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Submission + - Reexamining Windows ME: A brief look at what it got wrong, and what it got right 2

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: Released on September 14, 2000, Windows ME is beyond the memory of many computer users today but yet retains its place in computing history as a curious anomaly in the saga of Microsoft's Operation System releases, joining the ranks of other unfortunate Microsoft releases such as Windows Vista and Windows 8.

Windows ME was the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase. While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:

-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.

Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?

Submission + - Mystery Object Spotted On The Moon's Surface By Chinese Rover (msn.com)

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: A mystery object was recently observed on the lunar surface by the Yutu-2 moon rover. In the photo it appears as an cube-like object jutting slightly above the moon's horizon, about 80 meters away from the rover. In a Tweet by journalist Andrew Jones, he describes the discovery:

Ah. We have an update from Yutu-2 on the lunar far side, including an image of a cubic shape on the northern horizon ~80m away from the rover in Von Kármán crater. Referred to as "" ("mystery house"), the next 2-3 lunar days will be spent getting closer to check it out. pic.twitter.com/LWPZoWN05I

No, this probably isn't the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it will be interesting to see what is eventually revealed by the rover's investigations (probably a pile of rocks).

Comment Re:Oh, it's Serious Sam (Score 3) 60

by alaskana98 (#62051147) Attached to: After 25 Years, Quake 1 Gets Major 'Horde' Mode Update
I'm pretty sure Doom 1 did not have a TCP option for multiplayer. I believe it was all dial-up IPX/SPX. I remember how much of a pain it was to set up death matches on Doom 1 or Doom 2 as you had to pre-arrange the details such as who was going to be the caller and who the receiver, not to mention the network settings needed to make everything 'talk' so to speak. Quake revolutionized that whole process, IMO, in that it allowed TCP which made for fairly easy multiplayer match setups. You didn't have to worry about all the overhead in an IPS/SPX setup, you just needed your Internet connected and then choose multiplayer, find an open game and done.

Submission + - Oumuamua May Not Be A Frozen Nitrogen Chunk After All (livescience.com) 1

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: In the latest move in the war on who gets to define what exactly OuMuaMua is, Harvard astrophysicists Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb have countered the prevailing hypothesis that it is a frozen chunk of nitrogen with their own — that it is simply not possible:

"According to Siraj and his co-author, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, Jackson and Desch's conclusion that 'Oumuamua is a nitrogen iceberg is flawed because there isn't enough nitrogen in the universe to make an object like 'Oumuamua, which is somewhere between 1,300 and 2,600 feet (400 and 800 meters) long and between 115 and 548 feet (35 and 167 m) wide. Pure nitrogen is rare, Siraj said, and has been found only on Pluto, where it makes up about 0.5% of the total mass. Even if all of the nitrogen ice in the universe was scraped off every Pluto-like planet that's predicted to exist, there still wouldn't be enough nitrogen to make 'Oumuamua."

Although Oumuamua probably isn't some probe looking for humpbacked whales, it does continue to deliver plenty of intrigue — and controversy — for those astronomy buffs out there.

Submission + - Covid-19 Spike Protein Found to Disrupt DNA Repair (nih.gov) 1

Submitted by shaitand
shaitand writes: “Mechanistically we found that the spike protein localizes in the nucleus & inhibits DNA damage repair by impeding key DNA repair protein BRCA1 & 53BP1 recruitment to the damage site.” If confirmed this is very alarming. The mRNA vaccines being commonly distributed program healthy cells to produce this same spike protein.

Submission + - You shall not pinch to zoom: Rittenhouse trial judge disallows basic iPad featur (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Joe_Dragon
Joe_Dragon writes: When Kenosha County prosecutor Thomas Binger cross-examined murder suspect Kyle Rittenhouse yesterday, he wanted to show Rittenhouse video on an iPad and use a touchscreen feature that phone and tablet owners around the world use every day: pinch-to-zoom.

Judge Bruce Schroeder's ruling? You shall not pinch.

Schroeder prevented Binger from pinching and zooming after Rittenhouse's defense attorney Mark Richards claimed that when a user zooms in on a video, "Apple's iPad programming creat[es] what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there." Richards provided no evidence for this claim and admitted that he doesn't understand how the pinch-to-zoom feature works, but the judge decided the burden was on the prosecution to prove that zooming in doesn't add new images into the video.

When Binger proceeded with his cross-examination, he used a Windows PC connected to a TV instead of an iPad to display drone footage from August 25, 2020, the night of the fatal shootings in Wisconsin. While the TV screen seemed to provide an acceptable alternative to Binger's preferred method of zooming in on an iPad, Rittenhouse testified that he couldn't tell what was happening in the video in response to some of the prosecutor's questions.

You've likely already heard about this much-mocked incident at Kenosha County Circuit Court. In this article, you can read lengthy excerpts from the pinch-to-zoom discussion involving lead defense attorney Richards, Assistant District Attorney Binger, and Judge Schroeder. You can also watch this part of the trial on The Washington Post's YouTube channel. The discussion offers a glimpse into how criminal trials are affected by a judge's unfamiliarity with technology—even when that technology is a common consumer feature that's grasped intuitively by millions of people of all ages.

        Update on Friday, November 12 at 10:25 am ET: On Thursday, one day after the Wednesday events described in this article, the trial featured a separate debate about the use of an image that was enlarged by a state crime lab employee. Judge Schroeder eventually admitted the enlarged image into evidence "but Rittenhouse's defense attorney was also permitted to question the crime lab analyst about the software used to enlarge it with the jury present," according to an Associated Press article.

        "With all due respect to your honor, I think the defense is trying to take advantage of your lack of knowledge about technology," Kenosha County Assistant District Attorney James Kraus said. The AP notes that this disagreement over an enlarged image "came the day after Schroeder told prosecutors they would have to introduce an expert to prove that images taken from a drone were not distorted if they used the pinch-to-zoom function on an iPad to make them easier to see. Prosecutors opted to show the jury the footage as it was originally taken, with no zoom."

“I don’t think [zooming is] appropriate—it’s wrong”

The exchange on Wednesday began during cross-examination when Binger told Rittenhouse he was going to play the drone video and "use the pinch-and-zoom feature on the iPad to zoom in on the area." Richards interrupted Binger, saying, "Your honor, I'm going to object to this, and I'd like to be heard outside the presence of the jury."
Mark Richards, Kyle Rittenhouse's lead attorney, argues about Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger's line of questioning while cross-examining Kyle Rittenhouse on November 10, 2021.
Mark Richards, Kyle Rittenhouse's lead attorney, argues about Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger's line of questioning while cross-examining Kyle Rittenhouse on November 10, 2021.

After the jury left, Richards stated his objection:

        I don't know what the state's going to do next, but I suspect that it's something along the lines of... they're going to use the iPad, and Mr. Binger was talking about pinching the screen. iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three dimensions and logarithms.

Richards was apparently trying to say "algorithms." When asked to repeat himself, he called them "alogarithms" and added, "I don't understand it all, either." Richards then claimed that zooming in on an iPad screen adds things that aren't actually there into an image, and he asked the judge to disallow it:

        [The iPad] uses artificial intelligence or their logarithms to create what they believe is happening. So this isn't actually enhanced video; this is Apple's iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there. And I don't know what's going to happen, but we had this video enhanced, we had testimony regarding it, and this is one of the topics that came up. I asked my expert—I said, "Do you know of anything that does something like that?" Because that was when detective [Ben] Antaramian testified about pinching his telephone, and that's what I was told and that's where I think this is going, and I don't think it's appropriate—it's wrong.

Prosecutor: Pinch-to-zoom is like a magnifying glass
Kenosha County prosecutor Thomas Binger holds up his iPhone while arguing that pinch-to-zoom should be allowed when showing video during cross-examination in this screenshot from the Washington Post's livestream.
Kenosha County prosecutor Thomas Binger holds up his iPhone while arguing that pinch-to-zoom should be allowed when showing video during cross-examination in this screenshot from the Washington Post's livestream.
Washington Post

Binger responded that pretty much everyone who owns a smartphone has zoomed in on photos and videos and understands that doing so doesn't change the image in any fundamental way:

        I think everybody in this room has a smartphone, whether it's an Apple iPhone or some other device, and I think we've all taken a photograph or a video at one point or another and used the pinch-to-zoom feature. This is a common part of everyone's everyday life. In the olden days, you had a photograph and a magnifying glass, right? That doesn't change the photograph. When you use a magnifying glass to look at words on a paper or a photograph, the magnifying glass doesn't change the image. It doesn't change the pixels on a paper, it doesn't change the words in the book. All it does is make them easier to see. The pinch-to-zoom feature on the iPad or the iPhone or Android phone—whatever device everyone in this room has—does that exact same thing.

Binger then argued that the burden of proving that zooming should be disallowed is on the defense:

        Now if counsel has an expert who will say that this is unreliable or distorting the image or something along those lines—even though this is something everybody in this room has done with countless videos and photos through the last 10 years of our lives here; this is a feature of everyday life in America now with smartphones—if they want to have an expert come in and say it's unreliable and you can't believe what's on that screen, they can do that, and then the jury can make a decision as to whether or not pinching and zooming on an iPad or an iPhone is tampering with the video or altering the image or [is] unreliable or shouldn't be given any weight. If they want to make a jury question out of this, they are free to do so.

        I don't frankly understand or agree with anything counsel [Richards] just said. I've used my phone, I think probably you have, too; this is something within everyone's common knowledge to pinch and zoom on a screen, and that's what's going on here. It does not change the image in any way.

Judge: “I know less than anyone in the room about all of this stuff”
Kyle Rittenhouse watches video of himself from the night of the shootings during cross-examination at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 10, 2021, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Kyle Rittenhouse watches video of himself from the night of the shootings during cross-examination at the Kenosha County Courthouse on November 10, 2021, in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Getty Images | Pool

It quickly became clear that Judge Schroeder thought the prosecution must prove that zooming in doesn't insert new pixels and alter objects in the video.

Schroeder said:

        Well, I don't know. When I put the magnifying glass up, it's enlarging the image, it is not altering the image. What [the defense attorney is] saying, I think, and I know less than anyone in the room, I'm sure, about all of this stuff, but I'm hearing him to say that they are actually artificially inserting pixels into there, which is altering the object which is being portrayed.

        You know what, myself, when confronted with these changes in technology, what I usually do is to admit the evidence but make sure that the finder of fact is aware of the fact that it is not the original image and the method by which it's been enhanced. You're suggesting that I should make the defense bring in an expert for it. My thought would be that actually you're the one who's offering the exhibit, so you should be in a position to offer evidence as to the fact that it is not distorting the object which is depicted.

Binger protested that the court could simply use "common sense," but the judge insisted that zooming in on a video could "insert more items." Schroeder said:

        I thought I heard the expert say on the stand, and believe me again, this is not something I'm familiar with, but I thought I heard the expert say that you brought down in from the crime lab that in fact there were alterations made by adding pixels. That's an alteration of the image. I don't have any problem with it being received but you're going to have to have someone testify that it's a reliable... I don't want to say "mirror image," but because obviously if you insert more items into an area of space, it's going to distort what's depicted.

Prosecutor: Zooming and editing are totally different

The expert witness the judge referred to had testified about using video-editing software, not about zooming in on an unaltered video, Binger explained later in this discussion:

        He talked about what that software program does. He was not talking about the common, ordinary, everyday pinch-to-zoom feature on the Apple [device]. They are two different things, your honor. I want to be precise about this because I don't think it's fair to equate the technical video editing software used by a crime lab with pinching and zooming on an iPhone. They are different software programs, different procedures, and I don't think it's fair to extrapolate this. Every one of those jurors is familiar with that process, this is a fundamental part of our lives. It's much like 100 years ago, people used magnifying glasses. This is no different from that. This is common knowledge, and I don't think I need any sort of expertise on this issue.

The judge referred to that expert witness several times, as if the testimony about video-editing software was relevant to zooming in on a video. "Correct me if I'm wrong, I do believe the expert testified that he had inserted additional pixels into the image," Schroeder said in one of those instances.

"It's a different program, your honor," Binger replied.

"I don't know what kind of a... I don't care what kind of a program it is. The question is 'Is the image in its virginal state?'" Schroeder said.

Binger replied:

        I care about what program it is, your honor, because these are technical issues. Mr. Richards has just made technical representations with no basis in this record whatsoever. He is questioning a common part of life that everyone uses every single day. The expert who testified was talking about a different software program, and it does make a difference.

"I don't know," the judge replied. "You're the proponent, and you need to assure me before I let the jury speculate on it that it is a reliable method that does not distort what is depicted."

Judge: “Tell me where I’m wrong”

At another point, the judge told Binger that he wouldn't accept what either lawyer said as accurate, and Richards argued that zooming in on a video creates an "enhanced" version that hadn't yet been admitted into evidence:

        Judge Schroeder: "I'm not going to accept as accurate what Richards is saying, and I'm not going to accept what you're telling me. I said if you can offer somebody who is knowledgeable in these areas, I think you should be allowed to use the image. This is high-risk. To me, if you insert more data into an area of space... well, you're wagging your head, 'no'—tell me where I'm wrong."

        Binger: "There's no proof in this record that we're doing that, your honor."

        Judge Schroeder: "I didn't say there was proof of it. I said you have the burden of proof, you're the proponent of the exhibit, and you need to tell me that it's reliable."

        Binger: "The exhibit is already in evidence, your honor."

        Judge Schroeder: "That I know."

        Richards: "The enhanced exhibit is not in evidence."

        Binger: "This is not enhanced."

        Judge Schroeder: "Then why show it? The reason you want to show it is because it enhances the image, right?"

Binger then pointed out that "the defense has taken videos and photos and cropped them and zoomed in on them on many exhibits in this trial."

"We had a guy coming in yesterday with Walgreens prints. This is what is done with photographs all the time, there's enlargements done in the lab. It doesn't change the pixels," Binger said.
Judge: No pinching without expert testimony

Schroeder responded that Binger hadn't objected to those previous exhibits, so there was nothing for him to rule on. But with the zoomed-in video, "I've got an objection in front of me now," Schroeder said. "He's suggesting that amplifying the image is altering the image that is portrayed and you're giving me as a defense: 'It's no different from using a magnifying glass.' I don't believe that."

Schroeder announced a recess as the discussion wrapped up. He said he would not allow Binger to "amplify" the video—meaning, zoom in on the video—unless he got an expert to testify that doing so wouldn't alter the video. "Before I'm going to allow this to be amplified in the way that you want, it is going to have to be shown, demonstrated to me that it's a reliable way to do it," Schroeder said.

Binger pleaded for time to find an expert, saying, "Before I am done with my cross-examination of this witness, I would like to use this video, and I am going to need some time to make arrangements."

"Why don't you get on it right away, and maybe you can get somebody to testify on this within minutes, I don't know," Schroeder replied.
Rittenhouse on the stand: “I can’t see it”
Drone footage shown during the Kyle Rittenhouse cross-examination, as seen in a screenshot from the Washington Post's livestream.
Drone footage shown during the Kyle Rittenhouse cross-examination, as seen in a screenshot from the Washington Post's livestream.
Washington Post

After the recess, Binger cross-examined Rittenhouse and displayed the drone video on a 4K TV hooked up to a Windows computer:

        Binger: "Mr. Rittenhouse, you told us earlier everything that you did when you first got to this location, correct?"

        Rittenhouse: "Yes."

        Binger: "What you didn't tell us is that right here on the video, you have your gun raised. Don't you?"

        Rittenhouse: "I can't see it."

Binger then said, "You know what, this is a nice 4K TV—I'm going to turn it a little bit toward you." Binger showed him the video again, with Rittenhouse still replying that he couldn't tell what the video showed:

        Binger: "Mr. Rittenhouse, can you see in that video that you raised your weapon and pointed it at someone?"

        Rittenhouse: "I can't tell."

        Binger: "Let's play it one more time."

        Richards: "Your honor, he's answered the question."

        Binger: "Well, he says he can't see it, so I'm trying to help him see."

After another viewing, Rittenhouse said, "It doesn't look like I raised my rifle. It looks like my shoulder is up and my rifle is pointed downward."

Cross-examination continued, with Binger playing more footage for Rittenhouse and asking the defendant questions about what appeared in the video. The prosecutor did not pinch or zoom in.

Submission + - The Man Behind The 'Tic-Tac' UFO Videos Claim They've Been Here Since The 1950s

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: In a recent GQ magazine interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)’, he claims that the much publicized 'Tic-Tac' UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been flying in our skies for many decades:

“I have in my possession official US government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory."

He then goes on to state that he's even heard from pilots who sufferered real-world health issues as a consequence of getting to close to the objects:

"I’ve got to be careful, I can’t speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, “Lue, it’s really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days.” Well, that’s a sign of radiation. That’s not a sunburn; it’s a radiation burn." Perhaps most bizarre is a revelation that those who got closest to the UAPs experienced a form of time dilation: "“You know, Lue, it’s really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes’ worth of fuel. How is that possible?” Well, there’s a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment."

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — but if these claims can be corroborated with evidence it would suggest that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg in terms of information that has yet to be revealed on these things. Perhaps the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) will drive future efforts to get a better idea of what this phenomenon actually is.

Submission + - SPAM: Luis Elizondo Claims 'Tic-Tac' UAPs Have Been Visiting Us Since The 1950s

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: In a recent GQ interview with Luis Elizondo, the former head of the Department of Defense’s ‘Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP)’, he claims that the much publicized 'Tic-Tac ' UAPs observed by the U.S. Navy have been plying our skies for many decades:

"“I have in my possession official US government documentation that describes the exact same vehicle that we now call the Tic Tac [seen by the Nimitz pilots in 2004] being described in the early 1950s and early 1960s and performing in ways that, frankly, can outperform anything we have in our inventory."

He then goes on to state that he's even heard from pilots who sufferered real-world health issues as a consequence of getting to close to the objects:

"I’ve got to be careful, I can’t speak too specifically, but one might imagine that you get a report from a pilot who says, “Lue, it’s really weird. I was flying and I got close to this thing and I came back home and it was like I got a sunburn. I was red for four days.” Well, that’s a sign of radiation. That’s not a sunburn; it’s a radiation burn."

Perhaps most bizarre is a revelation that those who got closest to the UAPs experienced a form of time dilation:

"“You know, Lue, it’s really bizarre. It felt like I was there for only five minutes, but when I looked at my watch 30 minutes went by, but I only used five minutes’ worth of fuel. How is that possible?” Well, there’s a reason for that, we believe, and it probably has to do with warping of space time. And the closer you get to one of these vehicles, the more you may begin to experience space time relative to the vehicle and the environment."

As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but there is no doubt that Luis, who remains a contractor of the U.S. Government, has done more to 'mainstream' the discussion of UAPs and their potential threat to our national security than perhaps anyone else in the history of the topic, and without his activism it is unlikely the The Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force (UAPTF) would have been formed to investigate this phenomenon.


Link to Original Source

Submission + - Star System With Right-Angled Planets Surprises Astronomers (nytimes.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Star systems come in all shapes and sizes. Some have lots of planets, some have larger planets and others have no planets at all. But a particularly unusual system about 150 light-years from our own has scientists scratching their heads.

In 2016, astronomers discovered two planets orbiting the star HD 3167. They were thought to be super-Earths — between Earth and Neptune in size — and circled the star every one and 30 days. A third planet was found in the system in 2017, orbiting in about eight days.

What’s unusual is the inclinations of the outer two planets, HD 3167 c and d. Whereas in our solar system all the planets orbit in the same flat plane around the sun, these two are in polar orbits. That is, they go above and below their star’s poles, rather than around the equator as Earth and the other planets in our system do.

Now scientists have discovered the system is even weirder than they thought. Researchers measured the orbit of the innermost planet, HD 3167 b, for the first time — and it doesn’t match the other two. It instead orbits in the star’s flat plane, like planets in our solar system, and perpendicular to HD 3167 c and d. This star system is the first one known to act like this.

Submission + - Charlie Red Star: The Time A UFO Terrorized A Small Canadian Farming Community (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by alaskana98
alaskana98 writes: In one of the most prolific yet still relatively unknown Canadian UFO cases, a bright red UFO nicknamed 'Charlie Red Star' swooped in on the Pembina region of Manitoba, Canada to delight its spectators — or terrify. In one of the first reported sightings:

"a young girl was woken in the middle of the night by a piercing screaming noise outside that sounded sort of like a siren. As she sat there in her bed, she claimed that the whole house began to shudder as if an earthquake was happening and she rushed to the window to look outside. As she did, she claimed that she had seen a blazing red ball of light pass her window, flooding the room with light and emanating so much heat that she at first thought that it had set her home ablaze. As it rose up it passed over the house and then flew back in front of her, hovering there in the night and so bright that she would describe it as “looking like the Sun was coming up” before finally whizzing off into the distance, illuminating the ground along the way."

The sightings would only grow from here throughout 1975 into 1976:

"The following month, on April 10, 1975, a couple by the names of Bob and Elaine Diemert were out at a private airfield on their rural farmland property when they were startled to see a large red slow-moving light hovering over the tree line not far away. When they approached, they could see through the light that it was a disk shaped object with a dome attached. The object hovered there for about 5 minutes, immersed in a “red, pulsing light,” before flying straight at them and then suddenly veering off to fly off over the tree tops. After this, the mysterious object began to visit their farm on a nearly nightly basis, to the point that droves of curiosity seekers began showing up every evening to see the light show for themselves, with most witnesses describing it as playful and mischievous. Hovering over them, shooting back and forth, approaching observers, and repeatedly flying over their heads in a breathtaking display of aerial acrobatics, it was quite the sight to behold. It was at around this time that people began referring to the object as “Charlie Red Star,” delighting whole crowds of people. A Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Constable by the name of Ian Nicholson also came to the Diemert farm to see the object for himself, describing it as “as an oval red light, surrounded with an X-shaped white halo."

Charlie Red Star would eventually be filmed — albeit briefly — by a Canadian news crew. Sightings of Charlie Red Star would diminish and eventually fade away in 1976 but this remains one of the most well documented — and witnessed — UFO events in Canadian history.

Submission + - Man's picture used for 2 years to illustrate Wikipedia article on serial killer (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by Andreas Kolbe
Andreas Kolbe writes: For more than two years, Wikipedia illustrated its article on New York serial killer Nathaniel White with the police photo of an African-American man from Florida who happened to have the same name. A Wikipedia user said he had found the picture on crimefeed.com, a "true crime" site associated with the Discovery Channel, which also used the same photo in a TV broadcast on the serial killer. During the two-and-a-half years the Wikipedia article showed the picture of the wrong man, it was viewed over 125,000 times, including nearly 12,000 times on the day the TV program ran. The man whose picture was used said he received threats to his person from people who assumed he really was the killer, and took to dressing incognito. His picture is now all over Google when people search for the serial killer.

Submission + - Intel's Alder Lake Reviewed: 12th Gen Core Processors Bring Fight Back To AMD (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: After months of speculation and early look teases, Intel's 12th Gen Core processors are finally ready for prime time. Today marks the embargo lift for independent reviews of Alder Lake and it's clear Chipzilla is back and bringing the fight again versus chief rival AMD. Intel 12th Gen Core processors incorporate two new CPU core designs, dubbed Efficiency (E-core) and Performance (P-core). In addition to this new hybrid core architecture, 12th Gen Core processors and the Z690 motherboard chipset platform also feature support for the latest memory and IO technologies, including PCI Express Gen 5, DDR5, Thunderbolt 4 and Wi-Fi 6E. The new Core i9-12900K features a monolithic, 16-core (24-thread) die with 8 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores, while the Core i5-12600K has 10 cores / 16-threads, comprised of 6 P-cores and 4 E-cores. Alder Lake E-cores don't support HyperThreading but P-cores can process two threads simultaneously while E-cores can manage only one, hence the asymmetric core counts. In the benchmarks, the 16-core Core i9-12900K doesn't sweep AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X across the board in multi-threaded tests, but it certainly competes very well and notches plenty of victories. In the lightly-threaded tests though, it's a much clearer win for Intel and gaming is an obvious strong point as well. Alder Lake's performance cores are as fast as they come. The $589 (MSRP) 16-core Core i9-12900K competes well with the $750 16-core Ryzen 9 5950X, and the $289 10-core Core i5-12600K has a lower MSRP than a $299 6-core Ryzen 5 5600X. The new Core i5's power and performance look great too, especially when you consider this $289 chip outruns Intel's previous-gen flagship Core i9-11900K more often than not, and it smokes a Ryzen 5 5600X.

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