While the IT managers of the world stress about Windows 10’s buggy mail client , default browser , and dodgy domains, for the gamer, Microsoft’s latest and greatest OS is an exciting proposition. Windows 10, if you didn’t know, comes with DirectX 12 , which promises significant performance increases (particularly for AMD graphics card users), thanks to its new low-level API features. The trouble is, right now, there aren’t actually any games out there that use DX12. While Nvidia and AMD have both launched new drivers to bring DX12 support to a range of their current GPUs, there’s not a single DX12 game to play. 3DMark has a neat draw call benchmark that gives us some idea of how much faster DX12 will be, but it’s entirely synthetic. One of the first games to actually use DX12 will be StarDock’s upcoming RTS Ashes of the Singularity , with an early beta build showing a significant uplift in performance. We were hoping to check out a special benchmark build of the game this week, but sadly it’s been pushed back. Read 17 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Tag: entertainment
Non-Invasive Spinal Cord Stimulation Gets Paralyzed Legs Moving Again
schwit1 writes: A new technique called transcutaneous stimulation has allowed five men with complete motor paralysis regain the ability to move their legs voluntarily and produce step-like movements. The treatment requires no surgery and adds to prior work to help paralyzed people gain voluntary movement through electrical stimulation (one completed in 2011, the other in 2014). Gizmag reports: “The new treatment uses a technique called transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, which involves strategically placing electrodes on the skin of the lower back. While receiving stimulation, the men’s legs were supported by braces that hung from the ceiling. At first their legs only moved involuntarily, if at all. But they soon found they could voluntarily extend the distance their legs moved during stimulation. They doubled their range of voluntary motion after four treatment sessions.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Non-Invasive Spinal Cord Stimulation Gets Paralyzed Legs Moving Again
In Korea, Smartphones Use Multipath TCP To Reach 1 Gbps
An anonymous reader writes: Korean users are among the most bandwidth-hungry smartphone users. During the MPTCP WG meeting at IETF’93, SungHoon Seo announced that KT had deployed since mid June a commercial service that allows smartphone users to reach 1 Gbps. This is not yet 5G, but the first large scale commercial deployment of Multipath TCP by a mobile operator to combine fast LTE and fast WiFi to reach up to 1 Gbps. This service is offered on the Samsung Galaxy S6 whose Linux kernel includes the open-source Multipath TCP implementation and SOCKSv5 proxies managed by the network operator. Several thousands of users are already actively using this optional service. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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In Korea, Smartphones Use Multipath TCP To Reach 1 Gbps
Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an easy upgrade for old PCs
A whole bunch of people are going to upgrade to Windows 10. Not everyone . But when you offer free Windows via a nag message delivered to over 80 percent of the user base, you’re going to attract people who wouldn’t have driven to MicroCenter to buy an upgrade DVD. Especially if you bought an eligible PC in Windows 7’s heyday, you will probably be installing the new OS on five- or six-year-old hardware that has long since been forgotten about by the company that sold it to you. Or maybe you bought something during the post-Chromebook era, where Windows PCs dipped back into netbook territory in their quest for a low price tag. We installed Windows 10 on a few of these kinds of systems to see what you can expect, at least if you’re comparing a clean install to a clean install. Current users of both Windows 7 and Windows 8 should expect to recover a few gigabytes of drive space, a few megabytes of system RAM, and a few precious seconds of boot time. Read 16 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Faster booting, smaller footprint make Windows 10 an easy upgrade for old PCs
I’m Playing Xbox On Windows 10, And You Can Too
Yesterday, my wife wanted to play some Kingdom Hearts . I was in the mood for Titanfall . We only have one TV. So I pulled out a Surface 3 tablet, plugged in an Xbox One controller, and started streaming the game from my Xbox to my portable PC. It’s a new Windows 10 feature. Read more…
Britain Shuts Off 750,000 Streetlights With No Impact On Crime Or Crashes
Flash Modin writes: English cities are hard up for cash as the national government dolls out cuts. And in response, the country’s councils — local governing bodies — have slashed costs by turning off an estimated 750, 000 streetlights. Fans of the night sky and reduced energy usage are happy, but the move has also sparked a national debate. The Automobile Association claims six people have died as a direct result of dimming the lights. But a new study released Wednesday looked at 14 years of data from 63 local authorities across England and Wales and found that residents’ chances of being attacked, robbed, or struck by a car were no worse on the darker streets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Britain Shuts Off 750,000 Streetlights With No Impact On Crime Or Crashes
LG made 1.2 cents in profit for every phone it sold last quarter
LG’s latest earnings report shows just how tough the smartphone market is getting. On the one hand, LG Mobile shipped 8.1 million LTE smartphones, its best result ever. On the other hand, it sold fewer premium models in Korea and spent a lot of money marketing its flagship G4 in the US against models by Apple, Samsung, et al. (The company singled out Apple , saying that iPhone sales hurt its earnings this quarter.) The net result was a mobile operating profit of just 200 million won ($172, 000) or 1.2 cents per phone. The good news is that the LG G4 has only been on sale in the US for two months , so it may have a stronger impact on LG’s bottom line next quarter. On top of a tight smartphone market, LG’s Home Entertainment division said that global demand for LCD TVs was “soft, ” as revenue dropped 22.7 percent to 3.93 trillion won ($3.59 billion). However, the company is bullish on its 4K OLED TVs , and plans to expand its lineup “with newer designs at more attractive price points.” For the quarter, LG saw an overeall drop in sales of 7.6 percent and earnings that were down 45 percent over last year to 226.4 billion won ($195 million). And if not for the company’s profitable Home Appliance division , that number would’ve been a loss. Filed under: Cellphones , Home Entertainment , LG Comments Source: LG
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LG made 1.2 cents in profit for every phone it sold last quarter
Intel and Micron Unveil 3D XPoint Memory, 1000x Speed and Endurance Over Flash
MojoKid writes: Today at a press conference in San Francisco, Intel and Micron unveiled 3D XPoint (Cross Point) memory technology, a non-volatile memory architecture they claim could change the landscape of consumer electronics and computer architectures for years to come. Intel and Micron say 3D XPoint memory is 1000 times faster than NAND, boasts 1000x the endurance of NAND, and offers 8-10 times the density of conventional memory. 3D XPoint isn’t electron based, it’s material based. The companies aren’t diving into specifics yet surrounding the materials used in 3D XPoint, but the physics are fundamentally different than what we’re used to. It’s 3D stackable and its cross point connect structure allows for dense packing and individual access at the cell level from the top or bottom of a memory array. Better still, Intel alluded to 3D XPoint not being as cost-prohibitive as you might expect. Intel’s Rob Crooke explained, “You could put the cost somewhere between NAND and DRAM.” Products with the new memory are expected to arrive in 2016 and the joint venture is in production with wafers now. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel and Micron Unveil 3D XPoint Memory, 1000x Speed and Endurance Over Flash
Voyager’s Golden Record For Aliens Now Available On SoundCloud
An anonymous reader writes: For years you’ve been able to listen to the sounds recorded on the golden records carried by the twin Voyager spacecraft online but NASA just made it a bit easier. The orginization just uploaded the recordings to SoundCloud. Now you can listen to a continuous stream of clips instead of clicking back and forth to hear the different tracks. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Voyager’s Golden Record For Aliens Now Available On SoundCloud
Tomb, a Successor To TrueCrypt For Linux Geeks
jaromil writes: Last day we released Tomb version 2.1 with improvements to stability, documentation and translations. Tomb is just a ZSh script wrapping around cryptsetup, gpg and other tools to facilitate the creation and management of LUKS encrypted volumes with features like key separation, steganography, off-line search, QRcode paper backups etc. In designing Tomb we struggle for minimalism and readability, convinced that the increasing complexity of personal technology is the root of many vulnerabilities the world is witnessing today — and this approach turns out to be very successful, judging from the wide adoption, appreciation and contributions our project has received especially after the demise of TrueCrypt. As maintainer of the software I wonder what Slashdot readers think about what we are doing, how we are doing it and more in general about the need for simplicity in secure systems, a debate I perceive as transversal to many other GNU/Linux/BSD projects and their evolution. Given the increasing responsibility in maintaining such a software, considering the human-interface side of things is an easy to reach surface of attack, I can certainly use some advice and criticism. Read more of this story at Slashdot.