DX11 gets the sack

theinquirer.net is reporting that MS has decided to cut DX11 mandatory support form Windows 7. While this might seems as a big thing I believe this will benefit the industry more than having DX11 locked in Win7 on release. The benefit this an bring is that DX11 should be available for Win Vista, just as DX10 should be available for Win XP. Granted that MS claims XP and DX10 are incompatible, and XP has lived for 2 DX releases already - 8 and 9, so it is time to move on, but it would be a mistake to make DX11 Win7 exclusive. People like to have choice and forcing people to upgrade is not a way to go - especially when u see falling market share and have good products from competition out there.
Another big question is when is it coming out... If 7 comes in 5 years... well nobody wants to wait that long for DX11, while on other hand if it comes next year... well it will be simply to early as the games are not even mature for DX10 yet and forcing everyone to upgrade is not a way to go.

Either way.. whenever a new DX comes it has to be open and not force users to upgrade to new software. It would have been much better incentive for gamers to upgrade to Vista if XP had DX10 support while at the same displaying the DX speed improvements in Vista over XP... then at least someone could say - buy Vista, it is faster than XP!

Free Vista Ultimate

It seems that Microsoft has decided to give away free copies of Vista ultimate and Office Ultimate amongst others (Only one can be selected per participant). Although it sounds very peachy and innocent, it does have a price. MS want to be able to monitor your every move on PC and your time to fill in some surveys. Although the monitoring is not that long - only 3 months... I am not that sure I am that excited about it... If I had a spare computer and I lived in US, I surely would go for this .... just boot up the PC every day or every other day for couple of hours... check you mail and watch some stuff online and after 3 months Vista Ultimate is yours... pretty sweet eh?
On the other hand if you do this on you main machine it might be a bit annoying knowing that someone is looking at everything you do on you computer... Not sure on how deep they are planing to look, but I would say unless you have backup PC to put this on... better stay away...

iPhone invention of the year??? WTF

Times Magazine has named iPhone invention of the year. It seems to me that they are bunch of caveman who have been smoking crack for last 20 years or so and recently have came out of the cave... I mean WTF have apple invented with iPhone. OK maybe multitouch sceen on a phone is new thing but what else? They have names 5 reasons for their decision:
1. the iPhone is pretty.
I can hardly see this as an invention and if at all a subjective one at that. They should have entered it in beauty contest for that...
2. It's touchy-feely.
I have never used one so it would be hard for me to judge, but I hardly see this a greatest inverntion... from what i have seen HTC Touch has similar touch interface and at the end of the day it is just an touch screen with some eye-candy and nothing more.
3. It will make other phones better.
Will in now? It might make some more competition in its class but there are enough good phones and better phones out there already and I can not see how iPhone is gonna make $100 phones better... Only thing I can see iPhone will bring to industry is wider touch screen adaptation. And I am not so sure it is that great of a thing. I hear u leave them in a sun and they are baked....
4. It's not a phone, it's a platform.
So and by this for some reason we should forget that MS Windows Mobile that has been around for much longer, and is less restrictive, in essence you can do so much more with it... and it works with bunch of phones not just one...
5. It is but the ghost of iPhones yet to come.
And how does future iPhones relate to this year and being the best invention of this year...

Is iPhone a bed phone? Probably not, but is in invention of a year? I can't see it being there..
All it did was take things that been around for some time, put some Apple polish on them and shipped them to mainstream... Could this have been phone of the year... probably but by no means invention of the year!

is iPod killing music sales?

The Inquirer has an interesting article about iPod killing industry. Although I did own a Walkman back in a day I can not agree with with writers opinion that Walkmans were so much better devices, even though he raises some good points.
One of which is:
"Sure, you could store a zillion albums on it, but you never will. Firstly you only possess a copy of Queen's Greatest Hits, The Best of Steps and James Blunt's Bluntastic! What are you going to store on the remaining 39.5GB of space?
Well. It's going to be stolen music, isn't it?"
Even though it has nothing to do with Walkman around which most of the article is based - this I believe is the best point he makes. Going by the estimates of my music collection an average album takes 75MB on my hard drive. so on an 80GB iPod or Zune you will be able to store round 1000 albums! That is very big number and if you bought 1 album a week it would take almost 20 years to get that kind of collection... legally at least.
Yes you might argue that large storage space can now be used for movies which have even less of a legal presence in digital market, or general storage or file transfers.
And even if you plan to use it as storage, what will you store on it? Sure it will be more media of some kind.
So in the end we have large amounts of storage on these devices with an urge to fill it up as soon as possible and for most people only way to do so is by illegal downloads that are easily available that legal options will have hard time catching up and competing with price.
On a little side note, iTunes Plus songs now going at same rate as normal ones should have come long time ago, not so much for DRM - free media but for being better quality and larger file sizes to help fill up those iPods with legal music and leave less room for P2P stuff...

Microsoft taking care of things..

I have been using Hotmail for some time and find it relatively good, but that is not the story.
Some time ago MS opened a promotional campaign/site 'site of the champions' . It had some mystery to it.. and I hoped it will be like the alternate reality thing MS had going in Jan 2007 if I remember correctly to launch Vista! Wonder how is the space trip going there... Anyhow. I signed up for the champion newsletter with my Hotmail account. Because I do not get much mail in that.. I tent to check my junk mailbox as well as sometimes filters are trying too hard and get some good stuff mixed in there... You might already see where this is going... Hotmail moved the mail straigt into Junk folder... like it should as it was to advertise 10% off to MS SideWinder mouse....
Good Job MS... Next up to get those msn newsletters in Junk by default..!!!
Sorry I got no screen of this.. already deleted the mail as a habit...

Intel's rebranding scheme

Some time ago Intel announced that starting next year they will rebrand all their processors. This is due to many different names that apparently can be confusing to the customer. They intended just to settle for Core / Core 2... and so on.
Now aparently do to many complaints particulary form OEM's they have abandoned that idea. In my opinion that is a good idea, otherwise how will I know if it dual or quad core? Even though Core branding will remain the same they have redisigned the Centrino stickers to have unified design and Viiv brand to be under Core branding with little Viiv under the Core logo...
Good for them IMO!! :P

Source

Branded World

I have written before about the computer market becoming more about the looks rather then performance for majority user here. This time I wanted to take a broader look about how we live in very branded world. Because of the recent announcement by Samsung and Giorgio Armani of their collaboration to release phones and TVs in future. This goes hand in hand with what Lg did some time ago by teaming up with Prada and also Motorola D&G branded V3. All these high design brands are considered to be luxury merchandise, but here is where the problem comes in. They might cost some more but they are not that great and only thing making these pfones bearable is the branding. Of course there are lot of people out there that will carry any weight just have the branded life but I never expected to have such a low standards form such brands. I really hope Armani one will have something more to stand out from crow than just the name.
Going off from tech perspective I really see that D&G as a brand is selling out big time. I might be living in the past or something but when did luxury merchandise needed extra advertising by putting big self logos on all merchandise?? Not only that but also that you see people wearing it on every corner... I suppose people are maybe earning more... but i find it hard to grasp that they would rather go sell to gen pop than keep up the image and stay in lux...
Either way... Life Is Worth Living Only By Brand

Hyperdistribution

So many can argue that current model of advertising on TV as well as the current distribution model is well out of date and this guy has some nice ideas how to turn all the downloaded content in to advertising money!

rest of the lecture can be found here - Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4, Part5, Part6, Part7.
I really hope this makes some headways and becomes a reality... would be happy to get my content sooner and ... well legally for that matter..

iPhone and clone mess....

Recently Meizu have unveiled the screenshots of its upcoming M8's GUI. They can be found on Meizu forums and a fair comparison can be found on Engadget. Here is what it comes down to... Since the iPhone has such a hype around it... every touch screen phone will pretty much be compared to it. I mean off course there are and will be knockoffs...
The phone making some headways is Meizu M8 and it looks very similar to the the iPhone... both from design and GUI perspective... As it was stated before somewhere (sorry don't remeber where) that all the touch screen phones will be very similar to the iPhone as it was arguably the first in class. by first in class I mean that all other touch screen phones have at least few buttons and most have also stylos for input, which I find useful if you want to cram more info on the screen. And here on a random off thought I can see another reason why I don't seems so fond of iPhone... Although it has big screen it is not efficient... well maybe for pensioners it is....
Anyhow... I wanted to take a look how come M8 user interface so much resemble iPhone... I mean they have had enough time to make it better or do they really believe that iPhone is such an awesome device that it can not be improved??
If you look at the post on Engadget you can see that there are big resemblances to the iPhone but at the same time I there is the question ... are there that many different choices for GUI at this kind of phone? If you think about it .. the are icons and as they need to be easy to understand they will look similar across different products if not for all else then for at least consistency... and then there are the message list in which you also can't be much different.... And what is up with the keyboard layout with M8?? where is the consistency... should have been qwerty or something?? I really hope they change that for the Western market...
And where does that leave us? Chat screen... they do look awfully similar and it might be just me but i still would prefer the Skype type of chat screen rather than it being on the sides.. and I must say that for some strange reason I find that to be only real similarity with the phones... But who am I to stop dull iPhone admirer from seeing the obvious...

Marketing bluff...

gotta love the marketing people...
making up products and then convincing us that we need them... and just putting all that bogus information into peoples heads...
All this just stirs me up... and because came out because of my friend..
the focus here is on the computer industry at the particular... as he was boasting about his new processor with these for cores and how he as speeds of 9.6 GHz processor and all... and I was like ... where the fuck did u get that number... they don't really make processors above 3 GHz any more...
so it turns out that all the hype about all these new multi core processors seems that people seem to think that you can just multiply cores and the frequency to get the total one... I mean so lame...
And all this hype about direct X 10 cards and all... all I have seen with dx10 mid-level cards says avoid them unless u go and get high end one... i mean the performance is like way below the expected... but hey... i guess people that care about that will know it and get what they want while the majority of users will just perish in land of uselessness...