Canada is joining the ranks of countries and states planning to ban sales of combustion engine cars. Canada has outlined an Emissions Reduction Plan that will require all new passenger car sales to be zero-emissions models by 2035. The government will gradually ramp up pressure on automakers, requiring “at least” 20 percent zero-emissions sales by 2026 and 60 percent by 2030.
Officials didn’t say whether this applied to a make’s product mix or simply the volume of cars sold. The strategy is more forgiving for the workplace — the Canadian government wanted 35 percent of total medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales to be zero-emissions by 2035, and 100 percent of a “subset” of those machines by 2040.
The country is also offering $1.7 billion CAD (about $1.36 billion US) to extend incentives for buying electric cars and other zero-emissions vehicles. The current federal program offers up to a $5,000 CAD ($4,010 US) rebate for EVs, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell cars that meet varying price, seat and battery requirements. Some provinces, such as British Columbia and Nova Scotia, offer their own incentives.
The broader plan is meant to reduce emissions to 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. This includes funds to support renewable energy projects, shrink oil industry emissions and develop “nature-based climate solutions.”
Canada’s car market is small compared to the US. Passenger vehicle sales in Canada reached 1.64 million in 2021, according to estimates, versus an estimated 15 million for the country’s southern neighbor. However, the de facto ban on combustion engine cars could further motivate car brands already transitioning to EVs — that’s still a lot of potentially lost sales, particularly for a country known for its auto manufacturing plants.
Way back in 2018 Intel announced plans to develop its own line of discrete GPUs back designed to compete with rival cards from AMD and NVIDIA. And despite several delays including missing its original 2020 launch window, this spring the first batch of Intel’s new Arc graphics cards are finally ready for use in retail devices, starting with Samsung’s Galaxy Book 2 Pro laptops.
As a quick recap, while Intel’s Arc line will eventually cover both laptops and desktops, the first batch of A-series GPUs are lower-power cards intended mainly for ultraportables and thin-and-light notebooks. The company’s graphics cards will use a naming scheme similar to its CPUs to help differentiate between various performance tiers, beginning with the new Arc A350M and A370M, before moving on to the more powerful Arc 5 and Arc 7 cards which are due out sometime later this summer.
Intel
Across the entire family of Arc GPUs, Intel’s graphics architecture is based on four main pillars: the company’s XE cores, XE Media Engine, XE Display Engine, and the XE Graphics Pipeline. All Arc cards will also have the same basic feature set including support for DirectX 12 Ultimate, ray tracing, XE Super Sampling, AV1 hardware acceleration and more.
The Arc’s XE cores are based on Intel’s XE HPG (High Performance Graphics) microarchitecture, with each core featuring 16 256-bit Vector Engines. 16 1,024-bit Matrix Engines and 192KB of shared memory. The XE Media Engine is designed to support popular video apps with hardware encoding at up to 8K 10-bit HDR and hardware acceleration for a number of popular standards (VP9, AVC, HEVC, AV1). Meanwhile, the XE Display Engine was built to handle video output for up to two 8K displays at 60Hz simultaneously, four 4K displays running at 120Hz, or a single 1440p screen at 360Hz.
Intel
As for the two new cards themselves, both the A350M and A370M are targeting 1080p gaming at 60fps to 90fps across a range of popular games. The A350M is designed to draw between 25 and 35 watts of power and will sport six XE cores, six ray tracing units, a graphics clock of 1,150 MHz (which Intel says is a conservative estimate of the card’s typical clock speed) and 4GB of GDDR6 vRAM. Alternatively, the A370M is designed for slightly larger laptops with a power draw of between 35 and 50 watts, eight XE cores, 8 ray tracing units, a graphics clock of 1,550 MHz, and the same 4GB of vRAM. And as you can see in the image above, the upcoming Arc 5 and Arc 7 cards will be significantly more powerful. But again, they won’t be out until sometime in early summer.
Intel
Also, alongside its new GPUs, Intel created a software suite called Arc Control similar to NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience and AMD’s Radeon Software, designed to allow users to more easily monitor performance, install drivers and updates, record game highlights and even connect to live streaming apps like Xsplit. And thanks to a UI that uses a streamlined overlay, Intel’s Arc Control should be easy to access in the middle of a battle.
Intel even says it’s working more with developers to provide faster and more responsive driver support for new titles, with featured games on the Arc cards including titles such as Elden Ring, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Dolmen and a whole lot more. And as one of the largest chip makers in the world, Intel also created its Deep Link tech which is designed to give its Arc cards an additional performance boost when working in tandem with Intel’s onboard integrated graphics.
Intel
So while we’re only getting two new Arc cards right now (and relatively low-power ones at that), today marks an important moment as Intel finally becomes the true third horse in the discrete graphics space. The first retail device to feature one of Intel’s A-series cards is Samsung’s Galaxy Book 2 Pro, which goes on sale next month. However, Intel promises that there will be a slew of even more laptops featuring Arc GPUs coming soon from big names including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, MSI, Lenovo and others.
WhatsApp is looking to make it easier for people to send and listen to voice messages with a swathe of new features, albeit fairly basic ones. Users will be able to pause and resume while recording a message and listen back to it before sending.You’ll …
Etsy said it would raise transaction fees from 5 percent to 6.5 percent this April, and sellers aren’t happy. The Vergereports over 5,000 Etsy sellers are planning to go on a week-long strike starting April 11th, the day the fee increase takes effect, in protest over both the hike and previous decisions. They’re also urging customers to boycott the site during that week.
The company has drawn flak multiple times in recent years for policies that have hiked costs or put increased demands on sellers. It started automatically enrolling some sellers in an advertising service in 2020, slapping them with varying fees while denying them a chance to opt out. Etsy also launched a Star Seller program in 2021 that gives badges to sellers who can promise fast shipping, quick turnaround times and high ratings, potentially punishing shops that produce custom goods or otherwise can’t realistically meet the criteria.
The strike and boycott might face some challenges. Etsy communications head Kelly Clausen claimed the higher fees would let the company “increase our investments” in marketing, support and policy enforcement to preserve the site as a “beloved, trusted and thriving marketplace.” Previously, CEO Josh Silverman justified the fees by referencing Etsy’s success to date, including a record high for sales per seller last year.
As protest organizer Kristi Cassidy noted, though, the strike is meant as the first step in creating a broader “solidarity support movement.” In other words, this is an effort to give creators a stronger, unified voice that helps them push back against Etsy policies they see as harmful. In that regard, it’s part of a larger movement to obtain more bargaining power from tech companies that previously held all the clout.
Last Summer, Spotify introduced Blend, a fun feature that allows you and a friend to compare your musical tastes. After inviting another Spotify user to take part, the platform generates a shared playlist that pulls songs from both your libraries. It also provides a match score and updates the playlist daily, allowing you to see how your tastes change over time.
One limitation of the feature was that you could only create a Blend playlist with a single friend or family member at a time. That’s now changing. Starting today, you can create a Blend playlist with up to 10 people, with Spotify taking into consideration all your disparate music tastes at the same time. Additionally, you can now also create Blend playlists with select artists, including BTS, Diplo, Mimi Webb and others. In that case, it’s partly a showcase of the artist’s latest music, but it’s still fun to see where you overlap.
As with Blend playlists you create with your friends, Spotify will generate a story you can share on Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms to show off how close you are two are on your favorite tunes. If you haven’t made a Blend playlist yet, you do so by typing “Blend” within the “Search” tab and then inviting the people you want to take part.
We may be nearly two years out from the launch of the PlayStation 5, but it’s still pretty difficult to get your hands on one. If you’ve been eyeing the Digital Edition, you have another chance to grab one today. Amazon will have more PS5 Digital Editions for purchase starting at 8am PT/11am ET today, while supplies last.
As the name suggests, the Digital Edition differs from the standard PlayStation 5 in that it doesn’t have a disc drive. But if you already get and store all of your games in the cloud, this shouldn’t be a big deal. Also, now that you’re able to expand the PS5’s storage with a compatible SSD, you may want to save the extra $100 you’d spend on the standard console and put that towards a high-capacity drive for your Digital Edition.
It’s unclear at this point if Amazon will also restock the regular PlayStation 5 along with the Digital Edition. We don’t expect Amazon’s stock to last long, so if you’ve been trying to get your hands on one of these consoles since they debuted, today’s drop is your next best bet.
LinkedIn is building more tools for its growing base of creators. A year after introducing a dedicated “creator mode” profile setting, the company is adding a suite of new analytics and video features meant to help creators boost their following on the…
Roli has been building unconventional musical instruments for nearly a decade now — the company’s first product, the rubber-keyed Seaboard piano was first revealed back in 2013. It was originally released as a full size, 88-key piano, but a few years later Roli unveiled the smaller and more affordable Seaboard Rise. But since then Roli has mostly focused on other pursuits. That changes today as the company has just announced the Seaboard Rise 2, a totally revamped version of the older keyboard that is up for pre-order today.
Probably the most significant change here is a new “Keywave 2” playing surface that has what Roli calls “precision frets.” To explain what’s different here, you first need to know how the Seaboard differs from a traditional piano keyboard. Instead of having totally distinct keys for each of the 12 chromatic tones, the Seaboard keys are designed so that you can slide between them seamlessly. Those keys were undoubtably the biggest differentiator between the Seaboard and a traditional keyboard, as they let users easily bend pitches, add vibrato and generally conjure up sounds that are trickery to pull off with normal keys.
That’s all well and good, but not having distinct keys made it challenging to hit a note right in tune, a pretty major concern when you’re trying to play the Seaboard in a more traditional fashion. Roli says that the newly designed keywaves (the term it uses for its version of traditional keys) have been tested to be more precise and intuitive, letting traditional keyboard players have an easier time picking up the instrument and translating their skills to it. Of course, it’s the kind of thing that people will need to test out in person to verify Roli’s claims, but it’s good to note that they’re taking this into account with the new model.
Beyond the new playing surface, the Seaboard Rise 2 has a redesigned aluminum chassis that comes in a “platinum blue” color scheme; from the pics, it looks like a classy dark gray. Either way, Roli says the new casing is more durable than before, something that touring musicians should appreciate. Unsurprisingly, the Seaboard Rise 2 includes USB-C and MIDI ports for connectivity.
Roli
Finally, the keyboard includes several different software suites. The company’s own Equator2 MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) suite, which costs $249 on its own, is bundled alongside the more basic Roli Studio. The “lite” version of Ableton Live is included as well.
The initial run of the Seaboard Rise 2 goes up for pre-order today, priced at $1,399. The Seaboard Rise 2 comes in a four-octave, 49-key version only. The original Seaboard Rise also had a more affordable 25-key model, but Roli says that the 49-key option was by far the more popular, so they’re only going with that one this time out. As for when it’ll be available, Roli says that batches of keyboards will ship in order of when they’re pre-ordered, and the first group will ship in October.
The Seaboard Rise 2 is also notable as its the first hardware product Roli is releasing since the company filed for administration in the UK, a process similar to filing for bankruptcy in the US. The company reorganized under the brand name Luminary Roli and said at the time it would focus on beginners rather than professional musicians. The launch of the Seaboard Rise 2, definitely a product focused on professionals or advanced music enthusiasts, seems to contradict that a bit. But, Roli still offers its light-up Lumi keyboard, which was originally released alongside software that helps teach users how to play the piano. The company also offers a more advanced model called the Lumi Studio. Regardless of the Seaboard Rise 2 not exactly being a tool for beginners, it’s probably a good sign for Roli’s future that it’s releasing its first new product since filing for administration.
Meta’s long-running fight against TikTok may have gotten dirty. The Washington Post has obtained emails it says reveal that Facebook’s parent company is paying the major political consulting firm Targeted Victory to run a smear campaign against TikTok. The initiative reportedly promoted dodgy local news stories, opinion pieces and letters to the editor blaming TikTok for harmful teen behavior, whether or not it was truly responsible.
The aim was to position TikTok as the “real threat” in the public eye, prompting politicians to crack down on the social media firm while simultaneously promoting Facebook’s worth. This included speculation TikTok might share data with China. The strategy was apparently effective — Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal wrote a letter in September 2021 asking TikTok executives to testify for a subcommittee for allegedly fostering a vandalism challenge whose rumors first circulated on Facebook.
We’ve asked Meta for comment. In a statement to The Post, company spokesperson Andy Stone justified the campaign by claiming that every platform should “face a level of scrutiny consistent with their growing success.” Targeted Victory didn’t address the anti-TikTok campaign, but said it was “proud” of serving Met for several years. TikTok, meanwhile, was “deeply concerned” about the promotion of local news reports that incorrectly blamed it for hurtful trends.
A campaign like this wouldn’t be completely surprising. Meta doggedly pursues rivals that could undermine its core businesses, to the point where it mimics key features. And TikTok is one of the biggest rivals — leaked documents from Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen showed that teens were spending up to “2-3X” more of their time on that social platform than Instagram. In theory, trashing TikTok’s reputation would not only steer some of those users toward Meta’s products, but limit its ability to compete in the first place.
