Yeah right
Like we are going to open up our ATM communications to the cloud.
Microsoft has announced Windows 10 for the Internet of Things and an Azure IoT suite. The software giant said on Monday that Windows 10 would be delivered for a “diverse set of IoT devices" under the new moniker. Microsoft announced the Windows branch at the Convergence 2015 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. According to …
"Like we are going to open up our ATM communications to the cloud."
ATMs basically operate in the cloud already - you ask for money, the ATM asks the central bank computer to authorise the transaction and you get your money. The ATM is a sophisticated but basically dumb front end to the bank already.
Of course the bank owns that cloud so that's where the issue lies here. Banks aren't in a million years let their data be stored on someone else's machine unless it satisifies a million and one regulatory and security issues.
Changes in office 2016 include updates to Outlook and deployment. Microsoft also made a big deal out of the fact that Office macros aren’t changing."
They can't mean that the new Office is just a minor update!! Announcing they are not changing something inside Office shows how well their changes are welcomed.
McAfee is saluting this initiative and they are already preparing McAfee SecurityScan Plus IoT version. Malware writers in China and Russia are still silent on this matter but in a preemptive move, the NSA say they are already collecting metadata on who is turning on the light so the public is safe for now.
Strikes me that most IoT devices have very limited functionality. On/off, power level and not a great deal more.
So why the hell are we using advanced general purpose computing devices (fully blown PCs for all intents and purposes) to carry out tasks for which a 1975 6502 would be massive overkill?
Far better would be a decently hardened "home server" as the sole interface between the wider world and the devices it controls, and a collection of dumb devices which WILL NOT take instruction from anything but the server to which they are registered.
Sadly, this is very true. Marketing hype, etc. these days seems to trump sound engineering and minimal footprint. Bigger, more bells and whistles, etc. isn't better usually. But the marketing and sales droids love it. In the defense industry world, this is called "gold plating". Take something that works well and add stuff to raise the price (profit). Car companies (charge extra for radio, heater, windshield wipers, etc.) got in early on this and the philosophy has spread.
Often there is way more computing power/memory and code in the communications mechanism - ZigBee/WiFi/GPRS/3G etc - than there is in the application processor that is sampling the sensors and making decisions about how to interact with the outside world. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean its not there.
As far as I can see, the cloud (and persistant internet connectivity in general) is all about control. Taking it out of the hands of customers and into the hands of corporations. Revoking licences, changing terms, disabling functionality or whatever they please is simple if everything is forced through a central server.
I feel like I'm a luddite, but no thanks to all that.
customer: Sir, I need a fix for this new zero-day, now! My oven keeps switching to grill mode, so I cannot cook my Cornish pasties ... and it randomly turns itself on in the middle of the day, so my electricity bill will be very high this month.
support: Sir, I understand, however, that fridge has EOL'd 3 years ago and is out of support.
customer: But it is only 5 years old, what can I do ?
support: Buy a new one!
Can we clean up some of the old ones PLEASE!
Still using alternate data streams from WinNT er VMS. WTF?
Or how about the different locations for program installations
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/d913471a-d7fb-448d-869b-da9025dcc943/where-does-addremove-programs-get-its-information-from-in-the-registry?forum=w7itprogeneral
All the different ways you have to do things, and NONE of them is complete!
I WANT MY HAIR BACK!!!
Come on...such negative reactions....only because it's Microsoft, oh, sorry, I probably need to say Micro$oft or Micro$hit or something for this audience...please wake up people...we're not living in the nineties anymore...the world HAS changed.
The fact that Windows is one of the OS'es with the LEAST bugs nowadays, or the fact that MS Office still is on the forefront of Office suites, cloud or not, while being offered for free or for very little money, or that MS open-sources quite some products (.NET), or gives away for free (Visual Studio 2013 Pro, Windows 10 for phones and Rapsberry Pi 2,...), or adheres to the standards better than some others nowadays (Spartan browser, TypeScript,...) apparently is not important.
They got their bad name somewhere in the 90's for sometimes valid reasons, but that hardly goes for the Microsoft of this decade.
Ok, some people might argue that it all is with commercial intents, which probably will be true, it still IS a commercial company which employs many thousands of people....but then they're not that different from the likes of Apple, Oracle, IBM,...
For thos who still were not aware: IoT is THE future IT-related money-pit, worth of estimated BILLIONS of dollars/euros in the near future, like it or not, but it will be a fact.
You can ignore that fact, like MS did with the rise of tablets and smartphones, and lose marketshare, money and public image, or you can act with an open mind.
The alternative for a stripped down version of Windows 10 would be some Linux distro, or some other more exotic OS....not really big of a difference.
So why use 'full-blown hardware'? Well a Raspberry Pi or Arduino or whatever that would set you back some 40€ is not really expensive, it is indeed like mentioned before very common, mass-produced, hardware, so every developer or company can participate in building software. And the extra processing power might be really usefull in quite some IoT scenario's where quite some processing needs to be performed: think 4K video, face detection algorithms, ...
Don't worry, nice applications are being developed and will be released soon.
IoT is not MS's prerogative, but it's nice to see them participate in what still is a niche market now.
It feels like their focus is "get everything in the cloud" ... that has to be the result of some global scale agenda and really not everything needs to be / should be in the cloud.
That said:
If they can be innovative and make my life easier ... I'm all for it.
Nothing worth having is free these days.