Tuesday, June 3, 2014

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Microsoft says start-menu non-starter this year

Posted: 03 Jun 2014 02:12 AM PDT

It looks like Microsoft's promise to provide a Start Menu for Windows 8 with its coming Windows 8.1 Update 2 is not happening. ,

Vole had been promising a new "Mini" Start Menu part of a second update to Windows 8.1. Windows 8.1 Update 2 was supposed to arrive in August.

ZDNet hackett Mary Jo Foley said her deep throats in Redmond had told her that Microsoft's operating systems group has decided to hold off on delivering a Microsoft-developed Start Menu until Threshold. Threshold is the next "major" release of Windows which will be released in April 2015.

It is unclear if the postponement is because the feature won't be fully baked in time, or if there's another reason for the change in plans.

Vole is still trying to make Windows 8 work if people have computers rather than tablets. At the moment most people just ignore Metro and its clunky apps and stay on their desktops.

Foley said that the new Microsoft-developed Start Menu isn't going to be the same as the Windows XP/Vista/Windows 7 Start Menus. It will apparently integrate Windows 8's Metro-Style Start screen concept, which Microsoft is stubbornly holding onto.

With no start menu appearing in August, the question is what is going to be in Windows 8.1 Update 2?

So far Microsoft has not revealed if there is going to be any user-interface changes or will it be more a vehicle for under-the-covers programming interface and reliability improvements. 

Patent troll faces extra damages

Posted: 03 Jun 2014 01:46 AM PDT

Patent trolls are finding life difficult in the US courts all of a sudden and might find themselves becoming an endangered species.

A few years ago, trolls were coming out from underneath their bridges armed with lawyers can demanding big licencing fees from companies who paid up rather than going to court.

All that came to an end when a couple of high profile tech companies decided that this was silly and started fighting back.

According to Ars Technica, FindTheBest counter sued a patent troll called Lumen View last year. Company CEO Kevin O'Connor made it personal, and pledged $1 million of his own money to fight the legal battle.

FindTheBest pursued the case and was kicked to death by the courts. The judge invalidated Lumen's patent saying it was just computer-oriented "matchmaking."

Now the judge overseeing the case has ruled that it's Lumen View, not FindTheBest, that should have to pay the $200,000 in expenses. In a first-of-its-kind implementation of new fee-shifting rules mandated by the Supreme Court, US District Judge Denise Cote found that the Lumen View lawsuit was a "prototypical exceptional case."

Judge Cote said that Lumen's motivation in this litigation was to extract a nuisance settlement from FTB on the theory that FTB would rather pay an unjustified license fee than bear the costs of the threatened expensive litigation.

Lumen made threats of 'full-scale litigation,' 'protracted discovery,' and a settlement demand escalator should FTB file papers, were aimed at convincing FTB that a pay-off was the lesser injustice.

Recently the Supreme Court changed the test for fee-shifting precisely to deter behaviour such as Lumen's, Cote found.

She said that Lumen didn't do "any reasonable pre-suit investigation," and filed a number of near-identical "boilerplate" complaints in a short time frame.

Lumen also attempted to get a "gag order" against FTB, to stop it from talking to the press about its case. It is not clear how much Lumen will have to pay.

It is good news for FindTheBest which recently lost an RICO anti-extortion lawsuit against Lumen View. In that case, also overseen by Cote, the judgewasn't convinced that RICO could be used to fight bogus lawsuits, even ones as baseless as Lumen's. 

Apple installs Bing

Posted: 03 Jun 2014 01:32 AM PDT

It looks like the long running feud between Apple and Microsoft is over as both sides have a common enemy in Google.

Apple has announced that it is getting rid of Google's search engine from its shiny rounded rectangular toys in favour of Microsoft's Bing.

Bing will find its way into OS X 10.10, the new desktop operating system from Apple.

Other signs have followed that Microsoft and Apple are chums. Recently Microsoft introduced a version of Office for the iPad which suddenly made the keyboardless netbook useful.

Now that the Bing search engine is well on its way to gain additional traction due to its integration with OS X, do expect its current partnerships with Siri and Windows 8 to also help see the search engine gain some market share in the long run.

Still it does mean that the days of Apple fanboys boring anyone who will listen that Microsoft is always copying Apple a few years later will finally be bought to a close. Instead they will be telling the world, plus dog, that Bing is better than Google because Apple uses it. 

Google Glass is ancient technology

Posted: 03 Jun 2014 01:21 AM PDT

While the US press goes on about how clever Google is for inventing its Glass project it appears to be forgetting that the British came up with the idea more than a decade ago but could not be bothered with it.

Vaccum cleaner maker Dyson, which is celebrating its 21st birthday, has revealed that it had an augmented reality headset with a voice-controlled digital assistant.

Dubbed the Dyson Halo, an augmented reality headset was codenamed N066 and was a portable, head-mounted, wearable computer, that could be carried in the user's pocket, but which worked as a communications device and PC," the company said. "It had a headset that could be worn on your head like a pair of glasses and used audio prompts and visual cues to overlay information on your surroundings."

OK it was not as sexy looking as Google Glass because some of the technology was not there at the time. It had a headset wrapping around the back of the head and connecting via a cable to a small computer in your pocket.

Dyson's designs suggest it would have a 1GHz chip and 256MB memory, alongside a 20GB hard drive - with the idea for the cloud to feed data in to the device.

The Dyson Halo projected a virtual keyboard to "type" on any surface. It also featured a wrist-worn control pad that had a surface to use as a mouse, and tracked finger and hand movement for gesture recognition.

"Two plane mirrors reflected the display of two tiny monitors, mounted by your temples, onto a prism," Dyson said. "This created an illusion of a projected, translucent, 10in display around one meter in front of you. The screen showed a series of applications similar to the smartphones of today."

It seems that Dyson believed that there would be a voice recognition, and the headset worked with a digital assistant, taking simple voice commands and read out emails.

It is not really clear why Dyson shelved the project as it was a decade ahead of its time and would not really have required much to get it going. Officially it was so that Dyson engineers could focus on expanding Dyson technology into the USA.

Still the research has not died. Now that the Americans have high-tech hand driers and vacuums, Dyson is looking at elements of the technology which are being used in future research projects. 

Intel shows off Broadwell

Posted: 03 Jun 2014 01:00 AM PDT

Intel President Renée James provided the assorted throngs at Computex with a debut of a next-gen "Broadwell" chip under the bonnet of a Llama Mountain device.

Billing it the "world's first 14 nanometer fanless mobile PC reference design," James went onto the hard sell about Chipzilla's Broadwell processor.

Broadwell is a 14-nanometer "shrink" of the existing 22 nm Haswell processor. The smaller circuits result in a design that can enable more compact devices.

The Llama Mountain device is powered by the Broadwell Y series and wqill be branded the "Core M" processor. Chipzilla claims that it will be the most energy efficient Core processor in the company's history.

Llama Mountain sports a 12.5-inch screen and is 7.2mm thick (0.28 inches) with the keyboard detached and weighs in at 670 grams (1.47 pounds).

"The majority of designs based on this new chip are expected to be fanless and deliver both a lightning-fast tablet and a razor-thin laptop," James said.

Other things mentioned in the keynote were Foxconn tablets. Foxconn executive Young Liu showed more than 10 Intel-based tablets available now or coming soon. Those include tablets based on the Bay Trail processor and "many" will include built-in 3G or LTE communications.

James mentioned the use of fast LTE silicon which is a Category 6-capable Intel XMM 7260 "LTE-Advanced" chip is now shipping to customers for interoperability testing. This new technology is expected to appear in devices in the months ahead James said.

There was also mention of a quad-core SoFIA LTE system-on-a-chip for low-cost phones and tablets is due in the first half of 2015.

Gamers will get 4GHz out of the fourth-generation Intel Core i7 and i5 processor "K" processor. "The first from Intel to deliver four cores at up to 4GHz base frequency. This desktop processor, built for enthusiasts, provide higher performance and enable new levels of overclocking capability. Production shipments begin in June of this year. 
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