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Windows

Microsoft Reveals Windows 10 Will Be a Free Upgrade 570

Posted by samzenpus from the try-it-free dept.
mpicpp was one of many to point out this bit of news about Windows 10."Microsoft just took another big step toward the release of Windows 10 and revealed it will be free for many current Windows users. The company unveiled the Windows 10 consumer preview on Wednesday, showcasing some of the new features in the latest version of the operating system that powers the vast majority of the world's desktop PCs. The developer preview has been available since Microsoft first announced Windows 10 in the fall, but it was buggy, limited in scope and very light on new features. Importantly, Windows 10 will be free for existing Windows users running versions of Windows back to Windows 7. That includes Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and Windows Phone. Microsoft specified it would only be free for the first year, indicating Windows would be software that users subscribe to, rather than buy outright. Microsoft Corporate Vice President of the Operating Systems Group Joe Belfiore showed off some of the new features in Windows 10. While Microsoft had already announced it would bring back the much-missed Start Menu, Belfiore revealed it would also have a full-screen mode that includes more of the Windows 8 Start screen. He said Windows machines would go back and forth between to two menus in a way that wouldn't confuse people. Belfiore also showed a new notification center for Windows, which puts a user's notifications in an Action Center menu that can appear along the right side, similar to how notifications work in Apple OS X. Microsoft Executive Vice President of Operating Systems Terry Myerson revealed that 1.7 million people had downloaded the Windows 10 developer preview, giving Microsoft over 800,000 individual piece of feedback. Myerson explained that Windows 10 has several main intents: the give users a mobility of experience from device to device, instill a sense of trust in users, and provide the most natural ways to interact with devices." More details are available directly from Microsoft.
Security

DARPA Training Cadets and Midshipmen As Cyber Warriors 65

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the reverse-engineering-is-acrime dept.
An anonymous reader writes "DARPA officials say the Defense Department must train 4,000 cybersecurity experts by 2017. Meeting that goal requires building a pipeline for training and education, especially for future officers who'll oversee protection of the cyber domain. During a winter weekend in Pittsburgh, more than 50 cadets and midshipmen from three service academies sat elbow to elbow at nine round tables in a packed room. They'd been training since November to compete in a pilot program of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency called the Service Academy Cyber Stakes. From the article: 'This involves skills such as being able to reverse engineer binary, or machine-readable, files and, Ragsdale said, finding source-code-level vulnerabilities that could be exploited, and doing so with software source-level analysis and with automated tools that perform functions such as fuzzing, the informal name for automatic bug finding."
The Internet

FCC Chair: It's Ok For ISPs To Discriminate Traffic 365

Posted by Soulskill from the pay-per-bit dept.
sl4shd0rk writes "Remember when the ex-cable lobbyist Tom Wheeler was appointed to the FCC chair back in May of 2013? Turns out he's currently gunning for Internet Service Providers to be able to 'favor some traffic over other traffic.' It would set a dangerous precedent, considering the Open Internet Order in 2010 forbade such action if it fell under unreasonable discrimination. The bendy interpretation of the 2010 order is apparently aimed somewhat at Netflix, as Wheeler stated: 'Netflix might say, "I'll pay in order to make sure that my subscriber might receive the best possible transmission of this movie."'"
The Almighty Buck

Square Is Discontinuing Monthly Pricing On February 1, 2014 114

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the something-about-being-easier dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Mobile payment startup Square has decided to discontinue its monthly pricing option on February 1, 2014. The company says it does not plan to reinstate monthly pricing at any point. If you are currently enrolled in monthly pricing, Square will give you "a grace period" through the end of January 2014, after which the per-swipe rate will apply to transactions. On January 2, monthly pricing subscribers will be billed their last monthly fee, which will cover the rest of the month."
Classic Games (Games)

Boot To Zork 106

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the you-have-been-eaten-by-a-grue dept.
Seemingly to inflict more suffering upon himself, Matthew Garrett (lord of getting things to boot using EFI) decided that booting directly into Zork would be cool. Quoting his weblog entry: "So, Frotz seemed like the natural choice when this happened. But despite having a set of functionality that makes it look much more like an OS than a boot environment, UEFI doesn't actually expose a standard C library. The EFI Application Development Kit solves this particular design decision. Porting Frotz ended up involving far more fixing up of Frotz bugs that tripped up -Werror than anything else. One note, though - make sure you include DevShell in the list of required packages at build time, otherwise file i/o will mysteriously fail." Grab the code, assuming you have a copy of Zork (or any other Z-machine game, as long as you name it ZORK1.DAT, I think).
Twitter

Vine Launches On Android 33

Posted by samzenpus from the check-it-out dept.
Dawn Kawamoto writes "Twitter's free social media video app Vine is now on Android. But while the app rocked on the iOS platform, especially among teens, its move to Android has...dare I say...been a bit of a tangled mess. It launched on Google play without the capability for the two apps to sync, nor does it have such features as front-facing camera, search, mentions and hashtags. Another biggie is it doesn't yet allow users to post their six-second videos to Facebook. Vine says it's working on these features and all should be good soon. For now, however, a swing on the vine may not be a robust experience."
Government

DARPA Tackles Machine Learning 95

Posted by samzenpus from the learn-faster dept.
coondoggie writes "Researchers at DARPA want to take the science of machine learning — teaching computers to automatically understand data, manage results and surmise insights — up a couple notches. Machine learning, DARPA says, is already at the heart of many cutting edge technologies today, like email spam filters, smartphone personal assistants and self-driving cars. 'Unfortunately, even as the demand for these capabilities is accelerating, every new application requires a Herculean effort. Even a team of specially-trained machine learning experts makes only painfully slow progress due to the lack of tools to build these systems,' DARPA says."

Comment I doubt it (Score 2) 393

by Tyrion Moath (#42942543) Attached to: The End Is Near for GameStop

I'm not an insider or anything, but they seem to be pretty quick on their feet to adjust to the market. They're still going to sell new games and used games for PS3/360 for quite a while even after PS4/720 come out. They're also selling cards for your steam wallet and MS points etc. Probably still in the used system market as well, not to mention the nice margin on off brand controllers. If the end is coming, it'll still be a while yet.
Technology

Are There Any Real Inventors Left? 417

Posted by Soulskill from the self-sealing-stembolt dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC is running a story about invention and innovation, suggesting that there have been no truly new inventions in a long time. 'Consumers are presented with an "invention illusion," which is really little more than a marketing tool to give the impression of "breakthrough" products. This is a difficult cycle to break, particularly with the media's appetite for sensational stories, and it is hampering opportunities for credible companies without sexy stories. It also means that many entrepreneurs are looking for innovation in the wrong places and pursuing new product design ineffectively.' It leads to the question: what are the most recent things you can think of that have been actual, new inventions? Or has the high-tech revolution just been iterative innovation?"
Science

"Superomniphobic" Nanoscale Coating Repels Almost Any Liquid 104

Posted by samzenpus from the keeping-it-dry dept.
cylonlover writes "A team of engineering researchers at the University of Michigan has developed a nanoscale coating that causes almost all liquids to bounce off surfaces treated with it. Creating a surface structure that is least 95 percent air, the new 'superomniphobic' coating is claimed to repel the broadest range of liquids of any material in its class, opening up the possibility of super stain-resistant clothing, drag-reducing waterproof paints for ship hulls, breathable garments that provide protection from harmful chemicals, and touchscreens resistant to fingerprint smudges."

Comment Re:Some Steam titles will play on Piston (Score 1) 328

by Tyrion Moath (#42524923) Attached to: Valve's SteamBox Gets a Name and an Early Demo at CES

... or CCP port EVE?

Don't know about the others you listed, but EVE runs fine on WINE from what I understand. There's even a section on the official forums for Linux users: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=topics&f=274

Don't count on them making an official executable for it, however.
Government

Postal Service Pilots 'Federal Cloud Credential Exchange' 54

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the trading-krbtgts dept.
CowboyRobot writes with news about a federal initiative to support federated authentication for government services. From the article: "The U.S. Postal Service will be the guinea pig for a White House-led effort to accelerate government adoption of technologies that allow federal agencies to accept third-party identity credentials for online services. The program involves using services ... through standards like OpenID rather than requiring users to create government usernames and passwords. ... The federated identity effort, known as the Federal Cloud Credential Exchange, is just one piece of a broader Obama administration online identity initiative: the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC), which aims to catalyze private sector-led development of a secure, digital 'identity ecosystem' to better protect identities online. ... The Postal Service pilot is but one of several different pilots that are part of NSTIC. There are also three cryptography pilots and two non-cryptographic privacy pilots in the works. Each of those pilots is being carried out by multiple private sector organizations ranging from the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles to AOL to AARP to Aetna."
Canada

Canada Creates Cap On Liability For File Sharing Lawsuits 208

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the mpaa-ground-troops-reported-in-toronto dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over the past couple of days, there have been reports about the return of file sharing lawsuits to Canada, with fears that thousands of Canadians could be targeted. While it is possible that many will receive demand letters, Michael Geist has posted a detailed primer on liability in Canada that notes that recent changes to Canadian copyright law limit liability in non-commercial cases to a maximum of $5,000 for all infringement claims. In fact, it is likely that a court would award far less — perhaps as little as $100 — if the case went to court as even the government's FAQ on the recent copyright reform bill provided assurances that Canadians 'will not face disproportionate penalties for minor infringements of copyright by distinguishing between commercial and non-commercial infringement.'"

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