The Hot Take: More push for cloud space I'd assume.
Windows 11 26H2 is out, and Microsoft has enabled Windows settings backup by default, a move that could send administrators scrambling to opt out where they once had to opt in. The latest release hasn't made a lot of shockwaves in the community featurewise. Users with up-to-date versions of 25H2 will unlikely notice much difference â 26H2 has the same code base, delivered via an enablement package. It even has the same set of known issues, although all are now "mitigated" in one way or another. However, administrators will spot severalâŚ
Firefox 157 is here, but this time, Mozilla is making an unusual amount of noise about this release and its new look. This release has a new theme called âNova,â which in the release notes Mozilla calls âFirefoxâs biggest visual refresh in years.â The new theme is the flagship here, and aside from that, the new features in this version are fairly modest. Theyâre all welcome enough, though. Video calls which use WebRTC â Web Real Time Compression â now use hardware compression, and a bug which made video appear upside-down has been fixed, alongâŚ
The Hot Take: Snapdragon SoC's going out of support sooner than x86 chips or that just me thinking this?
The Surface lineup belonging to Microsoft largely comprises machines shipping with Snapdragon chipsets or Intel processors, with the latest addition being NVIDIAâs RTX Spark SoCs for the ultra-premium Surface Laptop Ultra. If youâve noticed, AMD is sorely missing from the list, even though the companyâs Xbox hardware ships with these chips. Well, a company executive has provided a reason, and itâs not because Microsoft has little to no love for AMD. A Microsoft executive says âwe love working with AMD,â but itâs working with a limited productâŚ
The Hot Take: No privacy any where. Except maybe linux but then you get emulated gaming... I just don't like that emulation overhead i want bare metal raw performance.
A viral post on X claims that Windows keeps a thumbnail of every photo youâve ever deleted, stored secretly in a file called thumbcache_256.db. It sounds scary for a desktop OS used by 1.5 billion people. The post has 1.7M views so far, and I received several DMs asking if they should follow the instructions in the tweet.
To be fair, this is a Windows feature. File Explorer does keep a thumbnail cache, so it doesnât have to regenerate image previews when needed. However, the post goes too far on multiple levels.
Viral post claiming WindowsâŚ
The Hot Take: I'm gonna take a guess because we don't own it, we just license it is why.
More games are taking advantage of the free-to-play model, and Microsoft is building systems designed to deliver ads without disrupting the gaming experience. According to Respawn First, the system would first give players some ad-free playtime, which could either be based on time or in-game progress, such as levels and bosses. Once this expires, the company will then open a window and briefly serve âpromoted content.â However, this system will not just show ads out of the blue. Instead, it will work with the game engine so that they will onlyâŚ
The Hot Take: Will have to see how this works and if the fidelity is good.
 AMD has shown a ray tracing trick that slashes memory and acceleration-structure costs while keeping hundreds of millions of animated triangles moving in real time.
AMD Fellow Holger Gruen demonstrated the technique using a terrain scene containing about 25,000 independently animated plants. At maximum level of detail, the vegetation represents roughly 2.8 billion triangles.
After level-of-detail selection, the system ray-traces about 500 million animated triangles each frame using primary and shadow rays. AMD says the scene runs at moreâŚ
The Register reports:
When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year's annual RustConf, being held this week in MontrĂŠal.âŚ