Microsoft introduces new wake-up feature for Word that attempts to suggest PC alternatives

Microsoft has included a new feature in the latest version of its Word software that acts as an inclusiveness checker and offers PC alternatives to phrases that might bother others.

Traditionally, Microsoft Word offered tools to its 250 million users, such as spelling, punctuation and grammar checking software.

But now the tech giant has added an additional feature that reads a user’s work and examines whether the language used might offend an individual.

The sun reports that it does this by highlighting phrases that focus on gender, age, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or “socioeconomic status.”

The feature, which produces a purple line under words or phrases it deems potentially problematic, can be turned on and off in Word’s settings.

Microsoft Word also used red lines to indicate spelling errors and green lines for grammatical errors.

After highlighting the inclusivity issue, Word’s new feature will provide more palatable alternatives – which include changing Postman Pat to “mailman” or “postman”.

The software also suggested changing astronaut Neil Armstrong’s famous quote from “one giant leap for mankind” to “mankind” or “mankind.”

In 2020, Microsoft also released an update for Word that highlighted a double space as an error.

Current versions of the software highlight the erroneous double space with a blue line, highlighting a grammatical error.

The feature, which produces a purple line under words or phrases it deems potentially problematic, can be turned on and off in Word’s settings.

The popular use of double-spaced is a holdover from the days of typescript, when the equal-width characters of “monospaced” fonts required clearer sentence endings.

The introduction of proportional-spaced typewriters in 1944, however, began the process of making extra space unnecessary to ensure easy readability.

Nevertheless, the tradition of double-spaced continued – and is often found among people who first learned to type on a typewriter.

The news comes after last month when a poll found Microsoft to be one of the most trusted big tech companies in the US, with 43% of survey participants suggesting they trust the company.” a lot a lot”.

The new software also follows reports earlier this month that the computer programming flaw known as the Millennium bug that plagued PCs in 2000 has returned, with Microsoft Exchange users reporting similar issues for access email 22 years later.

As the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve, Microsoft customers reported suffering from a reappearance of the Millennium bug that plagued PCs in 2000 (stock image)

The problem of deleting exchange servers around the world started when the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.

Microsoft system administrators dubbed the Y2K22 issue after the Y2K bug, a computer programming glitch that plagued some computers around the turn of the millennium 22 years ago.

As the new millennium approached, computer programmers realized that their software might not be interpreting 00 as 2000, but as 1900 – a problem that many feared would spell disaster for governments, corporations, banks and industries around the world.

Many economists predicted a global recession, and doomsday leaflets warning of an apocalyptic fallout following computer malfunctions were released en masse in the late 1990s.

Fortunately, the computer apocalypse never happened, with only minimal disruptions recorded, but the problem returned on some Microsoft Exchange servers 22 years later.

The UK government released leaflets about the bug in the late 1990s. As the new millennium approached, computer programmers realized that their software might not be interpreting 00 as 2000, but as 1900 – a problem which many feared would spell disaster for governments, businesses, banks and industries around the world.

The problem stems from the way Microsoft names updates for its malware scanning engine, which uses the year, month, and date before another four-digit number, called the update number.

For example, in this case, the update number would be 220101, followed by 0001.

This system is used to track updates, with the most recent update being assigned a higher value.

But the field where the update number is stored seems to have a 31-bit limit, which means the maximum value that can be entered is two to the 31st power, or 2,147,483,648.

When the calendar changed to 2022, the naming system exceeded the maximum value and failed.

As a result, Microsoft’s anti-malware scanning software, which queues and checks messages before they are delivered to the recipient, queues emails and does not send them. .

Responding to reports of the problem reappearing, Microsoft said earlier this month that engineers had been “working around the clock on a fix.”