Nothing against 2007 horror anthology Trick ‘r Treat—we all love a spooky kid with a pumpkin head. But its popularity has come to overshadow Trick or Treat, the 1986 tale of a cursed heavy metal record that features some rock-royalty cameos. Horns up: it’s been elusive online for some time, but Trick or Treat’s return…
Source: Gizmodo – Rockin’ Cult Classic Trick or Treat Is Coming to Streaming for Halloween
Much like the 2020 franchise spin-off, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Spider-Man 2 contains a neat Easter egg directly connected to the amazing animated film, Into the Spider-Verse. And the best part is it’s easy to find.
Source: Kotaku – One Of Miles’ Spider-Man 2 Suits Unlocks A Rad Bonus Feature
This language learner lifetime subscription bundle featuring uTalk offers more than 140 languages, and it’s on sale today, Oct. 23, for $29.97. The deal allows subscribers to select six languages (but you don’t need to choose all six languages immediately—you can pick one now and wait to select the others, with no…
Source: LifeHacker – This ‘Language Learner’ Bundle Is Right Now
Enlarge / US President Joe Biden during a meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on Friday, Oct. 20, 2023. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)
The Supreme Court has blocked an injunction that would prevent the Biden administration from pressuring social media firms to take down content. Justices agreed to hear the Biden administration’s appeal of the injunction, which will be stayed until the high court issues a ruling that could either uphold the injunction or block it permanently.
The decision to grant the stay and hear the administration’s appeal was issued in an order Friday. The court previously issued a temporary stay while it considered whether to hear the case, so the injunction has not been enforced.
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented, arguing that the stay “allows the defendants to persist in committing the type of First Amendment violations that the lower courts identified. The majority takes this action in the face of the lower courts’ detailed findings of fact.”
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Source: Ars Technica – SCOTUS blocks order that said Biden admin can’t “coerce” social media firms
Spider-Man 2 developer Insomniac Games is promising a fix for a bit of an embarrassing slip-up in an upcoming patch. In what was likely an attempt to represent co-protagonist Miles Morales’ Puerto Rican heritage, the Cuban flag was displayed in the character’s apartment instead.
Source: Kotaku – Spider-Man 2 Error Goes Viral, Developer Promises Fix
Last night, I set about brutalizing some pumpkins. First, I purchased the pumpkins. Next, I stopped by the dollar store to get a little kit to carve them up. The kit cost a mere 3% of what my three pumpkins had run me, so I was grateful for a deal. When I got home, I got to work, sawing into the top of one of my big…
Source: LifeHacker – There Are Better Ways to Carve a Pumpkin Than That Dollar-Store Kit
After struggling to land its first in-space manufacturing capsule in the U.S., Varda Space is now looking down under for future batches of space drugs to reenter through Earth’s atmosphere.
Source: Gizmodo – Startup Wants to Land Space Drugs Factory in Australia After US Denies Reentry
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Last week, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that. Excel’s automatic conversions are intended to make it easier and faster to input certain types of commonly entered data — numbers and dates, for instance. But for scientists using quick shorthand to make things legible, it could ruin published, peer-reviewed data, as a 2016 study found.
Microsoft detailed the update in a blog post last week, adding a checkbox labeled “Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date.” You can probably guess what that toggles. The update builds on the Automatic Data Conversions settings the company added last year, which included the option for Excel to warn you when it’s about to get extra helpful and let you load your file without automatic conversion so you can ensure nothing will be screwed up by it.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Fixes the Excel Feature That Was Wrecking Scientific Data
Wizards of the Coast is assembling its franchise heroes, and Marvel is next to join up with Magic: The Gathering. As part of a deepening collaboration with parent company Hasbro, the publisher “will develop collectible products” based around the characters of Marvel Comics for Magic. You can expect these to land on…
Source: Gizmodo – Magic: The Gathering Is Getting a Huge Marvel Crossover
An unorthodox group of 7 users is now the most dominant news source for information about the Israel-Hamas war on X (formerly Twitter), according to a new report from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. Dubbed the “New Elites” of X, the report found these users racked up 1.6 billion views on…
Source: Gizmodo – Meet the ‘New Elites’ Who Control Twitter’s Israel-Hamas News
The Biden administration and the US Commerce Department just named 31 regions as “tech hubs”, drawn from nearly 400 applicants. These hub areas are spread across the country, in addition to territories like Puerto Rico, and each spot could share in $500 million of funding as originally detailed in the CHIPS and Science Act that was signed into law back in 2022.
The administration hopes to use these hubs to “catalyze investment in technologies critical to economic growth, national security and job creation” with an end goal of helping “communities across the country become centers of innovation critical to American competitiveness.” Additionally, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters that the program seeks to diversify the country’s tech interests, moving away from traditional hubs like Silicon Valley, Seattle and Boston, as reported by Yahoo.
To that end, these hubs will focus on everything under the sun, from artificial intelligence, biotech, clean energy, semiconductors, quantum computing and more. Examples include a hub in Washington state that’s developing new materials for next-gen fuel-efficient aircraft, a Wisconsin program seeking to make advancements in personalized medicine and a New York organization researching new battery technologies, among 28 others. It’s worth noting that many of these hubs are in small or medium-sized cities, with Raimondo saying that “people shouldn’t have to move to get a good job.”
There’s one caveat. Snagging one of these coveted hub designations doesn’t guarantee federal funding. The Commerce Department will follow each program throughout the next year, with funding to follow. Raimondo says that five to 10 hubs will receive up to $75 million. With 31 hub areas and just $500 million to disperse, that could leave many locations in the financial cold.
Additionally, the CHIPS and Science Act is a robust piece of legislation that drops more than $280 billion into various sectors, so these hubs represent less than 1/500th of the allocated funding set aside by the bill. There’s $52 billion in tax credits and funding for US chipmakers to expand domestic production, $7 billion for clean hydrogen and $1.5 billion to “boost US leadership in wireless technologies and their supply chains.” The bill also sets aside $10 billion to “invest in regional innovation and technology” which is the exact point of these hubs, so maybe more money is coming down the line.
Biden has asked Congress for an additional $4 billion to fund even more regional tech hubs, but, well, that would be part of the full-year budget and you may have noticed that the House still lacks a speaker with a government shutdown on the horizon.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/biden-administration-designates-31-new-tech-hubs-to-encourage-innovation-155812340.html?src=rss
Source: Engadget – Biden administration designates 31 new ‘tech hubs’ to encourage innovation
Twitch has reversed a previous rule to now allow streamers on its platform to simulcast to any other platform, but it does come with a few caveats. The decision was announced just as the company’s biggest event of the year kicked off in Las Vegas, TwitchCon.
Twitch has been under the gun as of late with some of its decisions and new competition
Source: Hot Hardware – Twitch Streamers Are Now Allowed To Simulcast On Any Service But There Are Caveats
Scheduled for an official launch on October 24th, the Mozilla Firefox 119 open-source web browser is now available for download, and it’s time to take a first look at its new features and improvements.
The post Mozilla Firefox 119 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New appeared first on Linux Today.
Source: Linux Today – Mozilla Firefox 119 Is Now Available for Download, Here’s What’s New
There are a lot of notation apps out there that will happily take both your time and money, but you don’t need to look far for such an app: These days, Google Keep is good enough to make do for simple note taking and writing. The company recently updated the app to support version history (thank goodness), and now…
Source: LifeHacker – You Can Now Format Text in Google Keep
As Doctor Who nears another milestone anniversary, the long shadow of the BBC’s loss of almost a hundred stories from the earliest eras of the show—destroyed in the process of archival junking in TV’s nascent age—still lingers. But the corporation is still clinging to one lifeline that could still let fans experience…
Source: Gizmodo – Doctor Who Wants to Keep Animating Its Missing History
The new M2 chip was released last summer to wide acclaim, and now the 2022 M2 MacBook Air is getting a great discount (by Apple standards). The laptop’s price dropped to $899 (normally $1,099) at Best Buy. This is cheaper than any prize Amazon has seen, according to Camelcamelcamel, and it matches Best Buy’s lowest…
Source: LifeHacker – The M2 MacBook Air Has Dropped to Prime Day Prices
An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple was caught flat-footed when ChatGPT and other AI tools took the technology industry by storm. But the company is now preparing its response and plans to develop features for its full range of devices. One of the most intense and widespread endeavors at Apple right now is its effort to respond to the AI frenzy sweeping the technology industry. The company has some catching up to do. Apple largely sat on the sidelines when OpenAI’s ChatGPT took off like a rocket last year. It watched as Google and Microsoft rolled out generative AI versions of their search engines, which spit out convincingly human-like responses to users’ queries. Microsoft also updated its Windows apps with smarter assistants, and Amazon unveiled an AI-enhanced overhaul of Alexa. All the while, the only noteworthy AI release from Apple was an improved auto-correct system in iOS 17.
Apple’s senior vice presidents in charge of AI and software engineering, John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, are spearheading the effort. On Cook’s team, they’re referred to as the “executive sponsors” of the generative AI push. Eddy Cue, the head of services, is also involved, I’m told. The trio are now on course to spend about $1 billion per year on the undertaking. Giannandrea is overseeing development of the underlying technology for a new AI system, and his team is revamping Siri in a way that will deeply implement it. This smarter version of Siri could be ready as soon as next year, but there are still concerns about the technology and it may take longer for Apple’s AI features to spread across its product line. Federighi’s software engineering group, meanwhile, is adding AI to the next version of iOS. There’s an edict to fill it with features running on the company’s large language model, or LLM, which uses a flood of data to hone AI capabilities. The new features should improve how both Siri and the Messages app can field questions and auto-complete sentences, mirroring recent changes to competing services.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Source: Slashdot – Inside Apple’s Big Plan to Bring Generative AI To All Its Devices
While the recently released Ubuntu 23.10 is bringing some performance improvements to Intel Xeon Max / Sapphire Rapids, Ubuntu Linux still isn’t delivering the best possible out-of-the-box server performance. For that Intel continues to show the importance of software optimizations with the likes of their in-house Clear Linux platform as well as the likes of CentOS Stream having more sensible defaults. Here is a look at the Intel Xeon Max 9480 performance across Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 23.10, CentOS Stream 9, Fedora Server 39, and Clear Linux 40130.
Source: Phoronix – Intel Continues To Demonstrate The Importance Of Software Optimizations: Clear Linux + Xeon Max Benchmarks
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is out now on Nintendo Switch, and reviews are hailing the game as a wonderful addition to the plumber’s 2D platforming adventures. While you may already know about exciting features—like Elephant Mario—you probably haven’t heard that when you play Wonder with a Pro Controller, the gamepad…
Source: Kotaku – Mario Wonder Has A Wild Musical Secret Hidden In Plain Sight
Microsoft recently published a blog highlighting new Excel updates that allow users to disable Automatic Data Conversion. This comes as good news for the scientists because in recent years they had to rename quite a few human gene names since Excel wa converting them to dates.
Source: Gizmodo – Microsoft Fixes Excel Feature That Forced Scientists to Rename Human Genes
