It’s a very spooky day today, zombies everywhere, bats flapping around… It must be october 31st, Halloween! Man, can you imagine if it were also friday the 13th? That’d be truly scary. Here at Mojang, we celebrate halloween in style: with snapshots! And this weeks snapshot is another doozy! New cats! New blocks! Lots of new blocks! Keeping in the spooky theme of the day, though, we’ve not added any new functionality to the new blocks contained within this snapshot. How fiendish of the developers! What could they possibly be for? We may never find out… At least not today.

A full summary of the content available in this snapshot can be found in the changelog on Minecraft.net, the following is a short summary:

• Split cats and ocelots to their own creatures and updated cats with new features!
• Added lots of new blocks!
• You can now right click on signs with dyes to change the text color
• Lots of performance improvements, especially to client stuttering!
• Added “Programmer Art” in the resource pack menu: it’s the old textures, easy to use!

CAT AND OCELOT SPLIT

• Stray cats can be tamed
• Tamed cats can give lovely (or less lovely) morning gifts to their owners
• Ocelots can’t be tamed, but they might start trusting you if you feed them with fish
• Phantoms are terribly scared of cats – how convenient!
• Cat collars can now be dyed
• Added several new cat skins!

NEW BLOCKS

Even more! Can you believe it?!

All of these blocks currently have no functionality and are only available in the creative inventory. This will change really soon, we just wanted to get the actual blocks themselves out there as soon as we could! They might also change visually, too!

• Added Barrel
• Added Smoker
• Added Blast Furnace
• Added Cartography Table
• Added Fletching Table
• Added Grindstone
• Added Lectern
• Added Smithing Table
• Added Stonecutter
• Added Bell

To get snapshots, open your launcher and go to the “launch options” tab. Check the box saying “Enable snapshots” and save. To switch between the snapshot and normal version, you can find a new dropdown menu next to the “Play” button. Back up your world first or run the game on in a different folder (In the “launch options” page).

Please report any and all bugs you find in Minecraft to bugs.mojang.com.

Snapshots can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds. 

Share your thoughts on how 1.14 is shaping up in the comments below!

She has a staggering 660 million online users. And, while they know she’s not real, many prize her as a dear friend, even a trusted confidante. Sometimes the line between fact and fantasy blurs. She gets love letters and gifts. And not too long ago, a group of fans asked her out to dinner and even ordered an extra meal – just in case she showed up.

She is Xiaoice – Microsoft’s chatbot phenomenon that has enthralled digital audiences across the world’s most populous nation for the past four years.

Her popularity is such that she ranks among China’s most admired celebrities. And, her talents appear to have no bounds: She is a poet, a painter, a TV presenter, a news pundit, and a lot more.

Sometimes sweet, sometimes sassy and always streetwise, this virtual teenager has her own opinions and steadfastly acts like no other bot. She doesn’t try to answer every question posed by a user. And, she’s loathed to follow their commands. Instead, her conversations with her often adoring users are peppered with wry remarks, jokes, empathic advice on life and love, and a few simple words of encouragement.

Herein lies the secret of her success: She is learning, with increasing success, to relate and interact with humans through nuance, social skills, and, importantly, emotions.

But that’s just part of the story. “Xiaoice the chatbot” is just a small part a massive and multi-dimensional artificial intelligence (AI) framework, which continuously uses deep learning techniques to soak up the types of data that build up her emotional intelligence (EQ). She is using her interactions with humans to acquire human social skills, behavior, and knowhow. In other words, she is learning to be more like “us” every day.

“This is what we call an Empathic Computing Framework,” explains Di Li, Microsoft’s general manager for Xiaoice in Microsoft’s Software and Technology Center of Asia. “To create an AI framework, you need to choose EQ or IQ, or EQ plus IQ”.

“And, if you want to choose EQ plus IQ, you must choose which one to do first. When we started with Xiaoice, we chose to do the EQ first and the IQ later.”

Every interaction a chatbot has with a human produces data. AI systems use this data to build that bot’s capabilities. The more data a machine has, the more it learns and the more it can do.

When they started, Di Li and his team in China did what other chatbot designers were not doing. When they launched the Xiaoice project, they deliberately discarded data that was based on user requests for facts and figures or commands to do simple tasks. Instead, they homed in on data that would help build a “personality” that would attract and engage users.

“Xiaoice wasn’t initially built to tell you how high the Himalayas are or to turn your house lights on. In the beginning, some users didn’t like that. But we soon found that many others stayed around and started treating her like a social entity.”

”With her attempts to interact, they made emotional connections. This kind of data is very valuable for us. They treat Xiaoice as if she were human, like a friend, which was a goal.”

From there she has never looked back. Almost every day, her legions of fans and friends across China send her cards and gifts – so much so that the team have set aside a whole office at their Beijing lab to display many of these tokens of affection and even declarations of “love”.

Originally, her character was to be that of a 16-year-old. But her creators raised that to 18 once her capabilities increased and she started taking on new “jobs”. Since then, her fans have voted that she stay 18 forever. “She won’t grow older. Eighteen is the age many of us want to be,” explains Di Li.

The depth of feeling generated by Xiaoice across her fan base is surprising. Social media shows that people seek her advice on all sorts of personal issues. “They tell her about their family, their job, their health, their boyfriends or girlfriends,” says Di Li. “It can get very personal.”

Some users can spend hours talking with Xiaoice. Others just follow their imaginations. Recently, a group of five students once went to a restaurant and ordered for six in the hope that Xiaoice would come too.

But there is a serious side to this. Microsoft’s research and work on the Xiaoice project has generated serious and important progress on a much wider front that points to where we’re are heading with computing. Xiaoice as “a friend chatbot,” represents is just a small slither of what the AI framework is achieving. Its base of knowledge and skill is also increasing across multiple sectors and tasks.

We were just as sceptical as you guys were when we first heard about the existence of Command & Conquer: Rivals. It IS a pretty cynical use of a much loved franchise that hasn’t had a decent try in years, after all.

At the same time, looking at what we’ve seen so far (including Dan’s hands-on time with the game at E3), I still think there’s room for Rivals to surprise us all. Plenty of people who’ve actually played the game have suggested that it’s actually pretty decent. Behind the abused license seem to lurk a paced, deep tactics game that just wants to be given a chance.

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Which you can do come December 4th, when the game releases worldwide on both iOS and Android devices.

As EA themselves point out, this isn’t a “drop-and-watch” game like other competitive strategy tiles on mobile. You do have control of your units through all stages of a match. EA are also pretty serious about making this a major mobile title for them, as indicated by their yearly earnings report:

It will also be our next official EA competitive gaming franchise, with a complete ecosystem beginning to roll out in Q4, including community tournaments and a championship pro scene. This is a fast-paced, head-to-head strategy game that is easy to play, a lot of fun, and perfect for competitive play. We’ve had great engagement and feedback in our soft-launch testing, and strong interest from competitive players. This is our first entry into mobile esports, and we’re excited for Command & Conquer: Rivals to expand our global audience of players and spectators.

What is currently unknown, and what we’ll be looking closely at, is the monetisation systems. EA have a bad reputation in this space, and I doubt their overall strategy will shift dramatically for Rivals, but if we’re lucky, it may be just enough to make it worth-while. The influences of games like Fortnite also can’t be ignored, which subsist largely on cosmetic DLC – proof, of sorts, that you don’t need to resort to pay-to-win to engage your player base.

You can go to the official website if you want to try and get in on the pre-release activity on iOS, and on Android you can just register directly on the Google Play store.

Command & Conquer Rivals will release world-wide on iOS and Android December 4th, 2018.

The Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) All Member Meeting takes place bi-annually and brings the AGL community together to learn about the latest developments, share best practices and collaborate to drive rapid innovation across the industry.

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Skype is designed to keep you connected to the people who matter the most and help you do the work you need to do. We take your feedback very seriously and are grateful to our active accessibility community who point us to areas of improvement to live up to our vision. Building on the work we announced earlier this year, we’ve been listening to your feedback and have continued to work to make the latest version of Skype (version 8.0) even more accessible.

Based off your suggestion to make the transition to the new version easier, we created the Accessibility support for Skype page with details on how to easily use a screen reader to move from Skype version 6 or 7 to Skype version 8.0. The page also demonstrates keyboard shortcuts for Skype version 8.0, as well as how to complete key scenarios in Skype with a screen reader, including chat, adding expressions, and navigating a profile.

In addition, since our last update on accessibility, we made a few more improvements to the latest version of Skype, including:

• Focus assist, which announces when you receive an incoming call for keyboard only and screen reader users.
• Screen reader announcements from users in the active call list.
• Navigational focus announcements within the contact list and settings to improve flow.
• Announcing the name, content, and actions of a pop up dialog.
• New message announcements when users are in another chat.
• Smoother navigation that takes a more natural left-to-right and top-to-bottom path.
• Displaying additional information when sending and receiving messages. For example, Skype now announces when messages are sent and when messages you attempt to send have failed.

We are committed to continually improving our software and services to meet the needs of all our customers. Please share your thoughts and ideas via the Microsoft Accessibility UserVoice or contact the Disability Answer Desk for real-time support via phone, chat, or ASL videophone—your feedback is always appreciated. If you are an early adopter—and comfortable with early preview releases—please consider joining the Skype Insider community.

By AppleInsider Staff
Wednesday, October 31, 2018, 09:06 pm PT (12:06 am ET)

As this year’s cutting edge iPhone XS and XR handsets ship to rave reviews, Apple quietly declared its six-year-old iPhone 5 — itself once considered the world’s most advanced smartphone — obsolete.

The iPhone 5 was added to Apple’s “vintage and obsolete” product list on Tuesday, noting the hardware is now considered vintage in the United States and obsolete in the rest of the world. Devices that fall into the “vintage” category, defined as products in production for more than five years but less than seven, are excluded from ongoing repair support except in regions where local laws preclude such prohibitions.

Mac Otakara noted the addition to Apple’s product support document on Wednesday.

Apple debuted iPhone 5 at a special media event in 2012. The 4-inch handset was the first of Apple’s smartphones to move away from the 3.5-inch screen size that dictated iPhone’s form factor for five device generations. Apple has since embraced a looser stance on designs with larger screens, a trend toward “phablets” that culminated in this year’s 6.5-inch iPhone XS Max.

Along with a larger Retina display, iPhone 5 introduced a number of technologies, some of which, like the proprietary Lightning port, are still in use today. The handset was Apple’s first to support 4G LTE connectivity and its last to sport a 32-bit A-series chip. Apple cut off iOS support for iPhone 5, and other legacy devices with 32-bit processors, when it released iOS 11 last year.

Apple routinely obsoletes legacy devices as new hardware versions take their place.

Open Source Forum is an invitation only event (request an invitation required – deadline is Nov. 23, 23:59, JST) that will be held in Japan annually. The event is designed to advance the open source industry in Japan by bringing the hottest open source technology topics and people together to collaborate.

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This October, we’re excited to announce several new features at Bing.

Multi-perspectives on ballot initiatives

With the midterm election a week away, we want to make it as easy as possible to find the information you are looking for about measures on the ballot.  

 

We try hard to make well-educated decisions when we vote, but we live in a world overloaded with information. With Bing’s multi-perspective answer, we hope to help voters understand the full range of arguments for or against key propositions by clearly presenting and summarizing the main arguments on each side.

For example, Colorado voters can stay up to date on Proposition Y (redistricting limitations), or Proposition 111 (payday lending practices) while voters in Florida can view for and against arguments for Amendment 9 (offshore drilling) and Amendment 4 (felons’ voting rights).

Covering more than 75 measures nationwide, Bing gives voters the information they are looking for before heading to the polls on November 6.

A new way to view and browse images

We’ve updated the UX of the image detail page on Bing desktop to more easily highlight new and relevant information about images you click on. For example, if you’re searching for images of food, Bing will automatically find recipes associated with that image, presenting the information in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Looking for outfits or costumes? Bing will help you find related product pages where you can purchase the item you are looking for. The intention behind these changes it to make it easier than ever to find relevant information and inspiration for your image-based searches. 

We’ve also extended these UX changes to our new visual search results page, where you can search using an image as an input. Whether you’ve uploaded an image yourself or are browsing the web, Bing’s object detection features can help you more easily zoom in on particular parts of the image which you might want to search, learn more about, or buy. 

NFL expanded 

With the NFL season in full swing, we’ve come up with even more ways for football fans to stay on top of their game. No matter what information you’re looking for, Bing presents a comprehensive picture of each game with stats, schedules, viewing information, injury reports, news, and even predictions.

Additionally, Bing’s pre-game insights provide specialized notes that guide both new and experienced football fans on the history of the teams and the matchup, as well as what to watch for in the current showdown. 

Word of the day

Finally, as we’re approaching the new year—we want to give everyone a fun and easy opportunity to expand their vocabulary. Bing’s new word of the day is simple way to expose yourself to new words and concepts. Learn the featured word’s meaning, pronunciation, and see the word in context. You can also navigate through the words for the past week to catch up on words you may have missed. 

Tomorrow’s word? That’s a surprise! 

 

We value your feedback

As always, we value your perspective, and one of the best ways for you to provide it is via the Bing Insider Program, which gives our users the opportunity to provide feedback to Bing engineers and partner teams via monthly calls, Insider events, interactive feedback sessions, and more.

Please register here to become a Bing Insider. Even if you don’t join today, the website is full of great content featuring our Insiders as well as new Bing features. We hope you enjoy the new site and come back often.