PCWorld reports that the infamous Windows XP "FCKGW" product key was not a hack but a leaked legitimate corporate volume licensing key. The key allowed millions of users to bypass Windows XP's mandatory activation process, as volume licenses did not require phoning home to Microsoft. Microsoft has since blacklisted the key and shut down the associated servers, closing this well-known piracy loophole. About a year ago, in a social media post, long-time Microsoft veteran Dave Plummer ( who worked on Windows Task Manager) recounted the story of what's now known as the most iconic Windows product key.

PCWorld notes that Windows XP is celebrating its 25th anniversary, having officially launched on October 25, 2001, and it remains a legendary piece of software history. Built on the stable Windows NT architecture, XP delivered fewer crashes than Windows 98 or ME, transforming computing through reliability and lasting popularity. Remarkably, Statcounter shows 0.09 percent of users still run Windows XP today, meaning it still edges out Windows 8 in market share. This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of Windows XP, an event worthy of commemoration. Computer manufacturers gained access to this classic operating system on August 24, 2001, but it wasn't available for purchase until October 25th of that same year. Unlike its predecessors Windows 95, 98, and ME, Windows XP was based on Windows NT, which meant fewer system crashes and greater security. Microsoft called Windows XP " the most important version of Windows ever," and in retrospect, that was no exaggeration. Windows XP proved so popular that support for it was repeatedly extended, and even today there are some users who stubbornly cling to this iconic version. According to the latest data from Statcounter, 0.09 percent of the population still uses Windows XP, compared to 0.02 percent for Windows 8, which was released 11 years later.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. The developers encountered a technical fault, whilst the program's code was largely undocumented. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has now revealed why the classic pinball game 3D Pinball: Space Cadet disappeared from Windows after Windows XP. The story was first reported by Windows Latest . According to Chen, problems arose when the Windows code was being adapted from 32-bit to 64-bit.

Microsoft is killing this 25-year-old Windows tool. Windows 11 preview update KB5120998 removes WMIC, a command-line tool used since Windows XP for admin and automation tasks. With the latest Windows 11 preview update (KB5120998), Microsoft is finally bidding farewell to a tool that has been part of the operating system since Windows XP: the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC). It's being removed from Windows 11 in an upcoming patch, and it'll affect both Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2. The announcement comes via Microsoft's official release notes for KB512098, meant for Release Preview Builds 26100.9267

In e-commerce, opinion summarization is the process of summarizing the consensus opinions found in product reviews. However, the potential of additional sources such as product description and question-answers (QA) has been considered less often. Moreover, the absence of any supervised training data makes this task challenging. To address this, we propose a novel synthetic dataset creation (SDC) strategy that leverages information from reviews as well as additional sources for selecting one of the reviews as a pseudo-summary to enable supervised training. Our Multi-Encoder Decoder framework for Opinion Summarization (MEDOS) employs a separate encoder for each source, enabling effective selection of information while generating the summary. For evaluation, due to the unavailability of test sets with additional sources, we extend the Amazon, Oposum+, and Flipkart test sets and leverage ChatGPT to annotate summaries. Experiments across nine test sets demonstrate that the combination of our SDC approach and MEDOS model achieves on average a 14.5% improvement in ROUGE-1 F1 over the SOTA. Moreover, comparative analysis underlines the significance of incorporating additional sources for generating more informative summaries. Human evaluations further indicate that MEDOS scores relatively higher in coherence and fluency with 0.41 and 0.5 (-1 to 1) respectively, compared to existing models. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to generate opinion summaries leveraging additional sources in a self-supervised setting.

Imagine a world in which healthcare can prevent disease. It's a world that is actually within our grasp. And the key to it is centralising health data to enable the use of emerging technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Predictive Analytics. Using such cutting-edge tech would enable accurate predictions on the extensive data we've captured over many years. Which in turn would catch these ailments in their early stages or even before symptoms start to manifest.

Now, it may be more of a reality than previously thought. Public information about company leadership can make an email or social media phishing attack more convincing, especially as hackers automate data collection on a targeted company using ML to emulate both the timing of communications and writing style. When will Siri be smart enough to step in and protect us?::cough:: Is that even on Apple's radar? The technical journalist's job is to know the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and to educate the user about them. New iPad Pro has both strengths and weaknesses.

Three years after Microsoft killed Windows XP for good, the rest of the tech world is ending its vigil for the venerated operating system. Even games that launched during the XP era are moving on, as over the weekend, Blizzard announced that its pantheon of PC-focused titles are dumping support for Windows XP and Vista. "Starting later this year, we will begin the process of ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista in World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm," Blizzard wrote in its forums. "Microsoft ceased mainstream support for these versions of Windows in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but since a decent portion of our audience was still using them at the time, we continued supporting them. However, there have been three major Windows releases since Vista, and at this point, the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions."

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.