A Desktop Environment is an implementation of the desktop metaphor built as a collection of different user and system programs running on top of an operating system, and share a common GUI
Source: Linux Today – 10 Best and Most Popular Linux Desktop Environments of All Time
For many people who have been stuck at home for the past year, social interaction has been in short supply. Zoom and Discord voice chat allow some stopgaps for friends looking to connect, but physical interactions have been limited to roommates or family. That got me thinking about how difficult it’s been to find new…
Source: LifeHacker – What Are the Best Two-Player Board Games?
Smartwatches have added incredibly sophisticated health features in recent years, with the ability to take electrocardiograms to diagnose atrial fibrillation and monitor your blood oxygen levels. But if rumors are to be believed, the next iteration of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch and the Apple Watch Series 7 could attempt…
Source: Gizmodo – Rumor Has It the Next Samsung, Apple Smartwatches Might Monitor Blood Glucose
What 2D side-scroller Cyber Shadow is missing in personality it makes up for with amazing visuals and action sequences that challenge your timing and reflexes without ever feeling tedious or cheap. I’ve been loving my time with its pastiche of classic NES games, even if, so far, its story hasn’t measured up to…
Source: Kotaku – Cyber Shadow Is Another Fantastic Homage To Classic NES Games
The pandemic has created a nightmare job scenario for many of us this year—whether we’ve had to take a large pay cut, lost our jobs entirely, or found ourselves stuck in a job that we hate. With the job market looking as dismal as it is now, is there any hope? Personal finance expert (and friend of The Upgrade) Ramit…
Source: LifeHacker – How to Get a New Job in 2021, With Ramit Sethi
Facebook is attempting to increase transparency around ads that ran in the lead up to November’s US elections. Starting on February 1st, researchers will have access to targeting data on more than 1.3 million social issues, electoral and political ad…
Source: Engadget – Facebook will let researchers study its election ad targeting data
GameStop shares surged to a record Monday, before pulling back and giving up much of their gains, the latest sign that frenetic trading by individual investors is leading to outsize stock-market moves. From a report: Class A shares of the Texas-based games retailer surged as much as 145% to $159.18 in morning trading, before reversing course and briefly turning lower. By midday, the stock was up 27% at $82.55, up more than 330% in 2021. The rapid swings prompted the New York Stock Exchange to briefly halt trading multiple times. The rally has been fueled by individual investors, encouraging each other on social media to pile into GameStop shares and options. The buying pressure has led money managers to switch out of substantial bets that the stock would fall, analysts said. This resulted in a short squeeze, in which rising prices prompt investors to buy back shares they had sold short to cut their losses, pushing the stock higher still.
The company has become a high-profile battleground between bullish chatroom-driven day traders, especially on online platform Reddit, and hedge fund short sellers, who have been betting against the stock. GameStop has been the most-actively traded stock by customers of Fidelity Investments in recent sessions, with buy orders outnumbering sell orders by more than four-to-one, according to the brokerage. “We broke it. We broke GME at open,” one Reddit user wrote Monday after the NYSE halted trading, referring to GameStop’s stock-market ticker. The tussle over the company, with a modest market value of about $5 billion at Friday’s close and four years of declining sales, exemplifies the increased sway of retail investors. Many poured into the market during the coronavirus lockdown, congregating on online platforms to swap trading ideas and to boast about winning bets. From last week: Gaming the System: How GameStop Stock Surged 1,500% In Nine Months.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – GameStop Stock Jumps To New Record
Well, that didn’t take long. Two weeks after Dragonlance co-creators and authors of its most famous novels, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, voluntarily dismissed their $10 million lawsuit against Wizards of the Coast for messing with their plans to write a new book trilogy set in the beloved Dungeons & Dragons…
Source: io9 – That New Dragonlance Trilogy From the Series’ Classic Authors Is Coming After All
The ultimate goal to making virtual reality feel more like reality is letting users physically touch non-existent objects in a VR world. Until we figure out the technology behind Star Trek’s Holodecks, researchers from the University of Tokyo are experimenting with steerable helium balloons that VR users can safely…
Source: Gizmodo – Steering a Balloon With Sound Waves Could Be the Secret to Touching Objects in VR
Cyberpunk 2077’s 1.1 update was supposed to set the troubled game on the path toward redemption. Instead, it seems to have come with its own set of problems. Per Eurogamer, players have discovered a game-breaking bug involving Cyberpunk 2077’s “Down…
Source: Engadget – ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ update introduced a game-breaking bug
Here we are excited about things like ray tracing and the latest game controllers such as the PS5 DualSense with its haptic feedback and adaptive triggers. But folks, when it comes to the future of gaming, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has some wild ideas. The DualSense might be cool now, but “meat peripherals” will eventually take a backseat
Source: Hot Hardware – Valve’s Gabe Newell Sees Brain Computer Interfaces As Future Of Gaming And Our Perceived Reality
Since an update raised the Pokémon GO level cap from 40 to 50 late last year, players around the world have been racing to hit the new max. This morning, Twitch streamer FleeceKing became the first player to reach level 50, with a little help from a timely Niantic fix for a progress-wiping problem.
Source: Kotaku – First Pokémon GO Player Hits Level 50 With A Boost From A Bug Fix
The annual Sundance Film Festival kicks off this Thursday, Jan. 28, and for the first time, you don’t have to travel to Utah or stand in line in the cold to take part. The Sundance Institute is screening films, Q&A panels, and special events virtually so you can watch from the comfort (and safety) of your living room.
Source: LifeHacker – How to Virtually Attend Sundance This Year
Twitter is launching a new feature to fight misinformation: Birdwatch, a “community-driven approach” that crowdsources fact checks directly from other Twitter users. The experiment was first spotted last fall, but the company is now officially introd…
Source: Engadget – Twitter’s new ‘Birdwatch’ experiment crowdsources fact-checking
A unique planetary system located 200 light-years from Earth hosts five exoplanets with orbits locked together in a repeating pattern, despite their very different sizes and densities. The discovery is challenging astronomers’ notions of the kinds of planetary systems that can exist and how they form.
Source: Gizmodo – Enigmatic Star System Has 5 Planets Locked in Perfect Harmony
Imagine that you were granted one wish, and that wish were that America got to watch a real-world Hollywood switcheroo involving Jeff Bezos and an Amazon warehouse worker. And now hold onto that pleasant thought so you can stomach this news: According to a new Oxfam study, the spare change that the world’s top ten…
Source: Gizmodo – Study Finds It Could Take Humanity a Decade to Recover from Pandemic Costs, Except for Billionaires, Who Are Doing Great
Time to Walk will display photos to match speakers’ stories and talks while you walk. [credit:
Apple
]
Today, Apple launched a new component of its Fitness+ personal health subscription service: “Time to Walk.” With it, users who own an Apple Watch can take a tracked walk exercise while listening to stories or inspiring talks from “influential and interesting people.”
These talks will be automatically downloaded to users’ Apple Watch, provided those users subscribe to Fitness+. When users start listening to one of the 25-40 minute episodes, the Watch will begin tracking a Walk workout. For users in weelchairs, Time to Walk is instead called “Time to Push” and offers up an Outdoor Weelchair Walk Pace workout instead.
The announcement states that “each Time to Walk episode is shaped by the guest’s personal, life-shaping moments and includes lessons learned, meaningful memories, thoughts on purpose and gratitude, moments of levity, and other thought-provoking topics, recorded while walking outside or in locations that are meaningful to them.”
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Source: Ars Technica – Apple doubles down on Fitness+ with new “Time to Walk” Apple Watch content
SpaceX is scheduled to launch Starship prototype SN9 later today, in what will be the second high-altitude test of the company’s next-gen rocket. You can watch the action live right here.
Source: Gizmodo – Watch Live: SpaceX Attempts Second High-Altitude Launch of a Starship Prototype
Dutch police arrested two individuals late last week for allegedly selling data from the Dutch health ministry’s COVID-19 systems on the criminal underground. From a report: The arrests came after an investigation by RTL Nieuws reporter Daniel Verlaan who discovered ads for Dutch citizen data online, advertised on instant messaging apps like Telegram, Snapchat, and Wickr. The ads consisted of photos of computer screens listing data of one or more Dutch citizens. The reporter said he tracked down the screengrabs to two IT systems used by the Dutch Municipal Health Service (GGD) — namely CoronIT, which contains details about Dutch citizens who took a COVID-19 test, and HPzone Light, one of the DDG’s contact-tracing systems. Verlaan said the data had been sold online for months for prices ranging from $36 to $60 per person. Buyers would receive details such as home addresses, emails, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and a person’s BSN identifier (Dutch social security number).
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Dutch COVID-19 Patient Data Sold on the Criminal Underground
