added 9 June 2010  

996 members have voted

  1. 1. How did you find Neowin?

    • A Google (Search) Result
      505
    • From a friend/acquaintance
      137
    • At work
      26
    • By a news story
      78
    • From TV/Radio
      3
    • Link exchange / Linked from another site
      212


Recommended Posts

Oh man, I have never seen this thread before, but I think my first exposure to Neowin was via Desktop Sidebar in 2004, which included several news feeds in it's News Panel via RSS, including Neowin, Slashdot, and many others! I just had a squiz on WayBack, and it all came flooding back. A test release of MSN Messenger 7?! Holy crap, that stuff was like crack to me as a teenager! *Nudge*

https://web.archive.org/web/20041001041507/http://neowin.net/

  • Like 1
  • Love 1
  • 3 weeks later...

Just stumbled across this site again. 

Delighted to see it's still going. I have vague memories of speaking to the founder in an Irish Bar in the Netherlands in the early 2000's. He was a delightful chap with a real passion for gadgets!

Nice to see it's still going strong.

  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...
  • 4 weeks later...

A Pacific NW resident for a majority of my eons of existance. Known to rearrange 1's and 0's starting many years ago. Lived and workef in several countries around our world. Almost ended up in a former East Berlin prison for a few years, accused of trying to smuggle a woman to freedom in West Berlin (1967).

My wonderful significant partner also had experience living outside of of the PNW in her young years. Her father was a US spy stationed for a while in Moscow. He also came close to potential incarceration. He and family were able to escape.

Spent a few years as an investigatine news reporter with a former Auburn radio station.

Enjoying life in our relatively new home, in which we are continuing our significant updates. My past home remodeling experience is coming in handy alongside her experience with the finishing aspects to coordinate the new, refreshing home for us and our two dogs.

More later...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...
  • 3 months later...

Back in my Windows XP days. When I was heavily into computing and everything related to technology. I found Neowin!  Neowin was at that time one of my favorite go-to places for everything technology related. I had not been active on the site because I had forgotten my logon credentials. I had signed up with an email account that has long since been dead for at least 15 years or more. It was only recently that I had tried and to my surprise. I was able to logon. I've seen so many changes to the site. Now I plan on visiting every day. It's good to be back!

What a time it was then to be sure! I too remember Beta Testing Windows XP at that time. Prior to that I was running Windows NT or Windows 98. Beta Tested Windows Vista (Longhorn) and Windows 7 too! I'm dating myself here, but I remember first using DOS 2.0 way back in the day LOL. So much change, exciting times and the promise of how technology would change world. I was young and very optimistic then. I'm still cautiously optimistic that we will ultimately use these new technologies for the good of mankind. Right now, I'm waiting to see what will happen.

Edited by NeoFyle
  • Love 1
  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Found a URL for neowin on Reddit from a Google search. Jumping ship from Discord and Reddit. Wanted a forum that could give me the "small-town" vibes of simpler times, and this seems to be the place.

  • 1 month later...

Same as the dude above me: found a link on an old Reddit thread. I'm old enough to have spent my teen years lurking around forums during my teens and early twenties, and I've been wanting to discover a forum community or two that's still managing to stay active in today's online world.

  • Like 2
  • Thanks 1

I was coming here a lot to get information on Microsoft Whistler and Longhorn betas so I decided to officially join on Christmas Eve 2001 and it has been my homepage now for almost 25 years!

It's...been a long time since I joined. It was around the time of MSN Messenger. I was a Neowin lurker for a few months IIRC. I was trying to find information on Windows and stumbled on the news site/forum, maybe through Google, Yahoo or Excite searches. I liked reading the technology news articles. I think I spent the weekend reading most of the articles going back to when the site opened lol. I just liked the writing style and the topics.

At the time, I remember something happened to MSN Messenger and it wiped out my whole contact/friend list of the application. It happened to more than just me though, it seemed global. I searched online for a solution but didn't find one. So I dug into the Windows registry (I had done that for other applications to tinker) and found the contact information stored there for the application. I decoded it and submitted my findings to Neowin and joined the forum at the same time. I think I took a screenshot of Neobond's thanks. I will search for it and if I find it before the new years, I will post it.

I haven't been much on these forums in a while but I am truly happy my profile hasn't been deleted. Many thanks to whomever is/was in charge of that. 

 

Edited by kintamanate
Fix typos
  • Like 3
On 05/12/2025 at 16:18, Spark99 said:

I was coming here a lot to get information on Microsoft Whistler and Longhorn betas so I decided to officially join on Christmas Eve 2001 and it has been my homepage now for almost 25 years!

I was born 8 months before you joined Neowin :)

  • Like 1
  • 3 weeks later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • GitHub removes manual model selection from Copilot free and student plans by Karthik Mudaliar GitHub is removing the ability to manually select an AI model from its Copilot Free and Student plans, making its automatic routing system the default and only way to choose a model. This means users on these tiers will no longer be able to deliberately select a particular OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or Microsoft model for a task. In its announcement, GitHub said Copilot Auto will dynamically choose what it considers the best model for each request. Free and Student accounts will retain access to models from multiple families, although the available selection will continue to depend on the restrictions attached to each plan. GitHub did not identify a fixed pool of models that Auto will always use, and its documentation warns that model availability can change over time. GitHub describes Auto as more than a random fallback system. On supported surfaces, its task-optimization technology evaluates the complexity of a request alongside real-time information about model health and availability. Straightforward prompts can be routed to faster and less expensive models, while more demanding coding tasks may be sent to higher-cost reasoning models. The company says this approach should reduce rate limiting, latency, and failed requests. Auto generally selects one model along natural prompt-caching boundaries rather than repeatedly switching models during a session, as GitHub found that mid-session changes increased costs without producing sufficient improvements in output quality. Users can still check which model generated a response. In Copilot Chat, the information appears when hovering over an answer, while Copilot CLI and the Copilot cloud agent display the selected model alongside their output. Auto is available in Copilot Chat, Copilot CLI, and the cloud agent, with the exact implementation and release status varying between supported development environments. The latest restriction follows several months of adjustments to Copilot’s individual plans. GitHub temporarily halted new Pro, Pro+, and Student subscriptions in April as it sought to manage demand and service reliability. It later introduced token-based billing and began gradually reopening individual-plan registrations on June 17. Alongside the picker change, GitHub is retiring the “Preview” label from Microsoft-developed models. It argues that the label is no longer necessary because Auto handles model routing and models are continuously updated behind the scenes.
    • Look up 'inflation' kid. Ask an AI for the numbers between both games.
    • Google reportedly set to lose two key Gemini and DeepMind researchers to Anthropic by Karthik Mudaliar Google is reportedly preparing to lose two more prominent artificial intelligence researchers, with Gemini contributors Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel planning to join rival AI developer Anthropic. According to a report from Bloomberg, both researchers are viewed internally as important contributors to Google’s flagship Gemini model family. Adler worked on Google’s AI coding efforts, while Pritzel was involved in the process used to train AI systems. Neither company has publicly confirmed the moves. The report also does not say when the researchers will formally leave Google or what positions they will hold at Anthropic. Training a large AI model requires decisions covering its architecture, data preparation, distributed computing infrastructure, and post-training methods that shape how the finished system behaves. Researchers with experience operating at the scale of Gemini are consequently difficult to replace quickly. Both Adler and Pritzel have previously contributed to Google DeepMind’s scientific research as well. They are listed among the authors of the company’s work on expanding AlphaFold protein-structure predictions across entire proteomes, alongside AlphaFold researchers including John Jumper. The reported departures arrive shortly after another important change within Google’s Gemini organization. Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer is leaving Google for OpenAI, after returning to the search company in 2024 through its deal with Character.AI. Shazeer is particularly well known as one of the authors of the Transformer paper, whose architecture became the foundation for most modern large language models. Anthropic, meanwhile, has been recruiting recognizable figures from other leading laboratories. OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI director Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May. His move, followed by the reported recruitment of several Google researchers, suggests Anthropic is strengthening the research teams responsible for the core capabilities of future Claude models rather than concentrating solely on product and enterprise sales. The competition is complicated by the companies’ extensive commercial relationships. Anthropic competes directly with Google’s Gemini models, but it also relies on Google as an infrastructure partner. In April, Anthropic announced an expanded agreement with Google and Broadcom covering multiple gigawatts of next-generation Tensor Processing Unit capacity. TPUs are Google-designed accelerators used to train and run large AI models. via Bloomberg
    • This article makes my head hurt. Lots of confusing words
    • Google adds built-in computer control to Gemini 3.5 flash by Karthik Mudaliar Google has added Computer Use as a built-in tool in Gemini 3.5 Flash, giving developers a single model that can reason about a task and operate graphical interfaces across browsers, mobile devices, and desktop environments. The feature is available through the Gemini API and Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, although it remains a preview feature for now. Computer Use enables an AI agent to examine screenshots and return actions such as mouse clicks, scrolling, and keyboard input. A developer’s application must execute those actions, capture the resulting screen, and send it back to Gemini, creating a continuous loop until the task is completed. Google says the integration can be used for activities including repetitive form filling, application testing, research across multiple websites, and longer enterprise workflows. Gemini 3.5 Flash can work with browser, mobile, and desktop environments, whereas Google’s earlier standalone Computer Use model was primarily positioned around browser interaction. The main change is consolidation. Computer control was previously offered through the separate Gemini 2.5 Computer Use preview model. As Neowin reported when that model was introduced, it was designed to interpret a visual interface and generate actions without requiring a website-specific API. Google later brought Computer Use to preview versions of Gemini 3 Pro and Gemini 3 Flash in January 2026. The latest release now incorporates the tool into the stable Gemini 3.5 Flash model rather than requiring developers to select a specialized model solely for interface automation. Gemini 3.5 Flash itself was announced in May as Google’s latest fast model for coding and multi-step agent workflows. It supports a one-million-token input context window and up to 65,000 output tokens, along with adjustable thinking levels that let developers trade additional reasoning for lower latency and cost. Google also added that Gemini 3.5 Flash received targeted adversarial training for computer-use scenarios. The company is also offering safeguards that can require user confirmation before sensitive or irreversible actions and automatically stop a workflow when suspected prompt injection is detected. Its developer documentation describes configurable protections for areas such as financial transactions and changes to sensitive records. Google isn't the first to bring Computer Use to its platform. Anthropic has made computer control available through Claude, while OpenAI has continued improving computer-use performance in its recent models. Microsoft has also applied the concept to business workflows, including a Computer Use capability for the Researcher agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Dedicated
      Scoobystu earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • First Post
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      First Post
    • One Month Later
      D0nn13 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Rookie
      +ChiefOfNeo went up a rank
      Rookie
    • One Year In
      Tom Schmidt earned a badge
      One Year In
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      463
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      177
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      124
    4. 4
      Michael Scrip
      79
    5. 5
      Xenon
      76
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!