Sales of VR headsets in the U.S. this year declined 2% from a year earlier to $1.1 billion as of early December, according to data shared with CNBC by research firm NPD Group. CNBC reports: [D]ata from analyst firm CCS Insight reveals that worldwide shipments of VR headsets as well as augmented reality devices dropped more than 12% year over year to 9.6 million in 2022. Taken together, the estimates of VR headset sales and shipments create a problematic picture for Meta, whose stock price has lost about two-thirds of its value this year. Zuckerberg has said he's playing the long game with the metaverse, expecting it take up to a decade to go mainstream and projecting it will eventually host hundreds of billions of dollars in commerce. Sales of Meta's flagship Quest device dropped in 2022, a decline that can be attributed to the device's big year in 2021, said Ben Arnold, NPD's consumer electronics analyst. [...]

A confluence of factors contributed to lower sales and shipments in 2022. The Quest 2 has been around for a few years and, like any consumer electronics device, has lost some appeal as it's aged. And while Meta released a new VR headset in fall, the Quest Pro, that device is geared toward businesses and costs $1,100 more than the Quest 2, pushing it even further out of reach for many VR enthusiasts.

Next year is expected to be another "slow year" for the VR market, CCS Insight said in its latest report, citing a weak economy and inflation. [Leo Gebbie, an analyst at CCS Insight] said "consumer budgets will be tightening," and "non-essential purchases like VR headsets are likely to be the casualty of this."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Twitter rivalMastodon has rejected more than five investment offers from Silicon Valley venture capital firms in recent months, as its founder pledged to protect the fast-growing social media platform's non-profit status. Mastodon, an open-source microblogging site founded in 2016 by German software developer Eugen Rochko, has seen a surge in users since Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion in October amid concerns over the billionaire's running of the social media platform.

Rochko told the Financial Times he had received offers from more than five US-based investors to invest "hundreds of thousands of dollars" in backing the product, following its fast growth. But he said the platform's non-profit status was "untouchable," adding that Mastodon's independence and the choice of moderation styles across its servers were part of its attraction. "Mastodon will not turn into everything you hate about Twitter," said Rochko. "The fact that it can be sold to a controversial billionaire, the fact that it can be shut down, go bankrupt and so on. It's the difference in paradigms [between the platforms]."

Rochko is Mastodon's sole shareholder and, according to its 2021 annual report, he paid himself 2,400 euros per month last year, a figure he said has since risen by 500 euros. Mastodon will continue to rely on donations to fund the platform. The site has more than 8,500 donors on the membership platform Patreon, through which it is raising over 25,000 pounds a month. This compares with total earnings of just over 55,000 euros in the six months from June to December 2021. Rochko said his long-term ambition for Mastodon was to replace Twitter and other commercial social networks. "It's a long road ahead but at the same time, it's bigger than it ever has been."

The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will require anyone arriving by air from China to provide a negative Covid test, following a surge of Covid-19 cases across China as Beijing has eased its strict zero-Covid rules. Politico reports: Under the new rules, which will take effect on Jan. 5, anyone two years and older will need to show a negative result from a test taken within two days of their departure from airports in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, administration officials told reporters in a briefing. The move reflects the Biden administration's alarm about the potential spillover of new Covid variants linked to soaring Covid infections in China. The Chinese government ended its draconian Covid-zero policy -- hinged to mass testing, tracing and lockdowns -- on Dec. 7 following mass protests in November fueled by anger about the strategy. According to health authorities in Milan, almost half of the passengers on flights from China were found to have COVID-19. They, too, will begin testing all arrivals from China and will be sequencing the tests to see if there are new variants.

In an advertisement on Facebook and Instagram, a middle-aged man holding a dumbbell says testosterone "literally changed my life," restoring his energy and happiness. What the October ad from telehealth startup Hone Health doesn't say is that the unidentified man is an actor who has never used the prescription drug. From a report: It doesn't mention that testosterone is approved by the Food and Drug Administration only for men with specific disorders and that among its risks are heart attacks and stroke. Similar telehealth companies are flooding TikTok, Instagram and other platforms with ads that don't conform to longtime standards governing the marketing of prescription drugs and healthcare treatments. They feature actors posing as customers, tout benefits of drugs with no mention of side effects and promote medications for uses not approved by the FDA.

Since the pandemic, online advertising has drawn hundreds of thousands of people to telehealth companies such as Cerebral and Done for treatment of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety and other medical conditions. Some employees and patients have said their marketing practices contributed to the abuse of controlled substances. In a four-week period spanning October and November, about 20 companies ran more than 2,100 ads on Facebook and Instagram that described benefits of prescription drugs without citing risks, promoted drugs for unapproved uses or featured testimonials without disclosing whether they came from actors or company employees, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of ads collected by the nonprofit Algorithmic Transparency Institute from Meta Platforms' ad library.

The popular Chinese video app TikTok has been banned from all U.S. House of Representatives-managed devices, according to the House's administration arm, mimicking a law soon to go into effect banning the app from U.S. government devices. From a report: The app is considered "high risk due to a number of security issues," the House's Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) said in a message sent to all lawmakers and staff on Tuesday, and must be deleted from all devices managed by the House. The new rule follows a series of moves by U.S. state governments to ban TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, from government devices. As of last week, 19 states have at least partially blocked the app from state-managed devices over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app to track Americans and censor content.

The artificial intelligence algorithms behind the chatbot program ChatGPT -- which has drawn attention for its ability to generate humanlike written responses to some of the most creative queries -- might one day be able to help doctors detect Alzheimer's Disease in its early stages. EurekaAlert: Research from Drexel University's School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems recently demonstrated that OpenAI's GPT-3 program can identify clues from spontaneous speech that are 80% accurate in predicting the early stages of dementia. Reported in the journal PLOS Digital Health, the Drexel study is the latest in a series of efforts to show the effectiveness of natural language processing programs for early prediction of Alzheimer's -- leveraging current research suggesting that language impairment can be an early indicator of neurodegenerative disorders.

The current practice for diagnosing Alzheimer's Disease typically involves a medical history review and lengthy set of physical and neurological evaluations and tests. While there is still no cure for the disease, spotting it early can give patients more options for therapeutics and support. Because language impairment is a symptom in 60-80% of dementia patients, researchers have been focusing on programs that can pick up on subtle clues -- such as hesitation, making grammar and pronunciation mistakes and forgetting the meaning of words -- as a quick test that could indicate whether or not a patient should undergo a full examination.

GPT-3, officially the third generation of OpenAI's General Pretrained Transformer (GPT), uses a deep learning algorithm -- trained by processing vast swaths of information from the internet, with a particular focus on how words are used, and how language is constructed. This training allows it to produce a human-like response to any task that involves language, from responses to simple questions, to writing poems or essays. GPT-3 is particularly good at "zero-data learning" -- meaning it can respond to questions that would normally require external knowledge that has not been provided. For example, asking the program to write "Cliff's Notes" of a text, would normally require an explanation that this means a summary. But GPT-3 has gone through enough training to understand the reference and adapt itself to produce the expected response. Link to the paper.

Google has so far taken steps to streamline without mass layoffs, but employees are girding for deeper cuts. From a report: Google workers in Switzerland sent a letter this month to the company's vice president of human resources, outlining their worries that a new employee evaluation system could be used to cull the work force. "The number and spread of reports that reached us indicates that at least some managers were aggressively pressured to apply a quota" on a process that could lead to employees getting negative ratings and potentially losing their jobs, five workers and employee representatives wrote in the letter, which was obtained by The New York Times. The letter signaled how some Google employees are increasingly interpreting recent management decisions as warnings that the company may be angling to conduct broader layoffs. From the impending closure of a small office and the cancellation of a content-moderation project to various efforts to ease budgets during 2023 planning meetings, the Silicon Valley behemoth has become a tinderbox of anxiety, according to interviews with 14 current and former employees.

In some cases, Google employees have reacted to a program that the company began in July to simplify operations, cut red tape and make itself more productive. In other instances, they have had budget conversations, with some teams unable to hire more next year, the people said. And workers have also fretted over decisions made months ago that, to some, have taken on new meaning, they said. The worries have grown as Google's tech industry peers have handed out pink slips amid a souring global economy. Last month, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, purged its ranks by 11,000, or about 13 percent of its work force. Amazon also began laying off about 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, or about 3 percent of its corporate employees.

TikTok will no longer be allowed on any device managed by the US House of Representatives. Ars Technica reports: On Tuesday, the House's Chief Administrative Office announced the ban of the popular video-sharing app, a move that comes just a week after legislation that would bar TikTok from all federal devices was introduced. Congresspersons and their staffers will not be able to download the app on managed devices, the CAO's Office of Cybersecurity said in an email seen by Reuters. The mobile app is a "high risk to users due to a number of security risks," the email said. "If you have the TikTok app on your House mobile device, you will be contacted to remove it," the email continued.

Potential federal bans aside, TikTok is already at least partially banned from government-owned devices in 19 states. And the federal omnibus spending bill passed last week will put the kibosh on TikTok when it comes to all federally managed smartphones and devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Headlines: In a recent voice assistant test conducted by popular YouTuber MKBHD, Google Assistant emerged as the best voice assistant, outperforming Apple's Siri, Samsung's Bixby, and Amazon's Alexa. There are several reasons why Google Assistant stands out as the top voice assistant. Firstly, it is backed by Google's powerful artificial intelligence, which helps it to understand and interpret user requests accurately. Secondly, Google Assistant has access to a vast amount of data from its users, which allows it to provide a more personalized experience. The company also collects data from various services such as search, maps, and email to improve the functionality and performance of Google Assistant. However, one of the biggest reasons behind Google Assistant's win is its strong conversation skills. Google's AI uses natural language processing (NLP) algorithms to understand the meaning and context of words and phrases, which helps to keep the conversation going.

Apple's Siri took second place in the competition. It performed well when asked to complete tasks like setting a timer and searching the internet, but struggled when asked to answer more complex or conversational questions. Additionally, Siri was unable to perform tasks that required interacting with apps. In contrast, Samsung's Bixby excelled in device control thanks to its integration with Samsung devices. This integration enables Bixby to control system settings and integrate more deeply with apps than any other voice assistant. Bixby can send text messages, check sports scores, turn down screen brightness, check your calendar, launch apps, and more.

Of all the digital assistants, Amazon's Alexa performed the worst in the voice assistant test. This is due to several factors. Firstly, Alexa is not integrated into smartphones, which means it lacks the personalized touch of other voice assistants. This can make it feel less intuitive and less convenient to use. Secondly, Alexa's inaccuracy in finding facts, inability to interact with other apps and poor conversational models all combine to create a subpar experience when used on a phone. These issues make it difficult for Alexa to provide useful and reliable information, which is a key expectation of voice assistants. In addition, the inclusion of Amazon advertisements between tasks can be annoying and disrupt the user experience.

Southwest canceled more than 2,900 flights Monday -- at least 70% of its schedule for the day -- and more than 2,500 flights Tuesday as of 9:10 a.m. ET -- at least 60% of its schedule, according to flight tracker FlightAware. NPR reports: The number of canceled flights for Southwest Monday was more than 10 times higher than for Delta, which had the second-most cancellations by a U.S. airline with 265 flights called off. Other airlines have also ordered large-scale cancellations in the past week. Southwest spokesperson Chris Perry told NPR the airline's disruptions are a result of the winter storm's lingering effects, adding that it hopes to "stabilize and improve its operation" with more favorable weather conditions. Other issues that have exacerbated the airline's struggle to accommodate the holiday rush include problems with "connecting flight crews to their schedules," Perry said. That issue has made it difficult for employees to access crew scheduling services and get reassignments.

Kyle Potter, executive editor of Thrifty Traveler, called it an incredibly complex task for an airline with a network as vast as Southwest's to coordinate staffing and scheduling, particularly after weather delays. But with many areas seeing clear skies on Monday, the airline would seem to have few obvious reasons to cancel so many flights. Potter calls it a "full-blown meltdown." "This is really as bad as it gets for an airline," Potter said. "We've seen this again and again over the course of the last year or so, when airlines really just struggle especially after a storm, but there's pretty clear skies across the country." The U.S. Department of Transportation called the cancellations "unacceptable," and will be investigating the airline to see whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan (PDF).

Baidu, the Chinese internet giant that became known for its search engines, is making some big strides in autonomous driving. From a report: Starting this week, the public can ride its robotaxis in Wuhan between 7 am and 11 pm without safety drivers behind the wheel. Previously, its unmanned vehicles could only operate from 9 am to 5 pm in the city. The updated scheme is expected to cover one million customers in certain areas of Wuhan, a city of more than 10 million people.

Like most autonomous vehicle startups, Baidu combines a mix of third-party cameras, radars, and lidars to help its cars see better in low-visibility conditions, in contrast to Tesla's vision-based solution. In August, Baidu started offering fully driverless robotaxi rides, charging passengers at taxi rates. In Q3, Apollo Go, the firm's robotaxi hailing app, completed more than 474,000 rides, up 311% year over year. Accumulatively, Apollo Go had exceeded 1.4 million orders as of Q3. That sounds like a potentially substantial revenue stream for Baidu, but one should take such figures with a grain of salt and ask: how many of these trips are subsidized by discounts? How many of them are repeatable, daily routes rather than one-off novelty rides taken by early adopters? To juice up performance numbers, it's not uncommon to see Chinese robotaxi operators enticing the public to ride in their vehicles with perks.

The number of GPU startups in China is extraordinary as the country tries to gain AI prowess as well as semiconductor sovereignty, according to a new report from Jon Peddie Research. From a report: In addition, the number of GPU makers grew worldwide in recent years as demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC), and graphics processing increased at a rather unprecedented rate. When it comes to discrete graphics for PCs, AMD and Nvidia maintain lead, whereas Intel is trying to catch up.

Tens of companies developed graphics cards and discrete graphics processors in the 1980s and the 1990s, but cut-throat competition for the highest performance in 3D games drove the vast majority of them out of business. By 2010, only AMD and Nvidia could offer competitive standalone GPUs for gaming and compute, whereas others focused either on integrated GPUs or GPU IP. The mid-2010s found the number of China-based PC GPU developers increasing rapidly, fueled by the country's push for tech self-sufficiency as well as the advent of AI and HPC as high-tech megatrends.

In total, there are 18 companies developing and producing GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. There are two companies that develop SoC-bound GPUs primarily with smartphones and notebooks in mind, there are six GPU IP providers, and there are 11 GPU developers focused on GPUs for PCs and datacenters, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia, which design graphics cards that end up in our list of the best graphics cards. In fact, if we added other China-based companies like Biren Technology and Tianshu Zhixin to the list, there would be even more GPU designers. However, Biren and Tianshu Zhixin are solely focused on AI and HPC for now, so JPR does not consider them GPU developers.

The U.S. Copyright Office has completed its public consultations on the use of technical measures to identify and protect copyrighted content online. From a report: For many years, U.S. lawmakers have considered options to update the DMCA so it can more effectively deal with today's online copyright issues. Many proposals have come and gone, without resulting in any significant updates. Calls to change current legislation persist, however. Following repeated nudges from Senators Thom Tillis and Patrick Leahy, the Copyright Office launched a consultation on automated tools that online services can use to ensure that pirated content is less easily shared.

The Copyright Office also asked stakeholders whether it's desirable to make certain standard technical measures mandatory for online platforms. Such measures could include upload filters to block pirated content from being reuploaded. This month the Copyright Office presents its conclusions, which are also shared with Senators Tillis and Leahy in two letters. After reviewing thousands of responses and input from stakeholders in plenary sessions, the overall conclusion is one of clear disagreement. Most parties agree that it's impossible to design an error-free takedown process but disagree on what error rate is acceptable when takedowns are automated. Opponents of filtering technology warn that fair use and First Amendment rights are at stake.

Rightsholders did not dispute that but noted that these issues don't play a role when full copies of copyrighted content are shared. When it comes to the implementation of voluntary measures, the Copyright Office doesn't have any concrete suggestions. Instead, it will continue to back existing initiatives, while facilitating dialogue between various stakeholders. "The public comments and the consultations confirmed that there cannot be a one-size-fits-all approach to voluntary technical measures, and that there remains a lack of consensus in this area," the Office writes. "Nevertheless, the consultations served as valuable opportunities for dialogue among stakeholders, which may lead to further voluntary action. The Copyright Office proposed options to continue its role as convener of these conversations in the future."

The Bitcoin network hashrate has dropped by more than 38.8% from its peak, as many U.S.-based miners have been forced to switch down their facilities due to deadly blizzards. From a report: Bitcoin hashrate, the level of computing power used for mining and processing transactions, came in at 155.28 exahashes per second on Saturday, down from 253.88 exahashes on Wednesday, according to data from IntoTheBlock. A winter storm has claimed at least 32 lives across the U.S., as of Monday morning in Hong Kong, according to media reports.

Raymond Chen, writing for Microsoft DevBlogs: In the mid-1980's, Microsoft produced an expansion card for the IBM PC and PC XT, known as the Mach 10. In addition to occupying an expansion slot, it also replaced your CPU: You unplugged your old and busted 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and plugged into the now-empty socket a special adapter that led via a ribbon cable back to the Mach 10 card. On the Mach 10 card was the new hotness: A 9.54 MHz 8086 CPU. This gave you a 2x performance upgrade for a lot less money than an IBM PC AT. The Mach 10 also came with a mouse port, so you could add a mouse without having to burn an additional expansion slot. Sidebar: The product name was stylized as MACH [PDF] in some product literature. The Mach 10 was a flop.

Undaunted, Microsoft partnered with a company called Portable Computer Support Group to produce the Mach 20, released in 1987. You probably remember the Portable Computer Support Group for their disk cache software called Lightning. The Mach 20 took the same basic idea as the Mach 10, but to the next level: As before, you unplugged your old 4.77 MHz 8088 CPU and replaced it with an adapter that led via ribbon cable to the Mach 20 card, which you plugged into an expansion slot. This time, the Mach 20 had an 8 MHz 80286 CPU, so you were really cooking with gas now. And, like the Mach 10, it had a mouse port built in. According to a review in Info World, it retailed for $495. The Mach 20 itself had room for expansion: it had an empty socket for an 80287 floating point coprocessor. One daughterboard was the Mach 20 Memory Plus Expanded Memory Option, which gave you an astonishing 3.5 megabytes of RAM, and it was high-speed RAM since it wasn't bottlenecked by the ISA bus on the main motherboard. The other daughterboard was the Mach 20 Disk Plus, which lets you connect 5 1/4 or 3 1/2 floppy drives.

A key detail is that all these expansions connected directly to the main Mach 20 board, so that they didn't consume a precious expansion slot. The IBM PC came with five expansion slots, and they were in high demand. You needed one for the hard drive controller, one for the floppy drive controller, one for the video card, one for the printer parallel port, one for the mouse. Oh no, you ran out of slots, and you haven't even gotten to installing a network card or expansion RAM yet! You could try to do some consolidation by buying so-called multifunction cards, but still, the expansion card crunch was real. But why go to all this trouble to upgrade your IBM PC to something roughly equivalent to an IBM PC AT? Why not just buy an IBM PC AT in the first place? Who would be interested in this niche upgrade product?

An anonymous reader writes: This column about a writer's struggle to find the perfect note-taking app resonated a lot with me. "A singular productivity tool that works for everyone is a unicorn -- beautiful, perfect, and completely fictional. Still, there has to be some sort of middle ground between an unachievable fantasy and the current landscape. I would happily settle for two, maybe three apps. Honestly, less than 10 is all I'm asking for. Until then, my phone and laptop will be a cluttered mess of productivity apps that only do half their jobs," writes Victoria Song.

Over the years, I have tried Notion, Apple Notes, the good old Windows' Notepad, Roam Research, Obsidian, Google Keep, Google Docs, and OneNote among possibly many more that I am unable to recall anymore. Some support Apple Pencil, which is one of the usecases I find useful. Roam Research did not even have a native app for mobile devices for the longest time. Some applications are good, but they don't support online syncing, or support syncing with only a particular storage service. And have you noticed just how expensive some of these apps could get? As much as $15-$30 a month! Out of curiosity, and forget my usecases -- as I admit I have not mentioned many -- how do you maintain your notes for work and personal life. (I have been using physical notepads a lot more in recent months but would like an app for digital notes.)

It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes those things were documented, or at least hinted at, in blog posts that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95. From a report: A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch. Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds.

Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: "provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks."

Mozilla recently fixed a bug that was first reported 18 years ago in Firebox 1.0, reports How-to Geek: Bug 290125 was first reported on April 12, 2005, only a few days before the release of Firefox 1.0.3, and outlined an issue with how Firefox rendered text with the ::first-letter CSS pseudo-element. The author said, "when floating left a :first-letter (to produce a dropcap), Gecko ignores any declared line-height and inherits the line-height of the parent box. [...] Both Opera 7.5+ and Safari 1.0+ correctly handle this."

The initial problem was that the Mac version of Firefox handled line heights differently than Firefox on other platforms, which was fixed in time for Firefox 3.0 in 2007. The issue was then re-opened in 2014, when it was decided in a CSS Working Group meeting that Firefox's special handling of line heights didn't meet CSS specifications and was causing compatibility problems. It led to some sites with a large first letter in blocks of text, like The Verge and The Guardian, render incorrectly in Firefox compared to other browsers.

The issue was still marked as low priority, so progress continued slowly, until it was finally marked as fixed on December 20, 2022. Firefox 110 should include the updated code, which is expected to roll out to everyone in February 2023.

Subscribers to "NFL Sunday Ticket" can watch broadcasts of every Sunday game of American football. But for access next season, "fans will have to Google it..." warns the Associated Press — because Thursday the football league announced plans to distribute their game package on YouTube TV and YouTube Primetime Channels.

Google beat out both Apple and Amazon by offering over $2 billion a year for 7 years — but Yahoo Finance believes it's more about drawing attention to YouTube's streaming TV services. "Don't expect the package to be profitable, one analyst warned." "They're not making money on this — this is a loss leader," Michael Pachter, managing director of equity research at Wedbush, told Yahoo Finance Live, referencing YouTube TV's current price point of $64.99. "I don't think they make a penny at that level...."

"It's an extremely expensive package of content," Tim Nollen, analyst at Macquarie Group, previously told Yahoo Finance Live, noting the Sunday Ticket package was not a profitable service for DirecTV [which since 1994 has held the exclusive broadcast rights in the U.S.]

[...] YouTube TV has more than 5 million subscribers and trial users as of July. "Five million subscribers is just not enough," Pachter stressed. "Even if all 5 million pay the $400 bucks a year...they're going to barely cover their costs." Still, despite the lack of profitability and sky-high price tag, Pachter noted YouTube might be best positioned to take advantage of the package, especially as the demand for live sports escalates. "I think they can be smart about how they carve up the content," Pachter said, suggesting the platform could more easily sell games to bars and restaurants.

"A Microsoft employee appears to have accidentally announced that Windows 11's Notepad app is getting a tabs feature," reports the Verge: The employee, a senior product manager at Microsoft, posted a photo of a version of Notepad with tabs, enthusiastically announcing "Notepad in Windows 11 now has tabs!" with a loudspeaker emoji.

The tweet was deleted minutes later, but not before Windows Central and several Windows enthusiast Twitter accounts had spotted the mistake. The Notepad screenshot includes a Microsoft internal warning: "Confidential Don't discuss features or take screenshots...."

The addition of tabs in Notepad could signal a shift towards tabs appearing in more built-in Windows apps.