A few years ago, drone talk could have been considered a bit taboo as people and communities struggled to come to terms with the how’s and why’s of unmanned air flight within city ordinances.

Fast forward five or so years and the discussion surrounding drones and its $1 billion commercial industry has shifted from outright banishment to terms of regulation and the beneficial aspects of rural and industrial applications.

Lending a voice to the evolving discussion of drone technology and its growing presence in modern communities of agriculture, mapping, weather prediction, infrastructure development, and maintenance is Microsoft with its TechSpark initiative.

Microsoft recently announced plans to invest with the University of North Dakota (UND) Aerospace Foundation, $100,000 worth of project funding to boost innovation in drone technology coming out of the region.

“TechSpark saw the drone innovation in North Dakota’s Red River Valley that is driving exciting advances for the U.S. drone industry and wanted to be a part of it,” said Kate Behncken, general manager of Global Community Engagement at Microsoft. “This cutting-edge project has the potential to increase crop yields and boost the production of renewable energy through safe drone advancements created locally, leading to greater economic opportunities for North Dakotans.”

With Microsoft’s jumpstart investment of $100,000, successful projections see over half a million dollars of “additional investment” in Airtonomy as well as boosting of other economic opportunities throughout the state.

Microsoft’s involvement has already begun to pay dividends as an uncalculated multiplier which helped Airtonomy unlock close to $570,000 in additional funding from local investors confident in Microsoft’s involvement.

Microsoft’s North Dakota partnership comes as one of six other TechSpark related initiatives which began in 2017 as a way to imbue rural and smaller communities with new economic opportunities and potential.

As with the other TechSpark projects, the UND partnership will produce a proof of concept utilizing Microsoft services that include IoT, cloud computing and AI technologies this time around.

One of the good things that the internet can do, despite all of its failings, is to help to shine a light on injustice, and a new initiative launching today aims to do just that. Human rights attorney Amal Clooney and her actor husband George Clooney, with help from Microsoft, have created an app called TrialWatch, based on Azure and Microsoft speech-to-text and machine translation tools. The app allows volunteers to collect and report data on trial proceedings, tracking cases that “involve vulnerable populations, like minorities, LGBTQ individuals, human rights activists, and journalists,” according to a report on GeekWire.

The app, which will be available on iOS, Android, and Windows, has been piloted in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, and The Clooney Foundation will coordinate and assign volunteers to monitor important trials around the world, with a team of trained experts to review the data, and will issue reports on how fair or unfair these trials prove to be.

The TrialWatch app and initiative is expected to be unveiled at an event in New York City today.

Yesterday, Microsoft released Fiscal Year 2019 3rd quarter earnings, and with all aspects of the company seemingly raking in the cash, the market is understandably excited. For a short time in after hours trading last night, the company’s “market cap,” or market capitilazation, that is the total shares of a company (for Microsoft, that’s 767 billion at last count) multiplied by its share price. To hit $1 trillion, the share price needs to hit $130.038, which it flirted with last night and has already hit a couple of times this morning, although currently it’s trading at $130.18.

Microsoft’s stock jumped almost 5% overnight on the earnings news, and there’s no reason to think that the company won’t continue its upward trend, at least in the short term. Build is coming up in just a couple of weeks, a good chance for the company to show off what it’s doing, and plans to do, with Azure, Windows, and Office. As the Verge’s Tom Warren pointed out yesterday on Twitter, Microsoft is now composed of three main pillars, all contributing equally:

Microsoft splits its businesses up into three main buckets, and they’re all roughly contributing the same amount of revenue (~30%)
Office + LinkedIn + Dynamics = $10.2B
Azure cloud + server + enterprise services = $9.7B
Windows + Xbox + Surface = $10.7B

Both Amazon and Apple have recently hit the trillion dollar market cap mark, but both have fallen back, with AMZN trading today at about $942B market cap, and AAPL at $975B. Of course you don’t get any special prizes for going over the trillion dollar mark, but it is remarkable how values of tech companies in general, and Microsoft in particular, have gone up. For comparison, in February 2014, when Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer as CEO, stocks were trading at 37.92, and the market cap was about $315B.

Microsoft is still flirting at just under that trillion dollar mark as we bring this post to a close, but there’s no denying that this company is firing on all cylinders right now, with a bright future ahead.

The Windows 10 May 2019 Update is just around the corner but select Windows Insiders are already being given the opportunity to upgrade their systems to it if they so choose.

Unfortunately, there appears to be a rather odd issue that’s preventing some users from upgrading. Essentially, those that attempt to download and install the Windows 10 May 2019 Update with a USB drive or SD card installed, will be presented with an error message that says, “This PC can’t be upgraded to Windows 10.”

Basically, Microsoft has detected that if an external drive is connected while the update is installed, the various drive letters, both internal and external, can become jumbled. To prevent this from happening to user’s devices, Microsoft has simply made it so that the update won’t complete with any external drive connected.

The official workaround? Simply unplug all external drives when performing the update and then reconnect them once the update is complete.

A post on ArsT claims that this glitch only affects those upgrading from versions 1803 and 1809 of the operating system while the official status on this issue from Microsoft states that, “This issue will be resolved in a future servicing update for Windows 10. For Windows Insiders, this issue is resolved in build 18877 and later builds.”

Have you been affected by this problem? Share your experience with the community in the comments below and then follow us on Twitter for more Windows news.

Yesterday, April 23, 2019, Lenovo unleashed a torrent of news regarding its Legion gaming line of laptops that involve processor updates, new GPU’s and the addition of two more models to its line up of mobile gaming offerings.

Starting with the new additions, gamers that may not have had their interest piqued by the design or price of the previous Y730 or the Y530 can now be on the lookout for the Y7000 and new Idepad L340 devices.

The Y7000 comes in a 15-inch wrapper with a crimson red “Y” backlit keyboard and thin bezels surrounding a full HD display sporting up to 144Hz refresh rates and offering 300 nits of brightness on an IPS anti-glare screen. The Y7000 carries a similar design to other Legion hardware with its slate gray color scheme and angular edges and signature “Y” light up the lid and comes with all the latest Intel and NVIDIA updates as the rest.

Y7000: pricing will be shared later

However, the new Ideapad L340 is where Lenovo is beginning to meld its more traditional consumer aesthetic with its gaming specs and produces a more mainstream looking device that just happens to be able to run a few games at higher fidelity. The L340 comes in both 15 and 17-inch options sporting Doly Audio support, something called Intel Opten for increasing game speeds all in a case that could easily be mistaken for an elegant mainstream direct MacBook competitor.

Ideapad L340: starting at $869.99 15″ & $919.99 17″ in May 2019

Now for the meat and potatoes. Lenovo’s Flagship Legion Y700 line is getting bumped to Y740 and getting refreshed with the latest Intel 9th generation Intel Core i7 processor and a lineup that includes NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Max-Q GPU and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti options. In addition to the beefed up specs gamers will gain access to FHD display with 144Hz refresh rate, NVIDIA G-SYNC, Dolby Vision and a screen as bright as 500 nits. Matching the impressive display output is the Y740’s Dolby Atmos Speaker System with Dolby Sound Radar for crisper sound quality. The aesthetic remains roughly the same with RGB backlit keyboard and system lighting with over 16 million color customization options to choose from. Gamers will also be able to beef up their system with an option 32GB DDR4 2666Mhz RAM.

Lenovo Legion Y740: starting at $1,699 17″ & $1,609.99 15″ in May 2019

Lenovo’s Y500 series gets its yearly bump to the Y540 and comes with similar accouterments such as the 9th gen Intel i7 and GeForce TRX 2060 GPU as well as some nifty new features such as the ColdFron dual fan thermal layout for cooling systems during intense gameplay and Harman Kardon speakers with Dolby Atmos support.

Lenono Legion Y540: Starting at $1209.99 for GeForce 1660 Ti 15″ & $1269.99 GeForce 1660 Ti 17″ in May 2019 and June 2019

Last but not least is the Lenovo Legion Y7000p which is also known as the less cool brother of the Y7000 comes as the affordable gaming hog donning the same Intel 9th gen i7 processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, GTX 1660, and 1650 GPUs and subtle white backlit keyboard. The Y7000p comes in a one size fits all 15″ design.

Lenovo Legion Y7000: Starting at $1199.99 in May 2019

Next month is shaping up to be a good month to start looking at PCs for gamers to purchase ahead of some interesting E3 2019 announcements a month later. With the continued merging of Xbox console and PC gaming platforms by Microsoft, finding a PC that is both a mainstream machine and a gaming rig in after-hours could become a shopping segment Lenovo could corner with its Legion line of devices.

Today on the Microsoft Security Guidance blog, the company has published an explanation of its draft release of its security configuration baseline settings for Windows 10 1903 and Windows Server 1903. This document sets guidelines for Group Policy baseline settings, and with this latest draft there are some significant changes. Among the most noteworthy is a change to no longer set password expiration policies that require “periodic password changes,” a long standing baseline that Microsoft says has become “an ancient and obsolete mitigation of very low value.”

The blog post goes on to explain why Microsoft is dropping the password expiration policy, noting first that “we are not proposing changing requirements for minimum password length, history, or complexity:”

Periodic password expiration is a defense only against the probability that a password (or hash) will be stolen during its validity interval and will be used by an unauthorized entity. If a password is never stolen, there’s no need to expire it. And if you have evidence that a password has been stolen, you would presumably act immediately rather than wait for expiration to fix the problem.

While the baseline guidelines are dropping the outdated expiration policy, the blog post also notes that “we must reiterate that we strongly recommend additional protections even though they cannot be expressed in our baselines,” and notes that Azure AD password protection and multi-factor authenitcaion are much better alternatives.

In addition to the news about password expiration, default disabling of built in Guest and Administrator accounts are also being proposed for elimination.

Note that removing these settings from the baseline would not mean that we recommend that these accounts be enabled, nor would removing these settings mean that the accounts will be enabled. Removing the settings from the baselines would simply mean that administrators could now choose to enable these accounts as needed.

The proposed guidelines are just that, proposed, and interested parties can download the draft and comment via the blog post.

I recently reviewed the Lenovo Smart Tab P10 and came away thinking it was a device on a trajectory similar to Microsoft’s Surface Pro. In what I considered the early awkward phases of its future proposition, I saw the P10 and its less-premium M10 version as a tablet and separate connected speaker experience attempting to leapfrog the current model of ambient computing known to buyers today and similar to the Surface Pro, I overlooked perhaps one of its biggest selling points, choice.

While the Surface Pro was clunky in its early execution, one of its biggest selling points and what is proving to be its greatest staying power is that it’s a consolidation of financial resources that I often feel tech reviewers take for granted when reviewing expensive and even seemingly inexpensive tech; these devices come with shelf lives much longer than the 30-60 day window we as reviewers become accustomed to. Much like the Surface Pro, the Lenovo Smart Tab P10 and M10 empower their buyers to choose how they use the device.

Where the Surface Pro can make for an awkward dedicated tablet at times, a buyer is also free to use it in tablet mode for as long or as little as they may actually use a dedicated tablet and the same goes for its productivity experience. The Smart Tab P10 and M10 allow buyers the freedom to use it as a tablet or docked Smart Display in a myriad of configurations that more traditional Smart displays are limited by their dedicated construction.

With that being said, much of my earlier review that still holds, however, I took some extra time to play around with the P10 before sending it back to Lenovo and now feel compelled to amend my initial review. The P10, for some, will still be a tablet posing as Smart Speaker/Home Hub-like device, but others might just see what I saw in my late-phase testing of the device, a Smart Speaker/Home-hub-like device that can also offer all the productivity and consumption benefits of a tablet, for roughly the same price as a traditional smart speaker.

Off the top, Lenovo already offers a more traditional smart display experience in its Smart Display powered by Google. The Lenovo Smart Display was first unveiled at CES 2018 and it comes with all the accouterment customary for this type of device, including 10W full range speakers, 8 or 10-inch FHD display and voice assistant for hands-free operations all for the starting price of $199. Other Smart Speakers/Display in this category range from Google’s Home Hub at $149 to Amazon’s pricier Echo Show at $229 and this is where I had to reevaluate the way I reviewed the P10 in that it’s a device that offers all of the features of Smart Display experience while also offering customary benefits of a tablet for a $199.99 starting price.

Being able to dock and undock the display from the premium speaker portion of the P10 and M10 enables a wider range of use cases that move beyond the single room uses often showcased during demos of other Smart Displays. The P10 and M10 can definitely hold their own in a kitchen, living room, bedside table, but they can also do all three at once without having to be moved or the addition of extra hardware.

Once I was able to figure out the Bluetooth issues I was initially having with the dock, I unlocked a whole new world of Alexa Assistant commands and skills used when the tablet was in my bedroom but was gonna later be used in the kitchen or began playing music and video content from different rooms. The P10 and M10 aren’t the only devices that can utilize this sort of Bluetooth magic, but a Sonos set up is arguably more expensive, Chromecast requires the purchase of several pieces of hardware and other Smart Displays are fundamentally limited by their single-use design.

Beyond the Smart Display of the P10 and M10, using the tablet for my more consumption-oriented task led to a better free-flowing of data transfer in the entire experience. When I couldn’t shout out queries for recipes from other rooms due to sleeping children, I was able to un-dock the tablet and take my time to curate a recipe book for lunches and dinners for the week, peacefully and quietly on my couch, that I could later have read to me when cooking.

I also took the time to review the unit as a true Amazon stand, by linking my Amazon Prime music collection the device which made jumping in and out of lists much easier than what I had originally tried doing, which consisted of starting a song in Spotify and having it amplified when docked, thus bypassing the selling points of the Alexa mode.

When initially reviewing the P10 there were two sticking points that I kept running into when using the device, and I was reminded that one of them can be resolved by simply buying the M10. Perhaps, in an attempt to offer a familiar premium smartphone experience in a home hub device, Lenovo opted for glass on glass design for the P10, which for anyone who uses a glass on glass phone without a case knows how unsettling it can be to hold anywhere that isn’t a cushioned couch flanked by tons of soft pillows. However, the M10 offers the same functional experience of the P10 for around $30 less and with a soft-touch back for better grip when the device is being used undocked. The other sticking point was the processing power of the tablet, to which I am still hung up on, but have come to live with. The processing power of the tablet only becomes apparent when compared to my use-case on my Galaxy Note 8 which seems to be quicker at completing tasks.

I use my Note 8 for everything from revising PowerPoint presentations to catching up on Game of Thrones via the Showtime app, but when using any dedicated tablet, I tend to limit my use case scenarios thanks to the proximity of either my smartphone or computer, and I would venture to say a lot of people are in the same boat. While I would like to see the P10 and M10 at least make use of a more powerful Snapdragon processor, I’ve come to acknowledge my actual uses of the tablet were already limited before reviewing the device.

In the end, the M10/P10 are still two devices attempting to offer an experience that’s some might find best served by dedicated hardware, but the reality of spending $199 to $249 to get everything from a tablet, smart assistant, home and kitchen display, Bluetooth speaker and potential home hub is something that more industry manufacturers should look to embrace in the near future.

The second episode of Life is Strange 2 is now available to play for free for all Xbox Game Pass subscribers on Xbox One.
This latest episode follows the events of the first one and also features a tie-in with the Captain Spirit spin-off.

Here’s the official description and trailer:

The two brothers continue their journey on the road into the winter months & struggle against the cold. As Daniel gradually falls ill, Sean’s concern for his younger brother increases and decides the pair of them must make their way to their distant grandparent’s house to recover and seek shelter. During their stay, they encounter next-door neighbour Chris, a young boy the same age as Daniel who believes he is a super-hero by the name of Captain Spirit. As Daniel and Chris begin to form a friendship, Sean insists on Daniel following a set of rules around his power. Will Daniel keep his power concealed or break the rules in a time of need?

Xbox Game Pass is a Netflix-like subscription service for Xbox video games. Every month new game content is added while older games are removed. Subscribers can play the current games in the Xbox Game Pass library in full as if they owned them outright.

Are you an Xbox Game Pass subscriber and are you playing Life is Strange 2? Let us know if you’re enjoying it in the comments below and then follow us on Pinterest for more Xbox gaming content.

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Go to store
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Microsoft has started rolling File Restore for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams, a feature that will allow Office 365 admins to restore any files or folders deleted from the two services within the last 30 days. File Restore was initially announced back at Microsoft’s Ignite conference last Fall, and it should be an important selling point for Microsoft 365 going forward.

“Files Restore is now available for SharePoint document libraries, protecting your shared files in SharePoint, Teams, Outlook groups, and Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups and uses the same recovery capabilities that protect your individual files in OneDrive for Business,” the company explained in a blog post. Files shared on Microsoft Teams also leverage SharePoint Document libraries, which means that IT admins don’t have to deal with separate storage containers.

To access the new feature, Office 365 admins will need to click the gear icon in SharePoint, select Restore this library, then select a date range and the files that need to be restored. Microsoft is currently rolling out Files Restore to Targeted Release organizations, and the company expect the new feature to be available for all Office 365 customers by the end of next month.

The Windows Insider webcast is coming back at 10AM PDT this morning, and this episode should dive deep into the upcoming May 2019 update for Windows 10 as well as Microsoft’s new Edge Insider browser. Indeed, Kyle Pflug and William Devereux from the Edge team will make a special appearance at 11AM PST, and we hope to learn more about new features coming soon to the new Chromium-based Edge.

Join us tomorrow at 11am PDT as @kylealden and @MasterDevwi join the @windowsinsider webcast to discuss the preview builds of Microsoft Edge. Come chat with us and ask questions in real-time as we stream live on @watchmixer. See you tomorrow!https://t.co/Faua9x5PBg

— Microsoft Edge Dev (@MSEdgeDev) April 23, 2019

After some internal builds leaked in March, Microsoft’s new Edge Insider browser finally became officially available earlier this month with the Dev and Canary public channels. Since then, Microsoft has already introduced new features such as the ability to sync favorites with Edge on Android, as well as support for Windows Mixed Reality headsets. There are many other features currently hidden in the “Edge://flags” menu, but Microsoft is already iterating fast with daily updates in the Canary channel.

There are still many things we’d like to learn about the new Edge Insider browser, including when the Beta channel and macOS version are coming, and we may well get more information more during the podcast this morning. As usual, you’ll be able to watch it live on mixer.com/windowsinsider.

Intel announced today the launch of new 9th Gen Core H-Series mobile processors designed for gamers and content creators. The company is promising desktop-grade performance for complex tasks such as video editing, with up to 33% overall performance leap compared to a 3-year old PC.

The lineup of new 45W H-series chips include Core i5, i7 processors and the top of the line Core i9-9980HK CPU with eight cores that can reach up to 5 GHz with Intel Thermal Velocity Boost. This new Core i9 processor is pretty much a mobile version of Intel’s Core i9-9900K processor that launched last Fall, a chip that could also reach 5Ghz.

All of Intel’s new 9th gen laptop CPUs also support the latest Wi-Fi 6 standard, Thunderbolt 3, as well as Intel Optane memory technology. The new chips will start shipping first in laptops from Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and MSI.

In addition to the new mobile CPUs, Intel also announced today a pretty big extension of its family of 9th Gen Core desktop processors. The 25 new chips include affordable Pentium Gold and Celeron products starting at $42, as well as new Core i3, i5, i7 and i9 CPUs with prices going from $122 to $439 for the new Core i9-9900 CPU. You can find more details about all the new SKUs on this page.

Microsoft is continuing to build out its already massive array of Azure datacenters, and the latest plans include building two new centers in Goodyear, Arizona. According to AZCentral, a USA Today news site (via DataCenterKnowledge), Microsoft purchased one parcel of land near the Phoenix Goodyear Airport last year for $48 million, and just purchased another 147 acres about 10 miles south of the first one for another $37 million. The city of Goodyear had been secretive about plans for the land, providing The Arizona Republic with a largely redacted site plan, but last Friday allowed the news operation to inspect a fully unredacted plan, revealing plans for the Microsoft datacenters.

In addition, Microsoft provided a statement on the acquisitions:

“As part of our plans to support the growing demand for cloud and internet services in Arizona and across the Western United States, Microsoft recently purchased land at two locations in Goodyear, Arizona where we intend to develop world-class data center facilities.”

Microsoft promises that its data center designs “are more energy and water efficient than traditional enterprise data centers,” as water cooling in arid Arizona is a big concern, and AZCentral also raised concerns that datacenters would not bring as many jobs into the area as a manufacturing facility would.

One phase of construction at the airport site is scheduled for a first phase of development for the first of a potential five massive 250,000 square foot buildings.

There’s no word as of yet on when these datacenters will come online, but Microsoft continues to aggressively build out its Azure services.

The official Slack app has updated for Windows 10 devices with a massive load of bug fixes both large and small.

A lot of visual glitches have been fixes in this update as have some more technical problems such as buggy cursor issue.

Here’s the full release notes:

Bug Fixes

• Interactions with network drives are now handled with grace and panache. Or, at the very least, “better”.
• If you want to launch slack minimized, you now can. We will no longer stand in your way.
• We’ve changed the look, feel and texture of our new HTML notifications. Give them a try! They’re delicious.
• Sometimes on Windows 10, moving the window, say, up would cause a white bar to appear. We raised the bar.
• Also, moving the window would sometimes change the size of the window. Your aim was true; we no longer move the goalposts on you.
• In the Apps and Features and Uninstall a Program window, the icon showing up was not the right one. It now is.
• The notification and unread indicators on the taskbar are now more readable.
• Blurry icons were an issue for some users with multiple displays. Now all is clear.
• The Slack icon, previously appearing with an opaque background color on Windows 10 is now all the clearer for being less clear.
• Some people were seeing sidebar icons for teams other than the one they were in. This was confusing, and has now stopped.
• And finally, if you have been having issues with keyboard or cursor issues, you should no longer be having them.

Slack is a communications and collaboration tool that supports text messaging and voice calls, file sharing, and integration with a variety of other services such as Outlook and OneDrive.

Do you use Slack? Let us know why or why not in the comments below and then follow us on Twitter for more tech news.

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