An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2020, scientists decided just to rework the alphanumeric symbols they used to represent genes rather than try to deal with an Excel feature that was interpreting their names as dates and (un)helpfully reformatting them automatically. Last week, a member of the Excel team posted that the company is rolling out an update on Windows and macOS to fix that. Excel’s automatic conversions are intended to make it easier and faster to input certain types of commonly entered data — numbers and dates, for instance. But for scientists using quick shorthand to make things legible, it could ruin published, peer-reviewed data, as a 2016 study found.

Microsoft detailed the update in a blog post last week, adding a checkbox labeled “Convert continuous letters and numbers to a date.” You can probably guess what that toggles. The update builds on the Automatic Data Conversions settings the company added last year, which included the option for Excel to warn you when it’s about to get extra helpful and let you load your file without automatic conversion so you can ensure nothing will be screwed up by it.

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Source: Slashdot – Microsoft Fixes the Excel Feature That Was Wrecking Scientific Data

An anonymous reader shares a report: Apple was caught flat-footed when ChatGPT and other AI tools took the technology industry by storm. But the company is now preparing its response and plans to develop features for its full range of devices. One of the most intense and widespread endeavors at Apple right now is its effort to respond to the AI frenzy sweeping the technology industry. The company has some catching up to do. Apple largely sat on the sidelines when OpenAI’s ChatGPT took off like a rocket last year. It watched as Google and Microsoft rolled out generative AI versions of their search engines, which spit out convincingly human-like responses to users’ queries. Microsoft also updated its Windows apps with smarter assistants, and Amazon unveiled an AI-enhanced overhaul of Alexa. All the while, the only noteworthy AI release from Apple was an improved auto-correct system in iOS 17.

Apple’s senior vice presidents in charge of AI and software engineering, John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, are spearheading the effort. On Cook’s team, they’re referred to as the “executive sponsors” of the generative AI push. Eddy Cue, the head of services, is also involved, I’m told. The trio are now on course to spend about $1 billion per year on the undertaking. Giannandrea is overseeing development of the underlying technology for a new AI system, and his team is revamping Siri in a way that will deeply implement it. This smarter version of Siri could be ready as soon as next year, but there are still concerns about the technology and it may take longer for Apple’s AI features to spread across its product line. Federighi’s software engineering group, meanwhile, is adding AI to the next version of iOS. There’s an edict to fill it with features running on the company’s large language model, or LLM, which uses a flood of data to hone AI capabilities. The new features should improve how both Siri and the Messages app can field questions and auto-complete sentences, mirroring recent changes to competing services.

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Source: Slashdot – Inside Apple’s Big Plan to Bring Generative AI To All Its Devices

Martin Goetz, who joined the computer industry in its infancy in the mid-1950s as a programmer working on Univac mainframes and who later received the first U.S. patent for software, died on Oct. 10 at his home in Brighton, Mass. He was 93. The New York Times: His daughter Karen Jacobs said the cause was leukemia. In 1968, nearly a decade after he and several other partners started the company Applied Data Research, Mr. Goetz received his patent, for data-sorting software for mainframes. It was major news in the industry: An article in Computerworld magazine bore the headline “First Patent Is Issued for Software, Full Implications Are Not Known.” Until then, software had not been viewed as a patentable product, one that was bundled into hulking mainframes like those made by IBM. Ms. Jacobs said her father had patented his own software so that IBM could not copy it and put it on its machines.

“By 1968, I had been involved in arguing about the patentability of software for about three years,” Mr. Goetz said in an oral history interview in 2002 for the University of Minnesota. “I knew at some point in time the patent office would recognize it.” What Mr. Goetz called his “sorting system” is believed to have been the first software product to be sold commercially, and his success at securing a patent led him to become a vocal champion of patenting software. The programs that instruct computers on what to do, he said, were often as worthy of patents as the machines themselves. The issuance of Mr. Goetz’s patent “helped managers, programmers and lawyers at young software firms feel as if they were forming an industry of their own — one in which they were creating products that were potentially profitable and legally defensible as proprietary inventions,” Gerardo Con Diaz, a professor of science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis, wrote in the 2019 book “Software Rights: How Patent Law Transformed Software Development.” Further reading, from Slashdot archive: Recipient of First Software Patent Defends Them (2009).

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Source: Slashdot – Martin Goetz, Who Received the First Software Patent, Dies at 93

Japan’s antitrust watchdog has begun an investigation into whether Alphabet’s Google abuses its market position to block rival services, compounding scrutiny of the internet leader’s business practices across the globe. From a report: The country’s Fair Trade Commission has begun a probe centered on allegations of potential antitrust violations, an official with the agency said, confirming a Nikkei report. It plans to solicit information and views on the matter from the public, the official added. The agency plans to examine whether Google inappropriately asked smartphone makers to prioritize its search services on their devices.

The Japanese investigation marked the first time the commission has consulted with third parties from the outset of an individual probe, agency officials told reporters in Tokyo. The probe could widen to include Android phone makers found to be complicit in antitrust activity, an official said, without elaborating. Japan’s review comes on top of an antitrust case the US has mounted against the global search leader. Federal regulators accuse Google of abusing its dominance to block startups and larger rivals such as Microsoft, a key argument in the biggest tech anti-monopoly case since the 1990s.

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Source: Slashdot – Japan Investigates Google Over Alleged Antitrust Violations