40 Years on
On reflecting that First Technology is 40 years old this year, I thought back to the early days of the internet when exactly 20 years ago I started sending out “Top Stories” about Technology developments and news in the IT industry that I felt might be relevant to you because many people were still challenged with accessing and searching the internet reliably for news.
I think many found it useful to see at a glance what was interesting and then to click on the link to the website that allowed them to read more.
I stopped sending it out as the internet became more directly accessible to everybody and Google became more “searchable” allowing you to find ways to get the news you were interested in yourself.
What’s Changed
In Short – there’s too much changing – Moore’s Law is back big time (there are some that don’t agree), and the amount of news pouring out on the internet is simply too much to process to try and filter out what is relevant to us in IT in South Africa and what is noise from the rest of the world.
In a couple of years, maybe less, we will have an AI that will do it for us, and every day present us with news that is relevant to our jobs, hobbies and family interests.
It will do a better job than what I will try to do, but until that time comes, I’ll try to pick out news that might be worthwhile reading.
I have been watching news feeds for 20 years, and have gotten ok at picking out news that might be a good idea to read (with my personal perspective).
You are all in different industries, so some stories may not be relevant to you, but will be to others, as I’m trying to share what is relevant to everybody with some specifics.
But I’m not going to get it right all the time, and will miss important stuff, so unlike 20 years ago, I need to hear from you what stories that are important that I may have missed, or even publications that I'm not monitoring.
I use a “pool” of around 15 publications, where some of them also act as news aggregators, and of course The Register!
There are many ways to distribute this, but for now, I’ll stick to email and see how we do with “TOP STORIES”, the reboot.
Oh, last thing, suggestions on doing it better so it is of more value will be most welcome!
TOP STORIES #1 (The Reboot)
It is divided into sections:
Hardware Tech, Microsoft, Security, AI, Movies
Microsoft will have more stories than others!
Hardware
PCIe 5 Going mainstream
Soon you will be able to buy Gen 5 NVMe SSD’s that will be hitting transfer rates of 14Gigabytes a SECOND and they will be inside your new notebook or PC later this year.
Read here. Clearly, gamers will be happy with their games loading even faster.
Read more here.
Great Website to check out reviews of many computer products, especially monitors.
https://www.rtings.com/
Microsoft
Chat GPT4 coming Soon
ChatGPT 4.0 will be able to interact with you in a humanlike way to edit and create pictures and videos – and it is weeks away from being released. Read here. A colleague of mine, Ryan, M.D. of BUI that is part of the FirstTech Group, shared this demo with me here – you REALLY should take a look!
Annoying File copy bug squashed in Windows 11
On Patch Tuesday, 16th of March the bug is officially removed. This was annoyingly slow file copy speeds of large files. Read more here
A good workaround is/was TeraCopy – worth looking at!
BIG News! The Shortcut we all wanted for Word, is HERE!!
It’s “Paste Text Only” Read about it here. I tried, it’s not working for me in Office 2021, so guess it’s for O365 for now.
How to use Live Captions in Windows 11: add subtitles to any audio automatically
Live Captions are a great way to better understand audio, whether it's a film, a new song, or a conversation with a friend. Here's how to enable Live Captions.
Outlook for MAC is now Free
Read all about it here.
Microsoft may soon be testing Windows 12 code
It’s early days, but it looks like Microsoft is going to be releasing Windows 12 code to testers.
Read more here
Microsoft Previews ChatGPT in Azure
Microsoft announced on Thursday that its Azure OpenAI service now offers a preview of ChatGPT, the OpenAI-based chat engine.
Read here.
Microsoft is holding a 'future of work' AI event on March 16th
Microsoft isn't saying much about what the news will entail, CEO Satya Nadella and Microsoft 365 lead Jared Spataro are hosting the presentation. Read more here
Security
How the FBI proved a remote admin tool was actually malware
A lesson in that you can never be too careful or too suspicious!
Read the story here about NetWire.
AI
Discord is taking ChatGPT out of your browser and into your server
Discord is joining the ChatGPT revolution by implementing its Clyde chatbot with AI features.
Read here
Grammarly's ChatGPT upgrade won’t just improve your writing, it’ll do it for you.
As we have already seen, the AI will most certainly need human intervention. Read here
Parallax Depth Effects powered by AI are coming to Windows
This is giving us a big hint that Windows 12 will be a fully AI-enabled operating system. This “tweak” in Windows 11 is giving us a hint of what is coming for Windows 12. Read here.
Movies
Movies in theatres this coming week are:
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