If you’re keen to game on the move but also dealing with a tight budget, you’re in luck. Right now, you can buy the Asus TUF F16 Gaming Laptop at Amazon for $999.99 (was $1.199.99). That’s a pretty sweet deal for a gaming laptop which has an RTX 4050 GPU — ideal for 1080p gaming.

The Asus TUF F16 Gaming Laptop is a limited-time deal, so you’ll likely need to move fast. It offers a reasonable set of specs for the price, with a 16-inch full HD+ display with a 144Hz refresh rate working well alongside the budget-friendly RTX 4050 GPU. It also has 512GB of SSD storage, 16GB RAM, and an Intel Core i7-13620H CPU. The laptop looks pretty stylish, too, without completely succumbing to an excessive gamer aesthetic.

Today’s best budget gaming laptop deal

We haven’t reviewed this particular model, but we have reviewed a similar Asus TUF A16 Gaming Laptop, which was awarded a strong four out of five stars. It doesn’t quite compete with the very best gaming laptops, but it’s excellent value for money.

It has a good mixture of hardware that complements each component well. It looks pretty sleek yet stylish without being too in your face. It also has military-grade durability, so it can handle a more physical life if needed (but please don’t throw your laptop).

Little details like a backlit keyboard, HDMI port, Thunderbolt port, and plenty of USB ports all add up nicely as well. If you want one of the best laptops around, but also be able to game, this is worth checking out if you’re on a budget and can’t go all out with your purchase.

If you’re interested in seeing what else is out there, there are other cheap gaming laptop deals around. If you want a regular laptop, there are also some strong laptop deals to look through.

BearingPoint’s Shruti Goyal talks about zero-copy architecture and why it’s ultimately a game-changer for data teams.

The world of data architecture, according to Shruti Goyal, has been defined by one process for the last decade: extract, transform and load (ETL).

ETL is a three-phase computing process where data is extracted from transactional systems or real-time source systems, transformed (meaning cleaned, enriched and standardised) into an analytical format, and loaded (or stored) into a data hub or warehouse for reporting and analytics.

“In practice, this meant building complex pipelines using tools like SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), Azure Data Factory (ADF) and Microsoft Data Pipelines,” explains Goyal, who is manager of data analytics and AI at BearingPoint.

“ETL ensures data is reliable, consistent, and ready for analysis and decision-making.”

However, Goyal believes that after a decade of data dominance, ETL may be on its way out due to the rise of zero-copy architecture – an approach “where data is used where it already lives, without physically copying it into downstream systems”.

“Data is no longer physically moved – instead, access to it is,” she says.

What is zero-copy?

As Goyal explains to SiliconRepublic.com, zero-copy architecture allows users to query, share and access data directly at the source, as opposed to ETL’s transitory process.

Zero-copy enables this by using metadata, permissions and query pushdown “without duplicating the underlying data”.

Goyal says the catalyst for this change is analytics platform Microsoft Fabric, specifically its OneLake storage platform.

“Fabric introduces a unified logical data core that renders traditional data duplication obsolete,” she explains. “The two critical mechanisms are Mirroring, which keeps source systems reflected in near real-time, and Shortcuts, which allow entire multiterabyte databases to be surfaced into an analytics environment in seconds without any physical copying.

“While ADF remains relevant for complex orchestration scenarios, it is no longer the backbone of data movement – OneLake is.”

‘Long-overdue liberation’

Significant changes in any industry can be met with either joy or disdain depending on the circumstances, but Goyal says that for data teams, the so-called ‘death of ETL’ has been described as nothing short of “a long-overdue liberation”.

“Years spent tuning SSIS packages and mapping ADF data flows are giving way to managing metadata and governance policies instead,” she says. “The burden shifts from responding to pipeline failures to maintaining stable, governed shortcuts.

“The skillset evolves accordingly – the focus moves from pipeline engineering toward data governance, metadata management and strategic architecture, representing a significant elevation of the data management role.”

But why specifically is zero-copy being embraced over ETL?

For starters, Goyal says zero-copy is replacing ETL because it is faster, cheaper and “fundamentally more reliable”.

“Zero‑copy architectures replace ETL by letting analytics and AI access live data at its source – eliminating duplication, latency and governance complexity while reducing cost.

“In short, ETL is costly, slow and brittle; zero-copy is lean, live and self-governing.”

Why it’s significant

Goyal believes the transition from ETL is significant because it “represents a fundamental architectural shift”, allowing teams to manage metadata and governance instead of fragmented data copies and “fragile pipelines”.

“The move is from a reactive, maintenance-heavy model – characterised by late-night pipeline failure alerts – to a live feed of the business.

“Over time, this means organisations can make decisions on current data rather than yesterday’s batch, reduce infrastructure overhead significantly and redirect skilled data teams away from operational firefighting toward strategic work.”

Goyal adds that from a data strategy standpoint, zero-copy “changes what is fundamentally possible”.

“When the analytics layer reflects the business in near real-time rather than hours after the fact, decisions can be made on current ground truth,” she says. “The elimination of redundant storage means strategies can scale without proportional cost increases.

“Built-in governance and metadata persistence also mean organisations can trust their data more deeply – enabling AI workloads, reporting and operational systems to coexist confidently on a single, well-governed data estate.”

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

from the sucker-born-every-minute dept

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announced a half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a “phone company” was generous; it was a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, “MAGA-focused” mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resold T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy Trump brand partnership.

The centerpiece of this effort was supposed to be a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone that the Trump org claimed would be “proudly designed and built in the United States” and released sometime last August. Not only was the device never going to be made in the States (all mention of that was quickly stripped from press materials), the August launch date came and went with no Trump phone.

It’s now April of 2026, and while there’s still no phone (despite a long line of rubes having plunked down $100 deposits), there is a revamped Trump Mobile website and a renewed promise of a slightly different phone, according to The Verge. This includes a revamped and gaudy new mock up of what the gold Trump T1 phone is supposed to look like, should it ever actually be released:

You’ll notice that the phone looks suspiciously like the HTC U24 Pro, a phone released two years ago and available for as little as $460 on Amazon (even less on places like eBay):

While the original “Trump phone” was announced with a $500 price tag, the backers of Trump’s latest grift insist that price was “promotional,” and the full price tag will be closer to around $1000:

“The phone is now listed with a “promotional price” of $499, which used to simply be its standard price. The site is still accepting $100 deposits, with the promise that you can “lock in” the “promotional pricing.” When I spoke to executives Eric Thomas and Don Hendrickson in February, they declared that $499 had been an “introductory” price, which would be rising after the relaunch — though they promised that early buyers would still be charged $499 total, and that the new price would be “less than $1,000.”

So there’s no phone or release date, but there’s already been a price hike on a lazy rebrand of an existing phone they just needed to spray paint gold and slap a Trump logo on. There’s simply no reason that doing this very basic rebrand should have taken so long (assuming they do plan to eventually released a phone), but as a concept the whole thing remains very on brand.

Filed Under: branding, con, donald trump, mvno, smartphone, trump phone, wireless

Companies: trump mobile

The US federal government’s central energy information agency is planning to implement a mandatory nationwide survey of data centers focused on their energy use, according to a letter seen by WIRED. This survey would be the first effort of its type to collect basic information about data centers.

The letter was sent to senators Elizabeth Warren and Josh Hawley on April 9 by the head of the Energy Information Administration, Tristan Abbey, and comes in response to a previous inquiry from the senators about the EIA’s plans to get more information about data centers. WIRED reported on Hawley and Warren’s letter last month.

“Americans deserve to know how much energy data centers are sucking up and what that’s doing to their utility bills,” Warren told WIRED in a statement. “The EIA’s mandatory survey is an important first step towards holding data centers accountable, but people are hurting right now. I’m pushing EIA to collect and share this data as soon as possible.”

The EIA told WIRED that it doesn’t have any specifics to share beyond what is in the letter to the senators.

The explosion of data centers across the US has caused an outpouring of public concern and proposed legislation to rein in their resource use, as well as put moratoriums on their construction. But there’s surprisingly little official data collected on the industry.

Most details about data centers’ energy use—a particular worry for many voters in the face of mounting utility bills—are considered proprietary business information, and are usually not made public. In response to encouragement from the Trump administration to protect ratepayers, many data center developers are now turning to building their own power sources, known as behind-the-meter power. These facilities—many of which are gas-powered—introduce new concerns around air pollution and climate change. (On Tuesday, the NAACP filed a lawsuit against xAI alleging it was running behind-the-meter gas turbines on a data center in Mississippi without a permit and polluting the community around it. xAI did not immediately reply to a request for comment.)

The EIA conducts mandatory surveys of providers of various types of energy generation, including oil and gas production, electric generation, and renewables, as well as their industrial customers. In late March, a day before the senators sent their letter, the EIA announced that it would conduct a pilot survey in three areas of the country that have heavy data center development: Texas, Washington state, and the northern Virginia/DC metro area.

In the April 9 letter, Abbey says that the agency will announce a second tranche of pilot surveys “covering at least three more states.” Both surveys would be complete by late September. These two pilot studies, Abbey writes, are “a necessary step in the methodical development of a nationwide mandatory survey.”

Information being collected by the EIA from data centers in these pilots, according to the letter, includes not just information on annual electricity use, but also information on behind-the-meter power generation. The surveys, Abbey writes, will also include questions on the classification of different types of data centers; cooling systems; facility characteristics, like square footage; and IT specifications, including metrics on how efficiently a data center uses energy.

The letter still leaves a lot of questions unanswered about the structure of the pilots.

According to the letter, the pilot won’t ask every respondent for the full set of metrics, but will rather tailor questions “to the particular location of each data center facility.” The current pilot also asks the 196 companies identified across the three regions to choose just one location to report metrics on. The EIA did not answer questions about how it determined which locations should receive which questions, or if it provided any requirements to survey respondents about how to go about choosing which data center location to provide information about.

The EIA also did not answer questions from WIRED about when it plans to launch the second set of pilot surveys, the states that will be included, or the possible timing of a national mandatory survey.

Most smartwatches ask you to choose between looking good and doing a lot, but the Apple Watch Series 11 has never been willing to make that particular compromise.

That combination of capability and design is now more accessible, with the Apple Watch Series 11 available for $299 reduced from its usual $399 only at Amazon.