PC Magazine June 2020

Summer is almost here, and we know what that means: Time to start thinking about taking some of those hard-earned days off, getting out into the beautiful weather, and hitting the open road… Oh, wait. Not this year. We had originally planned to fill the June issue of the PCMag Digital Edition with stories about travel technology—everything from how to plan your trip to the right gadgets to bring along. But even though parts of our country and the world are starting to relax restrictions on travel (and being outdoors, for that matter) imposed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of us are not going anywhere for a while. So it made sense for us to change direction—toward home. Specifically, working at home, which is swiftly becoming part of the new normal.…

EMBEDDING YOUTUBE VIDEOS I just read your article, “How to Download YouTube Videos,” which you recently posted online. Your article is extremely informative and has prompted me to write to you with a specific question, if you don’t mind answering? Presently, I am developing a free Android family app, and I intend to embed various YouTube videos using Google’s YouTube API in the application. Typical videos would include “The Tale of the Lonesome Pie” and “Operation Mincemeat,” for example. I am aware of Google’s terms of service for downloading YouTube videos, but I would like to know how they would apply for Android applications. The answers that I have received from various technical Android groups are all over the map, and I must admit this issue is giving me a bit of a…

The coronavirus and the ensuing need to work from home is creating skyrocketing demand for PCs, according to research firms. Canalys attributes the surge to businesses upgrading their workforces with new laptops and IT equipment. At the same time, parents have been shopping for new PCs so their kids can attend classes online. “The PC industry has been boosted by the global COVID-19 lockdown, with products flying off the shelves throughout Q1,” says Canalys Research Director Rushabh Doshi. Other products in demand include webcams, monitors, printers, and headphones. Research firm IDC is also seeing a spike in laptop sales in Europe. “This has led to many retailers and distributors in Western Europe running out of stock,” IDC analyst Malini Paul writes in a research note. Laptop vendors are struggling to capitalize on…

In April, Intel announced the launch of its new set of mainstream-focused desktop processors, the 10th Generation “Comet Lake-S” chips, which are set to go head-to-head with AMD’s similarly positioned “Zen 2” line of Ryzen CPUs. This announcement from Intel is familiar and predictable, lacking the revolutionary flair that came with the launch of Zen 2 last year and leaving AMD in a prime position to expand its footprint in the desktop-CPU market. On the surface, the launch of Comet Lake-S may have the appearance of keeping Intel competitive with the performance hounds out there (gamers and creators alike). But once you start to scratch through the PR crust, the core (no pun intended) of what’s on offer here may not be as substantial as the chip giant would have you…

How Nvidia’s Ampere architecture will improve the company’s gaming graphics cards remains a mystery. But in May, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up how the technology will supercharge the company’s enterprise GPUs. The Ampere architecture will first end up in the A100, a graphics card designed for data analytics and scientific computing. According to Nvidia, the A100 will offer a 20-times performance boost when running AI-powered applications compared with the company’s V100 GPU from three years ago. The new card itself contains 54.2 billion transistors, 6,912 CUDA Cores, and 40GB of memory, which can produce a memory bandwidth of 1.6 TB per second, which Huang said is an industry first. The company was able to do this with the help of TSMC’s seven-nanometer manufacturing technology, which can pack more transistors on the…

The coronavirus outbreak has affected millions of Americans. Most of us are stuck at home; others are on the front lines pushing back against the outbreak. It’s a time of enormous uncertainty, and it’s only helping the bad guys that our politicians are putting out contradictory, confusing, and sometimes misleading information. FEAR, UNCERTAINTY, AND DOUBT In security circles, fear, uncertainty, and doubt—a.k.a. FUD—is often used by unscrupulous companies. A company is spreading FUD when it makes urgent claims there are boogeymen around every corner and its product is the only thing that can save you. The boogeymen are often exaggerated and sometimes completely imaginary. FUD doesn’t even need to be particularly convincing; it just needs to create doubt in otherwise evident truths. In that context, FUD distorts reality to sell you a…