Computing

Shares for Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft are way up Thursday evening following huge sales figures reported for the previous quarter. Shares for Alphabet, the holding company for Google, jumped to over $1,000 after the company reported 24% growth over last three months. Amazon's sales rose a whopping 34% which pushed its shares up over $1,000 as well. Microsoft's sales were up 12% from the previous year which was also good news for investors. Their stock jumped 3% to an all-time-high above $82. Alphabet's profits grew from $5.6 billion to $7.8 billion with most of that coming from Google, of course. YouTube in particular has seen rapid growth with Google estimating that 1.5 billion people spend an average of one hour per day watching content. Alphabet's "Other Bets" like Waymo and Project Loon have also seen strong growth as well. Despite Amazon's growth, their profits have remained largely flat. This is due to their massive reinvestment in data centers, media content, and other … [Read more...] about Leading tech stocks surge following strong growth numbers

Google has yet to launch its first smartwatch, but the company may already be working on the next steps for its wearable plans. According to a Protocol report , Google is planning to integrate fitness trackers into Google TV and Android TV as part of a broader push to strengthen its product ecosystem. The question is whether the historically fragmented Wear OS platform is up for the challenge. The company purportedly laid out the plans at a closed-door event with its TV partners, Protocol reports. The idea is to let Wear OS and Fitbit users broadcast real-time metrics like heart rate and calories burned on the screen. Better smart home controls are also part of the plan. That said, these efforts may take a while. Google’s fitness plans supposedly won’t show up until 2023 at the earliest, with smart home efforts coming the following year. This is partly because Google’s partners have to create more powerful smart TVs and streaming gadgets to enable all of this. In the short … [Read more...] about Google’s big plans for wearables could include workouts from your TV

Audio player loading… The Apple M2 is finally here. Revealed during the tech giant’s WWDC 2022 event , the new chip is the next generation of Apple silicon that will power the latest MacBooks and iPads. The Apple M2 chip is a significant advance over the Apple M1 chip which powered the last generation of MacBook Air, along with the MacBook Pro 13-inch and Apple Mac Mini. The Apple M2 chip is an 8-core SoC, featuring a 4+4 core configuration, with four performance cores and four efficiency cores, running with a TDP around 10-15 watts. The second generation of Apple silicon is designed on an enhanced 5nm process, with 5 billion transistors, 100GB/s of memory bandwidth, and up to 24GB of unified memory. The M2 features a 10-core GPU, and a neural engine capable of 5.8 trillion operations per second, more than 40% more operations than on the M1. This story is developing… … [Read more...] about Apple announces the new super-efficient M2 chip at WWDC 2022

If a Linux Bash script relies on certain files or directories being present, it can’t just assume they do. It needs to check that they’re definitely present. Here’s how to do that. Don’t Assume Anything When you’re writing a script you can’t make assumptions about what is and isn’t present on a computer. That’s doubly true if the script is going to be distributed and run on many different computers. Sooner or later, the script will run on a computer that doesn’t meet your assumptions, and the script will fail or run unpredictably. Everything we value or create on a computer is stored in a file of some format, and all of those files reside in a directory . Scripts can read, write, rename, delete and move files and directories—all the things you can do on the command line. The advantage you have as a human is that you can see the contents of a directory and you know if a file exists or not—or whether the expected directory even exists. If a script fouls up when it is … [Read more...] about How to Check If a File Exists in Linux Bash Scripts

Asked about the future of design, Donald Greenberg holds up a model of a human aorta. “After my son became an intravascular heart surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic, he hired one of my students to use CAT scans and create digital 3D models of an aortic aneurysm,” said the computer graphics pioneer in a video interview from his office at Cornell University. The models enabled custom stents that fit so well patients could leave the hospital soon after they’re inserted. It’s one example Greenberg gives of how computer graphics are becoming part of every human enterprise. A Whole New Chapter Expanding the frontier, he’s creating new tools for an architecture design course based on today’s capabilities for building realistic 3D worlds and digital twins . It will define a holistic process so everyone from engineers to city planners can participate in a design. The courseware is still at the concept stage, but his passion for it is palpable. “This is my next big project, and I’m … [Read more...] about Design in the Age of Digital Twins: A Conversation With Graphics-Pioneer Donald Greenberg