Windows 10 upgrade will be free

[Suff]

For all operating systems from Windows7 upwards, including phones and tablets.

For one year after it ships.

Oh and they demo'd some rather cool Augmented Reality glasses which they're calling Holographic. In reality they do add a holographic layer onto the world the person sees. It was extremely interesting what was demo'd. If I was a TV manufacturer I'd be looking to see how I could get on the bandwagon. What was more interesting but not said is that everyone in the house could be sitting in the same room, watching the same wall, all watching different programs on their HoloLens.

What Microsoft is offering with Cortana (personal assistant already on my phone), full cross platform from phone to desktop PC and xBox One, is something Microsoft has never even looked like delivering before. I've always said that Microsoft gets better in direct response to the threat to their business.

It's going to be an interesting year....

Keynote here.

Comments are coming in too.

[Workingman]

I also like MS Windows OSes, but this is not for me.

It has got lots and lots and lots of new things, I appreciate that, but as a home user they are things that I will never, ever, use, so from my point of view they are not enhancements but bloatware. It also looks to have got very 'entertainmenty', another aspect I do not require.

Another thing that worries me slightly is that things look to be drifting to "Microsoftworld" where your phone, tablet, laptop, PC, xBox, TV........... toilet seat, are all running exclusively on Windows OS with pay-for Windows apps. Everything is running Windows till one day they will only be able to run Microsoft software.

I prefer to have an element of control over the technology I use and this is taking a lot of that control away. I am not a business and I am not a gamer and I do not need everything syncing with everything else. I also like 'real' reality, it serves me quite well.

Apple Mk2?

[Suff]

If you want to set up an iPad, you _have_ to have an Apple account. Apple TV? Apple everything if they had their way, all backed by the Apple store with "paid for". Also Apple has way more of the IOT than MS does. They are just catching up.

Ditto Android. Whist it's possible to set up an Android device (phone, tablet etc), without submitting a Google account, it's not possible to use the play store without one. So Google account. Google search, google TV, Google Apps, Google services.......

Google is a bigger threat to the "only runs android", Android has 85% of the mobile market world wide.

I like what MS is trying to do. OK I won't do the gaming but I might buy an xBox if I can use it as a core media streaming device which streams to all my windows devices, including tablets. Something which is there in the Google and Apple world.

I liked the HoloLens. If I could get rid of a TV and a host of other stuff round the house for the price of a couple of pairs of glasses like that (or better), I'd be very happy to do that. Especially for me who travels and, effectively, lives in more than one place on a regular basis. It would be nice to sit down in the Hotel, put on the HoloLens and watch a movie of mine, perhaps even streamed from home, on an 80" screen with virtual 7.1 on a set of decent headphones.

There is a lot of potential here. Sadly I won't live to see the most interesting stuff where they feed the Augmented reality direct into the optical nerve or even into the brain. That's for 50-100 years from now and I'm just not going to last that long....

Windows 10 should be interesting and it's a free upgrade. Given the people I've seen playing with Siri, cortana should be heavily used and if it's as capable as they want it to be, then it will soon become a firm favourite. After all who wouldn't have a PA if they could afford it?

If I look into the possibilities for Cortana in the workplace, it's a godsend for someone like me. Never miss another meeting, never miss another report, always know what the tasks are, taken direct from the minutes of the last meeting; all without having to transfer my minutes to my own actions list. There is a whole host of stuff in there which will be extremely useful to me and to the upcoming generations who will see all of this as just part of life. Personal shopper? Cortana will know what you like, how often you buy it, the last time you treated yourself.... Etc....

Granted I'm looking a decade or so down the road here, but the framework is there and it will only grow. Both in speed, power and ability. You won't even need your phone in your hand, your wrist band or watch will tell you the messages Cortana has for you.

Personally I'm not happy with the whole location thing but there are times when a location based reminder might be useful in saving on wasted journeys.

The xBox I can take or leave, the integrated cross platform stuff I'm not overly bothered about but the consistent interface cross phone and PC, works for me.

I see a lot of possibilities. Things are going to change and it's going to be another time of wonder when they start doing things which we had never even thought of. The most interesting statement for me was the one about the physical world having boundaries and there being no boundaries in software. Not quite true, but I like the sentiment. Also I read a review of the HoloLens and something which was not said was that you could interact with your image of your home. The instance stated was the one where you could take a hammer from minecraft and smash up the coffee table in your living room. It would then remove it from your view even when you are moving your head around. Which is quite clever but might wind up with you barking your shins if you are not careful...

There are some odd things too which the youngsters might grow up with. Like having a home with very little furniture in it and nothing on the walls, without the glasses, but a home full of life and colour with them on. Like sending virtual flowers which appear in a vase in the house on the "virtual" sideboard. Virtual smells might be an issue though...

I'm just throwing out ideas here, but it's a very interesting future we're looking towards.

[Workingman]

I am not disagreeing with what you say, Suff, but I reckon I will be taking the long sleep before much of it comes to pass. I have to say, though, I would like to come back in twenty or thirty years and see how things are getting on. We must be getting near the end of the first part of Pareto's 80:20 principle so I will expect a slowdown at some point.

As for Android. I did not get a google account. I download apk files from sites around the web to my laptop. You have to be a bit careful not to get malware, but most malware scanners do a good job, and a factory reset isn't hard to do.

I have just downloaded Linux Mint to see how that looks. Unix for dummies will be getting read again.

[Suff]

Hmmm, I was thinking "general public" and not geeks like us. Whilst I could get APK files and load them, usually what I'm after is only on the store, so it's not something I do a lot of.

I had a read of Pareto's 80:20 principle and I think it applies in one scenario. Fixed boundaries. In every instance quoted on the wiki site, there was a fixed boundary inherent in what it was saying. Code, garden, population, etc....

In the world of software solutions and hardware solutions, there are no fixed boundaries. We are limited by the technology of the current era so our boundaries are flexible to technology changes. For instance my first boss in computing told me that we couldn't have much more than 128mbytes of RAM in a computer because it would take too long to memory check it. Enter virtual instant memory checks.

Throughout the world of technology people have been constantly telling us that we will reach the end of one particular linear line of technology. However for any single line of technology there are at least 5 or 6 competing technologies going on at the same time. The winner will be the one which is able to scale beyond the capability of the current front runner.

We've been there time and time again. I remember when the First Pentium II chips came out and magazine editors were making inane quips like "if it gets any faster it will do what you want before you press enter". In fact, we got 100 times faster and the operating system still lags what we want to do. In the end it is the software, not the hardware which will do what we want before we press enter, think Cortana.

In the world of software and hardware we will always push the boundaries so we will always be seeing a new 80% or 20% depending on how you view it. Remember the Apple newton? Now consider if you had said to the press, at that time, that you would have a mobile phone 1,000 times more capable than the Newton, with real time events display on your watch and a tablet with which you could do all of your daily work which you did on the PC to carry around with you, all with a minimum of 8 hours constant use battery life and with voice commands and smart sync over wireless. They would have told you first that you were daft and second to come back in 50 years. 28 years later and it is not only a reality but is becoming passé.

The world of technology has an alarming habit of outstripping our expectations.

For instance take Cortana. I caught the inference to the fact that the largest part of Cortana is actually central. Cortana will work best with always on devices which share 100% of what you do with the Cortana servers.

Then Bing almost becomes irrelevant. For instance let's take the restaurants which Cortana was mining the information on. So you wanted to go somewhere and Cortana was getting the information from Bing to display restaurant menu and opening times. However, consider this. The restaurant staff are using Windows10 with Cortana. They, using the business pc which Cortana knows, update the menu and the opening hours. Cortana already has this and shares it with Cortana everywhere. So Cortana eventually becomes more up to date than Bing if everyone is using it.

Coincidentally, in this way, Cortana has the potential to completely invalidate Google as a search tool, because you would never need to go and search, Cortana would bring all the information you need to your fingertips just by looking at what you are trying to do...

I would expect someone in Google is already getting the lawyers fired up for the next antitrust case.......

[Workingman]

The version of Pareto I was taught went something like this: You will achieve 80% of whatever using only 20% of your resources, but to achieve the last 20% will take 80% or resources. It also went that the last 20% would also be subject to the 80:20 rule and so could go on to infinity with the last little bit getting ever more difficult to achieve.

I remember a chat with a German Physics graduate on a course I was running. He was adamant that 512 MB banks of RAM were near the limit and that any more would be nigh on impossible. He also said that such a thing as what we now know as SSD drives would never work as access to them was so different from a spinning HDD. And to cap it all he was absolutely certain that there would never be a computer that turned on at the point it was turned off. So much for Physics teaching in Germany. It was only his imagination holding him back, not the technology.

I take your point about Cortana, Google and search engines in general. There will come a time when they are largely redundant, sooner rather then later. Everything has a shelf life. Isn't that why Goole is spending huge sums in buying up companies so that it can diversify? How many of us go past page one of search results: page 2? A search for "Cars" brought up 226,999,917 results (0.29 seconds). Am I ever likely to trawl through all that lot? If Cortana can pick up that I am interested in Citroen and specifically the C4, 1,279,024 results (0.22 seconds) on Google, she can cut to the chase. If she picks up that I am in a particular area of Leeds all I will get is page one.......

I am about to have a play with Mint using VMware. I may be some time.......

[Suff]

I see, the wiki page was not quite that clear about how the last 20% would be so expensive in terms of resources. I guess my point was that we will never really get past 60-70% of anything before moving off at a tangent and doing something else along the same line but somewhat different.

Also it depends on where you believe we are on the journey of technology, hardware, software and the use of all those things. I believe we're still at about 10% for hardware and 5% or less for software. We haven't even touched the smallest use of technology for our daily lives. Think cars, they now have dozens of computers in them. But, again, it's just the smallest piece of the whole. We have solid state motion detectors now which are so sensitive they could pick up whether a door has loose hinges just by the rise and fall of the door when closing and opening. We could have chips which report the play in ball joints and a plethora of other purely mechanical things which we check by hand today. Our cars could report the state of every part of the car including every mm of wire, every bulb and the flow of all the fluid around the engine.

This is just one are of our work. The first nanomachines have finally been created and they are working on more. When we can start building on the atomic level, things will change dramatically. Even our ability to create new elements. We haven't even scratched the surface of what our technology can do with us and I believe that things like Facebook and totally pervasive media libraries will actually slow our rate of advance down as people become more and more absorbed into these virtual worlds.

Linux. That has ever been an on and off story for me. I have come to the conclusion that if I want to program 50% of things I need and learn 110% of everything else then Linux would be for me. However I'm not a teenager and my time is limited. Even then the rewards will be limited. I would be in total control of my computing life for sure. But I would also miss out on the larger part of the technological revolutions which are happening today simply for the matter that Linux is positioned as a Server technology with some desktops for geeks. A bit like using AIX for your desktop 15 years ago, the sky is the limit but you have to build your own aeroplane....

Now if you want to spend loads of time on something potentially useless, how about helping me work out recursive compression by taking two 8 bit bytes, making them into a single 16 bit byte and creating an index and offset stream, by using binary chop for the index of the 16 bit byte and using standard compression techniques to compress each stream individually then tack the two together again as a single file to go through the whole process all over again....

[Workingman]

Can't I am messing with Linux Mint 'Cinnamon' and.....................

Trying to imagine what will come of the experiment in Scotland showing that the speed of light is not as fixed as we thought it was, well not the proton part. The guys in Glasgow and Herriot Watt have slowed light down and kept it slow once it has propagated.

It all came about when two Professors were musing the problem over a beer. That's the sort of blue sky thinking I like. I might yet be able to come back and see the "future".

[Suff]

I never get a clear answer to my question. "Is the speed of light measured in time or is time measured in the speed of light".... It's always good to drop. We need to get out into space and up to 0.5c. Then we will see what stuff looks like hitting a sensor at 1.5c and we might get a whole new view of the universe around us....

Just remember that Linux commands have come up in the world. They now have -h switches which stand for "Humanly Readable". df -h is much easier than df -k. I haven't looked under the skin for a while now, I only use Linux for deep tech recovery stuff and not for my day to day stuff. My biggest issue with a lot of the RTFM stuff is then when I do read the FAQing manual the person who wrote it has not deigned to descend to the level of mere mortals and I get sick of having to try and translate every 3 words. Worse when I go on a forum the answers are in the same geekese and they won't even try and explain to mere mortals. They resort to RTFM at which point the circle is closed and I prefer to just go away and ponder the world of people who really don't want you to use their technology.....

I could understand this if I was some ordinary guy who knows nothing about computers, uses Windows because you just press the power button and it goes on and don't want to learn. But I've been using and working with Linux since 1997, I've architected and delivered hundreds of Unix servers and I've even worked with Unix services on a mainframe.

As you can imagine, Linux is low on the priority of my snuff list.....