Microsoft will bundle the all-new Office, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as part of Window 10 for phones and tablets, Joe Belfiore announced during Microsoft’s two-hour-long Windows 10 event. However, there was no mention whether this generous app gift-giving would extend to the desktop. Read more…
View post:
Microsoft Office Will Be Free on Windows 10 Phones and Tablets
It’s Windows 10 day! Again . This time though, Microsoft had a ton of in depth announcements about free upgrades, the future of Windows Phones, playing Xbox games on PC, and putting holodeck goggles on your face. Here are the highlights. Read more…
Read More:
Everything Microsoft Announced About Windows 10 Today
Microsoft has made mistakes. It knows this. But as the company proved today at its Windows 10 HOLOGRAPHIC GOGGLES launch event, it’s also not going to stop pushing user interface design into the future. It’s just getting smarter about it. Read more…
View article:
Windows 10’s Big Step Back Is Actually a Huge Step Forward
VR? Meh. Microsoft is going the holodeck route, with something called Project Hololens. They are Holographic Glasses and they’ll be coming out around the same time as Windows 10. Man this sure looks awesome and cool and probably also really janky and dumb! We’ll find out soon though; Microsoft will be showing off the tech to attendees later today. Read more…
Continue reading here:
Project Hololens: Microsoft’s Audacious Plan to Make Anywhere a Holodeck
Several readers sent word that we’re now less than six months away from the end of support for Windows Server 2003. Though the operating system’s usage peaked in 2009, it still runs on millions of machines, and many IT departments are just now starting to look at replacements. Although Microsoft publishes support deadlines long in advance — and has been beating the drum to dump Server 2003 for months — it’s not unusual for customers to hang on too long. Last year, as Windows XP neared its final days of support, there were still huge numbers of systems running the aged OS. Companies lined up to pay Microsoft for extended support contracts and PC sales stabilized in part because enterprises bought new replacement machines. Problems replacing Windows Server 2003 may appear similar at first glance, but they’re not: Servers are critical to a business because of the applications that run on them, which may have to be rewritten or replaced. [In many cases, legacy applications are the sole reason for the continued use of Server 2003.] Those applications may themselves be unsupported at this point, the company that built them may be out of business or the in-house development team may have been disbanded. Any of those scenarios would make it difficult or even impossible to update the applications’ code to run on a newer version of Windows Server. Complicating any move is the fact that many of those applications are 32-bit — and have been kept on Windows Server 2003 for that reason — and while Windows Server 2012 R2 offers a compatibility mode to run such applications, it’s not foolproof. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
An anonymous reader tips an Associated Press report saying that Healthcare.gov is sending users’ personal data to private companies. The information involved is typical ad-related analytic data: “…it can include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It can include a computer’s Internet address, which can identify a person’s name or address when combined with other information collected by sophisticated online marketing or advertising firms.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the report, saying that data is being sent from Healthcare.gov to at least 14 third-party domains. The EFF says, “Sending such personal information raises significant privacy concerns. A company like Doubleclick, for example, could match up the personal data provided by healthcare.gov with an already extensive trove of information about what you read online and what your buying preferences are to create an extremely detailed profile of exactly who you are and what your interests are. It could do all this based on a tracking cookie that it sets which would be the same across any site you visit. Based on this data, Doubleclick could start showing you smoking ads or infer your risk of cancer based on where you live, how old you are and your status as a smoker. Doubleclick might start to show you ads related to pregnancy, which could have embarrassing and potentially dangerous consequences such as when Target notified a woman’s family that she was pregnant before she even told them. ” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Taken from:
Healthcare.gov Sends Personal Data To Over a Dozen Tracking Websites
mi writes At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside. The device the Marshals Service and others are using, known as the Range-R, looks like a sophisticated stud-finder. Its display shows whether it has detected movement on the other side of a wall and, if so, how far away it is — but it does not show a picture of what’s happening inside. The Range-R’s maker, L-3 Communications, estimates it has sold about 200 devices to 50 law enforcement agencies at a cost of about $6, 000 each. Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities, including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is capable of being mounted on a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Continued here:
Police Nation-Wide Use Wall-Penetrating Radars To Peer Into Homes
Snow days can be nightmares for working parents. Some areas tend to need very little snow to cause a school closing, while in other areas schools don’t blink if there’s two feet of snow. Read more…
More:
This Map Shows the Amount of Snow It Takes to Cancel School
New submitter Solandri writes: When Mt. Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, it destroyed a library of classical works in Herculaneum. The papyrus scrolls weren’t incinerated, but were instead carbonized by the hot gases. The resulting black carbon cylinders have mostly withstood attempts to read their contents since their discovery. Earlier attempts to unfurl the scrolls yielded some readable material, but were judged too destructive. Researchers decided to wait for newer technology to be invented that could read the scrolls without unrolling them. Now, a team led by Dr. Vito Mocella from the National Research Council’s Institute for Microelectronics and Microsystems (CNR-IMM) in Naples, Italy has managed to read individual letters inside one of the scrolls. Using a form of x-ray phase contrast tomography (abstract), they were able to ascertain the height difference (about 0.1mm) between the ink of the letters and the papyrus fibers which they sat upon. Due to the fibrous nature of the papyrus and the carbon-based ink, regular spectral and chemical analysis had thus far been unable to distinguish the ink from the paper. Further complicating the work, the scrolls are not in neat cylinders, but squashed and ruffled as the hot gases vaporized water in the papyrus and distorted the paper. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read More:
Interior of Burnt Herculaneum Scroll Read For First Time
This is the amazing town of Epecuén . Once a booming resort city, it was drowned in 10 metres of water for 25 years after the dam protecting the town was destroyed. Only recently dried up, you can read more about the place in our photo essay from last year . [AP via New Scientist ] Read more…
View original post here:
This is the amazing town of Epecuén.