Author: kenmay

Latest Windows 10 update shows how rapid releases work in practice

Windows 10’s updates and maintenance are following a different, better path to all prior Windows releases: one with more regular updates and quicker access to new features for those who want it, while still offering enterprises a slower pace of delivery. With the first update to the Windows 10 Technical Preview a month ago, Microsoft also enabled a two-speed update track for the million or so members of the Windows Insider program. By default, preview users are put on the slow track. However, about 10 percent of users have put themselves on the fast track. The first ( contentious ) fast track release was made almost two weeks ago, and fast track users have been using it since then. Those fast track users also revealed a variety of problem scenarios. The two big ones were the screen going black (and staying black) every time a PC was unlocked, and a blue screen of death. A pair of patches have been released to fast track users to address these issues, the second coming yesterday, and both of them seem now to be fixed. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Latest Windows 10 update shows how rapid releases work in practice

Watch two hours of deleted scenes from the original Star Wars Trilogy

If you’re looking for two hours of deleted scenes and alternate footage from the original Star Wars Trilogy and hoping that they’d be masterfully edited together documentary-style, well, here you go. Garrett Gilchrist put together all this Star Wars footage you probably never seen before in Star Wars: Deleted Magic. Read more…

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Watch two hours of deleted scenes from the original Star Wars Trilogy

Bloomberg: Sony Is Making a Watch Entirely Out of E-Paper

Keen not to be outdone by Apple, perhaps, Sony is said to be making a new watch whose surfaces are entirely made from e-paper. It will, according to Bloomberg , “emphasize style, rather than trying to outdo more technological offerings.” Read more…

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Bloomberg: Sony Is Making a Watch Entirely Out of E-Paper

Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold

An anonymous reader writes It’s the oldest rock on Earth–and it’s from Mars. A 4.4-billion-year-old martian meteorite, found in a dozen pieces in the western Sahara, has ignited a frenzy among collectors and scientists; prices have reached $10, 000 a gram, and museums and universities are vying for slivers of it. It is the only known martian meteorite made of sediment, a conglomerate of pebbles and other clumps of minerals from when the planet was warm, wet, and possibly habitable. The story of the discovery of the rock and its significance is fascinating, as well as the details presented about the economics of rare space materials. Apropos, this older story about missing moon rocks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Conglomerate Rock From Mars: (Much) More Precious Than Gold

There are now 3 billion internet users, but mostly in rich countries

The UN’s International Telecommunication’s Union ( ITU ) has revealed that over 3 billion people are now connected to the internet, an increase of 6.6 percent over last year. The good news is that such access can have a huge impact “for those who are the poorest and most disenfranchised, including women, youth and those with disabilities, ” according to the report. However, the bad news is that much of that coverage doesn’t apply to people who need it the most. Of the 4.3 billion people still not connected to the internet, 90 percent live in developing countries, with two-thirds of users in first-world countries. So how to get more people online in the poorest countries? The ITU pointed out that nations setting ambitious information tech targets have the greatest internet user growth, so it figures that developing countries need to set similar targets. It also noted that people in rural areas were least likely to be connected, especially in poor nations — a statistic that’s related as much to a lack of connectivity as the lack of means to pay for it. To tackle that issue, the ITU recently unveiled a plan to connect as many as 1.5 billion more users to the internet in 5 years, in part by opening up more wireless spectrum currently used for TV broadcast. It hopes doing that will also lower access costs — a tall job, given that poor rural users often get by on a dollar a day or less. Filed under: Wireless , Mobile Comments Via: ZDNet Source: ITU

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There are now 3 billion internet users, but mostly in rich countries

How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive

itwbennett writes: For too long, it looked like SSD capacity would always lag well behind hard disk drives, which were pushing into the 6TB and 8TB territory while SSDs were primarily 256GB to 512GB. That seems to be ending. In September, Samsung announced a 3.2TB SSD drive. And during an investor webcast last week, Intel announced it will begin offering 3D NAND drives in the second half of next year as part of its joint flash venture with Micron. Meanwhile, hard drive technology has hit the wall in many ways. They can’t really spin the drives faster than 7, 200 RPM without increasing heat and the rate of failure. All hard drives have now is the capacity argument; speed is all gone. Oh, and price. We’ll have to wait and see on that. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How Intel and Micron May Finally Kill the Hard Disk Drive

How English describes color vs how Chinese describes color

Here’s a fascinating visualization created by Muyueh Lee that shows the differences between how the English language and Chinese language each describe colors. On the left, you can see the number of English names for color hues (there’s a lot!) and on the right, the number of Chinese names (there’s a little!). Read more…

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How English describes color vs how Chinese describes color

Sony Pictures hack takes computers down studio-wide

As a whole, Sony isn’t a stranger to being hacked, but the most recent effort targeted its movie division — not PlayStation. Computers in Sony Pictures offices have been compromised, as Deadline , The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report . Studio-wide, computers were breached by a group named “#GOP” that threatened the following: “We already warned you, and this is just a beginning. We continue till our request be met. We’ve obtained all of your internal data including your secrets and top secrets. If you don’t obey us, we’ll release the data shown below to the world.” Those released files were promised for 11 p.m. GMT (6 p.m. Eastern) today, and what it is that the hackers actually want isn’t quite clear. Sony Rumors notes that the hackers commandeered a handful of the company’s Twitter accounts too, but the firm’s since regained control of those. A Deadline source says the outfit is “completely down, paralyzed.” Variety ‘s source says that the hack could take anywhere from one day to three weeks to recover from, and that employees are being urged to not connect to any company networks or access their work inboxes. Sony for its part hasn’t outright confirmed the intrusion, instead saying it was investigating “an IT matter” in a statement to Variety . If any upcoming Sony movies flood the internet this evening, well, it probably won’t be hard to figure out where they came from. [Image credit: Sony Rumors ] Filed under: Home Entertainment , Internet , HD , Sony Comments Source: Deadline , Variety , The Hollywood Reporter , Sony Rumors

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Sony Pictures hack takes computers down studio-wide

T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers

When T-Mobile US customers exceed their monthly data caps, they aren’t cut off from the Internet entirely. Instead, T-Mobile throttles their connections to 128Kbps or 64Kbps, depending on which plan they have, for the rest of the month. But T-Mobile has made it difficult for those customers to figure out just how slow their connections are, with a system that exempts speed test applications from the throttling. After complaints from consumer advocates , the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigated the issue and has forced T-Mobile to be more honest about its network’s throttled speeds. Announced today , an agreement between T-Mobile and the FCC ensures that customers will be able to accurately gauge their throttled speeds. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile forced to stop hiding slow speeds from throttled customers