A new drug, called Erenumab, has shown promise in preventing migraine attacks, the intense headaches that chronically plague millions of adults each year in the US alone.
Source: Gizmodo – For the First Time in Decades, a Drug for Migraines Shows Promise
Back in September, Amazon announced that its Video Skills Kit would open the doors to Alexa support for third-party video apps. Now, Hulu has announced that the video streaming app now works with Alexa voice commands.
Source: Engadget – Control Hulu with your voice on Amazon’s Fire TV devices
Most people are guilty of sharing a story on Facebook or Twitter that they didn’t read. And according to a new study, users are no different when it comes to performatively upvoting articles on Reddit. What’s most surprising is just how often those votes are impulse clicks.
Source: Gizmodo – Study Says Most Redditors Won’t Read This Story Before Voting on It
John Gruber, reporting for DaringFireball: It’s natural to speculate how a bug as egregious as the now-fixed High Sierra root login bug could escape notice for so long. It seems to have been there ever since High Sierra 10.3.0 shipped on September 25, and may have existed in the betas through the summer. One explanation is that logging in with the username “root” and a blank password is so bizarre that it’s the sort of thing no one would think to try. More insidious though, is the notion that it might not have escaped notice prior to its widespread publicization yesterday — but that the people who had heretofore discovered it kept it to themselves. This exploit was in fact posted to Apple’s own support forums on November 13. It’s a bizarre thread. The thread started back on June 8 when a user ran into a problem after installing the WWDC developer beta of High Sierra.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – High Sierra Root Login Bug Was Mentioned on Apple’s Support Forums Two Weeks Ago
Everywhere Windows 10 can be. And on the server, too, though there it gets a different branding. (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told shareholders that Windows 10 has now passed 600 million monthly active users, picking up 100 million since May of this year.
This number counts all Windows 10 devices used over a 28-day period. While most of these will be PCs, there are other things in the mix there: a few million Xbox Ones, a few million Windows 10 Mobile phones, and special hardware like the HoloLens and Surface Hub. The exact mix between these categories isn’t known, because Microsoft doesn’t say.
The company’s original ambition (and sales pitch to developers) was to have one billion systems running Windows 10 within about three years of the operating system’s launch. In July last year, the company acknowledged that it won’t hit that target—the original plan called for 50 million or more phone sales a year, which the retreat from the phone market has made impossible. But at the current rate it should still be on track for somewhere in excess of 700 million users at the self-imposed deadline.
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Source: Ars Technica – Windows 10 now on 600 million machines, not all of them PCs
Sunslice is a small folding solar charger that can fit into a pocket, while still producing enough electricity to compete with much larger offerings.
Source: TreeHugger – Credit card-sized unit claims to be world’s smallest solar charger
This is a video of the deepest living fish discovered so far, the Mariana snailfish (Pseudoliparis swirei). The Mariana snailfish can miraculously survive deeper than 7,485 meters (24,557 feet, ~4.65 miles) below the surface in the Mariana Trench, where the pressure is so great (~750-times the pressure at sea level) it gives me a headache just to think about. For reference, one time I swam down to the bottom of a 16-foot pool and it felt like my head was going to implode. It didn’t, although I’m fairly certain it’s been a little dented on one side ever since. And on my good side! “You don’t have a good side.” My butt is cool.
Keep going for a closeup of a Mariana snailfish (they kind of look like albino tadpoles), and the video.
Source: Geekologie – The Deepest Living Fish Ever Captured On Video
The legal battle between Apple and Qualcomm is even hotter than you might have thought — so hot they were suing each other on the same day. While Apple was busy suing Qualcomm over Snapdragon chips on November 29th, Qualcomm was filing its own laws…
Source: Engadget – Qualcomm hopes to ban Apple’s iPhone X sales with new lawsuit
When 30 Rock called Toronto “New York without all the stuff,” it was … funny, honestly. But Toronto has stuff! You just have to scrape the ice off it. We asked Lifehacker readers for their best Toronto tips, and they gave dozens of great answers. Here are the highlights.
Source: LifeHacker – The Best Toronto Tips From Our Readers
A performance bug in recent NVIDIA drivers has been causing a loss of performance across the company’s GPUs. Additionally, the bug results in higher VRAM usage than previous drivers, and NVIDIA has now commented on when the issue may be fixed. Thanks cageymaru.
This likely matches a similar performance drop observed on another Feral game, Total War: WARHAMMER. We’ve been tracking it internally as bug 1963500. There was a change, introduced in our r378 branch, to the logic of allocation of certain textures, but it apparently exposed a bug in our memory manager. Our next release branch, r390, will carry a workaround, and we’re still working on finding and fixing the root cause.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – NVIDIA Confirms Driver Bug Resulting in Loss of Performance on Linux
Starting today, Microsoft Edge is available for iOS and Android as a free download. It brings familiar features like your Favorites, Reading List, New Tab Page, Reading View, and Roaming Passwords across your PC and phone, but what makes Microsoft Edge really stand out is the ability to continue on your PC.
We are committed to empowering people and organizations to achieve more, and Microsoft Edge for iOS and Android is another step in that journey. While we’re excited to remove the preview label along with the download restrictions, we are more excited about all that’s ahead. We have a long list of new features to build and improvements to make. We hope you will try the app alongside your Windows 10 PCs and provide your ideas on what can make it even better.
Discussion
Source: [H]ardOCP – Microsoft Edge Now Available for iOS and Android
When an unresponsive patient arrived at a Florida hospital ER, the medical staff was taken aback upon discovering the words “DO NOT RESUSCITATE” tattooed onto the man’s chest—with the word “NOT” underlined and with his signature beneath it. Confused and alarmed, the medical staff chose to ignore the apparent DNR…
Source: Gizmodo – Unconscious Patient With ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ Tattoo Causes Ethical Conundrum at Hospital
This weekend, for the several billionth or so time in Earth’s history, the Moon will be in the part of its orbit around Earth where it’s a little closer, 16,000 miles closer than usual, and it looks a teeny amount larger. By this point, this so-called “supermoon” is a fairly cliched but certainly hyped piece of…
Source: Gizmodo – You Should Look at The Moon
Unless the person on your list already owns a smart TV, media streamers are almost fool-proof as far as gift ideas go, and they’re reasonably affordable too. We put several in our holiday gift guide, including the Apple TV 4K at the high end and the…
Source: Engadget – The best TVs and media streamers to give as gifts
“This is like … date night,” I said to my husband as we were sitting in the bleachers, watching our four-year-old at her weekly evening swim class. Maybe that realization should have made depressed—with so much going on, I couldn’t remember the last time we had a proper date night—but it didn’t. We were nestled hip…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Sneak in ‘Microdates’ With Your Partner When You Can’t Get a Sitter
Despite all the time and energy companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and others have spent stressing the importance of AI, actual progress doesn’t always feel that swift. That’s because after about a year on the market, the Google Home has just gotten the ability to do two things at once.
Source: Gizmodo – Google Home Finally Smart Enough to Do Two Things at Once
Since launching The Boring Company a year ago, Elon Musk has mentioned several possibly construction sites for the tunnel-drilling business, and thrown out a vague reference to a “verbal” government approval for a Hyperloop tunnel connecting New York City and Washington, DC. But now we know at least one mayor wants…
Source: Gizmodo – Chicago Mayor Actually Wants Elon Musk To Drill a Tunnel Under The City
A Turkish Airlines flight from Nairobi to Istanbul was diverted after the detection of a wi-fi network called “bomb on board” that alarmed the passengers, the airline said on Thursday. From a report: In a statement, Turkish Airlines said the flight made an emergency landing at the Khartoum airport in Sudan, but the flight was safely resumed after security inspections on all passengers and the aircraft. Individuals can create personal wi-fi networks on devices such as mobile phones and name them what they want.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – ‘Bomb on Board’ Wi-Fi Network Causes Turkish Airlines Flight To Be Diverted
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)
On August 1, a dissident faction of the Bitcoin community created a new payment network called Bitcoin Cash. There are lots of Bitcoin-derived spinoff currencies, of course, but this was was unusual because it branched off from the existing Bitcoin blockchain. The result was the cryptocurrency equivalent of a stock split: everyone who owned one bitcoin before the split suddenly owned a “cash” bitcoin after the split.
Today, the value of Bitcoin Cash in circulation is about $20 billion. That makes it the third most valuable currency, after only the original Bitcoin and Ethereum. And this appears to be newly-created wealth. The value of vanilla bitcoins didn’t fall significantly on the day of the split, and they has since zoomed upwards so that the value of all conventional bitcoins is now around $150 billion.
With that kind of money on the table, it was inevitable that others would try the same trick. In early November, another group of Bitcoin developers publicly launched the Bitcoin Gold network. This version of Bitcoin swaps out Bitcoin’s current mining process—where people compete for bitcoins by computing SHA-256 hashes using custom-designed mining hardware—with a memory-hard algorithm that, designers hope, will make it resistant to acceleration by custom hardware. The creators say they want to re-democratize Bitcoin mining, once again making it possible for anyone to earn Bitcoin Gold with their home PCs.
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Source: Ars Technica – Get ready for a wave of Bitcoin forks
If you have one of the industrial-grade Intense-PC computers manufactured by CompuLab, there is now mainline Coreboot support!..
Source: Phoronix – Coreboot Picks Up Support For CompuLab’s Intense-PC
