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Rumors are brewing that Microsoft is going to announce the release of a new product called Worldwide Telescope later this month. WT should allow users to zoom in on parts of the sky for which data exists. Data will be drawn from a number of ground-based telescopes as well as Hubble. Google Sky does this already in a nauseatingly ugly way. It’s bad. Epic fail there. Stellarium, on the other hand, is an open source star charting program that blows Google Sky away. I’ve been using it for a few years now and have been very happy with it. From the sound of the TechCrunch article, though, Worldwide Telescope could blow Stellarium away. I really hope so. And if it’s free, I’ll be forced to give Microsoft props for doing something right for a change.
CNN is reporting that Microsoft is making eyes at Yahoo! to the tune of $31 per share, or about $44.6 billion. If such a deal ever materialized, it would definitely make things interesting for Google. Personally I consider both Microsoft Live search and Yahoo to be inferior products to the Google, but two wrongs make a right, wrong? [hat tip] There has been talk the SEC might try to block such a move due to monopoly worries. I’m not convinced there is anything to worry about, but what do I know.
What I am interested in knowing, though, is how this will affect both Microsoft and Yahoo’s research arms. Will they become bigger and better than ever or will there be some cuts? I certainly hope the former is true.
Update
Check out the comments on the Google Blogoscoped article regarding the monopoly worries. I just read them after posting and they pretty much shoot down the idea of an SEC action on those grounds.
I wonder if a campaign like this, executed a few years ago, would have helped endear him more to the public? He actually comes across as somewhat human.
Whenever I’m in the lab and mistype my password logging into my laptop, there is an insanely loud beep from the PC speaker. Why not use the actual speakers on the machine rather than resorting to the PC speaker, a relic from the times when computers and dinosaurs walked side-by-side and computers had to be loud in order to be heard over the rumbling of the earth? Tonight I was messing around on the command line in MySQL and entered a bad command only to have my ears blown away by this 270 decibel dinosaur-alerting screech.
So I went searching for a solution to my problem and I was willing to do anything — even if it meant opening my system and ripping out the little speaker’s still-beeping heart. I gotta hand it to Microsoft, though, they make things easy. Psyche!
Under Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager, you get a screen like so:
You would think that the PC Speaker would be under “Sound, video and game controllers”, but you’d be wrong. PC Speaker is hidden under System Devices. Disabling that does absolutely nothing. This is because Microsoft practices something called function obfuscation. Basically, if you expect something to do something because doing so would be intuitive, the actual function is performed by something else.
The Microsoft developers had this conversation:
Bob: Ok, we need to add the PC Speaker to the Device Manager.
Jim: I think we should add it to “Display Adapters” since it is displaying sound in the air.
Bob: Good point.
Jill: Wait, that is really messed up. People might guess that.
Bob: I just had an idea. People might guess that.
Jill: That’s what I said.
Bob: Be quiet, Jill, men are talking.
Jill: <storms out of the room>
Jim: I know, let’s make it a hidden option called Beep.
Bob: Brilliant. It’ll be years before anyone finds it.
To make a long story about a really boring topic that just totally pissed me off so I had to vent short:
Under View, choose the option “Show hidden devices.” This will reveal the “Non-plug and play devices” node in the tree under which is the “Beep” device. Click on the Driver tab and click “Stop” and under Startup choose the type as “Disabled”. Now wasn’t that easy?
The Computer and Communications Industry Assocation is a nonprofit organization with members including Google, Microsoft, RedHat, Sun, and the Linux Foundation. To boil it down: they’re a lobbying group for the computing industry. I’m not saying they are therefore bad: it’s the unfortunate state of Washington that everything and everyone has to have a lobbyist in order to get anything done. For the moment I consider this group to be one of the “ok” guys (I’m not sure I’ll call them the “good” guys yet).
So yesterday, they released a study that reports that fair use exceptions in US copyright law account for $4.5 trillion in revenue each year: 18% of US economic growth. I’m not sure what economic growth is referring to here exactly. It’s not GDP because GDP is $13.13 trillion per year, which would make that percentage about 34%. This $4.5 trillion compares to the $1.3 trillion estimated to be the value that copyright industries contribute [source]. The fair use exception value is growing at a fast rate too, 31% since 2002.
So if fair use is that much better for business, why not expand it? Would it only eat into that $1.3 trillion or would it expand the economy even further?
Clive Thompson has an interesting article in Wired a short while back that explains why we can all rest easy: there are geeks like Bill Gates in the world who can have compassion on more than eight people at once.
Phew. I can finally get some sleep. I was seriously worrying what’s going to happen when oil supplies start to run out given that the entire world economy depends on it. No more. Oh and global warming? Fahgetaboutit! A geek will save the day because he can think in terms of mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, zetta, yotta — because .. wait for it .. his job demands it. Just to reassure us that he hasn’t just emerged from Gates’ backside, Clive does throw in an occasional aside as to how Gates is a drooling social bafoon — but don’t be fooled. This piece is little more than worshipping at the Gates throne.
Movie pirate Scott McCausland must switch to Microsoft Windows as part of his sentence for uploading Star Wars: Episode 3 to a BitTorrent site. This is blatantly unconstitutional and I’m amazed any judge would do this. Here is the pertinent line from the constitution expressly forbidding this sort of thing:
Amendments to the Constitution
Article VIII.
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
Well, the now-former editor-in-chief of that great citadel of Microsoft-brown-nosing PC Magazine, is now swearing off Vista. You know when Microsoft’s lackeys begin jumping ship that something is wrong. This should certainly convince anyone if the fact that most businesses are reluctant to switch to Vista or that China will use XP for computer systems relating to next year’s Olympics.
I love this quote from the Olympics tech guy at Lenovo:
“At the Olympics, we need the most reliable and stable systems.” (source)
That just says it all.
Full disclosure: I do not use nor do I plan to use Vista.
Note: I was informed the PC Mag link isn’t permanent, so I have linked to the digg article instead.
While I’m not usually into endorsing anything related to Microsoft, they do appear to have a rather cool offering with Photosynth. It uses multiple images to compile a three-dimensional representation of the subject. I’ve used the firefox extension to look at the Shuttle Endeavor from many different angles and many of the pictures are high-res enough that you can zoom in and see the shuttle up close and personal. Worth a few minutes examination, at any rate.
Microsoft Photosynth: http://labs.live.com/photosynth/
Shuttle Endeavor: http://media.labs.live.com/photosynth/NASA/default.htm
