Samsung's 970 EVO has always been the fastest of the low-priced NVMe SSDs, and the company's new 970 EVO Plus, announced Tuesday, further cements its hold on that position. Samsung claims up to a 57 percent increase in performance for the Plus over the older 970 EVO. I didn't see quite that, but sustained writes when the drive was using its SLC cache increased by 10 percent, and jumped by a very welcome 42 percent when writing to the main body of TLC NAND.
Addendum 4/25/2019: Unfortunately, Apple users looking to upgrade the NVMe in their older machines should steer clear of this SSD, as it has so far proven unstable on the Mac. Whether this is Samsung's or Apple's issue was not clear.
A shortage in Intel microprocessors that affected Microsoft and the PC industry during late 2018 appears to have ended, helping spur sales of Microsoft's Windows and Surface products.
During Microsoft’s earnings call on Wednesday, chief financial officer Amy Hood said the overall PC market was stronger than anticipated. “In Windows, the overall PC market was stronger than we anticipated, driven by improved chip supply that met both unfulfilled Q2 commercial and premium consumer demand as well as better-than-expected Q3 commercial demand,” Hood said.
A quarter ago, Hood had taken a different tone, complaining on behalf of Microsoft that chip supply constraints had hurt the overall PC market. “The overall PC market was smaller than we expected primarily due to the timing of chip supply to our OEM partners, which constrained an otherwise healthy PC ecosystem and negatively impacted both OEM Pro and non-Pro revenue growth,” Hood said then.
Join The Half Nerd gang as they talk about the latest PC hardware topics. In today's show Brad and Gordon are both on vacation, meaning Alaina and Adam are left to discuss the taboo topics such as consoles, game streaming, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture! As always we will be answering your live questions so speak up in the chat.
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Mortal Kombat ‘s fraught relationship with the PC continues. Back in 2015, I tentatively reviewed Mortal Kombat X on the Xbox One because that’s what NetherRealm sent over, then was forced to yank our positive score when the PC port arrived like a train on fire. Then the situation got weirder as NetherRealm canceled the release of the expanded XL edition on PC, only to surprise-release it six months after the fact—a pattern that repeated with the release of Injustice 2, which hit consoles in May of 2017 and arrived on PC that winter.
The wait for 5G is almost nearly over. But if you want to live in this speedy new world, you’re going to have to pay for it. Verizon on Thursday announced that the Samsung Galaxy S10 5G is available for preorder for delivery May 16 starting at $1,300 for 256GB of storage or $1400 for 256GB of storage.
The pricing is remarkably expensive and tops the iPhone XS Max and Samsung’s own Galaxy S10+. The S10 5G comes in either silver or black, the latter of which you can only get through Verizon stores.
For now, in fact, the only place to buy the S10 5G in any color is at a Verizon store. It’s not clear how long the exclusivity lasts, but AT&T and Sprint have already signaled that they will have the phone in the first half of 2019 as well.
We love just about everything about the Google's Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL except for one thing: they're price. Like the rest of the premium Android crop, Google's handsets will cost you a pretty penny, but today the price is a little easier to swallow: You can take $200 either model in the Google Store, bringing the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL down to a more-palatable $599 and $699Remove non-product link, respectively.
If you didn't jump on yesterday's display deal (which is still live at NeweggRemove non-product link), perhaps today's deal will convince you to take the plunge: Amazon is selling the factory overclocked Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX Vega 56 for $300Remove non-product link, an all-time low and nearly $200 off its $480 retail price.
You expect every laptop to have Wi-Fi and some kind of USB. What you probably don't expect is battling specs that will make it difficult to know what sort of wireless and USB you have. We'll sort it out for you here: What Wi-Fi 5 and USB 3.2 mean, and why they're the same thing as good ol' 802.11ac and USB 3.1.
Confused? That's okay. You're just the latest victim of a major rebranding of both Wi-Fi and USB. With the release of major performance updates to both specs, both have also received extreme makeovers. The good news is it's actually easy to understand.
Wi-Fi 6: This is the newest standard and has the shiny good stuff, like up to 3.5Gbps of speed, plus power savings and less network congestion (read our sibling site Macworld's primer for more details). We'll point out that you will also need a new router that supports Wi-Fi 6 to realize its full potential. If you care about Wi-Fi and intend to run the latest gear, you'll want to make sure it is Wi-Fi 6-complaint.
You could say that the opposite of version control—from the perspective of internal software development—is chaos. If development teams don’t manage various versions of their work, things can quickly spiral out of control.
Version-control software, a component of software configuration management, helps teams manage changes to documents, programs, websites, and other development initiatives. Given the fact that so many development efforts rely on teams working on the same files at the same time, a lack of version control could create serious problems.
When multiple teams design, develop, and deploy applications, often more than one version of the same software is deployed at different sites, and developers work on updates simultaneously. Some features—and in many cases some bugs—might be present in only certain versions of the software.
Oh HP Spectre x360 13, you’re such an overachiever. While others in your class just phone it in year-after-year, you’re always trying to improve yourself.
This year, you’ve really gone over the top. Besides a major body redesign with sculpted “diamond-cut” angles, you’re also packing Intel’s latest Whiskey Lake CPU and a 1-watt panel that just slays in the battery department. We won’t even bring up all the other goodness that you’ve pioneered: pen support, convertible design, biometric cameras, and awesome bang for the buck.
So while others are content with a new color swath or LED change, the Spectre x360 13 (2019 model) still manages to impress. Of course no laptop is flawless, but this new model still managers to improve upon the really nice one it replaces.
While Microsoft's $9.6 billion in 'commercial cloud' revenues stole the headline show for its Q3 FY19, Windows also contributed significantly to Microsoft's numbers.
Picking a gaming laptop is a lot more fun today than it was five years ago, when a “real” gaming laptop meant 12 pounds of back-breaking hardware to haul around. Check out our top picks immediately below, and keep reading to catch up on the latest news and reviews.
With major advances in laptop CPUs and graphics technologies, you can now get great gaming performance in sizes from slender to huge, and prices from budget to sky-high. That’s where this handy-dandy buyer’s guide come in. We’ll name the best gaming laptops currently available, and we’ll highlight what to look for when buying a gaming laptop. (Check back often, as we’ll update this list as new products arrive.)
The best wireless keyboards do more than free you from a cable. They let you toss the crummy keyboard you got for free with your PC—does anyone like that one?—and they also give you options. The models we’ve reviewed range from full-size desktop slabs to portable models that skip easily from laptop to tablet to phone. Whatever you need to type with, there’s a keyboard for it. (If you’re looking for a gaming keyboard, we’ve got you covered! Click that link to see our full reviews and rankings.)
Keyboard choice can be very subjective. That said, we’ve based our reviews on hours spent with each model, banging away on work projects or surfing the web and keeping up on social media.
Choosing a gaming keyboard is a matter of personal taste. To that point, there are a plethora of options, with a dizzying mix of features. One person could be into Cherry Browns and white backlighting. Another might favor Razer Greens and a rippling RGB glow. Gigantic wrist pads, compact shapes, numeric keypads, macro keys, volume controls.... You get the picture
To help you sort through the many options, we’ve rounded up a large number of planks, putting them through their paces, to come up with our top recommendations. All of these are mechanical keyboards, and for good reason—they’re simply more comfortable to use over the long haul. But we’re open-minded, so if we encounter an alternative that works well, you may see it appear on this list. We’ll keep updating it periodically as we test new keyboards.
The laptop world is a-changing. New CPUs and GPUs—yes, mobile discrete GPUs—are bringing forth laptops that are thinner, lighter, and faster than ever, even gaming laptops. And the advances keep coming: After a busy round of CES announcements in January, Intel and Nvidia have welcomed spring with yet another round of products: the 9th generation of Core mobile processors, and mobile GeForce GTX 1650 and 1660 Ti graphics. Acer, Asus, Dell, Razer, and more companies are jumping on this bandwagon, so stay tuned for new models we bring in for review.
If you're looking to buy a new business PC, HP is currently offering a "buy more, save more" discount that gets activated at 3 different price points, and using a special code.
Configure your new PC to the $599+ price point and apply code BMSM60 to save $60. Or configure to $1,299+ and use code BMSM150 to save $150. Configure to $1,999+ and use code BMSM350 for a whopping $350 off your new PC. Click the codes just mentioned to learn more, or click right here to review available models, specs, and configurations.
Grammy Award-winning Childish Gambino isn’t done collaborating with Google. Following his groovy Playground Playmoji released alongside the Pixel 3, Donald Glover’s alter ego is back with Pharos, a brand new augmented reality app built using Google’s ARCore platform, and it’s quite a trip.
When you launch the app, you’ll be prompted to plug in headphones, but they’re not necessary for the experience. You’ll then be instructed to scan the floor of the room you’re in and then pinpoint an empty space. That will create a door that lets you literally step out of your reality and into Gambino’s universe, which is where things get really weird.
Google has finally announced a standalone Google Fit app for iOS, but it lacks the ability to properly sync all of your exercise and workout data to Apple Health.
A bug in Microsoft’s Windows 10 is blocking users from upgrading to the May 2019 Update, for PCs that have either an SD card or USB device connected during the process.
Microsoft’s May 2019 Update currently exists in a sort of limbo. It’s available to Windows Insiders, but hasn’t reached official “release” status. This bug is easily fixed: Simply remove the SD card and/or USB storage, then proceed through the upgrade as usual via Windows Update.
Microsoft has said it expects to fix the bug in an upcoming servicing release of Windows 10, and it has about a month to do so, before the May 2019 Update is finally pushed to the PC ecosystem at large.
Before analyzing customer data, we need to describe the customers. Descriptive features for customers usually revolve around three categories: revenues, demographics and behavior. While revenues and demographics are easy to quantify, customer behavior is harder to define and therefore harder to quantify.
Customer behavior depends heavily on the kind of business. Behavior in energy usage requires different metrics than behavior in newspaper reading. Loyalty to the business is measured differently in subscription-based businesses than in a traditional retail store. When it comes to online shopping, the number of metrics proposed to measure user behavior is just overwhelming.
Kubernetes has become a standard way—many would say the standard way — to deploy containerized applications at scale. But if Kubernetes helps us to tame sprawling and complex container deployments, what’s available to help us tame Kubernetes? It too can be complex, messy, and difficult to manage.
As Kubernetes grows and evolves, it is likely that some of its excesses will be tamed from within. But some people aren’t waiting around for Kubernetes to get any easier to work with, and have rolled their own solutions to many common problems with Kubernetes in production.
Here we highlight 22 open-source projects and third-party tools that simplify Kubernetes in various ways, from easing command-line interactions, to simplifying application deployment syntax, to integrating with AWS, to providing a window into multiple clusters.
Microsoft has released .Net Framework 4.8, the latest version of the company’s application development framework for Windows. The update brings a number of bug fixes, security patches, and improvements to the Common Language Runtime, ASP.Net, Windows Forms, Windows Presentation Foundation, and Windows Communication Foundation.
Microsoft launched a collection of tools and templates aimed at freelance workers late last year. Moving forward, Microsoft has much bigger plans to target those in the 'gig economy.'
Node.js 12 has arrived as the latest version of the server-side JavaScript framework, with faster startup and improved default heap limits. Node.js 12 is an LTS (Long Term Support) release, meaning it will be supported for three years, including six months as the current release, 18 months as an active release, and 12 months as a maintenance release.
Microsoft’s Active Server Pages have been around a long time; launching back in the early days of the web. Since then they’ve been through several iterations and frameworks, driving the development of ASP.Net and now ASP.Net Core. A focus on the model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern has kept them relevant, with the latest generation of the platform now an open source project.
ASP.Net Core is a redesign of the popular ASP.Net 4 framework, rebuilt for the open .Net Core framework and ideal for use in Windows container microservices hosted in Windows Server Nano. Lightweight and fast, it’s quick to deploy and works well as part of a modern cloud-hosted application architecture. You’re not limited to Microsoft’s own IIS web server either, as the latest versions host on Linux as well as Windows, and run in Apache and Nginx.
Sets, Microsoft's Windows-management feature which allowed users to group data, sites and other information in tabs, is gone and not expected to come back in a future release of Windows 10, my contacts say.
ASP.Net Core MVC provides support for uploading files through model binding that leverages the IFormFile interface. Recall that model binding maps data from an HTTP request to action method parameters. Model binding simplifies access to the data sent by an HTTP request and makes it easier for the action methods to be unit tested. The IFormFile interface simply represents a file sent with an HTTP request.
We can take advantage of the IFormFile interface in our ASP.Net Core MVC applications to represent a file that is sent from the client to the server along with the HTTP request. This article presents a discussion of how we can upload files in ASP.Net Core MVC.
Create an ASP.Net Core MVC project
First off, let’s create an ASP.Net Core MVC project in Visual Studio. At the time of this writing, Visual Studio 2019 is available for free download. If you don’t have a copy of Visual Studio 2019 installed in your system, you can download it here.
Both Oracle and IBM have missed out on a $10 billion U.S. Department of Defense cloud contract. Amazon Web Services and Microsoft remain in the running. While $10 billion is a big prize, the bigger concern is that Oracle and IBM are increasingly out of the running for the much larger grand prize of $117 billion in cloud spending (across IaaS and PaaS) expected by 2021, according to IDC.
While their incumbency in traditional data center workloads makes them contenders for cloud contracts in a hybrid cloud world, this DoD indifference to their cloud future suggests something is fundamentally wrong with their product strategies.
Android Studio 3.4, the latest version of Google’s IDE for building Android applications, is now available, building on the Project Marble effort to improve fundamental features and workflows. Along with performance improvements and bug fixes, Android Studio 3.4 features a streamlined UI for managing dependencies and build files, a new default code shrinker and obfuscator, a new app resource management tool, and a more efficient Android Emulator.
Surprise: Microsoft has made the Windows 10 1903 (May 2019 Update) and Windows Server 1903 bits available for download on MSDN, a month earlier than many were expecting.
Microsoft has purchased Express Logic, maker of ThreadX RTOS, one of the most widely deployed real-time operating systems for microcontroller-based devices.
Last week, I casually dropped the term “higher-order function” when talking about memoization. While I feel comfortable throwing around terms like that now, I didn’t always know what they meant. This week we’ll examine what higher-order functions are, show some common examples, and learn how to go about creating our own.
At its core, a higher-order function is just a function that accepts a function as an argument or returns a function. This is possible in JavaScript thanks to first-class functions, which means that functions in JavaScript can be passed around like any other variable. While this sounds pretty straightforward, it doesn’t quite telegraph the kind of power you have with first-class functions.
The application development world is continuously changing, evidenced by the analyst community’s frequent revisions of their various categories and definitions of application development tools and platforms. The rapid evolution and consequent flux are fueled by organizations clamoring for a single platform and toolset that can help them quickly deliver omnichannel, customer-grade apps spanning desktop, web, mobile, wearables, etc.
The right low-code solution based on open standards can be invaluable in an era of “more apps, faster, that run anywhere.” That said, not all low-code solutions are created equal. Here are three red flags to watch for when evaluating a solution.
Low-code red flag #1: Black boxes
Low-code gets a bad rap due to an “impenetrable black box” perception, which is understandable considering developer reluctance to run mission-critical services on something over which they have no control. The answer to increased productivity in a fast-paced environment shouldn’t be the extreme of no-code black boxes, but a low-code solution that is an “open box”—based on open standards and with a full view of the source. Low-code at its core is merely a tool whose value is derived from those who use it—and that calls for a professional developer, not a no-code business user.
Blink and you might miss some of the most interesting developments around Docker these days. Kubernetes may be getting more of the hot-new-tool thunder, but Docker continues to offer “just enough” container orchestration for most development projects and deployments.
Plus Docker has its own rich ecosystem of third-party tools that extend Docker, jazz it up, or make it less persnickety. Here are 12 open-source creations that get a boost from Docker or give Docker a boost, leveraging Docker for specific use cases or making Docker easier to work with.
Dive
Docker images are like sandwiches, with many layers. Maybe it is better to say they’re like sandwiches in opaque wrappers: You don’t always know how many layers there are, or what’s in them. Dive lets you visually explore the layers in a Docker image through an interactive UI. You can see what ingredients are present in each layer, and also determine how each layer has changed the layer below it (what has been added or removed). You can also analyze an image for wasted or duplicated space, and even pass the results along to your continuous integration pipeline, so that an image with too much wasted space fails the build process.
Despite more than a decade of cloud migration, there’s still a vast amount of data running on-premises. That’s not surprising since data migrations, even between similar systems, are complex, slow, and add risk to your day-to-day operations. Moving to the cloud adds additional management overhead, raising questions of network connectivity and bandwidth, as well as the variable costs associated with running cloud databases.
Part of the problem is that we tend to think of cloud services as a replica of our on-premises systems. That leads to a mismatch with the cloud, where we take servers that are sized appropriately for a multiyear lifespan with additional capacity for any sudden increase in demand and move that specification straight to a cloud infrastructure. The result is often underused virtual machines and a compute budget that’s substantially higher than what’s actually needed. Instead of lifting and shifting entire infrastructures we need to consider taking advantage of cloud services, working with them as platforms not as datacenters.
Last year, a Microsoft patent for voice-powered wireless earbuds emerged. Microsoft may be moving ahead with plans for that type of device, according to a new report.
Design patterns are used to solve common design problems in software development and to reduce the complexities in our source code. Design patterns can be creational (related to object creation), structural (related to object assembly), or behavioral (related to object collaboration and separation of responsibilities).
The strategy design pattern is a Gang-of-Four (GoF) design pattern. It is a behavioral pattern used to define a family of algorithms and encapsulate each of them inside a class. These encapsulated algorithms are then interchangeable — i.e., they can vary based on different inputs, independently of the client that uses them.
Graph databases such as Neo4j, TigerGraph, Amazon Neptune, the graph portion of Azure Cosmos DB, and AnzoGraph, the subject of this review, offer a natural representation of data that is primarily about the relationships between people, places, and things. Graph databases are good for applications for fraud detection, social networks, recommendation systems, and so on.
Version 1.34 of the Rust systems programming language is now available.
Released April 2019, Rust 2.34 includes the following new and changed features:
Cargo, the project and package management system for Rus, now works with registries other than the default (Crates.io), including self-hosted registries. Note that any Crates hosted on Crates.io can only depend on Crates also in Crates.io.
The ? operator, used for unpacking errors and valid values from Result types, can now be used in documentation tests. This makes it possible to write more fully fleshed out test examples alongside the code being documented.
Custom attributes can now accept arbitrary token streams. This allows custom attributes in procedural macros to be more succinct and use more idiomatic Rust code.
The TryFrom and TryInto traits can now allow type conversions that might allow failure.
Many library and API stabilizations have been added, such as support for a wider range of atomic integer types (which can be shared safely between threads).
Any time you're writing code, it means the code is going to be doing work for you. Many times, the burden of that work is transparent to us and our users. When it does make itself apparent, we have a performance issue on our hands. On the front-end this might manifest itself as lag or jank. On the back-end we may have higher latency or slow responses.
Sometimes there are ways of choosing faster algorithms or better data structures to resolve our performance issues, but not always. So what do we do when we’re too slow but can’t speed things up any more? One way of doing this in JavaScript is called memoization, which is a functional programming technique used to deal with costly pure functions.
Kubernetes has many core abstractions, sometimes called primitives, that make the experience of deploying and managing applications so much better than what came before. Understanding these abstractions helps you take full advantage of Kubernetes and also avoid complexity—especially when running stateful applications like databases, data analytics, big data applications, streaming engines, machine learning, and AI apps.
In this article, I’ll review some of the fundamental abstractions in Kubernetes storage, and walk through how Portworx PX-Enterprise helps solve important challenges that arise with the need for persistent storage in Kubernetes.
Want a good reason for the smashing success of the Python programming language? Look no further than the massive collection of libraries available for Python, both native and third-party libraries. With so many Python libraries out there, though, it’s no surprise that some don’t get all the attention they deserve. Plus, programmers who work exclusively in one domain don’t always know about the goodies available to them for other kinds of work.
Here are 24 Python libraries you may have overlooked but are definitely worth your attention. These gems run the gamut of usefulness, simplifying everything from file system access, database programming, and working with cloud services to building lightweight web apps, creating GUIs, and working with images, ebooks, and Word files—and much more besides. Some are well-known, others lesser-known, but all of these Python libraries deserve a place in your toolbox.
New Slack apps for Outlook calendar and email, plus an updated Slack OneDrive app are available to users who want more seamless collaboration between Slack and Microsoft Office.
Microsoft is removing or replacing more than 50 Chromium services in building its new Chromium-based Edge browser, besides working to provide some unique value-add not found in every other Chromium browser.
Microsoft officially is releasing the first Developer and Canary test builds of its Chromium-based Edge browser for 64-bit Windows 10 only. Here's where to get it and who should (and shouldn't) download it.
Microsoft's HealthVault personal-health-record service is closing on November 20 and any data left in it at that time will be deleted, Microsoft officials are telling users via e-mail.
Microsoft is switching up the way it's going to be testing Windows 10 with the next couple of releases. What's behind its latest moves? I have some theories.
Complaints about alleged gender harassment and discrimination are the subject of an email thread that's worked its way up the chain of command inside Microsoft, according to a new report.
Microsoft will be integrating its Kaizala service into Teams over the next 12 to 18 months. In the interim, it's adding a lot more features to Kaizala.