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?
 |
| 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.
Wednesday, June 16, 2010
Join The Dumb Club
My neighbor uses "The Club" on his fancy Mustang; you know, that big orange piece of steel that is supposed to deter car thieves from picking yours?
What he hopes is that it makes my decade-old mini-van a better target for thieves, but it turns out he may be just attracting a better class of criminal to his own vehicle. Stephen J. Dubner tells us that professionals may actually seek out cars with The Club on them. D'oh!
One of these clubs would work better.
What he hopes is that it makes my decade-old mini-van a better target for thieves, but it turns out he may be just attracting a better class of criminal to his own vehicle. Stephen J. Dubner tells us that professionals may actually seek out cars with The Club on them. D'oh!
One of these clubs would work better.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Monday, June 14, 2010
Monday, June 7, 2010
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Irony-clad security
“Never attribute to stupidity what can be adequately explained by malice.”
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/if_you_see_some_1.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/if_you_see_some_1.html
One Laptop Per Child
This Year’s Model is $75:
http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/05/27/negreponte-one-laptop-per-child-is-now-a-75-android-tablet/
The lower the price, the goofier the look, it seems…
More nonsensical "Security Theater"
More small inconveniences for terrorists. Apparently the strategy is to nickel-and-dime these jokers until they pick a different world power to annoy:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/16200/pre_paid_burners_aid_terrorists_so_must_be_banned
Thursday, April 29, 2010
It connects to the POTS by magic, Jack!
I'm trying out the MagicJack device tonight. I ordered the free trial - "free" as in, "We don't charge your credit card so long as you send the device back to us within exactly 2,592,000 seconds... starting... 3-2-1, NOW!" (That's 30 days, for those of you that don't habla...)
It arrived within 3 days of ordering via First Class USPS, so no need to pay extra for faster shipping... Arrived inside my smallish mailbox in a 5" x 7" foam-packed envelope. The device itself being 3" x 2" and about an inch thick. A USB connection on one end, and a RJ-11 phone jack on t'other.
Plug it into a USB port, and it connects two flash drives: one appears to be the drivers and software needed to run the device - a softphone pops up automagically in a few seconds - and the other drive is probably storage dedicated to the device, perhaps storing your ID or assigned phone number, call history, whatever... although I suppose some of those data are stored on the MagicJack servers.
First time you use it, you enter your location details (required for the E911 service that the device provides), and then you pick a telephone number (no, you can't use your existing phone number.) My own town's exchanges were not available, but the next town over was, so no problem. But I understand that local numbers can be spotty in some areas - a bit like CompuServe or Quantum Link numbers back in the day... (You see kids, before the Internets, we used to have to DIAL in with MODEMs to BBSes with proprietary... oh, never mind...)
Afer the setup process of about 5 minutes, the first person I called was... ME... my POTS land line. I was slightly disappointed but not surprised to find that the call quality was not good... HOWEVER, as I said, "not surprised" because I happened to be downloading a large file at the time (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS if you must know...) So after I finished my download, and after I chased my kids off their YouTubes, streaming Pandoras, µtorrents and whatnot, I found the call quality to be quite good. At least as good as the real land-line, and this is on the slowest connection that DSL Extreme offers (testing at about 620kbps down and 320kbps up tonight.)
Voicemail kicks in if you happen to have no Magic in your Jacks at the moment, or you just let the phone ring four times. However, the voicemail thinks your 11-digit number is an "extension", and the system appears to be sitting on the East Coast, since that's the time being used to stamp the messages. Minor annoyance.
The device is completely portable; since it remembers your number, and contains all the software embedded in the device, you can plug it in to any Windows PC (XP, Vista, 7... I've only used it with Windows 7 so far...) or, allegedly, Mac ...if you happened to leave your stinkin' iPhone in a Beer Garden, that is... I can't imagine many Mac users will be attracted to something designed to save money.
One overall caveat... some folks who're not way into the whole capitalism thing or are really privacy-sensitive may become slightly annoyed that the software includes advertising that might use location data derived from number you dial as ad targeting information. The ad space is not that large, but I'm not sure I've seen all their tricks yet. Be aware.
All in all, so far, so good. But I'll wait until day 29 (or second 2,505,600, for those of you that DO habla...) to give AT&T the heave-ho... Stay tuned.
It arrived within 3 days of ordering via First Class USPS, so no need to pay extra for faster shipping... Arrived inside my smallish mailbox in a 5" x 7" foam-packed envelope. The device itself being 3" x 2" and about an inch thick. A USB connection on one end, and a RJ-11 phone jack on t'other.
Plug it into a USB port, and it connects two flash drives: one appears to be the drivers and software needed to run the device - a softphone pops up automagically in a few seconds - and the other drive is probably storage dedicated to the device, perhaps storing your ID or assigned phone number, call history, whatever... although I suppose some of those data are stored on the MagicJack servers.
First time you use it, you enter your location details (required for the E911 service that the device provides), and then you pick a telephone number (no, you can't use your existing phone number.) My own town's exchanges were not available, but the next town over was, so no problem. But I understand that local numbers can be spotty in some areas - a bit like CompuServe or Quantum Link numbers back in the day... (You see kids, before the Internets, we used to have to DIAL in with MODEMs to BBSes with proprietary... oh, never mind...)
Afer the setup process of about 5 minutes, the first person I called was... ME... my POTS land line. I was slightly disappointed but not surprised to find that the call quality was not good... HOWEVER, as I said, "not surprised" because I happened to be downloading a large file at the time (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS if you must know...) So after I finished my download, and after I chased my kids off their YouTubes, streaming Pandoras, µtorrents and whatnot, I found the call quality to be quite good. At least as good as the real land-line, and this is on the slowest connection that DSL Extreme offers (testing at about 620kbps down and 320kbps up tonight.)
Voicemail kicks in if you happen to have no Magic in your Jacks at the moment, or you just let the phone ring four times. However, the voicemail thinks your 11-digit number is an "extension", and the system appears to be sitting on the East Coast, since that's the time being used to stamp the messages. Minor annoyance.
The device is completely portable; since it remembers your number, and contains all the software embedded in the device, you can plug it in to any Windows PC (XP, Vista, 7... I've only used it with Windows 7 so far...) or, allegedly, Mac ...if you happened to leave your stinkin' iPhone in a Beer Garden, that is... I can't imagine many Mac users will be attracted to something designed to save money.
One overall caveat... some folks who're not way into the whole capitalism thing or are really privacy-sensitive may become slightly annoyed that the software includes advertising that might use location data derived from number you dial as ad targeting information. The ad space is not that large, but I'm not sure I've seen all their tricks yet. Be aware.
All in all, so far, so good. But I'll wait until day 29 (or second 2,505,600, for those of you that DO habla...) to give AT&T the heave-ho... Stay tuned.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
"I guess irony can be pretty ironic sometimes..."
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