Month: September 2021

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

New versions of Microsoft Office aren't as big a deal as they used to be, thanks to the continuously updated (and continuously paid for) versions of the apps that come with a Microsoft 365 subscription. But for everyone else, there's still Office 2021, an upgrade to Office 2019 that's coming to both Windows and macOS on October 5, Microsoft announced today. Office 2021 will add the same features as the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (or LTSC, catchy) release, which is available today.

Compared to Office 2019, the last "perpetual" version of Office, the new version includes Dark Mode support, support for version 1.3 of the OpenDocument format, new Excel functions and formulas, improved slide show recording for PowerPoint, and various user-interface tweaks and enhancements. Microsoft lists most of the new features here.

Microsoft plans to offer five years of "Mainstream Support" for Office 2021, without any extended support beyond that. The end date for Office 2021 support is in October of 2016, just a year after support ends for the Windows versions of Office 2016 and Office 2019.

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  Lost Judgment's action detective, Takayuki Yagami.

At a glance, Lost Judgment may seem intimidating to anyone who hasn't graduated from Sega's school of hard Yakuza knocks. To start, it’s a spinoff of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio’s long-running crime series, which is saddled with a truckload of backstory. On top of that, it’s a direct follow-up to 2019’s Judgment, the first game from that spinoff. Finally, the overwhelming, unadulterated immersion into modern Japan that Yakuza games are known for doesn’t really feel like anything else in video games.

With these eccentricities in mind, anyone not already intimately familiar with the broader Yakuza universe may feel too lost to know where to begin here, if they want to bother trying at all. Yet after spending roughly 15 hours over the past week playing through the first four chapters of this game, I can say Lost Judgment is absolutely worth your time, with a barrier to entry much lower than you’d expect. Stacked up against any recent high-production action games, it's unlike anything else you'll play this year.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Jeff Greenberg)

A hospital system in Arkansas is making it a bit more difficult for staff to receive a religious exemption from its COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The hospital is now requiring staff to also swear off extremely common medicines, such as Tylenol, Tums, and even Preparation H, to get the exemption.

The move was prompted when Conway Regional Health System noted an unusual uptick in vaccine exemption requests that cited the use of fetal cell lines in the development and testing of the vaccines.

"This was significantly disproportionate to what we've seen with the influenza vaccine," Matt Troup, president and CEO of Conway Regional Health System, told Becker's Hospital Review in an interview Wednesday.

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  A Project Taara transmitter.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, is still experimenting with hooking up remote towns to the Internet via frickin' laser beams. Today, Alphabet's moonshot "X Lab" shared an update on Project Taara, its experimental point-to-point optical communication system, often described as "fiber optics without the fiber." The company built a working installation in Africa and has been blasting a 20Gbps link about 5 km across the Congo River to a town of millions of people, lowering the cost of Internet access for them.

The Taara laser beam is bridging the gap between Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which are on opposite sides of the Congo River. Brazzaville has decent Internet, but because nobody wanted to run a fiber line through the world's deepest and second-fastest river, Kinshasa uses a fiber line that runs 400 km around the river, and the Internet is five times more expensive there. Alphabet's 20Gbps commercial link has been up and running for 20 days now, and the company says it has served nearly 700TB of data in that time, with 99.9 percent uptime.

Taara was born out of the "Loon" Internet balloon project launched in 2017. Originally, Google was building flying cell towers to beam down the Internet from the sky (over RF), but for balloon-to-balloon backhaul, the company was planning communications via laser beam. Space X just started doing something similar by equipping its Starlink satellites with space lasers for optical intra-satellite communication. One benefit of Sky- and space-based laser communication is that not much can interfere with a point-to-point optical beam. Ground-based lasers have more interference to consider, since they have to deal with nearly everything: rain, fog, birds, and once, according to Alphabet's blog post, "a curious monkey."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Cavan Images)

Locast was ordered to shut down its online TV service forever in a permanent injunction issued yesterday by a federal judge. The order came two weeks after the judge gave major broadcast networks a big victory in their copyright case against Locast, a nonprofit organization that provided online access to broadcast TV stations.

Locast will have to win on appeal in order to stream broadcast channels again. Locast already suspended operations after the September 1 ruling that said it does not qualify for a copyright-law exemption available to nonprofits, so the permanent injunction doesn't change the status quo.

US District Judge Louis Stanton cited a December 2019 agreement between Locast and the networks that limited the scope of the litigation and said a permanent injunction should be entered if the court determines that Locast does not qualify for the copyright-law exemption. The deal did not prohibit Locast "from applying for a stay of the permanent injunction pending appeal, nor to bar the broadcasters from opposing any such stay," the agreement said.

Enlarge / Pope Francis speaking to journalists as he returned to the Vatican on September 15, 2021. (credit: Vatican)

Pope Francis, well-known for his freewheeling conversations with journalists aboard the papal plane, yesterday called out COVID-19 vaccine resistance within church ranks as he flew home from Hungary and Slovakia. And he went straight to the top.

"Even in the College of Cardinals, there are a few 'deniers' ['negazionisti'] and one of them, poor man, is hospitalized with the virus," Francis told journalists on the flight, according to a translation of his Italian remarks.

Then he added, "Mah, ironia della vita…"