Month: October 2013

People generally seem to like the new Microsoft Surface 2, BUT, they can;t use their favorite apps… so they are timid about making the jump.

Apps the issue for Microsoft Surface 2

The Australian News – “The new Surface 2 improves on last year’s Surface RT in almost every way.

The Surface 2 is quick by virtue of its up-to-the-minute Nvidia Tegra 4, four-core CPU. Apps open quickly, multi-tasking is smooth, video doesn’t stutter and, unlike the original RT, you can bash away on the optional Type and Touch Cover keyboards and not get ahead of the tablet’s processing power.

I tested the Surface 2 against the original RT model using the 3DMark Ice Storm cross-platform benchmark and it was no contest, with the new model racking up a score of 9531 on Ice Storm Extreme and 14,360 on Ice Storm Unlimited. The RT could only muster 2069 and 3276.

The 10.6-inch screen scores a major upgrade from 1366 x 768 pixel resolution to the 1920 x 1080 pixel screen used on the big brother Surface Pro 2.

It’s a sweet screen with deep blacks, vivid colours and a wide range of viewing angles, but not quite up to the standard of Apple’s Retina display on recent iPads.

Unlike an iPad, you can plug plenty of stuff into a Surface tablet. The new one gets a USB 3.0 port upgrade compared with USB 2.0 on the original and there’s a micro HDMI port for hooking up to bigger screens and projectors, as well as a micro SD card slot for boosting the memory beyond the supplied storage of 32GB or 64GB.

The front 3.5-megapixel and rear 5-megapixel cameras are way better than the just-get-you-by 1.2-megapixel cameras on the Surface RT and are capable of decent 1080p video recording.

The cameras are also designed to work well in low light, which comes in handy for video calls.

The Surface 2 is slightly lighter at 680g and a smidgin thinner. But ergonomically, the big news is Microsoft has given the Surface 2 a double-position kickstand with the second position making the gadget more lap-friendly.

I really like the kickstand, it comes in especially handy for bedtime reading where larger-screen tablets like the Surface 2 become tedious to hold for long periods.

Battery life is decent but not outstanding. Microsoft claims 10 hours of video playback time. I scored a bit better than that, running continuous video with the display at 85 per cent brightness. The gadget looks prettier too, with a silvery matt finish on the magnesium alloy casing replacing the fingerprint-magnet black on the RT.

Then there’s the accessories. The Surface 2 works with the new Touch Cover 2 and Type Cover 2 clip-on keyboards, which now come with backlighting and transform the device into an almost notebook.

Microsoft sells a small and portable, Bluetooth-connected Wedge Mouse if you want to go the whole hog into laptop operation.

The old Touch and Type covers also work on the Surface 2.

My pick for mobile working on a Surface is the Type Cover with its tactile, moving keys.

While the Surface 2’s hardware has improved at almost every level over the Surface RT, software, or a dearth of it, remains the big problem affecting the Surface 2 and other devices based on the Microsoft Windows 8.1 operating system. Apple and Android tablet owners not only have hundreds of thousands of apps to choose from, they are assured of scoring a version of pretty much every new game, social network platform utility, service or productivity app that arrives, or even temporary apps designed for one-off events like a rock concert or sporting event.

If you are using an RT device, there is no such comfort. Need iTunes? Forget it. Want another browser besides Internet Explorer? No can do.

The list goes on. Run the Sonos music system in your home? Sonos doesn’t do a control app for Windows RT or Windows Phone 8, although there is a pay-for-third-party Sonos app available.

The RT software library has grown over the past 12 months, with Microsoft claiming 100,000 apps on offer, and there are some great-looking Metro interface-style apps that work on the Surface 2, such as the showcase Fresh Paint app.

If you like Microsoft apps and services such as Skype messaging, Skydrive cloud storage and Xbox gaming, then you are well served and the integration is very good.

There is one killer app, from Microsoft’s point of view, that the Surface 2 packs for free and is unavailable on Apple and Android tablets and that is Microsoft Office, which now includes the all-important Outlook client.”

Can AI (Artificial Intelligence) be TOO smart? What if computer programs could start passing CAPTCHA tests on-line? CAPTCHA tests are those little image and word tests that identify that you are a human, and not a computer, so that it eliminates spam of on-line questionnaires, etc. Well, one has passed that test for the first time!

Vicarious AI Passes Turing Test

EEtimes – PORTLAND, Ore. — The world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) to pass the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart — Captcha — debuts today from Vicarious FPC Inc. in San Francisco.

Captcha is that annoying authentication test where users have to decipher and type-in the characters from a distorted image to prove they are human. Without Captcha authentication, software robots (bots) can only keep trying passwords over and over until they hit on the right one. Now that Vicarious’s AI has been demonstrated to perform as well as a human at Captcha, it has proven the technique ineffective as an authentication method at Google, Paypal, Yahoo, and hundreds of other sites.

Alan Turing, the computer science pioneer and recognized “Father of AI,” designed his original Turing Test as a procedure by which an AI displays behavior that is indistinguishable from a human. Since Captcha was specifically designed to distinguish humans from computers, it is sometimes called a reverse Turing Test. Nevertheless, the crux is that Vicarious’s AI is now as smart as a human — at least at Captcha.

‘Our algorithms have passed their first Turning Test — Captcha — the world’s most widely used test of a computer’s ability to act human,’ said D. Scott Phoenix, co-founder of Vicarious, in an interview with EE Times. ‘Captcha is considered broken if a computer is able to solve it at least 1 percent of the time, and our algorithms achieve success rates of over 90 percent on the Captcha used by Google, Paypal, Yahoo, and many others.’

Now that the Vicarious bot has become as smart as a human at Captcha, the world is going to have to come up with a better test. However, for now, Vicarious is keeping its proprietary algorithms as a trade secret, so most sites are expected to keep using Captcha in the short term.

‘We don’t plan on exposing how our algorithms work, and we don’t expect other people to be able to duplicate them in the near term,’ said Phoenix. “So I think people can keep using Captcha for now.”

Nevertheless, because it is now known to be possible for a bot to pass that Turing Test, its only a matter of time until hackers figure out how to do it, too.

Vicarious is a three-year old California Flexible Purpose Corporation (thus the FPC after its name), which instead of maximizing shareholder value, like a normal corporation, is aiming to fulfill a singular purpose — to solve the important algorithmic problems behind building a human-like AI. For Captcha, its already succeeded, but Vicarious’s long-term goal is to generalize its Captcha AI into a complete robotic brain that is as smart as a human in all areas of sensory perception.

‘Our goal is to combine insights from neuroscience with modern machine learning techniques and cast them into mathematical algorithms that are just as intelligent as humans,’ Phoenix told us.

The three-year-old startup was founded by Phoenix, formerly entrepreneur in residence at Founders Fund, and co-founder Dileep George, formerly chief technology officer of Numenta. Vicarious is running on its second round of funding. The first seed round in 2010 was $1.1 million, and its Series A for $15 million was just completed last year, giving the six-person company the time and money it thinks it needs to fulfill its mission of casting human intelligence into mathematical algorithms, which it expects to achieve in five to seven years.”

Apple released a new version of it’s operating system last week. And, in a surprising move, said it will be free from now on! Good for them! But, some compatibility concerns are showing up.

Concerns rise on OS X Mavericks’ Gmail compatibility

ZDNet – “There are a number of new, useful features in Mac Mail, such as improved searching for attachments and a button to delete an unwanted message from a notification banner. Nice. However, if you are using Mail as a client for one or more Google Gmail accounts, there are new issues, some serious.

Worse, for those who have tweaked Mail or Gmail preferences in the past to account for Gmail’s particular message handling, then a blind upgrade to Mavericks may prove problematic.

In a long post at TidBITS, Joe Kissell runs down the issues. The problems for most users will be that Mail takes a significant time to display messages in the Inbox and other mailboxes — here ‘significant’ could be more than a day, even a several days, depending on the number of messages stored. Mail, it appears, is reindexing folders and performing other tasks, but doesn’t tell the user. Depending on user’s Gmail settings, it could be downloading gigabytes of already read messages.

For longtime Mac power users, AppleScripts written for Gmail accounts will likely be broken with this initial move to Mavericks Mail. Some mailboxes will be reported as empty but have messages in them. Ordinary rules are also having problems, according to some reports.”

Until this evening. Lot’s happening this past weekend. I will ‘splain it all on the show! Stay tuned!

Hey! This is cool! Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for my Android phone, tablets, etc! Nice!

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Mobile has been released!

From the Malwarebytes Anti-Malware web site: “We’ve gone mobile! After many months of development and testing, I’m pleased to announce the launch of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Mobile.

If you’re like me, you can’t imagine living without your phone. It’s a social link, a necessary time waster, a business tool, and sometimes I even make calls with it.

So our team of developers and malware researchers built an Android mobile security app for our needs. The Malwarebytes way. We wrote all our own code and built our own malware signature database from scratch. That way we knew that the database was accurate and relevant. And we included only the essential security features—the native Android Device Manager now takes care of all the phone location features typically found in mobile security products, so it didn’t make sense add those. The core is anti-malware, with a couple other features that can detect apps that are violating your privacy or tracking your physical location.

And it’s just in time. Mobile malware increased by 614 percent over the past year according to some analysts. And that’s to be expected!

I wanted a lean, powerful app that beat the bad guys. And it had to be free. I think we pulled it off. But, more importantly, what do you think?”

Download from Google Play at https://mwb.to/MMobile