Monthly Archives: June 2017

Raspberry Pi Wins UK's Top Engineering Award

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An anonymous reader shares a BBC report: The team behind the device was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s MacRobert Prize at a ceremony in London last night. The tiny computer launched in 2012. Its designers hoped to introduce children to coding and had modest ambitions. They beat two other finalists, cyber-security company Darktrace and radiotherapy pioneers Vision RT, to win the prize. Previous winners of the innovation award, which has been run since 1969, include the creators of the CT (computerised tomography) scanner; the designers of the Severn Bridge; and the team at Microsoft in Cambridge that developed the Kinect motion sensor.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Raspberry Pi Wins UK’s Top Engineering Award

I'm Glad Microsoft Cancelled This Surface Mini

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Look at that chunky monkey above. You might be inclined to think that’s a photoshopped iPad Mini in a really thick case. But you are wrong. The photo above is supposedly a picture of Microsoft’s Surface Mini—a Windows tablet that Microsoft reportedly axed just days before its expected announcement in 2014.

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Source: Gizmodo – I’m Glad Microsoft Cancelled This Surface Mini

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs

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This is a fairly long read, and the first half of it is relegated to describing the repetitive and seemingly meaningless gameplay in Mass Effect: Andromeda, however once you are past that, it gets into some very interesting discussion about young low-skilled men in society. The gist is that a bunch of twenty-something guys are wasting their 20s sitting around playing video games and that when they get into their 30s and 40s, it will have substantially effed up their lives. The article however goes much much deeper than that and touches on a lot of political and social elements that surround this phenomenon, and they do tie it all back into “real” gaming. And just a reminder, if you want to be violently forced out of gaming…again…Daikatana is on sale.



Eventually I quit playing. I already have a job, and though I enjoy it quite a bit, I didn’t feel as if I needed another one.

But what about those who aren’t employed? It’s easy to imagine a game like Andromeda taking the place of work.

The economy has rebounded since the great recession, and national unemployment now sits below 5 percent. But that figure only counts people who are actively seeking work. Even as the unemployment rate has dropped, labor force participation—the number of people who either work or want to work—has dwindled. In particular, young men without college degrees have become increasingly detached from the labor market. And what they appear to be doing instead is playing video games.

In 2000, just 35 percent of lower-skilled young men lived with family. Now a slight majority of lower-skilled young men reside with their parents, whether they’re employed or not. For those who lack employment, the figure is 70 percent. The vast majority of low-skilled young men-roughly 90 percent-have not built families. “If you’re not working, as a man in your 20s with less than a bachelor’s degree, you’re pretty much single and childless,” Hurst said last year on the podcast EconTalk.

Yet this group reports far higher levels of overall happiness than low-skilled young men from the turn of the 21st century. In contrast, self-reported happiness for older workers without college degrees fell during the same period. For low-skilled young women and men with college degrees, it stayed basically the same. A significant part of the difference comes down to what Hurst has called “innovations in leisure computer activities for young men.”

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs

This Dance Video Is Seriously Freaking Me Out

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Don’t waste your time trying to make sense of director Kouhei Nakama’s music video for Broke For Free’s Hella, because hyper-realistic action figures breaking apart and randomly exploding into hundreds of doppelgangers isn’t meant to be a understood. It’s eye candy for the sake of eye candy, with a sick beat tossed in…

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Source: Gizmodo – This Dance Video Is Seriously Freaking Me Out

Iranian City Soars To Record 129F Degrees: Near Hottest On Earth in Modern Measurements

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A city in southwest Iran posted the country’s hottest temperature ever recorded Thursday afternoon, and may have tied the world record for the most extreme high temperature. From a report on The Washington Post: Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at French meteorological agency MeteoFrance, posted to Twitter that the city of Ahvaz soared to “53.7C” (128.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Kapikian said the temperature is a “new absolute national record of reliable Iranian heat” (alternative, non-paywalled source) and that it was the hottest temperature ever recorded in June over mainland Asia. Iran’s previous hottest temperature was 127.4. Weather Underground’s website indicates the temperature in Ahvaz climbed even higher, hitting 129.2 degrees at both 4:51 and 5 p.m. local time. If that 129.2 degrees reading is accurate, it would arguably tie the hottest temperature ever measured on Earth in modern times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Iranian City Soars To Record 129F Degrees: Near Hottest On Earth in Modern Measurements

Iranian City Soars To Record 129 Degrees: Near Hottest On Earth in Modern Measurements

Posted on by

A city in southwest Iran posted the country’s hottest temperature ever recorded Thursday afternoon, and may have tied the world record for the most extreme high temperature. From a report on The Washington Post: Etienne Kapikian, a forecaster at French meteorological agency MeteoFrance, posted to Twitter that the city of Ahvaz soared to “53.7C” (128.7 degrees Fahrenheit). Kapikian said the temperature is a “new absolute national record of reliable Iranian heat” (alternative, non-paywalled source) and that it was the hottest temperature ever recorded in June over mainland Asia. Iran’s previous hottest temperature was 127.4. Weather Underground’s website indicates the temperature in Ahvaz climbed even higher, hitting 129.2 degrees at both 4:51 and 5 p.m. local time. If that 129.2 degrees reading is accurate, it would arguably tie the hottest temperature ever measured on Earth in modern times.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Iranian City Soars To Record 129 Degrees: Near Hottest On Earth in Modern Measurements

No evidence NotPetya developers obtained NSA exploits weeks before their public leak

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Source: Ars Technica – No evidence NotPetya developers obtained NSA exploits weeks before their public leak

Windows Defender Application Guard to Use Virtualized Environment

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There are a lot of HardOCP readers that know the value of a virtual machine running on your desktop when it comes to security and now Microsoft seems to be following suit. In an upcoming version of Windows we will be seeing Microsoft isolate its Edge browser in a Hyper V container. This is essentially Microsoft running a virtualized operating environment outside of its own operating system. Since most attacks we see are browser based nowadays on a individual level, this seems like a very smart thing to incorporate into its security goals. Certainly this is nothing that most enthusiasts cannot do on their own, but this delivers a fairly high level of security to the masses.



We take a look at Windows Defender Application Guard a new capability coming to Windows 10 Creators update this fall to prevent browser-based attacks. You’ll see the user experience in Microsoft Edge when navigating to untrusted and trusted sites. How Windows Defender Application Guard leverages virtualization and Hyper-V to isolate the running processes from Windows and how you can deploy and configure application guard in your organization.

Discussion

Source: [H]ardOCP – Windows Defender Application Guard to Use Virtualized Environment

The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century

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Source: Ars Technica – The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century

Wall Street Journal To Cut Back Print Outside the US

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The Wall Street Journal plans to discontinue production of print edition outside the United States in what is the latest testament that popularity of print is waning and it is no longer as lucrative for news outlets to maintain print editions of their journalism. From a Financial Times report: The print edition of the business and finance newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, will no longer be available in Europe (paywalled; alternative source), according to two people briefed on the plans. Free copies and unprofitable hotel “amenity deals,” where hotels buy bulk copies at a discount, are also being scrapped. However, Dow Jones, the News Corp division that owns the Journal, is debating whether to continue mailing copies to subscribers who still want a physical paper. It is pursuing a similar approach in Asia but is in talks with a partner about a print joint venture that would continue distribution in one big market there, according to the people with knowledge of the discussions. In Australia some Wall Street Journal pages are available as an insert in The Australian, another Murdoch-owned paper.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.



Source: Slashdot – Wall Street Journal To Cut Back Print Outside the US