There's a small convenience store in the middle of Adirondack Park, by Canada Lake, NY, with a tiny coffee bar in a separate room. As recent as 1.5 years ago, the PC (there for residents/campers who don't have net access) was running gOS (here for more info). Was kind of clunky, but it was also a very very old PC (like, 256MB of RAM old).

There were a couple of things obviously wrong with it and I asked if they wanted me to fix it up, but they said no, some guy came by every month or two and did stuff to it.

All my gplus.to-shortened Google+ URLs are coming up 404 - and someone had identified gplus.to as hosted by an ISP in Turkey. Hmm ... mighty dangerous to freedom, that shortened URL to the g+ gymnastics community I moderate ...

Parked domains are a pretty poor measure.

At the risk of introducing information into the discussion ... some of the other respondents have taken oblique cue shots off this info, but to get it out on the table ... EMET is a software package that enforces otherwise existing security protections on programs that may not have them in place. For example, DEP, ASLR, SEHOP (very Windows-specific mitigation), heapspray prevention, and in 4.1 they added certificate pinning, to detect mitm attacks. (looking up acronyms left as an exercise for the reader)

The good news - these mitigations can be applied from outside the apps involved (as of 4.1, no more app recompiling or special-versions needed). The somewhat bad news - there are compatibility issues, and many apps are not compatible with the whole list of protections (see the MS KB article for more info). I also wonder if there are performance impacts from doing so, as opposed to compiling in the mitigations that can be compiled in - but don't quote me on that, I'm not sure

More bad news - it won't work with certain app features, e.g. any code that accesses certain system services at too low a level, so for example DRM-using apps (so many videogames are off the table); and it only intended for desktop apps (so they "do not advise" you use it with system services or server apps).

We tested the 3.0 version, focusing solely on the mitigations that could be imposed from outside the code even in that version - and found that many apps had issues with most, and some with all, of the mitigations (and, a killer for us, it wouldn't work with virtualized apps). Maybe that's improved, not claiming to know.

All in all - it has value if you're deploying legacy apps over which you have no control to a broad array of desktops, and it doesn't break your apps. Frankly, I don't know why the emphasis on IE11 ... I think the only protection that wouldn't already be compiled in is the certificate pinning, but maybe that alone is enough - or it makes it doubly difficult to break out of IE11 if you have the compiled in e.g. ASLR as well as the imposed-sandbox ASLR ... not sure.

To be clear ... it's NOT comparable to mandatory access control - it's more mitigation-specific than that. And also, by way of information, the open source operating systems often enforce the same kinds of mitigations on the apps that they support from their repositories (e.g., the Canonical Ubuntu team compiles every app in their repo with all possible mitigations -- see the Ubuntu security features page for more info). That's one of the big advantages of open source - you don't have to try to impose really-meant-to-be-compiled-in security features from outside.

Heck, even just that screenshot looks better than WP, in that you can clearly have different size/shape tiles, and it doesn't have the stupid Fisher Price color scheme of WP. Add to that, the tile-based home screen will likely be optional, just like their similar launcher screen is on their current Android phones. Likely, they depicted it this way so there would be no question it wasn't yet another Android handset.

Maybe the algorithm is proprietary, and dryriver's company doesn't want to release it to the manufacturer yet, even under NDA. Hard to estimate what you're not allowed to see. Just a thought.

TFA itself links to a better FA at: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9244953/Microsoft_to_face_computer_makers_rebellion_at_CES

This original source article includes a discussion of the architecture involved - and the person they interviewed admits he hasn't seen it in action, and has no idea how it works. He suggests it could be one of three approaches - dual boot, an Android API within Windows (somewhat akin to Bluestacks), or a VM running within Windows. I would add a fourth - a hypervisor, permitting both OSes to run concurrently as VMs - though that seems unlikely, as it would require the OEMs to license Windows differently, as I understand it.

Interesting times. I agree with the commenters who say MS should be afraid of this - Google has taken its sweet time maturing Android into a desktop-supporting experience, but it's close, and "Android PCs" are already in the pipeline to take advantage of it. Any familiarization for the "unwashed masses" with what it feels like to simply run Android as your laptop/desktop OS has to be viewed by MS as, well, "crossing the streams" bad.

Sounds like they've built an Android API implementation library for Windows ... i.e., Windows-based Wine for Android.

It'd actually be interesting to see if the tech involved was open and cross-platform, so we could port it to Linux.

Nothing the judges said indicates that they may side with Oracle on the overall issue (there was back and forth, and teasers in both directions on that). The one clear indication given was that the judges lean toward saying that if they overturn Alsup on APIs being copyrightable, they agreed with Oracle that there's not a need for another jury trial.

NO executive management with the high-quality management training that is standard within MS would do anything at all like make statements to destroy the market share of their current market-leading product line! Isn't that called the Ratner Effect? The only thing even comparable would be for someone to fall prey to the Osborne Effect, and of course no one with a background in management at Microsoft would ever ... oh wait a minute ...

Haven't evaluated in over a year, but a stark finding from that timeframe was that making Puppet or Chef handle Windows was a force-fit, at the very least, and pretty crude. Have things advanced? How well do any of these solutions manage the byzantine complexity that is Windows CM?

Puppet, Chef, yadda yadda - the REAL action is in the META tools for automating all the Puppet and Chef etc. systems worldwide. PuppetMaster (pulls all the Puppet's strings), GordonRamsey (yells at all the Chefs out there). Let's not kid ourselves, THAT'S where Skynet is going to emerge.

However, remember that any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.

If their OS work was terrible, then why did the N9 win design awards, and receive overwhelmingly positive reviews? Agreed that Symbian was showing its age (in spite of not being the dog of a seller that MS reputation mgmt drones imply - it still was growing in sales when Elop axe-murdered it), but MeeGo was in-house as well, and took the N9 to a position that Windows Phones have never matched, in terms of critical acclaim.

If you listen to the video, it was clear "Sweetie" was an avatar - the pedophiles involved asked "her" to turn on her webcam. The avatar's near-lifelikeness may have played some role in attracting attention initially (the writeup/video don't say), but there's no indication any of the accessors thought it was really her.