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From one platform to rule them all to a carousel of half-baked visions

Comment It is July 2015. Microsoft has just released Windows 10. Developers, weary from the false trail of Windows 8 and being urged to make "Metro style" apps, are now being pitched a new vision from Microsoft: the Universal Windows Platform (UWP).…

Unix boxes needed a hotfix to survive early morning cold boots

On Call Mornings are hard, and Friday mornings doubly so. Which is why The Register gives readers a little kick along on the last day of the working week in the form of a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support treachery and triumph.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Researchers have created a microphone that listens with light instead of sound. Unlike traditional microphones, this visual microphone captures tiny vibrations on the surfaces of objects caused by sound waves and turns them into audible signals. In the journal Optics Express, the researchers describe the new approach, which applies single-pixel imaging to sound detection for the first time. Using an optical setup without any expensive components, they demonstrate that the technique can recover sound by using the vibrations on the surfaces of everyday objects such as leaves and pieces of paper. [...] To demonstrate the new visual microphone, the researchers tested its ability to reconstruct Chinese and English pronunciations of numbers as well as a segment from Beethoven's Fur Elise. They used a paper card and a leaf as vibration targets, placing them 0.5 meters away from the objects while a nearby speaker played the audio. The system was able to successfully reconstruct clear and intelligible audio, with the paper card producing better results than the leaf. Low-frequency sounds (1 kHz) showed slight distortion that improved when a signal processing filter was applied. Tests of the system's data rate showed it produced 4 MB/s, a rate sufficiently low to minimize storage demands and allow for long-term recording. "Currently, this technology still only exists in the laboratory and can be used in special scenarios where traditional microphones fail to work," said research team leader Xu-Ri Yao from Beijing Institute of Technology in China. "We aim to expand the system into other vibration measurement applications, including human pulse and heart rate detection, leveraging its multifunctional information sensing capabilities."

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Workers on joint US/UK/Australia nuclear submarine program are painting a target on themselves

The Director-General of Security at the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) has lamented the fact that many people list their work in the intelligence community or on sensitive military projects in their LinkedIn profiles.…

iBiz warns import imposts set to rise

World War Fee The USA’s evolving tariff policy wasn't all bad news for Apple, which manufactures most of its products overseas.…

Malaysia's attitude of 'This could be worse and our neighbours are copping it too' is a typical response

World War Fee US President Donald Trump on Thursday announced new tariff rates that reduce the import duties on goods from several major tech-producing nations.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A 515-mile (829km) lightning flash has set a new record as the longest ever identified. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) confirmed the new world record for the flash registered on October 22, 2017, over the Great Plains in the US. It stretched from east Texas to near Kansas City, Missouri, roughly the distance between Paris and Venice. The previous record of 768km was also recorded in the Great Plains, a hotspot for severe thunderstorms, on April 29, 2020. Since 2016, scientific advances in space-based mapping have allowed for lightning flashes to be measured over a broader space, allowing these long flashes to be recorded. This event was one of the first flashes to be documented using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's latest model of orbital satellite, known as a geostationary operational environmental satellite. [...] The advances in technology have also allowed for the recording of the greatest duration for a single lightning flash. The record is a flash that lasted 17.1 seconds during a thunderstorm over Uruguay and northern Argentina on June 18, 2020. The findings have been published in the journal Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

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