Google Is About to Force You to Use Generative Search
AI-generated summaries and roundups will appear at the top of your Google search results, whether you want them to or not.
By Adrianna Nine March 26, 2024
If you haven't already, you'll soon see AI-generated summaries and roundups at the top of your Google search results. Google's "Search Generative Experience," or SGE, was previously reserved for users who opted in. Still, now the tech giant plans to force it upon anyone who initiates a search from within the United States.
Introduced exactly one year ago, SGE uses AI to summarize definitions, product reviews, articles, and other content you'd typically have to do the hard work of clicking on yourself. The point, Google said, was to make the search experience easier so that "instead of asking a series of questions and piecing together that information yourself," Google could do it for you. While that alone sounds eerily dystopian, you didn't have to interact with SGE unless you opted into the feature voluntarily.
An international research team has sent an astounding amount of data at a nearly incomprehensible speed. It's the fastest data transmission ever using a single optical fiber and shows just how speedy the process can get using current materials.
In the UK, according to a report by regulatory group Ofcom published in September 2023, the average broadband speed in the country is about 70 megabits per second (Mb/s). While that's plenty of pipeline to watch tiny house tours, see robots do back flips, and check out the latest AI-generated videos, it's not really significant in the world of serious data transmission.
In that arena, world records are set at speeds of 319 Terabits per second (TB/s) and then broken a year later at one petabit per second (a petabit is one million gigabits). Of course that record then again gets trounced by another one that clocks an almost scary 22.9 petabits per second and so on and so on.
Internet Activity Plummeted As People Went Outside to Watch Solar Eclipse by Michael Kan
April 9, 2024
Introduction:
(PC Mag) Apparently, the only thing that will get people to look up from their computers and smartphones is a natural phenomenon like a solar eclipse.
Internet use briefly plummeted on Monday in areas of North America where the total solar eclipse crossed overhead, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare.
"Cloudflare's data shows a clear impact on internet traffic from Mexico to Canada, following the path of totality,” the company said in a report. The change was especially pronounced in Vermont, where internet traffic dropped 60% at 3:25 p.m. EST during a five-minute window, right as the Moon fully crossed the Sun’s path.
Meanwhile, Arkansas, Indiana, Maine, New Hampshire, and Ohio also experienced internet traffic decreases of 40% or more during their respective five-minute eclipse windows.
The trend even occurred in states where the eclipse could only be partially observed. For example, in Massachusetts and Kansas, internet traffic dropped around 30%, probably because over 85% of the sun was obscured in certain areas of each state, making the partial eclipse still worth seeing.
WD Unveils Portable Server With 368TB of Flash Storage
The Ultrastar Transporter is like a rolling server with a ton of high-speed storage.
By Josh Norem April 15, 2024 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/w ... sh-storage
Western Digital has unveiled a new portable server it calls the Ultrastar Transporter. It's essentially a rack-sized server you can toss in a briefcase and take anywhere. It also comes with 368TB of flash storage. The company calls it the pinnacle of network-attached storage, and it certainly beats the heck out of the lowly 32TB NAS device sitting on our desk.
WD's product page for the Transporter says it's for edge use cases, such as when a site's Internet goes down or is spotty, and you need a ton of high-performance storage pronto. Because it can be stuffed into a rolling hard case, you can just send it there and connect it directly to the network with its dual-port 200Gbe connections. WD doesn't say what kind of SSDs are inside, only that they're "enterprise NVME" drives.
Scientists Reveal Non-Volatile Memory Breakthrough
It could be the holy grail of NAND storage married with DRAM speed we've been waiting for all these years.
By Josh Norem April 23, 2024 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/s ... eakthrough
A long-running problem in the computer world is that DRAM is the fastest memory available but also volatile, so it can't hold onto its data when power is shut off. This makes it useless for data storage. On the other hand, we now have NAND flash, which is non-volatile, so it can keep data without needing constant power. But it's nowhere near as fast as DRAM, so both are required in current systems. Now, scientists in Korea have developed a prototype solution combining the best aspects of both technologies into a single memory device. This type of device—with the speed of memory but the ability to hold onto data without power—is the holy grail of storage and memory.
A team of researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has revealed its work on a new memory solution that uses phase-change memory. Phase-change memory (PCM) has been used in the past, but power consumption and manufacturing costs were sticking points, as TechRadar points out. However, this new version has reportedly resolved those issues by concentrating the phase change on a tiny area. Previous attempts involved using advanced lithography techniques and trying to shrink the devices themselves, which still resulted in high power consumption and exorbitant manufacturing costs.
