This gets incrementally closer to an ideal computing model I call "personal application omnipresence" [1]. Notably it brings a presumably-standard means for applications to scale their views to myriad input/output capabilities on the fly. Attach a monitor and the view expands and adjusts accordingly; attach a keyboard and the UI adjusts accordingly.
This is great progress, but I remain fixed in my desire for singular running instances of my personal applications to run on an application server I control and to which I attach views from all of my devices. I want to have a singular e-mail application that I see on all of my devices. I want to have a singular web browser application that I see on all my devices. And so on.
We need to make my many devices appear as one rather than making a single device act as many devices.
Inferno is a portable and can be run on host operating systems. It would be possible to build it as an app on Windows Phone, Android, etc to access your Inferno resources on other devices.
I'm sorry, but no. The resource sharing model of Plan9/Inferno is great, but what they demoed was essentially a modal UI - plug in your phone and you get an external display and a different UI, but the computing resources are still handled in exactly the same way.
I'm not sure what you mean. When I said that this is what Inferno provides I was referring to the parent posts request for their ideal computing model, not comparing to the Microsoft demo.
You can technically do this today albeit with some overhead.
Spin up an Azure VM, install all the apps you desire and configure it as you want.
Every other PC you own, becomes just a head display, using RDP you can use a single dedicated VM.
The overhead here becomes that you still need to have full blown OS installed on the heads, however their specs can be very limited (compared to the VM).
I have attempted to approximate what I call PAO on today's existing technologies by using application servers at my home and at a data center. However, I think you're missing the notion of multiple concurrent views of singular applications, with each view adapting to the capabilities of the device at hand.
The closest approximation is connecting multiple web browsers via WebSocket to a self-hosted web application with a responsive user interface, and then using the WebSocket to relay all UI interaction at a fine-grained level. But if you read my blog entry about PAO, you'd recognize that as a facsimile of what I want—an effort to create PAO out of the mish-mash of technologies we have today.
The guts of what Microsoft is building here would be a key building block if something like PAO were to ever materialize. It will be necessary for applications to understand the capabilities of the view as they change. What's missing still is supporting multiple concurrent views with a singular application state and secure network transport for those views.
A connection is not an extension. It is a poor replacement for what is suggested; extension of a system by employing multiple devices. Think of dual screen duplicating desktop vs an actual extension of the desktop on the second screen.
And being blocked by basically everything in existence. I installed a desktop on Linode and Google blocked me from even their search product. Many other sites had blocks set up or at least CAPTCHAs. If you have browsing activity coming from a datacenter, everyone assumes it's a bot. Geo IP gets messed up too. Really hard to get any work done like that.
That's strange. Maybe they do that for the big providers, but I've run roughly 80% of my browsing activity through a SOCKS proxy on a VPS running in multiple different datacenters and never really had a problem that I noticed. I usually get my VPSs from little guys so maybe that's why they're not on a blacklist.
Does this blocking also apply to VPNs which are likely routing through data centers? One would think that most botnets are running on compromised consumer networks.
Botnets must leverage their infected host's internet connection. Almost all anti-bot tools use IP/rate metrics to identify the classic DOS: a large number of connections from a few IPs.
To get around Threatstop, Distil, and other solutions, we see attackers having to use 100+ different source IPs during their coordinated attacks.
This is also the computing system of my fantasies :) I also imagine the application server would be able to use the hardware peripherals from any of the attached devices seamlessly. So, for example, I could use the video conference application with the audio output piped to my bluetooth headset attached to my phone, the video output to my TV, and the video/audio input from the built-in webcam on my laptop. Then I could change any of those on the fly as I move around. Someday ...
I know that's not exactly what you mean, but Chrome OS and similar cloud platforms are doing a similar thing, differently.
All you need is a monitor with a web browser. If you accept the browser as the OS, it already works, it just needs to get better. And it'll get better, it already is good enough for casual users.
This is something Canonical and Ubuntu have been trying to do for a while. It's definitely interesting to think about as phones become the de factor computing devices.
This is really really nice. I'm glad to see that they didn't abandon the phone to desktop model that they originally promised. This is the future right here. Its just so bland looking. I know that doesn't really matter, but they need some good ui/ux people to really sell this thing.
As a long time Android developer this has me super interested!
After years of writing apps (toys), struggling with design decisions made to get java running on 2007-level hardware like: 64k method limit, components with crazy life-cycles making concurrency difficult without leaking things, frankenstein Java ecosystem, brittle and complicated build system...
Microsoft comes along and says "screw that shit", write mobile Applications as /desktop/ applications using C#, F#, or C++.
This is also masterful because, as Windows Phone market share is hovering at almost zero, many people who simply need a low-powered device like chromebook, tablet, can just get a phablet Windows Phone and presto, they are now Windows Desktop /and/ Phone users.
From an app monetization standpoint, its great because now I can make money on form factors from phone, tablet, laptop, desktop with one code base - instead of Android (phone) and which has more or less failed on tablets.
Wow. Parts of that demo really seem to be inspired from Android. The hamburger menu, the black navigation bar at the bottom, the slide out menus etc.
But the potential really is in the Phone->PC continuum. If I can take a beefy x86 phone (Intel seems to be inching closer to that reality) running windows and use it like phone most time and then dock it onto a big screen with keyboard and mouse - that really is a killer feature. It could change things in Microsoft's favor if they manage to get the integration and hardware parts right.
(I should say that the concept is not new - Motorola tried that with the Atrix - but it was underpowered hardware, flakey software and little integration that killed it. From the looks of it Microsoft seems to be geared to address all three rather well.)
This future would benefit from universal, non-proprietary docking stations, for the same reason we have standardized plugs/sockets for power, ethernet, USB, etc.
The new USB Type C standard can provide up to 100W of power, while at the same time letting you use it to send DisplayPort (and you can connect to HDMI or DVI devices with a simple adapter) signalling. And your network connection.
But with wireless charging + wireless data/display casting chances are it won't be that long before you won't need a wire for any of this most of the time.
In my experience, the people I know with the most assets are also the most careless people I know when it comes to security (passwords includes initials + birth date, name of children, name of the family dog and similar...)
That includes several quite wealthy tech founders...
This is pretty cool, although I wonder if/how they plan to deal with things that should really be only on the desktop display - particularly things that take up a lot of space on still pretty space constrained phones. The obvious example is programming tools that don't really make sense on a phone or say a large synced repo you don't want using phone space.
I get that they're not really v1 concerns, loads of people will probably be served amazingly by Outlook + office - but I love the form factor and hope it's feasible for what I do one day!
On another note, there didn't seem to be any sign of a notification of chance for interaction on the desktop display when he got a text. That seems like a no brainer, like pushbullet on Android or Apple's continuity. It's much less of a context switch to reply to messages on the big screen and would be a really great addition.
I'm no MSFT fanboy, but this is a big deal. Within 10 years, if not 5, we'll plug all of our phones into keyboards and monitors; and only the odd geek nerd will have a desktop or proper laptop.
I see efforts like this getting part-way there, but the actual uptake being in ubiquitous profiles — signing onto any phone with your (iCloud|Google|Windows) credentials and having all your apps and data "just there", signing onto any desktop and having all your desktop settings and apps "just there", and apps which share data between phone and desktop have this data available to both (as it does now).
The concept of local data will diminish against the cloud, and the market won't have to deal with inflated prices on phones just so they can power desktop screens and TVs. Hook a ChromeBit up to your TV instead, buy a regular laptop or desktop PC as you require it, and let anyone move between them as they like.
Latency and bandwidth means we're far from a situation where this is viable. Even locally in my house, wifi speeds are a painful limiting factor for some things.
It's also increasingly irrelevant if I carry a powerful computer with me anywhere to have it instantly available anyway. The only thing stopping your phone from having terabytes of storage today is that it's currently expensive, and not much demand for it vs. the slight extra space it would take (512GB SD cards are a thing, but apart from size - though micro-SD versions are bound to follow soon - the cost makes them prohibitive for the next year or two).
We're very rapidly approaching the point where - while there may be value in having everything synced to the cloud for backup and universal accessibility - you'll be able to store all your data on media smaller than your thumbnail. Storage density appears to grow far faster than peoples storage needs at the moment.
Well just look at how quickly we fill up phones with lowest-tiered storage (although this is artificially contained). There is also a technical hurdle of building apps in a way that they can be "lazy loaded" — my phone's 4G is the fastest internet I have access to (in Melbourne, Aus) so it's not inconceivable that the "core" 10MB of Facebook.app would be ready in seconds, with the "full" 77MB installation ready in under a minute.
Personally, my phone is full of photos. Cloud syncing allows for recent photos to be on-device and instant, while there's more than could ever fit on my phone stored just seconds away. Once Photos.app and Facebook.app are on-device, I could sign in with my cloud credentials and they automatically log me in and all my content is "just there" (this is true today). When we can log into any device, display "my" home screen with not-locally-installed YikYak.app (46MB) and run it on-demand we'll see true portability of profiles and portability of devices will begin to take a back seat.
I'm excited about this, too, but I'm not going to hold my breath. I can't connect a bluetooth keyboard to my Lumia 920, or treat it as a USB mass storage device, or mount a thumb drive in its USB port, etc. Why should I believe they'll let me connect "future devices" to an external display? When I install Windows 10 on my phone, will I be able to remote desktop to it? Probably not.
I wish I knew enough about Android USB to write a USB gadget driver that emulated FAT and Mass Storage - no reason it couldn't read/write sanely back to the host FS. Sure it wouldn't be as quick as native but it'd be enough to play MP3s on car stereos and the like.
They specifically called out the use of bluetooth keyboards and mice in the phone during their presentation, so that's a given. Since you're essentially running the full windows now, I don't see why remote desktop wouldn't work with the metro version currently present in their store either.
Not for the upcoming 4K video — and probably not even for today's Full HD.
A large screen is still a nice place to attach your phone to, instead of a dedicated docking station. At least it can provide a lot of electric power. Also, it's a reasonable place to put your phone's camera so that it's looking at you.
If the future is wireless then it will be full of interference.
We have a tech event here in Brazil that attracts about 8k people. Its impossible to use wifi reliably during the event and sometimes even bluetooth suffers.
Two thoughts here. I love the contrast between Apple and Microsoft. That is Microsoft frequently announces products/technologies with no shipping dates. While on the other side of the spectrum Apple builds out their products in secrecy announcing only when they have a ship date. As a developer building on their platforms I prefer Apple's approach as it lowers my risk of developing against a vapourware product.
Second, I'm betting Microsoft announced this before its ready in order to get out ahead of Apple and Android's mobile dominance and be seen as a leader in mobile. Though, I'd also bet that given where current technology is Apple's Continuity approach provides the better experience today. But, no doubt what Microsoft showed is the future.
I suspect it doesn't work as well when you're a marginal player (as they are in mobile today) as when you're the 800-lb gorilla.
Edit: I suppose this is a case of them trying to pull the conversation back to the place where they ARE an 800-lb gorilla. I just don't see them as being as dominant even on the desktop as they once were.
This is the first thing Microsoft has done in 10 years that truly interests me. This is exactly what I was hoping for with a Linux based smartphone similar to what Ubuntu was going to do.
I was hoping for this from Android phones. My Note 4 has 3 gigs of RAM and a fast processor. I bought a HDMI converter to hook it up to a large monitor but the connection was problematic.
I would argue that the amount of SSD storage on phones is not too big of an issue. More as a learning experience than anything else, I augmented my Linux and Mac laptops with a little Windows 8.1 HP Stream 11 this year that only has a 32 gig drive (with another 32 gigs added via a memory card). With OneDrive, not having much disk space is not much of an issue. I installed git, bash, IntelliJ, Java 8, and my current writing projects with enough room to spare because a lot of what I access (infrequently) can live in the cloud and only be cached locally if needed.
Anyway, my Android Note 4 has a pretty good Java IDE, useful apps (including Office 365 and my favorite games) and really could be my primary computer with excellent docking support. Add cloud development tools like nitrous.io, web version of visual studio, etc., and we are getting close to what should end up being the future of the way most people interact with productivity and entertainment devices.
They mentioned HDMI (presumably MHL) in the article, which surprised me, since I expected it to be USB type C that they're waiting for. That would allow the monitor to act as a docking station. 11-pin MHL would also allow this, but it's uncommon and not on any current generation phones, AFAICT.
It depends how you want the hardware to work. If you want people to bring their own monitors then you need to support HDMI.
I would expect a docking station that charged the phone and had a built in USB port. Said docking station could hook up via USB-C and use a displayport mode to send the data across of course.
In either case though saying HDMI is for the best as it sends the signal of "works with your hardware" versus "works with hardware we will be releasing".
Does this actually enable running legacy desktop apps on Windows Phone? Or is this just for Universal Apps?
If it's the former (and I hope it is), non-x86 chips is probably out of the question. For me, this would be the killer feature that finally drives me away from Android and onto Windows Phone.
I'm also hopeful that eventually we'll see Hyper-V ported to mobile and be able to run alternative mobile/desktop OS's simultaneously.
I hope you're wrong; there's several great Windows 10-capable phones already out that should have the horsepower to accomplish this. It would be a shame for such a useful feature to be limited to next year's devices.
You can stick multiple arches in the same binary, much like OSX does. I think you can have ARM, PowerPC, and x86 in the same executable, each with 32-bit and 64-bit varieties.
The way I understood it, Windows 10 universal apps are truly universal; if your device runs Windows 10, it runs the app. This can be achieved as duaneb said, using the same method Apple has been using since the Intel switch 10 years ago.
I'm surprised the technology isn't "fast enough" yet. Most top end phones are quad core, output 1080p, have 2-4gb ram, etc. Specs like that easily meet the listed minimum requirements of windows... odd.
They're now basically giving google and apple time to easily catch up to what could of been a killer feature that sells windows phones.
This seems an all too obvious entry into the enterprise environment for their mobile platform whilst strengthening the moat to their current desktop. Possibly for the education market too.
I'm surprised this hasn't come earlier and would be further surprised if this isn't a top priority. I'm 100% sold if it remains a snappy platform running a couple of screens and heavy-ish excel files in a native environment.
It's not exactly apples-to-apples comparison. Whilst on paper the specs are similar, each architecture (e.g. ARM vs x86) has different priorities - power vs performance. But the two's priorities are converging, ARM becoming more powerful and x86 more efficient.
I suppose, in another five years, running a desktop OS from your smartphone will be entirely feasible / practical. At the moment, it's just confined to tablets where higher power draw requirement is much more forgiving (better heat dissipation methods, and bigger battery).
It annoys me that Apple didn't ship this a few years ago. We had business units test switching to 100% iPad with VDI, and many of them actually enjoyed it.
It would be fairly trivial to deliver a great experience like this. In my case, I'd have 20,000 iPhone user ditching laptops.
HTML5 with CSS3 (offline) web apps offer that, Motorola Android offered that called "WebTop" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Atrix_4G), Ubuntu Phone offers that, Apple's continuity offers that. Windows RunTime apps may offer that in future - no specific date.
Microsoft had all the technology already for years inbuilt in Windows and Win32 API, called Windows Terminal Server and Remote Desktop (RDP) - it works great with all Windows applications in enterprise. Yet Microsoft hasn't delivered it yet to consumer devices.
Microsoft to agree to license Citrix technology for
Windows NT Server 4.0, which resulted in Windows Terminal
Server Edition in 1998
that seems exaggerated.. Being able to hook up your phone to a monitor (projector?)/keyboard/mouse and have access to what looks like the full office suite seems quite useful for some.
Maybe not no use, but if this means desktops are as locked down as phones, I'm not interested. If it means I get admin rights on my phone, even if only in desktop mode, then I'm interested.
I think the huge ecosystem of apps out there thoroughly disproves your point.
Honestly I love the permission scheme of the app stores compared to my desktop. Being able to control what the app can do is massively better than the desktop system of "runs as user".
On the topic of root, I would hope we would work towards a time when it wasn't necessary rather than using it as a crutch.
On desktop you have more control - you can firewall, code inject, rewrite dlls, crack, cheatengine stuff and so on. Root means ownership of your device. And not being confined to a walled garden ... so while a future in which root is not used is terrific, a future in which root does not belong to the user is terrifying ...
I would agree that root being an option is a huge win for consumers but I still believe that root not being the default is good for computing as a whole.
This is great progress, but I remain fixed in my desire for singular running instances of my personal applications to run on an application server I control and to which I attach views from all of my devices. I want to have a singular e-mail application that I see on all of my devices. I want to have a singular web browser application that I see on all my devices. And so on.
We need to make my many devices appear as one rather than making a single device act as many devices.
[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao