Software & Apps - Page 60

Apple might get a lot of the media spotlight for the iPhone, but Google kicks Apple's ass in more ways than one when it comes to services... and especially AI assistants.

Siri was announced six years ago now, with much more competiion in the artificial intelligence assistant game now from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and others. But now a team of researchers out of Cornell have been working on a new report that sheds some light on which company makes the best AI for smartphones.

Google's AI has an IQ of around 47.28, which is just below the average IQ of a six-year-old, while Siri has an IQ of just 23.9. The team said: "Although this work is still in progress, the results so far indicate that the artificial-intelligence systems produced by Google, Baidu, and others have significantly improved over the past two years but still have certain gaps as compared with even a six-year-old child," the researchers wrote in a paper published on ArXiv".

Microsoft have announced a release for their 4th major update for Windows 10 since its inception back in July 2015, the Fall Creators Update. This release should see Microsoft begin to release their major Windows 10 updates on a bi-annual occurrence post the Fall Creators Update. Recently announced at IFA by Terry Myerson, Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group at Microsoft, Terry revealed that not all features mentioned at Microsoft's previous Microsoft's developer conference, Build, would make it, with Timeline the biggest feature not make it this update.

Fluent Design, an interesting feature that will make the cut into the Fall Creators Update, is perhaps the biggest change and one that has already been making its subtle way into our operating systems. Aimed at making Windows more modern and sophisticated by adding effects with lighting and transparency, this is a welcomed feature and makes Windows a bit more appealing for the user.

Getting a bit of TLC, is Windows Ink. With 2-in-1 laptops providing a lot of functionality and creativity for the user, Windows Ink will enhance this experience. Windows Ink will now allow users the ability to drawing straight into PDF documents, a welcomed addition. If you're like me you'll love Windows Ink best feature, Find my Pen. This feature will display the last time your pen was connected, refreshing your memory to hopefully remember where you left your pen.

After 32 years, the era of Microsoft Paint might be coming to an end.

Microsoft's next Windows 10 update, called the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, will shift Paint to "deprecated" status. This means that Paint will "not be in active development and might be removed in future releases."

This move shouldn't surprise since Microsoft is focusing on the new Paint 3D, released in April with the Windows 10 Creators Update.

Microsoft is taking to Skynet for its fight against malware, cyberattacks, and viruses - with the upcoming Fall Creators Update for Window 10 using all internet-connected Windows 10 computers along with machine learning to fight off threats like WannaCry.

The global malware hits with WannaCry and Petya have woken Microsoft to a new world of attacks, prompting them to push the Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection system that uses machine learning powered by the massive 400 million Windows 10 PCs throughout the world. Director of Program Management Enterprise and Security said: "If Word were to start allocating memory in big chunks, when it never does, we would be able to detect that. We built the machine learning models around common applications like Word".

This new initiative will reportedly stop viruses from spreading as fast as they currently do, with enterprise customers being the first to receive this new feature. The consumer version of Windows will receive it sometime in the future, hopefully not too long from now... until you remember that Microsoft is using every Windows 10 user to make this happen. Will we be able to disable it?

Update: After this article went live, I was pointed in the direction of an update to the story from Andy, the administrator of Beta Archive. He posted on the forum saying:

Sony may have secured rights for a marketing deal with Ubisoft for Far Cry 5, and if so, we could see PS4 get exclusive content.

Sony has scooped up marketing deals for a swath of high-profile multi-platform games including Red Dead Redemption 2 and Destiny 2. It appears Far Cry 5 could be another triple-A game pulled over to the PS4's sphere of influence, meaning E3 2017 might be a massacre in terms of showcased third-party games. However, Ubisoft's deal for Far Cry 5 may only be for Europe.

Today Ubisoft officially released multiple teaser trailers for Far Cry 5, confirming the game is set in modern-day Montana. Interestingly enough, three out of the four released Far Cry 5 trailers aren't available in the United States...but that hasn't stopped uploaders from capturing and re-uploading them. Far Cry 5's official European trailers clearly show PS4 and PS4 Pro as the available platforms, but the single trailer released in North America doesn't list any platforms.

There are some people that use Facebook so much that they might not have many other apps installed on their phone, and for the people who want an even easier food delivery service with their phone will soon be able to tap the 'Order Food' button on Facebook.

TechCrunch is reporting that the new Order Food button will be made available on the Facebook app for mobile, as well as the desktop. It will be accessed by the main navigation menu, where it will be found at the bottom, with a hamburger icon. The ordering process itself is smooth, with Delivery.com and Slice powering it. You can type the specific location or general area you're in, where you'll be greeted to a list of available restaurants.

The options of restaurants and outlets won't be large at first, but it will continue to grow as the service expands with more users and businesses signing up. As TechCrunch said in their article, it seems like Facebook is building itself into a much larger ecosystem, where you will not need to leave Facebook at all, even if you're hungry.

Destiny 2's highly anticipated PC version won't be available during the game's official release in September, and has been delayed to ensure optimum performance.

With the help of Blizzard's Battle.net service, Bungie will bring its illustrious shared-worlds shooter to PC for the first time...but there's a caveat: the PC version doesn't officially have a release date. Destiny 2 is set to launch on September 8, 2017 on PS4 and Xbox One, but the PC flavor will be delayed.

The developers affirm the game's delay on PC is to ensure Destiny 2 is fully optimized with all the greatest features PC gamers expect, including uncapped frame rates, 4K support, native Ultrawide 21:9 support, FOV sliders, mouse and keyboard support, and other features.

Ubisoft has now officially confirmed a new Far Cry and Assassin's Creed game will release in its Fiscal Year 2018 timeline, which extends from April 2017 - March 2018.

Ubisoft today filed its financial earnings for last year, and delivered a roadmap for upcoming releases for 2017 and beyond. The company announced that it will release four AAA games this fiscal year: Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, The Crew, and South Park: Fractured But Whole. Before you get too excited, Ubisoft says that FY2018 will have stronger emphasis on recurring player investment, which translates to microtransaction spending--so expect all of these games to have some sort of live service with microtransactions.

The French games entertainment company expects to make $1.88 billion (1.7 billion Euros) this year, strongly bolstered by digital sales and recurring player investment.

It seems as though Microsoft is making some very interesting moves with its upcoming release of Windows 10 S, which is a more restricted version of the full Windows 10 for the education market, something Microsoft is looking to combat Google's Chromebook/Chrome OS combo with.

Microsoft is placing restrictions on the software you're allowed to install with Windows 10 S, with one of those caveats being that the software will only be available on the Windows Store - meaning no third-party browsers. This means we won't be seeing Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Safari on Windows 10 S, ever.

Windows Store policy 10.2.1. states: "Apps that browse the web must use the appropriate HTML and JavaScript engines provided by the Windows Platform".

Sony's new God of War game will likely be a major highlight of its E3 2017 showcase, and we could see the game release this year.

According to a listing found on Portuguese website Gaming Replay, Sony's new Norse-themed God of War game will release on September 14, 2017, just days after Bungie's high-profile Destiny 2 sequel.

We expect God of War to be a huge spectacle of Sony's E3 presence, joining other big games like The Last of Us 2 and the new Spider-Man title.

YouTube has started opening up a preview of the new design to a small group of people from all around the world so they can get feedback.

The design is aligned to look and feel more like YouTube's mobile apps. The site design is built on a new, faster framework named Polymer, which enables quicker feature development from here on out. One of the biggest changes is a new "dark theme", which turns your background dark throughout your entire YouTube experience.

YouTube also said that this is just the beginning and that new features are coming soon.

Facebook has announced that they are starting to roll out Instant Games on Messenger for more than 1.2 billion people who use Messenger every month. Instant Games were launched in November last year in the States, but now they will become available globally.

Facebook is also launching new features that they previewed to developers at their annual F8 conference. Those features allow developers to create unique game bots that can communicate with players about new levels and rewards.

Messenger will now support turn-based games instead of just single-player games with score leaderboards. One of the first games to take advantage of the new gameplay features is Zynga's Words With Friends.

In October 2016, Facebook released Facebook Messenger Lite, a stripped-down version of Messenger with a reduced feature set.

The app is aimed primarily at old Android phones and, when released, regions where high-speed Internet is not widely available. The app was first made available in Kenya, Tunisia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and Venezuela.

Facebook has now finally decided to expand Messenger Lite's reach, and the company made the app available in 150 additional countries, including Germany, Colombia, Italy, Vietnam, Algeria, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Turkey, Japan, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

Google has very, very quietly launched a new app with Areo, a new destination that lets you order food and home services. The major downside here is that Areo is only available in Bangladore and Mumbai in India, but we should expect Google to eventually launch it around the world.

Areo lets you order food from local restaurants from a single tap to your smartphone, with search features built-in, and more. Google is also pushing in some home services into Areo, with local electricians, plumbers, pest control, cleaners, and more can be ordered from an app and a tap of your finger.

There's no news on whether Google will bring Areo to other countries, but if it's this useful, I don't see why they wouldn't either roll it into its own app available throughout the world, or build it into Google Now.

Apple is shifting into the content business in a big way with teases that it will acquire Disney, which owns Pixar, LucasArts, and Marvel - their collective properties worth tens of billions of dollars. Now the company is reportedly looking at offering a premium TV service that would include HBO, Showtime, and Starz for a single monthly price.

If you were to subscribe to each of those premium TV channels, it would cost $35 per month, but according to Redcode, Apple is wanting to make it more convenient by offering the bundle as a standalone product. Instead of bunch of separate apps, Apple would offer the premium TV channels in a new app - with the power of having shows like Game of Thrones and Homeland on its side.

There haven't been any external comments from the premium TV side, or Apple, but with the previous rumors of the Disney acquisition - the race towards being a content king is something Apple has its sights set on.

Razer has had yet another cloud storage server failure, the second in March, with Razer peripheral owners forced back to their default settings - yes, everyone - all across the world.

The server outage happened over the weekend, when millions of gamers are you know - gaming. The profiles are stored both on the cloud, and on your local machine - but as TechPowerUp notes, you'll need to "use a XML editing hack to get the software in offline mode to make it actually use the local profile on your machine. Otherwise, the software prefers to just go to defaults and give the end-user an arguably irritable situation".

One of the TPU readers said that Razer lets you create "Tournament Mode" drivers, which makes an offline installer with your driver and profile in one spot. Razer doesn't advertise this, but with two cloud server outages and profile wipes in a month... I'd recommend doing this.

Facebook has made quite a few tweaks to Messenger, with reactions and @-mentions added - you can now react to individual messages, or even tag a specific friend in a group chat.

When you're using Messenger, reacting to a message is as easy as pressing and holding a message to see Facebook's love/laugh/cry emojis to show up. A small counter will add up the reactions, showing you who exactly is spamming that emoji button - it even has its own notification on your lock screen, a nice touch by Facebook.

Moving onto the mentions feature, where you just need to use the @ symbol, and then Messenger will show a drop down menu of all of the people in the chat - you can then tag their name, and they'll receive an individual notification.

We all know just how much CPU and especially RAM that Chrome can eat up, but Google promises that Chrome 57's background tabs will be limited to an average CPU load of just 1%, on a single CPU core.

Google explains the throttling method that they've used on background tabs on their Developers website, with Google pushing every background tab into its own time budget (in seconds), with specific CPU time for the tab to complete its process - and is limited to just 10 seconds, freeing up CPU cycles. The company does note that the regeneration code can be shifted around, as they take in more data about how background tabs are throttled.

If you're like me - right now, you've got a background tab playing music through Google Play Music, so there will be some exceptions to background tab throttling in order to see those tabs not crashing or not functioning properly.

GPU-Z has teased the upcoming release of the unconfirmed Radeon RX 500 series, with TechPowerUp's new GPU-Z v1.18.0 has support for the Radeon RX 580, RX 570, RX 560, and RX 550.

Most AMD partners are phasing out the older Radeon RX 400 series cards in favor of the upcoming rebranded RX 500 series cards, with a rumored price of $199 on the new Radeon RX 580, and just $149 for the new Radeon RX 570.

As for the GPU-Z 1.18.10 changelog, here it is: