All posts tagged: Performance

Loewe and On Made Performance Wear For Performance Artists

Loewe and On Made Performance Wear For Performance Artists

Published by Akaay Pradhan

Loewe x On just dropped a new collection featuring two new footwear models among a suite of artist-informed ready-to-wear. The campaign imagery, featuring fine artists like sound sculpturist Tarek Atoui, multimedia wunderkind Martine Syms, and legendary performer and video artist Joan Jonas, adds a lot of much-needed substance to the increasingly popular concept of “ready-to-wear designed to facilitate artistic expression” by…actually tapping artists to self-represent.   Now four-years-and-some-change into the Loewe x On partnership, this drop feels like the next step in the partnership’s evolution, from concept into practice. That’s why it makes the most sense to style actual artists and then place them in the wild, or in the case of the campaign video, in various states of their practice. The clip of Jonas tracing rocks with pastilles is my version of fashion cinema. The pieces are as practical as the practitioners animating them, designed to go either performance-wear-as-streetwear or streetwear-as-performance-wear depending on your lifestyle. Gear-wise, the two new shoes stand out as the newest piece of On technology given the Loewe treatment—the Cloudtilt Cosmic …

The 2026 Bentley Supersports is what happens when you combine luxury with on-track performance

The 2026 Bentley Supersports is what happens when you combine luxury with on-track performance

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Less is more” may seem a curious phrase when applied to a half-million-dollar, 199-mph, 657-horsepower twin-turbocharged V8 brute. But in the context of the posh luxury barges we expect from British automotive manufacturer Bentley, it’s applicable to the 2026 Bentley Supersports. That is because this car is as notable for what it lacks as for what it has. The Supersports is a rear-drive, combustion-only version of the Bentley Continental GT. But where that car has always employed all-wheel drive, and the current generation uses a hybrid-electric powertrain, the Supersports is the result of a “what-if” project by Bentley engineers. They wondered what was possible if they stripped the heavy all-wheel-drive and hybrid systems from the Continental GT and built a purely combustion-powered rear-drive car with track driving in mind. The answer is the Supersports. “Half-million dollars” is an approximation. The official starting price in the US is $486,600, but Bentley has already sold the entire production run, and every car has been customized, ensuring none of the cars actually sold for the list price. “Each …

Princess Diana's Brother Names 'Incredible' On-Screen Performance That 'Captures' Her Best

Princess Diana's Brother Names 'Incredible' On-Screen Performance That 'Captures' Her Best

Published by Sam Flores

In the 27 years since Princess Diana’s death, she’s been portrayed on screen multiple times, by everyone from Naomi Watts to Elizabeth Debicki, who won an Emmy for her efforts. However, according to the late Princess of Wales’ brother, Earl Charles Spencer, there’s one that came closer than anyone else to really capturing her essence. This week, the journalist Tina Brown – who published her own biography of Diana back in 2007 – asked Earl Spencer as part of a Q&A if he thinks there is a “fictional portrayal of Diana” that has “come close to capturing what she was like in real life”. Princess Diana pictured in 1989 “I was on a plane and I saw a movie called Spencer,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘I’d better look at that’. And there was Kristen Stewart, who doesn’t really look like Diana, but my goodness, she caught the spirit. I thought it was an incredible performance.” Not pulling any punches, he then quipped: “The film’s terrible. But I was really intrigued by how good she was …

Managers are using AI to write performance reviews – and it shows

Managers are using AI to write performance reviews – and it shows

Published by Miika Tikkanen

ZDNET’s key takeaways Managers are increasingly using AI to give direct reports feedback. How employees are receiving that is a mixed bag. AI fills a support gap in conversation prep. As AI use ramps up at work, where are the pros and cons, and for whom? New research from professional development firm Highwire shows where AI has entered the feedback loop — and where it’s both a potential problem and a solution for employee development. Highwire surveyed 1,034 corporate employees on how AI is infiltrating manager-employee relationships. It found that 78% of managers reported using AI to “help draft, edit, summarize, or inform feedback or a performance review” in the last year. Most of those managers, perhaps unsurprisingly, noted that AI sped up the process of prepping that feedback (Highwire told ZDNET it did not ask managers what else they noticed about using AI). Also: Nearly 70% of workers use AI regularly now – with no time to upskill However, only 16% of non-managerial employees surveyed were told AI influenced their review. Maybe concerns about …

I tested the same GPU over USB4 and Thunderbolt 3, and the performance gap is way bigger than you’d expect

I tested the same GPU over USB4 and Thunderbolt 3, and the performance gap is way bigger than you’d expect

Published by Miika Tikkanen

External GPUs are strange beasts. In theory, they sound like the perfect plug-and-play setup and are great if you want to use one device for everything. However, spend a little time with them, and you’ll quickly realize there are some severe limitations. The biggest bottleneck is Thunderbolt speeds, and each generation behaves differently. While I much prefer mydock (since it has extra ports and a nice enclosure), I ultimately switched to my hacky USB4 dock because the performance gap was too large to ignore. Related I plugged a desktop GPU into my laptop’s M.2 slot and it actually worked PCIe everything! A look at both setups A janky DIY dock versus a proper enclosure Two very different kinds of enclosures were used for this particular experiment. The first was your more or less regular, run-of-the-mill Thunderbolt 3-based eGPU enclosure. This particular one was from Acasis and uses the Intel JHL7440 chipset, also known as Titan Ridge. As for the second dock, it’s more of a DIY project. Essentially, it is an Oculink-to-USB4 adapter that uses …

Watch First Look at Sandra Huller’s Next Must-See Performance

Watch First Look at Sandra Huller’s Next Must-See Performance

Published by Daniella Wilson

In their conversations leading up to the making of Rose, star Sandra Hüller and director Markus Schleinzer worked hard at fine-tuning their eponymous 17th-century hero. Hüller was to play a woman disguising herself as a male soldier in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, ingratiating herself in a small Protestant village. She considered preparation routines like strength training, before setting them aside as anachronistic; she agonized over keeping things as believable as possible. “She was wondering, ‘What should I do with my voice — should I lower it?’” Schleinzer recalls. “Then we started to laugh because then we found out that my voice, as a man, is higher than her voice as a woman. It would be a weird thing for her, to lower her voice to pretend to be a man, for a male director who has a much higher voice than hers.” The anecdote offers some amusing insight into the dynamic between Schleinzer and Hüller, which remained deeply playful and collaborative over the years it took to get Rose made. Yet it …

Tru – review: a five-star performance of a three-star script about the life of Truman Capote

Tru – review: a five-star performance of a three-star script about the life of Truman Capote

Published by Sam Flores

Truman Capote’s core creative life was brief, peaking between the jolly novella Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1958) and the genre-influential “nonfiction-novel” In Cold Blood (1965). Blocked by drugs and drink, he spent two decades not writing a soi-disant masterpiece, Answered Prayers, although magazine publication of early chapters led to ostracisation by socialites who found the novel to be too nonfiction. But, in the 42 years since his death, far more has been written about him than he wrote, including the movies Capote and Infamous, a much-toured solo show by Bob Kingdom and a season of the TV series Feud dramatising the fallout from the writer fictionalising rich friends. These authorial autopsies began with Tru, a 1989 Broadway show by Jay Presson Allen, now revived in London by Jesse Tyler Ferguson, familiar from 11 seasons of Modern Family on TV and a sparky recent Palladium turn as Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar. Paul Farnsworth’s design is less set than installation, making the whole Menier a convincing recreation – carpet, wallpaper, ceiling tiles, books and antiques – of …

Emmerdale fans deliver verdict on Lawrence Robb’s Strictly Come Dancing debut performance

Emmerdale fans deliver verdict on Lawrence Robb’s Strictly Come Dancing debut performance

Published by Daniella Wilson

Fans of Emmerdale favourite Lawrence Robb have come to his defence amid criticism from judges on Strictly Come Dancing, following an impressive first showing. The Scottish actor, best known for his turn as the mischievous Mackenzie Boyd in the ITV soap, danced a paso doble to Harry Styles’s song Aperture with professional dancer Jowita Przystal and managed to earn a score of 20 from the judges. Craig Revel-Horwood awarded him 4 points, while Motsi Mabuse and Shirley Ballas gave him 5 points each, before Anton Du Beke awarded the actor 6 points. Robb’s performance earned him some constructive criticism, with all judges praising the acting skills that he displayed for his moody facial expressions, but commenting on some of the less-than-ideal aspects of his dancing technique. Motsi called on Robb to bring “control” for future performances, while asking him to control the shoulders especially. Shirley praised the actor’s “opening line”, while Anton noted a need for “better shaping” and Craig called it all “very square” and bemoaned the lack of “Spanish line”. Lawrence Robb. BBC/Ray Burmiston/BBC …

Your PC shipped with VT-x disabled, and that’s costing you real performance

Your PC shipped with VT-x disabled, and that’s costing you real performance

Published by Miika Tikkanen

You’d be surprised by what your PC can actually do, and that doesn’t mean getting more performance out of it. Instead, there are features that unlock completely new ways to use your PC. I’m talking virtualization, which is your computer’s ability to run multiple systems on a single physical machine. The setting for virtualization is called VT-x/AMD-V, and it’s a setting that everyone should enable, whether you think you need it or not. You don’t need a specific application to enable it, and once done, it can massively boost performance on certain workloads. Related The Windows security feature most people ignore is the one I check first on every PC And it’s almost always disabled. What virtualization actually does One PC, multiple isolated environments In a nutshell, virtualization enables a software-based simulation that adds an abstraction layer over your physical hardware, so you can run two or more computers at the same time that exist separately and never interact with each other. A hypervisor does the work: it acts as a bridge between the OS …

Claude Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance – and costs 40% less

Claude Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance – and costs 40% less

Published by Miika Tikkanen

Elyse Betters Picaro/ZDNET ZDNET’s key takeaways Claude Opus 5.5 could be a big win for power users. Developers may see faster coding with fewer steps. Anthropic says the upgrade is safer, cheaper, and less wordy. Less than two months after the release of Claude Opus 5, Anthropic is back with Opus 5.5. The big pitch for Opus 5 was that it had “near Fable” performance at half the price. This time, the headline is that the workhorse AI Opus 5.5 delivers Fable 5.1 performance for most work and costs about 40% less to run. “Our customers use Box AI on enormous amounts of content, so speed and cost are a top priority,” Yashodha Bhavnani, VP of AI Products at Box, reports. “In our evaluations, Claude Opus 5.5 used a third of the tokens Opus 5 did, and its answers were 40% less verbose without losing accuracy. We expect that to matter a lot for teams running agents across their content in areas like financial services and the public sector.” Anthropic says that, “Over the coming …