Doug Stephen on Tumblr
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thanks for sharing this calming file
gbattle sez:
Namaste interwebz.
I might set this as my new incoming text sound on my iPhone.
Oddly, I miss this.
I… didn’t even remember that this sound existed.
Sent shivers up my spine.
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I wish Windows looked like this→ 
This is not a mockup by Microsoft, but rather a post over at The Verge by user Sputnik8 of his vision for Windows.The mockup reminds me not of Metro, but rather a great deal of Metro’s precursor and the old Zune UI, which I believe was internally referred to as Iris.
I have always loved Iris, and I always wished that it had carried over in to more of Microsoft’s products. In fact, if Windows 8 had adopted Iris while Windows Phone had adopted Metro (in the same way that OS X uses Aqua while iOS uses whatever its UI is called), I think they would be in a much better place.
I’m a huge fan of minimal space and typography-focused design, so this definitely hits a sweet spot for me. Segoe has always been a type face that plays best when given a lot of room to breathe, and the uncluttered, heavily padded, and undecorated presentation of the UI here feels really fresh and modern.
Too bad that this has nothing to do with Microsoft. I would love to see something like this.
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Google Is Making A Killing Off Of Android — And By “Google” I Actually Mean “Microsoft”
Hey Google – we are the 70% #anotherandroidlicensebit.ly/w32SIE
— Frank X. Shaw (@fxshaw) January 12, 20121. Gotta love Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s head of corporate comm. (Unless you’re Google, of course.)
2. It’s actually over 70%.
3. Holy shit, over 70% of the Android phones sold in the U.S. are now contributing money to Microsoft’s pockets. Microsoft, not Google.
4. Given the volume we’re talking about, Microsoft has to be making more from Android than from Windows Phone, right?
LG is the newest member of Microsoft’s patent protection posse. The most notable hold out? Motorola, which, of course, is in the process of being acquired by Google. That’s one way to avoid the fee, I guess.
Steve Ballmer is getting a lot of love today (the press builds you up to knock you down to build you up again). Whether you think it’s evil or evil genius on Microsoft’s part to pursue these agreements, Ballmer was right: Android is not free, you have to pay Microsoft to use it.
I wonder if there’s a point where this stops making sense for certain OEMs? Certainly, it makes sense for Samsung, which is doing very well with Android and is likely happy to avoid anymore patent lawsuit headaches lingering over them. But what about the others not doing so hot? If they’re going to pay Microsoft, shouldn’t they at least get something out of it? Like say, a license for Windows Phone? These are the questions.
The other aspect that isn’t talked about a lot: Chrome OS. It’s another free Google OS that you pay Microsoft to use.
Well, siphoning all of the money out of Android and pumping it in to Windows Phone 7 is certainly one way to crush Google’s mobile arm.
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Official Google Blog: When patents attack Android We’re not naive; technology is a tough and ever-changing industry and we work very hard to stay focused on our own business and make better products. But in this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we’re determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it.
Well, then, maybe you should have taken that god damn auction a little more seriously
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Microsoft Herps some Derp about some Open Source HerpDerp and Just Generally Looks Like A Clown Car Full of Assholes A brief introduction on
dubstep productioncomputer graphicsComputer graphics is hard. It’s a field that’s steeped in esoteric math and bit-mangling voo-doo. I won’t pretend to be an expert on the subject by any means. Most people will never have to deal with this stuff, because they either
a.) Don’t need to deal with it, or
b.) Someone has provided them with the tools to abstract away all the scary stuffIn effect, graphics programming has little do with with being an artist and a lot to do with being really good at math and also understanding your physical hardware really really well.
Seriously, what?
All modern computers have some sort of hardware whose job is to handle graphics. Like I said before, graphics is effectively math, and it just so happens that the math required to do graphics well is kinda hard for a computer to handle quickly. So almost all modern computers have a piece of hardware that is dedicated to doing nothing but graphics. This piece of hardware is what you plug your monitor in to, and it’s called a graphics card. On a lower-end, standard consumer computer this is often called “integrated graphics” or “shared video memory” and it basically means that there’s a cheap graphic processor close to the regular processor on your computer, and the instructions that make up the math that has to be done gets stored in your memory (RAM) while its waiting for the processor to deal with whatever it’s doing at the moment. Higher end computers will sport what is known as dedicated graphics cards. These cards have their own processor, their own RAM, and typically a metric fuckton of specialized processors attached to them1 that are tuned to handling the type of math that is required for graphics processing. The graphics card handles the weird math, does it really quickly, and it uses the math to figure out which pixel needs to be which color and when, but for all of the pixels on your monitor. At more or less the same time.
Since the graphics card is its own piece of hardware, that means you have to communicate with it through a “driver”. And there are two main players in the “talking to graphics cards drivers” right now: OpenGL and DirectX. These are basically big hunks of code that other programmers can use in their own code that lets them talk to graphics cards.
The big difference between the two is that OpenGL is, well, open to everyone to use on any operating system… and DirectX is a Microsoft product, made for Windows.
OpenGL makes me think of PB&J sandwiches, for some reason
The big deal here is that WebGL is basically OpenGL in your browser. Web developers can write code that gets sent to your graphics card, which means that developers could potentially render impressive, interactive animations directly in your browser. Flash has been doing something similar to this for a while, though it wasn’t using your graphics card until very recently. Flash was having the regular processor do the work, which is why a lot of Flash sites could cause crashes and slow your computer down.
If you use Google Chrome, you can check out a neat example of what I’m talking about here.
Hopefully this is enough background to make the click-through article more sensible if it wasn’t before.
Because the take-away is this: Microsoft is, once again, full of shit.
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Everything in computers is either mathematics or moving something from one place to another. So where as you can think of your regular processor as “general purpose” in that it can do addition, multiplication, moving, etc. all moderately well, these specialized processors can only do one thing — like maybe they can only add — but they’re fucking fast as balls since they don’t ever have to worry about being good at anything else. ↩
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Wherein I Take To Tumblr So As To Disagree With A Fellow Mac Enthusiast
The following article is full of what the kids like to call “whack”:
Not long ago, at the mall, I found myself standing outside of the Microsoft Store which is strategically built directly across from the Apple Store. I stood at the window and watched the people playing in front of the Kinect demo. I made a point to look mostly at the players and the strange sort of pantomime they were doing as they manipulated the action on screen. One did not have to see the screen, that pantomime told the story. Pick up the ball from the rack, bring it up to the chest, swing it back behind, swing it forward and release. Roll. Strike! Bowling.
It really is an amazing and magical technology. Think about it. You are using natural real-world movement to mimic an action and it is happening in real time on a screen in front of you. No special gloves, wands, cables. Nothing. Just you. You pretend. It makes it real.
The problem is that Microsoft does not, can not, see it that way (and perhaps never will). They invented a device from the future yet could not untether themselves from the past and present. They could not see the potential to change the world with this device because they are too wedded to the idea that it had to work with the present. So, instead, it is just a toy, nothing more.
I do not deny that Microsoft lacked the ability and the foresight to properly estimate what the Kinect could do and/or could have been. And yes, it’s true that Microsoft could have, potentially, rolled the Kinect out as a completely different product. They could have been wizards.I’m no Microsoft fanboy by any account, but saying that the Kinect has become anything less than incredible outside of video games is silly (Sorry, Patrick. I do love your blog.)
If a lie of omission can be a sin, then a truth through omission can be a mitzvah.
What I mean to say is that in spite of the Kinect’s origins as a video game peripheral, it has become so much more so than that and it has done so because Microsoft has allowed it to. When the Kinect got hacked in to oblivion, Microsoft consciously chose to take no action against the people who did so and even released a non-Xbox SDK of their own for developers to toy with. Reiterating, I won’t deny that they were short-sighted in estimating the capabilities of the device, but they certainly haven’t done ANYTHING that speaks to keeping the device caged as a gimmick. The future and the potential of the Kinect has been delivered to developers and hackers the world over, and any failure to innovate is now quite squarely outside of Microsoft’s hands.
And quite frankly, I’d rather have it in somebody else’s hands, because this level of innovation clearly isn’t in Microsoft’s wheelhouse anymore.
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15 Candidates to Replace Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO [PC World]
