Day: January 3, 2019

Posted by

Nathan Kirsch |

Thu, Jan 03, 2019 – 12:23 PM

AMD has already made it clear that they are going to announce next-generation products at CES 2019 and enthusiasts are hardly able to contain themselves. Many believe that AMD will be releasing Ryzen 3000 series processors at CES 2019 and they might be right!

Internet sleuths recently noticed that Russian price tracking website e-Katalog has numerous Ryzen 3000 ‘Matisse’ series processors listed (they are still up). The biggest surprise of the leak is that AMD appears to be launching a Ryzen 9 sku with the introduction of 3000 series that consists of two processors that have 16 cores and 32 threads.  The Ryzen 9 3800X is expected to be the first 16-core, 32-thread processor from AMD and could be unveiled at CES 2019 for $449. The 3800X is shown to have a 3.9GHz base clock with a 4.7GHz boost clock and a 125W TDP. That’s impressive, but AMD has an even higher clocked part in the works. The Ryzen 9 3850X CPU is expected to come out May 2019 with an impressive 4.3GHz base clock and 5.1GHz boost clock. The TDP creeps up to 135W on this part, but the best part is that the price tag is only going up $50. So, AMD could have a 5.1GHz capable 16-core, 32-thread processor coming for $500. Damn!

On the other end of the Ryzen 3000 series is the Ryzen 3 3300, which has 6-cores and 12-thread for just $99. The clock speeds on this hex-core chip are 3.2GHz boost and 4GHz boost with just a  50W TDP. Crazy – $99 for a 6-core, 12-thread processor at 4GHz. Gamers and enthusiasts are likely more interested in the CPUs that support AMD XFR technology and for that the Ryzen 3 3300X might be of more interest at $129. It has the same number of cores as the Ryzen 3 3300, but they are clocked higher at 3.5GHz base and 4.3GHz boost at a 65W TDP. That would be unreal for $130!

Moving up to the Ryzen 5 models we have the Ryzen 5 3600 8-core, 16-thread processor at 3.6GHz boost and up to 4.4GHz for $178. The Ryzen 5 3600X bumps those clock speeds up to 4GHz base clock and 4.8GHz boost for $229. The Ryzen 5 3600 comes with a 65W TDP and the X variant with a 95W TDP.

From there we get into the Ryzen 7 series and the Ryzen 7 3700 12-core, 24-thread CPU is shown with a 3.8GHz base and 4.6GHz boost clock at 95W TDP for $299. The higher clocked Ryzen 7 3700X bumps up the clock speeds to 4.2GHz base and 5GHz boost with a 105W TDP at $329.

If this information and price points are close to the truth, then wow, AMD is really going for it. We can’t wait to get to CES 2019 to find out!

A new lawsuit filed against Comcast details an extensive list of lies the cable company allegedly told customers in order to hide the full cost of service.

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Comcast in Hennepin County District Court on December 21, seeking refunds for all customers who were harmed by Comcast’s alleged violations of the state’s Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

The complaint alleges, among other things, that Comcast reps falsely told customers that the company’s “Regional Sports Network (RSN)” and “Broadcast TV” fees were mandated by the government and not controlled by Comcast itself. These two fees, which are not included in Comcast’s advertised rates, have gone up steadily and now total $18.25 a month.

Comcast has responded to some lawsuits—including this one—by saying that the company had already stopped the practices that triggered the court actions. But Minnesota says that Comcast’s lies about the sports and broadcast fees continued into 2017, which is after Comcast knew about identical allegations raised in a separate class action complaint filed in 2016. (That case was settled out of court.)

Here’s what the Minnesota AG’s complaint says about how Comcast described the controversial fees to customers:

Despite creating the Broadcast TV fee and Regional Sports fee on its own initiative and increasing them at its own whims, Comcast/Xfinity has sometimes misrepresented to Minnesota consumers that it cannot control whether it charged consumers these fees or how much it charged for the fees. For example, Comcast/Xfinity told Minnesota consumers in 2015, 2016, and 2017—when the consumers called the company regarding undisclosed increases on their supposedly fixed-price bills—that the Broadcast TV fee and Regional Sports fee had increased or been added to their bills, but that “those fees are actually local fees and correspond to the FCC and we don’t manage those okay? Those aren’t up to Comcast;” “but that’s something again that’s out of our control;” that the increases “are outside our control;” “we have no control over the fees;” “the only thing Comcast cannot control are the taxes and fees within your state;” and that the Regional Sports fee can’t be taken off because it’s part of the “taxes.”

But in fact, “Comcast/Xfinity is not required by any state or federal law to collect such fees,” the Minnesota complaint said. Comcast “has chosen to segregate these fees from its base price so it can deceptively advertise and promise an artificially low price to price-sensitive customers, and at the same time confuse and conceal the true monthly cost of its Cable Television Packages.”

The AG’s office also says that Comcast charged many customers for services they didn’t request, and it promised prepaid Visa gift cards as incentives but “did not deliver these gift cards to thousands of Minnesota customers.”

“Comcast/Xfinity’s conduct has violated Minnesota’s consumer protection laws and injured thousands of Minnesota consumers who purchased Comcast/Xfinity’s cable television packages,” the complaint said.

Comcast blames customer service reps

When contacted by Ars, a Comcast spokesperson yesterday said that “our policy is to be very clear to our customers about the broadcast TV and RSN fees and [tell them] that these are not government-mandated fees.”

But employees make mistakes, the Comcast spokesperson said. “Employees may go off script and incorrectly characterize things, but that is not in line with our policy because [the broadcast TV and sports charges] are not government-mandated fees,” Comcast said.

Comcast pointed out that the fees are described correctly at this Comcast webpage. On customer bills, the charges are disclosed and listed separately from actual government-imposed taxes, Comcast said.

Comcast hasn’t explained why so many of its employees apparently made the same exact mistake, however.

Comcast noted that other cable companies started charging the broadcast TV and sports fees before Comcast began doing so in 2014 and 2015 and that “they reflect the increasing amount we need to pay for broadcast and sports.”

“Breaking the fees out makes it easier for customers to see what they’re paying for and lets us be clear about the factors that drive price changes,” Comcast said.

But as the Minnesota lawsuit notes, breaking the fees out separately also helps Comcast advertise lower rates than it actually charges. Minnesota says that the fee disclosures on Comcast’s promotional materials “are inconspicuous and not sufficient to correct the overall misimpression that the emphasized, artificially low base price is the actual price consumers will pay.”

Comcast will fight the Minnesota lawsuit and provided this statement:

We’re fully committed to our customers in Minnesota, and it’s important to us to make sure we deliver best-in-class products and services and that our customers understand the products and services they order. We fully disclose all charges, fees, and promotional requirements—and in fact have made numerous enhancements in our communications with our customers over the past few years. The facts today simply do not support the Minnesota AG’s allegations, most of which date back several years and have already been corrected. Our preference all along has been to work collaboratively with the Minnesota AG’s Office to resolve any remaining issues the office might have.

Swanson is leaving office after 12 years, and she will be replaced this month as Minnesota attorney general by Keith Ellison. Comcast claimed that “Bringing a lawsuit on the eve of the end of the AG’s term is simply not in the best interests of Minnesota consumers.” However, it’s not unusual for a new attorney general to continue pursuing lawsuits filed by the previous AG.

AG: Comcast knew of its bad behavior

Extra fees charged by Comcast “include monthly equipment rental fees for equipment to receive its Cable Television Packages, like cable set-top boxes, digital adapters, and Internet modems, as well as one-time activation and installation fees,” the Minnesota complaint said. The various fees, “often unbeknownst to consumers, can add 30 percent or more to the Cable Television Package’s total monthly price.”

Despite blaming customer service reps for the problems, Comcast has known for years “that it has misrepresented the total cost of its Cable Television Packages and failed to disclose that it will charge substantial, additional fees in addition to the deceptively low price that is promised consumers,” the lawsuit said. Comcast’s internal reports and investigations confirmed these failures, the complaint said.

For example, Comcast “is well aware of its fraudulent practice of charging Minnesota consumers for unauthorized services and equipment that they never requested and/or specifically refused,” the lawsuit said, noting that in 2016 Comcast settled an FCC investigation over the practice.

In November 2018, Comcast agreed to pay $700,000 in refunds “and cancel debts for more than 20,000 Massachusetts customers” to settle allegations that it used deceptive advertising to promote long-term cable contracts, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced at the time. Comcast is also facing a lawsuit from Washington state that accuses the company of misleading 500,000 customers in order to sell them “near-worthless” service protection plans.

Berlin’s flourishing tech scene attracts talent from across the globe. At a start-up incubator in the west of the city, an international team recently launched an app called SPRT, which connects sports enthusiasts.

Amy Cooper, a 20-year-old SPRT employee who moved to Germany from Britain last June, complains that Berlin’s Internet speed is so slow, it feels like the old dial-up days she’s heard her parents reminisce about.

“We’re working in a co-working office where there’s loads of start-ups, everything’s online,” Cooper says. “We use it every second of the day, so it’s important for us that it works and that it’s reliable. And most of the time, it’s not, and that can be really frustrating.”

Germany is Europe’s largest economy, but business leaders warn it is in danger of losing its edge because of sluggish Internet connections. While other countries are thinking about whether to upgrade their cell phone systems to 5G, Germany is still grappling with 3G.

A report by Germany’s Federal Network Agency last year showed that 29 percent of German Internet users reported Internet speeds of less than half of what was promised by service providers.

Claudia Engfeld of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry says 70 percent of the city’s businesses have complained to her office about slow and inadequate broadband. Engfeld says it’s not only an issue for new tech companies, but also for the city’s established Mittelstand (mid-sized) engineering firms.

“If you are doing 3-D printing on an industrial level, you’ll need to be fast,” Engfeld says. “You can’t wait two days till your machine has communicated to the printer to do something. This is a disadvantage that Berlin-based entrepreneurs have in comparison to other cities throughout the world.”

The Chamber of Commerce launched an online map tracking where sub-par broadband is affecting businesses in the city. Since last summer, more than 4,000 companies have contributed to the map, pinpointing areas with connectivity problems.

Engfeld says in some parts of Berlin, connections are so patchy that companies have had to move or asked staff to work from home, where Internet reliability is greater. Engfeld says having access to a good connection depends on luck, and how far you are from a distribution box.

Many CEOs blame Deutsche Telekom, the former state provider, which still dominates the domestic telecommunications market. Instead of installing fiber-optic cables, Deutsche Telekom has been fixing and improving its old copper telephone system, a process the telecommunications giant calls “vectoring.”

Engfeld says relying on old technology this way is the problem.

“In Germany, you will find almost everywhere copper cable that’s not capable to go faster than 250 megabits per second,” she says. “The average reality is about 50 megabits per second. That’s quite poor.”

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, less than 2 percent of Germany’s broadband connections are carried by pure fiber-optic systems. Deutsche Telekom spokesperson Georg von Wagner insists that most customers don’t need anything near speeds of 1 gigabit per second, the standard speed Germany can offer with pure fiber optics.

“Of course we could have decided, four or five years ago, to get rid of the copper wires and we could have replaced them with fiber-optic cables. If we had gone this route, 10 to 15 percent of German households would now have access to download speeds of up to 1 gigabit a second,” von Wagner says.

But, he says, fiber-optic coverage is expensive and would benefit relatively few customers. “The rest of the country would only have an average download connection of 16 megabits,” he says. “Instead, by improving the old copper wiring, 80 percent of households in Germany have access to download speeds of up to 50 megabits per second.”

Tech policy journalist Tomas Rudl says Deutsche Telekom’s fiber-optic strategy — or lack of one — was shortsighted but was meant to save money.

“Deutsche Telekom’s reasons for investing in the old copper wires makes complete financial sense,” Rudl says. “It’s much less expensive to rig the older tech than it is to dig deep into the ground and install fiber-optic cables.”

He stresses that the government also has to take its share of the blame. “Although Deutsche Telekom was privatized, the state is still one of its major shareholders,” Rudl says. “So it’s within the government’s own interests to ensure that its infrastructure policies and funding benefit a major German job provider.”

But the government now sees the benefits and necessity of fiber optics. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet has promised to help subsidize the rollout of fiber-optic broadband by 2025.

For Cooper at the SPRT start-up, a 2025 rollout seems too little, too late. It’s bad enough that the Internet goes down regularly at her office, but the creaky network also supports mobile phones and she is concerned SPRT’s customers can’t get the coverage they need to use the app she helped create.

“Should you really have to think about those things in Berlin,” she asks, “one of the biggest and most important tech cities in Europe?”

In 1926, Henry Ford shocked industry leaders around the world when he announced a five-day workweek for his Ford employees. “Just as the eight-hour day opened our way to prosperity in America, so the five-day workweek will open our way to still greater prosperity…it is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either lost time or a class privilege,” Ford wrote then.

At the time, unions and workers’ advocates had been jostling for reduced working hours for decades, as part of efforts to improve working conditions. However, Ford probably wasn’t thinking about his employee’s well-being when he made the switch, says John Pencavel, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. “He was more concerned, my guess, with preventing a possible unionization,” and losing any inch of control to organized labor.

To his probable surprise, Ford found, though, that knocking a day off of the work week actually improved productivity in his factories. It turned out,workers got more done in five days than they had in six.

It’s a counterintuitive result to mention today, particularly in a culture that rewards a burn-the-midnight-oil, work-until-you-drop mentality. But over a century of research on work environments has reached the same conclusion: Working more hours with more intensity doesn’t make your work better—it makes your work worse.

“The idea that shorter hours would increase output per hour is quite old, and goes back to the 19th century,” Pencavel says. It was unpopular with employers at the time—“the strength of their opposition was quite remarkable, actually,” he says. But case studies of reduced work hours at iron works, cotton mills, and eyeglass factories all reported improved work. In 1913, psychologist Hugo Münsterberg wrote that “It was found that everywhere, even abstracting from all other cultural and social interests, a moderate shortening of the working day did not involve loss, but brought a direct gain.”

More recent research echos those results. A 2004 review by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported that employees had decreased alertness and declines in vigilance at the end of long shifts, and that lengthy work days led to deterioration in work performance. Conversely, slightly shorter hours resulted in the opposite effect. A trial of a six-hour work day among a group of elderly-care nurses in Sweden improved their efficiency, and in a Swedish Toyota center, a six-hour work day led to increased profits.

Most recently, a study published this fall in Industrial and Labor Relations Review looked at data collected from 52,000 employees in Europe between 2010 and 2015. The authors, Hans Frankort, senior lecturer in strategy at Cass Business School in London and Argyro Avgoustaki, assistant professor of management at ESCP Europe, a business school with campuses across Europe, found that greater work effort actually impeded career progress. “There doesn’t seem to be any benefit from hard work,” Frankort says.

Hard work, as the study defined, was a measure of both the number of hours spent working and the intensity of that work—marked by things like the number of deadlines throughout the day. The amount of intensity was actually a greater predictor of poor work quality than more working hours or overtime, Frankort says. “It’s how much work you’re supposed to do within those hours. That’s important, because policy attention has often focused on hours, and not the pressure or intensity,” he says. He points to the four-day workplace as a popular idea, but says it wouldn’t lead to much improvement if all the same work in an office in a week just had to be done in a shorter time window—five days couldn’t just be jammed into four.

The negative effects of high intensity on workplace productivity can be mitigated, though, Frankort says, by implementing some element of choice around the way intense work gets done. “If you have some sort of discretion over how and when to do your work, it may reduce some of the negative consequences of excessive effort,” he says.

The worst environment for productivity, then, are workplaces with high pressure and little choice in how to operate within that pressure.

In the innately high pressure work environment of commercial air travel, regulatory bodies have stepped in to try and prevent long hours from impeding performance. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has limits on the number of hours pilots can fly, and mandates certain amounts of rest between flights.

Another industry with life-and-death implications—medicine—is struggling to figure out if mandating more limited hours makes sense for residents, doctors-in-training who regularly face 28-hour shifts. Studies of reduced hours report mixed results, and show that they might help prevent some elements of physician burnout. It’s not clear, though, if limiting hours improves performance and patient health, or if it takes away from resident education. “We’re really seeking more data to see what that sweet spot is between energy expended and efficiency, and a culture of wellness and self-worth,” says Mukta Panda, professor of medicine and assistant dean of medical student education at the University of Tennessee College of Medicine.

Even with evidence to show that working hard might not necessarily pay off, changing the habits that promote that idea isn’t easy—particularly in the United States, where the prevailing culture espouses the idea of the American Dream.

“If you work hard, in theory, you can achieve great things. I’m afraid most of those dreams don’t come true. But you only hear from the people whose dreams did come true,” Frankort says. “That’s why people respond with surprise to our findings.”

Elon Musk, for example, told reporters over the summer that he regularly works 120 hours a week, and links his success to that effort. “People then think if you work 120 hours a week, that will bring you great things,” Frankort says. “But it doesn’t mean that they were successful because they worked those hours.”

But even when people want to make changes to the amount they’re working, most employees have little to no influence over the decisions that govern how much they’re asked to work, and can’t restructure their workplace behaviors to match the evidence. In many industries, many people don’t have a choice of reducing the amount of time they spend working, even if it means those hours are less productive—if they’re paid by the hour, and their salary is low, the hours are unavoidable.

In other work environments, where people aren’t creating a visible output each day, employee productivity is difficult to evaluate by anything other than hours worked, Frankort says. “How do I convince you I’m working on something valuable if my output is billable hours? I’ll tell you I got lots of billable hours. The incentives are skewed,” he says.

Rather than uniformly cut down on the number of hours all humans work, Pencavel says, “I would recommend testing different work hours in each place.” There’s no one-size, fits-all approach, he says, and it would be in an employers best interest to experiment to see which hours fit best.

The same ethos holds true within the medical field in its search for the best way forward, Panda says. “We’re dealing with human beings, we have to be able to allow for flexibility,” she says. “People have different work pressures. Being able to provide the best work environment for each group is probably what’s needed.”

Chinese media announced that the nation’s Chang’e-4 lunar lander has successfully reached the far side of the moon, making it the first spacecraft to do so. This is China’s recent lunar mission, following Jade Rabbit in 2013, but by touching the side of the moon that’s always facing away from the Earth, it has notched a first in the space race.

Chang’e-4 is sitting in the South Pole-Aitken basin’s Von Karman crater, which is the oldest and deepest crater on the moon’s surface. Earlier this year China launched the Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) relay satellite that will allow its lander and rover to send back the first images taken from the surface

Developing..

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

January 2, 2019 at 10:51PM

Most people are probably never going to own a Segway, but the company is aiming to have more people interact with its products. At CES 2019, Segway-Ninebot will debut its first ever autonomous delivery robot designed to perform the final leg like of transporting packages. It’s also showing off the Model Max, its next generation of shared scooter designed to get people around the city (or be ditched on the sidewalk).

The Model Max scooter is right in Segway-Ninebot’s wheelhouse, seeing as the company already makes electric scooters that are used by popular scooter-sharing services. With the Model Max, it’s promising a new “top of the line vehicle” for traveling in urban environments. The next-generation scooter will reportedly be more weather resistant than previous models, as well as more reliable and safe — a nice assurance after scooter sharing firm Lime recalled thousands of Segway scooters believed to be at risk of bursting into flames while charging. Segway didn’t offer much else by way of specs for the scooter other than to note it aims to provide a better and cheaper ride.

Segway-Ninebot’s Loomo Delivery bot leaves the realm of riding entirely. The autonomous vehicle is instead designed to perform package deliveries. Built like a mailbox on wheels, Loomo Delivery uses AI to bring parcels to their final destination. Segway-Ninebot envisions the little bot doing the duty of delivery in office buildings or malls. The little bot has a built-in camera to help it see and relies upon proprietary algorithms to navigate and keep from slamming into walls. It’s almost more novelty than anything at this point so don’t expect your favorite mailman to start looking for work.

Follow all the latest news from CES 2019 here!

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

January 3, 2019 at 08:03AM