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SpaceX's Falcon X takes of Sunday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California.SpaceX
Elon Musk's SpaceX has pulled off back-to-back Falcon 9 rocket launches and landings, a milestone that helps prove it's up to the task of a more rapid pace.
A Falcon 9 rocket launched at 1:25 p.m. PT Sunday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, delivering 10 satellites into orbit for the communications company Iridium Communications. The first stage of the rocket successfully landed minutes later.
That was just two days after a Falcon 9 rocket that launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, carried a satellite for Bulgaria into orbit.
The private space company, whose ultimate goal is to get more people in space (and one daysend a million of us to Mars), needed to show it could handle the pressure of frequent launches.
The launches weren't suppose to occur within 48 hours of one another. But the BulgariaSat launch got pushed back from last weekend due to technical concerns.
The Falcon 9 launched Sunday was sporting an upgraded titanium hypersonic grid fin, which Musk tweeted did a good job of withstanding he heat of reentry.
"New titanium grid fins worked even better than expected," he tweeted. "Should be capable of an indefinite number of flights with no service."
Musk also posted this cool video showing a sped-up version of Sunday's launch:
Some of Microsoft's Windows 10 source code was leaked earlier in the week, but the potential damage from the breach may be limited, based on various reports.
The Register first noted on Friday that up to 32TB of "official and non-public (Windows 10) installation images" were uploaded to BetaArchive.com. (BetaArchive calls itself "the community for beta collectors" and "one of the webs largest Beta & Abandonware repositories!") The leaked code may date back to March 2017, The Reg said.
The code that was leaked is part of Microsoft's Shared Source Kit, which includes source code for the base Windows 10 hardware drivers, PnP code, USB and Wi-Fi stacks, storage drivers and some ARM-specific OneCore kernel code, according to "people who have seen its contents," The Reg reported.
BetaArchive has taken what its owner called 1.2 TB of Windows 10 code offline since the original report.
"Our review confirms that these files are actually a portion of the source code from the Shared Source Initiative and is used by OEMs and partners," according to a Microsoft statement.
Through its Shared Source Initiative, Microsoft licenses source code for various products to certain "qualified" customers, governments and partners for debugging and reference purposes.
Another report about the leak in The Verge claims that "most of the collection (of files that leaked) has been available for months or even years."
As various sites have reported, the Windows 10 source code leak happened right after two men were arrested in the UK for allegedly trying to hack various Microsoft's systems in order to get at customer data. So far, no one is saying whether these individuals had anything to do with the Windows 10 source leak.
This story originally posted as "Microsoft's Windows 10 Shared Source Kit code leaks" on ZDNet.
i'm vulnerable.
I look at my MacBook Air and think it a little dowdy.
It works just fine, but there are those times when you want to believe there's something better out there.
So when I heard that Microsoft had released its Surface Laptop, I wanted to be sold. I wanted someone to take me gently by the hand and lead me to a land of new promises, even if I had to experience them through Windows. And for that, I needed a real live human being. I'm old-fashioned that way.
I went to two local Microsoft stores, clutching my usual naivete like a glass of fine sauvignon blanc and told them my story. It happened to be the truth. I'm a lifelong MacBook user. Please tell me, I begged, please sell me on why this Surface Laptop is better. After all, Apple's always been the one who was supposed to be a good at selling. Has Microsoft caught up?
Microsoft store no. 1: A slippery Surface
At the first Microsoft store in Marin County, California, I sat down and began to play with a burgundy-colored laptop. Very quickly, a saleswoman came up to me. I bared my inner plight. "Why is this better than my MacBook Air?" I asked. She began by telling me that it came in a lot of different colors. Which didn't quite sway me. The next sales avenue was the touchscreen, which was certainly an improvement, but did it really matter that much?
Still, I was in a positive frame of mind. I wanted to type on it. I do a lot of typing. "Does this have Word on it?" I asked. "I don't know," came the reply. It turned out either that it didn't or that the saleswoman couldn't find it. This wasn't going well.
"How easy is it to transfer photos and files from my MacBook?" I asked. "Oh, that can be quite complicated," the saleswoman replied. That wasn't what I wanted to hear.
What was odd was that this saleswoman didn't seem sold on the laptop herself. In a very short time, she explained that I didn't really want the Surface Laptop at all. I wanted the Surface Pro 4. This was a problem for me. I have a very bad ergonomic habit. I type on my lap, almost all the time. There's no way I could balance a Surface Pro 4 on my lap. I tried. It didn't go well. I left the store painfully unsold.
Microsoft store No. 2: 'We thought about Macs when we designed it'
A week later, I wandered into another, slightly larger Microsoft store in San Francisco. My story stayed the same. The salesman's spiel was very different.
"Why is this better than my MacBook Air?" I asked. "Have you picked it up?" he replied. I picked it up. It felt slightly heavier than my MacBook Air. But it is slightly bigger. So, yes, I was warming. Next, the salesman asked me to close it and notice that it was very sleek, without a single visible screw.
I appreciated being sold on emotional values, rather than specs. This salesman then proceeded to (try to) sell me by telling me how Microsoft had designed the Surface Laptop with a lot of Mac gestures. "We thought about Macs when we designed it," the salesman told me.
I found this quite clever. Instead of making me feel alienated or confused -- I think of Windows as an unaesthetic world -- the idea here was to make me comfortable by seeing that, for example, the two-fingered gesture on the trackpad felt identical. Not once did this salesman try to fill me with facts and figures about, say, RAM.
He chose, instead, to guide me toward emotionally uplifting aspects -- like the sound coming from speakers buried beneath the keyboard or the amusement of writing on the screen. Oh, and when it came to the file transfer question, he was honest that files in some Apple programs couldn't be uploaded, but insisted that photos were simple to transfer -- and showed me how.
When he saw I was still wavering, he also tried to direct me to the Surface Pro 4. Why? Because he wanted me to see how amusing it was to write on the screen and have the Surface turn my handwriting into text. My handwriting is very bad. Sometimes, I can't read it. The Surface Pro 4 only got one word right.
I turned back to the Surface Laptop. "Do you find that you're selling this more to Windows users or to Mac users?" I asked. "50-50," came the reply. "Some people are just tired of Apple."
I'm just a little tired of my Air. And I'd have bought many items from this salesman. He was clever, mentally agile, listened and had good, positive answers to my questions. He knew Macs and knew what could be good and bad about them.
But I didn't buy the Surface Laptop. Why? Please forgive me, but to my eyes, it felt too square and the cloth covering just looked cheap. The more I used it, the cheaper it both looked and felt. (Some versions of this cost more than $2,000.)
Sometimes, one salesperson is much better than another. Sometimes, the gap between a successful sale and failed one is very narrow.
What was I supposed to do now? Go to an Apple store, I suppose.
Microsoft didn't immediately respond to my request for comment.
I look at my MacBook Air and think it a little dowdy.
It works just fine, but there are those times when you want to believe there's something better out there.
So when I heard that Microsoft had released its Surface Laptop, I wanted to be sold. I wanted someone to take me gently by the hand and lead me to a land of new promises, even if I had to experience them through Windows. And for that, I needed a real live human being. I'm old-fashioned that way.
I went to two local Microsoft stores, clutching my usual naivete like a glass of fine sauvignon blanc and told them my story. It happened to be the truth. I'm a lifelong MacBook user. Please tell me, I begged, please sell me on why this Surface Laptop is better. After all, Apple's always been the one who was supposed to be a good at selling. Has Microsoft caught up?
Microsoft store no. 1: A slippery Surface
At the first Microsoft store in Marin County, California, I sat down and began to play with a burgundy-colored laptop. Very quickly, a saleswoman came up to me. I bared my inner plight. "Why is this better than my MacBook Air?" I asked. She began by telling me that it came in a lot of different colors. Which didn't quite sway me. The next sales avenue was the touchscreen, which was certainly an improvement, but did it really matter that much?
Still, I was in a positive frame of mind. I wanted to type on it. I do a lot of typing. "Does this have Word on it?" I asked. "I don't know," came the reply. It turned out either that it didn't or that the saleswoman couldn't find it. This wasn't going well.
"How easy is it to transfer photos and files from my MacBook?" I asked. "Oh, that can be quite complicated," the saleswoman replied. That wasn't what I wanted to hear.
What was odd was that this saleswoman didn't seem sold on the laptop herself. In a very short time, she explained that I didn't really want the Surface Laptop at all. I wanted the Surface Pro 4. This was a problem for me. I have a very bad ergonomic habit. I type on my lap, almost all the time. There's no way I could balance a Surface Pro 4 on my lap. I tried. It didn't go well. I left the store painfully unsold.
Microsoft store No. 2: 'We thought about Macs when we designed it'
A week later, I wandered into another, slightly larger Microsoft store in San Francisco. My story stayed the same. The salesman's spiel was very different.
"Why is this better than my MacBook Air?" I asked. "Have you picked it up?" he replied. I picked it up. It felt slightly heavier than my MacBook Air. But it is slightly bigger. So, yes, I was warming. Next, the salesman asked me to close it and notice that it was very sleek, without a single visible screw.
I appreciated being sold on emotional values, rather than specs. This salesman then proceeded to (try to) sell me by telling me how Microsoft had designed the Surface Laptop with a lot of Mac gestures. "We thought about Macs when we designed it," the salesman told me.
I found this quite clever. Instead of making me feel alienated or confused -- I think of Windows as an unaesthetic world -- the idea here was to make me comfortable by seeing that, for example, the two-fingered gesture on the trackpad felt identical. Not once did this salesman try to fill me with facts and figures about, say, RAM.
He chose, instead, to guide me toward emotionally uplifting aspects -- like the sound coming from speakers buried beneath the keyboard or the amusement of writing on the screen. Oh, and when it came to the file transfer question, he was honest that files in some Apple programs couldn't be uploaded, but insisted that photos were simple to transfer -- and showed me how.
When he saw I was still wavering, he also tried to direct me to the Surface Pro 4. Why? Because he wanted me to see how amusing it was to write on the screen and have the Surface turn my handwriting into text. My handwriting is very bad. Sometimes, I can't read it. The Surface Pro 4 only got one word right.
I turned back to the Surface Laptop. "Do you find that you're selling this more to Windows users or to Mac users?" I asked. "50-50," came the reply. "Some people are just tired of Apple."
I'm just a little tired of my Air. And I'd have bought many items from this salesman. He was clever, mentally agile, listened and had good, positive answers to my questions. He knew Macs and knew what could be good and bad about them.
But I didn't buy the Surface Laptop. Why? Please forgive me, but to my eyes, it felt too square and the cloth covering just looked cheap. The more I used it, the cheaper it both looked and felt. (Some versions of this cost more than $2,000.)
Sometimes, one salesperson is much better than another. Sometimes, the gap between a successful sale and failed one is very narrow.
What was I supposed to do now? Go to an Apple store, I suppose.
Microsoft didn't immediately respond to my request for comment.
It's only natural that Spider-Man, of all heroes, would find a friendly reception on the web.
Fans and critics who've watched "Spider-Man: Homecoming" in early screenings are starting to share reviews and reactions on social media, and it's looking good for the reboot of the teen hero. (No spoilers ahead.)
The words "best" and "favorite" are being tossed around.
There's a sequence with Holland & Keaton playing off each other in #SpiderManHomecoming that's now my favorite Spider-Man scene put on film!
#SpiderManHomecoming is one of the best Marvel movies and the best Spider-Man movie, period. So completely terrific, a true crowd pleaser.
Star Tom Holland earned raves, with one moment standing out for CNET's Mike Sorrentino.
#SpiderManHomecoming has one amazing moment with Tom Holland and Michael Keaton that made the entire theater audibly gasp. Avoid spoilers
I can finally tell you #SpiderManHomecoming is great fun. Very funny, sweet, smaller stakes but more relatable. Tom Holland rocks.
The movie's humor and sense of fun were praised.
#SpiderManHomecoming is SUCH a good time. Fun, inventive action w/ some of the best humor in a Marvel film yet. Great start for MCU Spidey!
The high-school setting and film's innocence stood out for some viewers, including CNET's Alfred Ng.
I went to a high school for nerds in Brooklyn. #SpiderManHomecoming really nailed its portrayal. twitter.com/CNET/status/87…
GOOD NEWS EVERYONE!!!!!
And Holland himself weighed in on his adventures making the film.
"Spider-Man: Homecoming" opens July 7 in the US and UK, and on July 6 in Australia.