Month: April 2015

Yes, it has been 40 years… wow! I remember when they were “the new kid on the block.” Boy, am I a geezer!

Bill Gates writes 40-year anniversary letter to Microsoft employees

GeekSnack – By: Jason Moth – Believe it or not, Microsoft turned 40-years old today and although it’s been a while since Bill Gates stepped down as CEO, the co-founder is still very close to the company and its employees. So close in fact, that Gates recently took the time to write a heartwarming letter to the workers in order to mark this very special occasion. After reminiscing a bit about the good old days when he and Paul Allen came up with the idea of putting a computer in every home, Bill Gates quickly moved on to more important things – the future of Microsoft. The company came a long way in its first 40 years, but judging by Bill Gates’ latter, the innovations have only just begun.

‘Under Satya’s leadership, Microsoft is better positioned than ever to lead these advances,’ Bill Gates said in the letter that can be found on Twitter. ‘We have the resources to drive and solve tough problems. We are engaged in every facet of modern computing and have the deepest commitment to research in the industry. In my role as technical advisor to Satya, I get to join product reviews and am impressed by the vision and talent I see. The result is evident in products like Cortana, Skype Translator, and HoloLens — and those are just a few of the many innovations that are on the way.’

Despite some people bashing current CEO Satya Nadella left and right for some of the questionable decisions he took in the past, Bill Gates seems be very confident in his ability of taking Microsoft to the next level. Overall, Gates’ faith in Nadella seems justified if you ask me given that lately we’re seeing more and more great product ideas coming from the Redmond-based company. Most notably, the upcoming Windows 10 operating system already looks very solid and may in fact end up being the best iteration of the OS yet. Not only that, but Windows 10 will even be available as a free upgrade to anyone, including pirates. The fact that Microsoft is extremely interested in everyone using their platforms is becoming increasingly clearer, perhaps even more so than when Bill Gates was in charge.

‘We have accomplished a lot together during our first 40 years and empowered countless businesses and people to realize their full potential. But what matters most now is what we do next. Thank you for helping make Microsoft a fantastic company now and for decades to come, ‘ Bill Gates concluded.

There was the Dominoes robot:

Then CERN Confirmed the Force Exists:

“Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider just recently started testing the accelerator for running at the higher energy of 13 TeV, and already they have found new insights into the fundamental structure of the universe. Though four fundamental forces – the strong force, the weak force, the electromagnetic force and gravity – have been well documented and confirmed in experiments over the years, CERN announced today the first unequivocal evidence for the Force. “Very impressive, this result is,” said a diminutive green spokesperson for the laboratory.

‘The Force is what gives a particle physicist his powers,’ said CERN theorist Ben Kenobi of the University of Mos Eisley, Tatooine. ‘It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us; and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together.’

Though researchers are as yet unsure what exactly causes the Force, students and professors at the laboratory have already started to harness its power. Practical applications so far include long-distance communication, influencing minds, and lifting heavy things out of swamps.

Kenobi says he first started teaching the ways of the Force to a young lady who was having trouble revising for her particle-physics exams. ‘She said that I was her only hope,’ says Kenobi. ‘So I just kinda took it from there. I designed an experiment to detect the Force, and passed on my knowledge.’

Kenobi’s seminal paper “May the Force be with EU” – a strong argument that his experiment should be built in Europe – persuaded the CERN Council to finance the installation of dozens of new R2 units for the CERN data centre*. These plucky little droids are helping physicists to cope with the flood of data from the laboratory’s latest experiment, the Thermodynamic Injection Energy (TIE) detector, recently installed at the LHC.

‘We’re very pleased with this new addition to CERN’s accelerator complex,’ said data analyst Luke Daniels of human-cyborg relations. ‘The TIE detector has provided us with plenty of action, and what’s more it makes a really cool sound when the beams shoot out of it.’

But the research community is divided over the discovery. Dark-matter researcher Dave Vader was unimpressed, breathing heavily in disgust throughout the press conference announcing the results, and dismissing the cosmological implications of the Force with the quip ‘Asteroids do not concern me’.

Rumours are growing that this rogue researcher hopes to delve into the Dark Side of the Standard Model, and could even build his own research station some day. With the academic community split, many are tempted by Vader’s invitations to study the Dark Side, especially researchers working with red lasers, and anyone really with an evil streak who looks good in dark robes.”

Then, there was “SmartBox by InBox”:

Then, there was the “Hailo Piggy Back”

Not to mention Google allowing you to play Pacman on Google Maps!

Could the impossible happen? Will Microsoft EVER release Windows to Open Source? I gotta say, I don’t think so.

Open-source Windows? The unthinkable is already happening, says Microsoft

PC World – By: Mark Hachman – “However unlikely a future in which Microsoft makes Windows open source may sound, Microsoft has already taken considerable strides in that direction.

But instead of allowing developers to make changes to Windows and other products, it’s Microsoft’s fingers at the keyboard.

According to Microsoft Technical Fellow Mark Russinovich, a future that includes an open-source Windows could happen. ‘It’s definitely possible,’ Russinovich reportedly told an audience at the ChefCon conference in Santa Clara this week. ‘It’s a new Microsoft.’

‘Every conversation you can imagine about what should we do with our software—open versus not-open versus services—has happened,’ Russinovich added.

Why this matters: Saturday marks Microsoft’s 40th anniversary. Just a few years ago, such a statement by Russinovich would have been anathema to Microsoft—and if Bill Gates were still at the CEO’s desk, it might have resulted in a letter of termination. But this is the new Microsoft, forced into a spirit of cooperation and collaboration by increasing pressure on the PC and on its business model. This is still pie-in-the-sky stuff—but science fiction can become reality. Just ask Dick Tracy’s watch.

You can’t just toss away $4 billion per quarter

An open-source Windows would be unlikely in the near term, however. That would require Microsoft to expose its reams of code to public view, theoretically allowing developers to create their own proprietary, incompatible forks of Windows. That’s an absolute example, of course—Microsoft could decide to open the code to certain components within the OS—perhaps what will turn into the ‘legacy’ browser, Internet Explorer. But open-sourcing Windows—and perhaps make it free to use—would also require Microsoft to give up a large chunk of the $4 billion or so a quarter it collectively receives from Windows, Windows Phone, and Office licenses.

As Wired points out, Microsoft has agreed to provide OEMs a free copy of Windows for devices with displays under 8 inches. And it’s far more open to running open-source products on top of its Azure cloud services than it was.”

Will ARC lead to one OS for all?

Google’s ARC Beta runs Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, and Linux

Ars Technica – By: Ron Amadeo – “In September, Google launched ARC—the “App Runtime for Chrome,”—a project that allowed Android apps to run on Chrome OS. A few days later, a hack revealed the project’s full potential: it enabled ARC on every “desktop” version of Chrome, meaning you could unofficially run Android apps on Chrome OS, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. ARC made Android apps run on nearly every computing platform (save iOS).

ARC is an early beta though so Google has kept the project’s reach very limited—only a handful of apps have been ported to ARC, which have all been the result of close collaborations between Google and the app developer. Now though, Google is taking two big steps forward with the latest developer preview: it’s allowing any developer to run their app on ARC via a new Chrome app packager, and it’s allowing ARC to run on any desktop OS with a Chrome browser.

ARC runs Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS thanks to Native Client (abbreviated “NaCL”). NaCL is a Chrome sandboxing technology that allows Chrome apps and plugins to run at “near native” speeds, taking full advantage of the system’s CPU and GPU. Native Client turns Chrome into a development platform, write to it, and it’ll run on all desktop Chrome browsers. Google ported a full Android stack to Native Client, allowing Android apps to run on most major OSes.

With the original ARC release, there was no official process to getting an Android app running on the Chrome platform (other than working with Google). Now Google has released the adorably-named ARC Welder, a Chrome app which will convert any Android app into an ARC-powered Chrome app. It’s mainly for developers to package up an APK and submit it to the Chrome Web Store, but anyone can package and launch an APK from the app directly.

Since anyone can get an app up and running, we decided to take a look at just what ARC was like with certain apps. It turns out ARC is based on Android 4.4 and runs Dalvik VM, not the faster Android Run Time (ART) that debuted in Android 5.0.

A lot of standalone apps, like Twitter, work perfectly, while many stop working because ARC is not a smartphone and is missing a lot of what makes Android Android. Which brings us to the next big improvement:

ARC gets serious with Google Play Services

September’s unofficial hack allowed us to explore a few limitations of the Android Runtime for Chrome. The biggest missing puzzle piece were all of the Google Play components, which weren’t supported on the early version. This made ARC less like “Google’s Android” and more like an unsupported AOSP fork. Any app that used Google Play Services for OAuth logins, Maps, in-app purchases, cloud-to-device messaging, Play Games support, or any of the myriad of other features listed above would simply crash.

With this new release, ARC includes Google Play Services, potentially opening up compatibility for many apps that depend on Google’s proprietary ecosystem APIs. It’s not the full list of APIs from Play Services, though, only a handful: OAuth2, Google Cloud Messaging , Google+ sign-in, Maps, Location, and Ads. Developers have to specifically enable Play Services on ARC with ARC-specific metadata, too, so end users can’t go too crazy with other people’s apps.

While those five APIs are pretty common and will certainly help compatibility, ARC is still missing a big chunk of Play Services, which will stop some apps from working. The biggest missing piece seems to be the Play Store’s in-app purchasing, which isn’t in the API list. The Chrome Web Store supports in app purchasing, but it would require custom code from the app developer.

We can’t explore the full potential of Play Services on ARC, because it’s up to the app developer to add special metadata to the app to enable ARC’s special version of Play Services.

Write once, run anywhere?

So calling all developers: You can now (probably, maybe) run your Android apps on just about anything—Android, Chrome OS, Windows, Mac, and Linux—provided you fiddle with the ARC Welder and submit your app to the Chrome Web Store.

The App Runtime for Chrome and Native Client are hugely important projects because they potentially allow Google to push a “universal binary” strategy on developers. “Write your app for Android, and we’ll make it run on almost every popular OS! (other than iOS)” Google Play Services support is a major improvement for ARC and signals just how ambitious this project is. Some day it will be a great sales pitch to convince developers to write for Android first, which gives them apps on all these desktop OSes for free.

For now though, the project is just a developer preview. The next steps are to bring in the rest of the Play Services APIs, which will no doubt happen over the coming months. Google will also needs to do something about the Chrome Web Store, which isn’t nearly as popular, feature rich, or mature as the Play Store. Will they merge some day? Google already displays Chrome apps in the Google Play Store for Education.”

I know, I have 1 gig fiber to my house, but if 1 is good, 2 is better!

Comcast Takes On Google With 2Gbps Internet Service

PCMag – By: Chloe Albanesius – “There’s been a lot of talk about Google’s 1Gbps ‘gigabit’ Internet service, but Comcast said today that it is planning a 2Gbps service, beginning in Atlanta.

Comcast Gigabit Pro is a fiber-to-the-home service that ‘will be offered broadly across the Atlanta metro area’ starting next month, the cable giant said today.

The goal, Comcast said, is to make it available to about 18 million homes by the end of the year.

Pricing details were not released; Google Fiber will set you back about $70 per month for gigabit Internet service alone. As Ars Technica noted, Comcast’s existing 505Mbps residential speed tier costs $399.95 per month, but Comcast told Ars that Gigabit Pro will not be that pricey and 505 customers will get a bump to 2Gbps.

‘Our approach is to offer the most comprehensive rollout of multi-gigabit service to the most homes as quickly as possible, not just to certain neighborhoods,’ said Doug Guthrie, senior vice president of Comcast Cable’s South Region, a dig at Google’s city-by-city rollout. ‘We already provide the fastest speeds to the most homes and businesses in Atlanta, and access to Gigabit Pro will give our customers all the broadband capacity they need to stay ahead of future technologies and innovations.’

Comcast already has a fiber infrastructure for its business-level Internet service (145,000 route miles), which promises up to 10Gbps for its 1.5 million customers. As a result, Gigabit Pro ‘will be available to any home within close proximity of Comcast’s fiber network,’ provided they pay an installation fee.

That includes SunTrust Park, home of the Atlanta Braves. Last month, Comcast inked a deal with the team to provide Internet access there in exchange for a Comcast-branded office tower that will house an innovation lab. Comcast will wire up buildings in the vicinity, which includes residential units.

Google, meanwhile, recently announced plans to launch Google Fiber in Salt Lake City, while AT&T is expanding its gigabit Internet offering into Apple’s hometown of Cupertino.”