PagerDuty, a cloud computing company specializing in a SaaS incident response platform for IT departments, is joining the depressingly long list of tech firms laying off staff in these times of economic turmoil. Around 7% of its global workforce are losing their jobs, most of them based in the US. There’s no easy way to inform staff that they no longer have a job, but the layoff announcement email from PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada is generating a lot of heat for its tone—and other elements....

Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave, and other browsers powered by the open-source Chromium give users a list of default search engines that can be used as their preferred choice when browsing the web. It had been possible to delete or add more, but it now seems the former option has been dropped. Click to enlarge Ghacks reports that the change was initially noticed by a Reddit user who discovered it in Microsoft Edge....

The Phenom II X3 720 delivers roughly the same result with an average of 161fps, making it slightly faster than the Core i5 650. The Core i3 540 matches the Athlon II X4 635 at 1920x1200, making both processors just a single frame faster than the Core 2 Quad Q9500. Surprisingly the Phenom II X2 555 beats not only the Core 2 Duo E8500 but also the Core 2 Quad Q8400....

For SSD caching to make sense, it must improve performance without breaking the bank and this is why the RevoDrive Hybrid completely missed the point. The Adrenaline showed overall positive results, but it’s important to understand what will be sped up and under what conditions, so let’s quickly summarize the performance as we saw it. For copying, compressing or extracting files SSD cache technology isn’t nearly as effective as a standalone SSD....

The Crucial MX200 1TB was rather slow in our single large file copy test, sustaining just 247MB/s or 16% slower than the MX100. The BX100 fared no better as it was another 8% slower than the MX200. Both new Crucial SSDs offered below average performance – a disappointing find. Both the Crucial MX200 and BX100 provided a throughput of just over 200MB/s, which isn’t that much slower than the highest performing SATA SSDs, However, both were still around 10% slower than the MX100, which is obviously quite disappointing....

With the v4 series being limited to SATA 3Gb/s, read throughput maxes out at just 230MB/s while write performance peaks at 190MB/s for the 256GB model. The 128GB version is slightly slower at 175MB/s, while the 64GB version sustains just 100MB/s and the 32GB model 60MB/s. This is the kind of performance that we saw from the Crucial M225 series back in 2009, which has led many to believe that Crucial’s parent company Micron Technology is using the v4 series to clear inventory of unused 25nm MLC NAND flash chips....

Today’s satellite infrastructure supports communications, internet traffic, and GPS-based systems relied upon by millions around the world. This ever-growing reliance makes it a prime target for cyber criminals looking to cause social, economic, or even physical chaos. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recently discovered Fancy Bear, a hacking group with suspected links to the Russian government, stalking a US satellite communications provider. The discovery was made following reports of suspicious behavior within the identified networks....

Most of the trailers below are newly released with most of the games due later in 2017 or 2018, with a few launched in the last week or so – all of them are on PC. The list is in alphabetical order, which won’t make it easy to find new videos as we add them, so use the links below for easier navigation. Did we miss a great trailer? Let us know....

A US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing shows Musk made his offer in a letter to Twitter board chairman Bret Taylor. He wrote that since becoming Twitter’s largest shareholder, Musk has realized “the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form. Twitter needs to be transformed as a private company.” Musk added that the reason behind his initial investment was a belief in Twitter’s “potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy....

When EVGA rolled out its virtual queue system almost two years ago, only the RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards had been released, but grabbing one usually required a lot of money and even more luck. EVGA’s system levels the playing field a little by letting users select an Ampere card and hitting the Auto-Notify button. Once a card is in stock, and you’re next in the virtual queue, a secure email is sent out with a link allowing you to buy the item—as long as it’s purchased within 24 hours....

Average frame rates are up by 23 percent, but crucially 1% lows have improved by 38 percent. The performance doesn’t match a proper GTX 1080 gaming system here, though we are getting 1070 Max-Q like framerates. We haven’t tested a lot with Batman Arkham Knight but it’s back for this round of testing. The old eGPU setup couldn’t run the game at maximum detail levels, however we are now seeing those 1% lows fall above 30 FPS....

Not much needs to be said here. Even the best Intel integrated solutions deliver subpar gaming performance while Bay Trail-D should be dismissed.

So should you spend less on a streaming stick, or splurge on a fully-capable box? Here’s a quick-and-dirty guide. Size and Connections The streaming sticks are obviously smaller and they plug directly into your TV’s HDMI port. They are also capable of drawing power from an available USB port. The boxes all offer extra ports, including an Ethernet port which could be important if you don’t have great Wi-Fi....

Corsair is one of the most popular makers of PC hardware, from its memory modules and SSDs to excellent cases. Gaming laptops was one area it had never ventured before, but that changes with the new Corsair Voyager a1600 AMD Advantage Edition. Corsair created the laptop alongside AMD and the AMD Advantage program, which means it’ll be packing “the latest Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics, enabled with the entire family of Smart technologies,” so we can expect to see SmartAccess Storage once Microsoft’s DirectStorage API arrives....

Tesla previously said its RDNA 2-powered infotainment system in the Model S and Model X could deliver 10 TFLOPs of power that puts it on par with the latest consoles. Owners can already play games such as Cuphead on their 17-inch 2,200 × 1,300 displays via Tesla Arcade, and last year’s press images suggested The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 would eventually be available. When asked back in February when the games would land, Musk revealed Tesla was working on Steam integration....

Forza Horizon 4 is an open world racing video game developed by Playground Games and published by Microsoft Studios. The game features over 450 licensed cars and is set in a fictionalised representation of the United Kingdom. As the name suggests it’s the fourth Forza Horizon title, but also the eleventh installment in the Forza series. Two years ago we skipped over testing Forza Horizon 3 due to terrible performance on PC, and that wasn’t a suitable condition for testing....

In other words we are faced with the same dilemma that bedeviled the GeForce GT 220: Nvidia’s latest card uses very little power, but when compared to the performance it delivers, efficiency is not all that great. Despite its low power footprint the GeForce GT 240 runs just as hot as your typical graphics card. It was quite cool when sitting idle at the desktop, but under load the card was comparable to other 40nm products such as the Radeon HD 4770 and 5770....

In Watch Dogs, the overclocked GTX 970 SLI cards averaged an impressive 58fps at 3840x2160, or 16% faster than the overclocked R9 290s. Without any overclocking, the GTX 970s were 14% faster than the R9 290s and 79% faster than a single GTX 970. The frame time performance reflected the frame rate data for both the SLI and Crossfire graphics cards.

Its quad-core Intel Core i7 860 processor has plenty of power to spare, even for the most demanding of tasks, and you will likely never run low on memory with the included 16GB of RAM. The Seagate 1.5 TB 7200 RPM hard drive is speedy enough for a spinning drive and offers gobs of storage for all of your digital media. There is no choice for adding an SSD since Gateway won’t let you configure the system online, which is a real shame....