Month: January 2017

Enlarge / Books in Edge. (credit: Microsoft)

With the release of Windows 10 build 15002 earlier this month, Microsoft showed off some new features coming to its Edge browser in the Windows 10 Creators Update to improve tab management. Today, the company has announced a few more of the improvements that will be coming soon.

As VR is a significant focus of the Creators Update, it's perhaps not altogether surprising that Edge is getting in on the action. Microsoft announced in September that it was starting work on developing WebVR and that support will ship in the Creators Update. The WebVR API, originally developed by Mozilla, exposes information about head mounted displays to Web content, enabling 3D applications in WebGL to support the same kind of immersive experiences that are found on the desktop.

Edge will also be used for a new class of 2D content: books. The Windows Store is going to start including books, and the browser is being extended to support reading and managing e-books.

Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai testifying before a Senate subcommittee on May 11, 2016. (credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images)

Ajit Pai today presided over his first Federal Communications Commission meeting since being named chairman by President Donald Trump, and he promised that the FCC will eliminate regulations under his leadership.

He also said that consumer protection and enforcement are important priorities for the commission—but he wouldn't comment about whether he'll enforce the existing net neutrality rules.

In a press conference after the meeting, Pai was asked several times about net neutrality. While Pai has repeatedly made it clear that he opposes the current rules and wants to overturn them, he has not said whether the commission will continue to enforce all of the rules while they are still in place.

Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and the AirPods. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple will host its earnings call for the first quarter of its fiscal 2017 this afternoon at 5pm Eastern (10pm UK), and we'll be liveblogging the call and the analyst Q&A session to give you all the information along with our insights and charts.

This quarter's results are expected to be a return to year-over-year growth after a disappointing 2016 in which Apple's year-over-year earnings fell for the first time since 2001. Apple's guidance from last quarter predicted that the company would make between $76 and $78 billion this quarter with profit margins between 38 and 38.5 percent. It made $74.6 billion in revenue in Q1 of 2016.

Expect services revenue, a consistent bright spot in Apple's 2016 earnings reports, to continue climbing. The Mac's slow decline throughout 2016 could be slowed or reversed by the introduction of the new MacBook Pros in October. This is the first full quarter of availability for the new Series 1 and Series 2 Apple Watches, which could offset decline in the company's nebulous "Other Products" category. And the iPad, which has been in decline since Q2 of 2014, showed signs of bottoming out in the last couple quarters of 2016. The major wildcard will be iPhone 7 sales—the iPhone is nearly two-thirds of Apple's revenue, so slower sales of the iPhone 6S throughout 2016 were primarily responsible for the company's decline last year.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we have a big list of deals to share with you. One of today's featured deals is the Dell Latitude 14 notebook with Windows 10 Pro, a Core i7 processor, and a 500GB hard drive for just $599. In addition, we have a number of smart TVs on sale, as well as monitors, gaming headsets, and more.

Check out the full list of deals below.

Featured

©DigitalGlobe 2016

When archaeologists want to find lost monuments or hidden cities these days, they turn to satellite imagery. Patterns invisible to the eye on the ground become obvious from the air and help scientists decide where they should start digging. And now you can join those scientists by signing up for GlobalXplorer, a newly launched online community where members look at real satellite imagery from Peru to identify telltale patterns of ancient habitation.

GlobalXplorer is similar to other online citizen science efforts like Galaxy Zoo, where members identify galaxies from deep-field images. When you visit GlobalXplorer, you'll be shown one map tile from a satellite shot of Peru. Each tile is about 200 by 200 meters, and is one of roughly 120 million such tiles in the database. After a quick tutorial on the kinds of features to look for, you'll be asked to identify whether the tile contains evidence of looting (in the tutorial, you'll learn that looting holes produce a very distinctive pattern), illegal encroachment by developers, or a possible ancient structure. The more tiles you classify, the more you can level up and gain access to new data and more-difficult identification tasks.