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This is so freaking cool.
The BubbleShare folks have set up a CES 2006 Wiki to help folks find affordable accommodations in Las Vegas during next week's CES show. Among other things.
Speaking of which, there will be a CESCamp of nightly post-conference meetups.
In other words, a counter-unconference for the most conference-y of all conferences.
I so want to hack CES, and the whole freaking consumer electronics industry. Damn! Let's rock!
Big thanks to Jeneane Sessum for the pointer.
Thanks Doc Searls, who for the last several years has reported on CES for Linux Journal. Related articles are here, here, here and here, here, here, here and here.
We're going to Rock Vegas!
This is the time of year when everyone looks back at the year that was, what was hot and who flopped. So I was very glad to see Steve Blink looking forward to all the new releases we can expect from Microsoft this coming year. Steve is a tech guy who blogs, not the other way around, hope to see him again at WinHEC in March. Het goede Nieuwjaar Steve!
What can we expect from Microsoft in 2006
Toshiba Tecra M4 Named a CES Innovations Award Honoree
Toshiba’s premiere convertible Tablet PC, the Tecra M4, was named a 2006 CES Innovations Design and Engineering Awards honoree. The M4 will be displayed at the innovations showcase at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in Booth # 72444.
CES is a huge showcase for new computer Hardware and Software.
The latest in automotive technology including car audio and video, navigation systems, satellite radio, security and telematics will be on display at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show the world’s largest consumer technology tradeshow, January 5-8, 2006, in Las Vegas Nevada.
In car technologies have to include the Tablet PC and the iPod I hope
.Everyone from top automotive executives and mobile electronics manufacturers to service providers and installers flocks to CES each year to see the latest developments in the $7 billion U.S. mobile electronics market. It’s the only show that brings together all the major players in the industry and showcases how mobile electronics play into the overall CE market.
Google Zeitgeist is an interesting site to check-out, it's like the Book of lists LIVE!
2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist
It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We’ll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.
Looking at all this data you have to wonder what kinds of information they have about each of us....
I'm going to CES thanks to a Christmas miracle. I've been flying Delta Airlines for over thirty years, back in 2001 I amassed a million frequent flyer miles and was accustomed to the perks of flying at an elite customer level. Delta's customer service agents were extremely professional and we conversed in a language that today's outsourced call-center personal have never learned.
I get my tickets on the Delta website, but of late it has been like a Vegas slot machine. Before 9pm on Christmas evening they wanted over $600 for an L class ticket from EWR, JFK or LGA to LAS, when I could see the empty seats on the flights I wanted. I got my ticket in my customary T class, but it took a lot of looking after I had resigned to myself that I couldn't afford go. I'm excited about seeing and experiencing the Consumer Electronics Superbowl. Hope to meet some cool people there among all the gadgets and glitz.
If you're lucky enough to have an XBOX 360 under the Christmas Tree, sign-up for XBOX Live, get a GamerTag then have a look at XBOXLiveDiamond. Will they be giving out miles? We travel far on XBOX Live, but this looks more like the card your Supermarket gives you to grab spical deals each week in the store.
It just goes to show that the XBOX Live community is growing and growing, maybe it's time for us to start to gather in regional areas to help us put a face on every GamerTag.
We've been hearing rumors for the past year, but now it's out that NBC has taken control or will soon take control of MSNBC.
Microsoft's NYC office is now in Rockefeller Center where NBC is headquartered, but MSN stayed out in Redmond. So much was expected of a cable channel part owned by Microsoft, but the best they could do was third place behind CNN and FOX.
I never saw anyone with a Tablet PC on MSNBC, or how about a show about personal computing? A televised conversation about technology and how it helps us to get stuff done is needed. Television never lived up to the promise of teaching everyone to read and now it has failed to help increase computer literacy.
The MSNBC Website will still bridge the two companies, but you never know where MSN is going to go next….
Peace on Earth by better communication and innovation, wishing for new ideas.
Microsoft Is Warned by Europe, so Microsoft vs The EU is back in the news. Litigation can often take more time then innovation, America has gone Web 2.0 crazy, and Europe is languishing in a Web 1.0 world.
The European Commission has concluded, after a five-year investigation, that Microsoft Corporation broke European Union competition law by leveraging its near monopoly in the market for PC operating systems (OS) onto the markets for work group server operating systems...
The problem today is that Microsoft's attorneys haven't made a successful appeal of the EU Commissions 2004 ruling. Microsoft needs to reboot their effort of communicating client-server computing and interoperating in age of the Internet. A Team of imaginative technologists should be assembled to go to Brussels to articulate SOA, XML and Web-Services, because the legal Team has been conspicuously ineffective at communicating ideas.
The European commission hasn't been forthcoming with identifying which companies are at a disadvantage because Microsoft Server Software has better compatibility with the Windows OS. UNIX Servers were dominant the world over till recently as Windows Servers have encroached on to the network. Which company or corporation will be responsible for disclosing Apache and Linux compliance and interoperability?
A new Search Engine launched today, Wink offers a peek at Tags, who's got'em and where do the links go....
Find the latest links, see the Wink Blog, or maybe try to find a new link....
Some people might say “What exactly does Wink search?” Our thinking is that people who are frequent users of del.icio.us, digg and slashdot, who get their information from many sources, and who count on knowing what people are finding interesting right now - those people would like one place to search all those sources. Google and Yahoo are great for the whole Web, and we’ve integrated Google search into our service, but the Wink results - those are a measure of what people are thinking right now, based on their bookmarks and tagging.
Windows Communication Foundation
The vast majority of applications that are developed today need to communicate with other applications. The ability to share data between a wide network of services that can communicate with other platforms and devices is what Web services are all about. Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft's unified programming model for building Web service applications with managed code. It extends the .NET Framework to enable developers to build secure, reliable, and transacted Web services that interoperate across platforms and integrate with existing investments. Windows Communication Foundation is built from the ground-up to combine and extend the capabilities of existing Microsoft distributed systems technologies, including Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, .NET RemotWindows Communication Foundation ing, ASMX, and WSE to deliver a unified development experience.
Peer-to-Peer
Windows Vista provides capabilities for discovering and communicating between applications without the need for centralized servers. The peer-to-peer capabilities of Windows Vista give users and applications the ability to discover and interact with others on the network in a secure fashion.
Quality of Service
Today's new digital home usage scenarios increase AV, gaming, voice, and data traffic over a converged IP network. The emergence of wireless as the dominant home networking technology presents several challenges for multimedia and real-time applications—such as competition for available bandwidth, excessive latency at network bottlenecks, and uncontrollable latency variance (jitter). Further exacerbating this problem is wireless volatility caused by interference, common household obstructions, and sensitivity to distance. Windows Vista provides a set of technologies for applications to overcome these challenges, including the following:
- Auto-discovery of end-to-end network Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities
- Real-time feedback about changing network characteristics, such as:
- Maximum end-to-end link capacity
- Available bandwidth
- Congestion notification (for trans-rating, trans-coding, etc.)
- Intelligent packet prioritization
- Distributed admission control
- Enhanced diagnostic capabilities
The MotherShip has beemed-up yet another member of the community as Clements Vasters joins the Windows Communication Foundation Team.
Yes, all the rumors are true. I am moving from the consumer side of things to the builder side of things. From February 1st, 2006 I will be a “blue badge” and work for Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Windows Communication Foundation. The guys convinced me that it would be a good idea to make the move.
I’ve been spending so much time talking about and writing extensions for the shipping and not-yet shipping Microsoft distributed systems technologies stuff that it became the logical next step for me to become part of the team that creates all of these things. I hope that I can make some contribution to the cause.
As for why I am leaving my baby newtelligence? It’s the urge to build stuff that matters in a big way. Bart and Achim (my partners) have given me all the support they could since January in pursuing this goal. We’ve worked hard to put the company into a position that allows me to make this move and we are all delighted with the way things are. newtelligence is expanding its consulting business, continues to deliver world-class developer education and will continue to be a strong partner for our customers, which makes it easier for me to let go.
I’ll tell you more about it in the upcoming weeks…
Dazzling Graphics
Top Ten UI Development Breakthroughs In Windows Presentation Foundation Artical in MSDN Magazine writen by Ian Griffiths and Chris Sells
The current Win32-based Windows UI graphics subsystem, found in Windows ® XP, has been around for nearly 20 years. It's aging and limited, and as a result, user interface development has been somewhat, well, constrained at best.
The Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which is built on the .NET Framework, provides new techniques for developing applications, and makes better use of current hardware and technologies. In this article, we'll show you 10 of the most significant advances that make WPF superior to its Win32® forebears. While some of the specific details are likely to change in the final release of WPF, we expect the key concepts to remain the same. For details on how you can start working with WPF today, see the sidebar "Getting the Bits." 10. Advanced Graphics
Over the years, drawing functionality in Windows has improved steadily, though incrementally. Prior to WPF, GDI+ was the pinnacle of 2D graphics in Windows. GDI+ provides fully scalable drawing primitives including Bézier paths, cardinal splines, text, and various shapes. It supports a range of advanced gradient and texture fill styles. And it offers full support for partial transparency and anti-aliasing.
Enhanced Drawing Capabilities Based on just its basic drawing capabilities, WPF looks like a major step forward. It makes considerably better use of the underlying graphics hardware, so it performs much faster than GDI+. It offers as rich a set of drawing features, and brings a few new capabilities to the table. For example, while GDI+ allows arbitrary clip regions to be applied when drawing, WPF takes this feature even further: the opacity mask feature not only lets you clip output to any shape, but also lets you modify the opacity of any arbitrary content.
By Sam Gentile
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As I struggled with 5270, I looked around to see if others were having the same experience. Brandon LeBlanc is usually over-enthusiastic about general Vista builds but I see he has reached a lot of the same conclusions. I'll quote them as they speak for me as well, “I've been using the CTP alot this evening and I've come to the conclusion that as much as I want to, this build isn't ready for everyday use - at least for me and my hardware. In terms of my drivers for my hardware, this build moves completely back-wards. Before hand in builds such as 5231, all my drivers worked absolutely wonderfully. Build 5270 has not been nice to my hardware this time around. Especially with my sound and graphics.” “But UAP (User Account Protection) is something I wish I can just turn off and forget about. UAP is blocking my every move. Yes, I could log in as Administrator and do all my testing there but what's the point? I am testing Vista as Vista should be run by any average home user - never as an Administrator.”
I also don't understand the point of the way UAP is implemented. It also blocks my every move. You get an annoying dialog for almost everything you do and it is the wrong level of dialog as well. It talks about some DLL rather than a permission request. I've said it once, I'll say it again; if Microsoft wants to do Least Privilege right, they should like at how OS/X does it which raises a dialog box asking for an admin account. This coupled with all the driver issues makes this a build I can't really recommend to install. I mean, I don't want to be negative and I can't tell people to do but what's the point especially as WinFX Dec won't install on it. I wou | | |