The James Webb Space Telescope earlier this month started aligning its 18 mirrors, a mandatory, months-long process that involves the observatory’s Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument. Eventually, we got to see what Webb saw when it gazed at its first star. The sample image confirmed that NIRCam was working correctly, and that Webb was capturing light from the same star across each of its 18 primary mirror segments. And that’s exactly what we saw, a single image with 18 seemingly random organized dots of starlight....

The composite image of Jupiter seen above was captured using Webb’s NIRCam with three different filters: F360M (red), F212N (yellow-green), and F150W2 (cyan). Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, so the light from the scope has been mapped onto the visible spectrum. The auroras at the north and south poles of Jupiter are mapped to a reddish color. Another filter mapped to greens and yellows highlights hazes swirling around the poles, while a third filter mapped to blues showcases light from a deeper main cloud....

Similar to desktop replacements, most gaming laptops are large, heavy and usually lack in battery life. There are a number of specialized brands and boutique shops that will let you customize their products with all the latest components and even tailor their looks to your taste – but they’ll also charge a nice premium for it. Sager NP7280 (Built on the Clevo X7200) If you don’t mind stretching your budget to well over $2,000 for a few extra perks and top quality personalized service, there are a number of boutique PC shops waiting to take your order....

The publication did say the system will be comparable to the original 2600 in size, and will include a “playable” version of Pitfall! If you recall, the Lego NES set also included a playable scene from Super Mario Bros. This impressive engineering feat was all done mechanically, which is probably the same route Lego will take for the Pitfall! jungle scene where Pitfall Harry uses a vine to swing over a pit of crocodiles....

For the sake of brevity, I’ll only highlight a few of the key apps. Lenovo claims their tablet is the first to come with Netflix preloaded, even though it’s a few taps aways for the rest of Android users. Documents to Go is another key addition, an app that normally sells for $14.99 on the Android market. Documents to Go allows you to view, edit and create Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files as well as view Adobe PDF files and attachments....

The upcoming film “Fall” by Director Scott Mann found itself in a pickle when the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) rated it R for US audiences. Evidently, the MPAA took offense to all the F-bombs. It was unfortunate because they wanted a PG-13 to keep it open to a broader audience. “When we were filming the movie, we didn’t know if we were R or if we were PG-13, so I said the F-word so many times,” co-star Virginia Gardner told Variety....

But ask those who spend long hours working with PCs and most will say that having two or more monitors gives the greatest boost to day to day productivity. No more swapping between windows, while trying to keep track of what you’re doing; faster and easier drag and drop from folder to folder; lots of additional desktop space to view more things at once. Here’s our quick and easy guide for setting up a multi-monitor display in Windows....

The DirectX9 version features very basic lighting and many of the edges are quite jagged as we are not using MSAA, just FXAA. Moving to DX10 improves lighting, making it more realistic and shadows become softer but some of the finer details are lost, the grass for example was less dense. Moving to DX10.1 appeared to be a downgrade as the lighting became less realistic with less shadows. Then we found that DX11 also keeps the brighter lighting with fewer shadows which accentuates the grass a lot more....

A freshman security researcher named Gtm Mänôz noticed the bug in July 2022. While looking for his first bug bounty to present at BountyCon 2022, Mänôz started playing around with the Meta Accounts Center interface, which manages all Meta accounts, adding similar functionality as Google’s one-stop login for its various services (YouTube, Gmail, Docs, etc). He noted that the page allowed users to associate a phone number with their accounts when linking them....

Meta has revealed three new features it’s working on to make parents feel safer about what their teens – the company maintains that users must be 13 and older to use its products – are using their Quest VR headsets for. It promises this is only the beginning of its work on parental controls. Starting in April, Quest owners will be able to lock individual apps behind an unlock pattern if they find them inappropriate for younger users....

As a first person shooter we were not expecting to see much in the way of CPU utilization on Metro: Last Light, but we were wrong. We were pleased to see AMD FX-8350 and FX-6350 processors performing really well at ~ 65fps. Expecting the FX-4320 to deliver somewhat similar performance, we were shocked that frame rates dropped ~15% when going from 6 threads to 4 threads. After that result it was hardly surprising that the AMD dual-core processors were slaughtered and even the Phenom II X2 570 managed just 28fps when coupled with a GTX Titan....

The CPU performance is very similar to what we saw when testing Metro: Last Light over a year ago. Gamers will get away with a Core i5 or FX-8000 series processor as the high-end Core i7 models only offer a few extra frames per second with a high-end GPU such as the Radeon R9 290X. Overclocking the Core i7-4770K helped gain a few extra frames per second but certainly nothing game changing....

In a new podcast interview with Justine and Jenna Ezarik on Same Brain, the YouTubers asked Xbox boss Phil Spencer about Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard and whether it might mean some games would no longer be available on PlayStation. “We’re not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation. I know that—which isn’t exactly what you asked, but just to like punch that one in the nose, that’s not our intent,” Spencer said....

The full metal body of the Surface 3 makes it one of the best designed, most attractive Windows tablets on the market. Throw in great features like the three-position kickstand, the hidden microSD card slot, the full-sized USB port, the 3:2 display, and Microsoft has nailed the design of this tablet. Performance-wise I was impressed with how the Atom x7-Z8700 fared in everyday tasks. While the Surface 3 isn’t the ideal device for power users wanting to do heavy Photoshopping, videos or large spreadsheets, the tablet performs well for browsing the web, accessing apps, editing documents and even some light gaming....

The Mini-ITX form factor was developed by VIA in 2001 to promote its C3 processor, but technology has come a long way in the last decade. CPUs are smaller, cooler, and faster than ever before, and desktop chassis makers have embraced the ultra-compact market. Through such advancements, the Mini-ITX platform is no longer limited to anemic low-end solutions. Today we’re looking at a new breed of Mini-ITX motherboards from Asrock called the Z68M-ITX/HT and A75M-ITX....

And with that, we need to smack you with this obvious disclaimer: many interesting upcoming titles were excluded from our list, which is admittedly subjective and impossible to complete without adding everything due in 2013, but that would totally defeat the purpose of a “most anticipated” compilation. As always, you’re more than welcome (encouraged, even) to hit the comments and tell us what we’ve missed and why you think it’s important – just make sure it’s a PC game coming out in 2013 or be ready to take your lumps....

Hitachi ID recently published the results of its latest survey of North American businesses on ransomware attacks. In it, 65 percent of respondents say hackers have approached them or their employees to help carry out ransomware schemes on their own companies. According to Hitachi, it’s a 17-percent increase from a November 2021 survey. Only 27 percent of those polled said they had never been approached, and eight percent answered “unsure....

The S617 comes with an octa-core CPU configuration split into two four-core clusters. All cores are ARM Cortex-A53s, with the “big” cluster clocked at 1.52 GHz, and the “LITTLE” at 1.21 GHz. Interestingly, the S617 actually features a clock speed reduction on the big cluster, which sat at 1.7 GHz on the S616. It’s odd that Qualcomm would look to decrease CPU performance here, although it may be for power consumption reasons....

This laptop doesn’t perform quite as well as the Asus G752VS as Asus applies a factory overclock by default to the Core i7-6820HK CPU in that laptop. You could easily achieve similar performance by applying an overclock to the CPU in the MSI GT73VR yourself. As for storage performance, the RAID0 setup in this laptop absolutely smokes its competitors in sequential read and write speeds, exceeding 2.5 GB/s in both situations....

At the top-end of MSI’s rebranded CreatorPro workstation line are the Z17 and Z16P laptops, which can be had with up to a 14C/20T Core i9-12900H and a 16GB RTX A5500 GPU. The latter is Nvidia’s most powerful professional GPU for mobile workstations, launched recently alongside the reveal of the company’s next-gen Hopper architecture. Both the Z17 (17-inch) and Z16P (16-inch) have support for up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM (4,800MHz) and have Windows Hello-compatible FHD IR webcams on top of their QHD+ (2,560 x 1,600px) resolution displays....