Overview # It has been a breakthrough year in Artificial Intelligence, and many industries are already transforming. Interestingly, Seems like Google missed the importance of their own AI research! Still - I would like to argue that No Other Company Today is better positioned to replace Search with AI agents. The closest competitor, in my opinion, is Apple - although currently their AI is really struggling.
Yet again I come to you with rant, but this time seems like the reason is Microsoft’s huge lapse in basic Skype account security. Probably like mst of you, I have created my Skype account Many years ago.
My son and I went through rather painful ordeal with this Event 11 that Windows quietly generates. It took us few weeks to fully work out why Windows suddenly started hanging, misbehaving or even crashing with blue screen. Now that I feel it is fully resolved, I thought I’d share my conclusion (and the process) – hopefully it will help few others out there who are struggling with this. Ridiculously, many people are likely affected by this issue, but unless they open Event Viewer and search for this event id 11, they will not realize that hanging is not “normal” behavior, even for Windows! OS seems to silently recover from this problem 10 to 60 seconds later, which is really strange in my book – considering that user isn’t even alerted to this serious atapi error.
Just a quick post regarding the Software Industry drama unraveling here, here and here. Quick recap: Google is upset with “patent trolls” extracting fees from Android manufacturers via Patents. This ends up costing device manufacturers, and probably ends up making more money for Microsoft than they make from their Windows Mobile 7 sales!
Yesterday IE 9 Beta landed on the web. It’s a major rework of the most popular browser, with support for fancy new features (like HTML 5 and CSS 3) and Hardware Video acceleration. I of course installed it right away, and then was even more ecstatic when I saw in my Google Reader feed that Adobe (Finally!!!) released 64 Bit version of their ubiquitous Flash Player.
The Apps Store is all the rage nowadays and everyone says how “Apple Invented this Revolutionary Concept”. As I recall – Windows had a Marketplace for Apps and Accessories going way back…
The title is all you need to know. The special price only at your local MicroCenter store and only for 3 days. Of you don’t have one, check local Costco. Or, I will have a link to Amazon, which promised to deliver on Oct 22, on here later today.
Posting from my iPhone, so signing off now.
I’m back, and just posting quick update on little “big” things that are going on with me. Filing this one under “Random Thoughts”, FYI. Microsoft announced officially last week that they are discontinuing Microsoft Money product. This Really saddened me, frankly. Something in the way they presented it made me especially sad. I was always expecting MS-Money desktop software to die, and to be replaced by cloud based solution (like Quicken.com and MSN Money). But instead of telling us to use Web solution, they just told us to “Go Away”…
I have decided to have a few posts focused on discussing what’s next in the world of computing. The idea is to look at progression thus far, and see what makes sense to be researched and improved next. This simple formula can be surprisingly effective, due to collective “creationism” that defines computing industry. In other words – we create our future (just like in real life) by focusing research efforts (aka: wishes) on particular things. Thus, we can foresee now what will the future bring, simply by assuming that our research pans out.
This is amazing demonstration by Microsoft Office Labs, what they called vision for 2019. For me, the main focus in this demo is on computing interfaces. Notice how many different ways of interacting with the “computer” are shown. Amazing ones are on little cards/devices, that “sense” the motion of the device and respond by showing you different parts of the content, zooming in, etc. Actually, this is something easy to develop on the smart phone today, though I only know of very few apps that do that.
I think as any responsible techie, I downloaded both 32 Bit and 64 Bit editions of Windows 7 beta, the first day it came out (naturally). Got 2 keys also (one for each edition).
EDITORS NOTE: I used a little-known hack in WordPress 3.1 to actually adjust a time stamp of this post, originally posted December 24, 2009 – to timewarp into December 2008. Enjoy! Wow, so much has happened this past year, that I find it virtually impossible to even try and predict next year. But, I guess it’s somewhat of a tradition on this blog, so I will give it a go:
We just received the new XBox 360 Experience, and I decided to blog about it right away (I know, totally untypical!). I expected much from this major upgrade, and I have to say so far I am impressed!
There is still about two weeks to Microsoft’s acclaimed Professional Developers Conference 2008, where all (or at least a lot) will be officially revealed. But I want to jump the gun and theorize, or perhaps even Dream, of what’s to come. It is widely expected that Microsoft will launch their next generation Cloud OS (Operating System), named Strata. Obviously this is mostly targeting servers, but the concept of servers and clients is becoming more and more obsolete as the computing devices undergo daily transformation.
An important announcement from Microsoft, something called Mesh, is happening tonight at Midnight eastern time. I am into guessing game, again, mostly because it is fun, but also because in a funny coincidence, I left a rather long rant at Yahoo’s own Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. What started as a short comment, turned into longer and I think worthy read about future of operating environments for us all. Jeremy doesn’t post too much, which is exactly how I prefer it and thus he is on my ‘read-first’ list. Check out my comment right here.
Robert Scoble stunned us today with admission that Microsoft Research project that he saw behind closed doors, made him cry with joy. But, of course, he can’t tell us what it is, just yet!
