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The UK Treasury and Bank of England are setting up a "Central Bank Digital Currency" taskforce to investigate creating a digital pound. The rise of cryptocurrency has seen governments around the world take a serious look at how a completely digital financial system may look. The so-called "BritCoin" would mean that individuals and businesses would be able to hold currency directly with the... [Read the rest here]

NVIDIA unveiled the new line of 3000 series RTX graphics cards yesterday, but the biggest surprise was the huge leap in performance and a reduction in price. The RTX 3070 costs £479, but claims to match the hugely expensive 2080 RTX in performance. The pressure from AMD and the next generation of consoles has put considerable pressure on NVIDIA, so the pricing on the RTX 3070 is likely to... [Read the rest here]

We may have our first "in the wild" glimpse of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 performance, as it has shown up in a benchmark on the popular UserBenchmark website. The benchmark has since been removed, but not before some quick-thinking twitter users spotted the result. Here's the full screenshot, thanks to _rogame on twitter: The graphics card was listed as a NVIDIA (10DE 1467) and shows... [Read the rest here]

If you were to think about the state of computing in the late 1960's, you'd likely think about punch cards, basic text-only displays and unintuitive button interfaces. However, a conference by Doug Engelbert in December 1968 shows a live demonstration of the "oN-Line System" (NLS), which shows so many features that are comparable to modern day computing. The demonstration included a live video... [Read the rest here]

Conspiracy theories posted on Facebook and other social media are blaming 5G masts for the spread of Coronavirus, even going as far to blame the rollout of 5th Generation wireless data technology as causing the symptoms of the virus and killing people. Several 5G masts (in Birmingham, Liverpool and Melling) have already been set alight, with further incidents at undisclosed locations. This... [Read the rest here]

The European Commission has proposed introducing new laws which will improve the "right to repair" of electronics devices. So many laptops, mobile phones and other devices are difficult to repair and are simply thrown away when a single module or component breaks. The premise of the new laws would be to tackle the disposable and "premature obsolescence" culture of electronics goods, and... [Read the rest here]

The UK Met Office is set to upgrade their current forecasting supercomputer to one that is 6x more powerful (with a further 3x upgrade after 5 years). The total cost for the new system is £1.2 billion, which includes operating costs over the 10 year lifespan. The upgrade in performance will allow weather forecasting resolution down to 100m², a huge improvement on the 1500m² grid (outside... [Read the rest here]

The Wi-Fi Alliance is introducing a new Wi-Fi 6E standard, which designates devices as cable of using the 6Ghz band as well as features of the similarly named Wi-Fi 6 standard (namely higher performance and lower latency). Existing 2.4Ghz and 5 Ghz channels are becoming saturated with the rapid increase in connected devices, so any additional space on the spectrum is to be welcomed. This will... [Read the rest here]

The Half Life series has been one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time, however the story ended abruptly nearly 12 years ago with Half Life 2: Episide 2. Fans have been clamouring for Half Life 3 for years, with an endless supply of memes, false starts and April fools jokes about the game. However, there is finally some good news... Valve have announced Half Life: Alyx, one of... [Read the rest here]

Microsoft have been working on Flight Simulator 2020 for quite some time, having previewed the game at E3 a little earlier this year. This upcoming release has been long awaited by flight sim fans, as the previous edition of the game is coming up to 8 years old and is starting to look a little long in the tooth. Huge generational changes have been made in Flight Simulator 2020, including... [Read the rest here]