FSP introduced its Dagger family of SFX PSUs for gaming systems at Computex 2016, about nine months ago. However, sometimes it takes…
FSP introduced its Dagger family of SFX PSUs for gaming systems at Computex 2016, about nine months ago. However, sometimes it takes several quarters for products to reach the market after their formal announcement because makers finalize certain details. This week, the company announced pricing of its SFX PSUs, an indicator that they are going to hit the market shortly.
As reported, the FSP Dagger lineup consists of two models rated for 500 W and 600 W maximum load. Both PSUs are compliant with the SFX12V V3.3 and ATX12V V2.4 specs as well as carry the 80 Plus Gold certification. The Dagger power supplies have modular design and come with EPS12V power connectors (one 24-pin and a 4+4-pin connector), two PCIe 8-pin (6+2) power connectors to support all existing graphics cards as well as the upcoming GPUS, as well as five SATA power plugs. For cooling, both PSUs are equipped with an 80 mm dual ball bearing fan.
FSP will offer the Dagger 500 W for $99, whereas the Dagger 600 W will retail for $109. MSRP of FSP’s 500 W SFX PSU is in line with prices of competing devices of the same wattage, whereas the 600 W is slightly cheaper than the rivals are.
It is noteworthy that over the past several quarters, three PSU manufacturers have announced their SFX PSUs for miniature gaming systems. Enermax, FSP and Thermaltake are joining the club, which originally only had Corsair and SilverStone a year ago. This is not exactly surprising, as miniature gaming PCs are getting more popular. Virtually all makers of high-performance computers offer small-form-factor gaming systems, and there are a number of newcomers that exclusively build only SFF gaming machines. While initiatives like Valve’s Steam Machine has helped bring some systems to market, others like Corsair’s Bulldog and One aim to bring a gaming PC into to the living room. Obviously the DIY market follows the industrial trend and demand for various components for mini PCs is on the rise, which is why five makers now offer SFX PSUs.
Most vendors stagger their PSU launches based on region, and we expect FSP to do this as well.
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CNET’s Terry Collins prevails over Bing’s prediction tool to (kinda) claim major bracketology braggadicio.
I beat Bing Predicts!
Yep, no mistype here. I beat Microsoft’s forecasting engine in a bracket battle over this year’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament. OK. I barely beat Bing. But I still won.
Out of 65 games, I won 40 compared to Bing’s 38. Of course, we shared some defeats. Both of our picks to win the national title fizzled out.
Still, I held out hope thinking I had a chance. I can shout out my victory over Bing from my patio and when I do I can hear the fight song of Iowa, my alma mater.
«I’ll admit, you did well,» said Walter Sun, a Bing Predicts data scientist, after tallying up the totals on Thursday. «You beat us with your picks. »
After its bracket lost to CNET’s Terry Collins, Bing Predicts now thinks Sindarius Thornwell and the South Carolina Gamecocks will win the 2017 NCAA men’s basketball title.
Look, there isn’t an exact science to all of this. Sure there’s some skill involved. But mostly, we’re relying on luck when we fill out our (sometimes multiple) brackets. And it doesn’t matter because it’s March Madness and the NCAA hoops tourney is one of the biggest sporting events in the US.
We’ll watch it any way we can. Prior to Saturday’s Final Four matchup, basketball nuts had watched a record-setting 88 million live streams of tournament games compared to 67 million at this time a year ago. That’s a 31 percent increase.
«I guess this means fans want to watch their favorite teams and see how their brackets are doing, no matter where they’re at,» Mio Babic, founder of iStreamPlanet, the live-streaming arm for Turner Sports, told me. iStreamPlanet is streaming all 67 tournament games on 15 platforms.
If you have a winning bracket, you get bragging rights for a year. That gives me 52 weeks to enjoy besting a machine run by a software giant. Neither of us, however, will get the big prize — picking the champion —because neither Bing nor I have a team in Saturday’s Final Four matchups. No Gonzaga, South Carolina, North Carolina or Oregon.
In case you’re interested, Bing picked last year’s champion, Villanova , giving it a 74 percent chance to repeat. I settled on Duke to win its second title in three seasons. ( Vegas had Duke as a 5-to-1 favorite to win, compared to 8-to-1 for Villanova.)
Here’s what our brackets look like:
This is Bing’s NCAA tourney bracket.
This is the top of my bracket. Click on the image to view the full bracket on Bing’s site.
I worked my longstanding theory of brackets being won or busted in the first two days. A handful of upset wins, such as Michigan State and Wichita State on Day 2, helped me.
Bing’s Sun was quick to remind me that I didn’t take South Carolina , the Cinderella team of this year. The Gamecocks beat Duke in the second round.
Guess what, though? Bing picked that game wrong, too.
«I think the main takeaway is our original brackets weren’t that great,» said Sun as we reached agreement.
Despite our brackets taking a beatdown, Sun said Bing is faring quite well in ESPN’s Tournament Challenge Second Chance , where fans can take another whack at picking a winner filling out a bracket from the Sweet 16 teams.
Bing has a perfect bracket entering the Final Four among a field of nearly 3 million brackets competing.
And instead of the Redmond, Washington-based company staying close to home by picking Spokane’s Gonzaga to win on Monday night, Bing is going with the underdog South Carolina.
«We think South Carolina has a viable chance,» Sun said.
Ah, so that’s it. Bing is going from predicting the overwhelming favorite in its original bracket to picking the least likeliest team to win the title.
I’ll be curious to see what Sun says next week about Bing’s latest pick.
Meanwhile, I’ll savor my victory.

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The tech titan has big hopes for its new digital helper. Will it get shouted down by Google, Apple and Amazon?
OK Google, meet Bixby. Alexa, meet Bixby. Hey Siri — never mind, you all get the point.
So if Samsung’s Bixby is kind of the same but not as comprehensive or bug-free as Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa, why is Samsung even bothering with a me-too voice butler?
I posed this question to three industry experts who all gave the same answer: differentiation. Living in the competitive world of Android devices, Samsung needs to find more ways to maintain customer loyalty. Bixby is clearly a basic product for now; Samsung didn’t even let Bixby talk onstage during its S8 launch presentation Wednesday in Manhattan. Still, the experts said, the assistant could mature into an important part of Samsung’s competitive edge.
Bixby also gives Samsung one of its best chances at grabbing a huge chunk of the smart-home market. The tech conglomerate is talking up the idea of adding its homegrown assistant and connecting software into more of its products , such as TVs, washing machines and refrigerators.
«Bixby is a vision, a promise for the future, but a promise for which Samsung has yet to deliver,» said Gartner analyst Werner Goertz.
That Samsung felt it needed to introduce a new voice assistant, following the launch of its unpopular S Voice software in 2012, shows how hypercompetitive the voice market has become. Since Apple introduced Siri to the world five years ago, there are now four leading consumer voice helpers: Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana. All are vying to become the new operating systems for smart homes, voice shopping or connected cars.
Samsung has to stick with the voice game — despite being late to the party with Bixby — because voice is becoming a key way we interact with all of our devices.
«They are late, but it’s still early in the voice-assistant marketplace,» said Tim Bajarin, president of tech consulting firm Creative Strategies.
For its part, Samsung says it isn’t offering Bixby as another all-seeing, all-knowing voice assistant that can answer any question you can think to ask. Instead, it’s a way for us to control its Galaxy S8. But even by those standards, Bixby doesn’t appear to do much yet.
Samsung faces obvious challenges.
For starters, Bixby has to share the phone’s real estate with Android’s standard voice helper, Google Assistant. There’s a real risk Samsung will just end up confusing customers by providing two built-in voice butlers. («Sooo, when do I use Bixby and when should I wake up Google Assistant? «) And if Bixby starts off buggy, there’s a good chance people will just stop using it. So much for the great new way to control our devices.
Confusion is especially likely if folks don’t understand Bixby’s three separate skill sets and what they’re used for: Bixby Voice (a personal assistant to operate the phone), Bixby Home (informative flashcards) and Bixby Vision (a layer of image recognition added to the camera).
«In the end, they’ll naturally gravitate to what’s working best and the other thing gets forgotten,» IBB Consulting senior partner Jefferson Wang said of S8 users.
Also, the voice market has matured a lot in just the past two years since Alexa came out. Consumers already expect plenty from these digital assistants, so Bixby will have to deliver, or become a really fast learner. Granted, Alexa still struggles to understand users at time, and Siri often produces the wrong responses.
But Bixby could help Samsung create a more tightly knit ecosystem, allowing the company to better compete against its main rival, Apple, which prides itself on making devices that all work well together.
Beyond that, Goertz suggested that platforms like Bixby, artificial intelligence and connected devices could enable Samsung to get its disparate business units — from appliances to semiconductors — working more closely together and therefore making better products. That may be putting too much on Bixby’s shoulders.
Samsung’s sales pitch will be critical. Apple may have oversold Siri’s capabilities as a chatty friend in its early commercials with Samuel L. Jackson and Zooey Deschanel. Amazon, in contrast, launched Alexa with hardly any fanfare and just a smattering of voice commands ( it now has over 10,000 ).
If Samsung can figure out a way to present Bixby in the right light — perhaps somewhere between Apple’s strategy and Amazon’s — Bixby could find its happy place in the voice market.
«For Samsung, it will all boil down to messaging,» Goertz said. «If they position Bixby as a direct competitor to Alexa, it will be showing Bixby as inferior. «

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Scarlett Johansson’s new film blurs the line between humanity and technology, and the effects are a dazzling combination of live action with cutting edge CGI.
The new trailer for the upcoming live-action version of the classic anime.
Sequences like the water-filled courtyard fight or climactic Spider Tank familiar to fans of the anime are recreated with complex layers of digital character animation, computer-generated environments and simulations of explosions, gunfire damage and destruction added to greenscreened live action footage.
Recreating the stunning courtyard fight sequence in all its water-y glory meant building a completely computer-generated environment and water effects blended with real stunt footage. The scene was further complicated by adding the invisibility effect of the «thermoptic camouflage» suit worn by Johansson’s character.
Scarlett Johansson films a live action fight scene in front of a giant greenscreen, to which a futuristic cityscape will be added in post-production.
We show how the new movie’s special effects team recreate and reinterpret the legendary anime’s iconic «shelling» sequence with a physical cyborg skeleton.
MPC was also involved in conjuring the movie’s futuristic city. The visual effects team created a library of futuristic buildings and highways teeming with simulated crowds and vehicles. Amongst the towering skyscrapers are giant advertising holograms, dubbed ‘Solograms’. MPC made some 372 Solograms and other holograms to fill the city.
To create these holograms — or photoreal volumetric displays, to give them their proper name — the filmmakers filmed actors with a custom-made rig of some 80 high definition cameras, each running at 24 frames per second. MPC then developed new software and tools to reconstruct, process and manipulate the huge amount of 3D data generated.
A special camera rig was also used for a scene in which the Major’s virtual self explores a rival robot’s memory. 150 DSLRs captured the actors frozen mid-movement so they could be recreated digitally.
«Ghost in the Shell» in theatres now.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/ghost-in-the-shell-scarlett-johansson-special-effects-gallery/
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