Sitting in the audience watching Acer proudly announce its new Concept D line of “premium high-end desktops, notebook PCs and monitors designed for professional and amateur creators,” my heart beat a little faster. Xeons and Quadros and ECC memory, oh my! Acer talked about needing “to reach out to emotions” with the hardware design. …
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Microsoft’s messaging app Skype looks like it’s getting another friendly face in an upcoming version — yours! A split-screen feature for displaying what’s happening on your side of the call appeared in a beta build of the app (the Skype Insider program), so you’ll likely see it in an upcoming release. Screen sharing can be used for showing documents without …
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If you have that rarity in the PC market, a laptop powered by a Qualcomm processor and not the more common Intel chip, you can now use the Firefox web browser on it. Mozilla on Thursday released a beta version of Firefox for computers based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips for laptops. The nonprofit hopes its browser will graduate from beta …
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Microsoft said late last year it planned to swap out the rendering engine used in Edge and swap in one based on Chromium, the open-source foundation used in Google’s Chrome browser as well as in Brave, Opera and other popular browsers. If you’ve been waiting to see what Microsoft is up to with Edge, you can now download an early …
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The global market for personal computers continued its years-long downward spiral in the first quarter, according to preliminary numbers released Wednesday by market analysts. Worldwide shipments of PCs, including desktops, notebooks and workstations, declined 3% during the first three months of 2019, compared with the same period last year, market researcher IDC reported Wednesday. Market researcher Gartner tallied the same …
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Qualcomm, best known for mobile phone chips, plans to build AI chips that run in data centers packed with thousands of powerful servers. Artificial intelligence — or neural network tech based loosely on human brains — is revolutionizing computing with the abilities like distinguishing what’s in a photo or understanding human speech. Lots of AI runs on your phone or laptop, …
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Microsoft thinks the Federal Communications Commission is vastly undercounting the number of Americans who still don’t have access to broadband internet. In a Monday blog post, the tech giant said it found that 162.8 million people aren’t using the internet at broadband speeds. That’s a much greater number than the 25 million Americans the FCC estimates don’t have access to …
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if you’ve upgraded to Windows 10’s October 2018 release (and are current on updates), you can now remove USB storage devices without ejecting them first. If you ever bothered to do it in the first place. In the past, you needed to eject writable removable USB storage because Windows defaulted to “Better performance,” which delayed writes to improve speed, rather …
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Microsoft, having given up on its own core browser technology, has released test versions of its Edge browser built instead on the same foundations as Google’s Chrome. “In these first builds we are very much focused on the fundamentals and have not yet included a wide range of feature and language support that will come later,” said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s …
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The US Army’s specially modified version of Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 headsets resembles a real-life version of the first-person shooter video game Call of Duty, according to a CNBC reporter who got a first-hand look at how the Army is using the augmented reality technology. Microsoft won a $480 million contract in November to supply the US Army with prototype HoloLens …
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