Microsoft’s local Australian division will work directly with the NSW Data Analytics Centre (DAC) to provide data solutions within and outside the government. DAC was created in 2015 and will now leverage Microsoft’s Azure to create machine learning. Specifically, it will use the neural network to allocate the AU$30 billion procurement budget that is given to NSW each year. “The NSW Data Analytics Centre is an employer of some of the best data scientists who are spearheading data analytics inside of government,” NSW Minister of Finance, Services and Property Victor Dominello said....

The posts in question come from former Senate candidate Patrick Little, who was removed from a GOP convention in may for similar views. They describe “raising jews as livestock” for “ritual death by torture”, as well as promises to destroy a Holocaust memorial. Gab was founded as an alternative to mainstream social networks that have strict content policies and actively remove posts. As such, it tends to attract a number of extreme viewpoints, such as those of Little....

Essentially, the tool allows shoppers using Microsoft Bing to sort items by how environmentally ethical they are. Microsoft’s announcement came last Friday, which was Earth Day 2022. As for the feature, it is available in the shopping section on Microsoft Bing. When a user enters a search term, like “trousers”, on the left pane there are Ethical Value filters like “Eco-Friendly materials”, “Organic”, Recycled/Upcycled materials”, “Fairtrade”, and “Vegan.” Bing also assigns Ethical Ratings to items where the engine uses data from Good On You to highlight the ethical qualities of a product....

However, over the first few weeks of availability, Windows 10 version 20H2 has been less problematic than other recent feature updates. In fact, Microsoft has until today reported just five known issues with the build. Perhaps the relative stability of Windows 10 version 20H2 out of the box has to do with the fact this is a light feature upgrade. It does not come with a long list of new features....

1 Office and Productivity2 Surface and Windows It is worth noting that Microsoft runs its fiscal year from July to July. So, while this is the second quarter of 2018 in the general financial year, it is the company’s fourth quarter. Satya Nadella reported net income of $16.6 billion from record revenue of $110.4 billion over the last 12 months. The numbers highlight the significant growth Microsoft has enjoyed under its CEO....

Microsoft also plans to make the devices available in Germany and Japan “later this month,” as well as in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Belgium during the summer. The 1TB Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 have received positive reviews from users in the US and Canada since their release. Aside from the “amazing storage capacity,” the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4 also come “with 6th Generation Intel® Core™ i7 processors, [and] 16 GB of RAM,” according to Dan Laycock, Senior Communications Manager at Surface....

Perhaps the most notable addition is the return of smooth touch scrolling. Users on the old (non-Chromium) Edge will remember this tool was part of the experience. When Chromium Edge launched the smooth touch scrolling was removed. Elsewhere in the new update, Microsoft has introduced Family Safety tools on Windows 10. Furthermore, Edge now has an option in the New Tab Page that allows users to user their work or school account in Office content....

Because this support requires big changes to WSL, Microsoft says current support is opt-in. That means users who don’t want their current distros affected avoid systemd. However, after feedback and previewing, Microsoft says it will bring full support by default. Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu – provided Microsoft with technical support. According to the companies, it was important for WSL to finally get systemd. Many of the popular Linux distributions use the suite, which provides software components for the Linux OS....

In blog post today, Microsoft says it has worked closely with its largest customers to understand their needs. Across industries like financial services and healthcare, customers consistently require identity governance across their cloud and on-premises. Azure AD already provider identity management and security. However, the SailPoint integration means Azure Active Directory Premium customers get a full provisioning and lifecycle governance to enterprise customers on-premises and in the cloud. Microsoft explains the main capabilities of the new partnership, which are available for joint Azure AD and SailPoint customers....

For clarification, this is not the recently launched Skype for Linux Beta experience, but the old app. With that in mind, Microsoft says it will retire all versions of the client from build 4.3 and older. This move mirrors Microsoft’s recent culling of older Skype versions on other platforms. For instance, on March 1, the company closed older Skype versions on Windows (v7.16 and older) and Mac (v7.18 and older)....

Fitch has been helping Microsoft one hardware for a few months. He lists the Surface Pro 5 as one of the products he is working on. On his LinkedIn profile, it shows that he has been working on the Analog Speech Design Team since June 2016. Since January 2017, Fitch has been creating speech models for “devices of the future including but not limited to: HoloLens, Surface Pro 5, Xbox....

Microsoft is now leveraging AMD’s announcement of 4th EPYC processors to deliver its own HPC instances for Azure VMs. HX-series will even get AMD’s planned Genoa X processors, which should debut in early 2023. According to Microsoft, the next-gen VMs also provide the following features: “800 GB/s of DDR5 memory bandwidth (STREAM TRIAD). 400 Gb/s NVIDIA Quantum-2 CX7 InfiniBand, the first on the public cloud. 80 Gb/s Azure Accelerated Networking....

Xbox Console Streaming allows users to stream their content from Xbox One to an Android device. There are currently several limitations in place. The preview is only available to users on the Xbox Insider Program running the Alpha and Alpha Skip Ahead channels. Furthermore, only users running Android 6.0 or higher and with an Xbox One Bluetooth controller can use the service. With the Xbox Game Streaming app on the Xbox One, users send content to an Android phone....

Specifically, the company has it will remove the keyboard from the App Store starting from October 5. Most users probably knew this day was coming considering SwiftKey has been an example of abandonware for over a year. A Microsoft spokesperson spoke to ZDNet and confirmed that the company will delist the app soon. However, the that same official says that the current versions of the app will continue to work on iPhone and iPad hardware: “As of October 5, support for SwiftKey iOS will end and it will be delisted from the Apple App Store....

“DeepSpeed is compatible with PyTorch. One piece of that library, called ZeRO, is a new parallelized optimizer that greatly reduces the resources needed for model and data parallelism while massively increasing the number of parameters that can be trained,” explained the company. “Researchers have used these breakthroughs to create Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG), the largest publicly known language model at 17 billion parameters.” With the release, Microsoft hopes to help AI developers gain the increased accuracy that can be had though training on large models....

For anyone interested, this brings SQL Server 2016 to version number 13.0.4422.0. The file weighs in at 415.4 MB so is a sizeable release. However, as this is a cumulative update, there are no new features involved. Instead, Microsoft says this patch has fixes for issues that were fixed after the release of SQL Server 2016 SP1. The company released Service Pack 1 for its newest relational databased management platform last November....

Reports suggested cyber-criminals are using Microsoft Teams and have conducted ransomware attacks in Spain. Twitter accounts forwarded Teams as the channel for the attacks. None of these accounts were involved in the investigation into the attacks. Microsoft has responded and said Teams was not involved. “Microsoft has been investigating recent attacks by malicious actors using the Dopplepaymer ransomware,” said Simon Pope, Director of Incident Response at the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC)....

Users of the business version of the cloud storage solution can now view 360° within the app. Images taken with a 360-degree camera can be zoomed and panned across the panorama. When a new image is taken, OneDrive automatically detects if it is 360°. Microsoft explains there are some things worth noting regarding the new tool: “Any 360° images uploaded to OneDrive for Business prior to the introduction of this feature will not be automatically identified....

In a video, Xbox’s Larry Hryb and Kevin Gammill introduced the device, which began shipping to developers this week. “When we went and kicked off project Scorpio, we actually went on the road and talked to our third party development partners and talked to them about really what they want in a dev kit,” said Gamill. “To get the tools out of the way of the developer and really enable them to create the game they wanted to create and the vision that they wanted to create it in....

Microsoft Dev Box provides developers with a way to create a virtual machine that is configured automatically through the company’s cloud infrastructure. This can be done without needing to setup workstations. With Dev Box, developers can configure their team members and images to allow instant coding on virtual machines. In its announcement blog post, Microsoft provides the following details: “Microsoft Dev Box ensures developers always have the right tools and resources based on project, task, and even role....