Thurrott Daily: December 21

Thurrott Daily: December 21

Tech tidbits from around the web.

12/21/2016 5:10:30 PM

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Get your Xbox crest: Your “reign of you”

I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is—you don’t actually see a nice summary of your year on Xbox, as some suggest, just a few data points—but Microsoft is letting you design a “crest,” like a coat of arms, that represents your Xbox Live activity from 2016. The personal data I see here is:

YOUR TOTAL GAMERSCORE EARNED IN 2016: 1,320

THIS YEAR YOUR GAMERSCORE RANKS IN THE TOP 28% OF THE XBOX COMMUNITY

YOUR RANK LAST YEAR: 43%

YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS UNLOCKED IN 2016: 55

COMMUNITY AVERAGE INDIVIDUAL ACHIEVEMENTS UNLOCKED IN 2016: 55

YOUR MOST-PLAYED GAME OF 2016 WAS CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS III

YOUR MOST-PLAYED GAME LAST YEAR [2015] WASCALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 3

Nokia sues Apple for infringing technology patents

Yes, really. Reuters explains:

Finland’s Nokia Corp said on Wednesday it had sued Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of violating 32 technology patents.

Nokia’s lawsuits, filed in courts in Dusseldorf, Mannheim and Munich, Germany and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, cover patents for displays, user interfaces, software, antennas, chipsets and video coding.

“Since agreeing a license covering some patents from the Nokia Technologies portfolio in 2011, Apple has declined subsequent offers made by Nokia to license other of its patented inventions which are used by many of Apple’s products,” Nokia said in a statement.

This is neat because I always felt the best outcome for Nokia’s future was to become a patent troll.

First set of Windows 10 themes show up on the Windows Store

Themes are making a comeback in Windows 10, apparently. MSPowerUser explains:

Microsoft teased some of the upcoming features for Windows 10 that are coming with the Creators Update at the Windows 10 event in October. One of the features teased at the event was Windows 10 themes from the Windows Store which would essentially add themed sounds, wallpapers, and much more to your PC. Now, it seems like the first set of Windows 10 themes are already live on the Windows Store and users can install them today.

Don’t get too excited, though — you can’t actually use the themes just yet as they are not supported by Windows 10 yet, even if you are a Windows Insider running the latest Insider preview builds.

Check out the post to download some of them now.

Microsoft and Boku bring carrier billing to Orange in France

Microsoft and Boku announced today that they are adding carrier billing as a payment option for all Windows Store purchases made from any Windows 10 device on the Orange network in France.

Boku has extended their agreement with Microsoft to bring carrier billing to all Windows 10 devices on Orange France, including Windows Phones, Surface tablets, PC’s and laptops. As part of the expanded integration with Boku, Windows 10 customers on Orange France will be able to use their mobile phone number to save their mobile account as their preferred payment method when making any purchase in the Windows Store.

This is the first time carrier billing will be offered as a payment option for the Windows Store in France and will be available across a full range of devices including Windows Phones, Surface Tablets and any PC or laptop running Windows 10.

Irony alert: When Windows Phone 8 was going to have an e-wallet, the first carrier to offer it was—wait for it—Orange in France.

AWS Lambda supports Microsoft’s C#

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/announcing-c-sharp-support-for-aws-lambda/

Free design books from O’Reilly

Darek Meridian tipped me off to this on Twitter today:

Expertise in UX design, design for the IoT, data-informed design, and more

Enhance your design skills with these free ebooks from experts in UX, Data, IoT, and more.

Lots of good choices in there. And they also have many free e-books for Data, IoT programming, security, web development, and WebOps.

 

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Conversation 13 comments

  • 5553

    21 December, 2016 - 5:52 pm

    <h1 style="font-size: 1.75rem; margin: 0.25rem 0px; color: #28272a; font-family: fira-sans, ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; padding: 0px 10px; line-height: 2rem; clear: both; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: -1.75px; text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">outshine Apple</h1>
    <section class="deck viewability" style="margin-bottom: 10px; width: auto; margin-top: 10px; float: none; color: #4e4242; font-family: myriad-pro, ‘Helvetica Neue’, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; widows: 2;">
    <h2 style="font-size: 1.15rem; margin: 0px; padding: 0px 10px; font-weight: 300; line-height: 1.35rem;">As more consumers grow disenchanted with Apple, Microsoft has taken the opportunity to cash in on the growing popularity of Surface devices.</h2>
    </section>

  • 5553

    21 December, 2016 - 5:54 pm

    <p>Apple has stolen ideas from others…not news.</p>
    <p>Glad they are getting sued though ?</p>

    • 5027

      21 December, 2016 - 8:31 pm

      <blockquote><em><a href="#31576">In reply to </a><a href="../../users/Joe_Blo">Joe_Blo</a><a href="#31576">:</a></em></blockquote>
      <p>The tired old excuse, a company&nbsp;has spend years and millions of dollars, even billion at time, to develop new technologies, and they have also paid to have a patent on it. Most companies pay to use the technology, because that is what you do .. ..then some big company chooses to not pay.. and the company that has the patent all of a sudden is a "Patent Troll" for wanting to get payed. &nbsp;Why is that?&nbsp;</p>
      <p>Apple claims to "own" rectangles with rounded corners, but some how Nokia is a patent troll ?&nbsp;</p>

  • 5553

    21 December, 2016 - 9:39 pm

    <p>MSFT $75 ? DOW $25000&nbsp;</p>
    <p>Trump ?</p>

  • 1377

    Premium Member
    22 December, 2016 - 1:35 am

    <p>Who WANTS to use C#? C for OSes and device drivers, C++ for systems programming (shared libraries, aka DLLs), but C#?</p>

    • 5592

      22 December, 2016 - 8:42 am

      <blockquote><em><a href="#31600">In reply to </a><a href="../../users/hrlngrv">hrlngrv</a><a href="#31600">:</a></em></blockquote>
      <p>Oh, pretty much anybody who wants a language without the massive design flaws and security holes&nbsp;of the&nbsp;1960s structured assembler design of C and the limitations put on C++ by it being originally designed as&nbsp;the cfront&nbsp;preprocessor for C.</p>
      <p>You know, people who don’t think of "buffer overrun" as a feature and realize that we have strings and arrays these days and not just streams of teletype data.</p>
      <p>Those people want to use C#. Or any other modern language.</p>

  • 5485

    22 December, 2016 - 3:39 am

    <p>Nokia is not a patent Troll. The company never acquired or patented stuff in &nbsp;order to be able to sue other and get money.&nbsp;</p>

  • 220

    22 December, 2016 - 4:53 am

    <p>Patent troll? What’s your beef with Nokia?</p>

  • 5496

    22 December, 2016 - 9:27 am

    <p>So it’s OK for Apple to sue someone because of rounded corners.</p>
    <p>But as soon as some sue Apple for using their patents, you go and complain.</p>
    <p>Nokia has parent the Apple is using without paying, is patent infringement.</p>

    • 5553

      23 December, 2016 - 11:18 am

      <blockquote><em>Parent the Apple ????<a href="#31635">In reply to </a><a href="../../users/lordbaal1">lordbaal1</a><a href="#31635">:</a></em></blockquote>
      <p>&nbsp;</p>

  • 364

    23 December, 2016 - 1:07 am

    <p>I’m a bit surprised, I would have expected myself to be way behind you Paul, and yet somehow I’m a tad ahead… and if the numbers are right, last year way ahead (23% this year and 7% last)… makes&nbsp;no sense to me as I’m not that big of a gamer, just a bit here and there… or so I thought..</p>

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