Microsoft’s new Surface Pro has 13.5 hours of battery life and LTE option
Available on June 15th starting at $799
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/23/15674198/microsoft-surface-pro-price-features-availability

Microsoft Unveils New Surface Pro Device to Reverse Sales Drop
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-23/microsoft-unveils-new-surface-pro-device-to-reverse-sales-drop

Microsoft Corp. unveiled a new version of its Surface Pro tablet and laptop combination device with more powerful chips and better battery life, updating an aging product with declining sales that hurt financial results last quarter.

The Redmond, Washington-based company introduced the fifth version of the Surface Pro at an event in Shanghai, the first time it’s held the launch of a major product outside the U.S. Microsoft also announced a version of Windows 10 for use by the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises, ending a standoff over the operating system by meeting the government’s requests for increased security and data control.

A week ago, Microsoft held its Build developer conference in its backyard in Seattle. This week, Google did the same in an amphitheater right next to its Mountain View campus. While Microsoft’s event felt like it embodied the resurgence of the company under the leadership of Satya Nadella, Google I/O — and especially its various, somewhat scattershot keynotes — fell flat this year.

The two companies have long been rivals, of course, but now — maybe more than ever — they are on a collision course that has them compete in cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, productivity applications and virtual and augmented reality.

And while Google mostly celebrated itself during its main I/O keynote, Nadella spent a good chunk of time during his segment on celebrating and empowering developers in a way that felt very genuine.

Having spent a few days at both events, I couldn’t help coming home thinking that it may be Microsoft that has the more complete vision for this AI-first world we’ll soon live in — and if Google has it, it didn’t do a good job articulating it at I/O this year.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted during his keynote segment that the company is moving from being a mobile first company to an AI first one. Microsoft is essentially on the same path, even as its CEO Satya Nadella phrased it differently. Neither company really mentioned the other during its keynote events, but the parallels here are pretty clear.

The two marquee products both companies used to show off their AI prowess were surprisingly similar. For Microsoft, that was Story Remix, a very nifty app that automatically makes interesting home videos our of your photos and videos. For Google, it was Google Photos, which is using its machine learning tech to help you share your best photos more easily. Remix is a far more fun and interesting product

Google Lens, which can identify useful information in images, looks like it could be really useful
Google also still offers Google Goggles, an app that allowed you to identify objects around you for a few years now. I think Google forgot that even existed, as it’s sometimes prone to do.

At the core of the two companies’ AI efforts for consumers are Microsoft Cortana and the Google Assistant. This is one area where Google remains clearly ahead of Microsoft, simply because it offers more hardware surfaces for accessing it and because it knows more about the user (and the rest of the world). Cortana works well enough, but because it mostly lives on the desktop and isn’t really connected to the rest of your devices, using it never comes natural.

In the virtual personal assistant arena, Google actually had some interesting announcements (though things like making calls on Google Home fell a bit flat, too, simply because Amazon announced this same feature for its Echo speakers a few days earlier).

With the Microsoft Graph, it’s worth mentioning, Microsoft is now building a fabric that will tie all of your devices and applications together. Whether that will work as planned remains to be seen, but it’s a bold project that could have wide-reaching consequences for how you use Microsoft’s tools, even on Android, in the future.

Both Microsoft and Google used their events to announce relatively evolutionary updates to their flagship operating systems. Google, of course, had already pre-announced Android O and Microsoft had already pre-announced that it’ll now offer two Windows 10 releases a year, so the fact that we’ll get a new update in the fall really wasn’t a surprise.

Microsoft’s opened its three Indian Azure data centres to the world.

Azure India kicked off in September 2015 but at the time Microsoft noted that “The India regions are currently available to volume licensing customers and partners with a local enrollment in India”, adding that “The India regions will open to direct online Azure subscriptions in 2016.”

It looks like Redmond missed that deadline by a few months, because on April 11th the company announced that “global companies can now benefit from access to the three Azure regions in India.”

As it’s not an LTS (Long Term Support) branch, the Linux 4.10 kernel series was doomed to reach end of life sooner or later, and it happened this weekend with the release of the Linux kernel 4.10.17 patch

Therefore, users are now urged to move to the Linux 4.11 kernel series.

Linux Kernel 4.10 Reached End of Life, Users Urged to Move to Linux 4.11 Series
Users are urged to move to the most stable kernel version
http://news.softpedia.com/news/linux-kernel-4-10-reached-end-of-life-users-urged-to-move-to-linux-4-11-series-515898.shtml

Greg Kroah-Hartman informed the Linux community about the release and immediate availability of the seventeenth maintenance update to the Linux 4.10 kernel series, which also marked the end of life.

“Upgrade to Linux kernel 4.11 as soon as possible if you’re using Linux 4.10″

If you’re curious to know what was changed in the Linux 4.10.17 kernel, we can tell you that it brings various improvements to the x86, ARM64 (AArch64), ARM, and PowerPC (PPC) hardware architectures, as well as to the CIFS, F2FS, Ceph, EXT4, JBD2, OrangeFS, and OverlayFS filesystems. It also updates a bunch of drivers for USB, TTY, InfiniBand, NVDIMM, MD, crypto, and Bluetooth devices.

Microsoft announced a new edition of Windows 10 at an education-focused event earlier this month. Windows 10 S is limited to only running apps downloaded from the Windows Store, and while it’s primarily aimed at the education sector, it will come pre-installed on some devices sold to consumers too, including Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop.

Until the end of the year, Surface Laptop buyers are being offered a free upgrade to Windows 10 Pro if they need it, which will enable them to run other software not downloaded from the Store. However, after that date, the cost to make that switch will rise to $49, and that price will also apply to other Windows 10 S devices that go on sale before then.

Of course, there are plenty of apps not yet available in the Store, including many that provide assistive technologies for those with disabilities and accessibility issues.

‘Safe and predictable’ Windows 10 S won’t run Linux, says Microsoft
http://www.zdnet.com/article/safe-and-predictable-windows-10-s-wont-run-linux-says-microsoft/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0g&utm_campaign=trueAnthem:+Trending+Content

Microsoft wants to clear up confusion about Windows 10 S and Linux distributions available on the Windows Store.

Just because Linux distributions are coming to the Windows Store, it doesn’t mean they will work on laptops running Microsoft’s streamlined Windows 10 S.

Microsoft wants to clear up any confusion over two recent announcements. At the beginning of May it unveiled Windows 10 S, a fast-booting, locked-down version of Windows 10 that can only install apps from the Windows Store and is restricted to Microsoft’s Edge browser.

Windows 10 S ships with Microsoft’s $1,000 Surface Laptop, as well as with forthcoming third-party Windows laptops that will be priced from $189 to take on the Chromebook market.

Microsoft’s quietly revealed that it’s shrunk Windows Server’s footprint, at least when you run it in Azure.

The newly-reduced versions of Windows Server are destined for use in Azure’s Managed Disks, a storage option that allows the creation of disks without first creating a storage account and without the need to manually assign a universal resource indicator. Managed disks are also designed for automation.

Microsoft offers Managed Disks at 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 512GB and a terabyte, with the two smallest sizes a recent addition. But it looks like users had trouble squeezing Windows into the little ones, because Microsoft’s now announced it has “dded a second set of Windows Server offerings with 30GB OS disks for Windows Server 2008R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012R2 and Windows Server 2016.”

This matters because it means Windows can now be popped onto 32GB Managed Disks at what Redmond reckons is a saving of “US$2.18 per VM if you choose to deploy with 32GB Standard Managed OS disk vs. 127GB.”

Microsoft presented its latest Windows 10 strategy to developers at its Build event in Seattle last week.

Microsoft states that Windows 10 is now installed on more than 500 million devices, halfway towards the goal of 1 billion by 2018 that it set itself at Build 2015.

In July 2016 the company acknowledged that its target was not realistic, telling the press that “due to the focusing of our phone hardware business, it will take longer than FY18 for us to reach our goal”.

“Focusing” in this context meant killing Windows Phone, other than for a business niche the company (and partners like HP) thinks may exist for multi-purpose devices that work like a PC when docked.

Build saw the announcement of a new Windows 10 release, the Fall Creators Update, along with key new features.