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Solar plane lands in New York City

A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said.  The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website.  Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
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Microsoft is forcing people to use its Bing search engine with the Cortana digital assistant in Windows 10

Every search done this way will also be piped only through its recently released Edge browser.  In a blogpost, Microsoft said it was making people use Bing so they could get the most out of other search-related features in its products.  Many Cortana users have previously preferred to carry out searches with Google rather than Bing.  Windows users will still be able to install other web browsers and use other search engines outside Cortana, said Ryan Gavin, Microsoft's head of search and Cortana, in the blogpost.  However, he said, Microsoft was adding extras to Edge and Bing that meant it made sense to tie these programs to Cortana instead of other search engines and browsers. Anything else would be a "compromised experience that is less reliable and predictable", he said.  The extra features will differ depending on what people search for, but if someone used Cortana to look for a restaurant the browser would take them to the relevant webpage and ad...
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UK-based artificial intelligence firm SwiftKey has been acquired by Microsoft, the company has confirmed

The Financial Times reports the deal is worth $250m (£174m).  SwiftKey is known for its predictive keyboard, which can be found installed on millions of smartphone devices.  The company said it was a "milestone" in its history.  "Our mission is to enhance interaction between people and technology. We think these are a perfect match, and we believe joining Microsoft is the right next stage in our journey," said SwiftKey's founders Jon Reynolds and Ben Medlock in a blog post.  The company, started by the Cambridge University graduates in 2008, is the latest UK artificial intelligence (AI) firm to be bought up by a US tech giant. DeepMind - which began within the University of Oxford - was bought by Google in 2014, for £400m. Another firm, VocalIQ, was bought recently by Apple.  As well as the popular smartphone app, SwiftKey is known for being behind the computer software on Prof Stephen Hawking's wheelchair. The deal furthers Microsoft's ne...
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Microsoft will store data under the sea

Testing of the firm's first underwater data centre - dubbed Leona Philpot after a character in an Xbox game- has just been completed in an initiative dubbed Project Natick.  Data centres are believed to consume up to 3% of the world's electricity, according to researchers.  Large technology firms are keen to find energy efficient ways to store their increasing amounts of data.  Microsoft said its reasons for experimenting with underwater data centres were twofold.  Firstly, half the world's population is located within 125 miles (200km) of the coast so data centres in the sea would reduce latency - the time its takes data to travel from its source to customers. But there were also environmental reasons for the trial. Putting the data centre in the ocean eliminated the need for cooling and, in future, if such centres could be colocated with offshore renewable energy sources, they could also produce zero emissions, according to Microsoft.Its first underwater...
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Your Computer Is Your Enemy

The old cliché, "If you want a friend, get a dog" still stands in the 21st Century. It is well established in the medical community that animals can do much to extend the human life span as well as improve the quality of life. Don't live on or vicariously through your computer.  A pastor once said his job was to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Thus we have the difference between a real live pet and an inanimate electro-mechanical object - in this case the personal computer. The pet comforts while the computer, improperly used and/or over used, is a thief and a murderer.  Besides, the computer, especially if you run a Microsoft Operating System and Microsoft production software, requires much more maintenance than does a pet. This alone is enough to drive most users' blood pressure through the roof. How many times do you suspect that needs to happen before it begins to take a toll on the human body? It is even more aggravating than t...
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