Technology

  ZIP files have been a handy way to compress information for easier transport and storage for decades. But the realities of 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppy longevity made relying on multi-disk zip archives a gamble when it came to long-term data preservation. For years, we’ve known it was possible to …

  AMD’s Ryzen 7 3000 family dropped earlier this week, delivering a body blow to Intel’s entire high-end product stack. The Ryzen 9 3900X destroys the Core i9-9900K’s performance at $500, while the $329 Ryzen 7 3700X is narrowly faster than the 9900K in most workloads, at 66 percent the …

  At Semicon West 2019, a panel of industry experts kicked off a debate on whether Moore’s Law — the great prediction given to us by Gordon Moore, which declared that the number of components per integrated circuit would regularly double over a predictable period of time (originally 12 months, …

  Adata’s XPG SX6000 Pro SSDs were designed to offer exceptional performance at an exceedingly low price point. As these SSDs are built as budget-oriented products, they aren’t able to compete with the fastest NVMe SSDs on the market in terms of performance. But their substantially lower price may make …

  Samsung has been making tablets almost as long as Apple, but while the iPad has maintained its popularity, Android-based slates have declined. Google might be giving up on making tablets, but Samsung is keeping at it with a rumored high-end Galaxy Tab S6. This device will allegedly be the …

  The proliferation of smart speakers has made it easier to listen to tunes and control smart home devices, but they also raise some potential privacy concerns. After all, these are internet-connected microphones capable of listening to your conversations from a great distance. Amazon has been under fire for how …

  Several years ago, Microsoft changed how it delivered security patches to its older operating systems like Windows 7, 8.1, and Windows Server 2012. Under the rules for its “Security-only updates,” Microsoft only includes, well, security updates for these products when it releases its monthly patches. This week, Microsoft released …

  The cold war between Amazon and Google began to thaw last year, but the icy relationship between the companies has been a nuisance for far too long already. When relations were at their worst, Amazon didn’t support or sell Chromecasts, and Google blocked YouTube on Amazon devices. Now, Google …

  Because the pre-launch run-up for AMD’s Ryzen 7 3000 family was… hectic, to say the least, a lot of nooks and corners had to be left unchecked, just to get the Navi and Ryzen reviews done on time. There was also a bit of difficulty in making sure that …

  You’d never expect a sub-$100 phone to be as fast as a flagship device like the Pixel 3 or Galaxy S10, but they can still be unreasonably slow sometimes. The bargain-priced Qualcomm Snapdragon 200-series chips have offered bare minimum performance in the past, but the company’s new Snapdragon 215 …