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Dan Ives’ latest Wedbush note reframes the AI winners debate for 2026 by putting monetization vectors—cloud platform seats, device subscriptions, robotaxi services, vertical AI software and cybersecurity—at the center of his investment thesis, and naming Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, Palantir and CrowdStrike as his five highest-conviction AI picks for the year ahead. Background / Overview Dan Ives’ call is notable because it deliberately sidelines the obvious semiconductor darling of the AI...

The columnist’s simple assertion — that “a beautiful family is a gift from God” — landed as a quiet, faith-affirming note in the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, and it does more than celebrate family as a moral good: it taps into a long-running national conversation about what family means in the 21st century, how demographics are shifting beneath our feet, and how technology is reshaping both private life and public policy. Background The short devotional column published in a local...

Microsoft’s cloud AI juggernaut crossed another operational and financial inflection point in 2025 as Azure’s OpenAI–facing infrastructure logged astronomical token volumes, enterprise adoption surged into the hundreds of thousands of organizations, and Microsoft’s balance sheet and capex plans reflected an all‑in bet on generative AI as platform plumbing. The headline numbers are striking: more than 100 trillion tokens processed in a quarter, a $13 billion AI revenue run rate, and a...

I found a single Windows folder eating gigabytes on a modern PC — and with the right tools and safeguards I recovered most of that space without breaking anything. Overview Every Windows installation keeps a hidden cache of staged driver packages in the Driver Store. On many systems that cache is small and harmless, but on long‑lived or heavily updated PCs it can grow into tens of gigabytes. A recent hands‑on cleanup that reclaimed roughly 20–22 GB from the Driver Store — described in the...

You can get real results from free AI tools in 2026 without paying a penny or becoming a tech expert, but the trick is choosing a small, reliable set and using them with clear safety habits from day one. The Chiang Rai Times roundup provides a practical shortlist of generative AI utilities that are either fully free or offer robust free tiers—tools that help you research, write, design, and automate simple workflows—and it’s a useful starting point for students, freelancers, creators, and...

The Windows ADK and WinPE separation still trips up experienced admins and newcomers alike, but getting the pair installed correctly — online or offline — is straightforward once you understand the version, order, and tooling details that Microsoft expects. Background / Overview The Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit (Windows ADK) is Microsoft’s official toolkit for building, customizing, and deploying Windows images at scale. It bundles a set of command-line and GUI utilities — DISM...

Before most hobbyist projects can boast running Doom on a refrigerator or a calculator, someone took the lighter, older crown of retrocomputing and proved that Zork — Infocom’s iconic text-adventure series — can be coaxed to run on an Intel 4004-based single-board computer, a feat that blends obsessive hardware tinkering with careful software engineering. Background Zork began life on large mainframes and became a defining example of portable game design because Infocom packaged the game...

Old SD cards are small, cheap, and surprisingly versatile — when repurposed with care they make excellent bootable rescue drives, multiboot toolkits, media sticks, encrypted key carriers, and compact test platforms — but getting dependable results means understanding formats, performance limits, risk vectors, and a short verification workflow before you rely on a card in the field. Background / Overview SD and microSD cards are everywhere: cameras, phones, action cams, single‑board computers...

A recent, methodical speed test that installed Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8.1, 10 and 11 cleanly onto the same Lenovo ThinkPad X220 and ran a battery of real‑world and synthetic benchmarks arrived at a blunt conclusion: newer Windows releases — and Windows 11 in particular — often consume far more resources and deliver worse responsiveness in everyday tasks than many older releases did, and the reasons are as much architectural as cultural. Background / Overview The benchmark project under...

Sandboxie Plus 1.16.9 and Sandboxie Classic 5.71.9 are now available in a stability-first release that patches a number of long‑standing compatibility and reliability issues — from browser and portable app quirks to a critical driver-level crash under heavy GPU process loads — while keeping the project’s dual‑edition model (modern Plus UI and the MFC‑based Classic UI) intact for users who want either a contemporary interface or the traditional control surface. Background / Overview Sandboxie...

On October 14, 2025 Microsoft formally ended mainstream security updates for Windows 10, leaving millions of otherwise serviceable PCs exposed to future vulnerabilities — but you do not have to treat that as an inevitable decline into insecurity. With a carefully chosen set of free tools and a sensible patch-and-defense regimen, an unsupported Windows 10 system can remain reasonably safe for everyday use while you plan an eventual upgrade. This feature examines five practical, no-cost (or...

The Premier League’s light‑hearted predictions column has quietly become a frontline test of what modern sports journalism looks like when human experience meets algorithmic recall — and, for now, the machines are winning. In early January 2026 the BBC’s weekly predictions feature saw veteran pundit Chris Sutton fall behind an artificial intelligence powered by Microsoft’s Copilot, as Sutton’s guest for the week — singer‑songwriter and Newcastle fan Andrew Cushin — lent a human, culturally...

With the dust settling on the Windows 11 refresh cycle, the PC market’s next commercial battleground is clear: turning a rapidly growing installed base of AI-capable PCs into sustained, measurable everyday use. Recent market trackers show that a large and growing share of European PCs sold in 2025 included on-device AI acceleration; vendors and distributors now see the channel — resellers, integrators and service partners — as the crucial bridge between hardware capability and real customer...

Row of Moai statues along the coast on Easter Island.

The sudden appearance of ad-like suggestions inside chat-based AI has forced a hard question onto product teams, publishers and marketers: can AI chatbots monetize without undermining the single asset that makes them valuable — user trust? Background The context: chat as a new discovery surface Chat interfaces capture richer intent than traditional search. A user who types “best blender for smoothies under $150, no-drip lid, ships fast” hands the assistant a near-complete brief. That...

Satya Nadella’s end‑of‑year blog post asking the industry to “stop calling AI ‘slop’” arrived less like contrition and more like a strategic reframing — an attempt to move debate from visible product failures to a philosophical roadmap for “models → systems” and human amplification — even as evidence mounts that Microsoft’s Copilot deployments, advertising pivots, and partner arrangements face concrete, measurable problems that careful customers and regulators cannot ignore. Background /...

Satya Nadella’s short New Year note asking the industry to “stop calling AI ‘slop’” is more than CEO spin — it’s a strategic reset that reframes success in generative AI from model-driven spectacle to engineered systems that must prove measurable, human-centered value before they can claim broad social licence. Background / Overview Satya Nadella closed 2025 with a personal post on a blog branded “sn scratchpad,” where he argued that the AI era is shifting away from discovery and hype toward...

Microsoft quietly signaled a course correction: after months of user outcry over promotional content across Windows, the company has begun rolling back some of the most intrusive upgrade prompts while simultaneously continuing to experiment with in-OS promotions like Start menu “recommendations.” Background Windows has been a carrier for promotional content for years, but the scope and visibility of those promotions accelerated around the Windows 10 → Windows 11 transition and the...

If you find Windows Search slow, inconsistent, or more distracting than helpful, Raycast’s Windows beta offers a compelling, keyboard‑first alternative that isn’t just about finding files — it’s about finding things and immediately acting on them, and that shift in mindset is worth a serious look. Overview Raycast arrived on macOS as a polished, keyboard‑centric command palette and has since migrated that model to Windows in a beta that reframes the launcher as an action surface rather than...

Satya Nadella’s plea to “stop calling AI ‘slop’” is less a PR flourish than a strategic reset: the Microsoft CEO is urging a shift from headline-grabbing model demos and mockable outputs toward engineered, instrumented systems that deliver measurable human benefit — even as independent evidence suggests heavy AI use can erode critical thinking in real users. Background / Overview Satya Nadella closed the year with a short blog post on his personal “sn scratchpad” page arguing that the AI...