Friday, July 9, 2010
Channel 9 drinking game
Take a drink each time Mark says "memory" or "RAM", or starts a sentence with "So...". Take another drink each time Charles says, "excellent" or "interesting".
Monday, June 28, 2010
Why is this man smiling?
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| What in the world could Frank Shaw, head of P.R. for Microsoft, have to smile about? |
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Windows Live Photo Gallery Beta (Wave 4)
Windows Live Essentials (wave 4) beta was just released today and I'm trying Photo Gallery first. The potential looks very good and many features work well. There are some performance issues which I expect will be worked out before final release.
The feature I'm most excited about is Photo Tagging - allowing you to manually or automatically (based on facial recognition) tag people in photos. The manual tagging works very well and quickly; when a photo is selected, the program finds any faces, and asks "Who is this?" for each. A pull-down list will show anyone you've previously tagged, and your list of contacts, and allowing you to add new people. It takes about two or three seconds to tag someone from your list in a new photo.
The automatic tagging hasn't worked so well yet. I'm not sure if it just needs more information - more time to correllate all the facial data - but for my photos, it only seems to identify a very limited few photos for each person. IOW, although I may have hundreds of photos of someone, it only finds and offers to tag two or three at a time.
I clicked the "Batch People Tag" button, which I assumed would look through ALL my photos, recognize faces in each one, and then offer me the choices of how (or who?) to tag. Unfortunately, this just caused the program to scan for "tag suggestions" endlessly; I got the spinning blue "wait tire" (as in, "I'm tired of waiting) for well over an hour before I gave up on it. I couldn't seem to get it to scan a subset of photos either... So, that's perfomance issue #1.
Performance issue #2 is more inexplicable. This occurred when I plugged in my camera and tried to use Photo Gallery to import photos for the first time, instead of using the Windows 7 import wizard as usual. It took at least 10 times longer to import the photos and video. That's a major failure, but at least I can work around it by using the built-in import, or just drag and drop.
Still, I'm so very impressed with just this one program of the WLE suite, I can't wait to try the other features like AutoMovie, and other programs, like the new Sync (combining the former Mesh Beta with Live Sync, I understand).
The bits are here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta
The feature I'm most excited about is Photo Tagging - allowing you to manually or automatically (based on facial recognition) tag people in photos. The manual tagging works very well and quickly; when a photo is selected, the program finds any faces, and asks "Who is this?" for each. A pull-down list will show anyone you've previously tagged, and your list of contacts, and allowing you to add new people. It takes about two or three seconds to tag someone from your list in a new photo.
The automatic tagging hasn't worked so well yet. I'm not sure if it just needs more information - more time to correllate all the facial data - but for my photos, it only seems to identify a very limited few photos for each person. IOW, although I may have hundreds of photos of someone, it only finds and offers to tag two or three at a time.
I clicked the "Batch People Tag" button, which I assumed would look through ALL my photos, recognize faces in each one, and then offer me the choices of how (or who?) to tag. Unfortunately, this just caused the program to scan for "tag suggestions" endlessly; I got the spinning blue "wait tire" (as in, "I'm tired of waiting) for well over an hour before I gave up on it. I couldn't seem to get it to scan a subset of photos either... So, that's perfomance issue #1.
Performance issue #2 is more inexplicable. This occurred when I plugged in my camera and tried to use Photo Gallery to import photos for the first time, instead of using the Windows 7 import wizard as usual. It took at least 10 times longer to import the photos and video. That's a major failure, but at least I can work around it by using the built-in import, or just drag and drop.
Still, I'm so very impressed with just this one program of the WLE suite, I can't wait to try the other features like AutoMovie, and other programs, like the new Sync (combining the former Mesh Beta with Live Sync, I understand).
The bits are here: http://explore.live.com/windows-live-essentials-beta
Monday, June 21, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Buffett to the very rich: "Spread your luck around!"
Warren Buffett, and Bill & Melinda Gates, are asking the extremely wealthy to pledge to give the majority of their wealth to charity.
The announcement on Charlie Rose.
Billionaires, please click here.
"My luck was accentuated by my living in a market system that sometimes produces distorted results, though overall it serves our country well. I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate's distribution of long straws is wildly capricious."
The announcement on Charlie Rose.
Billionaires, please click here.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Is there anything the Chinese can't knock-off?
I'm fairly certain that Wile E. Coyote thought of this first.
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