Jewel of the crown

His books snarled. They railed against today’s storms, its innumerous injustices. Monstrous Regiment lampooned the pointlessness of war. Equal Rites shouted at sexism, Small Gods at the problem of blind faith, Carpe Jugulum the privileged’s proclivity to demean those beneath them. In comparison, The Shepherd’s Crown feels quieter and tauter, although no less fierce. It feels like an acknowledgement. No matter Pratchett’s influence, there is only so much he could do, has done, can continue to do even as the effects of his writing ripple outwards. And he seems at peace with that. As Death muses to Granny Weatherwax, nobody can do better than to leave the world better than they’ve found it. … [Read more...] about : A quiet end to the

Many other news outlets have interviewed Weir and told the story of how The Martian came to be, so we won’t re-re-rehash the story beyond a quick summary. The Martian was written in installments and put up for free on Weir’s website, receiving good reviews from a small community of readers. However, attempts to shop the book to publishers were met with failure. After receiving reader requests for a way to read the book outside of a Web browser, Weir repackaged it in .epub and .mobi formats, eventually submitting it to Amazon’s online store so it could be loaded on Kindle readers. Doing so required Weir to attach a price, since Amazon won’t let you publish Kindle books for free. So Weir sold copies for the minimum of $0.99. Weirdly enough, far more people paid to download the Kindle version than downloaded it for free, and word of mouth pushed the book into the top download lists on Amazon. From there it attracted the attention of Crown Publishing, … [Read more...] about Stuck on Mars with nothing but disco: Ars talks with

Model Cores/Threads Boost/Base Frequency Total Cache TDP Suggested retail price Ryzen 9 3900XT 12/24 Up to 4.7GHz/3.8GHz 70MiB 105W $499 Ryzen 7 3800XT 8/16 Up to 4.7GHz/3.9GHz 36MiB 105W $399 Ryzen 5 3600XT 6/12 Up to 4.5GHz/3.8GHz 35MiB 95W $249 Although the single-threaded performance improvements are small, the margins between CPUs in that stat tend to be razor-thin, and AMD says they're enough to take the coveted single-thread performance crown away from Intel. A 4 percent improvement to the Ryzen 9 3900X score shown on the CGDirector leaderboard would come out to 531—a few points higher than CGDirector's posted score for the i9-10900K, although a few points lower than our own Cinebench R20 result for that processor, using an NZXT Kraken fluid-cooler and Primochill Praxis open-air bench. … [Read more...] about AMD’s upcoming Ryzen 3000XT brings 7nm improvements, higher boost

Lucid says its beta prototypes are regularly achieving over 400 miles (643km) of highway range in testing, and a real-world range of 400 miles is the company's target for the Air, which goes into production later this year. Currently, the only BEV with such long legs is the Tesla Model S, which recently broke through that psychological barrier thanks to a process of incremental improvement over the past eight years. … [Read more...] about How’s this for aerodynamic? The Lucid Air’s drag coefficient is only 0.21