Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple will move away from its current processor designs that keep the CPU and GPU cores on the same chip and see a performance gain.TSMC has just announced an all-new chip production process called "A16"One of the reasons for Apple Silicon's speed over the previous Intel processors has been that each M-series chip has been a single unit. This System-on-a-Chip (SoC) idea cuts bottlenecks by having all the processor's elements together on one chip package.According to Kuo, however, Apple is going to change this for the M5 Pro, M5 Max, and M5 Ultra. Only the M5 will remain as a single unit. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

On this episode of the HomeKit Insider Podcast, your hosts talk through even more smart home rumors from Apple, talk about the new 18.3 releases, and review the xBloom smart coffee maker.HomeKit Insider PodcastThis week on AppleInsider we rounded up all of the most recent Apple rumors for the smart home and tried to put them into a timeline and strategy that makes sense. We revisited that here on the podcast.We then walked through the newly-released beta updates for developers, including iOS 18.3 and tvOS 18.3. 4th updates have minor smart-home related changes, including support for robotic vacuum cleaners. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Apple's age rating system in the App Store is not doing enough to protect children, a report claims, after a day's worth of research found a high proportion of apps deemed acceptable to children actually posed a risk.App Store iconApple has various systems and mechanisms in place to make the use of an iPhone, iPad, or Mac relatively safe for children. Parental controls can limit what age ranges of apps are usable on a child's device, among other features.However, for those restrictions to actually be useful, the apps themselves have to be rated correctly. In a joint report from the Heat Initiative and ParentsTogether Action, it seems that the ratings aren't doing enough. Continue Reading on AppleInsider | Discuss on our Forums

Real estate blog The Real Deal has released its annual list of the top-performing architects in New York City. The firms with planned projects over 1 million square feet included SLCE and the office conversion leader Gensler. Nikolai Katz Architect finished first with 15 permitting applications. The list was again dominated by boutique residential studios. Rounding out the top ten were Leandro Nils Dickson Architect, S. Wieder Architect, IMC Architecture,Gerald Caliendo Architects,Aufgang Architects, Fred Geremia Architects & Planners, Baobab Architects P.C., and Lester Katz.Finally, TDR says there is "hope on the horizon" thanks to the recently passed City of Yes zoning regulations changes meant to build 80,000 new homes in the next 15 years.

With the coming months packed with many games, management fans can look forward to Two Point Museum, the latest from Two Point Studios. The objective is to manage a museum, and doing that requires exhibits. Fortunately, you can hire various Experts to embark on expeditions and retrieve them, as outlined in the latest trailer.Its easier said than done, though. The Expert must be trained and equipped with items like the First Aid Kit, which can prevent one potential injury. You can also increase XP with the XP-dition Journal, reduce expeditions costs with the Haggling Handbook, and more.Some expeditions may also present scenarios that require your input. What will you do when a giant snake emerges? How will you manage your team when hunger strikes? Depending on your decisions, there may be significant consequences. Succeed, and your cargo chopper will have another exhibit to add to the museum.Two Point Museum launches on March 4th, 2025, for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. Those who pre-order can obtain Sonic the Hedgehog items and staff outfits for their museum.

Researchers made replicas of Neolithic clay trays and baked their own focaccia bread. Scientific ReportsFocaccia, with its flaky crust and rich olive oil flavor, is a beloved staplebut just how far back does the delicious breads history stretch?While experts know it was made in ancient Rome, new research suggests that its origins may be even older: According to a recent study in the journal Scientific Reports, Neolithic communities were making their own focaccia-like bread between 7000 and 5000 B.C.E.Studying past dietary behaviors can provide valuable information about the social and cultural aspects of ancient populations, first author Sergio Taranto, an archaeologist atUAB Barcelona, tellsZME Sciences Rupendra Brahambhatt. This is particularly useful for studying prehistoric communities about which we have limited knowledge due to the lack of written records.To learn more about early baking practices and eating habits, researchers studied clay oval-shaped vessels known as husking trays. The trays had been found at sites across the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, including Mezraa Teleilat, Akaray Tepe and Tell Sabi Abyad. After analyzing the fossilized residues stuck to the artifacts, the team found that the bread was made by mixing wheat or barley with water. Various archaeological fragments analyzed during the research Scientific ReportsBased on how the trays have degraded, the researchers think the loaves were baked for around two hourslonger than the 20 to 30 minutes recommended today, writes Artnets Tim Brinkhofin a domed oven at an initial scorching temperature of 788 degrees Fahrenheit. They also discovered traces of animal fat and plant-based seasonings.The variation in organic materials found across the fragments suggests that Neolithic communities experimented with multiple recipes, says Taranto, per Archaeology News Dario Radley.The husking trays are made of coarse clay. They have low walls and a long oval base with a series of grooves on the inside. Previously, researchers have created replicas of such trays to learn more about how they were used, and they think the grooves made it easier to remove the bread from the trays so that it wouldnt stick to the pan.[The new study] confirms that the impressions inside these trays were meant to facilitate taking the bread/focaccia out of the vessel once cookedessentially an ancient non-stick technology, akin to our modern pans, Taranto tells ZME Science.Some of the larger trays from the study could produce loaves weighing nearly seven poundssuggesting that bakers may have made bread for many people to enjoy together.Our study offers a vivid picture of communities using the cereals they cultivated to prepare breads and focaccias enriched with various ingredients and consumed in groups, says Taranto in a statement. The use of the husking trays we identified leads us to consider that this late Neolithic culinary tradition developed over approximately six centuries and was practiced in a wide area of the Near East.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: Ancient Rome, Archaeology, Baking, Cooking, Food, Food History, History, Middle East , New Research

By all measures, 2024 was the biggest year for artificial intelligence yet at least when it comes to the commercialization.Read More

The software development world is experiencing its biggest transformation since the advent of open-source coding. Artificial intelligence assistants, once viewed with skepticism by professional developers, have become indispensable tools in the $736.96 billion global software development market. One of the products leading this seismic shift is AnRead More

DFC: Nintendo Switch 2 will be "the clear winner" of next-gen consolesMarket research firm suggests "there isn't room for more than two major consoles" in 2025 News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on Dec. 23, 2024 2025 is set to be a bumper year of growth for the games industry due to the long-awaited launches of Switch 2 and Grand Theft Auto 6.This is according to DFC Intelligence, which released its annual market report and forecast last week (via VGC).The firm predicted that Nintendo would be "the clear winner" in comparison to Sony and Microsoft and that only one of those firms would be able to compete with the console."There isn't room for more than two major consoles," the report said. "Sony or Microsoft will struggle mightily in a distant third place largely depending on which of those companies can gain early momentum."It suggested that Sony has the upper hand due to a "loyal base and strong Sony IP". In contrast, Microsoft will become "the world's largest software publisher" following its acquisition of Activision Blizzard in October 2023.Elsewhere, DFC Intelligence predicted that the number of players worldwide will increase past four billion by 2027."Over the past three decades, the video game industry has grown more than 20 times, and after two years of slumping hardware and software sales, it's poised to resume growing at a healthy rate through the end of the decade," said DFC Intelligence founder and CEO David Cole."While 2025 will mark the beginning of that upward trajectory, some huge questions remain, including who will lose the next-gen console war and who will win the game software distribution battle."And with the large publishers focused on live services around evergreen franchises, opportunities for smaller studios will be plentiful."

Brandon Riegg has spent the better part of a decade trying to make live TV happen at Netflix. He joined the company in 2016, after stints at NBC, ABC, and VH1, where hed worked on shows like Dancing with the Stars, The Voice, and Americas Got Talent. All those shows were the kind of unscripted reality fare hed been hired to bring to Netflix, but they also incorporated things like live voting to make the whole thing feel more urgent and interactive. I just felt like, if were really trying to be the preeminent entertainment service in the world, Riegg tells me, we should have all the tools at our disposal.So Riegg and Bela Bajaria, another longtime TV executive who joined Netflix around the same time and is now its chief content officer, began making the case around Netflix for why it should invest in the tech required to make live content work. Over and over, they got the same question: What do you want to do with it? And for years, Riegg says, they didnt have a great answer. Id go, Well, I dont have something specific right now, but I want to be able to jump on things that require live capability if those things come up.For years, that shrug of an answer didnt work. But somewhere around two years ago, the energy shifted. We were continuing to talk about how we wanted to have something for everyone, he says, and theres a requirement of live for some programs. For us to do those things, for us to buy those things, we need to have that functionality.Netflix has spent the last two years slowly learning how to do live programming and live streaming. It started with a Chris Rock comedy special last March, which was a technical success and a cultural hit. A few weeks later, it did a live Love Is Blind reunion show, which was such a spectacular disaster that the reunion wound up being filmed and released later. Then there was a live feed of baby gorillas at the Cleveland Zoo, a strange golf event that teamed Formula 1 drivers up with PGA pros, the SAG Awards, a tennis exhibition, a roast of Tom Brady, and John Mulaneys slightly unhinged late night show Everybodys in LA.All that was, in some ways, just practice. Because the real tests of Netflixs live prowess came this fall. First, the Jake Paul / Mike Tyson fight in November, which the company says was watched by more than 65 million Netflix subscribers around the world and had lots of technical difficulties and delays of its own. And next up, two NFL games on Christmas, complete with a Beyonc halftime show. The NFL is the biggest and most valuable entertainment property in the US, and football is the most-watched thing on television by a mile. Netflix is many things, but it is also now a live TV network. And you dont get to screw up football.The Paul / Tyson fight was a big one for Netflix though this photo is a lot clearer than the stream was. Photo by Tayfun Coskun / Anadolu via Getty ImagesWhen Netflix struggled to keep up with the Paul / Tyson fight, a lot of viewers were surprised. Netflix has been streaming stuff forever shouldnt it be good at this? When I put that question to Elizabeth Stone, Netflixs CTO, she says that streaming live is very different from just streaming. Maybe more different than Netflix itself originally thought.When were streaming video on demand, Stone says, we get the benefit of planning ahead. That content is in its final format; the video, images, audio are in nicely packaged files, and theyve already gone through all the production steps, the encoding steps, theyre ready to be placed on servers around the world through our content delivery network and through internet service providers. This is not trivial work, obviously, but its work Netflix has been doing for two decades. It has seen every problem, come up with every workaround. So when a member clicks play, Stone says, were really ready for them to click play.When youre filming and streaming live, you still have to do all that stuff and more, but you have to do it in real time. The camera feed goes to the production truck, goes to signal ingestion, goes into the cloud to get encoded. We then have to send that through our CDN, through internet service providers, to land on your TV or your phone. And we have seconds to do that. Streaming live, even to one person, is hard. Its doable, of course TV networks, streaming services, and tech companies do it every day but it takes work.Then theres the whole 65 million people thing. Stone laughs when I bring it up. Netflix builds and tests and plans as much as it can, she says, both with real events and by pummeling its infrastructure with fake traffic. But there is no lab in which you can simulate what happens to our systems when 65 million people are watching at the same time. Even on Netflixs all-time busiest days, its not getting that kind of traffic all at once.Stone breaks Netflixs system into two parts. Its a generalization, she says, but its close enough. When you log into Netflix and youre scrolling through the homepage, and youre watching trailers and youre deciding what to watch, thats supported by AWS servers. Netflix is a huge client of Amazons web services, which are the backbone of most of the internet at this point. Its a huge traffic burden just to have tens of millions of people flipping through the app at the same time, but AWS scales pretty well and Stone says that part of Netflix held up even during the fight.Once you press play, though, the system shifts to Netflixs own Open Connect system, which is generally considered the best in the streaming business. Netflix invested heavily in its own infrastructure when it first started doing streaming, but, again: 65 million people. I would argue that any company would have faced challenges at this type of scale, Stone says. We have these tight-knit connection points between our servers, Open Connect appliances, and what Ill call the last mile that ISPs give to devices. All of that was overloaded during the fight.Everybodys in LA was one of Netflixs more recent stabs at live programming. Photo by Gilbert Flores / Variety via Getty ImagesAmong the things you cant know until an event starts is whos going to watch, where theyre going to be, and what else might be happening. The internet is a finite thing, with only so much available bandwidth in the cables that connect things; if an event is unexpectedly popular in LA, its going to struggle in LA even if its fine elsewhere. Think of it as the difference between a truck delivering 100 bottles of water vs. having to run a live water hose to 100 people at once, Fastly CEO Anil Dash wrote recently. One problem is about moving some bits from one place to another, the other problem is keeping a live stream running at high volume at a massive scale. When theres not enough water being supplied to all those hoses, everyone gets a little less.Stone agrees the hoses are the challenge. All of the streamers out there, she says, we all face it: how much bandwidth is there? And are we going to need bandwidth at the same moment that many other streamers need bandwidth? Its not like Netflix can dig trenches or run more cables along your phone lines certainly not by Christmas, anyway so all it can do is try to optimize the system as best it can.Since the Paul / Tyson fight, Stone says Netflix has been trying to both increase its capacity and control the flow of bandwidth more effectively. Weve augmented our Open Connect servers, and several of the ISPs have augmented the capacity theyre bringing to the table, she says. Theyre particularly focused on places that were overloaded during the fight, though she doesnt specify which places those are. Internally, the team is also working on optimizing the algorithms that decide how to prioritize traffic and bandwidth.There probably wont be as many people watching football on Christmas as there were for the fight. Its possible no Netflix live event will be that big ever again there arent many one-off cultural moments that command an audience like that. But Stone says shes glad to have seen the system so wildly overtaxed and stressed because now the team knows what happens. It would have taken us a lot longer to get those learnings if we were just slightly turning the dial from some of the earlier live events, she says. By throwing the lever all the way to the end, she thinks Netflix can now be ready for just about anything.Though, to be clear, even Stone wont go so far as to promise the football games will go perfectly. All shell say is she loves a challenge.Netflix is pulling out all the stops for its NFL games, from Beyonc to blimps. Photo by Aaron M. Sprecher / Getty ImagesEven if the Christmas games go well, the Netflix team doesnt get much of a break. On January 6th, it will stream the first episode in a new weekly series: WWE Raw, the flagship wrestling show. Netflix bought the shows rights for $5 billion and is responsible for streaming it for the next decade. In 2027 and 2031, Netflix will also stream the FIFA Womens World Cup. Both have big, built-in interest, and both drive big buzz around the world. Theyre also recurring programs, which will keep subscribers subscribed. That stuff matters to Netflix.Its also just simple math. All the most popular things on TV now are live events: sports, awards shows, that sort of thing. Those are the shows that command the highest viewership and the highest ad rates, and Netflix is now rapidly trying to build its own ad business. Thats why Amazon paid for NFL rights, why Peacock went all-in on the Olympics, and why even the price of the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade is going up. In an increasingly splintered entertainment landscape (which is, of course, partly Netflixs fault), must-see live TV is more valuable than ever.Riegg, who oversees all these content choices, is adamant that for Netflix, live and sports are not the same thing. He seems to be animated by the idea of bringing people together, of creating communal moments where everyone is watching and talking about the same thing at the same time. Netflix, of course, is maybe the company most responsible for ending that monoculture by making huge libraries of content available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. But Riegg thinks the platform should bring some of that classic live TV energy back. Remember the Felix Baumgartner Red Bull space jump? he asks me. I remember everybody in the office was watching that something where theres still the specter that anything can happen. Were all experiencing this at the same time.Netflix is interested in buying more of these events, Riegg says, but he also wants to create them. Which brings Riegg to his current big question: What is our version of Dancing with the Stars? Or what is our version of Americas Got Talent?The Voice, and everyone around the world could opine and weigh in about who should win? Thats a different level of community viewing.I mention to Riegg that I was a longtime, immensely dedicated American Idol fan, and his eyes go wide. Well never see another Idol, he says, in terms of the gap between Idol and the second-place show. But we can certainly try to say, whats the next iteration of that? Its pretty clear he and the team have some ideas, though Riegg wont tell me what they are. Well just all have to find out together, live.