Good Deals. Good Ideas. Good Designs. Good Health.

Gotta have one of this!!!

I have been on Vista since Beta 2 days and till today. from AMD x2 to Intel Quad (DIY built, as always… Never own any branded PC in my entire life) now to all sorts of motherboards and graphic cards and RAMs… Vista has been nice to me, with no hardware drivers issue but only software compatibilities in the early days.

They are all modern stuff (less than 2 years old) and of course the experience with Vista ought to be all right. My short statement of Vista is simply this, ‘It’s the best Windows operating system ever, the most secure, the more elegant… and it’s still a Windows after all’ I won’t even be bullish to claim it is the BEST Operating System out there… cos that really depends on what you measure.

Vista will run fine on modern machine! Linux fanatics will brag about their five year old machine running modern Linux OS fine and blah blah… Tell that to Apple OSX! But OSX won’t run well with old machine and needs, just like Vista a modern machine… Why? Cos it got all the bells and whistles on top of the core OS stuff… and THAT is exactly what bogs Vista down on a less than modern machine.

The software issue are more of less fixed by now after Service Pack 1… just like XP days as well. The delays and the over promised under delivered feature stuff, in my opinion has been what kills Vista before it even open its gate to showcase. Negative press after another on that… just sank the whole thing and Microsoft did nothing.

I for one thought that Microsoft management were noble enough not to retaliate like the Coke – Pepsi ads in the 80s and 90s… there is just no end. I don’t know if that was part of the reason of not retaliating or simply too ashamed to speak up.     

Here’s a recent campaign from Microsoft to finally, turn the marketing pitch on Vista up another notch. After almost 2 years of bashing… It’s finally time! What took them so long?

According to a discussion with a friend in the localisation (translation of content to localised language) industry whom is in charge of Microsoft account, that there’s some exciting stuff coming this year end of the Live initiative front! I asked him what is that all about as they are already localising the contents (help, menu…) but he refused to disclose due to NDA, which is very respectable.

That only left me to speculate what could possibly be coming from the new Live stuff?

Guess this might be the only clue I know for now…

More information on Windows Live Wave 3

A little trick and the truth about Vista came out?

It’s all in the perception… and Microsoft certainly did nothing in the last 18 months… simply because Vista and its’ compatibilities & drivers issue are real. Since SP1, things have changed.

Have fun with Vista!

After years… decades… finally… one can access your Yahoo mail, OFFLINE for FREE!!! Via Zimbra Desktop!!!

Check it out and start downloading from your unlimited Yahoo mailbox!!!

Came across this article from ZDNet entitled ‘Microsoft turns to users for new wave of Xbox games’ and the part that interest me was the 70% revenue for the game developer! Sounds familiar… Oh I got it! Apple App Store is having that strategy as well and surprisingly, it too is on a 70% revenue split for the developer!!!

I have been reading great stuff on the XNA tools initiative for years now… and had never seen Microsoft looking at their market base and doing something like the way Apple did with the App Store!!! Microsoft had years of head start with the XNA Game Studio… but only now this announcement? Is this a reaction or responds to the Apple App Store?

Honestly, it does not matter as long as Microsoft learn something from it! It’s not about not taking the risk but about looking at your market, at your customers, and offering tools / ways to keep them EASY hooks to your platform and keep building on it. All of Microsoft ecosystem is like that… but sometimes, at the expense of bottom line / business… the entry penetration is costly / harder due to the cost involved.

Perhaps this model would work better… 70% of Microsoft stuff to be charged while 30% of it is given away free!!!

Just another rant…

Following up with a previous article from Google on Google Ranking Explained… we now have the so called part 2 of it which talks about the technologies behind Google Ranking. Not a must read for anyone in the online digital space as understanding the technologies behind does not necessary gives you any advantage to ‘fool’ or ‘trick’ the system… but it’s just amazing to see many of the academia stuff are making head ways into commercialisation. Google being heavily on that, recruiting professors and top scholars out of universities… Microsoft with it’s Research arm… The explosion & speed to market is getting more crucial in this day and age. Not necessary the first mover advantage but how to do the same thing, better. Google was never the first in online search… Alta Vista, Yahoo were some of the earlier pioneers… but Google with a ‘better’ system just came from the back and took over.

“

In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See "Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview" for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations.
Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. We work hard to fulfil the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade we have pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions.
When we talk about queries at Google, we use square brackets [ ] to mark the beginning and end of queries (see "How to write queries" by Matt Cutts), a notation I will use throughout this post. (Pages and search results change frequently, so in time, some examples used here may not behave as explained.)

• Understanding pages: Over years we have invested heavily in our crawl and indexing system. As a result we have a very large and very fresh index. In addition to size and freshness, we have improved our index in other ways. One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. We find the official homepage for Sprovieri Gallery in London for the Italian query [galleria sprovieri londra], even though the official page does not have either London or Londra on it. In the U.S., a user searching for [cool tech pc vancouver, wa] finds the homepage www.cooltechpc.com even though the page does not mention anywhere that they are in Vancouver, WA. Other technologies we have developed include distinctions between important and less important words in the page and the freshness of the information on the page.

…

I hope my two posts about Google ranking have made it clear that we live and breathe search, and we are more passionate than ever about it. Our fervor for serving all our users worldwide is unprecedented. We pride ourselves in running a very good ranking system, and are working incredibly hard every day to make it even better.

“

Love The Dark Knight movie… Love the action… Love the story (though very cramped)… Love the Joker… Love how the different character develops… Love Hans Zimmer!

Have always been a huge fan of Hans Zimmer and the score for The Dark Knight certainly did not disappoint, especially the final scene where it kinda set the tone for the next movie…

The building up since the death of Two Faces… the dialogue between commissioner Gordon & Batman… and the eventual runaway for Batman…

Brilliant!

Check out Hans Zimmer on MySpace and listen to some of his recent works.

Check out the power of the Silverlight DeepZoom technology (aka SeaDragon) for this 45 gigapixels Yosemite view!!!

When will be see widespread adoption? Perhaps after Beijing Olympics… we will see how much of Silverlight install base is at and that would perhaps, persuade some RIA developers to adopt Silverlight.

To all Windows Mobile user out there… it’s time enhance your mobile browsing experience, not by replacing your device and get an iPhone but install Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta!!!

Have fun!

Singapore news…

“

Former head of Ren Ci Hospital, the Venerable Shi Ming Yi has been charged with alleged forgery, conspiracy and misuse of funds.
Venerable Ming Yi, who was also the former Ren Ci chairman, was slapped with 10 charges on Tuesday morning.
The monk faces four charges under the Penal Code involving two counts of alleged criminal breach of trust. He also faces one count of alleged forgery for the purpose of cheating and one count of abetment for allegedly falsifying accounts.
He also faces six charges under the Charities Act for allegedly providing false information.
Two of his associates, Raymond Yeung and Phua Seow Hua, were also alleged to have gone into conspiracy with the Venerable and were also charged in court on Tuesday.
Separately, a volunteer from Ren Ci was charged with allegedly possessing some 70 copies of obscene film.
Venerable Ming Yi, also known as Goh Kah Heng, is out on a S$200,000 bail. His case will be heard in court on August 4.

…

“

The rest of the article can be found on Channel News Asia.

This is the guy that always get most attention on many charities by taking on challenging stunts and has always been very well respected in Singapore community… Now, this!!! This is probably the results of the tightening rules & policies & auditing needed after the NKF incident…

Let more be exposed…

Microsoft touted multi-touch integration when it gave the world a first look at Windows 7 earlier this year, but Dell isn’t going to wait around for them to release their next-generation OS sometime in 2010 to start supporting the feature. In fact, their Latitude XT already has the necessary hardware to support a multi-touch experience, but starting today, Dell will offer a firmware update that will finally enable it.

Article originated from TechSpot.