Windows Ain’t

Windows 8 installation has failed

The story of a Windows 8 upgrade that never happened!

With the January 31st, 2013 deadline looming for the chance to get a cheap Windows 8 Pro upgrade I decided to make the leap, hand-over my credit card info, and join the Windows 8 generation.

My joy was short-lived though. Well, I guess if you consider it lasted the entire time it took to download the upgrade and run the installer then it lasted for quite some time. But in the end, Windows 8 refused to install on my computer! Why is not entirely clear, but the message was absolute: Windows 8 installation has failed.

What makes this worse is before selling you the upgrade Microsoft insists on running a compatibility check tool. Now not every piece of software I had on the that computer was compatible – but that was to be expected and something I was prepared to live with. If that was really what prevented Windows 8 from installing then why wasn’t I told to un-install those pieces of software before proceeding?! I was confident my current Windows XP SP3 installation was all set to grow-up, but: Windows 8 installation has failed.

The computer also dual-boots to Arch Linux, but I don’t see why this should be a problem preventing me from installing Windows 8. In fact, I would expect Microsoft to see this as an opportunity to persuade me to rejoin the fold of faithful. I fully expected to have to reset my MBR once Windows 8 was installed, my GParted CD was on-hand and ready to go. But it never came to that: Windows 8 installation has failed.

And what makes this insulting, is googling “Windows 8 installation failed” turns up pages and pages of people with the same experience. Some managed to resolve the issue, most did not. I tried everything from disabling services, running as Administrator, deleting temp files, and even making a Steve Ballmer voodoo doll that I prayed to and sacrificed a chicken to. But to no avail: Windows 8 installation has failed.

As a last resort I supposed I could fire-up the Recovery Partition, re-install Windows XP from scratch, and then try the upgrade to Windows 8. But even then, after so many failed attempts, I’m pretty sure I’ll end up with: Windows 8 installation has failed.

So now my biggest concern is convincing Microsoft to give me my money back!

UPDATE: Windows 8 is now installed and running happily on my home computer! My problems seem to have come from Dell using a custom boot loader for their Dell Restore utility – which my installation of Linux had modified. Once I repaired that and restarted the installation process it went perfectly!

Cross-posted on Schultzter’s Blog

Greetings to all!
Web 3.0 as concept and technology is important and here is why.

Day after day, the amount of data and information as we discussed in the last post on the internet grows exponentially. New sites, images, videos and all sort of digital materials are coming up every second. Thus, with this huge set of data, a major challenge is how to cost-effectively extract what is relevant to our day-to-day activities. Therefore:

In a complex ever-changing information-intensive context, web3 tools are valuable for users in organizing information and business processes at large scale.

The evolution of the Web

Firstly, since the emergence of the first Web version, created in the early 90s by Tim Berners-Lee in Switzerland, its technologies have undergone significant changes until we reach the surface of Web 3.0, this happened especially in terms of user’s interactivity and the massification of the internet usage.

In short, according to our research a Aquarela Analytics, the Web’s history presents three major stages:

The Static Web – Web 1.0

The Web 1.0 presented data and information in a predominantly static way, being characterised by low users’ interaction with the content. For instance: leaving comments, manipulating or creating content of a website.

Technologies and methods of Web 1.0 are still widely used for displaying static content such as laws and manuals like this example: http://copyright.gov/title17/92preface.html . Yet, this text was build on this paradigm.

That generation of the Web was marked by the centralisation of the content production – such as portals,  AOL and directories, Yahoo, and Craigslist.

On Web 1.0 the user is responsible for its own navigation and the identification of relevant content, having a predominantly passive role in the process.

Another important aspect is that just few produce information that is consumed for many. Likewise, the broadcasting model widely used in the media industry by TV, radio, newspapers and magazines.

Web 1.0’s greatest virtue was the democratisation of information access.

The Interactive Web – Web 2.0

Web 2.0 in contrast to Web 1.0 has its content predominantly generated by its users in a process where: many users produce content and many consume.

An example of this model is Wikipedia. Other examples of user-generated content platforms are in blogs, social networks and YouTube. In the Web 2.0 users are no longer just content consumers; they become producers or co-producers of contents.

In this version of the Web, search engines become more advanced and proliferate, since there is no more room for lists of links in directories, which has given a huge volume of content made by many.

Web 2.0’s great virtue is the democratisation of content production.

The Actionable Intelligent Web – Web 3.0

Web 3.0 or Semantic Web combines the virtues of Web 1.0 and 2.0 by adding machine intelligence.

Tim Berners-Lee (2001), who is the creator of the Web, has published an article in the Scientific American magazine setting up the foundation of the Semantic Web.

In his words, Berners-Lee explained how two brothers organised the logistics to support their mother health treatment, using intelligent agents, they do all the planning and execution of the process automatically interacting with clinical systems, among themselves and with their home devices.

In Web 3.0, the machines get along with users in content production and in decision-making, transforming traditional supportive role of the internet infrastructure to a protagonist entity in content/process generation.

Furthermore, Web 3.0 services can unite users and computers for problem-solving and intensive knowledge creation tasks. Therefore, with its large processing capacity, Web 3.0 is able to bring services and products to people and businesses with high added value because of their assertiveness and high customisation.

Web 3.0’s great virtue is the democratisation of the capacity of action and knowledge, which was previously only accessible to large businesses and governments.

Evolution of the Web summarized

Web 3.0 examples

Examples of Web 3.0 applications are Wolfram Alpha and Apple’s Siri, which can summarise large amounts of information into knowledge and useful actions for people. 

Wolfram Alpha

We can do a little comparison between Wolfram Alpha and Google, using both tools, typing the “Brazil vs. Argentina” phrase in both searching engines, and then we see big differences in the results:

In the case of Google, the results turn out to be mostly about football games between Brazil and Argentina. Note that the word “football” or “games” were not mentioned in the search.  

In Wolfram Alpha, the tool considers that the search is a comparison between two countries and consequently brings organised statistics, historical, geographical (maps), demographic, linguistic and other useful aspects for comparison analysis.

Siri

The Apple’s Siri, in turn, uses techniques of speech recognition and artificial intelligence to bring results and perform actions such as:

“Where is the nearest pizzeria?” or

“How far am I from the nearest gas station” or “make an appointment at 9:00 am tomorrow.”

Above all, Traditional tools (Web 1.0 and 2.0) make search matching “word by word like” of the text in relation to what is published on the network. In other words, often it brings information bias of what is most abundant ending up not bringing what is most relevant to the user at that time.

Web 3.0 systems, however, seek contextualised knowledge to assist people in their jobs, pointing to series of analysis and potentially helpful information.

One of the distinctions of Web 3.0 search engine, is the time that user need to spend sailing in a sea of ​​information to find what he/she really wants to get solved.

Companies like Apple and IBM have been investing heavily in Web 3.0 technologies, for example, the Google Inc. over the past decade has made several acquisitions of companies in the Semantic Web area, such as Applied Semantics, and Metaweb Technologies, Inc, among others.

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