Oh wow, what a sight, the face of a huge nerd
eager for a fresh helping of tech news. Well, I'm happy to oblige.
A Microsoft blog post published this morning made it seem like the company was announcing a time limit
on their free upgrade offer for Windows 10 users.
The blog post has now been taken down, but when it was live, it's title read,
free upgrade to Windows 11 for a limited time only.
It's a little too casual. You might be screwed, whoopsie.
It could be that Microsoft isn't planning to restrict free Windows 10 to 11 upgrades,
at least more than they already have through hardware requirements,
but setting an upgrade deadline to coincide with the end of support for Windows 10,
which is coming October 14th this year, would mesh with the company's plans for 2025,
which it called the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh
in some kind of Oprah inspired manifestation exercise.
It also wouldn't be unprecedented. Microsoft limited free upgrades to Windows 10
from systems running seven and eight to one year,
but kept allowing users to activate Windows 10 using keys from those older OSes.
Interestingly, one reason Microsoft may have taken down the article
is that the limited time upgrade thing wasn't referenced at all in the actual text,
but it did mention that Office apps, which are now called Microsoft 365 apps, much simpler,
will also be losing support on Windows 10 devices
on the same day as the OS itself, October 14th,
which means even if you pay the 30 bucks a year for extended security updates on Windows 10,
the same can't be said for word and PowerPoint.
Now, Microsoft does say in a support document that the apps will keep working.
It's just, well, if you don't pay for protection,
you might encounter performance and reliability issues
over time, but what can you do? You know, it's a rough neighborhood.
NVIDIA has published new performance charts for their RTX 50 series GPUs
that shows just how important DLSS4
with multi-frame generation is to NVIDIA's extremely bold claims
of double the 40 series performance at CES last week.
Compared to the old charts for the 5090, 5080, 5070 Ti
which you can find in our new sources link in the description, the new charts
add a Resident Evil 4 benchmark that was run without DLSS.
And it looks like compared to their 40 series non-super counterparts, the 50 series shows pure
traditional rendering uplifts of around 30% for the 5090
and 15 to 20% for the others, which is not double.
And furthermore, it seems to scale linearly with the extra wattage each card is getting.
So you're telling me this architecture is better?
I could do that. In answer to complaints over their GPUs relying
on so-called fake frames to achieve high performance,
NVIDIA seems to be saying, yeah, so f***ing what?
Apparently 80% of RTX players turn on DLSS.
Sure, a lot of the time it's on by default, but the point is upscaling and frame gen
have pretty much already been normalized. So it makes total sense that NVIDIA is trying
to tell reviewers the right way to review their AI cards
that happen to generate pixels on your screen. Rumors are pointing to RTX 5090 reviews
going up on January 24th with 5080 reviews on the 30th
unless that was hallucinated by chatGPT. I mean, the biggest fake frame of them all.
Speaking of AI, Google has dropped its separate
Gemini add-on for Google Workspace and will be adding Gemini-powered features
for Gmail, Docs, Meet, et cetera to existing workspace plans for free
alongside a small price increase. Microsoft answered Google by relaunching
yet another thing called Copilot. Copilot Chat is free for commercial customers
with the ability to create and work with task-specific agents on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Copilot is, of course, based on tech from OpenAI
who also just announced a couple of new agentic tools.
Paying chatGPT users can now ask it to track tasks
and set reminders to, say, give me a daily weather update.
Just make sure you set another reminder to ask chatGPT if that update was a hallucination.
It's going to rain today. Is it though? Thinking, oh, nah, it won't.
You're the best. If you're not stoked on all of this AI stuff,
I guess you must hate local news because OpenAI also just announced
their funding news outlet Axios to develop local newsrooms in four new locations in the US.
And Google just made a deal with the Associated Press to swap content and tools.
Sure, it just came out that Metta and probably every other AI company
intentionally trained models on pirated books and probably pirated everything else.
But what, you hate local news? Ah, come on.
Still hungry, hmm? What's the tech news without a quick bits dessert?
I'm, this is weird, I'm sorry. The FBI says they had no choice
but to hack thousands of computers in the US to remove malware planted there
by a China-backed hacking group, which is almost a shame
because their name is Mustang Panda.
I feel like they should get some leeway for that. The Fed said that owners of infected PCs
were typically unaware of the infection.
So stands to reason they wouldn't be aware of the FBI
breaking into their computer to fix it for them. You're welcome.
Although they did apparently tell internet service providers of affected IP addresses
that they should inform their customers. The disclosure of the operation comes a year
after the FBI did something similar to de-infect routers being used as part of a botnet.
The FBI's just hacking stuff all the time. For good, for good reasons.
Samsung is apparently pre-empting Apple's iPhone 17 Air with their own Galaxy S25 Slim,
as detailed by reputable leaker OnLeaks and news site SmartPrix.
They showed renders of the phone, which will reportedly launch in May
at a thickness of just 6.4 millimeters,
which will enable owners to,
what, Jimmy Alok with it? Why do we want this? The White House is continuing to go ham
with the restrictions on China before President Biden leaves office,
adding more companies to a list of entities affected by trade restrictions.
The Biden administration also finalized its proposed rule
that will effectively ban Chinese cars and Chinese car components from the US.
In what I have to assume is a fit of rage, Chinese drone company, DJI,
which could be facing its own ban at some point, removed its geofencing feature that stops drones
from flying in no-fly zones. The week after one of them crashed into a plane
fighting the California wildfires.
So that's where international politics are at right now.
The FTC, Illinois and Minnesota have sued John Deere
over the company's anti-consumer repair practices,
alleging the tractor manufacturer has monopoly power over the repair market.
And I really hope this is a wake-up call for John Deere because what, they think they're Apple?
I can understand artsy baristas using the genius bar,
but you're gonna tell farmers they can't fix stuff?
You make tractors! And a coder going by a ding, 2210,
has baked a playable instance of Doom 1993 into a PDF file.
Yeah, they apparently did this thanks to the JavaScript support in PDFium,
the engine that renders PDFs in chromium-based browsers.
It supports WASD movement and other keyboard controls.
You just have to click the text box first, and then you're free to play Doom
in perhaps the worst way imaginable. But the best way to get more tech news
is to come back here on Friday, when we'll probably have news about the Switch 2.
Nintendo did not reveal the reveal for the Switch 2 today,
probably because everyone talked about it so much and they're shy, so damn it, shh, shh, shh!
It always comes right for me.
Just settle down.