Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a sad moment for gamers. Kotakureports Masayuki Uemura, the lead creator of the Famicom and Super Famicom (aka NES and SNES), died on December 6th at the age of 78. He started working at Sharp, where he sold solar cell and light sensor technology, but he’s best remembered for a long and highly influential run at Nintendo that effectively revived the video game industry following the 1983 crash.

Uemura first became involved with Nintendo after the company’s Gunpei Yokoi asked about using Sharp solar cells to produce light gun games. The future console designer joined Nintendo in 1971, and the company released gun games that included a home-friendly game called Duck Hunt (yes, the predecessor of the NES title). Company president Hiroshi Yamauchi put Uemura in charge of the R&D2 division responsible for hardware, including consoles, and in November 1981 famously called Uemura asking him to build a machine that lets you play arcade games on your TV. The result was 1983’s Famicom, the system that would become the NES outside of Japan.

You know at least some of what happened next. The Famicom and NES were wild successes, selling nearly 62 million units combined and rejuvenating interest in home consoles. Uemura then led work on the Super Famicom, whose global launch as the SNES further cemented Nintendo’s reputation. He also produced some NES games, including Ice Climber and three sports titles. He retired from Nintendo in 2004, but continued to serve as an advisor and would go on to teach and research video games as a professor at Ritsumeikan University.

It’s hard to overstate Uemura’s influence. The video game business as it exists today arguably owes much to the skill of Uemura and his team when they designed their first TV consoles. He also helped grow Japan’s overall tech industry by making Nintendo a global force in electronics. While he certainly wasn’t the only star at Nintendo, he was one of the most directly influential.

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In partnership with Spotify, Tinder has introduced Music Mode as part of its new Explore section, letting you hear the “Anthem” songs of members when you swipe to their profiles — a sort of mixtape for dates, if you will. The idea is to help you find others that share your musical taste, according to Tinder.

The new feature requires that you link your account to Spotify and choose an Anthem song “that defines [you] inside and out,” according to Tinder. If you’ve done all that, you’ll be able to head over to the Explore section and find the Music Mode card. Once you enable that, it’ll automatically play any member’s chosen anthem when you swipe their profile.

Tinder and Spotify added the Anthem feature back in 2016, so Music Mode is a new way discovering users favorite songs. Tinder notes that “around 40 percent of all Gen Z members globally have already added Anthems to their profiles and when they do, they see a 10 percent increase in matches.” Tinder said the Explore tab introduced this summer is the “biggest update to Tinder since the invention of the original Swipe feature,” thanks to the interactive features.

At the very least, Music Mode could help reduce the awkwardness of realizing you and your date have nothing in common when it comes to music. “Songs are deeply personal, and Music Mode is a place to spark something new through music,” Tinder VP Kyle Miller said in the press release. The new feature should launch “soon,” according to Tinder.

These days, we’re starting to see more computers come with NVMe SSDs, and DIY-ers are also opting to use NVMe SSDs for faster storage. Unfortunately, it seems that these faster speeds are being negated in Windows 11.

This is according to a report from Neowin who cites a post on Microsoft’s forums by user MJ_JasonM. According to the post, it seems that following the update to Windows 11, they have noticed that the performance of their NVMe SSD has been halved compared to when it was running Windows 10.

The user acknowledges that while drive speeds do fluctuate, dropping speeds by more than half seems like it could be a problem rather than regular fluctuations. In a post on Reddit, a member of Microsoft’s file systems team Neal Christiansen has confirmed that to be an issue, but also stated that Microsoft is investigating the matter.

In another post by commenter Jeff C., it has been suggested that maybe Microsoft’s drivers could be at fault. Jeff noted that their NVMe drives using Microsoft’s driver has the same issue, but the Intel drive that uses its own driver performs at full speed. Hopefully Microsoft will have a fix for the issue soon, but when exactly it is expected to be patched remains unclear.

This means that until then, users who rely heavily on their NVMe drives might want to steer clear of upgrading to Windows 11 for now, or if you’ve upgraded already, you should probably take this issue into account.

Windows 11 Reportedly Slowing Down NVMe SSD Speeds

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Microsoft Office as a standalone piece of software can be expensive, especially if you don’t really need all the features and functionality. To ease that price burden, Microsoft has a Microsoft 365 subscription that lets users pay a monthly subscription to access Office and a bunch of other services for a much cheaper rate.

Granted over time it might end up being more expensive, but it’s one way of dealing with a substantial upfront cost. That being said, there are some who have decided that piracy is still the best option for them, but now it looks like Microsoft is trying to tempt those pirates with a generous 50% discount.

According to a report from Ghacks.net, it seems that some users who are running a pirated copy of Office are now seeing a message in their apps where it reads, “Get up to 50% off. For a limited time, save up to 50% on a genuine Microsoft 365 subscription”. There is a link accompanying the message which when users click on it, they will be directed to a website where Microsoft warns users about the dangers of using pirated software.

Keep in mind that this offer is only valid for the first year of subscription, meaning that after that, users will have to go back to paying full price for Microsoft 365. It’s an interesting approach where instead of trying to go after users by suing them, they are offering a discount. How effective it is remains to be seen, but perhaps it might spook some users who thought Microsoft didn’t know about them using pirated software to start paying for the genuine article.

Microsoft Is Tempting Office Pirates With A 50% Discount On Genuine Software

, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.