TechSpot Forums reorganization is coming soon, give us your feedback Internally we've been talking about a reorganization of the forums for at least a couple years, shortly after we moved our community software to Xenforo. But since then projects have come and gone, we've gone through one minor and one total redesign, and the forum category breakdown has remained about the same. After a new revision, this is what the TS Forums will look like in the coming weeks (with the chance of changing stuff based on your feedback, of course)... TechSpot
Intel Xeon E5-2687W v3 and E5-2650 v3 Review: Haswell-EP with 10 Cores During September we managed to get hold of some Haswell-EP samples for a quick run through our testing suite. The Xeon E5 v3 range extends beyond that of the E5 v2 with the new architecture, support for DDR4 and more SKUs with more cores. These are generally split into several markets including workstation, server, low power and high performance, with a few SKUs dedicated for communications or off-map SKUs with different levels of support. Today we are testing two 10 core models... AnandTech
Bootstrapping a solar system civilization In one of my meetings with NASA, a senior official with the space agency once observed, "Right now, the mass we use in space all comes from the Earth. We need to break that paradigm so that the mass we use in space comes from space." NASA is already working on printable spacecraft, automated robotic construction using regolith, and self-replicating large structures. As a stepping stone to in-space manufacturing, NASA has sent the first-ever 3D printer to the International Space Station. The White House
Announcing key advances to JavaScript performance in Windows 10 Technical Preview Since its inception in IE9, Chakra has supported a multi-tiered architecture – one which utilizes an interpreter for very fast startup, a parallel JIT compiler to generate highly optimized code for high throughput speeds, and a concurrent background GC to reduce pauses and deliver great UI responsiveness for apps and sites. Once the JavaScript source code for an app or site hits the JavaScript subsystem, Chakra performs a quick parse pass to check for syntax errors. Microsoft
Sigourney Weaver on the legacy of Ellen Ripley, women in games, and her return in Alien: Isolation A magical thing happened a few months ago. I spoke with Sigourney Weaver on the phone. I’m not fully recovered. Find out what the actress, soon to be heard reprising her Ellen Ripley role in the video game Alien: Isolation, had to say about women in film, women in games, her sci-fi legacy, and Ripley’s daughter. We felt having Ripley’s daughter be the protagonist for Alien: Isolation (check out our advanced review here!) was an inspired choice. The Mary Sue
Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M performance testing - mobile gaming at its best When NVIDIA launched the GeForce GTX 980 and GTX 970 graphics cards last month, part of the discussion at our meetings also centered around the mobile variants of Maxwell. The NDA was a bit later though and Scott wrote up a short story announcing the release of the GTX 980M and the GTX 970M mobility GPUs. Both of these GPUs are based on the same GM204 design as the desktop cards... PC Perspective
Analyzing the iMac 5K Retina display: How do you squeeze 5K out of a last-gen GPU? Apple announced a new 27-inch iMac yesterday, and it packs a significant wallop on the display front. As we've already detailed, these new 5K displays are thinner, cheaper, draw less power thanks to a more-efficient LED backlight, and, perhaps most importantly, Apple is selling the whole 27-inch iMac system at a mind-blowing price of $2500. That's the same price tag on Dell’s 5K monitor. ExtremeTech
The three lives of Blizzard Entertainment "World of Warcraft transformed everything." It's a statement that's tough to argue regardless of your position. If you play games, it's almost a guarantee that something you've played in the last few years has elements borrowed from World of Warcraft. If you create games, there's a good chance that you or someone you work with has played and been inspired by Blizzard's enormously successful massively multiplayer game. Polygon
The last medium A couple of months ago, I met Cory Strassburger, a visual-effects artist and filmmaker, at the creative development studio Kite & Lightning. Strassburger is tall and wiry, with somewhat villainous facial hair on a friendly face. His studio is housed in a fancy branding company in Hollywood and is dominated by a mysterious polygonal metal structure with a platform inside. It looks like a massage table stuck inside a geodesic dome. California Sunday
OS X 10.10 Yosemite: The Ars Technica review When the book is finally closed on the product line known as OS X, last year’s release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks may end up getting short shrift. Sure, it brought tangible energy saving benefits to Mac laptop owners, but such gains are quickly taken for granted; internal changes and new frameworksare not as memorable to customers as they may be to developers and technophiles. Ars Technica
Samsung's 840 EVO update fixes slow reads with old data Last month, Samsung confirmed that its 840 EVO SSD can suffer from slower read speeds with older data. The company promised to address the issue with updated firmware, and we've been experimenting with the fix. Before we get into the results of our testing, we should spend a moment on the problem itself. Here's how Samsung describes the issue... The Tech Report
Linus Torvalds: I made a "metric s---load" of community-building mistakes Open source is not for the faint of heart. It's easy to assume that "open source community" translates to "hippie commune of peace-loving hackers." In practice, open source is often anything but. Just ask systemd developer Lennart Poettering, who describes the Linux community as "not a friendly place to be in" (and that's putting it mildly). ReadWrite
