Brandon Live!

It currently only supports the Seattle and San Francisco areas, but damned if it’s not cool.

 http://preview.local.live.com/

Interesting preview of what mapping sites could do in the future.

Check out these new VW ads for the mark 5 GTI.  The first one is my favorite. 

Seriously, they have the best Ad agency in the business.

One of the many great resources we offer for developers that are interested in WDS is the MSDN Developer Forum for Windows Desktop Search.

We’ve recently begun an effort to improve the forum (along with our Channel 9 wiki site).  The forum is first-and-foremost a developer community, focused on providing an atmosphere where developers can share their ideas and help each other out.  However, we do have engineers from the WDS product team (including myself) drop by frequently to answer questions.  We aren’t support personnel, and we can’t promise a timely response.  But we’re happy to help out when we can.

You can find the forum here:

MSDN Developer Forum for WDS

DailyTech has a report that ATI has been misleading consumers with their claims that their video cards are “HDCP-ready.”

True or not, one thing has been made clear:  The entertainment industry doesn’t have a clue.

They claim that rampant piracy is hurting their bottom line, and that despite thier best efforts (suing customers, installing viruses and rootkits on your PC, enforcing anti-consumer DRM policies) - consumers still download movies, TV shows, and music from illegitimate sources.

So what’s there next brilliant move?  Make it so that your computer will be forced to down-scale High Definition content that you paid for.  Meanwhile, pirated copies will be available that play in full resolution on any PC.

Does this sound backwards to anyone else? 

Seriously… what genious came up with the idea that they could beat piracy by making pirated copies better quality than what you can buy at the store?  You can’t encourage piracy and then complain about it.  But that’s exactly what they’re doing.

I think it’s time consumers started looking out for their own interests.  Speak up against the HDCP requirements.  Don’t pay for crippled content.  Don’t let them hold your content hostage and extort you for more money to buy new “approved” HD hardware.  It’s wrong, and it’s up to consumers to fight it.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or simply aren’t a geek at all, this should come as no surprise… 

It looks like Sony is either going to have a very high priced console (I’ve been predicting $600-800 range), or take a bath on each unit sold…

Engadget has the scoop on a Merrill Lynch analysis that predicts the console will cost Sony about $900 to build per unit.  This apparently takes into account every detail of the system’s production (including the mass quantities Sony will undoubtedly be buying parts in).

This should come as no surprise, when standalone Blu-Ray players are already $1000 or higher (and they don’t have expensive RAM chips or Cell processors or GPUs).

Also worth noting is that this price does not include the price of an optional Hard Drive.

Today Dan Warne from APC asked if Microsoft is listening.  In fact, he mentioned my team specifically!

The answer, of course, is a resounding YES!  We want to hear everything you’re saying about our product.  We want to know what features you like, what bugs you hate, and you think we could be doing better.

Unfortunately, Dan Warne was right when he said that the Desktop Search Wiki on Channel 9 had become rather dormant.  What’s interesting to me is the timing.  About two weeks ago we began talking about getting our team involved in some new community-focused efforts.  In fact, we have someone working with our team now whose sole purpose is to make sure we can foster conversation with and within our user and developer communities.  Just last week I was telling him about the C9 wiki and how great I thought it was during the original WDS beta and the first release.  I also mentioned that I was planning to go update it and sort through some things very soon.

That effort began today.  I moved the WDS wiki out of the “MSN Search” section (don’t know why it was there in the first place), and updated a few links.  There’s a lot of information on there, but I and other team members will be visiting there regularly and responding to users.  I’ll post more about it later in the week.  But why wait?  Jump in, and join the conversation!

WDS Wiki

This one can be found at http://co.mments.com/

Co.mments uses a “Bookmark-let” just like CoComment, however they apparently turn every comment thread into a seperate feed that you subscribe to.  This seems like a killer feature that CoComment is missing.

The real question is… does it work in Maxthon?

If you have an Xbox 360 and a Media Center PC - you probably know that you can watch WMV and MPEG videos using the Media Center Extender functionality of the Xbox 360.  You might also be aware that it doesn’t support Divx, Xvid, or several other popular video formats.

Until now.

Transcode 360 is an add-on you install on your Media Center PC.  It transcodes (on-the-fly) any videos on your Media Center PC to a format that your 360 can play.  It’s as simple as installing the app, booting up your 360’s Media Center Extender functionality, and selecting the video as you would normally.  The only difference is, instead of selecting the video and pressing “play” - you press “Info” and then select “Transcode” from the list of functions (might have to click “More…” to see them all).

On my setup it takes about 10 seconds to buffer and then away it goes.  I’d wondered if someone would write something like this (or if I’d eventually try to do it myself).  But I’m very glad to see someone has, and it’s a fine implementation they’ve done!

Want to search all your PCs from anywhere?

Don’t want all your personal data stored on an advertising companies’ server?

Then you should try Windows Desktop Search combined with the free FolderShare application.  With FolderShare your data remains safely on your PCs, but you can search, browse, and access your data from any internet-connected PC.  FolderShare added search integration with WDS last summer.  They were acquired by Microsoft a few months ago and the product was made free at that time.

Also, here’s more discussion about Google’s new “feature.”

At least according to the EFF.

 Google Copies Your Hard Drive - Government Smiles in Anticipation