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By Guest
Woman Wins $10,000 From Microsoft After Unwanted Windows 10 Upgrade
Good for her! She deserves it based on their bad behavior. Too bad the award doesn't have 5 or 6 more zeroes to the left of the decimal point. The Redmond Mafia needs to learn a lesson for their bad behavior, and that tiny little slap on the wrist will only represent a minor inconvenience to them. They deserve to draw back a bloody stump.
Unfortunately, the wickedness of Micro$loth knows no boundaries. They think they own us and our computers. This is what I use to kill all of the spyware and telemetry trash in Windows 10, block all updates and permanently expunge all of the bloatware apps and Windows Store garbage. It also kills and deletes OneDrive and disables (rather than only muting) UAC. Works great... very nice tool IMHO.
Destroy Windows Spying
I have also found third-party tweaks to replace the hideous giant calculator with the older version, completely kill the obnoxious Security Center nag-o-rama and exterminate Cortana.
Notwithstanding the tacky-looking aesthetics that remain (nasty abuse of white and pastel colors akin to the Windows 8.X abortion) it's fairly decent if you go to enough trouble to correct all of their mistakes. Performance in some things is still inferior to Windows 7, unfortunately. I pointed that out as an 'Insider' quite some time ago, but they apparently do not plan to fix it. They started hindering CPU performance in Windows 8.X and they must think it's OK since they are leaving it messed up from then until now.
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By StamatisX
Microsoft is planning to acquire the London-based AI powered predictive keyboard manufacturer for around $250M. The UK start-up company founded in 2008 by Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock, is installed on hundreds of millions of smartphones across the globe and has more than 150 employees in London, San Francisco and Seoul.
Swiftkey, which is considered by its founders as a language technology company, is offering the app free for download in both Android and iOS devices since 2014. It supports more than 100 languages and uses artificial intelligence in order to learn the writing style of its user and be able to predict the next word to be typed.
This is not the only company Microsoft is trying to acquire in an effort to regain a foothold in mobile but neither it is for Google with DeepMind or for Apple with VocalIQ whose AI software helps computer and people converse more naturally.
Despite being installed on more than 300M devices and being on top of app chart as one of the most popular app, SwiftKey's selling price was lower than what investors might have hoped for a couple of years ago.
Source: Financial Times
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By Brian
Even as Microsoft's newest CEO Satya Nadella tries to steer the company back into relevance by attempting to unify Microsoft notebook, desktop, tablet and smartphone platforms under the "One Microsoft" structure devised by his predecessor Steve Ballmer, most consumers and developers don't seem to care and the company appears destined to fall into obscurity.
While it currently dominates the desktop market, it's newest and greatest hope in achieving the "One Microsoft" vision is Windows 10 and at the end of 2015, it barely had climbed to 10% share despite Microsoft's strong marketing push by giving it away for free. In fact, Windows 7 still retains 55% of the desktop OS market with consumers and developers alike perfectly content to stay where they are.
According to Forbes, Microsoft is now changing tactics by attempting to scare consumers into upgrading to Windows 10 by telling them Windows 7 has potentially serious security risks and hardware compatibility issues. In speaking to Windows Weekly, Microsoft Marketing chief Chris Capossela said that users who continue on with Windows 7 do so "at your own risk, at your own peril". Forbes Gordon Kelly notes that Microsoft's statements about Windows 7 amount to "complete rubbish" as Windows 7 will be supported until 2020 and with its greater market share vs Windows 10, it is guaranteed to receive more developer attention--which includes security patches and driver updates. Microsoft's motives are fairly transparent as it has a stated goal of one billion devices running Windows 10 within 2-3 years of it's release and with Windows 10 adoption seemingly faltering, they are getting desperate.
To make things worse, Vox has an article with a very interesting graph created by Joshua Kunst which illustrates Microsoft losing significant ground among developers since 2008. He made the graph by tracking popular tags on Stack Overflow, a popular forum where many developers hang out and answer programming questions.
Looking at this chart, going back to 2008 when Stack Overflow was founded, it becomes clear that Microsoft backed programming languages and applications have declined: C#, .NET, ASP.NET, SQL all lost ground, yet competing alternatives such as PHP, MYSQL, JavaScript gained significantly. JavaScript owes part of its rise thanks to Android which uses it as the main language for Android apps.
In the gaming market, Xbox One started off with a faulty strategy of attempting to force users into purchasing their Kinect device while their competitor Sony produced a more powerful system that did not have similar bundling restrictions. Microsoft eventually backed off but it seems to be too late as Sony's PS4 now holds a dominant lead over Xbox One despite Microsoft's best efforts.
(image credit: Ars Technica)
So will Microsoft be able to turn around its misfortunes? Maybe if Windows 10 has a drastic turn around in 2016 with more developers getting on board, it is possible but as of right now, the future doesn't seem too bright.
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By Brian
Digital Foundry re-tested Ark: Survival Evolved on an Xbox One after the developer made some performance improvements and unfortunately the results are still less than spectacular. This isn't really much of a surprise as the game has always performed pretty poorly even on powerful PCs such as my own Titan X setup. If you've never heard of Ark: Survival Evolved before, it is an open world sandbox game that takes place on an island full of dinosaurs where you are free to gather resources, build bases, tame dinosaurs and attack other player built bases. In concept it is similar to other open world games like Rust but this game just runs a lot worse.
You can watch Digital Foundry's video review below:
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