But hey, she sure interviewed well!

Project manager and IT director interview this contract programmer, and based on the contract shop's recommendation and a brief technical interview she's hired, reports a pilot fish on the scene.

"She interviewed well, but unfortunately that's where her skills largely ended," fish says.

"Basic skills required for this job were C, SQL and Oracle's PL/SQL and Pro*C -- that's like C with embedded SQL. After struggling for a few days on her first assignment, she asked me, 'How do you open a file in C?'"

Fish hands her his copy of The C Programming Language and tells her to look up the fopen() function.

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Brinno Duo review: Our favorite peephole camera adds live remote viewing

This security camera mounts to your door's peephole and streams live video to your smartphone and to its own display on the interior side of your door.
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Hands on: Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx reference laptop is a fresh attempt to be faster

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx is the chip the company hopes will scale the performance mountain, reaching the heights that competing Intel Core chips have already surmounted. After trying it at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Technology Summit in Maui, we can say it seems promising.

As we learned Thursday morning, the Snapdragon 8cx was designed as a ground-up, optimized design specifically for laptops. Its mission is to achieve performance comparable to that of an Intel U-series Core i5 chip.

Qualcomm supplied a limited number of Snapdragon 8cx reference notebooks at the event, all running Windows 10 Pro. We tried to navigate to one of the web-based benchmarks we’ve used to test previous Snapdragon PCs, but we were told that benchmarking wasn’t allowed. In part, that’s because the clock speeds of the chip haven’t been formally determined.

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Neato Botvac D7 Connected review: Building a better (but more expensive) mousetrap

With its advanced mapping, deep cleaning, and intuitive app, the D7 is our favorite high-end robot vacuum.
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Backdoor.Cobalt

Risk Level: Very Low. Type: Trojan.
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Windows 10: A guide to the updates

The launch of a big Windows 10 update like the October 2018 Update isn’t the end of a process — it’s really just the beginning. As soon as a major update is released, Microsoft quickly gets to work on improving it by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.

Here we’ve summarized what you need to know about every Windows 10 update being released to the public. First come updates to the currently shipping version of Windows 10 — version 1809, known as the October 2018 Update — with the most recent updates on top. (Note that the October 2018 Update is on a phased rollout, so you may not have received it yet.) Below that are updates to version 1803, known as the April 2018 Update; 1709, known as the Fall Creators Update; and finally updates to version 1703, known as the Creators Update. For each build, we’ve included the date of its initial release and a link to Microsoft’s announcement about it.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx for PCs aims to overcome the performance gap

Qualcomm’s efforts to put its Snapdragon chips into PCs have historically run into one major obstacle: The performance simply isn’t competitive with that of chips from Intel and AMD. Now Qualcomm is trying again, with what it’s calling an “extreme” version of the Snapdragon: the Snapdragon 8cx. 

Qualcomm’s promising that the 8cx will offer the equivalent performance of the competition’s 15-watt processor offerings—though it’s not saying which one. (Intel’s U-series Core chips consume 15 watts.) At the same time, Qualcomm is promising more of its traditional strength: an incredible 25 hours of battery life, plus support for niceties like LPDDR4X memory, NVMe SSDs, USB 3.1, and four PCI Express lanes. There’s Qualcomm QuickCharge, too.

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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive goes free-to-play, adds a battle royale mode called Danger Zone

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s finally making the free-to-play pivot, ditching the $15 barrier to entry it’s maintained since release in 2012. Starting today you can head over to Steam and grab the full game, including multiplayer modes, for free—though you can still pay $15 for “Prime” status and earn some extra skins.

It seems like an obvious move to keep Counter-Strike competitive in the modern era, what with the rise of the battle royale genre. CS:GO is even getting its own take on the phenomenon, called CS:GO Danger Zone, an 18-player battle royale(ish) mode that involves scrounging for supplies and money around the map. Timing that release with the move to free-to-play could convince an entire new generation of Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds players to give Counter-Strike a shot...maybe.

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Windows 7 to Windows 10 migration guide

All good things must come to an end, and the reign of Windows 7 as an actively supported, good-enough operating system is no exception. While it may feel like you just finished the heavy lifting of migrating your Windows XP machines to Windows 7, it turns out that Windows 7 is now more than nine years old, at least two and a half versions behind Windows 10 (depending on whether you consider Windows 8.1 to be a version of Windows all its own), and approaching end of Microsoft support in 2020.

Creating and managing deployment groups

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(Insider Story)