Last weekend I went with an old friend, David, and my daughter to watch the "Grand Prix Masters" which is now the only motor sport where the drivers are older than I am. There was a race for historic Formula one cars and, for those with the right tickets (not us), a Katie Melua concert afterwards. It seemed like a good way to spend an August day.
The weather was, "cold and dank and wet" to quote Michael Flanders on August. I had my camera but with rain drops on the filter that protects the lens, and lousy light it wasn't a great photography day. Security was relaxed and we could look around the pits - taking in the two seat GP Masters car - and then "doorstep" the VIP lounge. I was able to do my impression of a member of the paparazzi and snap a couple of the drivers coming and going. Katie Melua emerged in a crush of people and I was (just) on the ball enough to realise the fuss wasn't for a driver and get some reasonable pictures of her. You can see the results on the left. I was told you need a faster camera than mine to grab shots like this; David's camera can focus faster and he didn't get the shot. I did. Ha Ha. Replying to the "faster camera" advocate I said my Pentax can use standard batteries which the faster ones don't: on Sunday I'd forgotten to put freshly charged ones in the camera and ended up using batteries I bought at the track. The best camera is always one you can use.
If you're still reading you may be asking is he going to talk about software at all ?
When we got home, I put the memory card from the Camera into my laptop, and did a couple of quick edits with Microsoft Digital Image Suite - the only fancy thing I did was to make a single picture of the 2 seater car which I'd had to shoot in two halves. Mostly I was just tweaking the contrast curves a little, straightening and/or cropping the images, and retouching out the odd spot. The results are on the left. David asked what I was using. I'll admit that I don't evangelize about Digital Image Suite - I have a bit of an inferiority complex about it, as a serious photographer shouldn't I be using Photoshop ? David's view was different. "This is what I need. Photoshop is too complex, this does just the things that I want". I can recognize that - it was what I talked about with Writer, and I keep saying the best camera is always one you can use.
What I do evangelize about, of course, is Windows Vista. So when David asked "What do you use to organize your photos" he should have guessed what was coming. I said back in May that No photo filing system I've found works, and made the link with my work on the early Sharepoint. I know photographers with a couple of terabytes of space at home. There is only so much you can do with a hierarchical file system - you hit the problem of things that belong in more than one place. Do I want to file the Motor racing pictures by car, or by team or by race meeting ? When you have lots of anything you need search: and you need to search more than just the text. It is not only music, video and photos that need to be found by their properties - I want to find things like "that document of Barry's from last year". Or "The picture of a turtle that Kathy took" or "Nigel Mansell driving a Williams F1 Car" or "Pictures with [my daughter's friend] Alice in them". The problem with cataloging software is that it implements it's own meta data store. The data isn't store in the picture file header - entering it is often painful, and it isn't understood by anything else. By attaching the meta data to the file it becomes sticky (a lesson I learnt with sharepoint). And the search index is accessible to other applications - Daniel gave me a link to where he blogged a couple of sources for information on doing this in Vista. Do explorer and Photo Gallery in Vista amount to the last word in photo management ? No - but anyone developing software to do it in future would be stupid not use the fields that Vista users will enter - and stupid not to use the existing index. That's what a good OS is supposed to - provide great services which allow developers to write fantastic applications. Did I say I was evangelical about Vista ?
After pushing this post around for a few days I realised you can't appreciate indexing without seeing it. You can view the resulting blogcast on Vista search here. I had to use remote desktop because Windows media encoder and Vista don't get on at the moment - and te result won't play in my current build of Windows Media Player 11 (though vista's Movie maker will play it ... sigh)
About half way though the video I mention that a couple of tags are out of sequence, and I forgot to go back and explain that Lisa (Friends and Family) is actually \Friends and Family\Lisa and the Windows Vista Photo Gallery will show this as a proper hierarchy - showing all friends and family, and then dividing them into different individuals. Next time maybe I'll work to a script:-) As usual comments are welcome
Tagged as Microsoft Windows Vista Search Photos
Here is some Vista build information
Build 5456 was the June CTP (community technology preview) build
Build 5472 was the July CTP. Quick arithmetic: they are 16 apart, lets add keep adding 16s
Build 5488 Hmm, can't find this one. Add another 16
Build 5504 was an internal build. Builds from here are suffixed .16384 (interesting number) and the build date, if a minor change is made the build becomes .16385, 16386 etc. Add 16 again
Build 5520 was the internal build I was running when I blogged last week. Next!
Build 5536 was the one with the Bat-out-of-Hell performance (comparatively speaking) that got people excited last week. I upgraded to it yesterday, and it is available for download. However, if you're patient, you'll wait for RC-1. Roll on 16 more.
Build 5552 - a bit of fuss followed 5536 suggesting that this build was "Out" if this did see the light of day it appears to be by mistake so add another 16
Build 5568. Here's a story from Paul Thurrott on Monday.
"According to my sources, Microsoft plans to finalize Vista RC1 this afternoon. The build, 5568.16384, will ship internally today and will be seeded to customers next week if all goes well .... " .
That's the 3 parts of the build number. If he's right it will be 5568.16384.060828. He continues:
"So here's the schedule. Microsoft plans to ship RC1 publicly sometime in early September, probably right after Labor Day."
Being British I don't know anything about Labor day (I just assumed that it was when Americans got together to eat Meatloaf or something) is falls on September 4th.
I'll cast a little doubt on the article, because Paul talks about numbers of bugs (down, he says, from 825 bugs on August 5th to 7 on August 28th) . The number of "active" bugs is pretty sensitive and if someone has disclosed it their life may be a shade uncomfortable. With all the petty little things that go in the database as a bug and given that I know 2 that are still open, I'm sceptical. [Yes folks, that was a Microsoft person saying "No! I'm sure we have MORE bugs than that"] This morning I had a mail regarding my one of my bugs (%msft% appearing where the text should have said Microsoft - that's how small a bug can be) and talking about the release of RC-1. Was it built on Monday ? Yesterday ? Not built Yet ? Was the Main build number 5568, or did we go on to 5584 or even a nice round 5600 ? Was the minor number 16384 or 16385 or 16386 or higher ? Enough questions: dare I leak the news ?
Actually No, I daren't. Should Paul be happy with his prediction then? Lets just say he shouldn't be sad. And "available right after Labor day" ? Probably.
Update. I'm glad I didn't leak that "news" - it was wrong in one important respect, but "right after labor day" still rates a probably.
Tagged as Microsoft Windows Vista
A few oddments that I wanted to blog: technical content, it will resume shortly.
(1) Spam (occasionally) works. I posted in how not to be read things you should do to make sure people don't read you. I don't think the person who mailed me a link to a marine life video had read that, but choosing a targeted alias and giving two sentences explanation of the campaign for more marine reserves in UK meant I watched the video, signed the petition and passed the message on.
(2) You can learn from places you'd never expect. Back in 2004 "Belle De Jour - the diary of a London Call Girl" won the Guardian Newspaper's blog of the year award. Belle's mixture of poetic phrasing and sex won her a book deal but her identity remains a closely guarded secret. I'm might be sailing close to the wind by linking to or even mentioning a whore's blog, but this recent post of hers is great potted guide to the human side of security.
(3) Some people may never get "new media". One of my favorite lines for the TV series "Yes, Prime Minister" was when talking about some issue or other the Prime Minister says "This could be my Falkland Islands !" and his chief civil servant, Sir Humphry replies "Yes, Prime Minister. And you could be General Galtieri" I always think of this when I watch daft battles unfold on the Internet. And Microsoft is not immune to getting involved in these. Somehow in the "Mike Rowe soft" case we managed to come out ahead, but we didn't deserve to. But here are 3 examples of people who've come off worse.
Shortly after I started this job, it clicked that people want to do business with organizations they feel some connection with. That's part of what blogging at Microsoft is about. Then I read the "warren-kremer-paino Vs the Maine Blogger" story. I'd never heard of US advertising agency Warren Kremer Paino, but the precis was they moved to sue a blogger called Lance Dutson because they didn't like his take on their work for the state of Maine; dozens of bloggers from Scoble downwards got involved in the story, which ended with them backing down. Any prospective customer who searches for them now will find a host of negative items. It doesn't help people feel a sense of connection.
Last week I heard the story of Yell.com vs Yellow Wikis. The BBC reported lawyers acting for Yell threatened Wiki site saying it was "plainly purporting to be associated with our client" and that the firm's intellectual property was under threat". To most viewers Yell and the Yellow wikis appear to have nothing in common apart from providing listings and the colour yellow. No one pointed out to Yell that looking like a bully is bad for business - people don't want to connect with you, and that's worse than the existance of another yellow site.
Latest to point the PR pistol at their own foot is one Gina Ford. Ms Ford's lawyers wrote to the site Mumsnet beginning "We act for Ms Gina Ford, the world famous author and expert on baby care." which suggests that she takes her self pretty seriously. But reading that she objects to 'a posting timed at 12:36:34 on 21st July 2006, attributed to ‘morningpaper’, [which] says our client “straps babies to rockets and fires them into south Lebanon” - it seems to me such an accusation is so outlandish that it must be beyond the scope of defamation.
My solicitors wouldn't call me "World Famous" but I know a bit about the Internet, and I'll offer Gina Ford some advice, expert to expert. Working for Microsoft I know what Warren Kremer Paino should have known, and if you're quick you'll learn. When your work is out in the open people will criticize - whether the work is software, advertisements or a book. Not all criticism is fair, or justified, or accurate, and some is just plain nasty. The fair needs be accepted gracefully, the inaccurate needs a response and the nasty needs to be ignored. Ms Ford may have hired top legal experts, but the best advice have been "Go home, look at your royalty figures and forget all about it", win or lose or withdraw, legal action will damage you. If you win and close down a site where people dislike you, more people will dislike you and they will find somewhere to say so. There is a old saying. "The Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it", you can't control what's said about you, Gina, and you need to understand what happens if you try: look at what people have are posted to your book reviews on Amazon this week , the Video BBC is posting about you or ITV (under the headline Baby Guru's Web Tantrum), or The Telegraph or Daily Mail (similar headline to ITVwill you sue them ?) do an ego-search on yourself on technorati (or Windows Live news, or Google news) and see what people are saying about you or about the story .
THERE IS A MESSAGE HERE: "treats censorship as damage and routes around it" was the 1980s and 1990s. WEB 2.0 recognizes an attack and fights back.
Oh, and the other message here. When a story about you is turning into a train wreck, don't let people read in The Times [THE TIMES !] that "Neither Ms Ford, her lawyers nor her publisher, Random House, returned e-mails or calls seeking comment."
Update This link has some very good legal information on the story, and links through to the latest from mumsnet which contains an appology from the "Rockets to Lebanon" poster which had me crying with laughter.
Tagged as Free Speech mumsnet Gina Ford Censorship
Before I was working for Microsoft, I read Douglas Coupland's book "Microserfs". I visited Redmond in1997 and was amazed how close it was to the book. Half a dozen pages in Coupland writes "WinQuote ... gives continuouse updates on Microsoft's NASDAQ price ... Most staffers peek at Winquote a few times a day ... Last April Fools day someone fluctuated the price up and down by fifty dollars and half the staff had coronaries"
The value of stock roughly halved after I joined Microsoft in 2000 (not that I'm bitter about that), and we're not quite so obsessive about it. But I looked at last week's stock buy back offer and felt "It must be worth more than that". According to The Financial Times I wasn't alone. Disclaimer. This is not investment advice: consult someone qualified. The value of Microsoft shares can go up as well as down. Etc.
While I'm on the subject of Coupland. Some family friends recently opened a bookshop, and I picked up his latest "JPOD" last time I was in there (though I haven't started it yet). JPOD is billed as "Microserfs for the Google Generation", by the way, I love the home page for the JPOD book-site - and not just because the music listing includes an obscure cover of a Gary Numan song which I happen to have. I can't remember the last home page I loved.
Back at the Financial times I read that Coupland or his publisher could be on the wrong end of writs from Apple and Google, who both appear to have been studying at the Gina Ford school of public relations. Google want people to stop using their name as a verb. I can only think of a few tradenames which have become generic (like Kleenex) and also become a verb (you don't Kleenex your nose though you might Hoover your carpet, or Xerox your documents). Google don't want me to talk about "googling" something on Windows Live Search, but while defending a trademark is all fine and good, "you can’t put the toothpaste back in the genie bottle" as one blogger put it. The Independent reports Dictionaries already include the verb "to google" and I was first aware of people using it in print when I read William Gibson's 2003 novel "Patern Recognition" where it appears on the second page. In case you didn't know, Gibson is famous as the man who coined the term "Cyberspace".
Any Cricket fan will know of the term "Googly" maybe it will come to describe a kind of behaviour, and we'll have to refine the verb "to Google" as "to search for people using terms to which you claim rights" , if Apple turn googly, they may complain about Coupland's tittle as they claim to own the word "Pod". I don't know what we're supposed to call the things peas come out of (no... not "freezers") or groups of whales. I always thought that it was the 'i' part of iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb, iLife which was the Apple specific part. Apple have gone after the makers of a datalogger called "profit pod". If Yell can accuse Yellow wikis of passing off for using the colour yellow, how long before a name like Podtech attracts a "cease and desist" letter from Apple.
Robert Scoble is Podtech's famous employee. He picked up a link from someone with no hands on experience of Zune, who asserts that it won't have support for Podcasting: presumably non-Apple devices won't be allowed to call it that . Robert, knows more about RSS than that, he linked to one of my posts about it. Podcasting support is not in the iPod device, but the iTunes software. Sadly, I've no inside information about the Zune and I find the Zune blog by a Microsoft employee to be pretty feeble: so I'm forced to rely the same leak as everone else. That says nothing about the PC software and says that Wifi was disabled on the test device. Who knows what it will be able to fetch over wireless ?
That Zune story contains a reason why (if true) I might want one: built in FM transmitter. I was reading The 10 most annoying car innovations. My Citroen C5 has 5 of these 10 (and the automatic wipers and lights work well. It has lane departure warning - because it would have prevented an accident I was involved in last year). However Citroen have removed the Cassette player - it has a 6 CD multi-changer and a further CD player in the dash. I have to use an FM adapter to play WMAs and MP3 - which I do from my phone but it is such a fiddle to set up I rately bother. An FM transmitter would mean I could play music in the car and on any of the radios dotted round the house. This would be an inspired move, but who knows. Producing the player of choice for in-car use wouldn't hurt the stock price.
Tagged as Microsoft Zune Apple iPod Legal Google Gina Ford Yellow wikis
* Note I have no idea if they intend to or not: I've subtley changed the title from the original post so it doesn't imply that they will.
Three bits of news that I should mention although if you monitor the Virtual PC home page, you'll know all this already.
The Windows Vista Enterprise page hasn't caught up with this - there is no reference to the "4 instance license" and it still refers to Virtual PC express which I think is now dead. The Software assurance page only mentions enterprise edition so it's not clear if SA customers can get this with Ultimate edition. I'll try to find out ...
Some complaints about Microsoft are valid, Some aren't.
Anyone can get Microsoft Beta software. Developer ? Sign up for MSDN. IT Pro ? Sign up for TechNet. The new TechNet direct is a bargain. It gives you all the software and information you need for less than cost of two support incidents, and then throws in two free support Incidents.
The Windows team had a budget for distributing Windows Vista betas. There was a fixed number of "open" downloads and after that they turned the tap off. With an OS you want people to test it on a wide range of hardware and you make it available to testers years ahead of schedule. I ran Windows "Chicago" from mid 1994 before it was called Windows 95. At that time I was running a small Microsoft partner company, we got MSDN, Technet, partner mailings, training mailings. What we didn't get was an early look at office 95.
Times move on. The Office 2007 team wanted 500,000 downloads of office. They didn't turn the tap off. They kept going. They got 3 Million downloads - that's about one Peta-byte of transfers, which takes serious hosting and bandwidth. Did they stop then ? No, they said for a nominal charge people can still download it. And people complained. Next time guys, turn the tap off.
But here's a promise, if anyone can give me valid reasons why
Tagged as Microsoft Office 2007
One of the things that is new to Windows Vista is the Scheduling service. Out has gone the old AT service and in has a come a new Task engine with more features than you can shake a stick at.
In the current Beta builds of Vista there are still a few things we need to get right as I found out this morning. I mentioned resource monitor last week. I also mentioned the eccentricities of my Toshiba M3 and its screen driver - one of which is its tendency not to turn the screen back on when resuming from sleep, forcing me to use Hibernate for the time being. The Toshiba has what I refer to as an audible processor utilization indicator - otherwise known as a variable speed fan which responds to the processor speed. This morning, the fan sounded like a jet aircraft, and everything in Windows was sluggish - with my disk light stuck on. So I headed over to resource monitor to try to find out what was happening. A process named DfrgNtfs.exe had a huge and climbing number of read and write operations against its name, and was had the highest average CPU use of anything on the system. Hmmm. My disk was defragging - on a Monday morning.
One thing I miss in Vista is the information you get while running a manual disk defrag. Gone is the "technicolor barcode" of Windows XP and you get no information while the process is running. The reason for this is that defrag now runs as scheduled task. This is a Good Thing. But why was mine running at 9:00 on a Monday morning ? I needed to look at the task.
It became pretty obvious what was happening. I said the task engine has more features than you can shake a stick at, and these are spread over 6 tabs. General gives the task a name, the account it should run under, and says whether a user has to be logged on for it to run. History gives entries in the event log about this task. Triggers says when the task runs, when a user logs on, when the machine boots, when the machine goes idle, when the remote or local user connects or disconnects, when the machine is locked or unlocked, when a specific event is written to the event log, or on a timer. Defrag is set to run on a timer weekly at 1:00 AM every Monday. At 1:00 AM this morning my computer was in a hibernated state. Actions, specifies the program to run, e-mail to send, or message to display. Conditions tells the task if it can wake the computer up to run Settings specifies if a task is run after missing its start time, when to kill it if it takes to long, and if it should be restarted if it fails. Defrag does start if it misses it's scheduled time
So: 1:00AM Monday passed with the system hibernated, and the next chance it got the task scheduler launched the task; the net effect is that if your system is shut down or hibernated over the weekend, performance on Monday morning is going to suffer. I think, the optimum settings are to run defrag Every night, and to wake from sleep to run it, but not to run it if the scheduled time is missed - because when you start your PC you want to work on it.
Like Darren I've updated from to build 5472 of Windows Vista and I've also updated to the "Tech Refresh" build of office 2007. These interim builds can be "two steps forward, one step back" - 5456 was faster than the Beta 2 build (5384) but some things that had worked before were broken.
5472 is showing more speed still, some little improvements in fit and finish (polish to Icons, new screen saver, some wrong fonts fixed. The implementation of Info-cards has become Windows CardSpace , Windows Collaboration is now Windows Meeting Space ). And some of the things that broke between 5384 and 5456 are working again.
Working, then Broken then Fixed,
Still broken...
Newly working
Newly broken
On that last point try the following to see if you're affected. Start the Resource Monitor - either from the performance tab in Task manager, or from Reliability and Performance Console on the Start Menu. You should see something like this.
I think that in "Balanced" power plan the Maximum frequency for the CPU is never 100% - but that it should be when running on mains power. I haven't found a way to persuade this power plan to give me full CPU speed, so I've changed to High Performance.
Back when beta 2 came out I read Scot Finnie's article on ComputerWorld "20 things you won't like about Windows Vista ". I was shocked: with a whole new operating system to aim at he came up with 20 really lame things. I took it as a sign that we'd done really well when 5th place went to "Faulty assumption on the Start Menu.". I don't normally single out people for whining and sarcasm but this stuck in my memory.
In its supreme state of being, Microsoft knows precisely what's best for you. It knows that because its well-implemented new Sleep mode uses very little electricity and also takes only two or three seconds to either shut down or restart, you want to use this mode to "turn off" your computer, whether you realize it or not. It wants to teach you about what's best. It wants to make it harder for you to make a mistake. That's why it crafted the Shutdown area at the lower right-hand corner of the Start menu to make the large red Sleep button and the large blue Lock buttons very prominent. Meanwhile, the button that offers a pop-up menu with options like Switch User, Log Off, Restart and Shutdown is a teeny-tiny little arrow hanging off the edge of the Start menu. They know you'll find it there, but they're making it just a little harder for you to access by making the surface area so small that it's harder to click. So long as Microsoft gets you to do what it wants you to do, it doesn't matter that it's torturing the user experience in the process.
I like to have the power button hibernate the machine, and have it go to sleep if I just close the lid, but with my recent update I found they were both doing the same thing. It took a moment to find it under, Power options in control panel, and click change plan settings, then Change Advanced Power Settings,
you can change a whole range of settings, including changing the default on the start menu. This can be controlled using group policy like the other power settings. If you don't like the default in the beta then give us feedback. If you don't like the default when we ship, now you know what to do to change it.
Around the office loads of people have been saying the pretty much same thing... and before the management get nervous this has nothing to with it being "bonus season" right now. It's been "Have you tried the new build" . I haven't noticed this before
Vista is approaching the next major milestone: it's first "Release Candidate". Ordinary Microsoft employees (i.e. those who aren't Vista Developers) , are now running a build which, if it doesn't turn out to be the one to be made available externally is at least very close to it. You can tell this because the Internet explorer team have released their Release Candidate for XP, it's worth paying their blog a visit just for the IE 7 quick reference sheet
The previous builds have had one major problem for me - the Nvidia driver for my Toshiba M3 wasn't up to scratch. Odd behavior included failing to turn the screen back on when the machine came back from sleep - so I had to use hibernate. If IE was open when I hibernated when I went back some pages would "strobe" as I moved the mouse. Both of these things have been fixed. I've known for a long time what a difference drivers make and that drivers cause more windows issues than anything else. I've been living that for the last couple of months - a decent (but still not perfect) driver means this Toshiba doesn't seem "lousy" anymore, Visa feels better.
Then there are some things about Vista itself which are clearly better than 5472 - the July community technology preview build. I'd been running that for 3 weeks and although faster than my previous build, I described the performance as "lumpy" - it would have an unresponsive moment now and then - not to any pattern. That's gone, my 2GHz machine feels like a 2GHz machine. The time from log-on to starting work has been reduced so dramatically that I can only wonder what on earth was happening before. The time to come back from sleep (now that I can use it) is not much different from the time to come back from a screen saver. Overall speed is better: Outlook Web Access explodes onto the screen faster than I've seen it before. Battery use is better - I don't hear the Toshiba audible procesing indicator (fan) half as much which may be part of it.
It's not perfect - I reported a bug: if you delete properties you have set on a picture you can't edit them again - given what I said about using the Index for photography this is a pain. Soon after filing the report I got a flurry of mail from the product group who thought I'd found a variation of something they had fixed - this ended with a remote session for me to verify that their fix works - though I don't know if will be in RC-1. I don't think I would have seen such responsiveness if the team in question had been up to their eyes in bugs.
Postscript. While I was editting the above, Steve posted his entry The latest internal build of Windows Vista is REALLY GOOD he says we seem obsessed with build numbers - I hadn't noticed it before.
Bonus linksAs we get closer to shipping vista we can see the funny side. There's this movie which originated in Microsoft (thanks Steve for the reminder) and this song, which didn't (thanks Scoble)
Two quotes for the day
I am the final silenceThe last electrician alive And they called me the sparkle I was the best, I worked them all ....
and
Roy: There's only two of us now. Pris: Then we're stupid and we'll die.
The second is the from Blade runner. Oddly the page where I found the lyrics for the first says it makes him think of Blade runner.
The what made me think of this was I've been teasing Eileen on and off for being a Luddite (or as Darren would say a staller rather than an Installer) over the time it's taken her to move to Vista.
My build of Vista has been messed around with so much that things are breaking on it and last night I put the spare hard disk in and installed a clean copy of vista that I could do some demos with. This morning I swapped the hard disks back and Vista refused to boot, claiming that a key file couldn't be loaded. It told me to run the repair tools from the DVD. Since it was still in the drive, I did. The repair process told me that it had found a problem with my boot environment, would I like to repair and restart. Sure ... I mean ... in that situation, who wouldn't. and Normal Service is Resumed.
I've no idea what happened to the my machine, or what Vista fixed. AND THIS TROUBLES ME. I've understood BOOT.INI files, and the job of NTLDR, and NTDETECT.COM for the last 13 years. I feel like shouting at the computer .... "I'm technical !! Tell me what was wrong, and how you fixed it" . I know that I don't need to know this, but not knowing bothers me. Still, it took me ages to be happy with plug and play systems where interrupts and like were set automatically. Some days I feel like "I'm the last electrician alive" ...
I'm going to stick my neck out and be (I think) the first Microsoft blogger to tell you where to get details of the Zune.
It's widely known that Zune will have wireless functions and that means for the US market it needs FCC approval. Some people who watch the FCC web site have found this link. It seems Zune will be made by Toshiba. The best photos are found at the end of the Test report - which says there are 3 models designated 1089 1090 and 1091which are simply different colours. There may be further models with additional functions ...
The test report says nothing about FM transmission - which was one of the things I said might tempt me to buy one. The user guide was looks very rough band still seems to be using the code names "Argo" and "Pyxis" which seems to be someone else's trade mark. Interestingly someone had leaked the code name to engadget... What it says about wireless and other users is:
Using the Wireless communication.Turning on wireless: In order to use wireless sharing feature such as “send’ and “DJ” you will need to turn on your device’s wireless capabilities... ...your device will be discoverable by other Pyxis device and also be capable of searching for other Pyxis devices in range.
Sending Content: Once your wireless setting is set to on, you will be able to send and receive photos and promotional copies of songs, albums, and playlists from other Pyxis users... ...You will be presented with a“nearby” list containing any Pyxis devices that have their wireless setting on and are in range. Select one (and only one) device from the list and a notification will appear on that device allowing that user to accept or reject your send. DJing Content: Pyxis allows you to stream music to up to 4 other Pyxis devices. ... If you chose DJ:on, anyone (max 4 at one time) can listen in to the same music that you are currently listening to. If you chose DJ: friends, only people in your friends list can listen in. If you choose DJ:off, no one can listen to your music but you can still tune in to other people who have their DJ setting turned on. Friend requests: You can invite other Argo members that you meet to be your friends wirelessly via Pyxis.
Sending Content: Once your wireless setting is set to on, you will be able to send and receive photos and promotional copies of songs, albums, and playlists from other Pyxis users... ...You will be presented with a“nearby” list containing any Pyxis devices that have their wireless setting on and are in range. Select one (and only one) device from the list and a notification will appear on that device allowing that user to accept or reject your send.
DJing Content:
Pyxis allows you to stream music to up to 4 other Pyxis devices. ... If you chose DJ:on, anyone (max 4 at one time) can listen in to the same music that you are currently listening to. If you chose DJ: friends, only people in your friends list can listen in. If you choose DJ:off, no one can listen to your music but you can still tune in to other people who have their DJ setting turned on.
Friend requests: You can invite other Argo members that you meet to be your friends wirelessly via Pyxis.
Sounds to me like the wireless is an adhoc peer-peer arrangement. Nothing in here suggests that the device will be able to connect to home network to play through an XBox 360, or get recorded TV from media center, or download from a PC without USB ... never mind connect directly to the internet. Whether than is a matter of documentation or whether the features are missing is anybody's guess.
Tagged as Microsoft Zune
Yes, the BBC got my attention with that headline too. Here's the official press release. This is the launch of XNA Framework, a custom implementation of the .NET Compact Framework for game development.
Dan Fernadez has a great summary and a great collection of links on his blog. The talk is all about C# express, there is a tantalizing comment that "Since the XNA Framework is a set of managed code libraries, you can use any managed .NET Framework language." ... It opens up the rather odd possibility that you can write for the X-box in CoBOL ????
It seems like today might be a day of links, so here's a Bonus Link: After trying out VB express with some enthusiasm, I was going to write about about how it's a great time for the hobbyist programmer - but Dan's written that one too.
Tagged as Microsoft Xbox XNA
One of the things I tried ages ago was pressing the Window key and each other key on the keyboard. Call me strange if you like.
Under build 5472 of Vista on my Toshiba I got clumsy and hit [Window] [Pause] (they're next to each other). It opens the Windows system-properties dialog. That got me to experiment with some other combinations. [Window] [1] , [Window] [2] , [Window] [3] , etc open the first, second, third items on the Windows quick launch toolbar.
Now I've got to go back to XP and see if it was there all along.
The fact that Eileen has just blogged about something very similar shows the serendipity fairy has been busy again.
There are days I jump in with both feet. One of those was the day that Gordon Frazer was announced as our new MD. He seemed approachable, so I pitched him my idea to bring something like Channel 9 to the UK... wouldn't it be great to do the first interview with him ? Eileen was out of the country at the time but after a quick exchange of text messages, she thought it was a good idea too. Gordon said yes - which, as it turned out was the easy part. It's taken a week to get the video edited and posted, but Talking Microsoft is live with its first video for all to see, and we now know the process so future videos won't take so long. [Note to self: don't use the MD to learn on in future...]
To save you can going there you can click to play (WMV format) or click to download (Zipped WMV). And if you've got comments, or suggestions for future interviews please post them with the video.
I said it would be a day of Links. And thanks to Steve who was my producer and cameraman.