Best stock trading platforms 2020
With investing education, commission-free trading, and other key features now available from a variety of stock trading platforms, online trading has never been more accessible to new investors.
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Think you’re annoying? Windows 10 users are being subjected to full-screen ads for Microsoft Edge
If you've come face to face with an intrusive, windowless advert for Microsoft Edge whilst using Windows 10 in the last few weeks, then no, you’re not alone.
This is the latest A/B test (the process of showing two variants of the same web page to different segments of website visitors at the same time) introduced in the recent batch of updates for the operating system.
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No seeing past this
We’re no strangers to ads, especially when we understand that's how websites (like our own) keep running. That isn't to say that we don’t find them to be a nuisance when we’re enjoying content on sites like Facebook or Reddit, but they don’t commandeer the screen and demand 100% of your attention.
The intrusive ‘nag’ from Microsoft will appear when you set up your new PC or laptop, click on an advertising banner within the settings, or – our personal favorite – after every system update.
The purpose of the screen-hogging prompt is of course to persuade you to try out the new Chromium-based Edge over non-Microsoft owned products, with the ads appearing when people use Google Chrome and Firefox as default browsers. The ads themselves appear via the OOBE (out of box experience, essentially what you use to set up your device), and are easily closed by selecting “don’t update your browser settings”, but there isn’t currently a way to disable them from appearing
It’ll be interesting to see if this attention-demanding approach actually works because if the results from the A/B test are favorable, we will likely be subjected to more of this in the future. All of this isn’t to say that the new Edge isn’t a great browser, and we certainly think it has its merits. That said, in the spirit of petulant children everywhere who are being told what to do: “well now I’m not doing it”.
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Via Windows Latest
Date
16 Nov 2020Sources
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Microsoft lifts the lid on plans for 'planet-scale' AI infrastructure
Read MoreMicrosoft has revealed it is working on a new “planet-scale” scheduling system for AI workloads, called Singularity.
As explained in a technical paper published by the firm, Singularity is a “novel, workload-aware scheduler that can transparently preempt and elastically scale deep learning workloads to drive high utilization without impacting their correctness or performance across a global feel of AI accelerators”.
In non-technical speak, this means the system is designed to help ensure that the company’s global network of server hardware is utilized in the optimal manner, thereby cutting the costs associated with running AI workloads.
Microsoft Singularity
At the heart of the Singularity value proposition is the ability to resize jobs in mid-flow, as well as to shift them between different infrastructure located across the globe.
As explained in the paper, a live job can be migrated over to a different cluster or data center and resumed at the precise point at which it left off, thereby optimizing capacity usage. It can also be scaled elastically up or down, taking advantage of a varying number and type of AI accelerators as required.
The beauty of this system, Microsoft says, is that it requires no additional work on the part of developers, because no code modifications are required for Singularity to function.
Read moreTo make all this possible, however, Microsoft had to find a way to decouple workloads from the hardware resources. The novel solution utilizes something the company is calling a “device proxy”, which runs in its own address space and establishes a layer of separation that allows for fluid reallocation of resources.
“Singularity achieves a significant breakthrough in scheduling deep learning workloads, converting niche features such as elasticity into mainstream, always-on features that the scheduler can rely on for implementing stringent SLAs,” wrote Microsoft, in its summation.
“With novel mechanisms that make unmodified jobs preemptible and resizable with negligible performance overhead, Singularity enables unprecedented levels of workload fungibility, making it possible for jobs to take advantage of the spare capacity anywhere in the globally-distributed fleet.”
Although the scheduling service is the predominant focus of the paper, the authors state that the system is designed to scale across a fleet of hundreds of thousands of GPUs and other AI accelerators.
TechRadar Pro has asked Microsoft when it expects Singularity to become commercially available.
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Malicious Microsoft Edge extensions are mimicking popular VPN apps
Fraudulent Microsoft Edge add-ons are making their way into the official library.
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ACLU is suing the FBI over its efforts to break into encrypted devices
FBI's Electronic Device Analysis Unit may already have software capable of decrypting data stored on smartphones and computers.
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