News Microsoft Windows Update : The Operating Systemels Evolution Of Microsoft Windows Through Out The Years

Microsoft Windows has seen ten major versions since its first release in 1985. Over 30 years, Windows evolved to look very different while retaining a degree of familiarity.
The evolution of Windows is both a reflection on computing power of that generation and the dominant input devices, be it a mouse and keyboard earlier and a touchscreen now.

Here’s a brief look at the history of Windows:

Windows 1

The original. This is where it all began. The original Windows 1 was released in November 1985 and was Microsoft's first attempt at a graphical user interface.

Windows 1 ran on top of the then dominant operating system, Microsoft's DOS, which relied on command-line input. Windows 1 was one of the first software to heavily rely on mouse control before the mouse was a common input device.

Windows 2

Arriving two years after the release of its predecessor in December 1987, Windows 2 introduced features like the ability to minimise or maximise windows and allowing different windows to overlap each other. Windows 2 introduced the control panel, where system settings and configuration options resided. It also introduced the world to Microsoft Word and Excel.

Windows 3

Windows 3 launched in 1990 and was the first version of the OS to see widespread success and be considered a challenger to Apple’s Macintosh and the Commodore Amiga graphical user interfaces, coming pre-installed on computers from PC-compatible manufacturers.

It introduced the ability to run MS-DOS programmes in windows, which brought multitasking to legacy programmes, and supported 256 colours, bringing a more modern, colourful look to the interface.

It also introduced the world to one the most iconic timesink ever created, Solitaire.

Windows 95

Windows 95 launched in August 1995 and brought with it the start button and start menu.

Its big push was “plug and play” – connect a peripheral and the operating system finds the appropriate drivers for it and makes it work. That did not pan out as expected and led to millions of “plug and pray” jokes.

Internet Explorer too made its debut on Windows 95.

Windows 98

Released in June 1998, Windows 98 built on Windows 95 and came with Internet Explorer 4, Outlook Express, Microsoft Chat and eventually Windows Media Player.

It introduced the back and forward navigation buttons and the address bar in Windows Explorer, among other things.

USB support was much improved in Windows 98 and led to its widespread adoption, including USB hubs and USB mice.

Windows ME

Released in September 2000, Windows Millennium Edition (ME) was the last Windows to be based on MS-DOS, and the last in the Windows 9x line.

Considered the worst version of Windows ever, ME was the consumer-aimed operating system twinned with Windows 2000 that aimed at the enterprise market. It introduced some important concepts to consumers, including more automated system recovery tools.

IE 5.5, Windows Media Player 7 and Windows Movie Maker all made their appearance for the first time. Auto-complete also appeared in Windows Explorer, but the operating system was notorious for being buggy, failing to install properly and being generally poor.

Windows 2000

The enterprise twin of ME, Windows 2000 was released in February 2000 and was based on Microsoft’s business-oriented system Windows NT that later became the basis for the much more successful Windows XP.

Windows 2000 was the first time that Microsoft offered automatic updates and it was the first Windows to support hibernation.

Windows XP

Released in October 2001, Windows XP was a product of a Microsoft at the peak of its powers.

The start menu and task bar got a visual overhaul, bringing the familiar green start button, blue task bar and vista wallpaper, along with various shadow and other visual effects.

Windows XP was the longest running Microsoft operating system, seeing three major updates and support up until April 2014 – 13 years after its original release. Windows XP was still used on an estimated 430 million PCs when it was discontinued.

But its huge popularity turned out to be a boon for hackers and criminals, who mercilessly exploited its flaws, especially in Internet Explorer.

Windows Vista

Windows XP was replaced by Windows Vista in January 2007. Vista updated the look and feel of Windows with focus on transparent elements and search and security. Its development was long and troubled, with ambitious elements abandoned in the final release.

It was buggy and burdened the user with hundreds of requests for app permissions under “User Account Control” – the outcome of XP’s security problems. It also ran slowly on older computers despite them being deemed as “Vista Ready”.

Windows Media Player 11 and IE 7 debuted, along with Windows Defender, an anti-spyware programme. Vista included speech recognition, Windows DVD Maker and Photo Gallery, and was the first Windows to be distributed on DVD.

Windows 7

Windows 7 was released in October 2009 following the lukewarm response to the buggy Windows Vista. It was intended to fix all the problems and criticism faced by Vista, with slight tweaks to its appearance and a concentration on user-friendly features and less “dialogue box overload”.

It was faster, more stable and easier to use, becoming the operating system most users and businesses would upgrade to from Windows XP, forgoing Vista entirely.

Windows 8

Released in October 2012, Windows 8 was Microsoft’s most radical overhaul of the Windows interface. In an effort to bring Windows into the post-PC world dominated by touchscreen smartphones and tablets, Microsoft ditched the start button and start menu for a more touch-friendly start screen.

The new tiled interface saw programme icons and live tiles, which displayed information normally associated with “widgets”, replaced the lists of programmes and icons. A desktop was still included, which resembled Windows 7.

The radical overhaul led to a fallout with loyal Windows users. Microsoft's attempted to walk a fine line between touchscreen support and the traditional mouse and keyboard and somewhat failed on both fronts.

Windows 10

Released on July 29, 2015, Windows 10 is a sharp U-turn from its predecessor, bringing back the start menu and more balance to traditional desktop computer users.

It was released as a free upgrade to all users with legitimate copies of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

A major feature called Continuum introduced the ability to switch between a keyboard and mouse mode and a tablet mode, for those computers like the Surface Pro 3 with a detachable keyboard.

In an effort to recapture the web browser market it ceded to Google Chrome, Windows 10 comes with a new browser called Edge, which allows users to annotate web pages, save them to read later, or select "read mode" to strip out adverts and sidebars.

Windows 10 comes with Microsoft's virtual personal assistant, Cortana, which pops up with notifications and suggestions, and learns the user's preferences over time. Cortana responds to voice commands similar to Apple's Siri and has been touted as one of the core features of Windows 10.

Posted by Unknown Sunday, August 02, 2015

News Update Robotic Technology : Self-Aware AI Developed By New York Researchers

Machines have come a long way in the past few years. Engineers have developed robots that can navigate their environment based on the surrounding context, robots that can heal / repair themselves in just a few short minutes, and robots that can learn from their mistakes and improve future results.

And while Hollywood level artificial intelligence (AI) is still a long way from becoming a reality, little steps are being takes in that direction every day. The most recent achievement comes courtesy of professor Selmer Bringsjord from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who recorded video footage of a robot that waves and recognizes itself as an individual.

His self-aware experiment was conducted on three (3) commercially-available Nao robots. He programmed the machines to believe the two (2) of them were previously given a “dumbing pill” which would prevent them from speaking (of course, in reality, the professor only pressed a button that muted them).

All three (3) robots were then tasked with finding out which of them were unable to talk and which of them was able to talk. All of them tried to wanted to answer “I don’t know”, but since only one (1) of them was actually able to make any sounds, his voice was the only one he heard. He then waved his hand and said: “I know now. I was able to prove that I was not given a dumbing pill”.

Professor Bringsjord gave a statement informing the robot first needed to recognize the sound of his own voice in order to then use logic, prove that it understood the question, reach the above mentioned conclusion and pass the test.

The test itself was based on a classic philosophical problem known as “The King’s Wise Men” and addressed a very small but specific side of self-awareness. The philosophical scenario describes a king who has to decide who should be his next advisor. To do this he invites three (3) of the wisest men in his kingdom to compete in a contest, with the promise that it will be a fair one.

He informs them that he will be putting either a blue or a white hat on each of their hats, and that the color of each individual hat can be seen only by the men who are not wearing it. He then says that a least one of the three (3) is wearing a blue colored hat. The promise is that the first person to guess the color of the hat he’s wearing will become the king’s next adviser. The real answer is that they’re all wearing blue harts.

Professor Bringsjord is currently collaborating with the US Navy on a project that has the goal of teaching robots what’s considered right, what’s considered wrong, and what the difference between the two is.

Posted by Unknown Sunday, July 19, 2015

News Google Card Box Update : Google Is Supporting People With Free Cardboxes

Google has a new technologically developed aspect added to is genre. Google Expeditions, a Cardboard app that’s designed to take kids on a virtual-reality field trip to faraway places.

When Google announced a do-it-yourself virtual reality kit made of cardboard at its I/O developer conference this week, one of the first questions people asked was: Is this a big joke?

Was Google mocking VR and poking fun at Oculus, the VR goggle makers Facebook acquired for $2 billion? Or maybe the company was just pulling a gag on attendees, who were excited to get a free smartwatch in their conference goodie bag?

Turns out, Google is using cheap, corrugated paper to give virtual reality its neatest and most accessible tool for converting nonbelievers. While it’s no Oculus Rift headset, Google’s Cardboard initiative has a huge role to play in VR by putting it in the hands of anyone with $25 and a smartphone.

VR is supposed to change everything: film, gaming, communication, travel, education — even what we understand about sensory experience itself. Oculus is the once-scrappy outfit started by 21-year-old Palmer Luckey that was purchased by Mark Zuckerberg’s social network in March. Oculus, now flush with resources and the game industry’s finest minds, is the VR torchbearer, blazing a trail toward a bright future we’d thought only science fiction could provide.

But for most people, consumer VR is still a fringe technology. It’s a futurist’s fantasy easily caricatured, an activity we could see devolving into the kind of techno-dystopian world that we fear Facebook and the smartphone era has already begun creating. That’s a realm where people sit in the living room with computers strapped to their faces, ignoring each other and escaping even further from reality and face-to-face contact.

The crucial disparity between the critical reception of Oculus’ product and the public’s perception of VR is a problem. It arises from the fact that the technology, as it stands now, is firmly in the “you have to see it to believe it” camp of consumer electronics. Unless you’ve strapped an Oculus Rift or Sony’s Project Morpheus to your face — devices that quite literally change the world before your eyes — you’re not likely to think a high-fidelity VR headset is really a product category capable of changing industries.

Why? Well, most everyday technology users don’t frequent electronics trade shows or game developer conferences, where the Rift and Morpheus are trotted out and where attendees line up to give them a whirl. So while technologists believe in VR, our friends, family, and the folks freaked out by Google Glass, the company’s smart eyewear, aren’t going to have the opportunity to try out a modern-day VR experience until full-blown headsets arrive in the next year or so.

That’s where Google Cardboard, perhaps one of the most important, quirky, and ingenious advances in consumer VR since the Rift itself, comes in.

Announced as part of Google’s annual product giveaway at I/O, Cardboard is a meant to be a super-low-cost, crowdsourced toolkit anyone can build to run elementary VR experiences. Essentially, it’s a cardboard housing for a smartphone running Google’s Android mobile OS. You get a $10 lens kit, about $7 in off-the-shelf magnets, $3 worth of velcro, a rubber band, and an easily programmable $1.50 Near-Field Communication sticker tag for launching the companion mobile app automatically.

You can even cut the cardboard housing, the schematics for which are posted online (PDF), out of a pizza box.

The result is a low-key yet completely usable headset that’s good enough to hand to a stranger and have them experience a genuine VR revelation. In fact, countless people — at San Francisco’s Moscone Center and here, too, at CNET’s headquarters — who have never had the opportunity to try on a Rift have been holding up Cardboard’s goofy-looking smartphone mount and walking away thinking VR might not be so crazy after all.

They also say it may just be the coolest tech they’ve played with in a while.

Google’s Cardboard app, which is what plays on the phone screen while it sits in the cardboard casing, lets you cruise through a landscape or city street in Google Earth and watch YouTube videos in a virtual theater. Even wackier Web-based experiences — what Google is calling Chrome Experiments — let you play a simple coin-collecting game, visit the Great Barrier Reef in a helicopter, and ride a roller coaster. That only one of the more than a dozen apps you can access with Cardboard is game-related is a boon for VR too, proving that you can design worthwhile and interesting experiences in a first-person view.

 

The idea behind Cardboard isn’t to undermine the technical achievement and feasibility of professional-grade VR headsets, but rather to close the loop from the bottom up. Now, with Oculus and Cardboard, we have a full spectrum for VR, with both DIY and high-end hardware optimized for apps both large and small, serious and playful.

More than anything, Cardboard illustrates Google doing what it does best: handing everyday people the tools to build the kinds of experiences that larger companies, including itself, would otherwise never consider or have time for. It just so happens that in creating Cardboard, Google has designed the blueprints to a device that can convince the world that VR is mind-blowing, about to arrive, and about way more than just gaming.

Posted by Unknown Sunday, July 05, 2015

News Computer Technology Update : A New Type Of Computer System That Can Detect Sarcasm, Irony In Emails

Jerusalem: A new computerized learning system spots emotional sentiments, such as sarcasm and irony, in text messages and emails and it could even detect content that suggests suicidal ideations.

Eden Saig, a computer science student at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, developed the computerized learning system which works by recognizing repeated word patterns.

Saig developed the system at the Technician's Learning and Reasoning Laboratory, after taking a course in artificial intelligence supervised by Professor Shaul Markovich, of the Technician Faculty of Computer Science.

According to Saig, voice tone and inflections play an important role in conveying one's meaning in verbally communicated message.

In text and email messages, those nuances are lost and writers who want to signify sarcasm, sympathy or doubt have taken to using images, or "emoticons," such as the smiley face, to compensate.

"These icons are superficial cues at best. They could never express the subtle or complex feelings that exist in real life verbal communication," said Saig.

Recently, pages intended to be humorous on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter were titled "superior and condescending people," or "ordinary and sensible people." Such pages are very popular in Israel, said Saig, and users are invited to submit suggestions for phrases that can be labelled as 'stereotypical sayings,' for that particular page.

By observing posts to these groups, Saig identified existing patterns. The method he developed enables the system to detect future patterns on any social network.

Since the content in these sections was colloquial, everyday language, Saig realized that, "the content could provide a good database for collecting homogeneous data that could, in turn, help 'teach' a computerized learning system to recognize patronizing sounding semantics or slang words and phrases in text."
Saig applied 'Machine-Learning' algorithms to the content on these pages and used the results to automatically identify stereotypical behaviours found every day in social network communication.

The quantification was carried out by examining 5,000 posts on social media pages and, through statistical analysis, gearing a learning system to recognise content structure that could be identified as condescending or slang.

The system was constructed to identify key words and grammatical habits that were characteristic of sentence structure implied by the content's sentiments.

"Now, the system can recognize patterns that are either condescending or caring sentiments and can even send a text message to the user if the system thinks the post may be arrogant," said Saig.

When applied to other networking pages it may help detect content that suggests suicidal ideations, for example, or 'calls' for help, or expressions of admiration or pleasure, Saig said.    

Posted by Unknown Saturday, July 04, 2015

News Gaming Update : ‘Shadow Oof Mordor,’ ‘Monument Valley’ Win Big At Game Awards

“Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor” is king of the Game Developers Choice Awards.  Monolith Productions’ gritty action-adventure game set between J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” was honored as the game of the year at Wednesday’s 15th annual ceremony, which is held during the Game Developers Conference.

“I want to thank everyone at Monolith Productions,” said studio head Kevin Stephens as he was backed on stage by dozens of employees. “There are about 40 people up here. I holed them away for two years to make this game, and now I’m letting them loose on GDC.”

The artsy mobile puzzler “Monument Valley” from us two captured the most trophies, picking up the best visual art, mobile and innovation awards. “The last 12 months has been completely insane, and it’s far bigger than we ever expected, said executive producer Daniel Gray. “We’re genuinely humbled by the rest of the people in this room.”

Bungie’s shared-world sci-fi shooter “Destiny” was honored for best technology, while Creative Assembly’s intergalactic horror “Alien: Isolation” was awarded for best audio.

“When I first started watching people play our game, it was a big shock to me how much the audio affected how people played and how long they would spend hiding inside lockers and listening to the sounds of the station,” said studio director Tim Heaton. “If I’d realized how much effect it had, we probably could have made a shorter game.”

Other winners included Cardboard Computer’s adventure game “Kentucky Route Zero” for best narrative, Blizzard’s trade-carding title “Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft” for best design and Stoic Studio’s Viking-themed role-playing game “The Banner Saga” for best debut.

Frontier Developments’ updated space-trading simulator “Elite: Dangerous” landed the audience award, which was selected by online votes. David Braben, developer of the original “Elite” in the 1980s, received the Pioneer Award for his influential work, which featured revolutionary 3D graphics and moral quandaries for players.

Brenda Romero, a veteran game designer, was presented with the Ambassador Award, which recognizes individuals who have helped advance the gaming industry. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the Japanese creator of the long-running “Final Fantasy” series, was honored with the show’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

“I’m still chugging along,” Sakaguchi said through a translator. “I have not retired. I will not retire in the near future. With everyone here, I think we should just continue to make great content and great games.”

Posted by Unknown Thursday, March 05, 2015