Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-12-2018, 01:18 AM - Forum: Minecraft
- No Replies
Minecraft 1.13 Pre-Release 7
We’re on the final stretch for 1.13 and hope to have it released by the end of July. If you’re experiencing any issues with world conversion (opening a 1.12.2 world in 1.13-pre6), please let us know by reporting it on the Minecraft issue tracker.
A full changelog for this Pre-Release can be found on Minecraft.net.
Fixed outstanding issues with the new improved fonts
MC-132833 – Opening 1.5.2 world on 1.12.2 works perfectly but bed is transparent.
MC-132974 – Converting 1.12 world to 1.13 spams Chunk file at x,y is missing level data, skipping
MC-132977 – Esc key results in an older world being converted to a newer version during ‘Play’ menu sequence
MC-133063 – When trying to connect to an unreachable server Minecraft crashes instead of showing error message
MC-133136 – Crash when launching the game with LWJGL allocation debugging enabled
MC-133139 – The image write callback is never freed, leaking small amounts of memory for each screenshot
MC-133140 – The GL debug message callbacks are never freed, causing memory leak warnings
To get pre-releases, 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.
Pre-releases can corrupt your world, please backup and/or run them in a different folder from your main worlds.
Share your thoughts on how 1.13 is shaping up in the comments below!
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-11-2018, 07:31 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
WIRED: ‘How artificial intelligence could prevent natural disasters’
On May 27, a deluge dumped more than 6 inches of rain in less than three hours on Ellicott City, Maryland, killing one person and transforming Main Street into what looked like Class V river rapids, with cars tossed about like rubber ducks. The National Weather Service put the probability of such a storm at once in 1,000 years. Yet, “it’s the second time it’s happened in the last three years,” says Jeff Allenby, director of conservation technology for Chesapeake Conservancy, an environmental group.
Floods are nothing new in Ellicott City, located where two tributaries join the Patapsco River. But Allenby says the floods are getting worse, as development covers what used to be the “natural sponge of a forest” with paved surfaces, rooftops, and lawns. Just days before the May 27 flood, the US Department of Homeland Security selected Ellicott City—on the basis of its 2016 flood—for a pilot program to deliver better flood warnings to residents via automated sensors.
Recently, Allenby developed another tool to help predict, plan, and prepare for future floods: a first-of-its-kind, high-resolution map showing what’s on the ground—buildings, pavement, trees, lawns—across 100,000 square miles from upstate New York to southern Virginia that drain into Chesapeake Bay. The map, generated from aerial imagery with the help of artificial intelligence, shows objects as small as 3 feet square, roughly 1,000 times more precise than the maps that flood planners previously used. To understand the difference, imagine trying to identify an Uber driver on a crowded city street using a map that can only display objects the size of a Walmart.
Creating the map consumed a year and cost $3.5 million, with help from Microsoft and the University of Vermont. Allenby’s team pored over aerial imagery, road maps, and zoning charts to establish rules, classify objects, and scrub errors. “As soon as we finished the first data set,” Allenby says, “everyone started asking ‘when are you going to do it again?’” to keep the map fresh.
Enter AI. Microsoft helped Allenby’s team train its AI for Earth algorithms to identify objects on its own. Even with a robust data set, training the algorithms wasn’t easy. The effort required regular “pixel peeping”—manually zooming in on objects to verify and amend the automated results. With each pass, the algorithm improved its ability to recognize waterways, trees, fields, roads, and buildings. As relevant new data become available, Chesapeake Conservancy plans to use its AI to refresh the map more frequently and easily than the initial labor-intensive multi-million dollar effort.
Now, Microsoft is making the tool available more widely. For $42, anyone can run 200 million aerial images through Microsoft’s AI for Earth platform and generate a high-resolution land-cover map of the entire US in 10 minutes. The results won’t be as precise in other parts of the country where the algorithm has not been trained on local conditions—a redwood tree or saguaro cactus looks nothing like a willow oak.
A map of land use around Ellicott City, Maryland, built with the help of artificial intelligence (left) offers far more detail than its predecessor (right).
Chesapeake Conservancy
To a society obsessed with location and mapping services—where the physical world unfolds in the digital every day—the accomplishment may not seem groundbreaking. Until recently, though, neither the high-resolution data nor the AI smarts existed to make such maps cost-effective for environmental purposes, especially for nonprofit conservation organizations. With Microsoft’s offer, AI on a planetary scale is about to become a commodity.
Detailed, up-to-date information is paramount when it comes to designing stormwater management systems, Allenby says. “Looking at these systems with the power of AI can start to show when a watershed” is more likely to flood, he says. The Center for Watershed Protection, a nonprofit based in Ellicott City, reported in a 2001 study that when 10 percent of natural land gets developed, stream health declines and it begins to lose its ability to manage runoff. At 20 percent, runoff doubles, compared with undeveloped land. Allenby notes that paved surfaces and rooftops in Ellicott City reached 19 percent in recent years.
Allenby says the more detailed map will enable planners to keep up with land-use changes and plan drainage systems that can accommodate more water. Eventually, the map will offer “live dashboards” and automated alerts to serve as a warning system when new development threatens to overwhelm stormwater management capacity. The Urban Forestry Administration in Washington, DC, has used the new map to determine where to plant trees by searching the district for areas without tree cover where standing water accumulates. Earlier this year, Chesapeake Conservancy began working with conservation groups in Iowa and Arizona to develop training sets for the algorithms specific to those landscapes.
The combination of high-resolution imaging and sensor technologies, AI, and cloud computing is giving conservationists deeper insight into the health of the planet. The result is a near-real-time readout of Earth’s vital signs, firing off alerts and alarms whenever the ailing patient takes a turn for the worse.
Others are applying these techniques around the world. Global Forest Watch (GFW), a conservation project established by World Resources Institute, began offering monthly and weekly deforestation alerts in 2016, powered by AI algorithms developed by the University of Maryland.1 The algorithms analyze satellite imagery as it’s refreshed to detect “patterns that may indicate impending deforestation,” according to the organization’s website. Using GFW’s mobile app, Forest Watcher, volunteers and forest rangers take to the trees to verify the automated alerts in places like the Leuser Ecosystem in Indonesia, which calls itself “the last place on Earth where orangutans, rhinos, elephants and tigers are found together in the wild.”
The new conservation formula is also spilling into the oceans. On June 4, Paul Allen Philanthropies revealed a partnership with the Carnegie Institution of Science, the University of Queensland, the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, and the private satellite company Planet to map all of the world’s coral reefs by 2020. As Andrew Zolli, a Planet vice president, explains: For the first time in history, “new tools are up to the [planetary] level of the problem.”
By the end of 2017, Planet deployed nearly 200 satellites, forming a necklace around the globe that images the entire Earth every day down to 3-meter resolution. That’s trillions of pixels raining down daily, which could never be transformed into useful maps without AI algorithms trained to interpret them. The partnership leverages the Carnegie Institution’s computer-vision tools and the University of Queensland’s data on local conditions, including coral, algae, sand, and rocks.
“Today, we have no idea of the geography, rate, and frequency of global bleaching events,” explains Greg Asner, a scientist at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology. Based on what is known, scientists project that more than 90 percent of the world’s reefs, which sustain 25 percent of marine life, will be extinct by 2050. Lauren Kickham, impact director for Paul Allen Philanthropies, expects the partnership will bring the world’s coral crisis into clear view and enable scientists to track their health on a daily basis.
In a separate coral reef project, also being conducted with Planet and the Carnegie Institution, The Nature Conservancy is leveraging Carnegie’s computer vision AI to develop a high-resolution map of the shallow waters of the Caribbean basin. “By learning how these systems live and how they adapt, maybe not our generation, but maybe the next will be able to bring them back,” says Luis Solorzano, The Nature Conservancy’s Caribbean Coral Reef project lead.
Mapping services are hardly new to conservation. Geographic Information Systems have been a staple in the conservation toolkit for years, providing interactive maps to facilitate environmental monitoring, regulatory enforcement, and preservation planning. But, mapping services are only as good as the underlying data, which can be expensive to acquire and maintain. As a result, many conservationists resort to what’s freely available, like the 30-meter-resolution images supplied by the United States Geological Survey.
Ellicott City and the Chesapeake watershed demonstrate the challenges of responding to a changing climate and the impacts of human activity. Since the 1950s, the bay’s oyster reefs have declined by more than 80 percent. Biologists discovered one of the planet’s first marine dead zones in Chesapeake Bay in the 1970s. Blue crab populations plunged in the 1990s. The sea level has risen more than a foot since 1895, and, according to a 2017 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report, may rise as much as 6 feet by the end of this century.
Allenby joined the Chesapeake Conservancy in 2012 when technology companies provided a grant to explore the ways in which technology could help inform conservation. Allenby sought ways to deploy technology to help land managers, like those in Ellicott City, improve upon the dated 30-meter-resolution images that FEMA also uses for flood planning and preparation.
In 2015, Allenby connected with the University of Vermont—nationally recognized experts in generating county-level high-resolution land-cover maps—seeking a partner on a bigger project. They secured funding from a consortium of state and local governments, and nonprofit groups in 2016. The year-long effort involved integrating data from such disparate sources as aerial imagery, road maps, and zoning charts. As the data set came together, a Conservancy board member introduced Allenby to Microsoft, which was eager to demonstrate how its AI and cloud computing could be leveraged to support conservation.
“It’s been the frustration of my life to see what we’re capable of, yet how far behind we are in understanding basic information about the health of our planet,” says Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s chief environmental scientist, who oversees AI for Earth. “And to see that those individuals on the front line solving society’s problems, like environmental sustainability, are often in organizations with the least resources to take advantage of the technologies that are being put out there.”
The ultimate question, however, is whether the diagnoses offered by these AI-powered land-cover maps will arrive in time to help cure the problems caused by man.
1 CORRECTION, July 11, 1:10PM: Deforestation alerts from Global Forest Watch are powered by algorithms developed by the University of Maryland. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said the algorithms were developed by Orbital Insight.
In recent releases of Visual Studio 2017, there has been a great focus on improving the experience of working with Razor files (*.cshtml). The improvements were aimed at addressing the most pressing customer-facing issues and included changes from formatting and IntelliSense to general performance and reliability. Now that the fixes and enhancements have been publicly available for a few months, we hope you’ve been having a much-improved experience with the Razor editor.
Please let us know how we’re doing by taking a short, two-minute survey. Also, feel free to leave relevant feedback in the comments section below.
If you haven’t already downloaded the latest version, update your copy of Visual Studio 2017 through the Visual Studio Installer, or follow the links to download the installer from the Visual Studio website.
We know that despite our improvements, Razor editing isn’t perfect yet, so if you run into issues please file a report using the Visual Studio feedback tool. We review this feedback frequently and will continue to fix issues that are identified.
To launch the feedback tool, choose “Report a Problem…” under the Help->Send Feedback menu. When filing a report, please provide as much of your Razor file as you can share, with a description of what happened versus what you expected. (Sample code and screenshots are very helpful!)
Thanks for your interest in Web Development in Visual Studio. Happy coding!
Justin Clareburt, Senior Program Manager, Visual Studio
Justin Clareburt is the Web Tools PM on the Visual Studio team. He has over 20 years of Software Engineering experience and brings to the team his expert knowledge of IDEs and a passion for creating the ultimate development experience.
Motorsport Manager Mobile 3 is a thing; coming this summer
By Joe Robinson11 Jul 2018
Playsport Games have announced that they’re working on a third entry in their Motorsport Manager Mobile series. Better yet, we’ll be able to get our hands on it pretty soon!
The developers have been touting the following new features going into MM Mobile 3:
GT AND ENDURANCE RACING
With 6 new championships, MM Mobile 3 is bigger and better than ever before. GT races bring action-packed, wheel-to-wheel action, while Endurance is a Motorsport Manager’s ultimate strategic challenge, with 3 drivers per car and timed races!
A STUNNING SETTING
Monaco makes its Motorsport Manager debut! Manage your cars around la Rascasse, Casino Square and the Swimming Pool. It’s the ultimate test, rendered in a beautiful, detailed new art style.
NEW FEATURES
The Supplier Network sees managers grow their team’s presence around the globe, while Invitational Races are huge annual events, bringing international races with a unique twist. Mechanics are the new members of your team, and their relationship with the driver is all-important!
AUGMENTED REALITY
AR support brings you the ultimate camera mode! Choose your own perspective on the race. Peer over trees, through bridges and down cliffsides as you experience races in a whole new way.
GAME CHANGERS
Votes on rule changes, dynamic AI team movement (including teams going bust and being replaced) and new difficulty settings mean that the world of motorsport constantly evolves – but the challenge stays at your level.
ON-TRACK ACTION
Energy Recovery System, with Hybrid and Power modes, mixes up every race! Will you boost your way past your rivals into clear air, or smartly manage your fuel levels to pull off a genius strategy?
The release date is listed as ‘This Summer’, which according to my thermometer is pretty much now, and it will be launching on iOS and Android via the Google Play and Amazon App stores.
Given that the PC version has only ever had one release, how are you feeling about the mobile spin-offs? Are you excited for this new release? Let us know in the comments!
Corona, a seminal cross platform 2D game engine using the Lua programming language just released version 2018.3326. This is the first public release of Corona since 2017. The biggest new feature in this release has to be beta support for the HTML5 target, enabling you to run your Corona game in web browsers.
Important parts of the update:
HTML5 beta.
Google Play changes to support IAP level 27.
GDPR support.
Apple support fixed (iOS 11.4 and XCode 9.4 supported)
Additionally in this release, several libraries were made open source:
In addition to these changes, Corona Labs is open-sourcing the following libraries:
timer.*
easing.*
transition.*
composer.*
You can download the Lua source for these libraries from the Corona Labs GitHub account. In addition, the widget.* library was updated to be in sync with our internal library.
You can read the full release notes here. Corona is free to download but requires registration. You can sign in and download Corona here. If you run into problems trying to perform an HTML5 build, be sure to launch the Corona simulator as an administrator on Windows. This at least fixed my error 12 problems when performing an HTML5 build, seems to be a permissions issue.
The intrepid Captain Toad sets off on his own adventure for the very first time through a wide variety of tricky, enemy-infested, maze-like stages to find hidden gems and nab elusive gold stars.
WWE Extreme Rules 2018 Match Card: New Day Takes On Sanity In Tables Match
Does a regular old wrestling match do nothing for you? Do you want something more extreme, like superstars flying off of ladders, smashing each other with kendo sticks, and powerslams onto thumbtacks? Well, you're in luck--minus the thumbtacks--as WWE's most hardcore PPV of the year, Extreme Rules, comes to the WWE Network on Sunday, July 15.
This year's over-the-top PPV will take place at the PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and those going to the event or watching from the comfort of their homes will be in store for a night of hard hits and unconventional items being used as weapons. For those not attending the live event, Extreme Rules begins at 7 PM ET/4 PM PT with a Kickoff Show starting one hour prior. Normally, one match takes place during the Kickoff, but as of this writing, nothing has been announced.
For the first time in a while, there's actually a few fun tag team matches happening at a major WWE event. Daniel Bryan and Kane reunited recently on Smackdown, and now, they have a chance to win the Smackdown Tag Championships from The Bludgeon Brothers. Additionally, it's brother (Bray Wyatt) against brother (Bo Dallas) as the champions The Deleters of Worlds take on The B Team (The "B" stands for "Best") for the Raw Tag Championships. There are seven championships on the line that evening, and the only major title that won't be defended is the Universal Championship--because Brock Lesnar never defends it. At the time of this writing, there are eleven matches on the card. More than likely, this is in the finalized card.
Strangely enough, as of this writing, there is only one Extreme Rules match for the PPV, and that's for the Raw Women's Championship. As of this writing, a Tables Match has been added, but there are no more Extreme Rules matches.
Extreme Rules Match Card:
The New Day vs. SAnitY (Tables Match on KICKOFF SHOW)
Certification Plays Big Role in Open Source Hiring
With high demand for Linux professionals and a shortage of workers with these skills, it’s small wonder that employers are willing not only to train their staff but also to help them get certified. Forty-two percent of employers report having trained existing workers on new open source technologies this year to meet their needs, compared to only 30 percent in 2017, according to the 2018 Open Source Jobs report.
The report, produced by Dice and The Linux Foundation, also found that 38 percent of companies are less likely to rely on outside consultants, compared with 47 percent in 2017. Consequently, they are turning to training to keep up in a fast-paced, ever-changing tech environment. Sixty-four percent of hiring managers say their employees are requesting or taking training courses on their own – the exact same percentage as last year.
Why? There is a strong belief that IT certifications are a reliable predictor of a successful employee, according to IT trade association CompTIA. In its own research, CompTIA found five reasons why 91 percent of employers believe IT certifications play a big role in the hiring process:
Certifications help fill open positions
Most companies have IT staff who have certifications
Certified IT pros make great employees
IT certifications are increasing in importance
Training alone is not enough
Certification as an incentive
Forty-two percent of employers are using training and certification opportunities as an incentive to retain employees, up from 33 percent last year and 26 percent in 2016, this year’s Open Source Jobs Report found. Underscoring the importance employers place on certifications: Nearly half (47 percent) of hiring managers say employing certified open source professionals is a priority for them, essentially the same number as last year.
The same percentage say they are more likely to hire a certified professional than one without a certification. An increasing number of companies are willing to pay for certifications, with 55 percent that reported they helped to cover the costs of certifications this year, up from 47 percent last year and 34 percent in 2016. Only 17 percent say they would not pay for certifications, a decline from 21 percent last year and 30 percent in 2016.
Certifications is a benefit that can be used as a recruiting tool, and employers that offer certification courses for full-time employees should mention it in job postings, the report stresses. Similarly, professionals seeking this benefit should make clear during the interview process their desire to continue their education and become certified while employed.
However, there continues to be debate over the value of certifications versus on-the-job experience. There are many seasoned tech professionals who claim years of experience is more important, yet the average certification now represents a 7.6 percent premium on an IT pro’s base salary, according to research firm Foote Partners, which publishes an annual IT Skills and Certifications Pay Index. Specifically, gains were seen in networking and communications and applications development and programming language certifications, the firm says.
A significant majority (80 percent) of open source professionals say certifications are useful to their careers, up slightly from 76 percent in the previous two years. The main reasons cited are that certifications enable employees to demonstrate technical knowledge to potential employers (stated by 45 percent of respondents), and certifications make professionals more employable in general (33 percent). Forty-seven percent of open source professionals plan to take at least one certification exam this year, up from 40 percent in 2017.
Vendor neutrality matters
Employers increasingly want vendor neutrality in their training providers, with 77 percent of hiring managers rating this as important, up from 68 percent last year and 63 percent in 2016. Almost all types of training have increased this year, with online/virtual courses being the most popular. Sixty-six percent of employers report offering this benefit, compared to 63 percent in 2017 and 49 percent in 2016. Forty percent of hiring managers say they are providing onsite training, up from 39 percent last year and 31 percent in 2016; and 49 percent provide individual training courses, the same as last year.
Additionally, employers say they increasingly see benefits from sending employees to conferences. Fifty-six percent of hiring managers said they pay for employees to attend technical conferences, up from 46 percent in 2017.
If you have PS Plus, you can download and play Call of Duty Black Ops 3 for free. The deal is only eligible from June 11 - July 11. Sony announced this new PS Plus deal during its E3 2018 press conference. The deal is being promoted to give players a chance to try out Black Ops 3 prior to Black Ops 4's release later this year. It's available alongside the standard lineup of PS Plus freebies for June. [Update: The deadline for grabbing this freebie is nearly here; you've got just hours left to claim it if you haven't already. The rest of June's free games have gone back to their regular prices, but Plus members can now grab July's freebies.]
In our review of Black Ops 3, Mike Mahardy said, "[Black Ops III] tells an incomprehensible story about AI ascendancy and the moral grays of a hyper-connected future, raising intriguing questions but never bothering to answer them. At the end of it all, after hours of soulless shooting and unremarkable storytelling, Black Ops III delivered its nebulous twist, and I didn't dwell on it.
In its undead modes, and the first 10 hours of multiplayer, it excels. But in its campaign, it merely crawls forward. Black Ops III doesn't offer anything remarkable to the series, but does just enough to maintain the Call of Duty status quo. The franchise, however slowly, continues its inexorable march."
For more details on the upcoming Black Ops IV, and everything else we saw at E3 2018, stay tuned to our E3 hub.
Posted by: xSicKxBot - 07-11-2018, 01:29 PM - Forum: Windows
- No Replies
WIRED: ‘Surface Go is Microsoft’s big bet on a tiny-computer future’
Panos Panay is the betting type. You can see the evidence in Microsoft’s Building 37, where two $1 bills stick out from beneath a Surface tablet sitting on a shelf.
When I ask Panay about the dollars during a recent visit to Microsoft, he says it was a wager he made a few years back on a specific product. I ask if it was a bet on Surface RT, the very first Surface product Microsoft made, and he seems genuinely surprised. “I would have lost that bet, and I’m going to win this one,” he says. “It’s about a product that’s in market right now.” And that’s all he’ll volunteer.
Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer, isn’t there to talk about the ghosts of Surface’s past, or even the present. Panay wants to talk about his next big bet in the Surface product lineup: the brand-new Surface Go. But to call it “big” would be a misnomer, because the Surface Go was designed to disappear.
Ian C. Bates
If you’ve followed the trajectory of the Surface product line, you might say that the Surface Go previously existed in some form, if not as a prototype then in sketches and leaks and rumors and in our own imaginations. But Panay insists that this new 2-in-1 device is not the offspring of anything else—not the Surface RT, not the Surface 3, and not the Surface Mini (which served as a kind of fever-dream notepad for Panay, but never shipped).
Instead, the new Surface Go is an attempt to bring most of the premium features of a $1,000 Surface Pro to something that’s both ultra-portable and more affordable.
Ian C. Bates
Like a Surface Pro, the Go is a “detachable”—a tablet that attaches to Microsoft’s alcantara Type Cover keyboard. It has the same magnesium enclosure; a bright, high-res touchscreen display that has a 3:2 aspect ratio and is bonded with Gorilla Glass; a kickstand in the back that extends to 165 degrees; support for Microsoft’s stylus pen, which attaches magnetically to the tablet; a Windows Hello face recognition camera, for bio-authentication; two front-facing speakers, an 8-megapixel rear camera; and on and on. It’s a veritable checklist of Surface Go’s external features.
But the Surface Go is tiny. It measures just 9.6 by 6.9 by .33 inches, with a 10-inch diagonal display. It also weighs 1.15 pounds. The first time I saw the Go, Natalia Urbanowicz, a product marketing manager at Microsoft, pulled the thing out of a 10-inch, leather, cross-body Knomo bag to show just how easily it can be tucked away. It’s light enough to mistake for a notebook; the last time I felt that way about a computer was when Lenovo released the YogaBook back in 2016.
Ian C. Bates
The Go also happens to be the least expensive Surface ever. When it ships in early August, it will have a base price of $399. That’s for a configuration that includes 64 gigabytes of internal storage and 4 gigabytes of RAM, and ships with Windows 10 Home in S Mode (the S stands for “streamlined,” which means you can only download apps from the Windows Store). You’ll also have to shell out extra for a Type Cover keyboard and stylus pen.
From there, specs and prices creep up: A Surface Go with 256 gigabytes of storage, 8 gigabytes of RAM, and LTE will cost you more, though Microsoft hasn’t shared how much yet. All configurations have a microSD slot for additional storage too.
The Surface Go is not the first 10-inch Surface that Panay and his team have shipped. The original Surface had a 10.6-inch display. And in 2015, Microsoft released the 10.8-inch Surface 3. It started at $499, and ran a “real” version of Windows, not Windows RT. But it was also underpowered; and, Panay admits now, it had an inelegant charging mechanism.
“To this day I regret the charging port on Surface 3,” Panay says. “I’d convinced myself that this ubiquitous USB 2.0 connector was going to solve the thing people asked me for: Can I just charge it with the charger I already have? And what I learned is that people want a charger with the device, they want a very seamless charging experience…I know that seems small, but I don’t think I can overstate that every single little detail can be a major difference maker.”
Panay says there’s been clear demand for a successor to the Surface 3, which would, by definition, have been the Surface 4. But “that evolution wasn’t right,” he says. “That would be too close to the original Surface Pro, and that’s not what this product should be at all.” Instead, he’s been noodling something like the Surface Go—codenamed “Libra”—for the past three years.
The new Surface Go benefits from all those learnings. It has the same Surface Connect port as the Pro lineup, along with a USB-C 3.1 port for data transfers and backup charging. It’s supposed to get around nine hours of battery life. It also runs on an Intel Pentium Gold processor. This is not one of Intel’s top-of-the-line Core processors, but it’s still a significant jump up from the Cherry Trail Atom processor in the Surface 3.
Pete Kyriacou, general manager of program management for Surface, says Microsoft has worked closely with Intel to tune the processor for this particular form factor. “If you compare the graphics here to the Surface Pro 3 running on an i5 [chip], it’s 33 percent better; and if you compare it to the i7, it’s 20 percent better,” Kyriacou says. “So we’re talking about Pentium processing, but, it’s better from a graphics perspective than a Core processor was just three years ago.”
A lot about the new Surface has been “tuned”—not just the guts of the Go, but its software, too. “We tuned Office, we then tuned the Intel part, we tuned Windows, we made sure that, in portrait, it came to life,” Panay says. “We brought the Cortana [team] in to better design the Cortana box—we went after the details on what we think our customers need at 10 inches.”
There’s usually a tradeoff when you’re buying a computer this small. You get portability at the expense of space for apps and browser windows. The Surface Go has a built-in scaler that optimizes apps for a 10-inch screen, and Microsoft says that it’s working with third-parties to make sure certain apps run great. There’s only so much control, though, you have over software that’s not your own. I was reminded of this when I had a few minutes to use the Surface Go, went to download the Amazon Kindle app in the Windows Store, and couldn’t find it there.
Making the Surface smaller was no small feat, according to Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s longtime head of design. Groene walks me through part of Building 87 on Microsoft’s campus, where the design studio is housed and where Groene’s team of 60 are tasked with coming up with a steady stream of ideas for potential products.
Ralf Groene, Microsoft’s head of design.
Ian C. Bates
Behind a door that says “Absolutely No Tailgating”—a warning against letting someone in behind you, not a ban on barbecues and cornhole—a small multimedia team makes concept videos. “Before products get made, we have a vision, we have an idea, and we express it in a video,” Groene tells me. If the video is received well by top executives, they know they have a winner. “Since there’s usually a timeline on how long processors are good for, we try to build as many iterations as possible of a product within that timeline.”
Once the Surface Go got the go ahead, Groene’s job became that of a geometrist: How do you fit all this stuff into a 9.6-inch enclosure? Going with magnesium again was an easy choice; it’s up to 36 percent lighter than aluminum, Groene says, and Microsoft has already invested in the machinery needed to work with magnesium. Some of the angles of the Go’s body are softer—Groene calls these “curvatures and radii”—making it more comfortable to hold close for extended time periods, like if you’re reading or drawing.
By far the biggest challenge was the Go’s Type Cover keyboard. The factor that always stays the same is the human, Groene says, and that includes fingers. Shrink a keyboard too much in your quest to make a laptop thin and light, and you’ll inevitably get complaints from people that their fingers are cramped, or that they land on each key with an unsatisfying thud. (Or worse, that the keyboard is essentially broken.)
The Go’s keyboard is undoubtedly smaller than the one that attaches to the Surface Pro. But it still has a precision glass trackpad, and a key travel that Groene says is fractionally less than the key travel on the Pro.
Ian C. Bates
Most notably, the Go’s keyboard uses a scissor-switch mechanism that was designed to give, as Groene describes it, the right “force to fire.” Each key is also slightly dished, a decision that Microsoft made after watching hours of footage of people typing, captured with a high-speed camera. The keys are supposed to feel plush and good under your fingers and not at all like a tiny accessory keyboard. (I only used the keyboard on the Go for a brief period of time, so I can’t really say what it would be like to use the keyboard to, say, type of a story of this length.)
I mention to Groene that Apple has long held the stance that touchscreens aren’t right for PC’s, something that Apple’s software chief Craig Federighi underscored in a recent WIRED interview when he said that they’re “fatiguing.” And yet, Microsoft is pretty committed to touchscreen PCs. What does Microsoft’s research show about how people use touchscreen PCs?
Groene first points out that the Surface laptop is the only one in Microsoft’s product line that has a classic laptop form factor and a touchscreen; the others are detachables, or, there’s the giant Surface Studio PC. But, more to the point, he says, “By offering multiple ways to get things done doesn’t mean that we add things. It’s not like the Swiss army knife, where every tool you put in makes it bigger.”
Sure, if you sit there for eight hours holding your arm up, it will get tired, Groene acknowledges. But that’s not the way people are supposed to use these things. “It’s the same thing with the pen. ‘We don’t need the pen because we are born with ten styluses,’” Groene says, wiggling his fingers, making an oblique reference to a well-known Steve Jobs quote about styluses. “However, having the tool of a pen is awesome when you want to go sketch something.”
“We are trying to design products for people,” he says, “and we don’t try to dictate how people use our devices.”
Ian C. Bates
So who is this tiny Surface Go actually made for? It depends on who you ask at Microsoft, but the short answer seems to be: anybody and everybody.
Urbanowicz, the product marketing manager, says Go is about “reaching more audiences, and embracing the word ‘and’: I can be a mother, and an entrepreneurial badass; I can be a student, and a social justice warrior.” Kyriacou, when describing the Go’s cameras, says to “think about the front line worker in the field—a construction worker, architect, they can capture what they need to or even scan a document.” You can also dock the Go, Kyriacou points out, using the Surface Connect port, which makes it ideal for business travelers. Groene talks about reading, about drawing, about running software applications like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Almost everyone talks about watching Hulu and Netflix on it.
Panos Panay initially has a philosophical answer to this. It’s his “dream,” he says, to just get Surface products to more people. “I mean, that’s not my ultimate dream. But there are these blurred lines of life and work that are happening, and if you collect all that, Go was an obvious step for us.”
The evening before Panay and I chatted, he went to the Bellevue Square shopping center with his son, and at one point, had to pull out his LTE-equipped Surface Go to address what he said was an urgent work issue. His son asked if it was a new product, and Panay, realizing the blunder of having the thing out in public, tucked the Go in his jacket. To him, that’s the perfect anecdote: The lines between work and family time were blurred, he had to do something quickly, and when he was done, he could make his computer disappear.
Panos Panay, Microsoft’s chief product officer.
Ian C. Bates
Panay’s team also has a lot more insight into how people are using Surface products than it did eight years ago, he says, when Surface was still just a concept being developed in a dark lab. To be sure, Microsoft has been making hardware for decades—keyboards, mice, web cameras, Xbox consoles. But when Microsoft made the decision to start making its own PCs (and ultimately, take more control over how its software ran on laptops), it was a new hardware category for the company. It was a chance to get consumers excited about Microsoft again, not just enterprise customers.
The first few years of Surface were rocky. The first one, known as Surface RT, seems to be something that Microsoft executives would rather forget about; I don’t see it anywhere in the product lineups that Microsoft’s PR team has laid out ahead of my visit. Its 2012 launch coincided with the rollout of Windows 8, which had an entirely new UI from the previous version of Windows. It ran on a 32-bit ARM architecture, which meant it ran a version of the operating system called Windows RT. Depending on who you ask, the Surface RT was either a terrible idea or ahead of its time. (Panay says it was visionary.) Microsoft ending up taking a massive write-down on it the following year.
Since then, Microsoft has rolled out a series of Surface products that, due to the company’s design ethos, a newer operating system, and plain old Moore’s Law, have only gotten better. In 2013 it introduced the Surface Pro line, which are still detachables, but are built to perform like a premium laptop and can cost anywhere from $799 to $2,600. There’s the Surface Book line; the Surface Book 2 starts at $1,199 and clocks in around 3.5 pounds, making it a serious commitment of a laptop. The Surface Studio is a gorgeous, $2,999, all-in-one desktop PC, aimed at creative types. The Surface Laptop is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s MacBook Air. It starts at $799, and got largely positive reviews when it launched last year.
Even still, Microsoft’s Surface line has struggled to make a significant dent in the market for personal computing. HP and Lenovo dominate the broader PC market, while Apple leads in the tablet category (including both detachables and slate tablets).“From a shipment perspective, the entire Surface portfolio has been fairly soft,” says Linn Huang, an IDC research director who tracks devices and displays. “It was growing tremendously, and then the iPad Pro launched and Surface shipments have either been negative, year-over-year, for the past several quarters, or flat.”
Microsoft has new competition to worry about, too: Google’s inexpensive Chromebooks, which in a short amount of time have taken over a large share of the education market.
“Do I think about Chromebooks? Absolutely,” Panay says, when I ask him about them. “Do I think about iPads? Absolutely. I use multiple devices. It’s exhausting. But this product is meant to bring you a full app suite.” Panay is highlighting one of the drawbacks of lightweight Chromebooks: Their lack of local storage. Meanwhile, he says, Surfaces are designed to let people be productive both locally on the device, and in the cloud when they need to work in the cloud.
And, while Panay says he’s keeping an eye on Chromebooks, he insists that Microsoft didn’t build Go to compete with Chromebooks. That said, Surface Go will have a school-specific software option: IT administrators for schools can choose whether they want a batch of Go’s imaged with Windows 10 Pro Education, or Windows 10 S mode-enabled.
Panay wouldn’t comment on Microsoft’s plans for the future beyond Surface Go, although there have long been rumors of a possible Microsoft handheld device, codenamed Andromeda. If the Surface Go is something of a return to a smaller, 10-inch detachable, then a pocketable device that folds in half, one that could potentially run on an ARM processor, would be something of a return to mobile for Microsoft. Qualcomm has also been making mobile chips that are designed to compete directly with Intel’s Core processors for PCs.
For now, though, Panay is throwing all his chips behind the Surface Go, and making a big bet that this little device is the one that will make the masses fall in love with Surface. He tends to chalk up past Surface products, even the ones that didn’t do well, as simply before their time. Now, with the Go, he says, “it’s time.”
Justin Clareburt is the Web Tools PM on the Visual Studio team. He has over 20 years of Software Engineering experience and brings to the team his expert knowledge of IDEs and a passion for creating the ultimate development experience.
