It was only two years ago that Windows 8 was unleashed on the world. Microsoft tried to usher in an era of “Touch First” applications with a new look and feel for Windows. To say that Windows 8 was unsuccessful would be an understatement, and from both Microsoft’s and user’s perspectives, it was certainly a failure. Two years in, Windows 8 and its 8.1 derivative have struggled to gain market share over Windows 7 and XP, which still command the lion’s share of the desktop OS pie. A new interface, unfamiliar to users, did little to sway their wallets, and other market factors have come in to play as well.

 

Looking back at Windows 8, it was a big change from a company that traditionally has been called too conservative. Gone was the familiar start menu, replaced with a full screen version. Gone was the ability to move and resize applications into “windows” and instead it was replaced with full screen apps that take command of your desktop. Gone was a lot of what made Windows, well Windows. Add in the fact that Windows 8 at its launch was only half complete, and it is not surprising that the market did not buy into the new world. There were two disjointed interfaces, but one person had to interact with both no matter what form factor they were on. If you are on a touch based tablet, much of the settings and controls were still found in the old Control Panel applets. The file explorer was on the desktop, which was difficult to use with touch. On the other side of the coin, traditional desktop PC users also had to learn the new Start Screen, charms, and other controls which were clearly made for “touch first” and not the mouse and keyboard. Within weeks of the Windows 8 launch, major players in its creation were let go, or given new duties.

Since the day one release of Windows 8, Microsoft has been trying to fix many of the issues people have with the new version of their operating system, and Windows 8.1 was a step in the right direction, fixing interfaces for both the touch interface and the desktop. Windows 8.1 Update, announced at BUILD earlier this year, was a truly desktop-centric update with new keyboard and mouse controls for use in the touch environment, and the ability to control Windows Store apps with a title bar. It was a big help, but also showed off at BUILD were features coming in a later version of Windows, and that version has now come.

Windows 10 is as dramatic a shift from Windows 8 as Windows 8 was to Windows 7. Gone is the start screen for the desktop, with the familiar start menu back. Gone is the full screen applications taking over your computer, with those applications now being relegated to windows as before. Gone is the touch first interface on top of an operating system primarily used with a keyboard and mouse. However this is not Windows 7.1, and nor should it be. Windows 8 certainly had its faults, but not everything about Windows 8 needed to be thrown out.

Windows 10 starts its journey as the Windows Technical Preview for Enterprises. Microsoft’s core customer base is the enterprise, and this is important that they are starting the discussion with this market group this time around. Beginning tomorrow, people can join the Windows Insider Program and download and install the latest version of Windows for themselves. Microsoft has made it clear though that this preview is actually a preview, and not meant for general availability. Expect some rough edges, and some bugs, which should be worked out by the time the OS ships. As for the consumer side of the story, Microsoft is planning to announce more on that front in early 2015, and for developers, BUILD will be coming sometime after that. The actual Windows 10 launch is listed as “later in the year” with the year being 2015.

There is a lot to go over, and once we get our hands on the preview build we can dig into the new OS and give a full breakdown on what is new. One of the biggest complaints about Windows 8 and 8.1, is that real people do not want a single interface on every device they own. They want a User Interface which is tailored to the usage model. With Windows 10, Microsoft promises to address this.

Before we can talk about Windows though, we need to briefly discuss the Windows Store. Windows Store apps are executed in WinRT, which is the Windows RunTime, replacing the old Win32 runtime. WinRT has some advantages as a new framework, with the ability to be resolution independent natively, and support the Windows contracts such as Share. At BUILD in 2014, Microsoft announced Universal Apps, which are a key feature of the Windows store that is not available on any other platform. There is a lot of confusion as to what a Universal App is, and what it is not is a single application that runs on a phone, PC, tablet, and console. A Universal App leverages the common WinRT framework available in Windows, Xbox One, and Windows Phone, to allow a developer to share a common code base, but use a suitable UI for each system, and have all of it available on all platforms seamlessly through the Windows Store. It is certainly a lofty idea, and one that has gained a bit of traction in the store. With Windows 10 though, the concept of a Universal App allows a developer to target a phone, Xbox, tablet, and desktop. If anything is the killer feature of Windows 10, this could be it. Time will tell of course and developers need to buy into WinRT for this to be a reality. Today’s announcement is not developer focused, so we will expect more news on the WinRT API updates later on, at the BUILD conference.

The first place to start, is going to be Start. On Windows 7, clicking the Start button brought up the Start Menu. Windows 8 dropped the start button altogether, but 8.1 brought it back even though it opened the Start Screen. On tablets, the start screen was fine, but on a desktop, it could be unwieldy. It interrupted your workflow to bring you into a new environment, where you can find the application you want and launch it. Windows 10 brings back the Start Menu, but with a twist. Rather than just the traditional start menu of Windows 7, a familiar start menu can now also be populated with Live Tiles from the Windows Store apps. But this is only on the desktop. Tablets will get a different interface, as will the phone. To quote Microsoft: “We’re not talking about one UI to rule them all – we’re talking about one product family, with a tailored experience for each device.”

If Windows 10 is going to be successful, the tailored experience for each device is the key. The new start menu is just the first step towards that, and is especially important for the enterprise and desktop user.

The next interface change, was also announced at BUILD, and that is the ability to run Windows Store apps within a window on the desktop. This is a big change for two reasons. First, on a desktop, full screen Windows Store apps are less useful. Generally you have multiple things going on at once, and to have a single app take over the screen is generally not ideal. The usefulness of Windows Store apps has instantly been increased. The other reason it is important is for developer buy-in. Even though Windows 8 did not light the world on fire as far as unit sales, it is still on hundreds of millions of devices. However the majority of those devices are going to be traditional desktops. Writing an application for the Windows Store practically precluded use by the majority of the user base. By putting these apps on the desktop, it opens up a much larger potential audience. Microsoft needs the Windows Store to be kick-started, and this is one way they can advance that goal.

Windows Snap was also debuted in Windows 8, and it allowed two Windows Store apps to be snapped open, with one taking about 70% of the screen and the other using 30%. For multitasking, it was certainly better than other mobile operating systems from 2012, but it was a long way from Windows 7. Windows 8.1 improved Snap, and allows more than two apps to be snapped open on the screen at any one time, and for the snap percentage to be changed. Windows 10 is now offering another update on Snap. Apps can now be snapped to all four corners, giving more real estate to each app than before. Snap was a good feature, and this is a further improvement on it.

Another long requested feature is now coming to Windows 10 – multiple desktops. Desktops can be designated for different purposes, and users will be able to easily switch among them. There is a small but vocal group who have been asking for this for a long time, and they have finally been rewarded.

Sticking with the enterprise features, data security is always a big concern. Multifactor authentication based on smart cards or tokens is now built right into the OS. Bitlocker is still around, offering full device encryption, but Windows 10 now offers application and file level data separation, which can enable data protection even if that data leaves the device. Though they have not gone into a lot of detail as to how that is done, it likely leverages some of Microsoft’s other technologies such as Active Directory Rights Management Services.

Future updates to Windows should be easier for IT workers as well due to a new in-place upgrade option. And to go along with that, businesses will be able to choose whether to jump on the fast update consumer track, or lock down the updates to only deliver critical security patches, or somewhere in the middle. And this approach does not need to be at the enterprise level – different groups of machines can follow different update patterns depending on how critical the infrastructure is.

Windows 10 also supports Mobile Device Management (MDM) tools, as well as the traditional Active Directory and System Center approach to device management. This should be a boon to any small to mid-sized business who does not want to invest in a comprehensive solution.

Finally, the new Windows Store will allow volume license purchasing from within the store. Companies can re-claim licenses, and re-issue them to new devices. They can also create a custom store for their own computers which can include Windows Store and company-owned apps in the same interface.

Microsoft is trying hard to win back the Enterprise customers who have been turned off by Windows 8. Obviously we will have to wait and see if they are successful, but there is a lot to like in this new release. The “one UI to rule them all” model of Windows 8 has been put out to pasture, and instead replaced with a single platform, with a UI to suit the device it is running on.

Not all was bad about Windows 8, and it is good to see that some of the good ideas have been taken and molded into the new OS, but also tweaked at the same time to make them work better for the device they are on. The Universal App is a powerful idea, and one that has yet to make a big splash so far, but if the WinRT framework can be updated to make it more powerful, then it would certainly add a lot of power to Windows 10. Unlike Win32, WinRT apps support high DPI by default, which is more and more important as we move to higher resolution displays on all sizes of devices. The ability to log in to any Windows PC and get your own custom look and feel, including all of your applications, and data, is a powerful feeling. They have all of the tools they need to do this across all devices now, and it is exciting to see a glimpse at what the future may hold.

Once we get the actual install files for Windows 10, we will be able to provide more coverage on this major release of Windows.

 

Flickr user: Michael Vroegop

The music-sharing service Grooveshark was sued by major record labels in 2011, and yesterday the hammer blow finally came down. A New York federal judge has ruled in favor of the music companies on just about every issue that came up in the lawsuit. Damages, and the scope of an injunction, are yet to be determined.

The 57-page opinion (PDF) penned by US District Judge Thomas Griesa certainly seems like the beginning of the end for Grooveshark. It isn't hard to rattle off names of the unauthorized music-sharing services—like Napster, Grokster, Kazaa, and Limewire—that have been dealt a death-blow by federal court rulings.

The case doesn't look like a close call. Grooveshark was hoping to be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects online services from copyright lawsuits as long as they meet certain requirements, including responding to the takedown notices sent by copyright holders.

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Arduino

Arduino, maker of the open source hardware platform of the same name, is teaming up with a startup called Sharebot to sell a 3D printer for about $1,000.

Announced today, Materia 101 will be demonstrated at the Maker Faire in Rome this weekend. An on-sale date has not been revealed.

"The printer will be available only on the Arduino Store both as a kit and pre-assembled," the announcement said. "Official pricing of the device will be disclosed at a later date but the kit will sell for less than 600 EUR/800 USD, while the pre-assembled version will be available for less than 700 EUR/1000 USD."

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We're going to need more road again soon. Infrastructure sometimes has to chase California's vanishing water supply. USGS

In the public's mind, it's impossible to separate the climate from the weather. Each significant weather event seems to be accompanied by discussions of its implications for climate change; is it an example of what to expect, or clear indications that climate change isn't happening?

Often lost in the public discussion is that determining the role of climate change in a specific weather event is a challenging but interesting scientific problem. It's also one with immense practical implications. As regions rebuild after a damaging event, it's important that these efforts be informed by what we should expect in the future.

This month's edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society tackles this problem, termed "attribution," in a big way: 22 different studies of weather events rolled into a single report entitled "Explaining Extreme Events of 2013."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners from LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. The featured item is an Alienware 17 gaming laptop for $1,923 with free shipping. You save $375 off the regular price and get a $50 gift card! This beast of a laptop has a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 1080p screen, and a AMD Radeon R9 M290X with 4GB of video memory. It's perfect for school!

(OK, it's probably a little much for school, but it would be way more fun to bring this to class and frag things than pay attention to the lecture.)

Featured deal

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Microsoft talked briefly about the new features in its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, but it glossed over one thing that will surely be of great interest to sysadmins and developers alike: the further refinement of the Windows command line into a truly useful development and administration environment. Fortunately, engineer and blogger Rafael Rivera has spent some hands-on time with a technical preview, and he’s got a great post up explaining some of the new features—at least, as they stand right now.

The new Windows 10 command prompt options, from the current technical preview. Rafael Rivera

Rivera has a whole raft of additional screenshots demonstrating the additional command line features, but one of the simplest—and most anticipated—is proper text selection within command prompt windows. And we’re not just talking about Powershell, either—this is for every console window, including windows featuring good ol’ cmd.exe.

Previously, as anyone who’s dealt with a Windows command shell knows, selecting text at the prompt required a number of steps beyond simply clicking and dragging. You had to invoke a context menu, select "Mark" to tell Windows you wanted to mark text to select, and then lasso a selection box around what you wanted to pick. Text that spanned multiple lines was treated as not a single string, but rather multiple lines of text, with extraneous spacing and line breaks intact. This made for an annoying process—for more than basic selection, it was often easier to redirect whatever you were doing into a text file and do selection with a text editor.

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Kārlis Dambrāns

On Tuesday, eBay announced that in 2015 it would be splitting off its PayPal unit into a separate, publicly traded company. Investors lauded the move, sending eBay's stock price up nearly eight percent on the day, as of this writing.

PayPal has been an enormous player in the online payments and mobile payments sectors, but for years eBay's CEO John Donahoe resisted the clamor from investors to split PayPal into its own company. But after conferring with the company's board of directors, eBay has now changed its tune.

eBay acquired PayPal back in 2002, and it has been the company's fastest-growing segment, the Associated Press reported.

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OS X Yosemite as of the Public Beta. Andrew Cunningham

Not content to let some other company hog all the tens, MacRumors reports that Apple has just released the OS X Yosemite GM Candidate to developers using the new operating system. OS X 10.10 has been available to developers since it was unveiled at WWDC in June, and the release of a proposed "Golden Master" build suggests that Yosemite's fall release date will come sooner rather than later.

Note that a "GM Candidate" doesn't necessarily mean that this is the build Apple will release to the public later in the fall. It does indicate, however, that Apple has squashed the show-stopping bugs and that any future builds will contain minor patches rather than major changes. Apple has always released beta builds of work-in-progress operating systems to its registered developers, but Yosemite also brought with it the first public OS X beta program in about 14 years. Expanding its feedback pool beyond the developer community should hopefully mean that Yosemite is more stable and less buggy on day one than past OS X (and iOS) releases have sometimes been.

There's no word on when the GM build will be released to users of the OS X Yosemite Public Beta as an update, but we'd guess that Apple won't send it out before the official release date. Apple also sent out a Public Beta 4 build to users alongside the GM Candidate for developers—though it carries essentially the same build number as the developer build (14A379b, compared to 14A379a), Apple isn't labeling it as a "Golden Master" just yet.

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SAN FRANCISCO—At its Windows 10 event, Microsoft announced that the company will start a new beta program to give IT and enthusiasts early access to the next version of Windows. Beginning tomorrow, the Windows Ten Technical Preview for desktops and laptops will be available through the Windows Insider Program, with a Technical Preview of Windows 10 for servers following at a later date.

The company reinforced that this is not a version of Windows that everyone should run to download; it's an early release, not production quality, and should only be used by the technically able.

The company says that the initial version is oriented toward enterprise testers and users. Consumer-oriented features, such as the new Internet Explorer 12 interface, will emerge in early 2015, with the company planning a final release for around mid-2015.

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Don McCullough

Pennsylvania authorities suspect that two men accused of stealing mobile phones were monitoring law enforcement. Local media reported Tuesday that when they were arrested last month, one of the two suspects was carrying a camera-equipped drone that police saw flying over the Upper Saucon Township's police headquarters the day before the arrests.

The accused are Duane Holmes, 44, of North Bergen, and Chaviv Dykes, 20, of Newark. Police said they had $50,000 in mobile phones allegedly stolen from a Verizon Wireless store and other outlets that NJ.com said were lifted "during a string of smash-and-grab burglaries."

Police said footage from the drone they were reviewing did not contain images of the township's police station. However, the footage included still shots of I-495 in Union City heading toward the Lincoln Tunnel, and West 38th Street in Manhattan, CBS reported. Other footage from the drone was of shopping areas, leading CBS to suggest that the suspects were also using the drones to surveil their targets.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft today announced the name for the next version of Windows: not Windows 9 but Windows 10.

Terry Myerson, executive vice president for the Operating System Group, said that the new release represented such a shift in Microsoft's approach to delivering Windows and in what Windows will be—able to span everything from an Internet-of-Things gizmo to a phone to a tablet to a PC to a server—that calling it Windows 9 wouldn't be big enough to capture the differences.

Given the rest of the company's One-themed branding (Xbox One, OneDrive, OneNote, and such), Myerson said that calling the new OS Windows One was logical—but it turns out that a guy called Bill Gates already did that back in the 1980s. So the company went for Windows 10 instead.

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Researchers have captured the social spread of a new type of tool use in a wild population of chimps for the first time.

Regardless of one's opinion about the utility of the Pebble watch, there's no denying that the company has done a good job of updating their software, features, and both UI and hardware design as time has gone on. Earlier this year the company revealed the Pebble Steel which is a version of the Pebble with a more premium design. They also introduced the Pebble appstore which is home to over 4000 applications that have been downloaded over 5 million times cumulatively. Today the company is announcing more fitness focused features and a price drop for all versions of the Pebble,

The incoming health and fitness update will enable full activity tracking and sleep monitoring. The Misfit health application for Pebble has also been updated to take advantage of these new abilities. This, combined with the Pebble's relatively long battery life for a smartwatch, will provide health, fitness, and sleep tracking throughout the day and night which is difficult to do with other smartwatches that need to be taken off for a nightly charge.

To celebrate the Pebble's growth, the watch is also being reduced in price. The original Pebble is being dropped to just $99 / €129 / £99, while the Pebble Steel has been dropped to $199 / €229 / £179. At $250 the Pebble Steel was definitely pricey and had pressure from competing Android Wear devices that can sell for $199 or less. Even at $199 I think the Pebble Steel may be a hard sell due to its limitations compared to other smartwatches, but the superior battery life may be what sways users

TV-over-Internet startup Aereo was shut off following an adverse Supreme Court ruling this summer. The high court said it couldn't avoid paying for broadcast TV shows by claiming it was renting a tiny antenna to each customer.

It might get one last chance, though. The FCC is considering whether to regulate online providers of pre-scheduled programs the same way it handles cable and satellite companies, according to reports in National Journal and Multichannel News.

If true, it could be a breakthrough for Aereo. In the wake of the Supreme Court's ABC v. Aereo ruling, the company changed its strategy, embracing the idea that it should be considered a cable system. It wants to pay the same royalty fees for broadcast content that the cable companies pay.

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Early production still (not really)

Tetris, the block-stacking game that comes in near the top of many lists of greatest games ever, is being made into a live-action, feature-length, "sci-fi epic" motion picture, The Tetris Company announced today.

Before you ask, no, this is not a joke. You'd be forgiven for asking, though, because the very idea of a movie based on Tetris has been an Internet joke countless times in the past.

The film is being developed by Threshold Entertainment, best known to gaming crossover fans as the studio behind the 1995 Mortal Kombat movie. That film, which grossed $70 million, was one of the first to take a video game license to the silver screen, and it's still critically considered one of the best examples of the based-on-the-game sub-genre (though that's really somewhat damning with faint praise).

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Just as Lucy pulls the ball away from Charlie Brown, the NFL takes broadcasts away from fans. Charles M. Schulz

The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously voted to eliminate its sports blackout rules, challenging the National Football League to end its own policies that sometimes prevent fans from watching home games on TV.

"Today’s FCC action makes clear: if leagues want to mistreat fans, they will have to do so without Uncle Sam’s help," said David Goodfriend, an attorney and lobbyist who founded a group called the Sports Fans Coalition that fought against the rules.

NFL broadcasts are blacked out in local markets when games are not sold out. The NFL in 2012 relaxed the rules by letting individual teams reduce the likelihood of a blackout by only requiring that 85 percent of tickets be sold. But the policies have persisted for decades with support from the federal government.

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Over the past few days, Apple, Red Hat, and others have pushed out patches to vulnerabilities in the GNU Bourne Again Shell (bash). The vulnerabilities previously allowed attackers to execute commands remotely on systems that use the command parser under some conditions—including Web servers that use certain configurations of Apache. However, some of the patches made changes that broke from the functionality of the GNU bash code, so now debate continues about how to “un-fork” the patches and better secure bash.

At the same time, the urgency of applying those patches has mounted as more attacks that exploit the weaknesses in bash’s security (dubbed “Shellshock”) have appeared. In addition to the threat first spotted the day after the vulnerability was made public, a number of new attacks have emerged. While some appear to simply be vulnerability scans, there are also new exploit attempts that carry malware or attempt to give the attacker direct remote control of the targeted system.

Stormy weather

On Monday, the SANS Technology Institute’s Internet Storm Center (ISC) elevated its INFOcon threat level—a measure of the danger level of current Internet “worms” and other threats based on Internet traffic—to Yellow. This level indicates an attack that poses a minor threat to the Internet’s infrastructure as a whole with potential significant impact on some systems. Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at SANS, noted that six exploits based on Shellshock have been recorded by the ISC’s servers and “honeypot” systems. (A honeypot is a virtual or physical computer system set up to entice attackers and record their actions.)

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A few of a marketer's favorite things. Atlas Solutions

Facebook has officially relaunched the advertising platform Atlas in a new incarnation that will allow marketers to track users in new dimensions, according to a blog post from the company. Atlas will offer the ability to not only synthesize information about where users are seeing ads, but also to see how and whether those ad views play out into a purchase, even if it's offline.

Facebook acquired Atlas from Microsoft in 2013, and now the platform has been "rebuilt from the ground up." Atlas aims to accomplish what it calls "people-based marketing"—that is, the counterpoint to marketing based on a browser cookie or isolated social media profile.

Atlas's services purport to solve the "cross-device" problem, where marketers struggle to relate the browsing activity on a user's phone to what they do on their computer. This has become easier to an extent with Facebook profiles and logins, but Atlas also plans to add "partners" that "cross search, social, creative management and publishers" to track how ads are viewed and how successful they are on multiple "channels and platforms."

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The Matchstick. The streaming stick market is apparently heating up. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon all have entrants in this space, and if a new Kickstarter appeal succeeds, there will soon be a Firefox OS stick getting in on the action.

Inspired by the Chromecast, the Matchstick will plug into your TV using HDMI, connect to devices locally using Wi-Fi, and be used as a streaming media platform. Unlike Chromecast, however, Matchstick will use the open source Firefox OS as its base, making it readily accessible to developers who will be able to build HTML apps for Matchstick that leverage open Web technologies.

The developers hope it will deliver what they wanted Chromecast to achieve: any content on any HD screen, anywhere, any time. They've put together an SDK for both sending apps (that run on phones or PCs to transmit content to the Matchstick) and receiver apps (that run on the Matchstick itself).

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Jonathan McIntosh

A set of newly declassified documents shows definitively and explicitly that the United States intelligence community relies heavily on what is effectively unchecked presidential authority to conduct surveillance operations, as manifested through the Reagan-era Executive Order (EO) 12333.

And at a more basic level, the new documents illustrate that the government is adept at creating obscure legalistic definitions of plain language words, like "collection of information," which help obfuscate the public’s understanding of the scope and scale of such a dragnet.

The documents were first published on Monday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) after the group filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School.

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