Watch our macOS Sierra preview from June. Still, let’s start with Siri. It's Siri! It's the virtual assistant with a helpfulness that's approximately inverse to the amount of public attention it's getting at any given moment. (Right as another celebrity showed up in a Siri ad, you were probably struggling to look something up.) But five years later, it’s actually starting to pick up some useful skills. On the Mac, Siri lives in a bunch of different places — dock, menubar, keyboard shortcut — and pops up as a black box on top of whatever you're looking at, ready to start fielding questions (notably, it is wholly distinct from Spotlight, despite their similar functionality). It can do all of the stuff you've been doing with Siri on the iPhone until now, like display sports scores, look up movie times, and solve math problems, Siri can also just open apps for you (e.g., "Open Contacts" or "Open Spotify"). And one of the most useful functions it has on … [Read more...] about macOS Sierra review: Apple reaches for the clouds
Cloud
Alphabet profit miss sends stock down, but Google ad and cloud sales remain strong
It’s business as usual at Google parent company Alphabet, despite a growing number of controversies surrounding the company’s firing of former employee James Damore and a reckoning over content policies at YouTube. Alphabet posted its 2017 fourth quarter earnings today, showing sales of $32.32 billion and profit of $9.70 per share, coming in under Wall Street expectations of $9.96 per share. Wall Street reacted negatively to the profit miss, sending Alphabet stock down as much as 4 percent in after-hours trading. However, Google’s core ad business remains healthy, pulling in $27.27 billion in revenue and helping push Alphabet to a 24 percent year-over-year increase in sales. Concerning some analysts and investors is Google’s TAC, or traffic acquisition costs. Those continue to grow and gobble up a larger percentage of advertising revenues as Google shifts more of its business to so-called programmatic advertising and mobile search ads, which inherently have … [Read more...] about Alphabet profit miss sends stock down, but Google ad and cloud sales remain strong
Microsoft’s cloud bet continues to pay off in latest earnings
Microsoft posted its second quarter of its 2018 financial results today, reporting revenue of $28.9 billion and net income of $7.5 billion. Revenue has jumped 12 percent year-over-year during the holiday quarter, and the trend of Microsoft’s success with the cloud has continued. This time around, Azure revenue has increased by a massive 98 percent. Surface revenue is up just 1 percent, probably due to the only new Surface device in the quarter being the Surface Book 2 that launched in mid November. Microsoft refreshed its Surface Pro and introduced a new Surface Laptop earlier in 2017, but it’s still surprising to see these haven’t produced big gains to Surface revenue over the crucial holiday period. Windows OEM revenue is up 4 percent year-over-year, but Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue decreased 4 percent due to what Microsoft describes as a “large deal in the prior year.” The PC market recently achieved its first holiday quarter … [Read more...] about Microsoft’s cloud bet continues to pay off in latest earnings
Google Deploys TPU To Google Cloud Service
Google announced that it has released the Cloud TPU onto the Google Cloud Platform. The deployment is still in beta, but customers of Google’s cloud computing service can now use the company’s dedicated AI processing hardware for their own machine learning developments.TensorFlow framework, an open-source software library of high-level APIs that allow program workloads to be easily split across one or hundreds of TPUs. According to Google, TensorFlow implementations of popular machine learning algorithms can be dramatically sped up without code changes simply by allocating more TPUs towards them. What’s more, Google’s TPUs are available for virtual machine access. This means customers can have exclusive use of a TPU for real-time development, instead of only being able to submit jobs to a TPU compute farm.its “Cloud” TPU in mid 2017. The impetus behind what the company calls its tensor processing unit was the unsuitability of conventional CPUs for … [Read more...] about Google Deploys TPU To Google Cloud Service
Google ‘Yeti’ revives rumor of cloud-gaming entry, reportedly
Will Google be putting its big foot into cloud gaming? That's the question raised by a story in The Information that cites "people with knowledge of the project." It also says that it was intended to launch in time for the 2017 holiday shopping season, though no reasons are given why it never materialized.There aren't many details, such as when or how much, or even what type of games it will run, but both a console and a controller have been mentioned. It also has reportedly been tested running off a Chromecast streaming stick.Twice before we've seen the giant lose high-profile gaming acquisitions -- or possibly let them purposefully slip by -- to other megacorps. At Google I/O in June 2012, it demoed the Gaikai cloud-gaming service streaming gameplay through Chrome; only a few weeks later Sony snatched it up for its PlayStation. Then in August of 2016, Amazon swooped in to buy gameplay streaming service Twitch (to incorporate with its Lumberyard game-development environment), which … [Read more...] about Google ‘Yeti’ revives rumor of cloud-gaming entry, reportedly