The first few hours of Mass Effect: Andromeda are... well they aren't good I had, by purpose or distraction, not found out anything about Mass Effect Andromeda [official site] before playing its review build, beyond that it was set in a whole new galaxy. Ooh goody, I thought! A sci-fi RPG series I completely loved, but with a fresh start, baggage shed, and the extraordinary potential of a setting in a galaxy entirely unlike our own. Rock Paper Shotgun (Editor's note: Andromeda's PC performance results should be published on TechSpot tomorrow)

Where minimum-FPS figures mislead, frame-time analysis shines In the wake of AMD's Ryzen launch, I've been reading a lot of comments around the web about the inclusion or usefulness of the "minimum frame rate" in many reviewers' results. Readers seem to think folks who report a minimum frame rate alongside an average are providing a more complete picture of gaming performance from these new CPUs. That may be true in a way, but the picture is still about as shallow as reporting a frames-per-second average on its own. The Tech Report

HiSilicon Kirin 960: A closer look at performance and power HiSilicon's Kirin 950 proved to be a breakout product for the Huawei subsidiary, ultimately finding a home in many of Huawei's flagship phones, including the Mate 8, P9, P9 Plus, and Honor 8. Its big.LITTLE combination of four A72 and four A53 CPU cores manufactured on TSMC's 16nm FF+ FinFET process delivered excellent performance and efficiency. Somewhat surprisingly, it turned out to be one of the best, if not the best, implementation of ARM's IP we've seen. AnandTech

Benchmarks of many ARM Boards from the Raspberry Pi to Nvidia Jetson TX2 For some weekend benchmarking fun, I compared the Jetson TX2 that NVIDIA released this weekend with their ARM 64-bit "Denver 2" CPU cores paired with four Cortex-A57 cores to various other ARM single board computers I have access to. This is looking at the CPU performance in different benchmarks ranging from cheap ~$10 ARM SBCs to the Raspberry Pi to the Jetson TX1 and Jetson TX2. Phoronix

Wi-fi on rays of light---100 times faster, and never overloaded Slow wi-fi is a source of irritation that nearly everyone experiences. Wireless devices in the home consume ever more data, and it's only growing, and congesting the wi-fi network. Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology have come up with a surprising solution: a wireless network based on harmless infrared rays. The capacity is not only huge (more than 40Gbit/s per ray) but also there is no need to share since every device gets its own ray of light. Phys.org

Breath of the Wild is a Zelda game for the Minecraft generation Do you remember your first adventures in Minecraft? I do. I was mostly confused. For much of its history, Minecraft hasn't done much to help you understand how to play it, how to craft things, what these crafted things do, and why you'd want them. It doesn't tell you about the alternate dimensions that you can visit, or about how you get to them. It doesn't tell you why should should play or what you're aiming for. Eurogamer

The million dollar engineering problem For an early startup, using the cloud isn't even a question these days. No RFPs, provisioning orders, or physical shipments of servers. Just the promise of getting up and running on "infinitely scalable" compute power within minutes. But, the ability to provision thousands of dollars worth of infrastructure with a single API call comes with a very large hidden cost. And it's something you won't find on any pricing page. Segment

Google Glass didn't disappear. You can find it on the factory floor Remember Google Glass? They're the headsets that look like regular glasses but have a small computer on the side to speak to and access the Internet. If that's not ringing a bell, it could be because Google Glass fizzled out and was discontinued in the consumer market. NPR

What are some things you wish you knew when you started programming? I wish I knew a ton stuff, but 27 things come to mind. 1. You learn by doing. The only way to get better at programming is to actually program. Don't let an analysis paralysis prevent you from ever starting. 2. Programming isn't like studying for a test. Memorizing stuff doesn't matter all that much. 3. Cheating is completely acceptable. I use Google to solve most of my problems, and so do most programmers. Quora

Programs that have saved me 100+ hours by automating repetitive tasks Along the year I've been working on several web platforms where repetitive tasks are usually the norm. From batch optimizing a thousand images, to changing from this obscure format to csv or json. What if you need to critically update a file in your client's and you aren't fancy enough to use some kind of continuous integration tool I'll give you some tips and tricks to be productive. Sada Caraveo

Building a Hackintosh Pro If Apple made a mini tower that was upgradable and could take a full sized graphics card (or two), I'd have purchased it in a heartbeat. However, they don't. There's no doubt that Apple has a refresh for the desktop market in the works, I just don't know if it's going to be enough to satisfy the creative market who seem to be slowing migrating to Windows. Dan Counsell

Starbreeze Publishing signs OtherSide Entertainment's System Shock 3 Starbreeze AB, an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products, has signed a publishing agreement with Otherside Entertainment regarding the game System Shock 3. Starbreeze will invest $12 million to bring the game to PC and other platforms. OtherSide

Sales soar and Raspberry Pi beats Commodore 64 Recent Raspberry Pi sales figures show that the humble board is, in fact, the world's third best-selling general purpose computer. Raspberry Pi achieved this milestone by selling north of 12.5 million boards in five years. This figure beats the previous third place holder, the Commodore 64. Raspberry Pi

How Spotify is finally gaining leverage over record labels The problem with Spotify going public has always been that the record labels own the music. They force Spotify to pay 70 percent or more of its revenue to them for royalties, and could jack up that price if Spotify got too profitable. Tech Crunch