Microsoft has changed its approach to developing in recent years. Instead of launching major new revisions of the OS that require paid updates, it just keeps rolling out changes to Windows 10. It has, on occasion, released features before they were ready. Today, Microsoft accidentally released an internal build of Windows 10 publicly, and it features a completely redesigned Start menu. Microsoft’s Start menu machinations have been a bone of contention for years. Starting in Windows 8, the company tried to modernize the OS by removing the button. It also changed the menu to a full-screen UI that made more sense for touchscreens than desktops.
There’s a long-standing, good-natured feud between the different gaming factions on the internet. The console people bicker over who has the best exclusives, but all of them can unite against the PC gamers. A new project from custom PC builder Origin could bring everyone together in awe — the Big O has all three current-gen consoles and a in a single box. You can’t buy it, but it really is a thing to behold. Origin says it built the Big O to celebrate 10 years in business. When it launched, the company created another custom Big O machine that featured a gaming PC and an Xbox 360.
If you’ve ever wondered how different marsquakes are from earthquakes, we now have the answer thanks to NASA and Swiss research university ETH Zurich. NASA delivered the first-ever seismometer to the red planet aboard the InSight lander last year, and it’s now deployed and sending back data. Researchers from ETH Zurich have used that data to here on Earth, and it’s not what anyone expected. InSight touched down on Mars back in November of 2018. The robotic lander’s goal is to study the interior of Mars, which has not been possible with past missions like Curiosity. Among InSight’s instruments is the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS).
Today you can live the dream of building a home theater with an enormous 86-inch 4K TV that’s marked more than half off its original retail price. There are also some excellent deals on high-end gaming PCs. This enormous TV features an 86-inch display panel with a 4K resolution and HDR support. With a screen this size, you can live the dream of turning a room of your house into your own personal home theater. It also supports Google’s Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa AI programs built-in and it is able to accept voice commands. The price for this champion among TVs is rather high usually at $4,497.00, but if you buy one from Dell right now you can also get it for $1,1997.00 and it comes with a $300 Dell gift card to help take the sting off the price a bit.
One of the most popular image editing “tricks” is swapping out the sky in a photograph. While not appropriate for documentary images, it can make quite a bit of difference to whether an image is so-so or appears amazing (“appears” because, of course, it isn’t strictly a photograph at that point). Originally the process for swapping out the sky in a digital or digitized image involved using layers in Photoshop and carefully painting a mask. More recently, we’ve seen smarter masking tools to help with the job. Now, Skylum says it has created a simple, one-click, AI-powered, sky replacement filter that the company will unveil as part of its upcoming Luminar 4 release.
The GPU market has changed a good deal over the past month, courtesy of AMD’s Navi launch and Nvidia’s response to it. As soon as AMD announced the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT at $379 and $500, Nvidia declared it was launching a new family of RTX “Super” cards. These Turing refreshes for the RTX 2060 and RTX 2070 have the performance of both of those cards. In response, AMD cut its own GPU pricing, repositioning the 5700 and 5700 XT at $350 and $400. Now, we have the RTX 2080 Super arriving, with a smaller improvement at the top-end than Nvidia has already introduced with the RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070 Super.
If you’re still relying on external, physical hard drives to backup your data, you’re missing out. Cloud backup services have come a long way since their humble inception, and it’s now possible to safely and conveniently backup everything from small files to entire hard drives online. is an award-winning service that offers unparalleled access and speed, and a 10TB plan is currently available for over 95% off at just $99.99. Also available in , , and configurations, this service allows you to quickly and easily backup your files in a super-secure cloud platform. You’ll be able to backup up to 10TB of data using next-generation 256-bit encryption, perform backups on all of your devices at once, send files to friends and family via email or a link, and more.
Google has shown off some wildly futuristic technologies at its annual I/O gathering, but most of them have faded into obscurity without ever appearing in a consumer product. The Project Soli gesture control system has been pie-in-the-sky since its debut in 2015, but a report several months back confirmed Google was still working on the tech. Now, a new leak suggests it , PCMag reports. Soli originated with the Advanced Technology and Projects (ATAP) group, which Google kept when it sold off the rest of Motorola to Lenovo a couple of years back. ATAP is responsible for interesting but ultimately useless technologies like Jacquard touch fabric, Ara modular phones, and Tango 3D computer vision.
One of the first things we learn about computers is that they perform operations using binary code to represent values. It’s a fundamental trait of computing — but it’s not a requirement. It’s possible to build a computer that uses three discrete values for computing rather than just two. “Ternary” is the term for this, though you’ll sometimes see “trinary” used instead. South Korean researchers backed by Samsung have created such a device and demonstrated it can be built using conventional CMOS manufacturing. There are several different types of ternary computers. A ternary computer may use unbalanced trinary {0,1,2}, fractional unbalanced trinary {0, 1/2, 1}, balanced trinary {-1,0,1}, unknown state logic {F,?,T} or trinary coded binary {T,F,T}.
