3, ‘manage favourites’, and enter the URL manually. The station then appears under ‘My Favourites’. Nice flexibility!
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Radio listening completed, we switched to music streaming. For Spotify you use the Spotify app and point it at the Ruark for playback – we were pleased to find this works with free Spotify as well as paid (which isn’t the case for many streaming platforms and products).
And it was immediately evident that for all the other inputs – music services, CD, Bluetooth streaming – the R3’s sound balance was completely different. Gone was all the spittiness, gone the bass lumpiness. So we headed back to the tone controls, put the treble and bass back to zero, left the loudness on – and turned the 3D sound on.
And with these sources you should definitely try the 3D sound option. It gives the sound a real lift, a widening, an additional enjoyability, though it still occasionally has deleterious effects on certain tracks. We played Paul Simon’s You Can Call Me Al from Spotify Free and all was good.
But on the next track, Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard, the janglier right-channel guitars became nastily edgy and artificial until we turned ‘3D’ off again. We tried the same track from our own CD-quality collection sent by Bluetooth (which supports both AAC and aptX), and this softened the edginess somewhat, but it still sounded better with 3D off.
The more we played, the more songs reacted badly to the 3D setting, and we ended up keeping it off, with one notch down also on the treble slider to prevent residual fizziness in the treble.
So for best sonic results, adjust the tone options whenever you switch from file-based playback to radio, and vice versa – especially disabling the 3D sound for radio sources. It’s a shame the R3 can’t remember your tone preferences for each source (as it can for input levels, which are trimmable for each analogue and digital input), and we’d go so far as to suggest Ruark should simply disable 3D sound entirely for FM, DAB and internet radio sources, as its effects there are particularly nasty. Better still, a big ‘3D Sound’ button on the remote control would allow easily toggling of this sound mode, as on, say, a soundbar.
But if you’re happy to pop over to the R3 and switch this manually each time, you can enjoy the best which the R3 has to offer, which is considerable. It’s a delightful CD player, for example, those full-quality files filling the room with well-balanced sound. And the louder you play, the happier the R3 seems to be; the bass available from the two 75mm drivers is remarkable as you raise the level; its response begins in the 40s of hertz and rises impressively smoothly.
Soft recordings get a boost from the treble lift of the sonics here; Paul McCartney’s My Valentine has rarely sounded so well-defined. And as with all Ruark units we’ve tested, the R3 is adept with classical music, and we blasted forth the London Musici’s 1991 Conifer/Technics recording of Prokofiev’s ‘Classical’ symphony to confirm the R3’s adherence to this track record, pushing up the bass a tad to underpin this dynamic piece.
The R3 proved equally enjoyable from streaming music services. From Apple Music we streamed Neil Finn’s 2010 solo concert at Sydney’s intimate Seymour Centre, and the Ruark did a lovely job of presenting Finn’s voice and the decay of both artificial and venue reverb as he switched from guitar to piano, serving the latter with both percussive attack and pianissimo softness, as required.
There is a ‘Music Player’ option which you can use to play either from USB or from music shares on the network, although unfortunately the R3 couldn’t see our NAS drive of music (only our PVR, from which it bravely offered to play episodes of Home and Away etc., but of course couldn’t). From USB it was able to play MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV and FLAC, the last two up to 24-bit/48kHz, so no support for higher-res PCM or DSD.
Note that Ruark has chosen to include not a standard USB-A slot but rather a USB-C 5V charging connection, very up-to-date of it, except that you can’t plug in normal USB sticks and drives. USB-C sticks are widely available, so that’s what we used. Adapters are also available, though when we tried one, the R3 announced that ‘USB hubs are not supported’. Sticks must also be formatted in FAT-32 format.
(Image credit: Ruark Audio)
Verdict
So quite the journey we enjoyed with this versatile music system. While we thought its radio sources need a little tonal attention, its highlights are playback from CD, from streaming music services and Bluetooth, and overall it’s an impressively easy-to-use and attractive table-top unit which accesses pretty much every kind of music under the sun, delivered effectively under local, remote or app control.
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will step down as CEO and transition to a new position at the company as executive chair of the Amazon board in Q3 2021. Andy Jassy, who currently serves as CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), will replace Bezos as Amazon CEO.
“Being the CEO of Amazon is a deep responsibility, and it’s consuming. When you have a responsibility like that, it’s hard to put attention on anything else,” commented Bezos in an email announcing the change. “As Exec Chair I will stay engaged in important Amazon initiatives but also have the time and energy I need to focus on the Day 1 Fund, the Bezos Earth Fund, Blue Origin, The Washington Post, and my other passions.”
Bezos has served as Amazon’s CEO since he founded the company in 1994, and he has presided over the e-commerce giant as it grew from an online bookstore into one of the most dominant technology companies in the world.
Under Bezos’ stewardship, Amazon has come to rule over internet commerce, established itself as a backbone of the infrastructure of the modern web through its Amazon Web Services products, built a subscription empire around its Amazon Prime services, launched popular technology products like the Echo and Kindle lines of devices, and even started dabbling in physical retail through grocery stores and an acquisition of Whole Foods.
Bezos has also prospered as head of the company, with skyrocketing wealth that (until just a few weeks ago) made him the single richest human on Earth, with a net worth of nearly $180 billion.
Bezos’ transition to executive chairman of Amazon’s board will mean he’ll be slightly more removed from the day-to-day business of running the nearly $1.7 trillion company, allowing him to focus his “energies and attention on new products and early initiatives.” Those projects will include the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund, which Bezos established last year, and Blue Origins, his aerospace firm, which recently resumed test flights at the end of 2020.
Jassy is a familiar face at the company, having joined back in 1997. He has led the Amazon Web Services team since it was founded in 2003 and was named the CEO of AWS in 2016. The choice of Jassy — who has headed Amazon’s cloud service business since the beginning — over a retail or hardware executive is a telling one for Amazon’s priorities as a company.
Amazon’s cloud business is a huge part of the company (and the internet at large, to the point where AWS outages can take down whole swaths of internet for hours), and its new leadership choice reflects that. It’s also a parallel to other major tech CEOs, like Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who was similarly an instrumental part of the company’s cloud and server business before taking charge of Microsoft in 2014.
It’ll still be some time before Jassy takes over, though — Bezos isn’t set to transition to his new role until Q3 2021.
Valve has just updated its Steam Hardware Survey with results from January 2021. If you believe the numbers for videocards, Nvidia’s RTX 30-series GPUs now account for over 1% of the total gaming market on Steam. These are some of the best graphics cards, but demand is so high (and supply is so low) that finding one for sale is virtually impossible, and prices are much higher than the launch MSRPs.
I’ve followed the Steam Hardware Survey for a long time, wondering at the statistics behind the data. The past few months give me (even more) reason to suspect it isn’t a proper random sampling of users, which means no one should attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions. Valve has never revealed any details of how the survey gets conducted, but I suspect there’s a higher chance for it to ask for someone’s hardware details if it doesn’t recognize the graphics card. This means new cards like the RTX 30-series are much more likely to get included. However, that’s just a guess, and it’s possible Valve is actually doing a proper random sampling and simply hasn’t made that fact public. (But I doubt it.) In other words, don’t take these figures as any true indication of the distribution of various GPU models, even among Steam users. But the numbers are still interesting and fun to gawk at, wherever they come from.
The biggest news is that the GeForce RTX 3080 now sits at 0.66% of PCs surveyed. That’s up 0.18% from December, which was up 0.25% from November. The RTX 3080 has been on the charts for three months now, steadily gaining share, and is closing in on the GTX 1660 Ti. The other two Ampere GPUs to show up on the charts are the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, sitting at 0.27%, and the GeForce RTX 3090, which has 0.27% and theoretically has more hits on the survey than AMD’s previous-gen Radeon RX 5700 (the non-XT model).
AMD’s RDNA2 Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs are not yet part of the list, though there’s still the nebulous ‘Other’ category with 9.29% of all GPUs. Presumably, the Radeon RX 6900 XT, Radeon RX 6800XT, and RX 6800 all fall into that category, with less than 0.15% of the total each. Interestingly, Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3070 also fails to show up on the chart, so for now, at least the 3090 appears to be ahead in terms of Steam use.
(Image credit: Valve)
The top of the charts is also interesting. The GeForce GTX 1060 remains the most popular card, but its total share dropped 1.61%, falling below 10% for the first time in I don’t know how long. It could be all the users with Pascal are finally upgrading, or maybe just the Internet cafes have finally decided to move on from the 1060. Or it could simply be a normal variation in the sampling, as the GTX 1050 Ti use is up 0.61%, and GTX 1050 is up 0.44%.
Also of note is that several other reasonably popular GPUs have shown large dips this past month. The RTX 2060 is down 1.16%, 2070 Super is down 0.53%, and RTX 2070 is down 1.1%. The generic label of “Nvidia Graphics Device” is also down 0.68% (perhaps because formerly ‘unknown’ GPUs like the 3060 Ti and 3090 are now listed separately).
We’re perhaps getting too far into the weeds, as we don’t know the actual collection policy and statistical accuracy of any of the data. At best, this could be a random sample of Steam users from the past several months. At worst, it’s a biased sample of Steam users. Either way, it doesn’t account for any hardware that’s not used with Steam. Still, it does bear at least some semblance to what we’d expect to see in the market.
For instance, AMD CPU usage is up 3% last month relative to Intel usage, which is down 3%. AMD’s total for CPU use is now 28%, the highest it’s ever been. That makes perfect sense, as Intel’s desktop CPUs, in particular, have been stagnating on 14nm, while AMD’s Zen 3 (Ryzen 5000) series CPUs are now at the top of our best CPUs list and lead our CPU Benchmarks hierarchy. Meanwhile, 1920×1080 still claims the lion’s share of resolution usage, at 67% of the total, with the second most popular resolution being 1366×768 (yuck), and 2560×1440 usage represents just 7.5% of the users surveyed.
Let me close by once again calling on Valve to do the right thing and provide a clear explanation of the statistics behind the survey. If it’s a random sampling, tell us so we know we can put more confidence in the numbers. Tell us how many PCs were surveyed so we know the sample size. And if it’s not a proper statistical analysis, then fix the code. The ‘Other’ category in GPUs also continues to be quite large, and it would be great to allow numbers nerds like me to get the full list of GPUs, even for those with only a 0.01% share. And as long as I’m making wishes that are unlikely to be fulfilled, please fix all the PC component shortages, especially on the new video cards.
Millions is a new startup with a big promise: simply pick six numbers on its website, follow the @Millions Twitter account, and you could win $1 million.
It’s not some kind of scam, either: it’s being funded by same big names, like Biz Stone (one of the co-founders of Twitter), Joey Zwillinger (an Allbirds co-founder), Dave Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal (co-founders and CEOs of Warby Parker), Jeff Raider (who helped found both Warby Parker and Harry’s), and Daniel Greenberg (who helped found the viral internet firm MSCHF) among others. And the company — whose actual team is staying anonymous for now — is going to do 10 lottery drawings for the big $1 million prize.
It sounds too good to be true. A free million-dollar giveaway being run by an anonymous new internet startup, all for just following them on Twitter?
Well, that’s because it sort of is: Millions isn’t promising to actually give away $1 million. It’s effectively holding a standard pick-six lottery, similar to things like the Powerball or Mega Millions lotteries. If someone actually wins that lottery, the company will pay up.
But it turns out, that’s a big if. The Millions lottery is actually much, much harder to win than even the biggest real-world games because it has users pick six balls from 1-99, instead of the 1-69 or 1-70 pools that the traditional games require.
It’s not a perfect analog since both Powerball and Mega Millions have players match five balls, and then also correctly guess a 1-26 or 1-25 Powerball / Mega Ball number, instead of a straight pick-six format here, but the odds speak for themselves. Winning the Powerball jackpot is about a one in 292,201,338 chance. Winning the grand prize in the Mega Millions lottery is about one in 302,575,350.
Winning the $1 million jackpot in Millions? One in 1,120,529,256. Mathematically speaking, your chance of winning a major lottery (already infinitesimally small) is still nearly three times as likely as winning the jackpot in Millions.
Of course, the organizers behind Millions seem well aware of this: when asked about the low chances, the Millions organizers told The Verge that the “odds of winning the Weekly Prize are slim. But hey, all it costs is a Twitter follow!”
Looking at the official rules, the $1 million prize isn’t even listed as the “grand prize” of the competition. It’s a secondary, weekly prize that the company will give out if — and only if — someone hits the over one in a billion shot of matching all six numbers in one of the 10 weekly drawings. On the off chance that multiple winners hit that number somehow, it’ll get divided up.
The “real” prize is a far more modest $10,000, which will be randomly given to one of the entrants at the end of the 10 weeks — a sizable prize, to be sure, but a far cry from $1 million.
The difference, of course, is that even with Millions’ one-in-a-billion odds, it’s still free to enter. Buying a lottery ticket costs $2; entering the Millions giveaway is free — or at least, free in terms of actual money.
So, why bother? Well, because it seems that the actual point of Millions is to build up a brand and Twitter presence for the new company. The initial $1,000,000 giveaway is just the theoretical starting point; as the site explains, “Millions builds products that give away money to people. @Millions is the first of such experiences.” The company has already been giving away smaller prizes on Twitter for the past several weeks as a soft launch, too.
In essence, the big Millions giveaway is just another standard lottery — but instead of buying a ticket with cash, you’re paying with a Twitter follow and your contact information, valuable data that the company can use to help build its brand and launch future products down the line.
Millions could easily parlay this first venture into hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Twitter followers, all for the low cost of $10,000. And it’s easy to imagine future lotteries that then leverage that user base down the line for other ventures that may actually make money.
Of course, someone might win that $1 million prize. Millions is doing 10 drawings, one every week over the next ten weeks. Depending on how popular the service gets and how lucky everyone is, someone could actually get paid. But the odds are certainly not in anyone’s favor — except for Millions’, that is.
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