Microsoft Gives You The Windows 10 Upgrade Whether You Want It Or Not!

Microsoft recently confirmed that it has been pre-loading Windows 10 installation bits onto devices whose owners have not "reserved" a copy of the operating system, let alone showed any interest in it at all. Naturally, this has upset some users of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 with many complaining that the unsolicited downloads have caused them to exceed data caps from their internet service providers or seized storage space without their consent.

Microsoft released a statement acknowledging the downloads stating, "For those who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help customers prepare their devices for Windows 10 by downloading the files necessary for future installation. This results in a better upgrade experience and ensures the customer's device has the latest software. This is an industry practice that reduces the time for installation and ensures device readiness."

If a Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 user has Windows Update set to the default option, which was recommended by Microsoft, that allows the operating system to download and install security and other bug patches automatically in the background then Microsoft will push the Windows 10 upgrade files to the drive.

This upgrade can range from over 3GB to almost 6GB and is placed in the hidden "$Windows.~BT" folder. This folder has long been a destination for Windows upgrades and the Windows 10 upgrade will remain here until the user expresses an interest in installing the operating system...at least that's what we hope.

Microsoft has been pre-loading the Windows 10 upgrade on systems since the end of July, though it was believed that the practice was limited to PCs whose users had accepted Microsoft's free offer and reserved a copy of the operating system through an app the company automatically installed back in the spring and early summer on nearly every single PC running Windows 7 Home and Windows 8.1 Home, and on many PCs running Windows 7 Professional and Windows 8.1 Professional.

Once the Windows 10 upgrade was downloaded to the device, the user was notified via the app that installation was ready. But this new scheme is completely different in the fact that the bits are downloaded to the PC, regardless of the fact that the user has not asked for the upgrade whatsoever. What's not surprising is the people who noticed this first were the ones with data caps mandated by their internet service providers, especially those who relied on cellular connection to the internet.

There is a particularly long thread on Slashdot that has several commenters claiming that they had exceeded their caps because Microsoft downloaded this massive update to their devices without their approval. One comment reads, "I had to travel recently, so I took a laptop with clean Windows 8.1 Pro install. At my destination, I purchased a SIM (they only had 1GB data packages) and put it into the 3G/Wi-Fi router I carry. I powered the laptop, connected to Internet via said router, checked a few things, then went away for a few hours. When I got back to the apartment, my data package (and Internet connectivity) was killed because Microsoft idiots decided to start downloading Windows 10 even though I have explicitly closed/rejected all the offers."

Other users did not appreciate the unwanted upgrade that landed on their limited storage space. Anyone with a 128GB SSD would be very unhappy if 5% of their storage capacity was suddenly occupied without their approval. Others wondered whether Microsoft would take the next logical step by either giving users notifications telling them to apply the installed upgrade or make the move of triggering the download automatically.

If they triggered the download automatically it wouldn't be much different from what they've already done with those users who accepted the free upgrade and reserved a copy. It is also possible that a lot of users on the receiving end of the notifications would approve of the upgrade or even appreciate the fact they didn't have to wait a long time for the download to complete. However, if Microsoft downloaded the update without consent (again) then the people may very well grab their torches and pitchforks.

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IBM Creates A Limitless Linux

With significant drivers expanding the mission critical applications in the industry, it's no surprise that Linux is the fastest growing operating system in the business. Speed, agility, a unified development environment and cost are all factors to this success. In addition to that, Linux's quality has advanced in recent years with mobile driving an increased focus on this platform. IBM has a lot of eggs in this basket, pushing its z Systems platform to take advantage of this trend and provide the strongest large scale offering around. IBM is convinced that they can expand their capability by taking Linux to new heights and are doing so by announcing the expansion of their coverage. Customers have begun wanting IBM to take Linux and give it the same focus as the company's most capable systems, and that's exactly what IBM is doing.

IBM's LinuxOne Portfolio is designed to provide a selection of Linux distribution of its choosing and with the scale and support you would expect from IBM's most powerful systems, like the z System. In addition to that, there are two other offerings, both of which are named after penguins. These two systems are known as the LinuxONE Emperor and the LinuxONE Rockhopper. Emperor is the premier offering, providing the greatest flexibility and scalability along with performance and trust for business-critical Linux applications. Emperor also has the greatest capacity range and no top end, meaning it can be expanded whenever and however you need to. Rockhopper is the entry system that starts much smaller than Emperor and provides a solution for a smaller company or unit.

Both of the systems allow you to choose your distribution, hypervisor, runtime, management tools, your choice of databases, and your choice of analytics. There are other coverages on hypervisors as well, including PR/SM. z/VM, and KVM. Languages include Python, Pearl, COBOL, Java, and Node.js. On the management side, we have WAVE, IBM Cloud Manager, OpenStack, Docker, Chef, Puppet, and VMware vRealize Automation. In terms of databases, there's Oracle, DB2LUW, Maria DB, MongoDB, and PostgreSQL with analytics include Hadoop, Big Insights, DB@BLU, and Spark. The range of offerings is also pretty good, including single platform, multi-platform, on premise, off premise, and multiple mixed cloud environments with a common toolset.

When it comes to pricing, things are pretty flexible. There's a Pay-Per-Use model with no upfront payment needed, a fixed monthly or quarterly payment, and variable costing that scales based on usage. A second pricing model uses a 36-month fixed lease with a 36-month usage contact and a right to return after 1 year. The final payment style is a Pre-Core rental model that allows you to order what you need when you need it, add licenses as needed, decrease licenses as needed or cancel with a 30-day notice.

Scale out and up supports up to 8 thousand virtual servers in a single system along with tens of thousands of containers, tens of thousands of concurrent users, and the ability to run test, development, and production in a single system. There is a significant focus on speed here as IBM has included its fastest processor, biggest I/O pipe, up to 10TB of memory, and 4 levels of cache, all of which brings you a sub-second end user response time at full load. The platform is designed to run at 100% utilization and to spin containers and virtual servers in a matter of minutes, automatically provide physical resources as needed in seconds via automatic resources provisioning and reallocation.

IBM testing has shown that it can handle up to 30 billion RESTful web interactions per day with up to 350,000 database read and writes per second. This is twice the performance of competitors for any NoSQL database, along with the longest single DB node. This assists in avoiding costs, complexity, and overhead of sharding.

This is Linux without limits. The Open Mainframe Project is a key element in the effort and it is being pushed forward by the Linux foundation in order to drive capabilities and growth. IBM is showing a commitment to driving this project with a lot of funding and company resources. This includes IBM Linux Technology Centers, Open Source Community Contributions, Academic Initiative and Training Programs, and open access to Mainframe community clouds. Members of this project include CA, CompuWare, BMC, Marris College, and the University of Washington.

IBM is pulling out all the stops here and this is definitely one of the most significant moves by the company in the past 10 years. IBM is enabling its centers worldwide to port, test, and benchmark key applications with free access to the Mainframe Community Cloud for developers and students across a plethora of top-tier universities. IBM definitely sees its future tied closely to Linux and a score of students coming from educational institutions and is focused on ever more mobile, flexible, applications.

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New Solid-State Batteries From Samsung/MIT Could "Last A Lifetime"

Batteries. We need them for almost everything we use. They're in our laptops, our smartphones, our video game controllers, our remotes, and anything we use that is now wireless. But the one thing wrong with batteries in today's world is that they are finite. Eventually, they will run out of power and there's not a whole lot we can do about that. Or is there?

Researchers have recently developed a new material for a basic battery component that, according to them, will allow almost any battery indefinite power storage. This new material, known as a solid electrolyte, could increase battery life as well as battery storage capacity and safety as liquid electrolytes are the leading cause of battery fires.

The standard lithium-ion batteries that we use today use a liquid electrolyte. This liquid electrolyte is an organic solvent that has been known to overheat and cause fires in things like cars, commercial airliners and even smartphones. With a solid electrolyte, there is absolutely no safety problem whatsoever.

According to Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT and one of the main researchers on the project, "You could throw it against the wall, drive a nail through it - there's nothing there to burn." In addition to that, a solid-state electrolyte will have virtually no degradation, which means that such batteries could last through "hundreds of thousands of cycles," Ceder continued.

Organic electrolytes also have limited electrochemical stability, which means that they lose their ability to produce an electrical charge over time. In addition to MIT, scientists from the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, the University of California at San Diego and the University of Maryland also conducted research on the project.

The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Materials and the researchers described the solid-state electrolytes as an improvement over the current lithium-ion batteries we are using today. Electrolytes are one of three main components in a battery along with anode and cathode terminals.

The electrolyte component of the battery separates the battery's positive cathode and negative anode terminals while allowing the flow of ions between terminals. A chemical reaction then takes place between the two terminals, producing an electric current.

Previous problems with solid electrolytes are that they were incapable of conducting ions fast enough to be efficient energy, producers. The team of researchers from MIT and Samsung say that they have overcome that problem. Another advantage of a solid-state lithium-ion battery is that it can perform under very cold temperatures with Ceder calling this breakthrough "a real game-changer" that creates an "almost perfect battery".

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Acer's Aspire Z3-710 All-In-One Gets Windows 10

On Monday, Acer announced that its 23.8-inch Aspire Z3-710 Series of all-in-one desktop PCs are saving you some time by shipping with Windows 10. so you won't have to do the free upgrade from Windows 8.1.

The Z3-710-UR55 at $750 and Z3-710-UR54 at $900 will be the two models that ship with Windows 10. The Z3-710-UR55 comes with an Intell Core i3-4170T dual-core processor clocked at 3.2GHz with 3MB of cache, 6GB of DDR3L RAM, 1TB hard drive, DVD writer, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 + LE, 1080p webcam, three USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, GbE LAN, and stereo speakers.

The Z3-710-UR53 has a Core i5-4590T quad-core processor clocked at 2GHz with 6MB of cache and 8GB of RAM. If you're just using general purpose computing chores, it might not be worth the additional $150 as you only get 2GB of additional RAM. Even with the processor being an upgrade in cores and cache, it really is a downgrade in clock speed.

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Acer says that both systems come with a slim 1.4-inch chassis with a display that can tilt from 5 to 25 degrees using only two fingers. If these don't sound as appealing to you, Acer still offers the Z3-710-UR59, which is a Windows 8.1 model, only at $700. It has an Intel Pentium G3260T dual-core clocked at 2.9GHz, 4GB of RAM, and 1TB HDD. All of the systems sound pretty cool and the fact that they are All-in-Ones is a definite bonus. You just need to find which one bests suits your needs.

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Most Popular Programming Languages State by State

When it comes to programming languages, most people probably can't name more than 2. Popular answers to this question typically include languages like C++ or JavaScript, but there is a whole host of other languages out there for people to use. And just because you've never heard of one doesn't mean that it isn't the most popular programming language on the other side of the country.

Silicon Valley may be the hotbed of new and exciting tech, but most programmers and developers are working hard in other industries, like big business. A recent programmer Q&A from the site Experts Exchange delved deep into its own data to determine what exactly the most popular programming languages are in the United States.

The survey took a look at who was asking questions about which programming languages, which was one of the factors in determining which states used which programming languages. In addition to that, users who were qualified "Experts" on the site seemed to favor PHP heavily.

If you look at the data and simply go off of the number of questions asked then it's clear to see that Microsoft's .NET programming language is seeing increased use. However, most people in the business are not surprised by these results.

PHP is a script language that is pretty much the standard with web developers, despite the fact that a lot of programmers don't seem to like all that much. Going along with that, .NET is a Microsoft standard that isn't exactly the most talked about but it is a good entrance for coders who are just getting started with learning to build apps around Microsoft platforms, platforms which are widely used in the business world.

What this data also does is show those in the Silicon Valley that the popularity of the newest programming languages is insignificant when compared to the driving force of existing options. Some of the more trendy languages, like Ruby on Rails and Swift, don't even appear on the list.

So what are the most popular programming languages in the country? Here's the list:

• ASP
• Cold Fusion
• C++
• C#
• Delphi
• Java
• JavaJ2EE
• JavaScript
• .NET
• PHP
• Powershell
• Python
• Shell
• SQL
• VisualBasic

Just to note, West Virginia and North Dakota didn't return any significant data....coders must not exist there.

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Google Looking For Redemption With Google Glass For Enterprise

I guess the Science Fiction-esque future that Google Glass suggested in its ads is a little bit further ahead of us than Google realized. Google Glasses were all but a huge consumer flop. The general public just wasn't ready for goofy-looking, augmented reality glasses.

But that doesn't mean this product is dead, at least not yet. According to a recent FCC filing discovery, 9to5Google revealed the next version of Google Glass. This edition will be geared towards applications that are used in the enterprise space, leaving out the novelty consumer-oriented functions that were featured in the first "Explorer Edition".

The "Enterprise Edition" Google Glass is said to sport a larger prism display for a better augmented experience. This serves as an attempt to minimize eye strain many early glass users complained about.

Additionally the Enterprise Edition will drop the Texas Instruments processor for an Intel Atom processor which will be faster and have better battery life than existing Android Wear smartwatches.

While the Explorer Edition often overheated or ran out of batteries, Enterprise Edition promises to run cooler, even with the additional external battery pack Google is experimenting with.

The last thing cited in the report was a super-fast 802.11ac Wi-Fi with dual-band support for 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless channels, meaning even faster video streaming.

Google's decision to shift their Glass strategy towards enterprise customers is a huge, but intelligent shift. Yes, Google, assisting with specialized medical, law enforcement, or even business applications seems more important than letting consumers play virtual reality games.

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Crytek's CryEngine Embraces Linux

Linux gaming is starting to catch on and build up some momentum. Following in the footsteps of Valve’s Source engine, Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, and Unity 5, Crytek's CryEngine supports Linux. This also means that it will have support for SteamOS. This also means that it will be way easier for developers who are currently making games on these engines to add support for Linux.

Even with this, developers will still have to go a little out of their way and do some work in order to add Linux support to their Steam games, so every game that comes out won't have it. So don't get your hopes up on that. But either way, there will be a lot of titles coming out in the future and the technology will become more widely adopted. It reduces the effort needed by a lot.

This might not be huge news to all of the indie game players out there. Smaller companies might not want to invest the extra time into adding support for Linux, but for the huge, new AAA games the cost of porting them to Linux goes way down, and because SteamOS is a really promising, big new platform, it's starting to look like a much better idea to these big gaming companies. When the core engine of the game already supports that platform, everything else is pretty simple because all the hard work is already done.

On top of all that, engines that already support Linux should get a huge improvement in the quality of ports. Some of the Linux games currently on Steam use a lot of Windows coding and Direct3D, which makes performance a little bit problematic for Linux users. This new change will mean that developers can do away with whatever tricks they were using to make Windows code run (badly) on top of Linux.

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