The newest version of Microsoft Windows arrives July 29. Microsoft announced the launch date for Windows 10 on Monday. Upgrading to the major new edition of its operating system will be free for most consumers with a Windows 8 or Windows 7 machine. Microsoft didn't announce a price for those ineligible for a free upgrade. Nor did it say when the smartphone version would be available. Windows 10 represents Microsoft's first attempt to build an operating system that looks and feels the same regardless of the size of the screen or the type of device being used.

Microsoft will roll out the latest version of its Windows operating system at the end of July. The company said Monday that Windows 10 is designed with mobile computing in mind, allowing users to switch seamlessly between personal computers, tablets, smartphones and other gadgets. The operating system is intended to give apps a similar feel on all devices and comes with a new Web browser integrated with Cortana, the company's voice-activated answer to Apple's Siri. Microsoft Corp. says Windows 10 will be available in 190 countries as a free upgrade on July 29 for anyone currently running Windows 8.1 or 7, the two previous versions of the software.

Windows 10 will be released as a free update on 28 July, Microsoft has announced. It will be the last major release of the 29-year-old operating system before Microsoft switches to a "Windows as a service" system, which entails updates being rolled out when ready. This marks a change in Microsoft's business model. The operating system will be offered as a free upgrade for users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 within the first year. Each version of Windows has cost upwards of 100, although the majority of Windows users receive new versions of the operating system when buying a new computer, and not by upgrading the software themselves.

Cortana is taking the war of words to Siri's home turf, Amazon amazes us with its tax return, and we find out why the record industry has a love-hate relationship with YouTube. Microsoft is challenging Apple's voice-activated personal assistant Siri by bringing its own voice control system Cortana to iPhones, not to mention Android devices too. It's all part of the build-up to Windows 10, but will iPhone owners switch allegiance? Amazon is changing the way it operates in Europe to pay more taxes in individual countries, ending its much-criticised wheeze of exploiting the tax haven of Luxembourg. Tax doesn't have to be taxing.

Hey Siri, can you help me get access to my texts again after that strange message I received consisting of non-Latin characters crashed my iPhone? In advance of a software update to fix the bug, yes it can. Apple has published a temporary workaround for iOS users affected by the bug, which was found to affect iPhones earlier in the week, and subsequently revealed to be capable of affecting the Apple Watch, iPads and Macs. In a new article published on its support website, Apple outlined a three-step process, enabling people to open their Messages app again: The booby-trapped text message presented characters including those from Arabic, Chinese and Marathi in a specific sequence that choked Apple's CoreText system, crashing the recipient's device and leaving them unable to access their messages. Related: iPhone text message bug can crash Apple Watch, iPad and Mac too Pranksters seized upon the message to crash friends' iPhones, but security experts have warned that this kind of bug has the potential to be used for more malicious purposes in the future.

MOL Group announced yesterday the winners of the Freshhh 2015 competition, which sees students from all over the world compete in technology and business strategy simulations related to the oil and gas industry. 'Just Ask Siri', consisting of three students from the Prague University of Economics and the Czech Technical University, was awarded first place, with Hungary's'Oil's Creed' and Slovenia's'Decore' teams placing in second and third respectively. All three teams will now be given the opportunity to join MOL Group's graduate recruitment and development program. MOL Group HR Vice President Zdravka Demeter Bubalo commented in a company statement: "We congratulate the top three teams for winning the Freshhh competition 2015. I would like to thank all participants for their endless efforts during the competition. It is incredible to see how young students work with such difficult real-life cases and always find new solutions. The outstanding results from the participants and number of applications are showing us once more that we are heading in the right direction in order to attract top talents of the oil and gas industry."

We propose Coactive Learning as a model of interaction between a learning system and a human user, where both have the common goal of providing results of maximum utility to the user. Interactions in the Coactive Learning model take the following form: at each step, the system (e.g. search engine) receives a context (e.g. query) and predicts an object (e.g. ranking); the user responds by correcting the system if necessary, providing a slightly improved but not necessarily optimal object as feedback. We argue that such preference feedback can be inferred in large quantity from observable user behavior (e.g., clicks in web search), unlike the optimal feedback required in the expert model or the cardinal valuations required for bandit learning. Despite the relaxed requirements for the feedback, we show that it is possible to adapt many existing online learning algorithms to the coactive framework. In particular, we provide algorithms that achieve square root regret in terms of cardinal utility, even though the learning algorithm never observes cardinal utility values directly. We also provide an algorithm with logarithmic regret in the case of strongly convex loss functions. An extensive empirical study demonstrates the applicability of our model and algorithms on a movie recommendation task, as well as ranking for web search.

Microsoft's Cortana voice assistant is coming to IOS and Android. In a blog post published Tuesday, Joe Belfiore, head of Microsoft's Operating Systems Group, announced the upcoming launch of a Cortana app for Android phones and iPhones that will work as a companion to Cortana on your Windows 10 PC. The new Phone companion app will allow you to install and use Cortana for Android and iOS as part of Microsoft's goal to connect your Windows PC to whichever smartphone you own. Will Cortana for Android and iOS have the same capabilities as the version on your Windows Phone? You won't be able to use Cortana to open apps and change settings in the Android or iOS editions.

Much of the data being created on the web contains interactions between users and items. Stochastic blockmodels, and other methods for community detection and clustering of bipartite graphs, can infer latent user communities and latent item clusters from this interaction data. These methods, however, typically ignore the items' contents and the information they provide about item clusters, despite the tendency of items in the same latent cluster to share commonalities in content. We introduce content-augmented stochastic blockmodels (CASB), which use item content together with user-item interaction data to enhance the user communities and item clusters learned. Comparisons to several state-of-the-art benchmark methods, on datasets arising from scientists interacting with scientific articles, show that content-augmented stochastic blockmodels provide highly accurate clusters with respect to metrics representative of the underlying community structure.

Google's experimental "skunkworks" lab, Google X, has come up with a lot of weird, potentially useful ideas, including Internet-enabled weather balloons and special contact lenses to monitor the composition of users' tears. But a patent filed by Google X and published this week might be the lab's oddest project yet: a line of Internet-connected stuffed animals that can control appliances throughout your house and maintain eye contact with kids. Similar to Amazon's Echo home speaker/information hub, the Google toys would be activated by a spoken word or phrase which, the patent says, would cause the toy to "aim its gaze at the source of the social cue." The toys would be built with motors so they could physically open their eyes and turn their heads toward the person delivering the command. They would also have embedded speakers to let them verbally respond to the user, and the ability to mimic emotions the patent speculates that "to express surprise, [a toy] may make a sudden movement, sit or stand up straight, and/or dilate its pupils."