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Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

When Microsoft introduced the Cortana digital personal assistant last year at the company’s Build developer conference, the company already left hints of its future ambitions for the technology. Cortana was built largely on Microsoft’s Bing service, and the Cortana team indicated those services would eventually be accessible to Web and application developers. As it turns out, eventually is now. Though the most important elements are only available in a private preview, many of the machine learning capabilities behind Cortana have been released under Project Oxford, the joint effort between Microsoft Research and the Bing and Azure teams announced at Build in April. And at the conference, Ars got to dive deep on the components of Project Oxford with Ryan Gaglon, the senior program manager at Microsoft Technology and Research shepherding the project to market. The APIs make it possible to add image and speech processing to just about any application, often by using just a single Web request. “They’re all finished machine learning services in the sense that developers don’t have to create any model for them in Azure,” Gaglon told Ars. “They’re very modular.” All of the services are exposed as representational state transfer (REST) Web services based on HTTP “verbs” (such as GET, PUT, and POST), and they require an Azure API subscription key. To boot, all the API requests and responses are encrypted via HTTPS to protect their content. Read 38 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cortana for all: Microsoft’s plan to put voice recognition behind anything

Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Given enough time and attention from the development community, it’s practically inevitable that any video game console can and will be emulatable on a general-use computer. Hardware makers, always wary of the piracy implications of such a development, may hope that doesn’t happen until many years after that console ceases to be commercially viable. Unfortunately for Nintendo, that seems unlikely in the case of the 3DS. The Citra emulation project has been in the works for at least a year , but developers reached a breakthrough last December when they managed to load Ocarina of Time 3D for the first time. That title has now been shown running at nearly full speed on Citra with the help of an OpenGL renderer (though some visual artifacts still exist). Since then, compatibility work has continued on a seemingly game-by-game basis.  Virtual Console titles were shown off in February, and just this week team members posted evidence of Animal Crossing New Leaf , Super Monkey Ball 3D , and even the system’s home menu  running through emulation. There are a few homebrew demos available as well, including emulators for other systems running inside of the 3DS emulator and the kind of Minecraft port that’s seemingly required for all emulation projects these days. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Don’t look now, but 3DS emulation is becoming a thing

Nvidia turns on 1080p 60 FPS streaming for its Grid cloud gaming service

Starting today, Nvidia has enabled 1080p 60 FPS streaming from its Grid cloud gaming service . To use the new mode, you need to be part of the public Shield Hub beta group , have a Shield device, and at least a 30Mbps connection to the Internet. For the moment, around 35 Grid games support 1080p60 streaming, with Nvidia promising that rest (another 14 at the moment) will get a resolution bump after a server-side hardware refresh. Nvidia won’t say what that hardware refresh entails, but did confirm that its servers would be using the same Kepler-based Grid GPUs. Grid streaming remains free until June 30, after which Nvidia will offer a paid-for premium tier in addition to the free service. While Nvidia still won’t spill the beans on exactly what the premium tier gets you, or how much it’ll cost, we can confirm that 1080p streaming will not require a premium subscription. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Nvidia turns on 1080p 60 FPS streaming for its Grid cloud gaming service

With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

We often talk about the lost magic of owning a physical thing , whether that’s books, CDs, or the wondrous black slab of plastic that is the vinyl record. Holding that object in your hand, flicking through its dog-eared pages and admiring its intricately crafted artwork, imparts a sense of ownership that you just can’t replicate with a Kindle or a convenient subscription to Spotify. The trouble is, making physical objects is hard , not to mention expensive. That’s especially true of the vinyl record, where pressing plants aren’t exactly ten a penny. And yet, despite the high cost of manufacturing and end price to the consumer, vinyl sales are very much on the up. According to Nielsen , vinyl album sales in the US have grown an impressive 260 percent since 2009, reaching 9.2 million units last year, while in the UK sales reached a 20-year high of 1.29 million in 2014 . Of course, these numbers are but a tiny fraction of music sales as a whole, but—regardless of whether it’s customers chasing that creamy analogue sound, or there are just a lot more hipsters around these days—there’s a demand to be satisfied. But if you’re not a big record label with deep pockets, getting the capital together to produce a run of vinyl is tricky. Even if you do raise the cash, how do you decide how many to make? Too few and people are left wanting; too many and you’re left with stock you can’t sell. It’s a problem that the recently launched Qrates  is hoping to solve. Qrates is an intriguing mix of the old and the new, consisting of a vinyl pressing service, a crowdfunding system, and a digital store all rolled into one. Using the site’s online tool, you can upload your music, design the label and sleeve, choose your preferred playing speed (33 or 45), the weight and colour of the actual record, and how many you’d like (there’s currently a nice low minimum order of 100). Qrates gives you an estimated cost, and then works with a regional pressing plant to fulfil your order. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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With vinyl sales on the rise, this startup lets anyone press their own LP

AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint

With a month left before net neutrality complaints can be filed to the Federal Communications Commission, Internet service providers are continuing to sign agreements to prevent network congestion and a potential scolding from regulators. The latest agreement was announced today between AT&T and Level 3 , an Internet backbone operator that has accused broadband providers like AT&T of not upgrading interconnection points, allowing Internet performance for consumers to be degraded. A month ago, Level 3 told National Journal  that it was “evaluating our options” and “still experiencing interconnection point congestion as some large consumer ISPs continue to attempt to leverage control over access to their users to extract arbitrary tolls.” While the FCC’s net neutrality order  bans paid prioritization of traffic after it enters providers’ networks, it doesn’t ban payments for interconnection, which happens at the edges of the network. However, the FCC set up a complaint process so it can decide whether particular demands are unreasonable and prod companies into providing enough capacity to prevent Internet slowdowns. Complaints can be filed beginning June 12. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T to fix Internet congestion before it can be hit with complaint

In rare move, Silicon Valley county gov’t kills stingray acquisition

The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors has halted a plan to approve the purchase of a cell-site simulator , better known as a stingray. The secretive surveillance devices can be used to determine a phone’s location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. During the act of locating a phone, stingrays also sweep up information about nearby phones—not just the target phone. Earlier this year, Ars reported on how the FBI is actively trying to “prevent disclosure” of how these devices are used in local jurisdictions across America. The move, happening in one of the primary counties in Silicon Valley, marks an unusual occasion that a local government has turned away from federal funds that would be used to acquire such a device. The device was approved initially during a February 24, 2015 meeting, despite a testy exchange between the Santa Clara Sheriff’s Office and Supervisor Joe Simitian, a former state senator with a penchant for an interest in privacy issues. Simitian’s office didn’t immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In rare move, Silicon Valley county gov’t kills stingray acquisition

Comcast to pay you $20 each time a technician is late for an appointment [Updated]

UPDATE : After publication, we learned Comcast has been making the $20 guarantee for more than two years  before this week’s announcement. The other parts of the announcement, including the hiring boost, store renovations, and changes to technology and training, appear to be new. Comcast is once again pledging to overhaul its legendarily bad customer service, hiring more than 5,500 new customer service employees and making “major investments in technology and training,” the company announced yesterday . Part of the hiring boost will add “hundreds of additional technicians across the country,” with a goal to always be on time for customer appointments by Q3 2015, sometime between July and August. To prove how serious it is, Comcast is making a new promise: “If a technician doesn’t arrive on time for an appointment, Comcast will automatically credit the customer $20,” the cable company said. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Comcast to pay you $20 each time a technician is late for an appointment [Updated]

AT&T finally ramps down throttling of unlimited LTE customers

AT&T’s long-standing policy of throttling LTE service for unlimited data customers has finally been changed so that customers are throttled only when they connect to congested cell towers. Until now, AT&T customers who used 5GB of data in a single monthly billing period were throttled for the rest of the month at all times, receiving barely usable service, despite paying for “unlimited” data. AT&T is facing a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission over the practice and has denied wrongdoing , but it promised that it would change the policy to make it more lenient before the end of 2015. AT&T did not make any official announcement of the change, but it is now apparent in the policy detailed on its website : Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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AT&T finally ramps down throttling of unlimited LTE customers

Chrome 42 Launches With Push Notifications

An anonymous reader writes: Google today launched Chrome 42 for Windows, Mac, and Linux with new developer tools. Chrome 42 offers two new APIs (Push API and Notifications API) that together allow sites to send notifications to their users even after the given page is closed. While this can be quite an intrusive feature for a browser, Google promises the users have to first grant explicit permission before they receive such a message. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Chrome 42 Launches With Push Notifications