Tag: microsoft

Gates considering Xbox clones?

Post ImageI don’t think there is much to this story, but it’s interesting enough to mention. Apparently Chairman Bill Gates was recently asked in an interview if Microsoft would consider allowing third parties to manufacture Xbox units, and he gave a very open answer. Now, some people think that Microsoft is looking at paving the way for Xbox clones:

“Clearly, everyone at Microsoft is thinking out of the box to increase sales. I mean look at the nontraditional way of introducing the Xbox on MTV,” [JupiterResearch analyst Michael] Gartenberg said. “It sounds like they are just testing the waters with a hybrid of the (white box) PC model and the (proprietary hardware) video game model.”

I can see the reasons why such a move would be considered – Microsoft makes far more money on games than consoles, so increasing the market for their games is a good idea. On the other hand, I am not sure if this would fly with end users. Even if Microsoft kept the base standards for a console very strict, one of the best things about consoles is that everyone has the same stuff – the playing field is level. I suspect that hardcore gamers would not react favorably to a clone culture.

Read: CNET News.com

Tonight's Whidbey Event

Post ImageTonight the Edmonton .NET Wizards (don’t bother clicking, the site is horribly out of date) which Dickson and I manage hosted an event talking about Whidbey, or Visual Studio 2005. We had John Bristowe come up from Calgary to tell us all about the new changes in C#, VB.NET, the IDE, and the framework itself. The talk went very well, and it was really nice to finally meet John in person and have a chat.

The stuff I am most looking forward to is SQL Server 2005 and ClickOnce, two technologies we only had time to touch on tonight. They will probably affect my day to day development most. Hopefully we can host another talk on those topics in more detail some time in the future.

If you came to the event tonight, be sure to watch John’s Blog for more information, and check out the Visual Studio 2005 site at MSDN. And if you’re interested in the user group, rest assured we’re going to fix the website. It might be as simple as a Wiki, but it will be much easier to use and update than it is now!

Read: John Bristowe’s Blog

Microsoft: Browse. Search. Subscribe!

Post ImageHere’s some notes I took from the keystone by Dean Hachamovitch from Microsoft:

  • Longhorn *heart* RSS
  • Microsoft is betting big on RSS for Longhorn. They want to “RSS everything”.
  • They are using IE7 to show off the RSS experiences in Longhorn. This is the first public demo of IE7. IE7 now supports auto-discovery of feeds much like Firefox, an icon lights up on the toolbar. You can also view a preview of the feed, complete with search-in-page functionality. You can then subscribe to the feed in much the same way as a user would add a Favorite in IE today.
  • Now they are using MSN Search to search for Gnomedex, to display that it has an RSS feed that you can subscribe to.
  • Longhorn has the concept of a “subscription store” called a “common feed list”, so that all applications can hook into the same collection of feeds using the Windows API. This is the killer RSS feature for Longhorn, IMO. They are showing how this works with a new build of RSS Bandit.
  • They just thanked Dave Winer for inventing the enclosure tag. Was that necessary? You can only beat a dead horse so many times…
  • Now they’re showing how the Outlook calendar works with the whole Subscribe mentality. They visited the HTML schedule page for Gnomedex, and created an RSS feed from it. Now they have a special program that looks in the common feed list for feeds with calendar objects, and then adds them as appointments into Outlook.
  • Wow, someone at the front made a comment and just got chopped.
  • Oooh, pretty little demo of a photo blog being downloaded and the photos displayed in a screensaver complete with captions and descriptions. Very neat way of visualizing a photoblog.
  • Now they’re talking about the extensions to RSS that they are proposing. One of them allows RSS to work better with lists. Another allows a publisher to describe the content of the feed. They worked with Amazon.com to create RSS feeds out of the Amazon Wishlists as an example.
  • The specification for the Simple List Extensions is going to be released under a Creative Commons License. They played a video from Larry Lessig welcoming Microsoft into the CC family.
  • As of noon today, there will be an architectual overview document on RSS in Longhorn and specs for the Simple List Extensions avaiable on the web.
  • Schedule: Longhorn Beta 1 is set for PDC05, and will contain some of the envisioned RSS experience.
  • “This is the start of the conversation.”

All pretty cool stuff. I can’t wait to see the first beta of Longhorn, it should be pretty awesome if all of this stuff is implemented and working well.

Read: Gnomedex

Microsoft to make RSS announcement at Gnomedex

Post ImageThere will probably be quite a few Gnomedex-related posts over the next few days, so I figured the new graphic would be a good idea. I’ll use it for any post related to the conference – that way, if you’re less interested in the conference and more interested in what Dickson and I are up to in Seattle, you’ll know which posts to read and which to ignore.

It has been rumored for some time now that Microsoft is making a big announcement this weekend at Gnomedex, but this News.com article is the first mainstream press to pick it up (that I have seen anyway):

Microsoft plans to announce on Friday that it is expanding its support for the Web publishing standard Really Simple Syndication.

Microsoft is proposing an extension to RSS that would allow it to better support ordered lists of information. Today, RSS feeds are sent and read merely as a stream of messages, with the order being determined according to the time the messages were sent. Microsoft is proposing a way to add ordering information so that an RSS feed could better handle things like an e-commerce site’s list of best-selling items or calendar information ordered by the date of an event rather than when the appointment was created.

Sounds pretty interesting, and the article quotes Dave Winer, which probably means he’s not against the proposed extension. I guess I’ll be able to post details from the conference 🙂

Read: CNET News.com

Microsoft's own BitTorrent

Post ImageIt seems as though Microsoft is working on a technology that is very similar to the popular BitTorrent file sharing protocol. The technology is code-named “Avalance”, and is being created by researchers at the Cambridge facility:

While Avalanche is based on a different system than BitTorrent, both are essentially used for the same purpose–to distribute large files between a number of users.

A Microsoft research paper on the technology both praises and criticizes BitTorrent: “Despite their enormous potential and popularity, existing end-system co-operative schemes such as BitTorrent, may suffer from a number of inefficiencies.” The coding system used by Avalanche, which is based on network coding, is 20 percent more efficient with downloading, according to the research paper.

While the company currently has no plans to implement the technology in any products, or to otherwise release it, you never know, it could find it’s way into something like Windows Media Player in the future. A technology like BitTorrent that includes some sort of DRM would be perfect for Microsoft to allow movie downloads right inside Windows Media Player. I wouldn’t be surprised anyway!

Read: CNET News.com

Everyone loves a good rumor!

Post ImageIn case you missed it earlier this week, Apple announced it was switching to Intel chips for it’s computers starting in 2006. That’s pretty big news for the computer industry, and as a result, it has been debated, questioned, and otherwise picked apart over the last few days. People have all sorts of questions and thus theories about what is going to happen, but one of the most extreme comes to us from Robert X. Cringely (I picked out the best quotes):

And this time, what’s behind the announcement is so baffling and staggering that it isn’t surprising that nobody has yet figured it out until now. Apple and Intel are merging.

Then what is the driving force? Microsoft.

His article is a pretty interesting read, and he does ask some great questions. Why did Apple choose Intel and not AMD? Why did they not say anything about their previous marking campaigns that said PowerPC was so much faster than Intel? I expect these questions, and many others, have good answers.

As for Apple and Intel merging to dethrone Microsoft? Not likely:

  • Microsoft has so much money, they could be a bank. Heck, they could be anything they wanted almost overnight. And keeping a lot of money has always been part of the plan – lots of cash on hand means you can weather most storms. It would take a lot, an act of epic proportions, to harm Microsoft. Apple and Intel merging is not that act.
  • Dell and HP are the companies that have the real say here. If Intel were to buy Apple, I think you’d see Dell and HP knocking on AMD’s door extremely fast. Intel would lose it’s largest customers almost immediately.
  • Even if they didn’t, what’s stopping Microsoft from buying AMD? They’ve been pretty cozy lately anyway. At the very least, Microsoft could help AMD meet production demands if current Intel customers jumped ship.
  • Intel and Apple are hardware companies. Good luck creating and supporting a mainstream operating system! Microsoft is a software company at heart, it’s what they do. They might be slow at getting things fixed, but I am willing to bet they know a lot more about it than Intel-Apple would.

Basically, I don’t see the incentive for Intel to buy Apple. Maybe I’m wrong, but I think there is a much better chance that Apple would split into two companies: one focused on computers, and one focused on media (think iPod).

Read: I, Cringely

IE7 has tabs

Well it’s about time:

Yes, IE7 has tabs. Some people have asked why we didn’t put tabs in IE sooner. Initially, we had some concerns around complexity and consistency… will it confuse users more than it benefits them? Is it confusing if IE has tabs, but other core parts of the Windows experience, like Windows Media Player or the shell, don’t have tabs? I think we made the wrong decision here initially, and we’re making the right one now.

Now, where is the damn screenshot?

Read: IEBlog

Follow-up: Imagine Cup Canada

It has been a few days now since I posted about the problems facing Imagine Cup Canada. First of all, let me say thanks to everyone for the feedback on that post, online and offline. It was reassuring to know that some of you share my concerns, though not unexpected. Thank you also to Daniel, for making yourself immediately available to discuss my concerns.

So what happened? Well as you might expect, my post prompted some people at Microsoft to spring into action. Like I said to so many people, it just takes someone to stand up and say “we have a problem, let’s do something about it.” I am proud that I was able to make that step – I think it will go a long way towards improving the Imagine Cup. Let me explain what I mean by that.

The Imagine Cup teams, both in Canada and Redmond, are now aware of my concerns, and are committed to improving the experience for students. Daniel sounds enthusiastic about incorporating some feedback, proclaiming “let’s improve it tenfold!” In fact, Daniel has agreed to provide conference call facilities so that any interested student can take part in a feedback session with Daniel, and possibly members of the Redmond team. Here’s the details:

WHO: You, me, and the Imagine Cup team
WHAT: Conference Call Regarding Feedback for IC06
WHEN: May 31st, 2005 at 4 PM EST
WHERE: Phone/Internet Conference (LiveMeeting)

I’d rather not share the conference details on my blog, so if you are interested in taking part, please email me and I’ll send you everything you need. Keep in mind, only the first 20 students to attend will be able to take part, so if you want to join, make sure you’re there on time! If you won’t be able to attend but still have feedback you’d like to offer, drop me an email, and I will be sure to voice your concerns! I’ll be on MSN Messenger for the duration of the call as well.

Some of the big things on my mind are transparency and worldwide consistency in judging, some sort of written feedback to participants about their entry, and improved access to local competition information. How about you? What would you improve?

In Response
I had the opportunity to speak with Daniel after I made the original post. Here are some of the things I was able to learn:

  • The winners in Canada for 2005 were announced the day after I made the original post. Congratulations to the winning team if you are reading this! One of my biggest complaints was that participants did not receive any feedback regarding their entry, and so the opportunity to learn from the experience was lost. Daniel has promised to talk with any interested participant on the phone about their entry. All you have to do is get in touch with him (and he said he’ll work on being more available too).
  • Reducing the number of judges to two for this year was done as an experiment. In previous years, it was felt that the larger number of judges meant that not everyone’s entry was being fairly judged. This year, by having only two judges look at every entry, it was felt the process would be more fair. That may sound perfectly fine, but the problem is not with having too many judges. The problem is not having standard and very clear judging criteria! A good judge can fairly score an entry if their criteria is made reasonable clear.
  • Everyone generally agreed that communication was not very good. Daniel has said he’ll work to improve, and is open to ideas like a Canada-specific website for information. There were also some things that were, understandably, out of Daniel’s control.

I’d like to point out that everyone I spoke to at Microsoft seemed very concerned that things got to the point where I would post, Daniel included. The general feeling was that in experimenting to improve the competition in Canada this year, the opposite result was accomplished. That said, I am very encouraged by the opportunity to provide feedback and suggestions on how to make the Imagine Cup better!

Read: Imagine Cup

Xbox 360 Revealed!

Yep today is the big day! Microsoft finally revealed details on the next Xbox, named Xbox 360. Check out the amazing specs, a story about the launch, and live coverage of the MTV presentation.

Looks good to me. Three cores, just like the PS3 is slated to have.
Perhaps the most encouraging bit of news about the new Xbox, is that
there should be 25 to 40 new games supporting it’s launch. That’s in
stark contrast to the first Xbox.

Oh yeah, and apparently Halo 3 will come out this year too!

UPDATE: The official site is now up, check it out!
Some other cool features of the new Xbox: free, basic Xbox Live service
for everyone, and interchangeable faceplates for the console! Also,
sounds like The Killers kinda sucked during the MTV presentation – too
bad.

Read: Xbox

Red Screen of Death

It’s been a very long time since I have seen a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) – Windows XP is extremely stable in my experience. Chances are, I’ll never see one again, because in new, early releases of Longhorn, the screen of death is red:

The first Red Screen of Death (RSOD) reports surfaced this past weekend on various Web logs, including one written by a Microsoft employee. For their part, Microsoft officials are not denying that the RSOD exists. But they are characterizing the RSOD brouhaha as a “tempest in a teapot.”

You can see a screenshot here. Pretty funny!

Read: Microsoft Watch