Microsoft is dropping the Transfer Files feature from Office Mobile but says that transferring files will become easier. Transfer Files will be replaced by the OneDrive integration in the Office app. Users will be able to continue using Transfer Files as a legacy feature on Android and iOS until December 31, 2022, after which using the OneDrive app will become the only option. “Rest assured that files that have been sent and received using the Transfer Files feature will remain in the Office app and will be unaffected by this change,” Microsoft notes....

Much of the time, their words are bathed in so much deflection, misdirection, and gobbledygook that it’s hard to accept any of those words as having any true meaning. I was therefore unreasonably uplifted to see Microsoft address some very important customers with a level of disarming honesty that I wish every tech company could embrace. The subject at hand is a game called The Outer Worlds 2. Those who were entranced by the E3 2021 gamers paradise will surely be desperate to learn of its contents....

Today’s blog post mentions that Express Design is just one of several “additional creator experiences,” with more rolling out this Fall. (Maybe that’s a hint about Designer and Create?)

As Microsoft noted in a blog post in October, real-time video and voice data is protected by E2EE. But it doesn’t secure chat or file-sharing, which are both protected at rest and in-transit by other encryption protocols, like HTTPS, for secure connections between a device and a website. The E2EE Teams call feature is available on the latest version of the Teams desktop client for Windows or Mac, officials said....

In 2020, Microsoft launched the first of what would become a growing family of Industry Cloud offerings called the Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. As of Oct. 1, 2022, there are now seven Microsoft Industry Clouds, with more expected in the coming months and years. When Microsoft execs first outlined their strategy for these vertical cloud bundles, I felt like we were back to the old Microsoft “Better Together” strategy. More than a decade ago, Microsoft officials pitched to customers the idea that by sticking with their software, end-to-end, they’d get a better integrated, more seamless, and less problematic set of products....

The Cameo feature lets users choose how and where their faces from a Teams video will appear on live PowerPoint slides and offers recommendations where to optimally place the feed, or to record the presentation if needed. Microsoft announced Cameo and a host of other hybrid features for Teams and Office apps at Ignite in September. The Cameo feature is available to Office Insiders today and will be generally available in the second quarter of 2022, according to Microsoft....

I’ve only had about a day with the unit so far. So, I thought it made sense to focus on giving my first impressions of the company’s latest take on what a laptop designed for its Windows operating system should be. At first sight, you’d be hard-pressed to differentiate the Surface Laptop 5 from its predecessor, or its predecessor’s predecessor, for that matter. Microsoft once again went with essentially the exact same external design and layout....

Teams users with laptops equipped with Apple’s M1 or M2 chips should be noticing a better experience as Microsoft broadens the rollout to a version of Teams as a universal binary that runs on Intel and Apple silicon. Apple started the rollout in early August and marked it as generally available in September. It didn’t give users an option to download the universal binary as it opted to roll it out automatically in increments....

The OneNote app installed with Office is going to start getting new features and “key” existing features that are currently unique to OneNote for Windows 10 (the Store app). OneNote for Windows 10 users will get an in-app invitation at some point in the second half of 2022 to update to the new unified OneNote app. Also: Windows 365: Hands on with Microsoft’s pricey new Cloud PC subscriptions Officials said they are not making a new third OneNote app in addition to the existing two....

The research will be led by the Monash University’s Vision and Language Group at the Faculty of IT in collaboration with researchers from the David Nazarian College of Business and Economics at California State University, and King’s College London. According to Monash, the project will involve developing a language processing system to be used together with smart glasses. The hope is the system can recognise and adapt to emotional, social, and cultural cues that vary between different societies and languages....

Underscoring this is that MongoDB, and a rapidly growing cross section of its customer base, are going cloud-first. As of the latest quarter, Q1 FY 2022 which was reported back in June, the Atlas managed cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) now accounts for 51% of overall revenues. KEEPING THE LOVE WITH DEVELOPERS It shouldn’t be surprising, given that MongoDB’s core constituency has long been with application developers as opposed DBAs or data engineers, that a major focus of the 5....

NASA is sending a 1,320-pound spacecraft to smash into a never-before-seen asteroid to change the asteroid’s trajectory. Does this sound like your typical sci-fi movie plot in which an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth and threatening humankind? Well, the targeted Dimorphos asteroid is NOT a threat to humanity in any way. However, this mission is intended to prepare us for that potential threat. “DART is turning science fiction into science fact and is a testament to NASA’s proactivity and innovation for the benefit of all,” said NASA administrator Bill Nelson....

NASA launched Perseverance in 2020, trailing the Curiosity rover by nine years, and landed it on the red planet on February 18, 2021 to explore and extract material from Mars’ Jezero Crater. NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter took snaps of the landing. Perseverance collected its first rock samples in September 2021 and these are now inside sealed sample tubes but are stuck on the fourth planet from the Sun. Whether these actually return to Earth is not a given and requires assistance from rovers by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA)....

Mission control in Houston lost data to and from Orion at 12:09 am CST for 47 minutes while engineers were reconfiguring the communication link between the spacecraft and Deep Space Network. Engineers are now conducting a root cause analysis to understand why signals unexpectedly failed despite having tested the procedure several times during the past week. “This is why we test,” said Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration systems development, after the link was restored....

Flight 34 was the first time NASA has tested the new software, which should help the vehicle avoid damage when landing in future after tours of the Red Planet. “Despite the flight’s simple nature, the team is very excited because of what it means for the future of Ingenuity,” NASA said. Ingenuity wasn’t built for Mars’ rough and uneven terrain but rather for neat surfaces like the Wright Brothers Field – the large, flat and rock-free site on Mars that NASA chose as Ingenuity’s Martian airfield....

The CEOs of Telstra, Optus, TPG, Vocus, and Aussie Broadband said they were appealing to NBN’s sense of social responsibility and wanted the wholesaler to do more than the current CVC relief program is offering, citing increasing costs to acquire capacity. The telcos asked for a retrospective change to the program to have May 2021 usage as a baseline, and to calculate the credit on each telco’s individual overage charge and not on the overall industry overage, as it currently occurs....

The networking company reported third quarter revenue of $290.2 million, down 23.3% from a year ago when workers upgraded remote office and Wi-Fi infrastructure en masse. The company reported third quarter earnings of 31 cents a share and non-GAAP earnings of 50 cents a share. Mesh networking vs. traditional Wi-Fi routers: What is best for your home office? Wall Street was expecting Netgear to report third quarter revenue of $294....

The specification will enable 80 Gbps using existing 40 Gbps USB-C passive cables and new 80 Gbps USB Type-C “active cables”. According to Brad Saunders, USB Promoter Group chairman, the device to see the biggest gains from the speedier connection are higher-performance displays, storage, and USB-based hubs and docks. SEE: DeFi: Injective Protocol’s ‘CosmWasm’ upgrade adds more functionality for developers and users The USB Promoter Group, which includes Apple, HP, Intel and Microsoft among others, announced the 40 Gbps USB4 specification in 2019....

Nvidia AI Enterprise brings together three components: The Nvidia RAPIDS suite of software libraries; frameworks like TensorFlow and PyTorch; and Nvidia Tensor, the open-source inference serving software. The software suite packages these elements together with full enterprise-level support. It’s designed to run on mainstream servers from OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo and others. “The idea here is the same servers that have been racked and stacked into private clouds and enterprise data centers today, can now be utilized for AI, with a small amount of GPU added to the server [at] affordable, accessible, incremental costs,” Manuvir Das, head of Enterprise Computing at Nvidia, said to reporters....