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.
A year ago we got some insight into hard disk reliability when cloud backup provider Backblaze published its findings for the tens of thousands of disks that it operated. Backblaze uses regular consumer-grade disks in its storage because of the cheaper cost and good-enough reliability, but it also discovered that some kinds of disks fared extremely poorly when used 24/7. A year later on and the company has collected even more data , and drawn out even more differences between the different disks it uses. For a second year, the standout reliability leader was HGST. Now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Western Digital, HGST inherited the technology and designs from Hitachi (which itself bought IBM’s hard disk division). Across a range of models from 2 to 4 terabytes, the HGST models showed low failure rates; at worse, 2.3 percent failing a year. This includes some of the oldest disks among Backblaze’s collection; 2TB Desktop 7K2000 models are on average 3.9 years old, but still have a failure rate of just 1.1 percent. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Hard disk reliability examined once more: HGST rules, Seagate is alarming
An anonymous reader tips an Associated Press report saying that Healthcare.gov is sending users’ personal data to private companies. The information involved is typical ad-related analytic data: “…it can include age, income, ZIP code, whether a person smokes, and if a person is pregnant. It can include a computer’s Internet address, which can identify a person’s name or address when combined with other information collected by sophisticated online marketing or advertising firms.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation confirmed the report, saying that data is being sent from Healthcare.gov to at least 14 third-party domains. The EFF says, “Sending such personal information raises significant privacy concerns. A company like Doubleclick, for example, could match up the personal data provided by healthcare.gov with an already extensive trove of information about what you read online and what your buying preferences are to create an extremely detailed profile of exactly who you are and what your interests are. It could do all this based on a tracking cookie that it sets which would be the same across any site you visit. Based on this data, Doubleclick could start showing you smoking ads or infer your risk of cancer based on where you live, how old you are and your status as a smoker. Doubleclick might start to show you ads related to pregnancy, which could have embarrassing and potentially dangerous consequences such as when Target notified a woman’s family that she was pregnant before she even told them. ” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Healthcare.gov Sends Personal Data To Over a Dozen Tracking Websites
mi writes At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside. The device the Marshals Service and others are using, known as the Range-R, looks like a sophisticated stud-finder. Its display shows whether it has detected movement on the other side of a wall and, if so, how far away it is — but it does not show a picture of what’s happening inside. The Range-R’s maker, L-3 Communications, estimates it has sold about 200 devices to 50 law enforcement agencies at a cost of about $6, 000 each. Other radar devices have far more advanced capabilities, including three-dimensional displays of where people are located inside a building, according to marketing materials from their manufacturers. One is capable of being mounted on a drone. And the Justice Department has funded research to develop systems that can map the interiors of buildings and locate the people within them. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Police Nation-Wide Use Wall-Penetrating Radars To Peer Into Homes
Snow days can be nightmares for working parents. Some areas tend to need very little snow to cause a school closing, while in other areas schools don’t blink if there’s two feet of snow. Read more…
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This Map Shows the Amount of Snow It Takes to Cancel School