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Mar 22, 2023
The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has opened the door to endless opportunities across hundreds of industries, but privacy continues to be huge concern. The use of data to inform AI tools can unintentionally reveal sensitive and personal information.
Chatbots built atop large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 hold tremendous promise to reduce the amount of time knowedge workers spend summarizing meeting transcripts and online chats, creating presenations and campaigns, performing data analysis and even compiling code. But the technology is far from fully vetted.
As AI tools continue to grow and gain acceptance — not just within consumer-facing applications such as Microsoft's Bing and Google's Bard chatbot-powered search engines — there's a growing concern over data privacy and originality.
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Mar 21, 2023
Search and hyperscale computing giant Google said today that it has opened up access to Bard, a generative AI chatbot meant to compete with similar services offered by Microsoft and OpenAI, among others.
Bard, like similar advanced chatbots, is powered by a large language model. LLMs are essentially advanced deep learning algorithms, with a range of abilities that include translation, summarization and more, powered by huge amounts of text. The LLM used by Bard is a lightweight variant of LaMDA, Google's main natural-language processing model.
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Mar 21, 2023
Reality? What reality?
Soon, apparently, everything from brand assets to corporate videos to illustrations will be created differently using Adobe's creative and enterprise apps and its generative AI tool Firefly. You'll literally be able to speak to paint (or make video).
If you can say it, you can draw it
At Adobe Summit, the company also announced Adobe Express for Enterprise, a new tool to create, share, and collaborate on high-quality brand content such as multimedia assets, social posts and more. It's about to introduce generative AI tools within Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and its customer experience tools. And it rolled out a new content creation tool for enterprise users.
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Mar 21, 2023
One reason artificial intelligence-based chatbots have taken the world by storm in recent months is because they can generate or finesse text for a variety of purposes, whether it's to create an ad campaign or write a resume.
These chatbots are powered by large language model (LLM) algorithms, which can mimic human intelligence and create textual content as well as audio, video, images, and computer code. LLMs are a type of artificial intelligence trained on a massive trove of articles, books, or internet-based resouerces and other input to produce human-like responses to natural language inputs.
A growing number of tech firms have unveiled generative AI tools based on LLMs for business use to automate application tasks. For example, Microsoft last week rolled out to a limited number of users a chatbot based on OpenAI's ChatGPT; it's embedded in Microsoft 365 and can automate CRM and ERP application functions.
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Mar 20, 2023
Russia's Kremlin ordered officials to stop using iPhones, apparently over concerns the devices could be vulnerable to Western intelligence agencies, Reuters reports. When surveillance-as-a-service firms sit exposed for brazenly undermining device security, it's hard to think there isn't an argument there. But the bigger story isn't the harm to Apple's small business in Russia, it's the threat to digital supply chains it shows.
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Mar 20, 2023
Once you've mastered the basics of Google Docs, it's time take your documents up a notch. Some documents need to include citations, while some can benefit from charts or a table of contents. Others may require a watermark for security or branding purposes. In this guide, we'll show you how to work with these four elements in Google Docs for more professional documents.
[ Google Docs cheat sheet: How to get started ]
How to add charts in Google Docs
When your document contains lots of facts and figures, charts can highlight and clarify the most important data points. There are two ways to add a chart to a document in Google Docs: you can create a new chart or embed an existing chart from a spreadsheet in Google Sheets.
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Mar 17, 2023
Microsoft has resolved 80 new CVEs this month in addition to four earlier CVEs, bringing the number of security issues addressed in this month's Patch Tuesday release to 84.
Unfortunately, we have two zero-day flaws in Outlook (CVE-2023-23397) and Windows (CVE-2023-24880) that require a "Patch Now" release requirement for both Windows and Microsoft Office updates. As it was last month, there were no further updates for Microsoft Exchange Server or Adobe Reader. This month the team at Application Readiness has provided a helpful infographic that outlines the risks associated with each of the updates for this cycle.
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Mar 17, 2023
The hype machine is real with Generative AI and ChatGPT, which are seemingly everywhere in tech these days. So it's not surprising that we're starting to hear chatter about a new, improved Siri. In fact, 9to5Mac has already spotted a new natural language system.
Do you speak my language?
The claim is that Siri on tvOS 16.4 beta has a new "Siri Natural Language Generation" framework. As described, it doesn't sound impressive, as it mainly seems focused on telling (dad?) jokes, but might also let you to use natural language to set timers. It is codenamed "Bobcat."
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Mar 17, 2023
The chatbot's integration will allow enterprise users to get notifications about events such as security risks and the status of system health from within Teams, and also let them run command line interface commands to run notebooks to address issues.
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Mar 17, 2023
(Microsoft is a client of the author.)
Microsoft has unveiled its 'Copilot' generative AI for Office and I believe it is as big a game changer as the launch of Windows (and I was the launch analyst for Windows when I started my career).
With any advance like this, there is always an impact on employment, performance, and the trajectory of the related work. In thinking about generative AI, the third segment of the movie Fantasia — "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" — comes to mind. It dramatizes what can happen when someone gets an incredible power, but doesn't know how to use it properly and lands in an ocean of trouble. The most important part of using a force-multiplier tool like generative AI is to learn how to use it well and responsibly.
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Mar 16, 2023
After a run that lasted for a decade, the end has come for Google Glass, with the announcement this week that the tech behemoth will discontinue the enterprise version of the augmented reality (AR) glasses.
Sales of Google Glass Enterprise were halted as of Wednesday, though support will continue for another six months, according to a company announcement.
"After September 15, 2023, you will continue to be able to use the Glass Enterprise Edition device and existing software. No software updates from Google are planned," Google said in a FAQ.
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Mar 16, 2023
After announcing its Microsoft 365 Copilot chatbot to automate various tasks in multiple Microsoft office apps, Microsoft on Thursday demonstrated the tool's capabilities and introduced a new extension called Business Chat.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology based on GPT-4, a large language model (LLM) created by OpenAI, which is also the basis for the wildly popular ChatGPT chatbot.
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Mar 16, 2023
With the arrival of the iPhone 14, Apple has only sold smartphones with eSIM support in the US. But that may be about to change. At least one analyst thinks Apple plans to extend eSIM use to Europe and some Asian markets by next year, when SIMs will be removed from its devices.
eSIM for the rest of us?
We've expected the move since Apple began with eSIM inside the iPhone in 2018, though consumers have complained at the complexity of setup in the US. In part, these challenges reflect inconsistent approaches to the tech across mobile carriers, but there could be a reason for that — particularly if Apple and Google begin to try to monetize carrier choice on new devices.
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Mar 16, 2023
Applications aimed at helping office workers do their jobs more effectively in a remote or hybrid work environment — such as videoconferencing, project management, and other collaboration software — have surged during the pandemic era. But many employees don't spend their workdays sitting at a desk.
Employees who work away from a desk in such verticals as healthcare, hospitality, manufacturing, service and repair, transportation, logistics, construction, utilities, and retail are usually referred to as frontline workers. Many of these workers act as the "faces" of their organizations, coming into direct contact with customers; others perform the behind-the-scenes tasks that keep the modern world humming.
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Mar 16, 2023
India is trying to emerge as a competitive alternative to China in the semiconductor sector amid heightened chip war between the US and China.
India and the US last week signed a memorandum of understanding on establishing a semiconductor supply chain, which experts see as an opportunity for both nations to reduce global dependency on China.
"The MoU seeks to establish a collaborative mechanism for the semiconductor supply chain resiliency and diversification in view of the US CHIPS and Science Act and India Semiconductor Mission (ISM)," said Charlie Dai, vice president, and research director at research firm Forrester.
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Mar 15, 2023
India is set to announce its first semiconductor fabrication facility in the next few weeks, as the country moves to become more self-reliant for its chip supply in the wake of pandemic supply chain disruptions and the ongoing US semiconductor restrictions to China.
The country is well-positioned to foster a vibrant chip industry in the next three to four years on the "back of enabling policies" and the government's drive to boost its "manufacturing ecosystem," Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnav said on Tuesday, according to a PTI (Press Trust of India) report.
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Mar 15, 2023
Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscribers get more frequent software updates than those who have purchased Office without a subscription, which means subscribers have access to the latest features, security patches, and bug fixes. But it can be hard to keep track of the changes in each update and know when they're available. We're doing this for you, so you don't have to.
Following are summaries of the updates to Office 365/Microsoft 365 for Windows, with the latest releases shown first. We'll add info about new updates as they're rolled out.
Note: This story covers updates released to regular Office 365/Microsoft 365 for Windows subscribers. If you're a member of Microsoft's Office Insider preview program or want to get a sneak peek at upcoming features, see the company's "Release notes for Office for Windows Desktop (Beta builds)" page.
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Mar 15, 2023
Clean Energy Charging is not a conspiracy to reduce the speed or efficiency of charging when you plug in your iPhone. It is a harbinger of how most future electronics will consume power.
What is Clean Energy Charging?
Announced with iOS 16 and introduced in the US last fall, Clean Energy Charging selectively charges your device when lower carbon-emission electricity is available. In some regions, this might be during the daytime when solar and renewable energy production peak, but in most cases, it will be at night.
To support the feature, your iPhone gets a forecast of carbon emissions on your local energy grid. It then charges the device when the cleanest energy is available.
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Mar 15, 2023
Tableau, a subsidiary of Salesforce, has launched new AI-powered capabilities to help make data more accessible to business users and improve support for data-driven decisions and analysis.
The announcement comes a week after Salesforce revealed plans to add new generative AI functions to its CRM platform at its Trailblazer DX '23 developer conference.
Eight out of 10 business leaders agree that data is critical for decision-making, however, many still struggle with how to use it, according to a recent Salesforce survey of 10,000 business leaders. Furthermore, 41% of the business leaders polled said that they did not understand their data because it is too complex or not accessible enough.
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Mar 15, 2023
The US government, worried about the continuing growth of cybercrime, ransomware, and countries including Russia, Iran, and North Korea hacking into government and private networks, is in the middle of drastically changing its cybersecurity strategy. No longer will it rely largely on prodding businesses and tech companies to voluntarily take basic security measures such as patching vulnerable systems to keep them updated.
Instead, it now wants to establish baseline security requirements for businesses and tech companies and to fine those that don't comply.
It's not just companies that use the systems who might eventually need to abide by the regulations. Companies that make and sell them, such as Microsoft, Apple, and others could be held accountable as well. Early indications are that the feds already have Microsoft in their crosshairs — they've warned the company that, at the moment, it doesn't appear to be up to the task.
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Mar 14, 2023
Computing giant Google announced today that it will release previews of three new AI features, including AI composition for Google Workspace, developer prototyping and coding via PaLM and MakerSuite, and validated models for its Vertex AI service.
The Workspace features, currently, are focused on Docs and Gmail. Users can use Google's AI to rewrite emails in a particular style or tone, or even generate documents out of whole cloth. Simply asking the system to "generate a sales pitch" or similar will create a simple document that users can then edit to meet their needs. The AI can also help redraft documents to fit a more formal tone, or shorten them for brevity, and so on.
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Mar 14, 2023
Artificial intelligence (AI) research firm OpenAI today revealed the latest version of its computer program for natural language processing that powers ChatGPT, the wildly hyped chatbot with a fast-growing user base.
ChatGPT creator OpenAI announced the new large language model in a blog post, saying it will have better features than its predecessor, GPT-3.5 Word of GPT-4 first leaked last week when Andreas Braun, CTO of Microsoft Germany, let slip that it would be launched this week.
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Mar 14, 2023
The launch of a major Windows 10 update isn't the end of a process — it's really just the beginning. As soon as one of Microsoft's feature updates (such as Windows 10 version 22H2) is released, the company quickly gets to work on improving it by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.
In this story we summarize what you need to know about each update released to the public for the most recent versions of Windows 10 — versions 22H2, 21H2, 21H1, and 20H2. (Microsoft releases updates for those four versions together.) For each build, we've included the date of its initial release and a link to Microsoft's announcement about it. The most recent updates appear first.
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Mar 14, 2023
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has announced it will be cutting a further 10,000 jobs and leaving 5,000 vacant roles unfilled.
The news comes four months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that it was preparing to cut 11,000 jobs, impacting 13% of its global workforce.
In a statement posted on his Facebook page and Meta's news blog, Zuckerberg said that members of the company's recruitment teams will know by March 15 whether they've been affected, with restructurings and layoffs within Meta's tech groups expected in April, and then its business groups in late May.
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Mar 14, 2023
Apple Reality, India and security are emerging as three of the biggest stories for Apple in 2023, but there is another: Apple Silicon, principally the move to 3nm process technology in the upcoming A17 and M3 (series) processor upgrades. We're beginning to hear whispers suggesting what those chip upgrades mean.
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Mar 14, 2023
I'm a writer. That means many of my fellow writer buddies are worried sick about losing their jobs. Indeed, no one will say, "We laid people off because we could replace them with ChatGPT for $20 a month."
But that's actually already happening.
I'm concerned about this, too — but I'm not yet sweating bullets over it.
Why? Because, as of now, ChatGPT does a crappy job of writing non-fiction. That isn't stopping publishers from using it, of course. But readers are beginning to notice something is amiss, complaining that the "how to" story they just read turned into a "how not to" tale or that one AI-generated piece reported one of the people quoted in it is dead — when they're still very much alive.
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Mar 14, 2023
Google's ChromeOS is the Rodney Dangerfield of modern operating systems: It's been around for ages now, and it pops up in all sorts of unexpected places. No matter how hard it works, though — boy, oh boy — it just can't get no respect.
Much like Dangerfield, ChromeOS's struggle to be taken seriously dates back to its childhood. When the software first entered the universe in the simpler tech times of 2010, it truly was a barebones effort. The entire platform was essentially just a browser in a box — a full-screen view of Google's Chrome browser, with no real apps to speak of and not much else around it.
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Mar 13, 2023
The global value of central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will grow dramatically from $100 million today to $213 billion by 2030, once the virtual money gains greater adoption for domestic payments, according to new data from Juniper Research.
By 2030, 92% of the total value transacted through CBDCs around the world will be paid domestically, as cross-border payment systems face an uphill battle for adoption, Juniper predicted.
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Mar 13, 2023
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in Santa Clara, CA, billed itself as "the financial partner of the innovation economy" and had more than $342 billion in deposits — including money from many influential venture capitalists, start-ups and tech firms.
That was before last week happened, when a sudden run on the bank opened the door to the prospect of a larger meltdown in the financial system. After a weekend scramble, the Biden Administration, the US Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) devised a way to back up the full value of SVB deposits beyond the federally insured ceiling of $250,000. (The same is true for Signature Bank, which also failed.)
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Mar 13, 2023
I'm sure you've seen the ads: "Get Perpetual Office for a dirt-cheap price that's so cheap it's too good to be true."
It is, though they don't phrase the pitch quite like that. Instead, the advertisement says: "One-time purchase. No subscription. This is a Microsoft Office 365 account that activates up to 5 devices on all supported platforms, including Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Tablets. You can install and activate as many times as you want on all 5 devices. Activation is permanent and lifetime. You can always reinstall or transfer to another device. Cloud storage is not included. The login name provided cannot be changed or merged with a personal account. Microsoft Office 365 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Access, and Publisher. This software is multilingual, you can choose your language during installation. Digital Download - Redeem instructions will be emailed to you after purchase."
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Mar 13, 2023
Is there a turf war between Apple's operations and design teams over the first-generation Apple AR glasses? Or are we now hearing about old news being rehashed as competitors spread negative gossip in fear of Apple's looming AR launch?
What we think we know
We can't be certain, but this is what happened on the Apple Rumor Merry-go-round in the last 48 hours:
The Financial Times claimed Apple CEO Tim Cook might have ordered the launch of the new devices this year, despite warnings from those working on the project that the product isn't yet ready.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman later said the events described took place in 2018 when then-design lead Jony Ive pushed for AR above VR, with Apple compromising on a mixed-reality headset.
Gurman also said 11 high-ranking executives left the company in the second half of 2022. These were people in command of hardware, software, design, privacy, cloud, and other key verticals across the company. This may not relate to the above, but hints at some internal instability.
Apple has reportedly been working on AR glasses for seven years or more.
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Mar 13, 2023
Microsoft Forms is a web app that allows users to create various types of forms that gather information from people online and store that data in the cloud for review.
Why is this useful? Surveys, questionnaires, and other interactive forms are a vital part of doing business. They provide a great way to interact with employees, teammates, customers, and potential business partners. You can use online forms to collect customer feedback or business requirements, conduct market research, gauge employee satisfaction, register attendees for an upcoming event, test learners' knowledge after a training course, and more.
Forms is included with Microsoft 365 subscriptions for individuals and businesses, and a limited version is available for free to anyone with a Microsoft account. In this cheat sheet, we will cover how to use this program to create questionnaires, add specific types of questions, and view and analyze the responses.
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Mar 10, 2023
Developers can now integrate ChatGPT directly, using a token-based pricing system, into a host of different enterprise and end-user applications.
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Mar 10, 2023
Tech sector employment fell by 11,184 positions in February, a reduction of 0.2% of a total industry workforce that tops 5.5 million workers.
Unemployment in the tech industry rose from 1.5% in January to 2.2% last month, according to data released today by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and CompTIA, a nonprofit association for the IT industry and workforce. That's still well below the overall US unemployment rate of 3.6%, which saw a 0.1% increase from January.
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Mar 10, 2023
Reported plans to extend US chip export controls to Inspur affiliates signal continuing supply chain upheaval.
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Mar 10, 2023
It confounds me why this took so long, but Microsoft is at last making it easier to paste plain text with a keyboard shortcut; support for this is now available to Microsoft 365 Insiders in the Beta Channel.
Small change, big difference
While in no way at the scale of Microsoft's recent decision to officially permit Windows 11 on Apple Silicon Macs, the move is still significant. Sometimes the smallest improvements have huge impacts and if you've ever had to paste unformatted text in Word on a Mac or in Windows, you'll be cheering this one.
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Mar 10, 2023
The job market is weird.
I'm hearing from employers that they're struggling to hire. Job ads bring in a fraction of the number of candidates they used to, and the candidates who do apply tend to be unqualified, at least more so than in the past.
Meanwhile, prospective employees say it's hard to find work and struggle to get hired.
There are lots of job openings and plenty of people looking for work. But companies just can't seem to find the right people, and applicants apply but get ghosted by the companies they apply to. Tim Brackney, president and COO of the management consulting firm RGP, calls it the "Great Mismatch."
The problem is especially acute in IT and in IT specialties like cybersecurity.
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Mar 10, 2023
Schneider Electric, a Fortune Global 500 company that specializes in digital automation and energy management, has the same challenges other enterprises face today — namely, finding new IT talent or reskilling employees to build talent pools from within.
The company recruits new IT talent from multiple backgrounds, and not specifically computer science graduates. Across the tech industry, more companies are dropping college degree requirements in favor of talent with soft skills, such as the ability to learn, lead, and work as part of a team.
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Mar 10, 2023
Widgets, widgets, widgets. Has there ever been an Android feature so full of promise that went unloved by Google for so very long?
Okay, so maybe there has been — erm, lots of times, actually. But even so, Android's widgets system is a perfect example of an exceptional advantage that Google basically buried, abandoned, and left on the brink of extinction up until its overdue revival in 2021's Android 12 update. (And that revival, by the way, happened for no apparent reason whatsoever. Just a totally random, unprompted change of heart after a decade of indifference. Riiiiiiiiight.)
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Mar 10, 2023
Organizations are reaching a tipping point when it comes to workplace productivity, with large numbers of employees saying too much of their time is still spent on ‘work about work' rather than the skilled, strategic work they were hired to do, according to Asana's latest Anatomy of Work global index.
The report comprises findings from a survey of 9,615 knowledge workers — commonly defined as employees whose jobs mainly involve acquiring and using information in a creative way — in the United States, UK, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan, and seeks to uncover some of the biggest barriers currently facing them in the workplace.
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Mar 10, 2023
Artificial intelligence is already designing microchips and sending us spam, so what's next? Here's how generative AI really works and what to expect now that it's here.
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Mar 09, 2023
Generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly ChatGPT, has taken an AI market that seemed far off into the future and quickly catapulted it into our world. But the tools still seem raw, more suited to coders than end users who want a more worker-friendly productivity tool.
That changed this week with the announcement of Grammarly Go. Since I'm a Grammarly user, I'm particularly excited about this addition and I expect it to give us a frame of reference for when Microsoft eventually adds generative AI to Office.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 09, 2023
Generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly ChatGPT, has taken an AI market that seemed far off into the future and quickly catapulted it into our world. But the tools still seem raw, more suited to coders than end users who want a more worker-friendly productivity tool.
That changed this week with the announcement of GrammarlyGo. Since I'm a Grammarly user, I'm particularly excited about this addition and I expect it to give us a frame of reference for when Microsoft eventually adds generative AI to Office.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 09, 2023
Pressured by the US, the Netherlands is moving forward with new export restrictions on chip-making technology to China, expected to affect the manufacture of advanced logic and DRAM modules.
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Mar 09, 2023
While we wait for the inevitable cracks in the code to expose themselves, generative AI is all the rage across tech with implications across every business. Now you can even get ChatGPT on your Apple Watch.
ChatGPT on your wrist?
The watchGPT Apple Watch app isn't made by Apple and costs $3.99. Once it is installed, you'll be able to use natural language or type to ask it questions, which it will answer with results drawn from across the web. The app is also capable of creating lengthier messages, poetry,or even sick notes, on your behalf.
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Mar 09, 2023
The unemployment rate in the technology job market in the US is about half that of other fields — just 1.5% — so the onslaught of recent reports about major "tech worker" layoffs can be confounding.
For example, current data from online tracker company Layoff.fyi shows that 465 tech companies have fired a total of 126,057 employees in 2023 alone. And, according to layoff tracker TrueUp, so far this year, 608 tech companies have announced layoffs, affecting 162,541 people (or 2,426 people per day). In 2022, there were 1,535 layoffs at tech companies with 241,176 people let go.
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Mar 08, 2023
DuckDuckGo, the search engine focused on user privacy, announced today that it is rolling out an AI-powered instant answer service, which it calls DuckAssist, as part of a larger plan to integrate AI across its product lineup.
DuckAssist, in broad strokes, is a generative AI system that uses technology from ChatGPT makers OpenAI as well as another generative AI company, Anthropic, to generate its own answers to certain types of question.
It does this without tracking user queries and sticks to a specific set of data sources — namely, Wikipedia and other mostly reputable online encyclopedias. This is done to minimize "hallucination," which is the phenomenon where generative AI simply makes up an answer to a question out of whole cloth when it has incomplete or incorrect information to go on.
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Mar 08, 2023
Slack is set to launch a ChatGPT app for Slack, allowing customers to use the generative AI technology to create conversation summaries, act as a research tool, and provide writing assistance.
ChatGPT is a large language model from San Francisco-based OpenAI that uses natural language processing (NLP) to converse with a person via text and generate a wide range of content upon request. Last week, the company made the first APIs for ChatGPT available, enabling businesses to integrate the technology into their communications platforms.
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Mar 08, 2023
Mac, iPad, and iPhone users can choose to automatically install system security patches as they are released with a new Apple feature called Rapid Security Response.
Rapid Security Response aims to secure Apple's platforms with automated security updates. The idea is that if every user automatically installs such patches, the entire ecosystem becomes inherently more secure.
Announced last year at WWDC 2022, Apple began testing the feature in October. During beta testing, it shared four content-free downloads to test its distribution system, including one recent test in March. While the feature can be enabled on devices running the latest operating system, as of this month Apple had not yet begun to ship genuine security patches.
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Mar 08, 2023
As so many companies did at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, insurance firm Allstate sent tens of thousands of workers home over one weekend. Unlike many other companies, it told the employees to stay home - permanently.
The company's approach to remote and hybrid work: ask employees what they wanted, and give it to them.
The company either didn't renew leases or sold off office space, including its 232-acre, two-million-square-foot Chicago headquarters in November 2021. It donated the office furniture to charities, then invested in technology — especially virtual meeting spaces to help employees operate efficiently and inclusively.
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Mar 08, 2023
Android widgets are awesome. That much is obvious, right?
But as is the case with many tech-scented treasures, sometimes, it takes a teensy bit of digging to unearth the most wonderful widget options of all.
This week, I stumbled onto an especially clever and practical Android widget possibility I'd never before considered. It's a super-simple setup that empowers you to create your very own Android widgets from almost any website on this wide, wild internerp of ours. And it'll take you all of two minutes to get it all up and running in any way you want.
To read this article in full, please click here
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Mar 07, 2023
Apple-focused device management and security vendor Jamf today published its Security 360: Annual Trends report, which reveals the five security tends impacting organizations running hybrid work environments. As it is every year, the report is interesting, so I spoke to Michael Covington, vice president of portfolio strategy, for more details about what the company found this year.
First, here's a brief rundown of some of the salient points in the report:
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Mar 07, 2023
Australia-based collaboration software company Atlassian, whose products target software developers and project managers, has announced plans to lay off 500 employees, around 5% of its workforce, to focus on enterprise cloud migration issues and IT service management (ITSM).
A blog post published Monday and authored by the company's founders and co-CEOs, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes, said that the company had made the "difficult decision to rebalance our team to better position Atlassian for the long term."
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Mar 07, 2023
Whether it's a sales meeting in the executive conference room, a training session for new employees, or an annual meeting for franchisees in an auditorium, nothing gets the point across like a powerful projector. It can not only focus attention and turn a pitch into a show, but the right projector can let a variety of presenters share screens from their computers, phones, or tablets from anywhere in the room. In other words, the right projector has the power to put your company in the best possible light.
The good news is that there is an extraordinary variety of projectors available today that can put a sharp and bright image onto a screen to get your company's message across. From miniature marvels the size of a paperback book to desk-sized behemoths that can light up an auditorium's screen, there's a business projector for every room, purpose, and budget.
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Mar 06, 2023
Microsoft today unveiled a generative AI chatbot for business users that will draft email responses to customers, create textual summaries of Teams meetings, and generate marketing and sales email campaigns.
Based on OpenAI's GPT-3, Microsoft's new Dynamics 365 Copilot is an extension to its existing CRM and ERP software, working alongside those applications to assist in answering questions, creating content, and summarizing conversations and notes. The announcement furthers Microsoft's ongoing AI push in its business-centric apps.
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Mar 06, 2023
A look at the Biden Administration's recently updated National Cybersecurity Strategy document seems to reflect some of the approaches to cybercrime Apple already employs.
Take privacy, for example. The proposal suggests that privacy protection will no longer be something big tech can argue against - companies will be required to prioritize privacy. That's fine if you run a business that does not require wholesale collection and analysis of user information, which has always been Apple's approach. The best way to keep information private, the company argues, is not to collect it at all.
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Mar 06, 2023
Before employing artificial intelligence (AI) to find job candidates, Southwest Airlines had no definitive way to track the success of the company's email and website hiring campaigns. The airline also couldn't queue up potential applicants who'd logged into a job listings page and left before an applicable position had been posted.
Since it began using an AI-enabled hiring platform from tech firm Phenom, the airline now has "a warm pipeline of candidates" it can draw on whenever jobs opportunities arise, according to Kelby Tansey, manager for recruitment marketing at Southwest Airlines.
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Mar 03, 2023
There are few pieces of technology — ever — that have enjoyed a deeper lovefest from the media and the consumer public than ChatGPT and other efforts built atop vanilla GPT-3. And enterprise IT executives have been stampeding to develop homegrown apps based on GPT-3.
So far, so good.
But as we've seen before — think of the internet rush of the mid-1990s or blockchain more recently — companies can easily get ahead of themselves by making big investments on things other than strategic goals.
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Mar 03, 2023
The process of decoupling the Apple supply chain and China is accelerating, with the iPhone maker pushing partners hard to set up shop elsewhere.
Tech industry travels the Silk Road
While there are other important players, Hon Hai Precision Industry/Foxconn is Apple's biggest partner and now plans to invest $700 million in a new plant in India to boost production there.
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Mar 03, 2023
China will invest an additional $1.9 billion in Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), the country's biggest memory chip producer, to spur the growth of its domestic semiconductor industry, which is currently being cramped by US sanctions.
China's National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund, a government-backed investment body also known as the Big Fund, will inject the capital into YMTC, Bloomberg reported Friday. The magnitude of the investment shows China's effort to boost its struggling home-grown chip industry, which is currently facing constraints on its manufacturing capabilities from the US and other countries.
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Mar 03, 2023
As Dell Technologies continues to struggle with heavy decline in PC sales, green shoots are appearing in its servers, storage and networking business.
Although the company's revenue for last year was recorded at $102.3 billion, up 1% year-on-year, fourth quarter revenue declined 11% to $25 billion. Dell's commercial and consumer units were hit the hardest during the quarter, with revenue for those segments declining 17% and 40%, respectively.
However, revenue in the company's infrastructure solutions group (ISG), which includes servers, storage devices and networking hardware, rose 7% in the fourth quarter. At $9.9 billion in revenue, the ISG unit drove in about 40% of overall sales for Dell during the quarter.
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Mar 03, 2023
It's almost impossible to overstate the usefulness of remote desktop access for Windows PCs. Simply put, it lets a user or administrator on one Windows PC, called a client machine, establish a remote session on another Windows PC, called a server or host machine.
Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is the foundation on which various built-in Windows remote access tools rest. This secure network communications protocol supports both the old-school Remote Desktop Connection application and the modern Remote Desktop app, both shown in Figure 1 below.
Using available network connections between client and host via RDP, these programs let the client user open a window that displays some chosen remote desktop. With a remote desktop session up and running, that user can operate the targeted remote desktop almost as if they were sitting in front of it.
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Mar 03, 2023
Though technology companies announced massive layoffs last year, 2023 is looking much worse, as tech giants including Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, Salesforce, and Facebook parent company Alphabet announce sweeping jobs cuts.
The problem: Big Tech went on a hiring binge during the pandemic when lockdowns sparked a tech buying spree to support remote work and an uptick in e-commerce, and now they face revenue declines.
It's not only tech giants who are conducting layoffs. Smaller tech firms were also caught up in pandemic-generated hypergrowth and are now suffering the consequences.
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Mar 03, 2023
Getting around Android sure ain't what it used to be.
Google's made some serious changes to the Android navigation experience over the past several years, going from the old-style three-button setup to a somewhat clunky early gesture model in Android 9, then a whole other new gesture system in Android 10, and finally some slightly refined versions of that same gesture model with Android 11, Android 12, Android 13, and beyond.
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Mar 02, 2023
Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author.
Microsoft is rolling out an update to Windows 11 that adds ChatGPT. Though it's mostly a front-end for the Bing search engine at this point, eventually it could change how we interact with our computers. Think of it as another step in a long evolution that began with Microsoft Bob, then Clippy and Cortana, that is now on track to provide the capabilities those earlier efforts never did.
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Mar 02, 2023
Yet more data shows the acceleration of Mac adoption in the business world.
Okta's recent Businesses at Work 2023 report shared numerous insights into the state of enterprise IT. One in particular grabbed my attention: endpoint management and security tools have become the most popular category of security product across the enterprise, with some players achieving really significant growth, partly on the back of their Mac support.
The data: Jamf Pro has seen 428% customer growth across the last four years, while smaller vendor Kandji experienced a 172% increase in its customer base in just the last year.
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Mar 02, 2023
OpenAI has made available APIs for ChatGPT and the company's AI-powered transcription and translation service Whisper. These APIs will help businesses to integrate ChatGPT and Whisper into their conversation platforms and will be substantially cheaper than using the company's existing language model.
"Through a series of system-wide optimizations, we've achieved 90% cost reduction for ChatGPT since December; we're now passing through those savings to API users," the company said in a blog post.
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Mar 02, 2023
Microsoft has launched the general availability of Microsoft Intune Suite, a consolidation of its endpoint management and security solutions to streamline protection for cloud-connected and on-premises endpoints.
The consolidation is aimed to serve as a single vendor for all endpoint security needs for the customers to have single analytics, rather than multiple disparate datasets, with a consistent visibility to potential vulnerabilities and anomalies, according to a company blog post.
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Mar 02, 2023
New employees who start a job feeling undertrained and disconnected from their work environment are far more likely to quit than those who have a good onboarding experience.
With the unemployment rate lower than it has been in decades — even more so in technology fields — job candidates more often than not field multiple offers. So, if the onramp to a new job is bumpy, they're far more likely to reconsider staying with the organization, even in the short term.
According to research firm Gartner, 63% of new hires are satisfied with their onboarding experience. A recent survey by payroll and human resources provider Paychex showed onboarding experience affected how quickly they would quit after taking a position.
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Mar 01, 2023
The Biden administration has initiated an application procedure with guidelines for proposals from semiconductor maunfacturers that want to take advantage of incentives offered by the US CHIPS and Science Act.
The application process focuses on furthering the Biden's administration goals to "revitalize domestic semiconductor industry and bring supply chains back to the U.S," the Department of Commerce said in a press release.
The Department of Commerce is administering the $50 billion CHIPS program to revive the US semiconductor industry, including $39 billion in incentives to expand or build manufacturing facilities. The incentives are meant meant to "restore U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, support good-paying jobs across the semiconductor supply chain, and advance U.S. economic and national security," the Commerce Department said.
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Mar 01, 2023
Apple appears poised to make it more difficult to use cheap USB-C cables with its devices, and while it may well make a few dollars more from the purported plan, there are also good reasons to put the system in place.
Apple got to make a dollar or two
The claim is that Apple plans to replace Lightning ports and cables with USB-C in the iPhone 15, and when it does it will introduce a Made For iPhone (MFi) scheme for such products. The idea is that consumers will be able to purchase cables and other devices in full confidence that they will be compatible with their iPhone.
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Mar 01, 2023
Typically, when we talk about thoughtful new Android features, we talk about how they're inexplicably missing in action for owners of Samsung phones.
It's one of those blessing-and-a-curse sorts of situations: By its very nature, Android is an open platform — and that means phone-makers can muck around with the software as they see fit. This often leads to not-so-optimal interface choices (and sometimes even more disconcerting downsides), but on occasion, it can also lead to some impressively intelligent additions that aren't available in the standard Google Android version.
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Mar 01, 2023
By now you've likely read the reviews of the new generative AI chatbot embedded in Microsoft's Bing search engine: how in an exchange with New York Times reporter Kevin Roose it turned into a lovelorn stalker, professing its love for him and trying to get him to leave his wife, or when it told an Associated Press reporter he was ugly and had bad teeth, likening him to Adolf Hitler "because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history."
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Feb 28, 2023
A Windows launch isn't the end a process — it's really just the beginning. As with Windows 10, Microsoft continually works on improving Windows 11 by fixing bugs, releasing security patches, and occasionally adding new features.
In this story we summarize what you need to know about each update released to the public for the most recent version of Windows 11. For each build, we've included the date of its release and a link to Microsoft's announcement about it. The most recent updates appear first.
The easiest way to install updates is via Windows Update. Not sure how? See "How to handle Windows 10 and 11 updates" for full instructions. Note that Windows 11 version 22H2 is being released as a phased rollout and may not be available to you in Windows Update yet.
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Feb 28, 2023
As part of Microsoft's new Windows 11 feature update, users will be able to access the company's new AI-powered Bing directly from the taskbar.
In a blog post announcing the update, Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay said "the search box is one of the most widely used features on Windows" and therefore combining it with the new AI-powered Bing will empower users "to find the answers [they're] looking for, faster than ever before."
In order to access this new search box, users who are in the Bing preview will need to install the latest Windows 11 update. However, those who do not currently have access to the preview will need to sign up to the wait list.
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Feb 28, 2023
Reflecting the growing popularity of the Mac platform, Mac cloud and SaaS provider MacStadium's Orka Platform is now available to purchase at the AWS Marketplace, a move that brings Orka to Amazon EC2 Mac instances.
Mac my devs up
Orka Workspace is a Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution that delivers Mac desktops through the browser. Making this available via AWS should be a big boost to Mac teams that already use hyperscale cloud providers for non-Mac development.
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Feb 28, 2023
Videoconferencing company Zoom is pinning its growth plans on investment in AI, after reporting its first fourth quarter net loss since 2018.
Reporting results on Monday, Zoom said it posted a net loss of $104 million for the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2023, ended January 31, compared to a profit of $490 million in the year-earlier period. Online revenue was also down 10% year over year to $481.7 million.
The loss was largely a result of stock-based compensation expenses. Otherwise, Zoom recorded fourth quarter total revenue of $1.1 billion, up 4% year over year, with total revenue for the fiscal year 2022 reported as $4.4 billion, up 7% year over year.
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Feb 28, 2023
Facebook went all in on the "metaverse" a year and a half ago. The company changed its name to Meta and started pumping a billion dollars a month into a Hail Maryboondoggle to achieve relevance in the post-social world to come.
Now Meta finds itself entering a "metaverse winter" — a general decline in investment and excitement around the idea. Meta itself has laid off thousands in its metaverse and social businesses alike.
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Feb 27, 2023
About 10% of embattled social media giant Twitter's remaining workforce, including staff charged with keeping the platform functional, discovered that they had been laid off over the weekend, according to a report published Sunday by the New York Times.
About 200 data scientists, product managers and engineers working on issues like site reliability were among those fired, days after the company took some of its internal communications infrastructure offline, according to the report. These cuts are the latest of several that have afflicted Twitter since Elon Musk's takeover in late 2022. Fewer than 2,000 employees still work at Twitter, out of roughly 7,500 who were present before the company's go-private deal.
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Feb 27, 2023
A semiconductor alliance comprising the US, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea convened earlier this month to discuss global chip supply chain resilience, according to published reports.
Senior officials of the U.S.-East Asia Semiconductor Supply Chain Resilience Working Group —colloquially referred to as "Fab 4" or "Chip 4" — conducted a videoconference on February 16 to discuss the creation of an "early warning and mutual reminder" system to ensure a stable supply chain for chip manufacturers, according to a report from Taiwan's government-controlled Central News Agency (CNA).
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Feb 27, 2023
Nearly every day, software updates of some kind roll out for our systems. From operating systems to antivirus software, to cloud services, to hardware devices, virtually none of the technology we use is static. And with these updates come side effects and problems that sometimes take a while to get fixed.
I recently found an interesting bug that hasn't gotten a lot of attention when I purchased a Lexmark multi-function printer. As part of the installation process, I went online to download the latest printer driver. (I always recommend going to a vendor website to grab the latest drivers because, after all, the latest software should have the latest fixes, right?) I was able to set up the printer to print, scan, and electronically fax and figured I was done for the day.
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Feb 27, 2023
Apple's work on a 5G modem chipset may be coming along a little better than we expected, according to hints dropped this week by Qualcomm CEO and President Cristiano Amon at Mobile World Congress.
Apple will ‘do their own'
Speaking with Wall Street Journal reporter Joanna Stern, Amon explained that Qualcomm expects Apple will "do their own modem" in 2024, adding, "but if they need ours, they know where to find us."
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Feb 27, 2023
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm with its ability to generate textual answers that can be indistinguishable from human responses. The chatbot platform and its underlying large language model — GPT-3 — can be valuable tools to automate functions, help with creative ideas, and even suggest new computer code and fixes for broken apps.
The generative AI technology — or chatbots — have been overhyped and in some cases even claimed to have sentience or a form of consciousness. The technology has also had its share of embarassing missteps. Google's Bard stumbled out of the gate this month by providing wrong answers to questions posed by users.
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Feb 24, 2023
Mobile World Congress (MWC) opens for business soon, and what Apple is doing usually casts a shadow at the world's biggest mobile industry event. With that in mind, let's note the plethora of satellite communication tools being introduced in the prelude to this year's show.
Satellite's gone, way up to…
Apple introduced the first generation of satellite communications via smartphones in September 2022, through a huge, multi-year deal, with GlobalStar. History shows Apple's service — Emergency SOS via Satellite — reached market first. It is now available in multiple nations with iPhone 14.
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Feb 24, 2023
Chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) plans to set up a second semiconductor manufacturing plant in Japan with an investment of about $7.4 billion, Japanese newspaper Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun reported.
TSMC will build the new plant in the southwestern region of Kumamoto to manufacture 5nm and 10nm chips from 2025, the report said.
A TSMC spokesperson declined to comment on the development but instead pointed to CEO CC Wei's comment from the company's last quarterly earnings call in January, which said, "In Japan, we are building a specialty technology fab, which will utilize 12 and 16 nanometer, and 22/28 process technologies. Volume production is scheduled for late 2024. We are also considering building a second fab in Japan, as long as the demand from customers and the level of government support makes sense."
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Feb 24, 2023
More employers are leaving behind college degree requirements and embracing a skills-based hiring approach that emphasizes strong work backgrounds, certifications, assessments, and endorsements. And soft skills are becoming a key focus of hiring managers, even over hard skills.
Large companies, including Boeing, Walmart, and IBM, have signed on to varying skills-based employment projects, such as Rework America Alliance, the Business Roundtable's Multiple Pathways program, and the campaign to Tear the Paper Ceiling, pledging to implement skills-based practices, according to McKinsey & Co.
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Feb 23, 2023
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday from Twitter, the US government and the family of a Jordanian citizen killed in a 2017 terrorist attack, in a case that will decide whether the social media platform can be held liable for the actions of those who use its services.
Much of the hearing was devoted to a careful parsing of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), the law under which the Tammneh family brought their lawsuit. Their argument, essentially, is that Twitter is liable for providing a platform to terrorists who used it to communicate and plan the attack. Twitter, for its part, argued that it couldn't be held responsible without a demonstration that it had been informed of a specific attack and failed to do anything about it.
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Feb 23, 2023
Videoconferencing and collaboration vendors like Zoom have been reporting a sharp decline in business this year. It's been a recurring in the industry for decades, a boom followed by a bust. The first spike happened in the 1990s, when Intel CEO Andy Grove invested heavily in the technology then indicated that was one of his biggest mistakes. A second spike took place a decade later when HP rolled out Halo rooms, followed again, by a decline.
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Feb 23, 2023
A new family of Mac malware that spreads through pirated versions of Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, and other key creative apps has been identified by the Threat Labs team at Jamf.
The new XMRig threat is a subtle cryptocurrency mining attack that has evaded detection for months.
Piracy is bad karma, but good crypto
XMRig proliferates by attaching itself to pirated copies of creative applications, including versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro X, and Adobe Photoshop. That's the kind of "knock-off" Mac application you frequently find being distributed across peer to peer networks.
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Feb 23, 2023
Remember the metaverse?
Before the recent explosion of hype around artificial intelligence (AI), the metaverse was anointed the Next Big Thing, ready to transform the world, technology, and work in ways never before imagined. Soon we would all live and work together in a virtual world far more interesting, vital, and productive than the drab reality in which we're stuck.
It wasn't just Mark Zuckerberg who led the metaverse charge by changing Facebook's name to Meta. Microsoft hyped it as well, notably when CEO Satya Nadella said, "I can't overstate how much of a breakthrough this is," in his keynote speech at Microsoft Ignite two years ago.
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Feb 22, 2023
The world's largest trial of a four-day week ended this week — and 92% of the companies that participated plan to continue with the truncated work schedule because the benefits were so clear.
The study of 61 UK-based companies and about 3,000 employees delivered results that are largely consistent with existing evidence from other studies, "further demonstrating the benefits of reduced-hour, output-focused working," the study concluded.
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Feb 22, 2023
Although 65% of managed service providers (MSPs) expect their business customers to increase the use of Macs over the next 12 months, many companies may not be managing their devices well, according to new survey data from Addigy.
Apple is the only vendor to see market share growth in both PC and mobile devices during the past year, which has translated into growing Mac market share even as the overall PC market declines.
Yet more proof of Apple's growth in enterprise IT
Moving out of the current slump, Apple's advantage is that next-generation employees already prefer the company, certainly in the US. Those born after 1996 now represent around 34% of US iPhone owners, which makes them far more likely to use a Mac.
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Feb 22, 2023
Quick: When's the last time you used Google Tasks?
If you're like a lot of folks I know, the answer to that question might be: "Wait a sec — what? Google has a Tasks app?!"
Tasks is one of those services that's all too easy to forget about — or maybe even overlook entirely. Sure, there's an Android app for it (and even an iOS app, if you know anyone who swings that way). And Google's in the midst of reframing its cross-service reminders system so that it relies on Tasks as a primary hub for all those things you tell your Android phone or Smart Display to help you remember.
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Feb 22, 2023
Generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is increasingly being used to create resumes and cover letters, and according to a new survey by Resume Builder, using a chatbot improves your chances of getting the job.
The online job site said nealry half of 2,153 job seekers surveyed earlier this month used ChatGPT to help write their resumes, their cover letter, or both, and the majority said it helped them land the job they wanted.
Nearly three quarters (72%) of those who used ChatGPT did so to write their cover letter, and just over half (51%) used it to write their resume.
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Feb 21, 2023
The US Supreme Court today heard oral arguments from lawyers representing Google, the Department of Justice, and the family of a 23-year old woman killed in Paris by terrorists in 2015. The case, Gonzalez v. Google, represents a crucial legal landmark in how the US legal system holds large technology platforms like Google responsible for the content they host.
The family of Nohemi Gonzalez argues that Google acted as a recruiting platform for the Islamic State group, which the US State Department describes as a terrorist organization. By recommending Islamic State-related videos on YouTube, Google violated US laws against providing aid to terrorist groups, the family argues.
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Feb 21, 2023
Apple appears to be up to something very interesting with Safari and its support for Web apps on iPhones. It is working on features that seem to make such applications work a lot more like native apps.
This may be good news for any application publisher who wants to offer apps and services to Apple's mobile platforms outside of the App Store.
What's the story?
The recently reported changes in Safari 16.4 for iPad OS 16.4 and iOS 16.4 are both available in the first beta.
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Feb 21, 2023
Windows 11 does a lot under the hood to speed up a PC's performance. The same PC will generally run faster on Windows 11 than Windows 10. But no matter how zippy your Windows 11 may be, it can run faster. And keep in mind that PCs tend to slow down over time, and you want to make sure that doesn't happen to yours.
It's simple to make your Windows PC run faster. Just follow these tips.
Note: This story covers Windows 11 version 22H2. If you have an earlier release of Windows 11, some things may be slightly different. If you have Windows 10, see our Windows 10 speed tips.
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Feb 21, 2023
Microsoft is all set to more than triple the prices of its Bing Search APIs across all markets in what can be seen as an effort to recoup its investments into the search engine.
"The new pricing model reflects more accurately the technology investments Bing continues to make to improve Search, including newer experiences such as Bing Visual Search and Bing Entity Search," a Microsoft spokesperson said.
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Feb 20, 2023
One of the best ways to master Google Sheets — the powerful spreadsheet app that you use in a web browser — is to learn how to build and use pivot tables.
To describe it very generally, a pivot table takes data from a group of cells in your spreadsheet and presents it in more comprehensible and interesting ways.
Pivot tables are mainly used to compile number data in cells, but they can also manipulate text data. And they're most helpful when they're used to extract cell data from a spreadsheet that has lots of columns or rows.
Why use pivot tables?
The best way to explain what a pivot table does, and why you would want to create one, is to show examples. Below is a spreadsheet of "raw" cell data that hasn't been organized. Note the two columns that list the product names and the amounts of each product that were sold. Sales for the same product names were entered multiple times, so it's impossible to tell at a glance the total sales for each product type.
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Feb 17, 2023
The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs has recommended that the European Commission reject the proposed EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which would govern the way in which the personal information of EU citizens is handled by US companies.
The committee's decision — formally, a draft motion for a resolution— represents a rejection of the European Commission's recommendation, announced in December, that the data privacy framework should be adopted. The recommendation stated that US law now offers an "adequate" level of protection for the personal data of EU users of US companies' services.
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