Microsoft Reduces Windows 10 Roll-Back Grace Period

PSA: If you decide that you hate Windows 10, you’ve only got 10 days instead of 30 now to roll back. This also applies to reverting to a previous build of Windows 10 for testers participating in the Insider program.

With last week's Anniversary Update, aka version 1607, the 30 days were reduced to 10. (Microsoft identifies its major upgrades using numerals representing year and month of the release.) Microsoft said that the behind-the-scenes change had been triggered by data gleaned from the voluminous telemetry it collects from Windows 10 devices. "Based on our user research, we noticed most users who choose to go back to a previous version of Windows do it within the first several days," a spokesman said in an email. "As such, we changed the setting to 10 days to free storage space used by previous copies."

Comments

Australia: Science And IT Students Struggle To Get Jobs Upon Graduation

While majoring in a science or IT major is probably still a better idea than, say, theater arts, a report out of Australia would suggest that prospects aren’t as ideal as some would hope. Blame is being placed on lackluster education programs, as the number of graduates and available IT positions are comparable.

In 2015 only half of bachelor degree science graduates seeking full-time work had found it four months after completing their degrees, 17% below the average for all graduates. "Although many recent science graduates struggle in the labour market, things improve over time," it said. "For 2011 bachelor degree science graduates, their full-time employment rate four months later was 65%, but three years later, in 2014, 82% of those who were looking for full-time work had found it. "While this is a considerable increase, it is below the 89% rate for all graduates."

Comments

Shatner: Star Trek Wouldn't Exist Without Star Wars

Does this make Star Wars superior? Basically, Trek had been cancelled and Star Wars was what convinced Paramount executives to give the former another shot. Shatner notes that his series is human oriented, while Star Wars is more of an opera.

"First of all, 'Star Wars' created 'Star Trek.' You know that?" he asked, as fans gasped and looked puzzled. Actually, the original TV series "Star Trek" aired from 1966 to 1969. "Star Wars" didn't hit theaters until 1977. But Shatner clarified what he was saying: The blockbuster success of George Lucas's "Star Wars" film brought "Star Trek" back to life. "Every year there was the threat to be canceled. The third year, we were canceled, and everybody accepted it," he said. But then "Star Wars: A New Hope" made a mind-blowing $775 million at the box office.

Comments

President Prepares To Boost U.S. Military's Cyber Role

The Administration is planning to give more power to Pentagon’s Cyber Command so they can better develop cyber weapons and mount stronger electronic offensives/defensives. The move is expected to make the division, which has strong associations with the NSA, more self-reliant. Cyber attacks exercised by the organization thus far remain highly classified.

Cyber Command would be separated from the National Security Agency, a spy agency responsible for electronic eavesdropping, the officials said. That would give Cyber Command leaders a larger voice in arguing for the use of both offensive and defensive cyber tools in future conflicts. Both organizations are based at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 30 miles north of Washington, and led by the same officer, Navy Adm. Michael S. Rogers. A former senior intelligence official with knowledge of the plan said it reflects the growing role that cyber operations play in modern warfare, and the different missions of the Cyber Command and the NSA. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

Comments

DRAM Industry Might Face Upheaval

Micron is in trouble and is fending off hostile takeovers from Chinese firms due to their losses and declining stock prices. Micron is one of the big three DRAM manufacturers but is falling behind due to processing technology that is leading to higher production costs and lower profitability.

Samsung Electronics, which has the most advanced technology in fine process, is mass producing 18-nanometer (nm) DRAM chips. SK Hynix is mass producing DRAM products using its 21nm technology, whereas Micron has 20nm technology. The smaller the line width, the more dense circuits are, which leads to more production. The more advanced technology will lower production costs and improve profitability. The semiconductor industry sources say, "As the price of DRAM products has continuously dropped, the soundness of each firm has been shown." It means that Micron doesn’t have the competitiveness to make profits with the current DRAM prices.

Comments

First 13 Years Of Nintendo Power Available Free Online

Archive.org has over a decade of Nintendo Power issues that you can flip through if you’re feeling nostalgic. Those of you who grew up with these publications should remember at least a handful of these covers—I just don’t have the heart to throw out the issues of NP, EGM, and GamePro still stacked in one of my closets.

Comments

Monitors Are Vulnerable To Hijacking And Spying

Researchers have found a way to hack into monitors so they can see what is being displayed, as well as manipulate pixels so they can display different images. One billion monitors are reportedly susceptible, as most use the same processor that is vulnerable to this exploit.

…if a hacker can get you to visit a malicious website or click on a phishing link, they can then target the monitor’s embedded computer, specifically its firmware. This is the computer that controls the menu to change brightness and other simple settings on the monitor. The hacker can then put an implant there programmed to wait for further instructions. Then, the way the hacker can communicate with the implant is rather shrewd. The implant can be programmed to wait for commands sent over by a blinking pixel, which could be included in any video or a website. Essentially, that pixel is uploading code to the monitor. At that point, the hacker can mess with your monitor.

Comments

Apple Should Stop Selling Four-Year-Old Computers

Does Apple even care about their computing line anymore? The answer must be a resounding "no," as the company is still selling years-old hardware for substantial change. Things must be really bad if pro-Mac sites proclaim that only one product out of seven is worth buying these days.

The Retina MacBook Pro is 442 days into its current cycle, despite refreshes coming every 268 days on average in the past. The Mac mini has gone 657 days since its last update, which was controversial in itself since Apple removed quad-core options and made the product harder to upgrade after purchase. And the Mac Pro, released in December 2013 following much "Can’t innovate any more, my ass"-fueled fanfare? It hasn’t received a single update since then. "This is without a doubt the future of the pro desktop," Phil Schiller said when announcing the Mac Pro on stage that year. Did he mean that this was the precise model Apple expects professional users to use literally forever?

Comments

No Man's Sky's Day-One Patch Changes The Entire Game

In what is being described as a massive overhaul, No Man’s Sky is getting a launch-day patch that includes newly written story paths, altered "rules of the universe," and changes to aiming mechanics and upgrade stats. I’m really interested in seeing whether this title lives up to the hype.

The entire notes are here but in sum they describe a game that is functionally not at all what some people or press are playing right now. One person paid $1,300 for a copy of the game nearly two weeks before its launch date (which is Aug. 9) and began streaming his playthrough and offering detailed thoughts on how the game plays. Publications such as Polygon and Kotaku also acquired the game early from retailers and also posted streams.

Comments

Fire Station Of The Future Costs $32 Million

NYC’s Rescue Company 2 is getting a brand-new home in 2018, and it’s a huge upgrade to their current station. The building features plenty of open spaces, which are inspired by firemen’s frequenting of voids during rescues.

…Rescue Company 2's firemen have always responded to New York City's most dangerous emergencies. For the last 31 years, they have worked and trained at their station in Brownsville, Brooklyn. But by summer 2018, they will get a massive, new, state-of-the-art home. Designed by architecture and urban design firm Studio Gang, the 20,000-square-foot station will feature an obstacle course and a pit to practice underground rescues. On the edge of the roof terrace will be hooks to practice scaling the building — which firemen often need to do in real-life situations.

Comments

IBM Watson AI Saves Woman From Leukemia

One day, doctors may be able to just "plug in the right data and start the healing process." In what I assume is the world’s first case in which an AI made a medical professional look really bad, Watson, in 10 minutes, discovered that a patient’s ailment was misidentified and offered the correct diagnosis.

University of Tokyo doctors report that the artificial intelligence diagnosed a 60-year-old woman's rare form of leukemia that had been incorrectly identified months earlier. The analytical machine took just 10 minutes to compare the patient's genetic changes with a database of 20 million cancer research papers, delivering an accurate diagnosis and leading to proper treatment that had proven elusive. Watson has also identified another rare form of leukemia in another patient, the university says.

Comments

NASA Rocket Test Shot With Incredible New HDR High Speed Camera

The trouble with capturing booster tests is the incredibly bright conditions, but NASA’s got new HDR gear that can handle multiple exposures and capture footage at high speeds. Now we can now see details in plumes and components that we’ve never been able to before. Thanks to Etherton for the link.

"The HiDyRS-X project originated from a problem that exists when trying to film rocket motor tests," explains NASA. "Rocket motor plumes, in addition to being extremely loud, are also extremely bright, making them difficult to record without drastically cutting down the exposure settings on the camera. Doing so, however, darkens the rest of the image, obscuring other important components on the motor." The HiDyRS-X gives researchers the best of both worlds, and this QM-2 booster test was the camera’s first real world dry-run.

Comments

Older Workers Are Better At Adapting To New Technology, Study Finds

Younger people are lazy, entitled, and whine about everything—oh wait, it might actually be true. Out of 4,000 surveyed IT workers, one quarter of respondents 55 or older are bothered by tech in the workplace, but 36 percent of respondents 18 to 34—the ones who supposedly grew up with technology—said they find tech in the workplace stressful.

"My hypothesis, which could be right or wrong, is when you look at a younger generation in the workforce, a lot of the folks in that category are used to using tech in their personal lives that's pretty darn good. And that raises the expectations of what tech can be in their professional lives," he says. "That said, when you look at the technologies broadly still in use in the workplace, they often don’t achieve that level of cleanliness and personability [of the technology] in our personal lives. So younger people will feel frustration at tools that are not up to snuff," Baesman says. In contrast, older people who have been working longer "have seen a lot worse," he adds, "so there may be more tolerance for tech that may not always be as good as it might be."

Comments

Changing Passwords Is Bad For Security

While Carnegie Mellon faculty and government agencies sweat and debate over the consequences of routinely coming up with new passcodes, all the rest of us with common sense just turn to password generators/managers.

…researchers identified common techniques account holders used when they were required to change passwords. A password like "tarheels#1", for instance (excluding the quotation marks) frequently became "tArheels#1" after the first change, "taRheels#1" on the second change and so on. Or it might be changed to "tarheels#11" on the first change and "tarheels#111" on the second. Another common technique was to substitute a digit to make it "tarheels#2", "tarheels#3", and so on. "The UNC researchers said if people have to change their passwords every 90 days, they tend to use a pattern and they do what we call a transformation," Cranor explained. "They take their old passwords, they change it in some small way, and they come up with a new password."

Comments

1,007 Dancing Robots Break World Record In China

Cool feat. Now imagine that all of these robots were T-800s who all pointed their phase-plasma rifles at you simultaneously.

Last weekend at the Qingdao Beer Festival in Shandong, China, 1,007 robots bopped and shimmied their way to a new world record for the Most robots dancing simultaneously. Each of the 43.8 cm tall dancing machines were controlled from just one mobile phone and they had to dance for a full minute in order to count towards the record total. A few robots were disqualified because they didn’t dance or fell over, but the majority of the mechanical dance troupe completed the 60 second routine in perfect unison.

Comments

Apple Replaces Pistol Emoji With Water Gun

While some of you couldn’t care less about emoji and would merely accuse Apple of pussification, I suppose there is the potential for some real miscommunication here. We should just ban all emoji.

All other vendors display this emoji as a real gun. Even if they all decided to follow suit and change to a water or toy gun (which could happen, if Apple sticks with this), the change would take a considerable amount of time. By comparison, if you tell people to bring a snack using the 🍪 cookie emoji, and Galaxy users bring you saltine crackers, that’s a shame, but nothing more.

Comments

The World's First Website Went Online 25 Years Ago Today

History was made on August 6, 1991, when the world’s first web page was launched using a NeXT computer at CERN's headquarters in Geneva. The infrastructure for the web was built about a year before, which included core technologies such as HTTP and HTML.

On this day 25 years ago the world's first website went live to the public. The site, created by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, was a basic text page with hyperlinked words that connected to other pages. Berners-Lee used the public launch to outline his plan for the service, which would come to dominate life in the twenty-first century. "The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system," said Berners-Lee on the world's first public website. "The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone."

Comments

Wal-Mart In Talks To Buy Jet.com

Jet.com, otherwise known as that place you ordered from only because there was a coupon, may be bought by the world’s largest brick-and-mortar retailer. The deal would hypothetically bolster Wal-Mart’s disappointing performance in the e-commerce arena.

Jet, barely a year old, has sought to underprice Amazon with a vast marketplace that would require billions of dollars in funding and a plan to rely more on suppliers than warehouse inventory. A part of its growth strategy early on relied on taking orders for products it didn’t sell and placing orders on behalf of its customers on other sites, often selling the items below what it paid while absorbing steep shipping costs. Jet has curtailed the practice. Wal-Mart has scrambled to keep pace with Amazon, which overtook Wal-Mart by market capitalization a year ago and now sports a market value that is 50% larger.

Comments

World's First Industrial Tattoo Robot

This video stars tattoué, an incredible industrial tattoo machine that uses the principles of 3D printing to safely apply ink under the skin. What a great way to get your favorite video game tattoo.

Comments

Pokémon, Mario, And Zelda Headline NX "Dream" Line-Up

Let’s face it; the primary reason for owning a Nintendo system these days is for their first-party titles and staple franchises. The company seems to know this all too well, as they are reportedly ensuring that your favorite characters will be debuting shortly on the NX after its launch. This report also reveals that the new console will sit between the PS3 and PS4 in terms of power.

Nintendo is putting together a triple-A software line-up, to ensure NX flies out of the gate next year. Developer Game Freak will bring Pokémon to the platform, while Nintendo’s first party titles include the previously announced Zelda game – Breath of the Wild – and a new Mario game. All three products are scheduled to appear within the first six months of the machine’s life. The firm has also been busy securing third-party support, with Sega, Square Enix, Ubisoft, Activision and Warner Bros already on-board.

Comments

Christoph Waltz Shills The Galaxy Note 7

Samsung’s latest flagship phablet was officially unveiled this week, and they are hoping that Mr. Waltz’s star power will encourage more of you to buy it. I have no idea why the theme of the commercial is ‘Murica.

Comments

Why Quake Champions Isn't Coming To PS4 And Xbox One

Even if you don’t care for the upcoming Quake game, it’s interesting to hear an executive agree to something like this. Bethesda could probably water it down for consoles if they wanted to, but they are, shockingly, only catering this one for the master race.

"You know, Quake Champions, maybe anybody else would've been like, 'No, you have to do it, and it's got to work on every platform,'" Hines explained. "We were like, 'No, it's a PC-only thing. It's this kind of game. It's got to have this kind of performance, and it's going to be on PC full stop.' We feel very comfortable in making those calls. "I guess theoretically there's a chance [it could come to consoles]. Who knows what future consoles look like? But this is full stop a PC product: 120Hz, unlocked frame rate. That's the experience we want folks to have."

Comments

Internet Speeds Are Getting Faster In The U.S.

A new report from Speedtest.com has found that internet speeds have increased by 40% since last year. Leading the way are cities such as Austin, Phoenix, Seattle, and San Francisco. Mobile internet performance has also increased by 30%.

Fixed broadband customers have seen the biggest jump in performance with download speeds achieving an average of over 50 Mbps for the first time ever. This improvement is more than a 40% increase since July 2015. Overall, the fixed broadband industry has seen consolidation, speed upgrades and, thankfully, growth in fiber optic deployments from upstarts like Google Fiber to industry titans like XFINITY and AT&T to other regional internet service providers. Mobile internet customers have also seen performance gains, improving by more than 30% since last year with an average download speed of 19.27 Mbps in the first six months of 2016.

Comments

Microsoft Confirms Two Major Updates Planned For Windows 10 In 2017

Following this week’s big Anniversary patch, Windows 10 will continue to evolve with another "major" update planned for early next year and a "minor" one in the second or third quarter. While new features are always exciting, I hope they spend more time polishing the UI and fixing what is still inconsistent, like desktop and taskbar menus.

…the first major update for 2017 (codenamed Redstone 2) will release in the early part of 2017. The second major update scheduled for 2017 is codenamed "Redstone 3", which I've heard is being targeted for a Summer/Early Fall 2017 launch. This will leave around 4-6 months between Redstone 2 and Redstone 3, which is similar to the update pattern that the Threshold update wave followed. Redstone 3 will likely be a much smaller update compared to Redstone 2, much like Threshold 2 was to Threshold 1.

Comments

[H]ard|OCP Week in Reviews

Today is Friday and you know what that means! It is time once again for the [H]ard|OCP Week in Reviews! For anyone that might have missed them, we like to take a quick look back on the hardware evaluations and articles we posted earlier in the week. We kicked the week off with our evaluation of the Enermax Revolution X't II 750W power supply, followed by our AMD and NVIDIA GPU Vive VR Performance in Raw Data article. Finally, we wrapped things up with a look at the PowerColor Red Devil Radeon RX 470 video card.

PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470 Review

Another review of the PowerColor RED DEVIL RX 470 has popped up on the internet today. This time around it is the crew at Vortez doing the reviewing. You can see our evaluation here for comparison purposes.

Having already scrutinised the devilish delights of PowerColor’s RED DEVIL RX 480, we turn to the brand again today for a look at their RED DEVIL RX 470. The 470 variant arrives with a similar livery, although the cooler now bears two cooling fans and is obviously smaller in size – making it more discreet. PowerColor has equipped this new card to feature the dual-switch OC mode to have the card operate in a low-noise state or advanced overclock.

Comments

[H]ardware Round-Up II

Windows Flaw Lets Hackers Steal Your Username And Password

This 20 year old Windows flaw is causing headaches for Microsoft again. Obviously not enough of a headache to actually fix the flaw, but a headache none the less.

But now a new proof-of-exploit shows just how easy it is to steal someone's credentials. The flaw is widely known, and it's said to be almost 20 years old. It was allegedly found in 1997 by Aaron Spangler and was most recently resurfaced by researchers in 2015 at Black Hat, an annual security and hacking conference in Las Vegas.

Comments

Man Builds Star Wars Speeder Bike...Sorta

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know it's a motorcycle but you have to admit, it's still pretty badass. Wearing the stormtrooper costume while you ride it makes it all the more awesome.

Comments