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Enlarge / Surface Pro 3. (credit: Peter Bright)

Back in July, Microsoft acknowledged that some Surface Pro 3 systems were seeing their battery life drop to as little as a few minutes, apparently the result of a firmware bug of some kind. The fix for this is now out (via Mary Jo Foley).

The fix is a firmware update dated 29 August that must be installed while the system is charged and plugged in. It apparently takes a couple of reboots to install. Over the course of the following few battery cycles, the batteries will return to their correct charge level. The problem is caused by something in the Surface Pro 3's firmware causing the maximum charge to be improperly reported—meaning, the SP3 mistakenly thinks the battery is full and stops accepting charge accordingly. LG and Simplo provide batteries for Microsoft's two-in-one slabs, and while users have reported issues with LG batteries, the Simplo ones appear to be the main victims of this firmware trouble.

Early reports from Microsoft's support forums suggest that, for many at least, the firmware fix does indeed do the trick.

Enlarge / The Google Cast integration in Chrome. (credit: Google)

Google Cast—the protocol that powers Chromecast—previously worked inside of Chrome thanks to an extension released by Google. Buttons on YouTube, Google Music, and other sites allowed you to beam music and video to your TV or stereo system. Now you no longer need an extension to sling media across the room. Google has built the protocol directly into Chrome.

Like all Chrome features, Cast support started in the "Dev" and "Beta" versions. Cast has finally hit the stable channel that most consumers use. The Cast buttons in web site UIs will continue to work the way they always have, and if you click on the Chrome menu button, you'll be treated to a new "Cast..." option that can beam an entire tab to your television.

To get the new Cast functionality, you just need the latest version of Chrome and a Cast-aware device on your local network. According to this page, the old Cast extension will apparently still live on for those who want the tab-beam button in their toolbar.

Enlarge (credit: Fedora Magazine)

Fedora 24 is very near the best Linux distro release I've used, and certainly the best release I have tested this year. Considering 2016 has welcomed new offerings like Mint 18 and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, that says a great deal about the Fedora project's latest work. But like many Fedora releases before it, even Fedora 24 got off to a rocky start.

Longtime Fedora users are more than likely conservative when it comes to system upgrades. And historically, new Fedora releases tend to be rough around the edges. Wise Fedora followers tend to be patient and give a new release a couple of months for the kinks to work out and the updates to flow in. Usually, such a timing cushion also means all the latest packages in RPM Fusion have been updated as well. With that kind of precedent, being the first to jump on a Fedora upgrade—which comes every eight or so months—can be risky.

Patience does typically reward you with a really great Linux distro, though. And far more valuable than updated apps, waiting means you can skip catastrophic bugs like the one that completely broke Fedora 24 on Skylake systems after a kernel update. Fedora 24 shipped with Linux kernel 4.5 and managed to miss kernel 4.6 by about two weeks, which is a shame because no less than Linus Torvalds himself called kernel 4.6 "a fairly big release - more commits than we've had in a while." In other words, perhaps Fedora should have waited a few weeks to ship.

Enlarge / "Who's a good puppy?!" (credit: Enikő Kubinyi)

In most tests of general intelligence, dogs rate as reasonably clever, but nothing like primates. The one place where dogs beat primates is in interacting with humans. It's not clear whether dogs are better at reading human intentions or simply more motivated to act on them, but dogs truly seem to get us.

Now, researchers in Hungary have tested dogs' willingness to cooperate with us by getting them to sit still in an MRI machine. By tracking the dogs' brain activity, the researchers were able to determine that dogs can recognize not only words, but the emotional tone behind them. Dogs recognize when both words and tone indicate praise. That's when they feel rewarded.

The work was performed by a group of researchers based in Budapest, which becomes important when we get to the words the dogs were responding to. The hypothesis behind their work: dogs can recognize both the meaning of what's being said (technically, its lexical content) as well as the intonation used in saying it. In other words, it's not enough to say "good boy" to your dog—you have to sound like you mean it.

Enlarge / French Education minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, leaving the Elysee Presidential Palace last week in Paris. (credit: Frederic Stevens/Getty Images)

France's education minister has asked the company that makes Pokemon Go to keep its most valuable creatures out of French schools.

At a press conference earlier today, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said she will soon meet with California-based Niantic to ask them to tweak their game. According to statements reported by The Associated Press, Vallaud-Belkacem wants to keep some creatures out of French schools, since she's worried they would tempt non-students to enter.

Principals can already apply online for a school to be wholly removed from the game's map, but Vallaud-Belkacem wants the company to take some steps without being asked. The minister says that her main concern is the placement of extremely rare or "legendary" Pokemon creatures in schools, which would prove too tempting to strangers who shouldn't be around the school.

Enlarge (credit: Mike Mozart)

AT&T today won a major victory over the Federal Trade Commission, which was trying to punish AT&T for throttling the Internet connections of customers with unlimited data plans.

The FTC sued AT&T in October 2014, seeking refunds for customers who paid for unlimited data. The FTC said AT&T deceived customers by offering unlimited data plans and then throttling speeds once customers hit certain usage thresholds, such as 3GB or 5GB in a month. In response, AT&T claimed that the FTC had no jurisdiction over AT&T because of the company's status as a common carrier.

This argument was complicated. At the time, AT&T was a common carrier for landline phone and mobile voice service, but not for mobile Internet access. The Federal Communications Commission later reclassified mobile Internet as a common carrier service, which put it under a stricter FCC regime but exempted AT&T from FTC oversight.

Enlarge / The updated Outlook.com experience that many of us don't have yet. (credit: Microsoft)

In May 2015, Microsoft announced a big overhaul was coming to its Outlook.com free mail service. The new look Outlook.com looked a lot closer to the Outlook Web Access component in Exchange. It had Exchange features like the Clutter folder for handling all those e-mails that aren't quite spam but aren't quite important, pinned and flagged mail, new calendar views, and a better mobile interface that supports swipe-based gestures. In February 2016, this new experience was announced as being out of beta, and Microsoft rolled it out immediately to new users in North America. Everyone else was scheduled to be upgraded by the end of summer.

It looks like that's not the plan any more. The upgrade has been partially performed, and some users have been upgraded while others have not. A new error message (spotted by Twitter user gwydionjhr) suggests that those who don't have the update by now won't get it for quite a while. While attempting to share calendars, users have noticed that sharing between non-upgraded and upgraded users isn't possible, and this situation apparently won't be remedied until the first half of 2017.

It's not clear what the hold-up is or why the roll-out is taking longer than expected. The rollout is a big one behind the scenes, with Microsoft saying that the new system uses "Office 365-based infrastructure" and that there are hundreds of millions of accounts to migrate. Certainly the scale of what Microsoft is doing is certainly significant, but the delays are also frustrating, especially for anyone wanting to share calendars.