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About Wallowa County chieftain. (Enterprise, Wallowa County, Or.) 1943-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 18, 2019)
NEWS Wallowa County Chieftain B8 Wednesday, December 18, 2019 Microsoft Windows will lose tech support in January. But don’t panic. R. Li, H. Zang and X. Ding Windows 7 Support Ends Next Year, Should You Worry? A very large tyrannosaur Yutyrannus huali from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation of Liaoning Province, China bears long fi lamentous feathers, thus providing direct evidence for the presence of extensively feathered gigantic dinosaurs and off ering new insights into early feather evolution. E Feathered dinosaurs, like modern birds, were plagued by early versions of lice arlier this year, Microsoft announced that support for Windows 7 would end Jan. 14. What does this mean for owners of Windows 7 computers? First, not much. Most people on Win- dows 7 won’t notice anything different. Their computers will continue to oper- ate exactly as they did before Jan. 14. No disaster or malfunction will occur due to support ending. Of course, Microsoft would like you to pay for a Windows 10 upgrade or, better yet, buy a brand-new computer (from Mic- rosoft, naturally) but that isn’t necessary just because Windows 7 support is ending. Many people don’t want Windows 10 with its questionable data collection and unusual interface. In fact, according to a survey done last year, there are more people still using Windows 7 than people who have upgraded to Windows 10. The good news is that you probably don’t need to upgrade right now. Yes, you won’t be getting future bug-fi xes but, after 10 years of extensive use and updates, how many bugs could be still undiscovered in Windows 7? How about years in the future? Well, that depends on a number of fac- tors. If you don’t make any hardware or software changes to your Windows 7 com- puter, everything should continue to oper- ate as it has for the foreseeable future. Even if you add some external hardware, like a different printer or a new monitor, it should continue to work well with Windows 7. A few years ago I met a person who was still running Windows 3 — 20 years after its release! The computer was pretty old and slow but he was running a small busi- ness using one piece of software that only ran on Windows 3.1. He didn’t want to go to the trouble of learning new software — and he really didn’t have to. Everything still worked fi ne for him. Only you can determine if you need to upgrade to Windows 10. Basically, if TECH TIPS By Kimball Hawkins everything continues working the way you want it to, you don’t need to upgrade. I should add that you can purchase Mic- rosoft Extended Support, which would continue to send security updates for your Windows 7 computer for up to three years. If you need this additional support for Windows 7, contact Microsoft for more information. How about my antivirus software? While it is doubtful that Microsoft will continue to support their Microsoft Secu- rity Essentials software for Windows 7, other antivirus software companies should continue to provide updates. Contact your security software company to check how they plan to support Windows 7 computers in the future. If you are using Microsoft Security Essentials as your only antivirus protec- tion, you might consider getting a different antivirus software for protection after Jan. 14. Some non-Microsoft anti-virus soft- ware is available for free or very low cost. Check out Avast Free Antivirus, Avira, Bit- defender Internet Security, AVG Internet Security and Panda Security. Will Microsoft Offi ce continue to run? Yes. Just like the Windows 7 operat- ing system itself, Microsoft Offi ce and other software designed for Windows 7 will continue to function exactly as before. Microsoft says that Offi ce 2010, Offi ce 2013, Offi ce 2016 and Offi ce 365 will all continue to be supported for the time being. The bottom line is this: All software that is running on your Windows 7 computer today will continue to run after Jan. 14. You always have the option of upgrading to Windows 10 later. DOWNLOAD OUR FREE NEWS APP TODAY! Our new app offers access to the latest news as it happens with customizable features for mobile and tablet devices: Dinosaur feathers and pesky mites preserved in amber Gretchen Vogel American Association for the Advancement of Science Taiping Gao/Capital Normal University, China We know that birds, whether wild or domes- tic, can have problems with tiny biting insects known as lice. The pests fi nd the birds feathers to be an almost irre- sistible home, and a great snack. New fossils found in amber reveal the insects have been around for at least 100 million years, when they feasted on feathered dinosaurs. The fi nd “is very, very cool and very exciting for the louse community,” says Julie Allen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nevada in Reno who was not involved with the work. “Having an actual fossil— and not only this old, but feeding on feathers? That’s spectacular.” Genetic work on living lice had suggested they arose during the time of feathered dinosaurs, but fossil lice are few and far between. The tiny creatures are unlikely to fossilize, and even if they do they’re hard to spot. Paleon- tologists Taiping Gao, Dong Ren, and Chungkun Shih of Capital Normal Univer- sity in Beijing and their col- leagues spend a lot of time scanning fossils for over- looked insects, especially parasites like lice. In two specimens of amber from Myanmar, they noticed 10 tiny insects among well-pre- served downy feathers, which showed damage as though something had been eating them. The insects, which are just 0.2 millimeters long— roughly twice the width of Even 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs such as TRex and velociraptors had feathers, there were early versions of lice around to make their lives miserable. Incredible fossils found in Myanmar have preserved both the early versions of lice and the dinosaur feathers in amber. Taiping Gao/Capital Normal University, China An artist’s rendering of what the tiny lice trapped in amber on dinosaurs’ feathers might have looked like when alive. human hair—don’t look exactly like modern lice. Their mouthparts are not as sophisticated as those of today’s lice, and they have long, stiff bristles on their claws and anten- nae, the researchers report today in Nature Commu- nications. They named the insects Mesophthirus engeli. (Mesophthirus means Meso- zoic louse, for the geolog- ical era when it lived, and the species name is for ento- mologist and paleontologist Michael Engel.) Like modern lice, the ancient lice have no wings, their eyes are tiny, and they have short antennae and short legs—suggesting they didn’t travel far or fast. “They look a bit weird, but they defi nitely have louse-y features,” Allen says. Because they are so small, the researchers think their specimens were nymphs— juvenile lice—and the fully grown insects might have been half a millimeter long. Most lice today are extreme specialists, living on just one species or even just a specifi c body part of a single species. The feathers in the two amber specimens look quite different and may be from different dinosaurs, so it seems M. engeli was less picky, Shih says. Both feathers had damage that closely resembles that made by modern feather-eating lice, and the researchers sus- pect the ancient insects were the culprit. (Lice that infect humans drink blood, but many other lice today eat feathers or fl akes of skin.) Because these lice seemed to eat feathers, they probably didn’t bite their hosts’ skin, so infested dino- saurs probably didn’t itch, Shih says. But the damage they did to feathers might have prompted the dinos to groom themselves, preen- ing the way modern birds do to get rid of lice and mites, Allen says. “Now we know that feathered dinosaurs not only had feathers, they also had parasites—and they most likely had ways they tried to get rid of them.” • Scroll through the latest headlines while on-the-go. • Personalize your news feed with the stories you want. • Receive breaking news alerts on your phone. • Explore photos, videos and more. • Easily save articles for reading later. • Share articles with the tap of a finger. • Content can be viewed offline when out-of-service or in flight. • Customizable settings allow you to Join us for an Exquisite Holiday Celebration! 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