News in brief: Note 7 fire cause to be revealed; Trump gives up cellphone; Cortana moves on to Android lockscreen
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Tag Archive for: Cortana
Back to school: HP adds USB Type-C, Toshiba goes for a Cortana button
With Windows 10 arriving during the “back to school” buying season, hardware OEMs are starting to show off their new Windows 10 systems.
Toshiba’s embrace of Windows 10 comes in two parts: a Cortana button on the keyboard and dual array microphones. The Cortana button is the F1 key; pressing it brings up a small Cortana window, and you can speak or type to Microsoft’s virtual agent to get things done. Windows 10 has an equivalent shortcut built in—Win-C—so it seems a little superfluous, but the one-button solution may feel a little more comfortable to the many computer users who don’t routinely use multi-key shortcuts.
The Toshiba Satellite C shows off the Cortana button. It’s the magnifying glass on the F1 key.
Toshiba
Dual microphones aren’t new, and Toshiba has used them in the past. The company’s new lineup uses them across the board, from the Satellite C series starting at $ 394.99 through the Satellite L series starting at $ 529.99, up to the Satellite S series starting at $ 719.99, to provide better performance for Cortana’s voice recognition and in Skype and similar applications.
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Microsoft reveals Azure Service Fabric, platform behind Cortana and more
When Microsoft’s cloud platform, then known as Windows Azure, was first launched, it was strictly a Platform-as-a-Service offering. Apps written for Azure were deployed onto Windows and used Azure’s services such as storage, queues, and SQL databases. But management of the operating system and configuration of the virtual hardware beneath it was strictly Microsoft’s concern. In 2012, Azure added a VM role providing Infrastructure-as-a-Service capabilities in addition to the existing PaaS services.
Azure CTO Mark Russinovich announced today a new iteration the Azure PaaS offering, with Azure Service Fabric. Service Fabric provides a set of tools to do things such as offer smarter deployment with rolling upgrades to new application versions, health monitoring, automated rollbacks to earlier versions, scaling, and load balancing.
Service Fabric is built for “microservices,” where the functional parts that make up a service are split into small units that can be individually deployed, updated, distributed, and scaled. These smaller units are run in containers rather than directly on VMs. Service Fabric can handle the management and scaling of these containers, with potentially hundreds of containerized microservices running on a single VM.
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