Month: July 2016

Microsoft's Terry Myerson details the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. (credit: Microsoft)

The final build of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is build 14393. The update, which provides a range of new features and improvements, represents Microsoft's last big push to get Windows 7 and 8.1 users to upgrade to Windows 10.

The update is available right now to those who have opted in to the Windows Insider program, and it will be pushed out to Windows 10 users on the current branch on August 2. The free upgrade offer from Windows 7 and 8.1 to Windows 10, however, ends on July 29, leaving Microsoft hoping that the promise of the new update will be enough to get people to make the switch.

For consumers, the big Anniversary Update improvements are in stylus support and Cortana. For as long as Microsoft has been pushing pen interfaces on Windows—the specs for Windows XP Tablet edition came out about 15 years ago—the company has done so as a mouse alternative, with the only major pen-specific feature being handwriting recognition. This never worked well. Finger-based touch interfaces dominated with the rise of the iPhone, but Windows has always retained its pen support, with devices like the Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book shipping with pens.

Transistors will stop shrinking after 2021, but Moore's law will probably continue, according to the final International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS).

The ITRS—which has been produced almost annually by a collaboration of most of the world's major semiconductor companies since 1993—is about as authoritative as it gets when it comes to predicting the future of computing. The 2015 roadmap will however be its last.

The most interesting aspect of the ITRS is that it tries to predict what materials and processes we might be using in the next 15 years. The idea is that, by collaborating on such a roadmap, the companies involved can sink their R&D money into the "right" technologies.

(credit: Clever Cupcakes)

Verizon has confirmed earlier reports that it will buy ailing Internet pioneer Yahoo in an all-cash deal with a price tag of nearly £3.7 billion (~$4.8 billion).

The sale doesn't include Yahoo's shares in Alibaba, Verizon said. Yahoo's Japan shares, its non-core patents, and minority investments are also set to be cut loose from the planned takeover.

Those assets will form part of a new publicly traded company that will be spun out of Yahoo as a separate business. It's unclear who will head up that firm, however.

Maureen Stronach, an employee at Diageo's Dalwhinnie distillery, views whiskey drawn from a cask in the store room on April 21, 2011. (credit: Jeff Mitchell / Getty Images)

Almost every distillery tour follows the same format. First, you’re led by a display of raw materials. Then, the guide takes you around the fermentation tanks and by the still. But the magical part is what comes next. Once the whiskey is collected from the still, it’s put into barrels and stored in cool, shadowy warehouses called rickhouses. The air here smells of the vanilla and oak and grain from the spirit that’s evaporated. And since most rickhouses aren’t even wired for electricity, you almost feel like you’ve stepped back in time. Whatever comes from here will taste like pure wonder.

In reality, the spell was cast long before you stepped foot into these whiskey-scented buildings. Labels, websites, and other bits of marketing work together to paint pictures about things like generations of distillers, specific grain blends, or the surface details of aging. And within those first steps of any tour, a guide spins a narrative made of half myth and half fact, incorporating widely accepted statistics like the percentage of each barrel that evaporates each year. Despite the lack of published evidence to back such information up, these whiskey standards are often repeated as fact, especially by PR reps, bartenders, and enthusiastic consumers.

The truth is, most of the research being done on whiskey, especially about how and why it ages, will never be available to the public. With revenue from whiskey sales topping $2.7 billion in 2014 in the US and projected to keep rising, producers’ hesitance to share is somewhat understandable. In many cases, the data collected could give any company a competitive advantage.