The 'picturesque' Essex village that has been named one of the best in Britain
From “salty Scottish ports to bucolic English beauties”, experts from The Telegraph have pulled together a list of Britain’s 30 greatest villages.
All the Essex cities, towns and villages which could be underwater by 2050
CLIMATE experts have created a map which shows how the devastating affects of climate change could lead to parts of Essex being flooded under water by 2050.
The 'picturesque' Essex village that has been named one of the best in Britain
From “salty Scottish ports to bucolic English beauties”, experts from The Telegraph have pulled together a list of Britain’s 30 greatest villages.
Prime Minister 'concerned' after Essex couple fined for reporting migrant
Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he was “concerned” to hear about a Heybridge couple who were fined after reporting a migrant who clung to their motorhome.
The Essex area loved by celebs where only people with six-figure salaries can afford to live
People need a salary above £100k to be able to afford the average home there
SpaceX launches relief mission for stranded NASA astronauts
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully took off Friday night from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, on a mission to deliver four new astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).
Kim Kardashian, 44, will marry 'a FOURTH' time after admitting she's 'secretly' dating
The 44-year-old reality TV dynamo dropped the news during the latest episode of her show The Kardashians. Her previous husband include Damon Thomas, Kris Humphries and Kanye West.
5 notorious dogging hotspots located around the Essex area
There are a number of spots around Essex that have been used as dogging spots, including Barling Magna Wildlife Reserve and Chalkney Wood.
5 notorious dogging hotspots located around the Essex area
There are a number of spots around Essex that have been used as dogging spots, including Barling Magna Wildlife Reserve and Chalkney Wood.
Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster As It Ages
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Something very strange is happening inside Super Nintendo (SNES) consoles as they age: a component you've probably never heard of is running ever so slightly faster as we get further and further away from the time the consoles first hit the market in the early '90s. The discovery started a mild panic in the speedrunning community in late February since one theoretical consequence of a faster-running console is that it could impact how fast games are running and therefore how long they take to complete. This could potentially wreak havoc on decades of speedrunning leaderboards and make tracking the fastest times in the speedrunning scene much more difficult, but that outcome now seems very unlikely. However, the obscure discovery does highlight the fact that old consoles' performance is not frozen at the time of their release date, and that they are made of sensitive components that can age and degrade, or even 'upgrade', over time. The idea that SNESs are running faster in a way that could impact speedrunning started with a Bluesky post from Alan Cecil, known online as dwangoAC and the administrator of TASBot (short for tool-assisted speedrun robot), a robot that's programmed to play games faster and better than a human ever could.
[...] So what's going on here? The SNES has an audio processing unit (APU) called the SPC700, a coprocessor made by Sony for Nintendo. Documentation given to game developers at the time the SNES was released says that the SPC700 should have a digital signal processing (DSP) rate of 32,000hz, which is set by a ceramic resonator that runs 24.576Mhz on that coprocessor. We're getting pretty technical here as you can see, but basically the composition of this ceramic component and how it resonates when connected to an electronic circuit generates the frequency for the audio processing unit, or how much data it processes in a second. It's well documented that these types of ceramic resonators are sensitive and can run at higher frequencies when subject to heat and other external conditions. For example, the chart [here], taken from an application manual for Murata ceramic resonators, shows changes in the resonators' oscillation under different physical conditions.
As Cecil told me, as early as 2007 people making SNES emulators noticed that, despite documentation by Nintendo that the SPC700 should run at 32,000Hz, some SNESs ran faster. Emulators generally now emulate at the slightly higher frequency of 32,040Hz in order to emulate games more faithfully. Digging through forum posts in the SNES homebrew and emulation communities, Cecil started to put a pattern together: the SPC700 ran faster whenever it was measured further away from the SNES's release. Data Cecil collected since his Bluesky post, which now includes more than 140 responses, also shows that the SPC700 is running faster. There is still a lot of variation, in theory depending on how much an SNES was used, but overall the trend is clear: SNESs are running faster as they age, and the fastest SPC700 ran at 32,182Hz. More research shared by another user in the TASBot Discord has even more detailed technical analysis which appears to support those findings. "We don't yet know how much of an impact it will have on a long speedrun," Cecil told 404 Media. "We only know it has at least some impact on how quickly data can be transferred between the CPU and the APU."
Cecil said minor differences in SNES hardware may not affect human speedrunners but could impact TASBot's frame-precise runs, where inputs need to be precise down to the frame, or "deterministic."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Labour's VAT tax raid on private schools is forcing most to cut staff, bursaries and subjects on offer while pupil numbers are already plunging, new figures show
Many of the country's most prestigious private schools are being hit hard with cost cutting measures seeing pay, pensions and jobs being axed, a new poll has revealed.
Primark's new spring outfits that fans say they are 'obsessed' with and 'love'
The outfits are available now in all Primark stores
Trump spends some quality time with Elon Musk's son X as the pair board Marine Force One together
The president was spotted walking side-by-side with the exuberant four-year-old on the White House 's South Lawn on Friday.
Moment woke Indian student uses self-deport app to flee US for Canada after Trump's Columbia protesters threat
An Indian student at Columbia University who had their visa revoked was seen 'self-deporting' after the Trump administration cracked down on students believed to be supporting terrorist groups.
Tesco installs new anti-shoplifter measures to stop thieves sweeping supermarket shelves - but customers question how well they'll work
The contraptions are positioned loosely in front of store items and in footage uploaded to social media are seen being freely slid from left to right to uncover the goods.
'She wants to find a rich man and have a couple of kids': Truth about James Haskell's Big Brother beauty - and her conquests Shane Warne and Ben Cohen
When Sara McLean arrived at the Cheltenham races, she was beaming like she had won the Gold Cup. Perhaps because she was there on the arm of former England rugby star James Haskell.
US influencer who terrorised a baby wombat breaks her silence and accuses Aussies of being the REAL villains in shock online spray
The controversial US influencer who sparked international outrage after snatching a baby wombat from its distressed mother has broken her silence, declaring she is no 'villain'.
'Nomadic' sexual predator who drugged and raped women and children across seaside city is jailed for life - as 'broken' victims tell of their lasting 'anguish and sorrow'
Shane 'Blue' Gibbs preyed upon vulnerable victims, including two aged 15, in Brighton and Hove between October and December 2023.
Lewis Hamilton has not been at his apex since 2018 and despite blockbuster move to Ferrari, here's why at 40 the racing legend has all the odds and history against him, writes JONATHAN MCEVOY
JONATHAN MCEVOY IN MELBOURNE: Hamilton hopes that his golden age is before him, not behind him. But aged 40 and embarking on his final hurrah at Ferrari, there are no guarantees of that.
End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities With Tough Choice
With Microsoft ending free security updates for Windows 10 in October, millions of PCs that don't meet Windows 11's hardware requirements face an uncertain fate... Charities that refurbish and distribute computers to low-income individuals must choose between providing soon-to-be-insecure Windows 10 machines, transitioning to Linux -- despite usability challenges for non-tech-savvy users -- or recycling the hardware, contributing to ewaste. Tom's Hardware reports: So how bad will it really be to run an end-of-lifed Windows 10? Should people worry? [Chester Wisniewski, who serves as Director and Global Field CISO for Sophos, a major security services company] and other experts I talked to are unequivocal. You're at risk. "To put this in perspective, today [the day we talked] was Patch Tuesday," he said. "There were 57 vulnerabilities, 6 of which have already been abused by criminals before the fixes were available. There were also 57 in February and 159 in January. Windows 10 and Windows 11 largely have a shared codebase, meaning most, if not all, vulnerabilities each month are exploitable on both OSs. These will be actively turned into digital weapons by criminals and nation-states alike and Windows 10 users will be somewhat defenseless against them."
So, in short, even though Windows 10 has been around since 2015, there are still massive security holes being patched. Even within the past few weeks, dozens of vulnerabilities were fixed by Microsoft. So what's a charity to do when these updates are running out and clients will be left vulnerable? "What we decided to do is one year ahead of the cutoff, we discontinued Windows 10," said Casey Sorensen, CEO of PCs for People, one of the U.S.'s largest non-profit computer refurbishers. "We will distribute Linux laptops that are 6th or 7th gen. If we distribute a Windows laptop, it will be 8th gen or newer." Sorensen said that any PC that's fifth gen or older will be sent to an ewaste recycler.
[...] Sorensen, who founded the company in 1998, told us that he's comfortable giving clients computers that run Linux Mint, a free OS that's based on Ubuntu. The latest version of Mint, version 22.1, will be supported until 2029. "Ten years ago if we distributed Linux, they would be like what is it," he said. But today, he notes that many view their computers as windows to the Internet and, for that, a user-friendly version of Linux is acceptable. Further reading: Is 2025 the Year of the Linux Desktop?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.