windows – Page 285 – Tech Today w/ Ken May

NetHack: Still One of the Greatest Games Ever Written

M-Saunders writes: While everyone obsesses about frame rates and polygon counts, there’s one game that hasn’t changed visually for decades. NetHack may look incredibly primitive today, but it’s still arguably the best game of all time, with an unmatched level of depth, creativity and replayability. Linux Voice looks at this fascinating dungeon romp, explaining what makes it great, how to get started with it, and how to discover some of its secrets. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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NetHack: Still One of the Greatest Games Ever Written

Windows Does Defragment SSDs, But It’s Okay

You’ve likely heard before that you should never defragment your SSD. Conventional wisdom says not only do solid state drives not need defragging, doing so would cause unnecessary writes to the drive. This is only partially true. In fact, Windows does sometimes defragment SSDs—on purpose. Read more…

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Windows Does Defragment SSDs, But It’s Okay

Windows 10 Adds Battery Saver Feature

jones_supa writes In past builds of Windows 10 Technical Preview there has been an interesting feature called Battery Saver, but for the time being it has been just a mockup. In a leaked build 9888, the code is now in place. Battery Saver, as the name implies, will help your mobile device make the most out of your battery. This feature works by limiting the background activity on your device when the mode is activated. You can turn the feature on any time but there is also a setting to have it automatically turn on when the battery capacity goes below a user-defined percentage. Considering that this build was not supposed to make its way out of Redmond and that the company is not releasing any new builds this year, this may be the best look we get until the Consumer Preview arrives. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Windows 10 Adds Battery Saver Feature

Chromebooks Overtake iPads In US Education Market

SmartAboutThings writes In Q3 2014, IDC notes that Google shipped 715, 500 Chromebooks to U.S. schools while Apple shipped 702, 000 iPads. Thus, Apple’s iPad has lost its lead over Google’s line of Chromebook laptops in the U.S. education market as Google shipped more devices to schools last quarter. While analysts say [registration required] that this advantage for Google’s Chromebooks can be attributed to their low cost, the presence of a physical keyboard has also been seen as an important factor. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chromebooks Overtake iPads In US Education Market

iOS 8.2 Has Been Jailbroken Before It’s Even Released

The 8.2 version of iOS is still in beta and unavailable to non-developers, but that hasn’t stopped Chinese-based outfit TaiG from breaking it free from Apple’s shackles (and also jailbreaking 8.1.1, the current release, in the process). Read more…

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iOS 8.2 Has Been Jailbroken Before It’s Even Released

According to The Verge, Microsoft is planning to unveil the consumer preview of Windows 10 at an eve

According to The Verge , Microsoft is planning to unveil the consumer preview of Windows 10 at an event in late January. We’ll apparently see new consumer features, including a touch interface, and get more news on Microsoft’s phone and tablet lines. [ The Verge ] Read more…

Download This Free Tool to See If the Government’s Spying on You

It’s been over a year-and-a-half since documents leaked by Edward Snowden shook our sense of privacy to the core . Those documents proved that government is spying on us pretty much all the time. And now that we know Congress isn’t going to do anything about it right away, it’s time to find the tools to protect yourself. Detekt is a good one . Read more…

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Download This Free Tool to See If the Government’s Spying on You

Microsoft Updates How The Surface Pro 3 Handles Wi-Fi

Microsoft released a set of updates for its Surface Pro 3 tablet today, including fixes for the tablet-hybrid’s Wi-Fi connectivity, a part of the device’s performance that some have flagged as problematic. I’ve had some Wi-Fi issues with my loaner Surface Pro 3, but haven’t been sure if they stem from Windows 10′s nascency, or the device itself. Paul Thurrott… Read More

Rooftop Solar Could Reach Price Parity In the US By 2016

Lucas123 writes: The cost of rooftop solar-powered electricity will be on par with prices of coal-powered energy and other conventional sources in all 50 U.S. states in just two years, a leap from today where PV energy has price parity in only 10 states, according to Deutsche Bank’s leading solar industry analyst. The sharp decline in solar energy costs is the result of increased economies of scale leading to cheaper photovoltaic panels, new leasing models and declining installation costs, Deutsche Bank’s Vishal Shah stated in a recent report. The cost of solar-generated electricity in the top 10 states for capacity ranges from 11-15 cents per kilowatt hour (c/kWh), compared to the retail electricity price of 11-37 c/kWh. Amit Ronen, a former Congressional staffer behind legislation that created an investment tax credit for solar installations, said one of the only impediments to decreasing solar electricity prices are fees proposed by utilities on customers who install solar and take advantage of net metering, or the ability to sell excess power back to utilities. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X

MojoKid (1002251) writes One of the disadvantages to buying an Apple system is that it generally means less upgrade flexibility than a system from a traditional PC OEM. Over the last few years, Apple has introduced features and adopted standards that made using third-party hardware progressively more difficult. Now, with OS X 10.10 Yosemite, the company has taken another step down the path towards total vendor lock-in and effectively disabled support for third-party SSDs. We say “effectively” because while third-party SSDs will still work, they’ll no longer perform the TRIM garbage collection command. Being able to perform TRIM and clean the SSD when its sitting idle is vital to keeping the drive at maximum performance. Without it, an SSD’s real world performance will steadily degrade over time. What Apple did with OS X 10.10 is introduce KEXT (Kernel EXTension) driver signing. KEXT signing means that at boot, the OS checks to ensure that all drivers are approved and enabled by Apple. It’s conceptually similar to the device driver checks that Windows performs at boot. However, with OS X, if a third-party SSD is detected, the OS will detect that a non-approved SSD is in use, and Yosemite will refuse to load the appropriate TRIM-enabled driver. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Apple Disables Trim Support On 3rd Party SSDs In OS X