Lovers of Google's Inbox will be disappointed to learn that the company is pulling the pin and shutting it down in six months' time. Some of Inbox's features have already made their way into the regular Gmail service, while others, it seems, will be gone forever. When Inbox first launched in 2014, we didn't really know what to do with it. But after using it for a short time, many of us were sold . Its ability to intelligently bundle emails into useful categories, moving the most important emails to the top of the list instead of the most recent, was a gift from heaven for folk like tech writers and others who get bombarded with piles of messages daily. Using intelligence from Google Now, it would handily stick all your flight and hotel bookings in a separate folder, and place all your online shopping receipts and tracking emails in their own spot. You could then make them all disappear at the click of the "done" tick, getting them out of ...
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There are many compelling reasons to use open source software, where the code behind an app is free for anyone to view or contribute to. There's the obvious benefit that it's free to use. It's arguably more secure (thanks to the many eyes on the source code). It's built solely for the benefit of users. And it may have ethical appeal over an app built by, say, a multinational corporation. This in mind, here are 10 of the best open source alternatives to the software we use on our computers every day. 1. Web browser: Firefox Developed by the Mozilla Foundation, the Firefox web browser has been a mainstay of web users since its release in 2002. Firefox puts privacy front and center. Its Private Browsing mode not only deletes passwords and cookies after a browsing session, it also detects and blocks tracking software now prevalent on the web. It's also highly customizable thanks to myriad extensi...
"The values adopted to build today's AI systems will be reflected in the decisions those systems make for a decade or more," says IBM. Whether it's rating your credit history, offering you a job or even granting your parole, organizations are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to automate that decision making. Yet only recently we looked at how facial recognition systems can amplify rather than remove human bias , and that's just one example of an area of increasing concern: AI algorithms using imperfect data and flawed assumptions, inheriting the biases and prejudices of the humans behind them. With its newly-announced AI Fairness 360 toolkit, IBM is throwing down the gauntlet. The toolkit is a sort of Swiss Army knife of algorithms, available to anyone, designed to eliminate that bias. "This toolbox has multiple components," IBM Research AI's Kush R. Varshney tells New Atlas. "The first is how to check fo...
If you're a serious PC gamer, perhaps you get frustrated with trying to control all your onscreen actions via the keyboard and mouse. Well, that's why a California-based team of entrepreneurs created Tilted. It gets your head in on the act. Tilted is a small square device that the user sticks on top of their gaming headset via an included adhesive-backed magnetic pad. Utilizing an integrated gyroscopic sensor, it proceeds to detect their head gestures as they play. Via an interface on their PC, users can initially assign up to eight keyboard commands to specific movements such as tilting the head in various directions, or moving it up and down. The device wirelessly transmits the commands to the computer in two milliseconds. Tilted is claimed to be compatible with 99 percent of all PC game titles, and can additionally be used with non-gaming software – to that end, it could also come in handy for disabled computer users. It automat...
At its latest major hardware event, Microsoft has announced a host of product refreshes. We've got the Surface Pro 6, the Surface Laptop 2, the all-in-one Surface Studio 2, and even some brand new Surface Headphones. Oh, and the Windows 10 October 2018 update is out now, too. That's a lot of new devices to weigh up but what you essentially need to know is that all Microsoft's Surfaces, with the exception of the high-end Surface Book, are now more powerful and better than ever before. The Surface Pro 6 is Microsoft's latest tablet/laptop hybrid device, sticking with the same 12.3-inch display but updated with the newest 8th-generation Intel CPUs, and available with up to 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of SSD storage – so a formidable computer, if you take the specs all the way up. Oh, and it's now available in matte black too. Prices for the Surface Pro 6 start at US$899 for the Intel Core i5 model, and it g...