Microsoft is celebrating International Women’s Day (March 8th) by celebrating the creators and inventors with their #MakeWhatsNext campaign.
A new video from Microsoft shows the lack of awareness girls today have about women inventors and reminds them to celebrate those women’s accomplishments and be encouraged to follow in their footsteps.
Microsoft, as part of its longstanding efforts to encourage girls to build technology skills and learn about careers in technology, is also offering free resources for girls to learn to code and meet female role models at DigiGirlz events happening around the globe, and is also offering free online coding tutorials to make strides in closing the considerable gender gap in computer science education and the tech industry at large. In addition, Microsoft is announcing a new patent program focused on inviting select young female inventors to receive support from the company’s patent law resources to help them file for a U.S. patent.
These efforts are part of Microsoft’s broad commitment to computer science education, with programs and resources offered through Microsoft Philanthropies YouthSpark initiative to increase access for all youth to learn computer science, empowering them to achieve more for themselves, their families and their communities.
Windows Defender Advanced Threat Detection is the new tool being released by Microsoft to help Enterprises to fend off cyberattacks. Like its “Daddy” Windows Defender, it will be “baked in” to Windows 10 and will therefore be updated on a regular basis with the rest of the Operating System. The new tool is designed to detect advanced attacks and provide response recommendations. It will work in concert with Microsoft Advanced Threat Detection Solutions like Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection and Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics.
Microsoft says this tool is already “protecting 500,000 endpoints”.
Just like we developed Windows 10 with feedback from millions of Windows Insiders, we worked with our most advanced enterprise customers to address their biggest security challenges, including attack investigations and day-to-day operations, to test our solution in their environments. Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection is already live with early adopter customers that span across geographies and industries, and the entire Microsoft network, making it one of the largest running advanced threat protection services.
This does look like a promising tool. It is always nice to have a “fresh set of eyes” keeping and eye on the Bad Guys.
Lead photo: Eleven-year-old composer Garrett Weyenberg, right, and StaffPad creator David William Hearn are pictured in Angel Studios in London on Jan. 29, 2016. Photo by David Palmer.
The songs began when Garrett Weyenberg was 2 and would climb onto a piano bench and make up little tunes, each an ode to things like snowmen or peaches. By ages 5 and 6, he was composing full, intricate songs, sometimes scooting his entire body along the piano to play multiple octaves.
By age 10 last year, Garrett finished an eight-minute piece called “Sonatina in G Major,” a lively work in three movements that won a regional composition contest. It was just one song in a vast oeuvre of original music, built from a lifetime of melodies flowing from Garrett’s head. But until recently, he had no easy way to write his musical thoughts, no practical means of saving his music and sharing it with others to play.
That all changed when Garrett turned 11. He got a Surface Pro 3 for his birthday and started using StaffPad, a notation app that lets users handwrite music and save it for editing, playback and sharing. Designed for Microsoft Surface, the groundbreaking app uses the device’s pen-and-touch technology for a natural, tactile experience, and combines it with modern tools in handwriting recognition, orchestral playback and score editing.
“I like that it’s really simple and intuitive. I can just jot down ideas and it’s easy for me to get a song down now,” said Garrett from his home in McKinney, Texas. He can now write music wherever he is – at a piano or in the car – and his scores are saved in OneDrive for seamless syncing and access across devices.
Garrett recently flew to London to meet the creator of StaffPad, David William Hearn, a composer and music producer known for his work in TV and movies, from “Friday Night Lights” to “Les Misérables.” After Garrett’s mom emailed Hearn about StaffPad, the meeting arose as a way for Garrett to meet the man behind his favorite app, and for the maker to meet a young musician empowered by his creation. The two worked on one of Garrett’s songs in a session filmed for a new video by Microsoft.
“He’s obviously a very talented kid, very musical,” said Hearn, who’s based in London. He’s thrilled that StaffPad, available exclusively in the Windows Store, enables creativity in musicians around the world, from kids like Garrett to retired hobbyists to professional composers.
“It’s amazing how far-reaching music is,” he said. “There’s so many people writing music, so many people creating, which is just such a lovely thing. It goes so far beyond what I thought we could achieve with the app.”
Hearn was inspired to create StaffPad while working on a film score and wishing there was a way to make quick edits with other musicians, instead of having to go back to his studio and fire up his computer. He also wanted to return to the ease of handwriting music and evolve it with technology.
“There’s nothing more natural and fluid than picking up a pen and writing down your musical thoughts,” said Hearn. “It was really an idea of how we could push written music forward.”
StaffPad converts handwritten notes into a beautiful typeset score, with no mouse, keyboard or complicated notation software to fiddle with. The app’s simple interface enables musicians to focus on music and not technology, and Surface tablets deliver a smooth, mobile and productive experience.
“Before StaffPad, I was really just sort of chained to the desk,” said Hearn. “It’s great to have the option to move away from the computer and get outside, or sit down at the piano and just write as you would on paper.”
Recently updated for Windows 10, StaffPad now has a handy “Composer Assistant” that knows voice commands to add woodwinds or change the key signature. And Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform means StaffPad works on the 84-inch Surface Hub, a great educational tool Hearn is using with the Royal Academy of Music in London on new ways to teach music in a lecture hall.
Before Garrett had StaffPad, his mom used to record hours of video of him playing piano, so that he could later score his music. But notating was so tedious that it rarely happened. It took Garrett a year to write his seven-page “Sonatina in G Major,” a feat he said would now take a week or two with StaffPad and Surface.
“He is composing music in his mind daily,” said Garrett’s mother, Stephanie Weyenberg. “StaffPad truly has been the game changer for him.”
When a medical condition left Garrett in excruciating pain in recent weeks, writing music was an emotional balm, and the technology enabled him to write from bed. It’s helped deepen his love for music as a form of expression and a way to connect with others.
“It’s kind of cool for me that other people could play something that originally I was thinking,” he said.
For Microsoft, StaffPad highlights the power of technology – from natural touch input to Surface Pen precision —to help people young and old express creativity in new ways.
“We’re so inspired by Garrett’s passion and use of StaffPad’s powerful capabilities, the way David envisioned for every professional, educator, student or individual,” said Mona Cao, product marketing manager for Surface.
Microsoft Garage recently released a fun new iPhone App — Fetch!
It’s Joey and Fletcher Approved — it correctly identified their breeds even though I purposely took *terrible* pictures of them. Their faces were mostly covered as they slept. I haven’t had the nerve to find out if I belong in their “pack.” 🙂
Man’s best friend has inspired a new app – Fetch! Using your iPhone camera or photo library, it can identify and classify dogs by breeds and tell you what kind of human personality fits best with specific breeds. And just for fun, the app will even take an informed guess on what kind of dog you or your friends might be.
Released through the Microsoft Garage just in time for the American Kennel Club’s Meet & Compete and the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, this mobile app demonstrates the potential for Microsoft researchers’ continued advances in artificial intelligence, which have already appeared in other playful ways through Microsoft Project Oxford-powered experiences such as HowOld.net, TwinsOrNot.net, MyMoustache.net and Mimicker Alarm. In Fetch!, Project Oxford works together with some powerful new machine learning technology to deliver interesting results for all kinds of photos.
“There was an interest in creating a framework that would allow you to take a domain – in our case, dogs – and recognize numerous classes, such as breeds. We were interested in enabling an app to allow you to make object recognition extraordinary, fun and surprising,” says Mitch Goldberg, a development director at Microsoft Research whose Cambridge, U.K based team built the experience. His team works at the intersection of user experience, machine learning, computer vision and more recently, intelligent cloud services. He’s also had two German shepherd dogs, though now he has a cat. “We wanted to bring artificial intelligence to the canine world. We wanted to show that object recognition is something anyone could understand and interact with.”
Fetch! is designed for repeat use, and after giving it a couple tries, it’s easy to see how addictive it can be. You start with your dog, or your friends’ dogs. If the dog’s breed is unknown, the app will show a percentage of the closest breed. Tapping the percentage rosette leads to the top five breeds that could be in the dog. Clicking on the arrow in the corner leads you to more information on the breed.
“If you want to take photos of dogs, it will tell you what dog breed it is, if it’s one of our supported breeds,” Goldberg says. “If I choose to take a photograph of a flower, it’ll say, ‘No dogs found! Hmmm… This looks more like…flower?’ But if you take a picture of a person, it’ll kick into its hidden fun mode. And in a playful way, it’ll communicate to you not only what type of dog it thinks you are, but also why. It’s fun to see if the app knows it’s not a dog. A lot of the time, it’ll tell you what that image is. When there’s not a dog, you still want to use it.”
No two pictures yield the same result. You could resemble a Doberman Pinscher in one photo (sunglasses, no makeup) or a Pekingese (no glasses, makeup) in another. If you photograph an inanimate object, it might tell you, “No dogs found!” and make an informed guess at what it is.
If you like what you see, you can share the image on your social networks and through email.
Paul Thurrott does an outstanding job laying out the case of why the Windows 10 Upgrade should always be free.
I think that Microsoft will do the right thing. And today, I’d like to make the case that this is the only correct outcome. It is in fact, “the only outcome.”
That Microsoft gets that the world has moved on is obvious: They’ve evolved Windows into an always-updated modern monstrosity, and Windows 10 is now updated as if it were a simpler mobile OS or a cloud service. Yes, there are some fits and stops along the way, but this first year is all about making that transition.
Given this, it doesn’t make sense to return the Windows 10 upgrade to the paid model from the past. That is, once you’ve paid for Windows—by getting it with a new PC, usually—you’re entitled to free upgrades for the life of that device, just as you are (basically) on Android and iOS. The passage of 12 months of time doesn’t change that at all: If a customer still using (the still supported) Windows 7 in August 2016, or January 2017, or whatever, wants to upgrade to Windows 10, it is still in Microsoft’s best interests that that happen. And it should be as frictionless as possible. It should be free.
I agree. It’s the most logical decision. We’re moving to a subscription based, always on and in the cloud economy. Apple has already somewhat embraced this — it’s the model we’re all using for our smartphones already.
A New York Times article published on 1/31/16 highlights a new data center project from one of Microsoft’s Research groups called NExT (New Experiences and Technologies) that is solving a big data center problem (heat) with the cool ocean waters.
Today’s data centers, which power everything from streaming video to social networking and email, contain thousands of computer servers generating lots of heat. When there is too much heat, the servers crash.
Putting the gear under cold ocean water could fix the problem. It may also answer the exponentially growing energy demands of the computing world because Microsoft is considering pairing the system either with a turbine or a tidal energy system to generate electricity.
The effort, code-named Project Natick, might lead to strands of giant steel tubes linked by fiber optic cables placed on the seafloor. Another possibility would suspend containers shaped like jelly beans beneath the surface to capture the ocean current with turbines that generate electricity.
The experiment was a success — so much so that they extended the time and even ran some commercial data processing projects from the Azure cloud service.
The first prototype, affectionately named Leona Philpot — a character in Microsoft’s Halo video game series — has been returned, partly covered with barnacles, to the company’s corporate campus here.
It is a large white steel tube, covered with heat exchangers, with its ends sealed by metal plates and large bolts. Inside is a single data center computing rack that was bathed in pressurized nitrogen to efficiently remove heat from computing chips while the system was tested on the ocean floor.
This type of experiment leads to many other exciting options — better server hardware (can’t send a tech in the middle of the night to fix them under the sea), greener power (tidal wave generation, enhanced hardware power efficiency), etc.
It’s entirely possible that in the near future when you’re using the “cloud” you might actually be “under the sea.”
Microsoft is in what appears to be a huge rush to get everyone to upgrade to Windows 10. They’ve even put a date on when they will quit giving it away for free: July 29, 2016.
Why is that and what’s the rush you ask?
There are a few good reasons to get everyone on the same playing field. It’s easier to issue patches and updates if you don’t have to create and test four (or more) different versions of whatever exploit the bad guys found. You wouldn’t have to worry about anything that was over 10 years old and still using software that has been full of security and performance holes for the last eight. That old, slow hardware that diminishes the customer experience can be retired. These are the reasons that come from the top of my head. There are more and (likely) better reasons than these few.
So how will Windows make money off of this? They’re giving it away for free.
One billion devices. (It’s necessary to do that line with your best Dr. Evil voice impersonation.) Microsoft has set a goal of getting Windows 10 on one billion devices. The fastest route to that goal is giving it away for free. They have a sunset date of July 29, 2016 but it seems logical for them to continue past that date as they haven’t quite reached one quarter of their goal (200,000 at last report). One billion devices delivers enough customers for developers to come back to the Windows Store and start designing those Apps we’ve all become so familiar with. The Windows Store really is pathetic compared to Apple’s iTunes and Android’s Google Play stores. Apple already is on over a billion devices and reported $31 billion dollars in sales per year. In Apps and “services”. That’s not a fair comparison you say? Microsoft is an operating system on a computer, not a phone. True — until now. Microsoft is building Windows 10 as a “universal platform” that works on all your devices from desktop to tablet to phone. It’s designed the App Development kit to enable developers to take advantage of all those different screen sizes in one set of code so that the experience is consistent across all those different devices.
Microsoft is taking a page from the Apple and Google model.
Apple gives away its OS. So does Google (Chrome OS). Apple makes its money from a 30% cut of the pie for every sale in it’s app store. Google primarily sells advertisements (and by extension your tracked data). Microsoft giving away Windows 10 to encourage you to engage in their own subscription model. Office 365 is the current “flagship” with what Microsoft hopes is the Microsoft Store nipping at its heels IF they can get the developers on board. Microsoft has been dabbling with the advertising (like in the free email client Outlook.com), but so far has stayed away from it on most other things. I hope they continue to do so. I will gladly pay for a subscription if it means I can stay “commercial free.”
It ends up being a numbers game.
One billion devices provides incentive for developers to create; users to buy and Microsoft to make money. They take a “hit” on revenue up front, but in the long game they come out ahead as we buy Apps and Office365 and whatever other subscription based product they come up with. It makes sense to me to just continue to offer Windows 10 for free as an upgrade with a small fee for the OS on new devices that would be part of the purchase price (like it is now). Only time will tell what strategy Microsoft will use but it looks like they’re on a path that can keep them relevant and solvent. Even when they’re “giving it away.”
Two troubling articles have surfaced about Microsoft in the past 24 hours. One of the strengths Microsoft had (especially when purchasing new hardware from the Microsoft Store) was that you could get your new hardware without all the “crapware” and “bloatware” that the other hardware vendors put on their devices. They did that as an additional revenue stream. Supposedly it made the hardware “more cost effective.” It is just annoying.
The second article revolves around privacy and the “InPrivate” browsing mode that IE and Edge browsers have. The idea is that if you’re using the “InPrivate” feature, nothing gets written to the machine (cookies, URLs, etc.). This makes it harder for you to be tracked by the good or bad guys. Apparently the new Edge Browser on Windows 10 is keeping that data in folders that are fairly easy to access (if you know what you’re looking for). Microsoft says they’re working on fixing that. The full article is here: http://gadgets.ndtv.com/apps/news/microsoft-edge-private-browsing-flaw-leaking-your-web-history-report-795607
The Guardian recently released an “infomercial page” about the Microsoft Educator Community that does a really good job laying out some free resources for maximizing the Microsoft tools you likely already have in your classroom.
What sets MEC apart?
MEC has some particular advantages as a source of CPD:
It is separated from the school’s hierarchy and structure, and so is non-threatening and reassuring.
It is owned by the teacher, as a member of the MEC.
It is largely delivered by fellow educators, who, the evidence tells us, are the people from whom teachers are most likely to learn.
It is highly interactive – a collaborative learning community, not a passive group of learners.
It offers a wide choice of starting points – material which is age related, or subject related, or both, for example.
It is available anytime, anywhere, can be repeated, slowed down or approached from different directions.
It can be accredited with a system of “Microsoft innovative educator” badges.
