In a market where consumers had a host of other established programs to choose from, PowerPoint initially struggled to set itself apart from its competitors. They developed the software further, taking it to new heights with the release of PowerPoint By eliminating the need for programming knowledge or specialist skills, PowerPoint 97 granted personal computer users access to filmesque features like transitions and animations.
From version 97 onwards, PowerPoint went through major upgrades with every release. A version was released on average every two years, spreading through offices like wildfire. The version introduced a clipboard feature that could hold multiple objects at once. In , PowerPoint transformed its animation engine, allowing users to take advantage of advanced, custom animations. Submit Next Question. By signing up, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Forgot Password?
This website or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and required to achieve the purposes illustrated in the cookie policy. By closing this banner, scrolling this page, clicking a link or continuing to browse otherwise, you agree to our Privacy Policy. PowerPoint Version. Everyone wanted a bullet point in this story. By , the PowerPoint team was using PowerPoint to explain their business strategy.
Following their acquisition , Microsoft released its first official version of PowerPoint in The early versions of PowerPoint only produced transparencies , handouts , and speaker notes until the rise of laptops made transparencies obsolete. PowerPoint 97 was released with major improvements and updates, most notably, custom animation.
This allowed presentations to faded-zoom into the future. And the fact that users needed no special programming skills to animate their presentations made everyone pinwheel into love with PowerPoint. Since , PowerPoint has continued to improve and grow. Newer versions have come out with audio and video embedding, web support, and more slide transitions than ever before.
And the biggest Chinese technology companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Huawei are developing their own chips rather than banking on those from Intel, Nvidia, and other United States-based companies.
China is intent on developing semiconductor independence, both in design and manufacture of state-of-the-art chips. The urgency for doing so has been helped along by U. The sanctions extend to any Huawei suppliers that use U. The United States, alarmed at China's campaign to bring Taiwan under its control, has also begun an ambitious program to 'reshore' its semiconductor manufacturing after allowing much of it to migrate to Taiwan.
Around 80 percent of the world's semiconductor production capacity is in Asia, and nearly all the most advanced logic chip production is in Taiwan.
No Chinese semiconductor foundry has yet achieved the 5-nanometer processing needed to make Alibaba's new ARM-based chip, so it is still beholden to Taiwan for manufacturing.
But the implications of Alibaba's general choice of Arm and RISC-V instruction set architectures is perhaps more consequential for the long term. An instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the language in which software talks to hardware, and thus determines the kind of software that can run on a particular chip.
Most servers use CPUs based on Intel's x86 instruction set architecture. But UK-based Arm, which licenses its instruction set architecture to chip designers, has been gaining a foothold in this market.
RISC-V, which refers to the fifth generation of an open-source reduced instruction set computer architecture created by U. This past June, China hosted the fourth annual RISC-V summit, bringing together industry, academia, and government to talk about the future of the architecture. In the wake of the U. Unable to buy Intel chips because of the sanctions, Huawei most recently sold its x86 server unit to a company owned by China's Henan province.
From the beginning, the company indicated that it intended to open the CPU's source code—the hardware description language that describes the structure and behavior of the CPU core's electronic circuits. It has now done so… with little fanfare.
Its Yitian server system on a chip SoC , manufactured by Taiwan's TSMC, will have a total of Arm-based cores, with 60 billion integrated transistors and a top clock speed of 3. Alibaba said it is the first server processor compatible with the latest Armv9 architecture. Alibaba said the SoC achieved a score of in SPECint a standard benchmark for measuring CPU integer processing power , surpassing that of the current state-of-the-art Arm server processor based on Armv8 by 20 percent in performance and 50 percent in energy efficiency.
The company also announced the development of proprietary servers, under the brand name Panjiu , developed for the next-generation of cloud-native infrastructure. By separating computing from storage, the servers are optimized for both general-purpose and specialized AI computing, as well as high-performance storage. The company vowed to provide more services and support for RISC-V development tools, software development kits, and customized cores in the future.
Consultant Gwennap suggests that Alibaba's Arm and RISC-V efforts are experiments more than commercial endeavors, noting that Alibaba is still using x86 Intel chips for the vast majority of its internal use. Alibaba's new Arm-based server chip will be used in Alibaba datacenters to provide cloud services to customers..
The company will continue to offer Intel-based services, so it's up to customers to choose Arm over xbased chips. When Amazon did something similar a few years ago, there was little uptake for the Arm-based chips. But true semiconductor independence will require China to develop its own extreme ultraviolet lithography machines , required to etch microscopic circuits on silicon.
SMIC , China's main chip foundry, can't provide anything smaller than 14 nm. SMIC claims to have mastered the 3nm chip process in the lab and is trying to buy the EUV lithography machines necessary for production from ASML, the Dutch company that currently has a monopoly on the critical equipment.
But the United States is intent on blocking the sale. But getting that technology out of the lab and into a machine remains many years away. Japanese startup working towards autonomous robots that can do useful work inside and outside the space station. Late last year, Japanese robotics startup GITAI sent their S1 robotic arm up to the International Space Station as part of a commercial airlock extension module to test out some useful space-based autonomy.
Everything moves pretty slowly on the ISS, so it wasn't until last month that NASA astronauts installed the S1 arm and GITAI was able to put the system through its paces —or rather, sit in comfy chairs on Earth and watch the arm do most of its tasks by itself, because that's the dream, right?
So what's next for commercial autonomous robotics in space? One of the advantages of working in space is that it's a highly structured environment.
Microgravity can be somewhat unpredictable, but you have a very good idea of the characteristics of objects and even of lighting because everything that's up there is excessively well defined. So, stuff like using a two-finger gripper for relatively high precision tasks is totally possible, because the variation that the system has to deal with is low.
Of course, things can always go wrong, so GITAI also tested teleop procedures from Houston to make sure that having humans in the loop was also an effective way of completing tasks. Since full autonomy is vastly more difficult than almost full autonomy, occasional teleop is probably going to be critical for space robots of all kinds.
GITAI will apply the general-purpose autonomous space robotics technology, know-how, and experience acquired through this tech demo to develop extra-vehicular robotics EVR that can execute docking, repair, and maintenance tasks for On-Orbit Servicing OOS or conduct various activities for lunar exploration and lunar base construction.
I'm sure you did many tests with the system on the ground before sending it to the ISS. How was operating the robot on the ISS different from the testing you had done on Earth? The biggest difference between experiments on the ground and on the ISS is the microgravity environment, but it was not that difficult to cope with.
However, experiments on the ISS, which is an unknown environment that we have never been to before, are subject to a variety of unexpected situations that were extremely difficult to deal with, for example an unexpected communication breakdown occurred due to a failed thruster firing experiment on the Russian module.
However, we were able to solve all the problems because the development team had carefully prepared for the irregularities in advance. It looked like the robot was performing many tasks using equipment designed for humans.
Do you think it would be better to design things like screws and control panels to make them easier for robots to see and operate? Yes, I think so.
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