"TechPoint" - The techie edge

Microsoft's been working hard on a project called Milan. In short, it is a multi touch sensitive computer. The possibilities are nerve wrecking. Expected to cost anywhere from $5,000 and $10,000. Microsoft plans to sell these units to Corporate customers towards the end of 2007. This is some of the things that Bill gates talks about in his books "The Road Ahead" and "Business at the speed of thought" where he predicts the future where we'll use digital news papers and that sort. He also mentioned about future of advertising, he wasn't talking about google adsense, but paradigm shifts. The ability to point something on the screen while watching a movie and finding more about it like the brand of the shoe or clothing, etc. Its already possible to find out about the location where a movie was shot etc in HD-DVDs.



And here's a Microsoft Surface teaser video.



Check the possibilities at http://www.microsoft.com/surface/

Gizmodo has more details here.

Microsoft Surface on Wikipedia.

Most of these are possibilities and may take a few years to develop depending on consumer feedback.

One of the all time most visited links in my blog is: Flex Vs Ajax - Which one is better and why? Interesting comparison though I don't provide an answer to the question since both flex and ajax have their own advantages and are good at them. And so I thought I'll revisit on this topic today.

One of the biggest flex turn offs for me is the way in which adobe promotes it. Pathetic! Since flex is a product of adobe, I've visited adobe.com many times to see what they are doing with flex, but I've always been disappointed because most part of their website still is in web 1.0; no flex nor ajax! Look at these pages: 1) registration page 2) forgot password . Traditional!

Adobe did do a good job at converting their website to coldfusion soon after the acquisition of macromedia. They believe in their product! Wait! Really? Do you think so? Because I don't!!!

I did hop in to a fairly decent adobe site, the adobe store. Looks good! The page is in coldfusion and pretty impressive. Do they have a page that is done in flex? (note that the extension for flex is .mxml). They could have done the adobe store in flex at least to showcase the power of flex. For example, the drag and drop shopping cart and all that cinematic stuff that can be done using flex.

Not seeing much of their own products in their website makes me think that they don't believe in their products or that they are planning on discontinuing some of their products.

Take Microsoft for example, their website serves as a good example of their products. Also take a look at http://expo.live.com/ Totally .Net Ajax!!!

My new toy for this Thanksgiving is the Xbox 360 and I have it hooked up to my home theater system and HDTV. Totally rocks! The Xbox 360 was launched on May of 2005, so I am late. There is a new feature that was launched on November 22, 2006 for the Xbox 360. The ability to rent movies via your Xbox 360, making Microsoft the first to launch this feature. It is analogous to the iTV, a set-top box that is being developed by Apple for release in the first quarter of 2007.

You can rent a movie by paying using Microsoft points available for retail purchase. Another gift idea for someone who owns Xbox 360, Microsoft points! :-) The movie will be deleted automatically after 14 days or after you watch it once whichever occurs first. I was pretty impressed with the download speed through my High Speed Internet and was curious if the 360 uses bit torrent for its downloads.

In short, it is sort of like your cable Pay per view, but the only thing is you'll have to wait for it to download first. There are not a whole lot of movies available at this time, but I can see the list growing soon.

The ability to rent movies online without leaving your home or waiting for movies (netflix/blockbuster) to arrive is definitely a plus sometimes.

Update: This happens only when the css does not load properly. It could be due to bandwidth reasons or something like that. Hitting the refresh should resolve the issue :-)

I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 yesterday. And I'm blogging from the new vista.
I like the desktop Gadgets, the media center and indexed search. The look and feel is pretty kool. That's it otherwise it's just windows xp with a new skin. Vista sucks a lot of memory. 1 GB of RAM would be good even though 512 MB will do a good job. I installed the 32 bit version, wonder if the 64 bit will have exceptional performance.

Jaschan was arrested in May following a tip-off passed to Microsoft which put up a cash reward of $250,000 for information leading to the arrest of whoever was behind the virulent worm.

The two individuals who helped identify the Sasser creator will share the reward now Jaschan has been convicted, said Microsoft.

Steve has decided to make a new transition from Power PC to Intel processors. After so many years of ridiculing Intel, Jobs has finally understood that Intel processors are indeed powerful in performance. Jobs claims his company has been secretly working on a version OS X that is processor independent compiling the operating system source code with every release to make universal binaries.

Steve says Rossetta and Xcode 2.1 will help Mac OS X applications work on Intel processors without any problem, but with a little performance loss.

Now that Mac is on Intel processors, I guess Apple could increase its hardware market share if it lets users to install windows. I think allowing users to install Windows on a Mac has many advantages for apple. People have always loved the Mac for its kool and creative designs. If they can install windows (may be a dual boot with Mac OS X), I beleive people will slowly migrate to OS X given more exposure and the ability to compare the two operating systems. Guess what, every time windows freezes or gets chocked up with spyware users are more prone to boot to OS X.

But Steve will never allow windows to run on Mac, because the power of Mac lies mostly on the OS X operating system.

Microsoft unvealed its x-box 360 officially.
The new x-box 360 features
* 20 GB hard drive
* wireless capability
* all x-box 360 games will be formatted for high definition televisions
* will play music and video stored on a windows xp computer
* will play dvd and music cds.
* will allow to rip music cds and store in its hard drive.

Microsoft has sold 30 million Xboxes since the console's introduction in 2001. PlayStation 2, which launched a year earlier and has sold nearly 87 million units.

Microsoft's and Apple's web-enabled software update technology is a patented technology by BTG International Inc. BTG asserts that MS Windows, MS office and Apple operating systems use their patented technology. BTG is trying to enter into a licensing with Microsoft and Apple to settle this issue. What a move? Imagine how it feels for a company to have such a control over two biggest players in the computer industry!!!

Microsoft after its long struggle has come to a settlement with Lindows.
Lindows a similar sounding operating system as Windows is actually a linux based operating system that looks like windows and is easy to use. Lindows has been selling loaded with new computers for cheaper price.
Microsoft has come to a settlement with Lindows and Lindows will no longer be used by the company which created it. They will have a different trademark name from now on.
Even though, the conditions of the settlement are kept confidential, there is news that Microsoft has paid $20 million to Lindows to do this. This might seem like a lot of money for Lindows but for microsft this is definitely a piece of cake.

Apple computers teamed with BMW and integrated their iPod in to some models of BMWs. Now Microsoft has teamed with FIAT to integrate devices such as cell phones, handheld computers and digital music players into cars.
Microsoft and fiat are talking about a Windows based software for the car and usb connections on the dashboard and a dedicated hardware and so many other stuff.

Microsoft has been granted a patent on the double-click by the US Patents and Trademark Office. The patent, number 6,727,830, was granted on April 27.

Microsoft agreed to pay Norway's Opera Software $12.75 million to head off a threatened lawsuit over code that made some Web pages on MSN look bad in certain versions of Opera's Web browser, CNET News.com has learned.

"Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free -- but in terms of the power of the servers, the power of the network will not be a limiting factor," Microsoft's chairman said.