There was a time when I used to think that Operating System prices would go down overtime as the OS market stabilizes. I guess I was wrong. The prices have steadily gone up over the years and has now reached a whopping $400. Yes that's right, that's how much you would pay for Vista Ultimate. Knowing that Vista Home Premium is what would sell the most Microsoft created Vista Ultimate Extras (addon software only available to Ultimate users) to try and lur the geeks to buy the Ultimate version. Extras sounds very familiar to the doomed Plus! pack MS had created for Windows 98, except that it comes only with Ultimate and it's free. They previewed the Extras pack at CES and by the looks of it, it appeared far from ready. They only previewed two pieces of software as part of the Extras pack, but I suspect there will me a lot more applications that would be part of it. Here are the two pieces they did demo:
- DreamScene (formerly know as Motion Desktop). In simple words this is a video that runs as your Windows Background. So far we only have been able to set an image as a background, but with this new Extra we could set any home video as Desktop Background. They did show some cool looking videos like Water dropping from a leaf, Waterfall that turns into a river, Rain drops. All these are very sutle videos which do not change the scene that much and only a couple of parts in the scene are moving. They have also taken a lot of care to make sure the video loops back properly without any hiccups in the scene, resulting in an infinitely running video.
- GroupShot (A photo fixing application). Imagine you taking a family photo. To be sure you got the best possible picture you would take two or three snaps right? Well imagine that all three turn out to be bad, where one person is blinking in one photo, while another person is blinking in another photo and so on. What you can do with this application is that you can choose the select the good areas from each of the photos and the application will merge them into one good photo. It is really amazing to see how it creates a new photo out of all the actual photos. Words cannot describe it enough. You have to see it. Unfortunately I don't have a link to the video so you will have to see the entire CES keynote video by Bill Gates and forward it slowly until you reach the Vista demo.
- There are a few other applications. You can read about them in Paul Thurrott's review which went live after I wrote this entry.
Microsoft is entering the Home Server market this Fall, and boy is it going to be good. The new product named Windows Home Server (for now) is a machine like the personal computer without the connections for monitor, keyboard and mouse (such devices are called headless computers). So how do you control this device? First off you connect this device to your home network, it does not have to be infront of you, you can throw it in your basement if you want, and control it using one of the other computers in your house. The device has the following features:
- Automatic backup of all devices connected to your home network. The algorithm used to backup is pretty optimized. If you have 10 PCs and all 10 have the same foo.jpg, it will only backup one file. If one of the files with the same name was slightly different in content, it will back it up separately. This backup strategy along with a new compression technology according to Microsoft studies with some users results in 15 TB data being reduced to 300GB. The fact that you don't have to worry about backups itself pays off for the device.
- What if the HDD on this machine dies? Microsoft expects you to have multiple HDDs on this device and has created a variant of the RAID system which would mirror data, such that even if one HDD fails you can still recover your data. The more number of smaller HDDs the better. The reason why they wrote their own variant of RAID is because RAID needs drive letters to work with, whereas Windows Home Server treats all HDDs as one big drive pool. It does not have any drive letter. In fact if you could just plug in more internal or external HDDs and Home Server will automatically add that device to the drive pool.
- In addition since we have so much HDD space it is best suited as a File Server. You can store all your media and non media related content on this device and use it to stream media to any other device like XBox 360 or Media Center PC on your network. How cool is that.
- The device also constantly monitors the health of all the machines on your network and indicates it to you when one of the machines has a problem. At this point it only monitors health, but I see this feature extended to where you can apply patches and anti-virus u pdates to all machines from this one device.
- As I mentioned about the management of this device can be done by any PC on your network. You need to install a small software (not sure if you need to install it on each and every device) and use an application that has just 4 tabs to configure the box. For the geeks out there, they can remote in to the box and get the familiar start menu and work around the OS. For everyone else Microsoft has tried to keep it very very simple.
- Finally the codebase for this new OS is based on Windows Server 2003, so it includes a webserver for anyone wanting to host their own website. You can also connect to any machine on your network using the Home Server.
How much is it going to cost? Microsoft isn't saying much except for a device that was previewed at CES by HP which had 300GB HDD was priced at $500 - $600. Microsoft will also be selling the OS by itself so you can install it on that old (so far) good for nothing box of yours after adding a couple of big HDDs.
Credits: Paul Thurrott, Channel 10
It had to happen sooner than later. Netflix has come out with a new service which let's users watch movie over the Internet. The way it works is, you need to install a software on your machine and then on Netflix site you will have two buttons play (for playing online) or add (for renting the DVD). Once you hit play the movie will start streaming down the Internet to your PC. The service does not let you download the movie, but is free for subscribers for a limited number of hours. From what I have read, those with $18.00 per month service will get 18 hours of free movie time. Also you only get timed for the number of minutes you watched the movie. So if you started watching a movie and found it crapy, you can stop it and get charged only for the number of minutes you were into the movie. The service is in the initial stages and I suspect it will be atleast a few years before this whole Internet Movies (if I were Apple I would have called it iMovies) gets mass acceptance, but until then I guess Neflix is just testing the waters.
Note: Verisign showed a demo of a similar service at CES 2007. The service lets you download HD quality content over the Internet. It uses a P2P backbone to speed up the content delivery.
Windows Live Writer is a Windows Application that let's bloggers post entries to their blog in a rich and interactive way instead of having to deal with the browser. The application is written in .NET and has some really cool features around adding pictures and layouts. It also has a plugin model which allows developers to add functionality to the app.
Here are some examples of what I can do with it:
The standard rich text editor features.
Ability to add and layout images:
Images from Google talk
using System;
namespace VaibhavKamath
{
public class HelloWorld
{
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
Console.WriteLine("Hello World!");
}
}
}
It also has features like save draft, spell checker, auto-save draft just as we are used to in Outlook.
Really awesome!
Apparently Microsoft is preparing a new XBox 360 for this fall. The new device will sport the following:
-
65-nanometer nm processor which runs at lower temperature making the 360s quieter than existing consoles.
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A 120GB HDD compared to the existing 20GB.
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HDMI port
-
Special circuitry onboard to make IPTV through your XBox possible.
A lot of users (around 10 million of those) who already own the existing consoles are crying foul at Microsoft for such a possibility as it would be like leaving the early adopters in the cold. My guess is that Microsoft will come out with some add on device for IPTV feature that existing users can attach to their console. These users will also get the option of buying a 120 HDD. The only thing that Microsoft cannot change for existing consoles is the HDMI port and the 65 nm processors.
Of course all this is speculation / rumor. I heard about this on Paul Thurrott Windows Weekly podcast on TWiT.tv and other news sources.
Microsoft is coming out with what many call the flash killer. The code name for the new software is WPF/e. WPF/e is a stripped down version of WPF which does not include any 3D support. The initial goal of Microsoft is to keep the download down to 1-1.5MB. You can listen to some recent podcasts/videos on this new technology here and here. Check out this cool Flash and WPF/e interaction using JavaScript.
Check out the cool Messenger (still in the works) that Yahoo has been building for the past few months for Windows Vista. These guys have done a really good job on the UI. Wonder what Microsoft is doing to it's messenger for Windows Vista. BTW the messenger has been developed using Windows Presentation Foundation that is part of .NET 3.0. So we now have 2 cool showcase applications for Vista. Yahoo Messenger and The NewYork Times Reader. I am sure we will see many more on Vista launch date (01/30/2007).
A couple of months ago I talked about adding AJAX features to my blog which would enable adding comments to every post right from the home page. As a prerequisite to it I added Captcha support to the feedback section of this blog. I learnt a valuable lesson from this exercise. Never start big on any thing you do, especially when you are working by yourself and not as a team. The scope of the project was so big that even though I wrote a lot of code to achive my target, it always felt like I was missing something. Hence I have decided that in the future I will do small incremental updates. Especially since the turn around time is not as fast as I would like it to be. Having made this decision, I have rolled back the Captcha support (commented out the code) until I find a real use to it. My blog is not target of any spam and hence there is no need to complicate the user experience and the codebase. I have been debating off and on about moving to community server, but everytime, I turn it down because that deprive me of any motivation to keep coding / enhancing the website. I do not have any good weekend projects in hand and hence until I come up with some I will keep playing around with enhancing this blog. Now I just hope I get this through my thick head and stop those urges of moving to community server.
Hello to everyone and a belated Happy New Year. The recently concluded Macworld has created fire in the news industry. Everyone is talking about the iPhone and Steve Jobs's stellar keynote performance. I simple couldn't resist the urge to blog about it and here goes my two cents.
Things have not been the same for Apple since the success of iPod. It sees better opportunities in new territories compared to the PC market. This year's Macworld keynote by Steve Jobs was a clear indication of that, where not a single technology on Mac was presented. In the next 3 to 4 years, I suspect Apple to get rid of the Mac hardware business and open up the Mac OSX operating systems to PC vendors like Dell and HP. That is a pretty bold statement, but before that can happen, existing businesses like Apple TV and iPhone need to turn into cashcows. The iPod / iTunes businesses have already proven to be a cashcow. Many have tried to repeat the Apple success story in the music business, but none have come even close. In the next two years I see Apple coming out with many high and low end cellphones that would be bought by people like crazy. Once the iPhone business is established Apple will try to get it's media center business steady, which will take atleast 3 years starting from the day it is released. The success of these businesses will result in Mac not being as profitable for Apple as it used to be, which would result in Apple axing it.
I think the porting of OSX to the Intel platform was the most brilliant move by Apple. It gives Apple the oppurtunity to open it's operating system to PC makers any time it wants. The biggest hurdle though is getting the device drivers ready, which is not an easy task. One of the major reasons for Linux's failure to be accepted mainstream is device drivers. What Apple will ultimately do will depend on a lot of factors, but the company surely has some very strong cards that it is holding very close to it's chest leaving us only to speculate.
