Super-size M200
It looks like a Toshiba design engineer ran out of time in developing the new Tecra M4, and decided to just hit the “zoom” button while looking at the M200 spec and submit that instead.
That’s the new Tecra, here’s the original M200:
Oh okay, if you look closely, it looks like the buttons on the screen were reversed. Still, I think this is a good example of not changing the formula when it already works so darn well.
MSN likes me more than Google
Buzz Bruggerman blogs, “What’s in a vanity search? Or why are the numbers so far off?”
He mentions that Google returns a much larger number of total results for his name (as well as several others) in quotes, ie. “Buzz Bruggerman” returns 24,100 results on Google and only 4,079 results on MSN Search.
But more interestingly, neither engine lets you see all of those results that it supposedly found! In his case, Google did still show a greater number of results (about 1,000 vs. 500), but he says that MSN’s number seems much closer to reality.
Tim Bray has a good explanation of what’s probably going on here.
Personally, I don’t know what all the hubbub is about:
Emergency back-up underway
One of the three parallel IDE drives remaining in my computer is dying. I’m not sure which at the moment, since they’re all in a span array and I’m more concerned with getting all of my precious music and videos off of them. I’d been meaning to do it for some time, knowing that at least one of those drives had been acting funny and that the disk span was, well, fault intolerant. But I just kept putting it off. Well, today, after a spree of delayed-write failed messages, the urgency of this matter became clear.
I’m tempted to just do away with these Parallel ATA drive altogether. I’m certain the newest of the three is fine, so I’ll definitely find it a new home if it leaves my computer. The other two I don’t trust quite so much (they’re the same model of Western Digital Special Edition drives).
My primary system disk is actually two WD Raptors in RAID 0 that have been fantastic. My main storage disks are two Maxtor 16MB cache 300GB SATA drives in RAID 0. None of these disks has had any problems (knock on wood).
Maybe it’s time for one of those new-fangled networkable hard drive dealies.
Followup: The disk isn’t actually losing any data. Scandisk finds nothing wrong with it. It simply has a habit of “falling asleep“ and not waking up again properly. I can reactivate it in Disk Manager after it does this and it works fine (for a while). I’m still planning to remove it from my system… but at least no data was corrupted.
At least somebody is listening
About an hour after I suggested a “Windows Champs” event, Scoble blogs about Team 99. He’s asking for his readers to nominate members/invitees for this event (I’ve already suggested a few myself) over at Channel 9.
The short interview that Chris and I recorded while I was at the Search Champs event is now online for your listening pleasure. We talked about the move to 64-bit Windows operating systems, MSN Search and Desktop Search, as well as the Search Champs event in general.
While at Search Champs, Chris recorded some other interviews as well:
Mick Stanic – (aka SplaTT) whose blog was one of the first I subscribed to.
Buzz Bruggerman –of ActiveWords fame.
Marc Orchant – Master of all things Tablet.
I highly recommend you check out each of these.
Re: Re: Re: Re: Longhorn
So I was reading Kevin Daly’s comment to Chris Pirillo’s response to Andre Da Costa’s rebuttal to Chris’ post about WinHEC and Longhorn.
Let’s try that again…
So I was reading something.
As I read Kevin’s comment, this part got me thinking:
Something to consider: much of what people eventually interact with in Longhorn will be built on Avalon, but Avalon as all of us who’ve installed the CTPs know is not yet nailed down – so the more code you write around it now, the more you’ll have to re-write.
Point taken… Now I’m no carpenter, but I bet when you’re building a house, you don’t start putting up the walls before the foundation is dry. On the other hand, you do have a plan for how things are going to look. And you’ve probably consulted with the people who are going to live there. Put it this way: You don’t wait until after the foundation is finished to ask them what the dimensions should be.
I think OSes are the same way. And this goes back to what I’ve said before: Longhorn doesn’t need to be ready to live in. They don’t even have to give out a build. Just show us what you’re planning to do with the UI. Ask us, “How does this look? What should we do differently?” – don’t wait until it’s finished and say “Yeah you’re right, we could have done that better. Oh well, too late now, code is frozen.”
The days when that was an acceptable answer are over. Microsoft isn’t Apple. They can’t expect that their fans are going to love every single thing they do unconditionally. In fact, they have quite the opposite problem. Most people are looking for reasons to dislike what Microsoft does.
The more you involve the enthusiast community, the better off your product will be. And not just for those power users. It’s the power users that tell the average users what to buy. It’s the power users that tell their family and friends all the cool shit that the other guys are doing. Give us something to show them. Help us get them excited about Windows again. Remember the launch of Windows 95? Remember people lining up at midnight to buy it? Have you noticed how that hasn’t happened once since 1995? It happens for Apple though. It happened for Halo 2. If you listen to us, it could happen for Longhorn.
Windows version roadmap
I made this so I could link to it to explain to people how Windows versions relate to each other (since microsoft doesn’t always make it very clear).
http://photos9.flickr.com/11421415_dd5a28bdce_o.png
Chris Pirillo blogged about Microsoft and Power Users having experienced the Longhorn presentation at WinHEC this week.
Now, I’ve been commenting a lot on Neowin, Scoble’s Blog comments, and other places about how this is a hardware engineering conference, and how the build of Longhorn that was distributed is meant only to provide those hardware engineers with what they need to start building drivers for Longhorn. A lot of people who have seen the screenshots of this build have complained that it “looks like Windows XP with a different theme.” To them I’ve said, things like “This build wasn’t meant to impress you.”
I stand by those comments, but Chris hit on another important issue. He’s not upset that WinHEC isn’t for users. He’s upset that there IS NO WinHEC for users (or Power Users, or users enthusiastic enough to care that they’re being ignored).
I think he’s right.
And what’s more, I think Microsoft made a mistake at WinHEC. The build they handed out to hardware engineers was everything it needed to be, so that’s not the problem. No, the problem is the build they showed up on the screen. The problem is that the on-screen demonstrations had little or nothing to do with hardware engineering and driver development. They showed what the Start menu looks like in the current build. They showed how Desktop Search is implemented in the pre-beta. They showed some interface enhancements for Windows Explorer and a few neat ideas like the shortcut lists – and also some hints at a very good tag-based Virtual Folder system for organizing your stuff. They even showed off some fairly lame transparency/transition effects.
But none of that had anything to do with hardware engineering. And when Windows enthusiasts everywhere (including, of all people, Paul Thurrott) express disappointment with the demonstration, you can’t say “Well it’s a Hardware Engineering Conference,” or “Well that’s not what it’s really going to look like when it’s done, that’s just what we have working right now.”
My response to that reasoning is simple: If this was really just for hardware engineers, don’t show us User Experience demonstrations. More importantly, if this isn’t what you expect it to look like when I actually get to use it, don’t even bother.
So what’s the answer to this problem?
Make a third Windows conference. Put it somewhere between WinHEC and PDC. Make this the place where you show off Windows to your fans and to the press, kind of like what happens at E3. Don’t put a demo up on a huge screen of the current build. Put up a well-made demo of what you currently expect the final version to look like. Hell it could be a Flash demo for all I care; it doesn’t even have to be interactive. Although, the more realistic the better. But include some real “Wow” factor. This would be the Windows team’s chance to be rock stars for a day (you know, like Steve Jobs is at every Apple event ever). I bet they’d have a blast.
Oh, and do yourselves a favor: Bring back that sick Alt+Tab animation you had in last year’s build of Longhorn. That alone impressed people more than anything you showed at WinHEC.
Real gets it right.
I never thought I’d hear myself say those words.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it myself, and I’m sure it’s got plenty of flaws. You don’t need to tell me about all of them. But hear me out.
Real has finally one thing right (being a first for Real since the company’s inception, this is a big event):
With their newest update to their Rhapsody service, they’re supporting multiple codecs, even those made by their competitors.
They even have Rhapsody To Go now which supports “janus” Windows Media DRM devices (like my Zen Micro or the iRiver H10), which is essentially Napster’s “To Go“ service, except not.
They also seem to have updated their “Harmony” support for the iPod, meaning that users of Apple’s crippled MP3 players can buy music from Real and listen to it on their devices… that is, until Apple realizes that someone is trying to give their customers an actual choice and once again releases a firmware upgrade that kills Harmony.
Unfortunately, Rhapsody To Go still won’t work on an iPod. And it seems that it probably never will, given Steve Jobs’ attitude toward subscription models.
But it’s good to see someone in the industry catching on. The codec wars have got to be one of the most anti-user phenomena I’ve ever seen.
By supporting the greatest number of media codecs that you can, you reduce the chance that one of your customers or potential customers is going to find your product useless, or become frustrated when it only works with some of their media.
The thinking behind a lot of the current strategies is that: If we make people like our codec, they’ll use it for all their stuff. Well newsflash: Most of my media wasn’t encoded by me. And I’m not just talking about the more nefarious methods of obtaining media in a format beyond your control, though the number of people who have that problem these days is huge. I’m also talking about: Media encoded by a device (DVR box, portable player/recorder, Media Center, roommate’s Mac, digital camcorder) or downloaded from another source (movie/game trailers, podcasts/videoblogs, news clips, videos sent by family/friends, etc). And then there are the 3 different legal DRM’d music download distributions, and un-DRM’d music distributors (like livephish and DMB’s live trax – which use unprotected FLAC, mp3, and wma).
Get it out of your marketing genius head that I’m even ABLE to have all of my media in your format. That’s just not going to happen. So if you want me to use your product, do what Real has done here. Do what made Xbox Media Center (the homebrew one) so popular… Support every format that I might find a file in. Every single one.
