The news surrounding HoloLens lately has not been positive. Microsoft has encountered issues in getting its augmented reality technology to work well enough to satisfy the U.S. Army – with which it has a contract worth $22 billion for headsets using some of the HoloLens technology. Microsoft’s decision to focus HoloLens on the enterprise market, not the consumer one, reportedly has caused rifts inside the team and led, at least in part, to hundreds of those working on HoloLens to leave Microsoft and join other AR/VR companies....

Microsoft also is introducing a few personal expression tools that are meant to be part of the Viva community experience: Storyline, Stories and Video Clip. Storyline and Stories build on top of OneDrive for Business and Microsoft Stream video service. Storylines are meant to create posts with links, files, photos and videos and will be available to users in Viva Connections, Outlook, Teams and Yammer. The feeds of these posts will be available via a new Storylines tab....

A number of people on the MLX team who worked on Family Safety, Microsoft’s parental-control service, are posting that their jobs were eliminated, but I hear (at least for now) the Family Safety product is not being dropped. In fact, Microsoft designated Family Safety as an “inbox app” for Windows 11 earlier this year. The MLX job cuts follow the company’s decision to curb hiring in its Office and Windows divisions and cut 1% of its 180,000-plus person workforce in July....

The AI model has 105 layers, 530 billion parameters, and operates on chunky supercomputer hardware like Selene. By comparison, the vaunted GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters. “Each model replica spans 280 NVIDIA A100 GPUs, with 8-way tensor-slicing within a node, and 35-way pipeline parallelism across nodes,” the pair said in a blog post. The model was trained on 15 datasets that contained 339 billion tokens, and was capable of showing how larger models need less training to operate well....

I would guess that Singularity is the next phase in turning Brainwave into a commercially available service. I’ve asked Microsoft for a comment on that. I’ve also asked when and how Microsoft plans to turn Singularity into a commercially available service. I will update this post with any information I get back. In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and officials announced a year later that they had built the fifth most powerful publicly recorded supercomputer in collaboration with and exclusively for OpenAI....

Will your PC run Windows 11? Even Microsoft can’t say for sure A new “out of box” set-up experience is part of today’s test build. It includes new animations and access to the new “Get Started app” (for those who opt to try it out). Microsoft also is allowing a subset of Insider testers to try out a feature which will provide estimated times for how long a restart for updates will take as part of today’s build....

Dpsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 4GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs, Dplsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 2GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 128 GiBs, and Epsv5 series, with up to 32 vCPUs and 8GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs The Azure VMs on Arm are meant to run Windows 11 Professional and Enterprise on Arm. They also support a variety of Linux OS distributions, including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian....

Also read: At Ignite, Microsoft enhances its cloud database, warehouse and lake services While the previous release (SQL Server 2019) focused on core features like Azure Data Studio, Big Data Clusters, and support for Java stored procedures, this release focuses heavily on rounding out Microsoft’s hybrid cloud story. This ensures SQL Server 2022, even when it runs on-premises, can integrate with a number of services available only in the cloud....

Loop can be used both as a standalone app/canvas, as well as inside other apps in the form of embeddable components that are built into other Microsoft apps like Outlook, Teams, OneNote, and/or Whiteboard. Speaking of Loop components, Microsoft also is announcing this week at Ignite 2022 updates to some of its existing components, plus the addition of some brand-new Loop component types. Users will be able to insert a poll, checklist or task list component into a Word for Web document – either under the Inert Menu or by using Editor with Context IQ by typing the “@” sign to trigger the most relevant content....

There isn’t a whole lot of Windows-focused development news at Build this week, but that may be by design. Microsoft is rumored to be planning a dedicated Windows event later this summer (and possibly next month) where it will talk about what’s next for Windows. Microsoft is expected to begin detailing the changes it is making in Windows with its Sun Valley UX refresh at that event. Officials have hinted that they want to put Windows in the limelight this year to prove that Windows is back and Microsoft is still investing in the platform....

BazarCall (or Bazacall) actors have been active since January and were notable because they used call center operators to guide victims into installing BazarLoader on to a Windows PC. Palo Alto Networks’ Brad Duncan recently detailed the group’s techniques in a blogpost. As he describes, the malware provides backdoor access to an infected Windows device: “After a client is infected, criminals use this backdoor access to send follow-up malware, scan the environment and exploit other vulnerable hosts on the network,” Duncan noted....

That’s because forest mapping is vital for forest management and ecosystem maintenance yet it has long been difficult to achieve and mostly done manually. Drawing on its established LiDAR expertise in other industries, spatial intelligence company Outsight has launched a new solution that utilizes LiDAR to automatically generate a 360° 3D map of a forest in real time and also allows on-site operators to collect data on each tree and digitally tag them, day or night....

On the Mous site you can find several case models available for the Galaxy S22 Ultra, iPhone 13 Pro Max, Google Pixel phones, iPad, Apple AirPods, and more. Some Samsung Mous cases support its AutoAlign Plus connection while many iPhone cases support MagSafe. Screen protectors, mounts, and many other accessories are also available from Mous. Also: Galaxy S22 Ultra review: Any more perfect and it’d be an iPhone 13 Pro Max...

“NBN Co is targeting annual revenue and other income in FY22 of between AU$5 billion to AU$5.2 billion and EBITDA in the range of AU$3 billion to AU$3.2 billion,” the company said in a rare mention of fiscal information. Unlike in years past, it did not state net profit nor capital expenditure for the coming year. Compared to the last year’s set of figures that did, the company said it was previously expecting revenue to be AU$5....

Add to that the resigned inevitability hovering over many of these jobs. Robots, already prominent in logistics operations, are steadily taking on tasks that previously required humans, including in the crucial final stage of picking and sorting. One example, at a warehouse in Novato some miles north of San Francisco, Zenni Optical is assigning a crucial stage of e-commerce fulfillment to a team of three specially trained robots provided by OSARO....

Although there are lots of VPNs to choose from, they are far from equal. Not many of them offer a level of protection that is even close to what NordVPN provides. No matter where you are or what type of connection you have, you will have completely private and unrestricted internet access. Your identity, as well as all of your most confidential personal information, is hidden with the utmost secrecy, thanks to NordVPN’s private tunnels and double encryption....

But how does it do that? Well, look closely and you’ll notice a trick. The way Apple misuses the word “New” on its website. Let’s take an example. Head over to Apple.com and click on the iPhone. Now, you and I know that there’s a new iPhone that’s going to land imminently. But you wouldn’t think that looking at Apple’s website. Must read: Seriously, don’t buy these Apple products Apple goes as far as labeling the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro as “New,” despite both being released last year....

“Nvidia and [SoftBank Group] have agreed to terminate the agreement on February 8, 2022 because of significant regulatory challenges preventing the consummation of the transaction, despite good faith efforts by the parties,” a statement from SoftBank said. “In accordance with the terms of the agreement, the deposit of $1.25 billion (¥143.8 billion) received by [SoftBank Group Capital] at the time of signing is non-refundable and therefore such amount will be recognized as profit in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year ending March 31, 2022....

Realistically, though, most of the applications used to power these kinds of advances won’t rely solely on quantum computing. They’ll likely use hybrid quantum-classical computing, with some algorithms optimized for quantum computing and others running on classical computing infrastructure. Currently, though, there’s a missing piece of the puzzle: a way for most high-performance computing (HPC) developers to accelerate their existing applications with quantum computers. SEE: What is quantum computing? Everything you need to know about the strange world of quantum computers To overcome this problem, Nvidia is introducing a new platform called QODA – Quantum Optimized Device Architecture – that will create a unified, open environment across traditional computers and quantum processors....

The company said the cybersecurity incident was detected on Sunday, but despite the help of forensics experts, they are still working to resolve the issue. “As part of the investigation and containment, we have suspended affected systems and have informed the relevant external partners. The current results of our investigation indicate the incident was contained to the Americas with no known impact to other regions,” the company statement said. “We are working with appropriate third parties on this situation and will continue to take all necessary measures to serve our customers and business partners in a secure way....