Month: May 2016

You'll need a little bit more of this. (credit: Pete)

Windows Vista was a shock to many Windows users, as its hardware requirements represented a steep upgrade over those required to run Windows XP: most 32-bit versions required a 1GHz processor, 1GB RAM, DirectX 9 graphics, and 40 GB of mass storage with 15GB free. But those 2006-era requirements looked much less steep once Windows 7 rolled out in 2009: it required almost the same system specs, but now 16GB of available disk space instead of 15. Windows 8 again stuck with the same specs and, at its release, so did Windows 10.

But the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (referred to in documentation as version 1607, so it ought to ship in July) changes that, with the first meaningful change in the Windows system requirements in almost a decade. The RAM requirement is going up, with 2GB the new floor for 32-bit installations. This happens to bring the system in line with the 64-bit requirements, which has called for 2GB since Windows 7.

The changed requirements were first spotted by Nokia Power User and WinBeta.

Let the Ars Overwatch commence! (credit: Sam Machkovech)

After an extensive beta period, Blizzard's first foray into first-person combat, the new team-based shooter Overwatch, finally launches on Monday, May 23. The game's final version didn't get a preview period for press, but our time with the game's beta has left us convinced that we're in for a pretty quality shooting game—and quite possibly the best entry in the "hero shooter" genre.

While Ars staffers and contributors have logged significant time in the beta, we're not ready to turn in our "review" call just yet, especially with a game so reliant on online play. Thus, we're going to whet your appetite with a live stream of Ars' dive into the game's first few hours of retail existence.

The game goes live at 7pm EDT, and while all of Ars' eager gamers are pre-installed and ready to rock on our gaming PCs, we're going to give the game's servers a little while to breathe before soft-launching our livestream at 7:30pm EDT today (and "officially" starting at 8pm, or 1am if you're in the UK). Click the above YouTube Gaming video box, or this link, to tune in. The feed will star yours truly on both webcam and gameplay feed, but Ars' Kyle Orland, Steven Strom, and Peter Bright will be on board as both voice chatters and party members. We'll do our best to respond to questions in both the YouTube Gaming chat scroll and on the Ars comments thread. Expect the live feed to last until roughly 9:30pm EDT tonight.

(credit: Val Altounian / Science Translational Medicine (2016)])

In some situations, antibiotics are lifesavers. In others, however, they do more harm than good. For instance, when antibiotics are used too much or for the wrong illnesses, the drugs only end up killing helpful microbes and spawning drug-resistant superbugs. To figure out the proper times to use antibiotics, doctors need to carefully weigh the risks and benefits of each situation. But, sadly, that calculation is extremely tricky—if not impossible—because scientists still aren’t sure what all of the risks are.

With two new studies, researchers added to the tally. In general, both studies found that when antibiotics kill off microbes in the gut, the immune system gets thrown out of balance and can cause unexpected health problems. In one of the studies, certain types of antibiotics appeared to spur an inflammatory condition in humans that can sabotage life-saving transplants. In the second study, a long course of antibiotics seemed to stymy the birth of brain cells in adult mice, which led to memory problems.

While the studies focus on disparate treatment situations, the studies both serve to highlight the unexpected risks of blasting the body’s complex microbial communities—and how careful doctors should be when using weapons of mass microbial destruction, such as antibiotics.

Editor’s Note: We won’t have access to the final release version of Overwatch before the rest of the world, but Game Director Jeff Kaplan described the Overwatch open beta earlier this month as "what will go live at launch" on the Blizzard forums. Here are some early thoughts based on that limited test before the game officially launches tonight.

With Overwatch, Blizzard looks poised to continue its game plan of taking years-old concepts and making them as clean, colorful, easily accessible, and generally perfected as possible. Unlike World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm, however, this feels less like the obvious conclusion to a well-worn genre.

Instead, Overwatch feels like a leap into an alternate future, where Team Fortress 2's even-keeled, class-based competition won out over Call of Duty 4's determined, gun-based progression. Overwatch is the game we should only have gotten after a decade of iteration and improvement to that TF2 formula, cemented with a Blizzard budget.

Enlarge (credit: FBI)

FBI officials are warning private industry partners to be on the lookout for highly stealthy keystroke loggers that surreptitiously sniff passwords and other input typed into wireless keyboards.

The FBI's Private Industry Notification is dated April 29, more than 15 months after whitehat hacker Samy Kamkar released a KeySweeper, a proof-of-concept attack platform that covertly logged and decrypted keystrokes from many Microsoft-branded wireless keyboards and transmitted the data over cellular networks. To lower the chances that the sniffing device might be discovered by a target, Kamkar designed it to look almost identical to USB phone chargers that are nearly ubiquitous in homes and offices.

"If placed strategically in an office or other location where individuals might use wireless devices, a malicious cyber actor could potentially harvest personally identifiable information, intellectual property, trade secrets, passwords, or other sensitive information," FBI officials wrote in last month's advisory. "Since the data is intercepted prior to reaching the CPU, security managers may not have insight into how sensitive information is being stolen."

5,000 years ago on a terraced slope above the Chan River in Shaanxi Province, China, some enterprising villagers built two sophisticated beer brewing kits. Part of the Mijiaya site, once the location of a thriving civilization, both kits were housed in pits sunk 2 to 3 meters into the ground, lined with rock, and accessed by stairs. One is fitted with a small shelf, and both have ceramic ovens for brewing in wide-mouthed pots that once held boiled barley. Archaeologists found other telltale beer-brewing tools (all covered in an ancient yellow residue), including funnels for filtration and amphorae, or cocoon-shaped containers, for fermentation. After careful analysis of plant and chemical remains on the inside of these storage containers, the scientists reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they had a pretty good idea of what kinds of ingredients went into this ancient beer.

Illustrations of the beer brewing pit and the 5,000-year-old components of the kit discovered at the Mijiaya site in Shaanxi Province, China. (credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Most of these ingredients will sound familiar to beer lovers. The scientists found traces of broomcorn millet, barley, Triticeae (wheat), and Job’s tears (a grain plant often called Chinese pearl barley, though it is not actually barley), plus small amounts of snake gourd root and lily (both are tubers often used in Chinese medicine), as well as yam. It's possible that the yam was added to enhance what was probably already a slightly sweet brew due to the barley. What impressed the archaeologists was that people living 5,000 years ago during the Neolithic Yangshao period had already mastered a pretty sophisticated system for brewing, including temperature regulation. This finding pre-dates by thousands of years the earliest writing about fermenting beer, which comes from Shang Dynasty manuscripts circa 1240-1046 BCE.

In their article, the researchers write that all the evidence they examined indicates that "the Yangshao people brewed a mixed beer with specialized tools and knowledge of temperature control. Our data show that the Yangshao people developed a complicated fermentation method by malting and mashing different starchy plants." This discovery may also shed light on a longstanding mystery about how barley came to Eastern China from Western Eurasia. By the time of the Han Dynasty, roughly 200 BCE, barley was already a popular crop. But what would have motivated early farmers to bring this grain all the way across the Central Plains? Apparently, it was for partying, not for eating. Write the archaeologists: