Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises.
He should be punished for that decision, not rewarded for it.
A Guest Post by Thom Reilly
Astronomers have found a 710-metre-wide asteroid that spins once every 1.9 minutes, so fast that it should have spun itself apart
I hear from a lot of people that are filled with bilious fury about the tech industry, but few companies have pissed off the world more than Adobe.
As the foremost monopolist in software, web and graphic design, Adobe has created one of the single-most abusive, usurious freakshows in capitalist
A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place and minimal damage. Some believe the same could be done with the brains of people with a terminal illness, so their mind can be reconstructed and they can "continue with their life"
Apophis will be visited by multiple spacecraft – including landers – when it skims past Earth in three years
Last week, I mentioned Arthur Leo Zagat, who was born in New York on February 15, 1896. He collaborated with Nat Schachner on their first eleven short stories, before they both launched solo careers. Like Schachner, Zagat attended City College, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree.
We know that a person’s outlook can have a huge effect on their health, and it’s no different when it comes to ageing. Columnist Graham Lawton looks at new evidence of just how powerful our attitude is – and how to use it to age better
They have created a system that values nuanced preferences rather than black-and-white winner-takes-all victory. It rewards politicians who reach out to the centre, rather than towards their base.
Small tweaks to the electoral system can fundamentally change the incentives and weaken people like Farage.
When Google said they were going to require verification from every single Android developer that would end the ability to install applications from outside of the Play Store (commonly wrongfully referred to as “sideloading”), it caused quite a backlash.
What happens if you make a Linux syscall in a Windows application? So yeah, you can make Linux syscalls from Windows programs, as long as they’re running under Wine. Totally useless, but the fact that such a Frankenstein monster of a program could exist is funny to me.
Race For the Galaxy, Revised 2nd Edition, by Tom Lehmann (Rio Grande Games, 2007) As I mentioned in my review of Terraforming Mars, Race for the Galaxy is one of my long-time favorite games. Its play models the expansion of up to four interstellar civilizations, each from one of five possible starting points: Old Earth, Epsilon Eridani, Alpha Centauri, New Sparta, and Earth’s Lost Colony.
Have a read of this by Sian Norris, everyone:
Tweaking our skin's microbiome via a probiotic cream could prevent frostbite and hypothermia in extreme environments
Gerd Faltings shocked mathematicians around the world for his 1983 proof of the Mordell conjecture, which brought together seemingly disparate mathematical fields
When you fold a flexible material such as a pancake or a tortilla, its behaviour depends on a competition between gravity and elasticity
We are constantly told to watch out for the health risks of eating ultra-processed food, but should you be worried every time you sit down for a meal? Sam Wong takes a look at the evidence
The GNOME team has released GNOME 50, the latest version of what is probably the most popular open source desktop environment. It brings fine-grained parental controls, and the groundwork for web filtering so that in future releases, parents and guardians can set content filters for children.
Swordsmen and Supermen (Centaur Press, February 1972). Cover by Virgil Finlay Swordsmen and Supermen 1972, subtitled “Swashbuckling Fantastic Anthology.” From Centaur Press, edited by Donald M. Grant. Cover from Virgil Finlay.
PosrtmarketOS, the Linux ‘distribution’ for mobile devices, now also has an immutable variant, called Duranium. Duranium is an immutable variant of postmarketOS, built around the idea that your device should just work, and keep working.
DOS didn’t have sudo yet. This gross oversight has been addressed. SUDO examines the environment for the COMSPEC variable to find the default command interpreter, falling back to C:\COMMAND.COM if not set.
Once again, social media giants Facebook and TikTok have been caught red-handed. More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.
The Perseverance rover has found tiny crystals that seem to be rubies or sapphires inside pebbles on Mars, where they have never been seen before
The neurodegenerative condition chronic traumatic encephalopathy appears to be driven by damage to the blood-brain barrier due to repetitive head injuries, like those that occur in boxing. This suggests that drugs that strengthen this barrier could prevent or slow the condition
Tar made from birch tree bark is commonly found at Neanderthal sites, and experiments show that it kills some bacteria that cause skin infections
Feedback discovers an accounting firm has unveiled its latest "lunar market assessment", which predicts huge profits to be had. Suit up, lunar entrepreneurs!
The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week
An upcoming book from presenter and author Dallas Campbell collects both iconic and lesser-known images of space, from illustration to photography
Climate activist and author Rebecca Solnit tells Rowan Hooper why she still has hope, even in these "catastrophic" times
Disruption to shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has led to a spike in oil and natural gas prices, which could spur countries to boost the rollout of renewable energy and electric vehicles
When particles in volcanic ash cloud rub together, some pick up positive charge and others negative – now physicists have finally elucidated how these different charges are determined
For the first time, scientists have measured atmospheric gases from the late Pliocene, yielding data that could help to predict the future climate
Abigail Marsh has found that many psychopaths don’t want to be cruel and uncaring, and argues that they deserve support to help them get there
Drugs like psilocybin that induce psychedelic effects have shown promise for treating depression. Now, a review of the evidence suggests that they are effective, but no more so than traditional antidepressants
A weather-forecasting AI was used to recommend routes for American Airlines flights between the US and Europe to reduce the formation of contrails, which contribute to global warming
A weather-forecasting AI was used to recommend routes for American Airlines flights between the US and Europe to reduce the formation of contrails, which contribute to global warming
A weather-forecasting AI was used to recommend routes for American Airlines flights between the US and Europe to reduce the formation of contrails, which contribute to global warming
Modern kernel anti-cheat systems are, without exaggeration, among the most sophisticated pieces of software running on consumer Windows machines. They operate at the highest privilege level available to software, they intercept kernel callbacks that were designed for legitimate security products, they scan memory structures that most programmers never touch in their entire careers, and they do all of this transparently while a game is running.
Around Thanksgiving, the fifth Thomas Adam Grey thriller by Duane Laflin, The Medusa Sting, came out. As I’ve been enjoying this series, I quickly got and read it. This series continues to be great, and I look forward to the next ones.
Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, has released a new version. There are several noticeable version updates in this release. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now.
Java 26 delivers thousands of improvements that boost developer productivity, simplify the language, and help developers integrate AI and cryptography functionality into their applications. To help developers further streamline and enhance their development initiatives, Oracle is also announcing the new Java Verified Portfolio, which provides developers with a curated set of Oracle-supported tools, frameworks, libraries, and services, including commercial support for JavaFX, a Java-based UI framework, and Helidon, a Java framework for microservices.
Hi! If you like this piece and want to support my work, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5000 to 185,000 words, including vast, extremely
Two lawsuits are being brought against giant tech firms for the dangers their apps pose to young people. Columnist Annalee Newitz says the outcome of those cases could dramatically change social media for the better
You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there’s something you need to know
People who share a bed with a partner are woken by them multiple times per night, but don’t remember most of these disturbances
People who share a bed with a partner are woken by them multiple times per night, but don’t remember most of these disturbances
Physicists working on the LHCb experiment have spotted an elusive and fleeting particle, a heavier and more charming cousin to the proton, that has been sought for decades
Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut) (194 minutes; 2005) Written by William Monahan. Directed by Ridley Scott. (There is a shorter theatrical cut, which should be avoided at all costs, like the plague it is.) What is it? Ridley Scott’s epic saga of the Crusades, as seen through the eyes of a simple French blacksmith who travels to Jerusalem in an attempt to save the soul of his late wife, and ends up as the defender of the city against the...
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The levels of a heavy form of hydrogen in 3I/ATLAS are 30 to 40 times higher than in Earth's oceans, suggesting the comet has a cold and distant origin
Since many of the platforms and conventions that came to dominate computing came from the western world, we never give it a second thought that virtually everything related to programming is written in English using the English alphabet.
It’s only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the utter idiocy that is modern Windows, but apparently it’s one enough people complained about Microsoft is finally addressing it. In all of its wisdom, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to set the name of your user’s home folder during the installation procedure of Windows 11.
A radical idea that resolves many quantum paradoxes suggests there is no objective view of reality. How can the cosmos be stitched together from interlocking perspectives?
All five of the canonical nucleobases – the underpinnings of DNA, RNA and life on Earth – have been found in samples from the asteroid Ryugu
Scientists disagree whether human-made climate change or natural fluctuations are mostly to blame for worse-than-expected heat in recent years
On Black Friday weekend 2025, Steeger Books put out their next two sets of Argosy Library volumes, Series XVIII and XIX, getting closer to 200 volumes. As always, with each series, we get 10 books of great and sometimes overlooked fiction that appeared in the early pulps.
With the Trump administration’s attacks on so-called woke AI it is becoming even harder to make the technology we use fairer and more diverse. Leading voices are speaking out, reports Catherine de Lange
Ancient DNA reveals that the Goths of eastern Europe, some of whom would ultimately sack the city of Rome, may have been a mix of peoples from three continents
Firefly For a show that hardly anybody watched (it was reportedly 98th in the Nielsen Ratings for 2002-2003. The TV Guide Ratings page has it at 125th, and Fox’s lowest-ranked show), that one word carries a lot of weight 23 years later.
Dimensions beyond the four we’re familiar with could solve a host of problems in physics and cosmology. Columnist Leah Crane explores what a higher-dimensional universe might be like – and how we could find out if we live in one
A complete set (18 issues) of Avon Fantasy Reader, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and published 1947-1952 Donald A. Wollheim edited a magazine between the years 1947 to 1952 called Avon Fantasy Reader for Avon Publishers.
Has Donald been reading the Prussian military theorist?*
China’s Xi Jinping is also benefiting.
Niki in It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons:
The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything is exactly the wrong thing to do. To stand out, things need to be different. But if everything has an icon, nothing stands out.
Come on Apple, get your shit together.
PS: The title of Niki's post is excellent. Works in every way. I normally try to tweak the titles of these link posts a bit, but had to quote this one verbatim because it's so great.
Via.
What if you have a very modern machine that is entirely UEFI-only, meaning it has no compatibility support module and thus no way of enabling a legacy BIOS mode? Well, install a CSM as an EFI application, of course! CSMWrap is an EFI application designed to be a drop-in solution to enable legacy BIOS booting on modern UEFI-only (class 3) systems.
Arcane Arts and Cold Steel (Pulp Hero Press, December 24, 2025) David C. Smith is a name that speaks to lovers of sword & sorcery, if not with the power of a Karl Edward Wagner, then not far behind, and if you love the genre but don’t know Dave’s name…1) Shame on you; 2) Let me get you up to speed.
In a randomised trial, men who experience premature ejaculation benefitted from using an app to learn techniques for extending intercourse
I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly
in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and
fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories
serving military contracts.
SMF is the illumos system for managing traditional Unix services (long-lived background processes, usually). It’s quite rich in order to correctly accommodate a lot of different use cases. But it sometimes exposes that complexity to users even when they’re trying to do something simple.
Google has announced that it will release Chrome for Linux on ARM64 in the second quarter of this year. Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google’s most helpful services into their browser.
I will not pass up an opportunity to make you talk about Plan 9, so let’s focus on Acme. Acme is remarkable for what it represents: a class of application that leverages a simple, text-based GUI to create a compelling model of interacting with all of the tools available in the Unix (or Plan 9) environment.
I’m feeling kind of nostalgic today so I thought I’d write Hello, world! in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum! The last time I wrote any Z80 assembly was when I was 14 so around 36 years ago! I may be a little rusty! ↫ Old Man By the Sea It’s easy to tell the world hello in BASIC, but a bit more involved in Z80 assembly.
Simulations of Australopithecus hominins’ anatomy suggest that when they gave birth, they may have exerted tremendous pressure on their pelvic floors, putting them at risk of tearing
There are a few simple things you can do to make your digital life much more secure, says cybersecurity expert Jake Moore - follow these tips to tighten up your passwords
A trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism seems able to predict one thing will follow another, hinting that such associative learning emerged long before multicellular nervous systems
Nat Schachner was born on January 16, 1895 in New York. He earned a Bachelor of Science in chemistry from City College in 1915. He served in the U.S. Army during World War I in the chemical warfare service from 1917 to 1918 and, when he returned to New York he earned a Doctor of Jurisprudence from New York University in 1919, the same year he married Helen Lichtenstein.
A growing body of research shows that we tend to discount a person’s good deeds if they stand to benefit from them. Columnist David Robson explores where this instinct comes from – and whether we should resist it
The errors that quantum computers make are holding the technology back. But recent progress in quantum error correction has excited many researchers
The president is obviously out of his mind. So why don't investors seem to care?
There is no strategy to what the White House does. There is no calculation. There is no sense of logic or application. It is a fucking madhouse.
Toys powered by AI show a worrying lack of emotional understanding. But we need to understand the risks and benefits of the technology so the industry can be regulated, not outright banned
Oh my!
Most abrupt fall from grace for a TV show since Heroes? If not, it's certainly up there with Prison Break.
Thought the first season of The Last of Us was magnificent. Enjoyed the way the broke up the story and told it in pieces. Could tell that they tried to employ similar techniques in season two. It just fell flat. Says it all that, despite the cliffhanger, I have no inclination to continue watching once season three rolls around.
Body mass index (BMI) is used as a global standard for measuring health, but does it actually tell you anything about how healthy you are on an individual level? Carissa Wong explains the problems with this flawed tool
The story of a wildflower that adapted to a severe drought in California raises hopes that evolution will come to the rescue of species hit by climate change, but there are limits
Two popular quantum computing algorithms for problems in chemistry may have very limited use even as quantum hardware improves
Fentanyl-related overdose deaths fell by nearly 30 per cent in the space of a year in the US, which could represent a significant turning point in the country's opioid addiction crisis
Star Nathan Fillion is stoking rumours that cult western-in-space television series Firefly could be rebooted. Emily H. Wilson realises she is being toyed with – but is still praying for its return
Teenagers are being bombarded with highly targeted commercial content on TikTok, despite an EU law that prohibits profiling minors for advertising
Black Gate has been tracking the inception and growth of New Edge Sword & Sorcery (NESS) mgazine, starting with Micheal Harrington’s 2022 interview with Oliver Brackenbury (champion and editor of NESS), through 2023 with NESS’s first two magazine releases (also Greg Mele’s review of #1), and then into 2024 with NESS’s first book “Beating Heart and Battle Axes and its two-novella combo book Double-Edged Sword & Sorcery, and then in 2025 we covered NESS‘s publication of a NEW Jirel of Joiry tale! (2025) and we interviewed one of their...
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