Month: September 2018

Enlarge (credit: Thomas Claveirole / Flickr)

Just as the cloud freed many administrators from the day-to-day tedium of tending to Exchange servers and infrastructure like Domain Controllers, Microsoft Managed Desktop (MMD) could do the same for the corporate desktop. The new service combines Microsoft 365 Enterprise (a combined Windows 10, Office 365, and Enterprise Mobility bundle), hardware leasing, and cloud-based device management to deliver secured, updated, and maintained systems, all with software maintenance handled by Microsoft.

Redmond says that it's offering the service in response to customer desire to hand off day-to-day device management tasks and spend more time addressing the needs of their organizations.

The new service will work on what the company calls "modern hardware": systems with the right hardware security features and remote-management capabilities. This will include both first-party Surface systems and, in coming months, third-party machines from companies such as Dell and HP. With MMD, customers will be able to put their credentials into systems straight from the OEM. Machines will retrieve their configuration, enroll in device management, and install necessary applications using Windows AutoPilot. There should be no need for IT personnel to ever touch the machines.

Enlarge / Elon Musk in 2015. (credit: ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/Getty Images)

For weeks, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been spoiling for a legal fight with Vernon Unsworth, the British cave diver who played a key role in rescuing a dozen teenagers and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand.

After Unsworth criticized the "submarine" Musk built to help with the rescue effort, Musk responded by calling Unsworth a pedophile—without a shred of evidence. Unsworth then threatened to sue Musk for defamation.

"I fucking hope he sues me," Musk said in an email to a Buzzfeed News reporter in late August.

Enlarge / A mbira—the researchers removed all the tines and placed a single loop of metallic tubing in their place. (credit: Joanna Bourne)

Even without the rise of online pharmacies, there have been multiple food and medicine adulteration cases, some due to carelessness, some due to greed. One unfortunate part of the story is that most cases of adulteration are pretty clumsy, and lives could have been saved if we had simple and widely available tests for contaminants.

That is precisely what a team of engineers has recently tried to achieve. They have taken some pretty old ideas and rejigged them to create a rather innovative testing system that can detect adulteration in liquid medicines and maybe even food.

Sounding off

The challenge with making a generic test for contamination is that all sorts of things can end up in food and medicine. The key to this new idea is that you don’t necessarily need to know what has been added, only that it is different from the standard formulation. In almost all cases, changing the formulation changes the density of a liquid. A sensitive mass sensor, then, should be able to detect medicines that have not been produced properly.

Enlarge / This cute little Switch controller won't work with your cute little Switch game library; only downloadable NES classics will be supported.

I've been on record for years now in my position that the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons are "hand-crampingly small" when being held horizontally, NES-controller style, by adult-sized hands. So I was hopeful that the Switch-compatible replica NES controllers Nintendo announced last week would let me play a variety of old-school Switch games with a full-sized controller, complete with an old-school d-pad and full-sized buttons.

Those hopes have been dashed, as Nintendo-watchers have noticed the following disclaimer on the UK and Australian versions of the Nintendo's Switch Online information pages (though, oddly enough, not on the US version of the page)

Please note: Nintendo Entertainment System Controllers can only be used while detached from the Nintendo Switch system, and only to play NES – Nintendo Switch Online games [emphasis added]. Nintendo Entertainment System Controllers can be charged by attaching to the Nintendo Switch system.

In its recent Nintendo Direct video presentation, the company only highlighted the controllers' use with downloadable NES games, and the fine print of that video did state that "Controllers do not include Joy-Con functionality." Still, these newly spotted Web disclaimers confirm that the special controllers won't work with any other Switch games.

Enlarge / iOS 12 is the rare update that actually noticeably improves performance across a range of older devices. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When we tested iOS 11 on the iPhone 5S, it was clear that it was slower than iOS 10 had been but that the iPhone 5S’ hardware was fast enough to keep everything usable. That’s especially true if you tempered your expectations: the phone was going on four years old at the time.

But at the time, some of you asked us to test a handful of other older iOS devices, particularly the A7-equipped iPad Air and Mini 2 and the A8-equipped iPhone 6 Plus. In the iPads, the same A7 CPU and GPU that powers the iPhone 5S’ screen has to adequately support a tablet with more than three times as many pixels. And the A8 in the 6 Plus draws a 2208×1242 image which is then downscaled to the phone’s 1080p screen; that means using a CPU that was around 25 percent faster than the A7 and a GPU that was only 50 percent faster to support a phone with 277 percent as many pixels.

The upshot is that those devices can often feel sluggish or laggy compared to subsequent models. Later Apple chips—from the A8X in the iPad Air 2 and the A9 in the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus onward, approximately—remain more than fast enough to run iOS 11 without any huge degradation of performance. But with iOS 12 this year, we’re testing an iPad Mini 2 and iPhone 6 Plus in addition to the old 5S to get an idea of how well Apple was able to improve the responsiveness of these older devices, many of which are still in use as secondary phones and tablets or hand-me-downs (or by people who just see no particular reason to upgrade).