This is an inflammatory headline that does justice neither to the NGOs nor to the people commenting about the NGOs.
A better headline would be "Health experts believe Bill and Melinda Gates could save more lives by modifying resource allocation" or something like that.
I'm not a writer so it could probably be stated better but you get the idea. The guy isn't saying what they are doing is bad, which the headline implies, but rather that resource spending could be further optimized.
They didn't announce Windows 9. Those were tech sites just reporting on rumours. And considering that the last couple OSes have been released on 3 year cycles, mid-2015 is exactly when you would expect Windows 9 to come out.
They have explicitly said that it can be anyone. It can be a friend across the country. It can be your cousin. It could be a sibling. You could even add your enemies and limit the sharing folder to only include awful games.
Only one person of the 10 with whom you share can play at a time. This will not restrict you from playing though. It's not clear whether you can play a co-op game together on a single copy. To me this seems better than actually lending a disk to someone since you can still play your game while you lend it out.
I have no idea why Microsoft are saying outright you can't lend games, since you can share them. I think their messaging has been absolutely awful.
It has about the same battery life as an 11" MacBook Air. If you add a keyboard, then it is about the same price as an 11" MacBook Air but the MacBook Air only has 1366x768 resolution vs. 1920x1080 for the Surface Pro.
I'm not missing the point. I just disagree that for the next two years their app offerings will be lackluster. And my reason for that disagreement is the fact that they are converging their platform to run on all systems (desktop, laptop, tablet, phone and console).
Keep in mind this change almost instantly increases the potential market a phone app developer can tap into because it will be available to desktop users as well. You've just gone from developing for WP7 users, to every Win 8 user. That is an order of magnitude increase. Add to that XBox users.
I think Microsoft will catch up much faster than most people anticipate.
Edit: Ok I will rephrase the premature thing: Experience of using the phone from 1 year ago is not a valid criticism of the ecosystem today. Even less so for a new ecosystem that is not going to be released for another 3-6 months.
I wouldn't call engineering your entire OS to be able to share code between devices as irrelevant, nor would I characterize it as something that is done for a quick marketing line.
Making this change likely involves significant capital cost investment that is not done lightly and without a great deal of forethought. You think it's a coincidence that this gets announced 2 days after the Surface (which is clearly a bridging device) and a week after leaks appears for a new XBox (what OS do you think that will run)?
This whole thing has pretty obviously been planned out a long time ago, and Microsoft are starting to lay down their cards to show their hand. And it's increasingly looking like they have been putting together a pretty strong hand.
The 3rd party app criticism is in my view an outdated one. One year ago would have been premature to make a declaration on the availability of 3rd party apps for the Windows platform since it was still relatively new.
Windows Phone has been catching up and can probably do so more quickly now that the phone and desktop OSes can use similar code.
Edit: Since I am being downvoted for my opinion, I will add some evidence
"An app for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 can share the same code and the same basic user interface, since both platforms use the Metro design language, according to Wissinger."
I don't understand the criticism leveled at organizations like IEEE although maybe I'm missing something. These are professional organizations and consequently non-profits. So even though they charge a lot to access the articles, it implies that nobody is actually getting rich off this.
Edit: I know that there are some for profit publishing houses, but there are also many journals published by non-profits (IEEE being one of them).
Sports games. I had heard that the killing aspect could have been been removed from the game in Germany for legal reasons. Bullets were to be replaced with paintballs and killing with simply eliminating opponents. They never ended up passing the law banning violent games though.