Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Releases Windows 10 IoT Core For Small, Embedded Devices
An anonymous reader writes: One of the more interesting aspects of Microsoft's Windows 10 push is their desire to see it running on hobbyist hardware platforms. Today they released Windows 10 IoT Core for the Raspberry Pi 2 and the MinnowBoard Max. They say, "Windows 10 IoT Core is a new edition for Windows targeted towards small, embedded devices that may or may not have screens. For devices with screens, Windows 10 IoT Core does not have a Windows shell experience; instead you can write a Universal Windows app that is the interface and "personality" for your device." Microsoft has posted a list of release notes for this version, calling out improved support for Python and Node.js, significantly improved GPIO performance, and more electronics support for breakout boards. Under a heading cheekily named 'Developers, Developer, Developers,' they lay out their plan for language support and provide a code sample.
Taking away the buzz word quotient, IOT is fine. Have appliances and devices that interact with one another in a clean, secure, interoperable way. That sounds great. I'd love more home automation and more safe interaction with the environment I walk through. The problems is nobody seems to talk to one another, they're horribly expensive, everyone's out to maximize the self-fullfilling non-existing profits in this space; all of which cripples any meaniungful adoption.
Just like 'cloud' before it, there was real meat behind the buzz, but it took time, open platform designs and simple integration before any real traction occurred in pushing LAN services into others' hosting.
Bye!
Win10IoT isn't for hobbyists, it's for embedded system vendors.
This is the play by MS to prevent all the ATMs, kiosks, and point of sale systems that still run XP/Vista/7 from getting replaced with Linux solutions. There's already one airline running rPi+Raspian on their airport gate screens. And if you've been wondering how the hell Redmond has any chance of hitting their "1 billion Win10 devices" goal, this is the lion's share of it. No way they sell that many PC/Surface/Xbone/WinPhone units and get that many people to upgrade from 7 and 8.x.
MS has never cared about hobbyist developers, and they never will. Everything they do is from a B2B perspective.
There are millions of ATMs and other embedded windows XP machines out there languishing as unsupported because they trusted Microsoft. Millions of ATM's and other embedded computer devices will be replaced not because they need to be, but because the operating system running them is no longer supported.
You are aware that Windows XP Embedded is still supported and receiving security patches to this very day, yes?
XP Embedded was released in November 2001 and extended support does not end until January 12th 2016.
In fact if you love living life further over the edge than just using XP, it is possible to hack up XP Pro to use XP Embedded security patches - though obviously even more at-your-own-risk than ever.