Gates puts net security first

[rpm]

http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_1730597,00.html

"Internet security is Microsoft's greatest challenge while developing mainstream technology to be able to talk to a computer is a frontier about to be crossed, company chairperson Bill Gates said here on Friday."

[Turtle]

Wow, great "spin" on that headline there.

Anyway, interesting quote that, we've been hearing about supposed "around-the-corner" breakthroughs in linking speech recognition to OSs for about a decade now but recently MS had gone a bit quieter about it. I wonder if they're really planning on releasing a worthwhile product that will help take this mainstream this time, or if this is just general "great things coming so stick with our products" feel-good marketing banter. (Proper AI is a long way off though so it'll be a long time before we're truly "talking to our computers" in the human-like sense, so until then isn't it just glorified dictation software and voice commands? Doubt that'll take off in a big way.) I remember playing around with the 'speech SDK' produced by MS R&D in the 90s, it wasn't very impressive back then (no better than the commercial speech engines like Dragon at that stage), but one would think they've made improvements by now, plus computers are faster now too.

[stoke]

Howz about allowing you to tell your computer to allow computer XYZ to connect to it with these privaleges in Windows XP without being forced to run a Domain Server.
Or is that just asking too damn much eh MS ? Windows 95 can doit, why not Win XP?

[bb_matt]

Techno-Babble marketing gobbledy-g00k regurgitated and spun in a different way.

The big problem Microsoft and their upcoming new version of windows, Longhorn is that people just aren't excited about it (well, some people might get excited about a Longhorn, but for different reasons)

So he touts security again - same as he did with windowsXP - same old rhetoric, yet we're still stuck with the same old ****.

And now he starts waffling on about "talking to computers" - ho hum.

Expect a lot of Techno-Babble over the next 18 months leading up to the next version of windows that doesn't amount to anything significant.

Fact is, Microsoft HAVE to keep supporting WindowsXP in terms of security updates and it's been indicated that windowsXP users will get many of the new features of the next version of windows as free upgrades.

So what do Microsoft have to sell us in the next version of windows ?
So far, an interface with translucent windows - whooop-de-doooo.
A vastly improved search engine - wow-i-wow.

IOW, f@ck-all.

I've read that Microsoft are worried because windowsXP adoption still hasn't come anywhere close to critical mass and that there are still a large percentage of PC's with win98 on them.

That doesn't bode well for Longhorn as it indicates people no longer get excited about a new OS from Microsoft, mainly because what they have already does the job, so why should they fork out another R2000 ?