Nvidia GeForce unhelpfully uninstalled its drivers, and the computer broke for twenty minutes. I uninstalled everything with the Nvidia name. Reinstalled. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 10, replaced by the new app Paint 3D. Microsoft lists. Like Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and other abstract artists before her, Crystal Ma creates colorful masterpieces that are as much about the creative process as. The voting village is the brainchild of a who’s-who list of security experts: DEF CON founder Jeff Moss, cryptographer Matt Blaze, computer programmer Harri Hursti.

It’s great news no one was seriously hurt, considering the long and sordid history of concert disasters, but this is another reminder pyrotechnics can be very. With an electronics ban in place for most flights coming from the Middle East and North Africa, and the threat of a laptop ban hanging over our heads, there’s a.

10 Seriously Epic Computer Software Bugs Funny Meme

RIP, Microsoft Paint. MS Paint, the first app you used for editing images, will probably be killed off in future updates of Windows 1. Paint 3. D. Microsoft lists the 3. Windows 1. 0’s next autumn update, a little X marking the end of an era. The app is certainly a relic, from a time when the casual computer user couldn’t crack open Photoshop or Skitch or Pixelmator or thousands of web apps. MS Paint can’t save image components as layers or vectors; it’s for making flat static images only. It doesn’t smooth lines or guess at your best intentions.

It does what you tell it and nothing more, faithfully representing the herky- jerky motion of drawing freehand with a computer mouse. It’s from a time before touch, a time before trackpads. As more sophisticated options appeared, Paint’s janky aesthetic became a conscious choice. TV Tropes lists major limitations that came to define a certain look: the wobbly freehand lines, awkward color handling, and inappropriate export settings that give Paint its distinctive look. In 2. 01. 4, Gawker’s Sam Biddle noted Paint’s influence on conspiracy theory images, calling the form “Chart Brut.” In amateur detectives’ attempts at identifying the Boston Marathon bombers, the simplicity and jaggedness of Paint evokes the “crazy wall” aesthetic of red string and scribbled notes, apparently without irony. The same year, internet historian Patrick Davison explored Paint’s influence on the last decade of meme culture, particularly Rage Comics. The outsider- art aesthetic feels appropriate to the relatable everyday content, and makes the art form unthreatening.

Of course, Paint offered a few features to smooth things out, like the circle and line tools and the “fill” tool, all used in the stoner comics of the early 1. Crucially, those circles still had jagged curves. The bright colors of stoner comics are flat, as MS Paint didn’t support gradients (without an elaborate hack). Contrast those pixellated lines with the slick, stylish face from this art tutorial: This slickness is built into Paint’s successor, Paint 3. D. From the moment you start sketching, Paint 3. D smooths out your art.

Paint’s sloppiness is probably why rage comics got so popular. Looking at a rage comic, you can tell exactly how it was drawn, and how you might draw one yourself. By delivering exactly what the artist draws, MS Paint forms an image that the viewer can mentally reverse- engineer and imitate. Unless you go absolutely nuts with it. Reddit user Toweringhorizon painstakingly assembled the drawing “To a Little Radio” using MS Paint tools like the oil brush, stretching the medium while maintaining a pixelated look. It’s one of the top submissions to MS Paint subreddit, a beautiful collaborative art gallery. Scrolling through this art feels like flipping through the sketchbook of the most artistic kid in high school.

There’s an accepted roughness, a desired minimalism. For example, the exquisite raindrops in the work above are reflected in a flat, featureless tabletop. Like a transistor radio, Paint might be showing its age, but this tenacious little gadget should not be underestimated.“To a Little Radio” doesn’t even come close to testing Paint’s limits.

As we say goodbye to the app that shaped an era, let us watch this bizarrely soundtracked time lapse of drawing Santa Claus in MS Paint on Windows 7 over the course of 5. We can only believe this is real because faking it would be even harder.

Nine Days With an Absurd $9,0. Gaming Laptop. There may exist inside of you a desire that burns white hot for the Acer Predator 2. X, but you will never buy this laptop. It is not for you, because if you want this laptop, you probably can’t afford it, and if you can afford it, you are probably old enough to not want to spend $9,0.

But if you’re reading Gizmodo you’re still enough of a gadget fan to want to at least understand the $9,0. To that end, I spent nine days working almost exclusively with Acer’s ode to excess. Here is its story. Day 1: The arrival. Our office manager looked suspiciously from me to the box, which is the size of three ten- year- olds squeezed together.“It’s a laptop,” I explained. While the office manager was incredulous, others were delighted.

Desiring nothing more than to game, I plopped the Predator 2. X on my knees as I would a Mac. Book. Fortunately, I used to bicycle a lot, so I’ve got strong thighs that don’t weep under the weight of 1. When I told inquisitive on- lookers the price, they looked at me aghast. Why does a $9,0. 00 machine exist? Everyone agreed that was very neat. The trick earned the computer its first “wow” unrelated to size or price.

After an hour and ten minutes of use, the computer died. It was after 5pm, and I did not want to find outlets for the computer’s two (two!) necessary power supplies, so I left it on a coworker’s desk and went home. Day 2: Set up. When I got to the office, I finally found outlets for the the 2. X’s two 3. 30 watt power supplies and began to use the laptop in earnest.

It comes with Tobii Eyetracking, but it didn’t appear to be working. The Nvidia graphics drivers were out of date too.

Nvidia Ge. Force unhelpfully uninstalled its drivers, and the computer broke for twenty minutes. I uninstalled everything with the Nvidia name. Reinstalled. Inexplicably, the eye tracking started working on the third restart.

After three hours of futzing with drivers and settings, I got Rise of the Tomb Raider running. My coworkers crowded around the computer shouting their advice on how to walk in a straight line.

Take a moment, remember when there was only one controller for the SNES at a slumber party. This moment was like that, but burlier. Yet there was exactly one coworker who did not care. She was the one who told me to mute the computer earlier when she’d had enough of Windows notifications exploding from the computer’s four speakers and two subwoofers.

Now she was irritated because the work day was over and people were peering at a laptop. I saved my game and closed the laptop. The battery was still not fully charged.

Day 3: Making my way downtown, part 1“You are taking this on the train.” It was not a suggestion. My boss and I agreed that you couldn’t review a laptop without testing its mobility—how easy it was to pack up and move around. In the case of the Acer 2.

X, it is a chore. The 2. 1- inch display might crack. So I packed it back up into the Pelican case and headed home an hour and a half early. No one questioned this. A woman offered to help me carry it down the second flight of stairs to the train, but I declined. It was only 4: 4. Thursday, but the train filled up the closer to Brooklyn we got.

When I arrived at my stop, I had to muscle my way to the door and pray the wheels on the case didn’t roll over a foot. I am too delicate to be shouted at by cranky commuters. Off the train, I made it up one flight of stairs, a line of annoyed passengers forming behind me. 30 0 1599 10 Chrome Installer.

A man wordlessly held out a hand and helped me up the second flight of stairs. New York is nicer than you’d expect it to be. It is . 4 miles from the train station to my home. The sidewalks aren’t the smooth and clean ones of the Flatiron District. They’re broken with concrete jutting up out of the ground. On the day I brought the Predator home, it had just rained, and while the streets were dry, puddles of brown, stagnant awful lay in a pedestrian’s path at every intersection. I lifted and dodged and hurried home.

The shipping weight of the box is 7. Pelican case, power supplies, and 1.

I was sure I was dragging all 7. The dog and cat were both alarmed by the monstrosity that took up residence in our living room. That night my roommate arrived home. She saw the computer on my lap and could not take her eyes off of it. Her voice was a whisper, barely heard over the hum of the machine. No. It was not for army.

Day 4: I cannot feel my toes. The journey home had clearly affected me. Like the best friend in an 1. I was plagued by a cough and a sniffle and a weakness of indeterminate origin. My only salve was the laptop.

I found a place for its two plugs, settled it on my lap, and downloaded Mass Effect: Andromeda. The machine did not like the internet in my home and it took an hour, three attempts to fix the internet, and one restart to download the game.

I couldn’t get comfortable. The Cherry Brown mechanical key switches were nice, and the trackpad gave me zero issues, but the spacing between the keyboard and trackpad felt all wrong, especially when the computer was sitting in my lap. I finally gave up and found my Xbox One controller. Gaming was instantly more pleasant.

Day 5: Never mind, everything hurts. I played Mass Effect for longer than I should admit in polite company, and at the very least the gaming performance is incredible. The dual Nvidia GTX 1. GB SSDs in a speedy RAID 0 configuration, plus the 6.

GB of RAM and the Kaby Lake i. It had zero issues giving me 1.

And with two Nvidia GTX 1. As long as the laptop was plugged in. After a very rare bathroom break I sat back down, balanced the computer across my lap and was startled to see the game had slowed to a crawl. Played again. It was still slow. Then I realized the plugs had disconnected, and I was running on battery power. I plugged back in and balance was restored Until my controller started to randomly disconnect every few minutes. As if the computer knew I’d been playing Mass Effect for 1.

I got annoyed and powered off for the night. Day 6: It’s hot in here. It was over 8. 0 degrees outside.

The heat didn’t bother me, until I balanced the computer on my knee. Then I was reminded of summers in Texas, my god daughter sitting in my lap, all sharp bones and sweat and a furnace that would rival whatever burns in your basement. The laptop is like a toddler I can put in a box at the end of the day. The discomfort grew too bothersome for me to ignore. I tried placing it on my secretary desk, but it was too big—too heavy—to be supported. Adobe Acrobat Display Pdf In Browser Grayed Out. I eventually gave up and went and played Mass Effect on my regular PC. I immediately missed the expanded field of vision the 2.

X afforded me. The 2. X. Moving to my 5.

K TV should have meant everything would feel bigger, but while the assets rendered by the game were larger, the 1. Yet I continued to play, because I did not miss the heat, or the disconnects, or the crushing weight of capitalism on my thighs. Day 7: A day of rest. I sat on the couch, and worked hard at my job, and I used the 2. X as a stand to hold my phone.

It was better this way. Day 8: Making my way downtown, part 2. My dog has a fear of packed bags. I am always mindful of it, distracting him with treats whenever I have to pack a bag for a trip. As I dismantled the X- 2.

I looked up. The dog thought I was going for good. But I was not. Instead, I took a Lyft to the office and an elevator up the stairs.

The laptop felt heavier than usual, its fans and cute little beeps were a cacophony overwhelming the quiet hum of the newsroom. The 2. 1 X is not a machine meant for silence. It is not a machine meant to be ignored.

It catches eyes, and earns comments, and strains my arms when I need to move it. What is it? a laptop that costs 9. Likeit costs 9. 00.

No Likeit costs 9. When I left that night, abandoning it, I felt no regret.

It had reaped the reward it was built to earn. I had written about this $9,0. Even now, long after it has been put away, I still struggle to understand who it is for. It could be for people who spend $1. Yet, this is luxury finished in the plastic of peons.