Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions

[Formfiller]

Welcome to Oceania!

The Xbox One's next-generation Kinect has a greater interest in your facial features, and is capable of discerning your identity, even if you hand off the controller.

In a brief demonstration in one of its Kinect testing rooms, Microsoft showed press how the Kinect kept track of two player profiles, each tied to a controller in use. When Player 1 and Player 2 swap controllers, the Xbox One is able to recognize which profile is the new Player 1. The Kinect also monitors the position of players, meaning it can match portions of split-screen games to the side of the screen at which that player is looking. This may also translate to fighting games, which is good news if you're the sort to get confused when your spot in the couch isn't aligned with your character.

Microsoft also demonstrated a few more tricks made possible by the new Kinect's enhanced sense of depth, its greater field of view - which does make closer gaming in smaller apartments a more feasible – its ability to see in the dark via infrared, and its flattering scrutiny of facial features. By examining your face's skin color and transparency, the Kinect and Xbox One are able to estimate your current heart rate.

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/21/xbox-ones-kinect-discerns-heartbeat-and-who-has-the-controller/

And this thing is always connected to boot:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4352596/the-xbox-one-is-always-listening

The Xbox One will always be listening to you, in your own home (update)

Did Microsoft just invent the Telescreen from '1984?'

...

Even when the console's turned off, users can simply say "Xbox On" to power up — which means the new Kinect will be listening to you in your living room at all times.

An always-on camera, with a connection to the mothership, that can monitor your heart beat, has infrared sensors, watches you in the dark, and is still somewhat working when turned off!

Nice bit about the skin color detection and facial detection. I guess it just wasn't creepy enough.

Used game-sales are blocked and regulated, but that's a given.

[Formfiller]

Nice touch that the reveal event was hold in a intimidating pyramid shaped building:

You really have to wonder how dense the MS marketing is. Quote from 1984:

"The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure.."

Aren't they aware that all this surveillance tech in the new xbox will draw these comparisons? And what do they do? Hold the event in a pyramid!

Just wow! Unbelievable stupid marketing. And then they wonder why there are backlashes.

[SIW2]

And what do they do? Hold the event in a pyramid!

Somebody at MS ( or the event organizer ) has a sense of humour.

Made me laugh.

A bit of levity is needed amidst the attempt to shove this awful thing on the unsuspecting public.

Edited May 22, 2013 by SIW2

[jaclaz]

Somebody at MS ( or the event organizer ) has a sense of humour.

Made me laugh.

Definitely:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4352596/the-xbox-one-is-always-listening

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson responded to our inquiry with the following statement.

The new Kinect is listening for a specific cue, like ‘Xbox on.’ We know our customers want and expect strong privacy protections to be built into our products, devices and services, and for companies to be responsible stewards of their data. Microsoft has more than ten years of experience making privacy a top priority. Kinect for Xbox 360 was designed and built with strong privacy protections in place and the new Kinect will continue this commitment.

For a firm established since 1975, i.e. 38 (thirty-eight) years ago, it is good to know that they had privacy as a top priority for more than ten years, the issue is whether they are last ten years or so or from 1975 to 1985....

jaclaz

[bpalone]

And what do they do? Hold the event in a pyramid!

Somebody at MS ( or the event organizer ) has a sense of humour.

Made me laugh.

A bit of levity is needed amidst the attempt to shove this awful thing on the unsuspecting public.

From a bumper sticker of years past:

WE ARE MICROSOFT, YOU WILL ASSIMILATE, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

Seems to fit their attitude these days.

[Tripredacus]

The XBox One will have a non-servicable hard drive...

http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-hard-drive/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

Whatever that means. But then look at the one Wired got. It has a standard notebook SATA HDD, doesn't look to difficult to remove.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one-development-photos/#slideid-138497

Not that I ever bothered tinkering with a console before like that, I just thought it odd for them to say it like that.

[JorgeA]

"The Ministry of Truth - Minitrue, in Newspeak - was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure.."

Aren't they aware that all this surveillance tech in the new xbox will draw these comparisons? And what do they do? Hold the event in a pyramid!

Just wow! Unbelievable stupid marketing. And then they wonder why there are backlashes.

Great catch, about Minitrue being in a pyramid-shaped building!

I don't know which possibility is more disturbing: that the Microsoft folks are clueless and oblivious to all these parallels to '1984'... or that they're well aware of them.

--JorgeA

Edited May 22, 2013 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Somebody at MS ( or the event organizer ) has a sense of humour.

Made me laugh.

Definitely:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/21/4352596/the-xbox-one-is-always-listening

Update: A Microsoft spokesperson responded to our inquiry with the following statement.

The new Kinect is listening for a specific cue, like Xbox on. We know our customers want and expect strong privacy protections to be built into our products, devices and services, and for companies to be responsible stewards of their data. Microsoft has more than ten years of experience making privacy a top priority. Kinect for Xbox 360 was designed and built with strong privacy protections in place and the new Kinect will continue this commitment.

For a firm established since 1975, i.e. 38 (thirty-eight) years ago, it is good to know that they had privacy as a top priority for more than ten years, the issue is whether they are last ten years or so or from 1975 to 1985....

jaclaz

Given that they snoop into customers' SkyDrive contents and that they're helping New York City to set up a city-wide network of surveillance cameras, those "ten years of experience" in privacy must've been 1975 to 1985. Certainly not anytime recently! :angrym:

Then again, maybe to them "privacy" actually means being constantly watched and monitored, just as in '1984' the slogan was that "Freeedom is Slavery."

--JorgeA

Edited May 22, 2013 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

The XBox One will have a non-servicable hard drive...

http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/21/xbox-one-hard-drive/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget

Whatever that means. But then look at the one Wired got. It has a standard notebook SATA HDD, doesn't look to difficult to remove.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/xbox-one-development-photos/#slideid-138497

Not that I ever bothered tinkering with a console before like that, I just thought it odd for them to say it like that.

One thing we were quick to ask about was the integrated storage. 500GB sounds like a lot today -- but so did the 20GB unit in the original Xbox 360. The HDD there was, at least, replaceable. Can you do the same with its successor? Sadly, no.

Doubtless it has to do with their DRM/copy protection scheme. Sounds like it's impossible to reinstall the system on a replacement HDD, which means that if the original drive fails, then you're SOL. Right?

Lovely system they're coming up with. Imagine if Hasbro, Milton -Bradley or whoever had been able to prevent buyers of their games and toys from lending them to friends and family. That's what MSFT is trying to move people to. Sheez.

--JorgeA

P.S. I like these bits in the comments section:

A console is a PC which has 99% of its functionality removed while still maintaining 50% of the price.

I can already predict what's going to happen. They will limit external storage to some stupid low amount. Then charge you for cloud storage. It's all about the Benjamins baby! And M$ is a pro at collecting them.

I see that somebody asked my obvious question:

But what if the main drive dies. Its basic function to be able to replace something like that. This is not just about total storage. This is a design fail in a big way.

[JorgeA]

From a bumper sticker of years past:

WE ARE MICROSOFT, YOU WILL ASSIMILATE, RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!

Seems to fit their attitude these days.

+1

Edited May 22, 2013 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Latest from Neowin:

Study: 60% of Windows 8 desktop users launch a Modern app less than once a day

Today, a new report claims that the percentage of current Windows 8 owners that use Modern apps extensively is quite low. The report comes from Soluto, which sent a copy of its findings to Neowin ahead of their official launch today. The Israel-based software company collects data from a PC app that helps with finding performance problems. Soluto says that for their report they looked at 10,848 Windows 8 PCs and analyzed 313,142 Modern app launches across 9,634 unique Metro apps.

Note that surprisingly (and perhaps tellingly) the percentage of touch-enabled laptop users launching a Metro app less than once a day is virtually the same as the percentage of non-touch laptop users who launch Metro apps less than once a day. In other words, having "touch" hasn't made a great deal of difference in the proportion of customers using Metro apps. There's just not much point to touch, or to Metro. (Touch-enabled users launch 2.22 Metro apps per day on average, compared to 1.51 Metro apps/day for non-touch laptop users.)

Here's the link to the original report (the report you see may change over time), and a quote from it:

Theres a consensus in the market that Windows 7 was a good, solid operating system, and its unclear why the change to Windows 8 was needed for those who are happy with Windows 7. Microsoft had to do something to compete with iOS, but we cant explain why they also changed the experience for people who just wanted their Windows as it is.

On the other hand, another consensus in the market is that if you dont innovate, you die. Microsoft had to innovate, and time will tell if their big bet was good or bad.

The dilemma is only apparent, of course. The solution is to offer the user a choice of UI, either upon installation or at will, instead of trying to foist Metro on everyone willy-nilly. If it's as wonderful, easy, and appealing as its fans claim, then there should be no problem building an audience for it. If not, then -- well, the market will have spoken. Let it speak for itself.

--JorgeA

Edited May 23, 2013 by JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Paul Thurrott looks into his crystal ball:

Azure Is the Future of Microsoft

What I'm about to suggest will be controversial in some circles. But it's a message that IT pros need to hear now so they can prepare for the future. And it goes like this: The market for on-premises servers and infrastructure is coming to an end. The futurethe end game, if you willisn't on-prem, and it's not even really a hybrid model, although there will of course be some of that. It's the cloud. And for Microsoft, that means Azure.

And certainly there are legitimate concerns about regulatory and privacy issues, and about bandwidth availability too. I get it. But here's a basic truth that I suspect you'll agree makes Azure and Microsoft's other cloud services inevitable. Microsoft has completely changed its basic business model over the past few years. Because of its history, the firm will of course continue supporting the on-premises solutions that make sense over a certain number of years. But this migration, this sea change, is inevitable. And it is happening right now. Eventually Microsoft will have to make the case that you, its customers, should follow this trusted source down this same path with it. My bet is that it will happen soon.

Anybody who hasn't slept through the last couple of years will be aware of the widespread and growing problem of enterprise online security. And in particular Microsoft's record on privacy is, shall we say, as solid as a block of Swiss cheese. Not to mention their admitted active cooperation with official snoops. If I were a CEO, I'd fire any IT manager who suggested moving the company's data to a server controlled by anybody other than us, much less Microsoft.

In a related post, Paul did offer the following insight about Windows 8 sales:

Windows 8 is evolving into the most controversial Windows release of all time, as much the result of our highly connected echo-chamber times as any functional weirdness. That Microsoft declined to release Windows 8 license sales figures with its quarterly financial results, is, I think, telling.

From 2009 to date, the firm has consistently sold about 20 million Windows licenses a month, and the suspicion is that Q1 2013 was the first quarter in which that didnt happen. One can only conclude that Windows 8 confuses too many in a time in which viable mobile computing optionsvarious tablets and smartphonesexist. And no business would ever broadly roll out the touch first Windows 8 this early in its life cycle.

--JorgeA

Edited May 23, 2013 by JorgeA

[jaclaz]

@JorgeA

Please re-read, slowly this time , this post (AND links in it):

You cannot use/trust a source only because - casually - it has the same opinion as you have.

MInd you, the guys over there seem all like very nice peeps, and possibly their software is the third best thing in life after sliced btread and ice cream , but they are seemingly too young and enthusiastic (which are very nice characteristics, BTW) to be able to provide any unbiased opinion or meaningful data.

Right now (and no offence whatever intended to the good guys ) the one in their team that I would trust more (generally speaking, not on PC related technology ) would be Speedy :

http://blog.soluto.com/2013/01/a-peek-inside-soluto-hq/

And BTW, the good Soluto guys did choose Azure (coincidence? ):

http://blog.soluto.com/2013/01/an-apology-from-the-soluto-team/

In the spoiler the most relevant part:

We could have obviously spent time building various mechanisms to make sure that whatever happens to Azure, we’ll be able to provide our service (the extreme example would be creating a fully redundant deployment in Amazon). But that’s not the startup way. Because by doing so, we wouldn’t have created hundreds of features for our users at the same time. And for well over a year, we hadn’t experienced severe downtime except for a single case of several hours in February, but once a year is acceptable.

And then came last Thursday. What happened was that the “storage service” in Azure’s main data center went down. Machines running code could still run code, but they could not access the data. And our service is all about access to data. So, for example, when you browsed to your Soluto account, the machine responding to your browser’s request was alive, but it could not fetch your PC’s data. If you clicked on the Soluto tray again – your PC’s agent was able to reach our web service, but the web service could not reach your PC’s data. Since we didn’t have any access to the data ourselves, we could not even move parts of it to somewhere else.

In the first hour we were not really sure what went wrong, because even Azure’s service dashboard was unavailable (it’s served from the same data center that went down). But as time progressed and we were able to contact people within Microsoft, we understood there’s a severe problem with the storage service and people are working over the weekend to resolve it.

One of the worst things about this downtime is that Microsoft didn’t know how long it would take to resolve the issue, and as a result we didn’t either. Deducing from our knowledge about Amazon downtimes, we assumed it would take a couple of hours, at most a day. It took much longer. In retrospect, had we known it would take so long, we would have taken various steps to ease the effect of the downtime for our users, but we were optimistic. Too optimistic.

Some people have asked us “why don’t you backup your data so it’s available in other data centers?”. Well, Azure has an option to pay about 30% more and get what’s called “geo-replication”, which means the data is backed up and can be restored in a different data center. Are you thinking to yourselves “those cheap bastards saved on geo-replication?” – well, you’re wrong. We do pay for it. But the issue is, that restoring an entire service from a backup is a process that takes Microsoft longer than the downtime we had. We were not aware of that fact beforehand, and now we treat the geo-replication as something very different from what we used to.

So what are we going to do?

First, we are going to start migrating some of the more critical elements of our architecture to a redundant solution, some of which will probably reside on both Azure and Amazon. In addition, we’re refactoring some of our service to be storage-independent. That process will take time. As we’re still learning the results and effects of the downtime, we will surely come up with additional improvements in the near future.

jaclaz

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Latest from Neowin:

Study: 60% of Windows 8 desktop users launch a Modern app less than once a day

Today, a new report claims that the percentage of current Windows 8 owners that use Modern apps extensively is quite low. The report comes from Soluto, which sent a copy of its findings to Neowin ahead of their official launch today. The Israel-based software company collects data from a PC app that helps with finding performance problems. Soluto says that for their report they looked at 10,848 Windows 8 PCs and analyzed 313,142 Modern app launches across 9,634 unique Metro apps.

And elsewhere ...

Study suggests majority of Windows 8 users ignore Metro apps ( TechSpot 2013-05-22 )

More than half of Windows 8 users just treat it like Windows 7. Almost nobody using Windows Store apps, survey finds ( UK Register 2013-05-22 )

Quite a beating the MetroTards are taking in the comments, even at NeoWin. Probably a bit surprising to them.

[CharlotteTheHarlot]

Paul Thurrott looks into his crystal ball:

Azure Is the Future of Microsoft

Quite a barfworthy article IMHO. Many quotes in there to demonstrate his shill-worthyness.

A fine time to resurrect this one ...