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The time has come.

From the 1st of July I will communicate only via internet. No more SMS text and more voice calls using the old (and reliable) GSM network. There is no need to use them anymore. We are all connected 24/7, so why should I keep paying for services that I barely use?

Luckily where I live, it’s possible to subscribe for a internet only package for the price of 99 dollars for 6 months and 12gb of data. This basically means I can use 2gb per month at the price of 16.5 dollars. And 2gb are more than what I need. At the moment I have a plan which include 500mb per month and I barely use 300, since I am always under wifi coverage at home and work.

Not very expensive in my honest opinion.

It will not be a big step actually. Text messages are long gone thanks to apps like iMessage, whatsapp, viber, Facebook, etc. And for the calls, well, that’s even easier. I barely make two calls every week. Now I will make then with viber, skype or facetime.

But what about the people who are not on internet or don’t own a smartphone?

Wait, who? I am sorry, the 90s are long gone, it’s time to move on. You can communicate with me from your computer or call me directly. Yes because I can still receive text and calls, my phone number will remain the same and nothing will change for you.

The downside is the reliability and coverage of 3G/4G networks. But I live in a big city where I’ve never encountered any problem at all. And when I will travel I am pretty sure I can find wireless in basically every cafe’.

I can only hope that more and more people will start doing like me, we are all tired of the unbelievable expensive rates the mobile carriers are always charging to us.

Because, let me ask you, when was last time you couldn’t use internet to communicate?

Taken from the book “The ant and the Ferrari” written by Kevin Spackman:

You’ve probably seen the very popular TV series MythBusters, where Jamie and Adam test popular myths to decide if they are ‘Confirmed, Busted or Plausible’. It’s a fun and easy format to follow, so let’s use their approach to begin our investigation.
In typical MythBusters’ fashion we’ll start by blowing up a car. (They love their explosions!)
Like Jamie and Adam, we’ll replay the car explosion in ultra-slow motion. When we do we see thousands of fragments flying in all directions: a bit of a door going this way, a wheel going that way. But rather than just observing the overall carnage, we’re going to analyse what happens to each of these pieces, one at a time.

The best way to do this is to pause the video and follow each fragment as we advance the video frame by frame. Doing this allows us to calculate the speed and direction of motion of every individual piece using the following technique:

1. We determine the speed of each fragment by seeing how far it moves between successive frames. For example, a door might move 3 metres between two frames while a wheel might move 6 metres. If that happens the wheel must be going twice   as fast because it has travelled twice as far as the door in the same time.
2. We determine the direction each object is moving in by drawing a line that joins its position as it moves from one frame to the next.

When we overlay these speeds and directions directly onto the video footage we notice something very interesting. No matter which frame we look at, the fragments furthest away from the car are going the fastest and the items closest to where the explosion began are going the slowest. But it’s even more precise than that. An object twice as far away is going twice as fast. An object 3.24 times as far away is going exactly 3.24 times as fast.

We also notice that each particle is moving in a direction pointing directly away from one single point. And what’s so special about that point? It’s exactly where the car used to be.

If we rewind our video and play it back in reverse we find all the fragments fly back together into a single place, at exactly the same time, to form a car. It’s like going back in time. But if any of the directions are misaligned, the objects won’t all meet back at the same place. Similarly, if some of the speeds are too fast those objects will arrive too early and carry on past the central point before the other fragments arrive. Again, we won’t get everything back together in one nice car.

The only way we can get everything back together in one piece is if:

- All objects move directly towards a single point. Their angles must be perfectly aligned.
- The speed of every object is perfectly matched with how far away it is from the central point.
- Items twice as far away must be going twice as fast. Items 2.41 times as far away must be going 2.41 times as fast. The match of speed and distance must be exact — otherwise they won’t arrive at the same time.

Now supposing we hadn’t seen the whole video of our car explosion, but were only given a single frame recorded halfway through the explosion. If all the speeds and directions of every fragment were marked on that frame, and they all perfectly matched our requirement of speed and direction, we could reasonably conclude all the fragments must have been in the same place at the same time in the past. That is, they came from a single explosion.

This brings us to a most surprising and unexpected discovery.

In the 1930s, astronomer Edwin Hubble decided to measure the speed of the stars and galaxies using the same technology the police use when they check your car’s speed with a radar gun. Hubble was gobsmacked to discover exactly the same pattern with the stars as we’ve just seen with our exploding car: stars that were twice as far away were going twice as fast and galaxies that were 127 times as far away were going 127 times as fast. This was a total shock to him, because at the time everyone expected all the stars to be fixed nicely in their own place in a static Universe.

Since then, thousands of people have checked literally billions of stars and galaxies using a variety of different speed-measuring techniques — and they always find the match of distance and speed is exact. We can be as confident of the stars’ speed as the police can be of your car’s speed. If we don’t doubt the police radar guns then we shouldn’t doubt the speed of the stars.

What was even more surprising was to find that all the stars were moving away from a single point, just as the fragments in our car explosion were. They’re all perfectly aligned. This can’t possibly be a coincidence. The only sensible conclusion we can come to is that at some time in the past everything in the Universe was squashed together in one place

We can easily calculate how long ago that was, by dividing the distances to each star by their speeds. It’s the same technique we use when calculating how long a journey is going to take. We divide the distance of the journey by how fast we’re going to drive. If it’s 300 km and we’re going to drive at an average of 60 km/h then it will take us 300/60 = 5 hours. When we do this calculation for the stars we find the entire Universe — every star and every galaxy — was squashed together into a single point 13.7 billion years ago.

It’s looking suspiciously like some sort of big explosion took place.

…

Onestamente, quanti di noi potevano pensare che dopo iOS di Apple e Android di Google, Microsoft riuscisse a creare un sistema operativo per smartphone innovativo? E invece guardate un po’!
E’ semplice, intuitivo, user friendly e accattivante. Non e’ perfetto e le lamentele non mancano, ma sinceramente e’ veramente un ottimo prodotto!
E credo che se Microsoft riuscisse a attirare molti piu sviluppatori cosi da ingrandire il Marketplace e spingesse di piu’ sul marketing potrebbe davvero avere un mercato molto piu’ ampio.
Penso inoltre che l’accordo con Nokia che sia stato un ottimo affare, unendo l’esperienza di Nokia con quella di Microsoft i primi smartphone presentati sembrano ottimi. Le varie lamentele sul fatto che siano in ritardo ormai lasciano il tempo che trovano, meglio tardi che mai,
sopratutto se si porta un ottimo prodotto in un mercato in cui di grandi innovazioni non se ne vedono.

Credo quindi che continuando questa strada con Windows 8 su pc, telefono e tablet sia la strada giusta.
Certamente il Windows 8 su pc avra’ oltre all’interfaccia metro anche la classica interfaccia a cui siamo abituati, mentre su tablet e smartphone solo l’interfaccia metro e un’architettura basata su ARM ma l’integrazione sara’ comunque ottima.
Se guardiamo il tutto nel complesso ( Windows 8 su pc, smartphone, tablet) ci aggiungiamo una Xbox360 con la nuova dashboard per omogeneizzare l’esperienza utente, ci aggiungiamo anche Bing e i servizi online di Microsoft, abbiamo un quadro a mio vedere positivo!
Sono utente Microsoft da sempre cosi come la maggior parte delle persone (cosi come lo sono di Apple e Linux) e questo e’ il periodo in cui sento meno quell’antipatia che normalmente c’era nelle persone verso Windows e microsoft.
Anzi cominciano a esserci persone contente di Microsoft e non si puo’ dargli torto. Windows 7 e’ un signor sistema operativo, i servizi online comiciano davvero a essere all’altezza della concorrenza e l’xbox 360 e’ al vertice da anni.

Analizzando tutto questo quindi non posso che pensare in modo positivo riguardo al futuro di Microsoft.
Purtroppo rimarra’ il problema delle architetture, ARM per smartphone e tablet e x86-64 per pc, cosi che non possano esistere applicazioni che girano sia su tablet sia su pc ma debbano essere scritte appositamente.
E’ un piccolo prezzo da pagare credo che verra’ colmato in futuro, quando Windows 8 raggiungera’ milioni di persone e il marketplace sara’ inondato di applicazioni.
Perche’ si sa, potete dire quello che volete, ma Windows per pc e’ il sistema operativo usato dal 90% delle persone del pianeta e avere un negozio di applicazioni che raggiunge quella portata e’ una manna per sviluppatori e aziende, e sopratutto Microsoft!