Microsoft will bundle the all-new Office, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as part of Window 10 for phones and tablets, Joe Belfiore announced during Microsoft’s two-hour-long Windows 10 event. However, there was no mention whether this generous app gift-giving would extend to the desktop. Read more…
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Microsoft Office Will Be Free on Windows 10 Phones and Tablets
Meet Mama Lee. Mama Lee is 86-years-old, enjoys ballroom dancing, and has been a full-time resident of a cruise ship for the past ten years. It costs her about $164, 000 a year, but it really sounds like she’s loving her permanent vacation . Read more…
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An 86-year-old woman has been living on cruise ships for a decade
Coming into today’s Windows 10 event, we already knew a lot about Microsoft’s latest and greatest. The company explained the thinking behind its new OS back in September, and the Technical Preview has been available for months. The core change comes in the form of a revitalized desktop experience — one that puts the best of Windows 7 and 8 into a single package. Windows will also now better match the convertible devices Microsoft is pushing, with a consistent UI across all platforms, but there’s a whole lot more to explore here, including some features detailed today for the first time. Let’s take a closer look. Cortana If you’ve been following Windows Phone at all, you’ll know what Cortana is: Microsoft’s take on a personal digital assistant. The mobile version offers features that are a mix between Siri and Google Now, but the PC version has a few added benefits. Cortana plugs into Windows search, meaning if you ask for “PowerPoint slides about the charity account, ” it’ll search your computer and OneDrive accounts for relevant files. Microsoft is really pushing its natural-language and transcription abilities — onstage, Cortana was asked to “show photos from December, ” which it happily (and quickly) did, and also transcribed and sent an email entirely through voice commands. New, universal apps Perhaps the biggest news, though, even if it doesn’t benefit the majority of Windows users — is that Windows apps will now be universal and run across PC, tablet, phone and even Xbox One . That doesn’t mean PC users won’t be getting new apps as well. Microsoft blazed through a load of new apps for Windows. Most are refreshes of existing offerings, although there’s an entirely new Office suite that includes a new version of Outlook, which uses the Word engine for composing or displaying emails, and a refreshed Photos app. The biggest new addition, though? Project Spartan. Project Spartan As early reports suggested, Project Spartan is a new browser for Windows 10, entirely separate from Internet Explorer. Sure there’s a very clean, almost Chrome-like design, and a brand-new rendering engine, but the focus here is on social sharing. You can highlight and annotate websites before sharing them with friends, kind of like having Skitch built right into your browser. There’s also Cortana integration and a reading view that, much like Pocket, lets you read pages offline. Better settings Windows 10 goes a long way to fixing the fragmented Control Panel and Settings menus currently in Windows 8.1. A unified settings menu is coming, with a clean design and simple options, and there’s also the new Action Center (pictured above), which provides more toggles for switching on or off WiFi and other settings. Notifications will also pop up in this space, which will be synced across devices — if you dismiss a notification on your phone, you won’t see it when you next look at your PC, and vice versa. Continuum Not just the name of John Mayer’s mellow third studio album and an underrated sci-fi series, Continuum is now a big part of improving Windows on convertibles. We got a brief glimpse of it back at Microsoft’s last Windows event, but it’s now been fully explained. If you have, for example, a Surface Pro 3 with the keyboard docked, the experience will be very similar to Windows 7 (or Windows 8.1 in desktop mode). All apps are now windowed, whether they’re the new touch-friendly kind or legacy applications. But say you’re using an app like OneNote, and you want to undock your Surface and use it as a tablet: Do just that, and it’ll automatically expand the app into fullscreen mode, making it easier to use with your fingers. Gaming Sony has let you stream PlayStation 4 games to a Vita from launch. Microsoft’s response? To let anyone stream any Xbox One game to any Windows 10 PC or tablet . Sure, you have to be on the same network, but it’s still pretty massive news. Elsewhere, there’s a new Xbox app for PC and tablet that lets you access your activity feed, messages and friends list. It’ll even display information on games in third-party clients like Steam. Uhh… Holograms? We were promised a couple of surprises today, and it’s fair to say that Microsoft came through with a huge surprise: Windows Holographic . It’s an AR platform, letting you see 3D “projections” using a pair of AR goggles. You’re probably thinking this is some vague pipe dream, but it’s not. Microsoft also showed off HoloLens — a wearable, wire-free computer that will enable Windows Holographic — which the company says will be available at some point “in the Windows 10 time frame.” Free upgrades, but we don’t know when While it’s not really a feature, it’s definitely worth noting: Windows 10 will be free for everyone using Windows 7 or 8.1, provided you upgrade within the first year. As for when you can actually get all these new features on your computer? Microsoft is staying mum about that. The latest preview build, which’ll have many, but not all of the features announced today, is rolling out to Windows Insiders later this month, with a phone-friendly version coming in February. A consumer-ready version is still earmarked for “2015.” Filed under: Desktops , Gaming , Laptops , Tablets , Software , Microsoft Comments
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What’s new in Windows 10 for PCs? A lot.
It’s Windows 10 day! Again . This time though, Microsoft had a ton of in depth announcements about free upgrades, the future of Windows Phones, playing Xbox games on PC, and putting holodeck goggles on your face. Here are the highlights. Read more…
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Everything Microsoft Announced About Windows 10 Today
Microsoft has made mistakes. It knows this. But as the company proved today at its Windows 10 HOLOGRAPHIC GOGGLES launch event, it’s also not going to stop pushing user interface design into the future. It’s just getting smarter about it. Read more…
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Windows 10’s Big Step Back Is Actually a Huge Step Forward
Internet Explorer is dead, long live Project Spartan! Even the most diehard Microsoft fan would probably admit that the Microsoft’s browser has become the punchline to a lot of jokes. The advent of Windows 10 has seen the outfit attempt to fix many of the gripes that users had with the last two generations of the operating system, so perhaps it’s no surprise to see that a replacement browser is in the works. Microsoft has now revealed more information about the browser project, apart from its actual name — for now, it’s codenamed Project Spartan . The new browser is designed to be everything that Internet Explorer isn’t, which is to say light, nimble and secure . To achieve that, Microsoft has built a brand new rendering engine, and given the browser a lean, pared-down look and feel. That means it won’t support Webkit like Chrome and Firefox, however, which may make web developers’ lives more difficult. However, Microsoft said the new engine would give Spartan a far more robust backbone for adding new features. One of those it showed off was “snapping, ” which lets you freeze a web page and clip out specific segments or add comments. From there, you can send whatever you clipped to a colleague using Windows 10’s built-in sharing tool. Another new feature revolves around reading — the new browser will let you reformat web content to make it more digestible, and will integrate Windows 8’s Pocket-like article reading list. In addition, Windows 10 will have built-in support for PDF files, presumably meaning that constant Adobe Reader downloads will no longer be unnecessary. Another big part of Project Spartan will be Cortana integration. Microsoft’s voice-search tool will work more like Google Now in order to predict what information you may need. For instance, if you ask for a flight time, Cortana may notice that a friend or family member already has one scheduled, and suggest that time as a response. Another example: if you’re looking at a restaurant website in the Project Spartan browser, Cortana will offer directions, photos and links to Yelp reviews. Microsoft said that the new browser would come to the PC first, and eventually arrive on Windows Phone devices later. As for Internet Explorer, it’ll be kept alive for compatibility reasons, but anybody migrating to Windows 10 who doesn’t need IE will get the new browser. From what we’ve seen, that’s a good thing — after seeing Spartan, Internet Explorer looks instantly obsolete. Daniel Cooper contributed to this report. Filed under: Internet , Software , Microsoft Comments
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Windows 10’s browser includes Cortana, note-taking and offline reading
On Wednesday, 4chan founder Christopher Poole, better known by the moniker “moot,” announced his retirement from running the site. moot started 4chan 11 and a half years ago when he was 15, and the image-based bulletin board has grown into a staunch supporter of anonymity for its posters since. That notoriety has drawn some of the best and also a lot of the very, very worst to its 63 boards. In his post today, moot explained the decision: 4chan has faced numerous challenges over the years, including how to continuously satisfy a community of millions, and ensure the site has the human, technical, and financial resources to continue operating. But the biggest hurdle it’s had to overcome is myself. As 4chan’s sole administrator, decision maker, and keeper of most of its institutional knowledge, I’ve come to represent an uncomfortably large single point of failure. moot continued to say that he has made sure the site will be financially secure in the foreseeable future and has delegated the tasks of running the site to “a few senior volunteers.” Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments
VR? Meh. Microsoft is going the holodeck route, with something called Project Hololens. They are Holographic Glasses and they’ll be coming out around the same time as Windows 10. Man this sure looks awesome and cool and probably also really janky and dumb! We’ll find out soon though; Microsoft will be showing off the tech to attendees later today. Read more…
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Project Hololens: Microsoft’s Audacious Plan to Make Anywhere a Holodeck
Remember last year, when the Chinese engineering firm WinSun 3D printed a bunch of houses? It made the news because they printed them so quickly—ten structures in less than 24 hours. The structures themselves weren’t huge, just 200-square-meter, one-story bungalows. But now WinSun’s set their goals higher, literally. They’ve 3D printed the structures you see here, which include a freaking five-story apartment building and a 1, 100-square-meter (roughly 12, 000-square-foot) villa. To be clear, they didn’t print the structures out in one shot. As with the earlier 10-house batch, they printed out individual panels which were then knocked together by conventional construction workers, and in this case they didn’t even print on-site, but back at the factory. (more…)
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China’s 3D-Printed Housing on the Rise. Literally
Several readers sent word that we’re now less than six months away from the end of support for Windows Server 2003. Though the operating system’s usage peaked in 2009, it still runs on millions of machines, and many IT departments are just now starting to look at replacements. Although Microsoft publishes support deadlines long in advance — and has been beating the drum to dump Server 2003 for months — it’s not unusual for customers to hang on too long. Last year, as Windows XP neared its final days of support, there were still huge numbers of systems running the aged OS. Companies lined up to pay Microsoft for extended support contracts and PC sales stabilized in part because enterprises bought new replacement machines. Problems replacing Windows Server 2003 may appear similar at first glance, but they’re not: Servers are critical to a business because of the applications that run on them, which may have to be rewritten or replaced. [In many cases, legacy applications are the sole reason for the continued use of Server 2003.] Those applications may themselves be unsupported at this point, the company that built them may be out of business or the in-house development team may have been disbanded. Any of those scenarios would make it difficult or even impossible to update the applications’ code to run on a newer version of Windows Server. Complicating any move is the fact that many of those applications are 32-bit — and have been kept on Windows Server 2003 for that reason — and while Windows Server 2012 R2 offers a compatibility mode to run such applications, it’s not foolproof. Read more of this story at Slashdot.