MS Touchscreen laptop demo

I have to say that I’m quite intrigued about the products leaking out of Microsoft’s Live Labs of late. First I got a look at Surface that yet to be released $10,000 (not a typo) touch screen table computer aimed at the business market. Then I got a chance to see photosynth at the NYS geospatial summit now they are showing off a demo of a laptop with a multi-touch display. This was just a matter of time. Looking at all three products I can’t help but thinking that I’ve seen this stuff before. First off Surface looks a lot like a gigantic table iPhone (at least the interface). Even the way the album covers were shuffling around looked a lot like cover flow to me. The zooming being done both there and in the laptop demo also looked a lot like the iPhone zooming. Photosynth looks a lot like some of the stuff demoed in Core Animation and to some degree time machine. I know its different but that was what I thought about when I first saw it. I find it interesting also that Microsoft is releasing info on all these projects now before the iPhone releases. Its as if they said hey the iPhone is cool but look what we’ve been cooking up in our labs. I think the folks in Redmond is realizing that once the iPhone has been unleashed on the World there is no turning back… people will expect this type of interface on their computers too. I can definitely see Apple plowing right ahead and incorporating the same/similar multi-touch technology that’s in the iPhone now into their computer products. Perhaps the iPhone was just a test to see how the masses would react. New multi-touch laptop from Apple in the Fall perhaps? Hey maybe Microsoft will beat them to the punch

Dead Board and all that

It was an ordinary Friday afternoon and I sat down to do yet another hard days work. Our consultant was waiting on a file or two from me. I wanted to get it done before I left for the day. I’ve been working on the file since mid-morning and was getting ready to finish up and email it when my computer froze and became unresponsive. One half of one of my monitor was pinkish I should have taken a picture but had left my camera at home. I thought oh that’s odd its never froze like this before… guess the computer just crashed so I rebooted since I had no choice in the matter. I rebooted, nothing, the lights were on but nobody was home. Black screen not even a blue one. I called the IT guru downstairs she came up and tried to reboot. Nahdah, she unplugged many of the devices and rebooted…nothing. I took the computer downstairs she tried it down there still nothing. She said I’ll bet that its the motherboard. I took it to the IT tech few doors down he did some troubleshooting but all he had was trouble no response from that tower of blackness. I figured after a minute or so that the beast would not be working for me today so I was trying to locate the new laptop. My Boss had it out in the field. The laptop had given him the blue screen of death. I figured that there was nothing more to do and simply wrapped up a few phone calls and went home sulking, wondering if it was the hard drive and what this would mean to some files that I hadn’t saved to the server yet. Today I heard from the folks who are fixing it that the motherboard went, died, kapooie, gone… done for. Why? I didn’t do anything special to it, it just up and died. I’ve been using, fixing, and doing all sort of wonderful stuff with PCs for years mainly Dells never had one died on me. This is a HP machine and fairly new at that and the board is gone. I’m staring to get worried that my colleague’s machine is next in line for said motherboard failure since she has the same exact model. Perhaps I got the bad one out of a million who knows. I’m told the beast will be back tomorrow or Thursday. At least I’ll have a new motherboard. Hope nothing else goes wrong anytime soon before I get a new one. Perhaps the next time I’ll be a pisser and insist on getting a Dell. Maybe I’ll raise some real stink and demand a Mac Pro yeah that would go over well until then its me and the little laptop that hasn’t given me the blue screen of death yet although it boots up really slowly for some odd reason.

Hard Drive Reformatting Time

I spent the better part of my afternoon today reformatting the hard drive of my PC at work. Although I haven’t reformatted a HD in a year or so since I don’t have a Windows PC at home anymore I was surprised at how much I remembered. It wasn’t as daunting as I thought it would be and everything worked like a charm. Its one of the easier reformats I’ve done mainly because the HP computers came with a restore CD that you stick in and it walks you through the process. The only thing that I didn’t like was that the utility only allow you 2 hard drive partition choices Fat 32 @32xxx or NTFS at 76xxx my HD was 80 GB and I wanted three smaller partitions. I created the three partitions and finished up the rest in the Windows XP environment. I made sure that I got that antivirus on there really quickly in fact I got some paranoid-about this I disabled my network card and forgot to enable it after I installed the Novell Client which meant that I couldn’t find any of my servers. I figured it out soon enough and now all seems to be well. Tomorrow I have to reinstall the rest of my software oh all the work… put in the CDs wait for Windows to fatten up my registry again. I am amazed at how much faster the system is without all those programs on it though…

Zune Video Walkthrouh

I’m an iPod owner so when I heard about Microsoft’s upcoming Zune and saw the photos I wasn’t all that excited. Basically, being the visual eye-candy sort, the Zune did not appeal to my visual side. However, I do have to admit that the screen size is quite appealing and the fact that it comes with a FM radio integrated is pretty sweet. Turns out that Engadget has a walkthrough of the interface. Here is a nice Quicktime H.264 video. The community features are also quite slick. Apple could take a few cues from the Zune functionalities although they still have them beat for eye-candy. There is talk of a new iPod widescreen coming out for December but they are so tight lipped in Curpetino who knows what we’ll see. Its nice to hear though that Uncle Steve has given away the new 2G Shuffle to all the Apple employees. Not a bad marketing idea they’ll be showing them off all over the place and next thing you know the kids will want a couple for Christmas. Gosh iPods are becoming like candy nowadays albeit $79 worth.

Those hot laptops

I’m getting a bit annoyed with all the complaints about hot laptops specifically MacBooks of late. It seems that everywhere I turn another thing is cooking in/on the Macbooks. One guy even suggested that you could cooked up some egg on the bottom of a MacBook. (BTW this is a joke) and I don’t think the eggs would taste well anyway with the plastic and all. So how hot is the Macbook anyway? The folks at Krische onLine did a little temperature test where they tested the temperature of the MacBook vs. a Dell D620 whilst running a DVD (the Hills of Eyes) for 1.5 hrs. The results might surprise you but the gist of it is that they found out that the MacBook wasn’t much hotter than the Dell. If you keep in mind that the Dell D620 Dell has built in cooling fans while the MacBooks do not. Makes me wonder why the D620 runs so hot with the cooling fans and why Apple left out cooling fans out of the Macbooks. Be sure to check out the graphs and details. After a visit to the local store I noticed that my fingers did not burn anymore than with any of the other laptops in the store and these were running well before I got there. Granted I wasn’t running a DVD though. I didn’t notice any scraping paint and other worn out marks on these store demo models either.

What’s with these laptops nowadays

It seems that everyday I open up my favorite blogs I hear yet another story of laptop discoloration
melting magsafe connectors, odd noises, and other ills. Most of these were related to the MacBooks & MacBook Pros but now I just read about an alleged Dell laptop exploding at a conference in Japan (Dell is currently investigating). I can understand the Macbook issues its Apple’s first debut of Intel based laptops and perhaps they didn’t think about a few things before rushing out the first batch. Dell on the other hand have been making Intel-based laptops for a while so what’s up with that. If you don’t think this is a big deal imagine if you were on a plane and this happens… Bad news all the way around. Hope that these two companies figure out what’s causing these funky issues and fix them. Until then I think I’ll stick to my desktop until the next edition of the MB/MB Pro line particularly.

Bypass the E-go laptops please

A company called Tulip has just expanded it’s line of E-go laptops to include a series with prices more accessible to normal folks. Oh I probably shouldn’t use the word normal coz which normal person would pay $4,000 for a laptop shaped like a first generation iBook with standard specs. actually I think it looks like a make-up carrying case. The only thing I like about it that it has an handle and the skins are nice. Although If I paid this much for a laptop I would want it in a laptop bag of some kind. The main selling point of the laptop is that it is customizable with dozens of skins. Again I like the skins but is the 4K worth all that? I rather get a regular laptop and have one of my artist friends do their magic on it if I was that desperate. E-go’s motto, displayed on the company’s web site with no apparent irony: “It’s all about the inside.” If you really believe that, I suspect like me you won’t wasting your $4,000 on a zebra-fur, toilet-seat-shaped laptop (though it does also come in basic black if you really can’t resist). Gosh with 4K you can get yourself a nice new MacBook Pro Duo and a Mac Mini Duo for Mom or grandma plus still have enough left over for software. Rotten rich or not who the heck pays this kind of money for form without all that much function?