Technology Ramblings

On Dec 19, MS released Windows 10 Build 17063 to Fast Ring & Skip Ahead insiders.   By far the largest update so far in the Redstone 4 branch - 17063 contained over 30 fixes, plus updates to Edge, Cortana, Settings, Input methods, the Linux Subsystem, The Windows Shell, Windows Defender, The People app and even the Snipping tool. But the headline features are Timeline and Sets.    Timeline is best described as an activity tracking feature that allows you to open a task view that displays your most recent activity and then scroll "backwards" in time looking at files you worked on or articles you read and quickly return to them.  There is a new "task view" button for the task bar or you can use the Windows Key + Tab to reach the timeline view.   For me it displayed Office docs I had opened each day along with Web pages I visited and MSN app page clips - so from News or Money or Sports, etc.    So the web page part only works when you use Edge.    It'

I've written several times about "cord cutting" options that are out there.  There is a big movement by cable & satellite companies as well as content producers to move towards streaming based IP based delivery of content instead of Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) and Quadrature Amplitude Modulation ( QAM) that has been used for years. Even today many cable and satellite companies provide a hybrid delivery method where both FDM/QAM and IP are used.  Often when you order a movie you are in fact streaming content. With streaming however there is a challenge and that is getting the content compressed enough to provide quick downloads while still maintaining the quality of video and audio.  Especially as we've progressed from 480p to 1080p and now 4k content along with Dolby Atmos and DTX audio. As anyone who has purchased an HD movie from iTunes or the MS store has noticed you often are downloading anywhere from 4 - 8GB of data.   That file size along wit

In a previous post I discussed the two new ARM based PCs from Asus and HP that were announced at the Qualcomm SnapDragon Technical Conference. The following day both Intel and AMD announced similar designs.  AMD will partner with Qualcomm while Intel may utilize their own LTE modem technology which they are heavily involved in. The key here being support for eSim based devices.   With LTE 5 around the corner and the potential for 1Gbps to 10Gbps speed depending on device density - it will change the way we think about mobile computing. As I stated n my previous post - I've installed LTE modems in my laptops for years. I tried to stay away from the LTE Wifi Hub or phone tethering approach since I felt having an device that focused specifically on the communication was well worth the $120 - $160 I would pay.  Combine that with the GPS & Voice capabilities that most of these modems provided and you suddenly did have an extremely mobile laptop. eSim extends that capability

On Dec 5 at the Qualcomm SnapDragon Tech Summit in Hawaii, Terry Myserson of MS along with Cristiano Amon of Qualcomm announced the first two "Always Connected" PCs from MS partners HP and Asus. These devices that were first mentioned and demo'd back at the WinHEC conference in Shenzhen China nearly a year ago and now coming to fruition.  Along with HP and Asus, Lenovo also announced a product coming in early 2018. All of this aligns with my prediction that these devices will be available by the time of the Windows 10 Redstone 4 branch milestone in March of next year. Both the new Asus NovaGO and HP Envy X2 devices are powered by Qualcomm 835 processors with LTE connectivity.   The NovaGo is a 2-in-1 laptop format and supports 1 Gbps LTE while the HP is more of a Surface style tablet with 4G LTE.   The HP however also supports Pen Input.  Both units support Windows Hello. Both units claim battery life in the 20+ hr range along with support for 32bit Windows

So was a little surprised this morning - Nov 23 - to see build 17046 of Windows 10 released to Fast Ring & Skip Ahead Insiders considering we are in a holiday week here is the US. Continuing the theme we've seen with the last couple of updates the focus of 17046 was improvements to both Edge and Input methods.  For Edge MS added a feature that I've been used to for years with Chrome and that is auto-form fill for things like addresses.   On the input side there is a new Emoji Panel if your into them and finally there was one Shell update that allows you to navigate directly to UWP app settings right from the start screen vs navigating the settings app.  In addition the build included about 15 fixes. So while the good news is that 17046 was supported on both my AMD based laptop and Intel Atom tablet - the bad news was it's still a slow update - 70 - 80 minutes on laptop and 100+ on tablet. I'm happy to report that the update to 17040 practically eliminated gree

On Nov 16, MS released Windows 10 build 17040 to Fast Ring and Skip Ahead Insiders.   17040 contained some Settings improvements for SDR and HDR along with Touch Keyboard and Writing Pad input improvements with a new gesture control.  And along with some button improvements for Chinese handwriting - contained about 20 bug fixes. Luckily I was able to install 17040 on both my test machines.  My one test laptop is AMD based and due to a bug check problem with 17035 was blocked from receiving it.  At the time of the 17035 release MS announced the block but I was expecting it to be lifted the following day.  Unfortunately it wasn't so never got a chance to run with it.  17040 Lifted that block. Like many test builds - this one again was slow to apply - nearly 90 minutes for my laptop and over 2 hours for my tablet. I will say the touch keyboard improvements seem nice - but I don't do enough of it on my tablet.  Similarly with the handwriting input.  The one place I do handw

It been a while since I've written about the state of data center networking and here are some new trends, products and approaches I'm seeing. First is the topology changes.  New data center networks are based on something called the Spine / Leaf architecture.  The spine is typically made up of a group of very high speed switches that connect to a number of leaf switches at top-of-rack (TOR).  This connectivity creates a 2 tier fabric where each leaf switch connects to each spine node.   In addition to the fabric itself, several legacy Layer 2 protocols like Spanning Tree (STP) are being replaced with Transparent Interconnect Lots of Links (TRILL) or Shortest Path Bridging (SPB).    Many data centers are transitioning to this model as they upgrade gear or begin to make the transition to Software Defined Networking (SDN) by adding overlay network capabilities like VXLAN or NVGRE One design consideration here is insuring that your leaf switches have enough uplink ports

On Nov 8, MS released Windows 10 build 17035 to Fast Ring & Skip Ahead Insiders.    The main focus of this build was on new features for Edge including what MS calls Near Share - a BT based local quick sharing capability, the continued evolution of the Settings area by adding Sound control, and then input improvements from on-screen keyboard and handwriting panel to Japanese Input methods.   Along with these new features where around 35 fixes. MS also added one new feature to it's Store app which is the ability to purchase a limited portfolio of Surface hardware and accessories via the app.  To me just like the ability to purchase Office is long overdue - but at least now it's available.  And with the holiday season coming - why isn't the new xBox One X in there ?   I was only able to install 17035 on one of my test machines as my test laptop runs an AMD CPU and during the release announcement MS noted a bug check issue with AMD based machines and blocked the upda

With both Apple & Microsoft recently releasing their most recent quarterly results - I thought it might be interesting to examine where both companies started, are heading now and how they'll do moving forward.. Both companies trace their lineage back over 40 years now.   Microsoft was founded in April of 1975 by Bill Gates and Paul Allen with Apple following a year later in April of 1976 - with Co-founders Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne.   Microsoft was all about software with their primary focus on a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8000 while Apple's focus was on the hardware with the Apple 1 computer. Even though Apple went public some 6 years before Microsoft in 1980, Microsoft exploded due to the PC boon and its Windows and Office product lines. For many years MS was the largest company in the world when measured by market capitalization and reached a then record valuation of $618.9B on 12/31/99. But then the dot com bust happened and over the next

On Nov 2 - IDC released their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker data for Q3 2017. The overall market sold 373.1M units a 2.7% increase over Q3 2016.  Just to give you some perspective that 373.1M I estimate to be 120M+ units more than the entire PC market for 2017.   The top five ranking did not change.    Samsung is still #1 worldwide with 83.3M units sold an increase of 9.5% and a 22.3% market share.   Apple is still number 2 with 46.7M units sold an increase of 2.6% - so pretty much in line with the overall market growth and a 12.5% market share - so about the same as last year. Huawei is still a strong #3 with 39.1M units sold - a 16.1% year over year growth and a 10.5% market share.  Back in my post on Q2 sales, I had predicted that Huawei may surpass Apple for #2, but Apple had a good Q3 with a lot of promotions during the summer. Oppo is #4 with 30.7M units sold - a 19% growth over 2016 and a 8.5% market share Xaiomi is #5 with 27.6M units sold a stagger 102

So I recently switched my daily driver phone from a Samsung Galaxy S7 to the new Google Pixel 2 XL.   Here's my take on the device The overall construction and shape are excellent.  The screen is taller but the width is about the same as the S7 - so it works well in my hand.   The back and edges have a slightly textured finish that provides confidence when picking up the phone.  My Galaxy always felt slick due to the all glass vs the metal/glass mix of the Pixel.   The power and volume rockers feel very solid along with the overall feel to the device. The phone is fast.  Compared to my S7, app loads, downloads & installs, just fly.  Boot-up is quick and easy it never feels like the phone is working hard. The fingerprint sensor location on the back is very easy to reach and in the perfect "natural" position.  While it does mean you need to pickup the phone if you want to use your finger - you can just as easily double-tap the screen swipe up and enter your PI

On Oct 27, Intel announced the availability of the Optane 900P SSD.  Focused towards the "Enthusiast" market segment, this Non-Volatile Memory drive based on Intel's 3D Xpoint lithography dramatically raises the bar for SSDs in both performance and longevity. The 900p will be available in two form factors.  First is a PCIe Card in HHHL CEM3.0 form factor that consumes 1 x PCIe. 3.0 4x slot in a traditional desktop PC.  It will be available in two capacities - 280GB and 480GB. The second form factor is a 2.5" "drive" factor that utilizes a U.2 connector.  The 2.5" is only available in the 280GB capacity. In either form factor the 280GB will be priced @ $389 and the 480GB @ $599.   The specs on the 900p are staggering.  It can support 2500MB/s sequential Read, 2,000Mbps sequential write @ 10us latency and 550,000 IOPS / read or write while only consuming 14W TDP active and 5W idle. The 900P can support 5.1PB of lifetime writes, with a MTBF of 1

Here we go again.   Some MS watcher blogs have started posting articles regarding a new Surface device that they are referring to as Surface Phone or maybe Surface Note or Surface Journal. This rumored device uses a foldable screen format for what is being described as a 3-in-1 device and will be ARM processor based.  So not a traditional phone format - ergo the Note/Journal potential name. According to the articles this new device will be driven by Windows 10 Core utilizing the Composable Shell (CShell) UI codenamed Andromeda.   The articles refer to another source that states andromeda components are actually in the current RS4 17025 build. The assumption here is that Windows 10 Core may be the market name for the Windows 10 on ARM effort that MS demo'd earlier this year and that I expect to be released at the end of the current Redstone 4 branch this March. The article also goes on to state that some of these devices have actually been spotted on the MS campus in Redmo

On Oct 25, MS released Windows 10 build 17025 to Fast Ring and Skip Ahead Insiders. The build itself contained some small updates to the Ease of Access settings, an option to allow UWP programs to be included in Startup, some updates to the Yahei font for Chinese simplified language configuration and then about 25 or so fixes to feedback issues.   In addition as I called out in my post on build 17017 - MS is continuing to move various UI components to the Fluent design framework. In this build it was CalendarView that is used in the clock and calendar flyout. The update installed cleanly on my test machines and seems slightly more stable so far than 17017 was.   I had been experiencing sudden black screen reboots when browsing in Chrome and so far none - albeit I've only been running the build for a couple of hours. So as my post title suggests - right now the RS4 branch is moving forward with small steps.  With all of the MS major events done for the year - we'll have

One surprise that came out this week from MS was announcement of an update the to Surface Book line of premium laptops - now called Surface Book 2. The big change was the expansion to two screen sizes 13.5" and 15" as well as updates on the i7 versions to 8th Gen Intel i7-8650U CPUs and nVidia GTX 1050 or 1060 GPUs.  MS retains the 3:2 Aspect ratio with a 3000 x 2000 Pixel Sense display for the 13.5" and a 3240 x 2160 for the 15".   The general form remains the same with a detachable screen that turns the device into a tablet.   Touch and Pen support is there - although MS does not include the pen ($99) and Windows Hello support is also there.   On the 15" you also get XBox Wireless Support. So the big performance gains are from the new 8th Gen Core CPU and nVidia GPUs.  Now with 4 cores and 8 threads there is a significant performance gain of around 40%. So these are certainly nice devices and reflective of MS continuing to push the new personal comput

Back on Oct 13, MS released what I consider the 2nd Insider release of the Redstone 4 branch - build 17017 to Fast Ring and Skip Ahead users.  In effect Skip Ahead is over as both groups will now receive the same builds going forward. I am only testing these builds on two devices for now - an HP Elitebook 745 G3 laptop running an AMD Pro A12-8800B CPU and my trusty old Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet running an Intel Atom Z3740D.   In both cases the update installed cleanly.    I've decided at this point to remove several of my other devices from Insider for now.  They are all at 16299.15 - so 1709 and will stay there for a bit. If there is one trend I see so far in RS4 it's the movement towards incorporating the Fluent Design elements into the primary UI - so initially the Start Menu and with a recent Store update the Mail/Calendar/People apps. So the big thing with Fluent is the transparent theme and a more refined look around icons, fonts, highlighting, etc.   It definitel

On Oct 10 both Gartner and IDC released their PC sales research for Q3 2017.  Both firms showed yet another drop in total worldwide volume of PCs to just over 67M units.  IDC showed a 0.5% drop while Gartner showed a 3.6% drop. YTD We are at about 187M units worldwide.  That means that to meet the 250M goal I estimated for 2017 - the industry will need to sell around 63M units in Q4.  With so much much focus on new high-end phones from Apple, Samsung and Google, it may be hard for the industry to reach that number.    Looking at the US market the numbers are worse with a 10.3% drop in volume to about 14M units with a few vendors Lenovo and Asus seeing pretty significant drops of 25.2% and 22..0% respectively.  Apple also fell 7.6% Worldwide - the top 5 firms remain the same.  HP, Lenovo, Dell, Asus and Apple.  As has been the trend for several years now the top 3 are gaining overall share from a consistently dropping Others category which fell 11.6% from 2016 volume. According

On Oct 8, Joe Belfiore - an MS Corporate Vice President and one time lead of the Windows Device division - effectively announced the official death of Windows 10 Mobile via a couple of tweets.. As an individual end-user, I switched platforms for the app/hw diversity. We will support those users too! Choose what's best 4 u.  and  Of course we'll continue to support the platform.. bug fixes, security updates, etc. But building new features/hw aren't the focus.  MS recently announced the availability of their Edge browser for iOS and Android and also updated their Android Launcher previous known as Arrow.   So while MS has certainly developed a portfolio of apps for both iOS and Android (many of which were better than their Windows 10 Mobile counterparts).  The question now is can MS really compete and maintain any sort of brand in the mobile space. So I have an Android device running Nougat and have several MS apps installed.  But for example with Office - I reall