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I’m back, and just posting quick update on little “big” things that are going on with me. Filing this one under “Random Thoughts”, FYI.

Microsoft announced officially last week that they are discontinuing Microsoft Money product. This Really saddened me, frankly. Something in the way they presented it made me especially sad. I was always expecting MS-Money desktop software to die, and to be replaced by cloud based solution (like Quicken.com and MSN Money). But instead of telling us to use Web solution, they just told us to “Go Away”…

Worse yet, I have been buying Home & Business edition for many years, to manage our small business, using their wonderful inventory management tools and invoices, etc. What replaces this? Nothing, really… Only super expensive and complex accounting packages, which I really hate (and don’t need for our tiny business)!!!

Ok, onto next rant… iPhone 3.0 came out, just installed it today. Where is my Video!? I really expected them to provide some video capture support for older handsets. Seriously, I don’t need fancy video editing in-phone, but I should be able to capture low-resolution clips!!! Phones with far lesser CPU were able to do this easily for years – Apple, I didn’t expect this level of incompetence, seriously! I am looking forward to finally be alerted if someone is trying to IM me on Yahoo Messenger or ICQ, etc. I hope it works, as finally latest OS should allow it, but don’t know which Apps implemented this yet… I’ll report on this later.

Final rant of the evening is about email and Twitter. I had a case in the office recently, someone replying to an email with “screenshot” of the issue. All he wrote was “I will check into it”. This resulted in 500KB+ email being blasted to hundreds of people by poor Microsoft Exchange server (and poor people who have to keep cleaning their mailboxes). Ridiculous! We need a better email system, and at least publically Twitter does some of that. Needs more evolution, but exchange Must Die and quick. We must figure out a better way to communicate, both inside the Enterprise and over public Internet. Well, I can blog my ideas on this in the future, if there is interest (hint, post comments!)

There, Rant Done! I’ll try to come back to regular insightful blogging in the near future

Meanwhile, I leave you with MORE RANT! Windows 7 64 Bit Release Candidate STILL doesn’t install on my main PC. No love for me, very sad… Thinking of replacing my Motherboard or something, but it’s annoying to go through all that trouble and expense…

I have decided to have a few posts focused on discussing what’s next in the world of computing. The idea is to look at progression thus far, and see what makes sense to be researched and improved next. This simple formula can be surprisingly effective, due to collective “creationism” that defines computing industry. In other words – we create our future (just like in real life) by focusing research efforts (aka: wishes) on particular things. Thus, we can foresee now what will the future bring, simply by assuming that our research pans out.

And now, the actual point – For a while now, everyone agreed that a lot of our collective progress was often hindered by the infamous “backwards compatibility” syndrome. The base dilemma thus, for engineers not just of operating systems, but of many core technologies, was “Do We Make It Faster and Break old software” or “Do We Keep it slow, but not Break anything”. Traditionally, Microsoft preferred not to simulate old software standards fully, probably because it would end up being too slow to properly run older software.

But now, with faster CPU’s and built-in virtualization on chip level, they can finally move forward and just run that old Windows XP stuff inside “Virtual PC” – a full computer simulator running a “real” copy of Windows XP SP3. This “magic” finally allows the developers to Revolutionize, as we often like to do.

This magic comes to Windows 7 officially now, though I used Virtual PC in Vista as you all know, happily running Windows 98 and some 1995 software in it, without a hitch. Even in Windows 7 it feels like an “add-on” to me, hopefully in Windows 8 and beyond, the engineers will fully realize the potential “simulating” past, and allow themselves to Rethink every layer of the Operating System! What will result is prettier, faster, better technology. But where would we want to take it? Stay tuned, we’ll discuss that in the next parts of the series!

[via Within Windows blog]

This is amazing demonstration by Microsoft Office Labs, what they called vision for 2019.

For me, the main focus in this demo is on computing interfaces. Notice how many different ways of interacting with the “computer” are shown. Amazing ones are on little cards/devices, that “sense” the motion of the device and respond by showing you different parts of the content, zooming in, etc. Actually, this is something easy to develop on the smart phone today, though I only know of very few apps that do that.

Interfaces are something I am always excited about discussing and improving. Also, you can’t make this vision a reality without a ubiquitous network availability and backed by some Cloud infrastructure somewhere. And we all know how Hot the Cloud discussion is these days. For more more complete story around this video, check out the blog where I found it.

[via i started something]

I think as any responsible techie, I downloaded both 32 Bit and 64 Bit editions of Windows 7 beta, the first day it came out (naturally). Got 2 keys also (one for each edition).

Shortly thereafter I installed 32 Bit version, on 2 very different computers. One was old Athlon 64 processor, 1gb ram, barely alive computer that my daughter insists that she still likes. The other was good Quad Core system. The new optimizations really shine, as old Athlon 64 computer felt as snappy as the new shiny quad core system! My daughter loves it now, and discovered several favorite features already, like that rotating desktop wallpaper (kitties galore!) and the sticky notes on the desktop. Most software she tried so far, worked properly and performed very well! We hit few minor bugs, but it’s beta after all, so we promptly reported them.

In light of this positive experience, I finally got the courage to install 64 Bit version of Win 7 on my Primary computer with 4gb of Ram, as dual boot, of course. However, most strange thing happened, sad thing, annoying thing or even Disturbing thing.

DVD with 64 Bit Windows 7 booted fine, though seem to take longer to reach first screen than I remembered on other installations. And from there, it only got worse. Win 7 Setup took 10 or 15 minutes between each “installation” step, and on screens where I had to type something, I would press a button and see it reflected on screen only 20 seconds later.

7 Hours later, it was still on First install step!!! Though, it wasn’t stuck, you could see percentages going up, I think it was as high as 80% by then, so I left it running overnight.

In the morning, the whole computer was completely “Off”, for whatever reason. Trying to boot into Win 7 (which now appeared on dual-boot menu), did nothing, just black screen. Safe startup mode was no help, hanging at some driver that didn’t seem related to my hardware…

I didn’t give up, wiped that partition and tried again… After second time, I gave up.

Strangest thing is that I don’t even know how to report this to MS. They have crashes and Feedback reported from within Windows 7, everywhere. But what if it is a case like mine, where Installer doesn’t even work?! I wonder if there is some log somewhere.

Another strange thing is that Windows Vista and Ubuntu work flawlessly on that same computer. Go figure…

But, it’s beta, so I am not holding it against folks at Redmond. I’ll keep trying to figure out how to submit a Setup log or something like it, in hopes that they will find time to analyze this issue.

Final words on Windows 7 – I think it is critical that in these hard times Microsoft prices Windows 7 properly. It should be cheaper, have LESS “editions” and allow for multi-PC license for home (like Mac does!).

EDITORS NOTE: I used a little-known hack in WordPress 3.1 to actually adjust a time stamp of this post, originally posted December 24, 2009 – to timewarp into December 2008. Enjoy!

Wow, so  much has happened this past year, that I find it virtually impossible to even try and predict next year. But, I guess it’s somewhat of a tradition on this blog, so I will give it a go:

• Since this is the great year when Gaming finally “took off”, I want to start things by reflecting on PlayStation 3 (R.I.P). Most people say that the introduction of Nintendo’s Wii HD is what killed it, but I felt the troubles brew right from the start, with their strange bet on now-dying Blu-ray format, and the problematic design of Cell CPU. Ironically, the competition now finally ripping the big rewards, especially from offering all those Excellent and Free Ad-Supported games this holiday season.
• Speaking of home entertainment – I believe Microsoft should put even more focus there. After taking such a big beating this year with the dramatic decline of Office and Windows market share, they really need to push their new Microsoft Home product, and get more builders signed up to having homes come with Windows preinstalled. Yea “Your Home with Windows!” would have been such a great pun, shame their silly marketing named it “Microsoft Home – Ultimate Edition”, instead of plain “Windows”. Their Entertainment unit is already the most profitable in the company, keeping the whole thing “afloat”, so it’s only natural…
• The Operating System wars are only likely to intensify in 2010. The introduction of Google OS this year, especially with it running so many Windows Apps faster than Windows, changed so much. I predict that in addition to further growing their already dominant market share on the ever so popular Netbooks, Google will finally build and market their custom business Client appliance (aka: PC). iNetBook (seriously Apple, creativity much!?) is a serious contender here, but their insistence on charging premium even over Windows 7 netbooks, is keeping their market-share still around 35%.
• I am still shocked and saddened by the recent demise of nVidia, as are many of you, I am sure. It’s a shame too, I always loved their products. So the big question now remains whether AMD can survive and even thrive, just on their excellent line of embedded chipsets for Netbooks, with those amazing 3D capabilities. Intel’s offering is finally on-par, now that they woke up to the importance of proper 3D and 2D graphic acceleration. I almost wish that AMD rename themselves to ATI, a brand that should make it easier to compete with Intel, in this great Brand war that we got now.
• Who could have predicted that Adobe would buy Sun this year, certainly not I… Or that they would so quickly release this amazing business cloud platform offering, integrating fully complete high-performance backend, with the amazing and visually appealing front-end framework? This only deepened the many troubles at Oracle, and I don’t see them coming back with anything next year either. Makes me wonder if Larry is asleep at the wheel, or just planning to abandon rapidly sinking ship soon? On a personal note, I was saddened at first to hear that Adobe chose to abandon Sun’s Java, in favor of ActionScript 5 standardization on client and server. I am a long time Java fan, but I guess I’ll have to get over it.
• In other personal news – I am still torn about exact specs of my “New Year Gift” for myself. I got my eye on that 14″ Dell beauty, the half a pound thin netbook, with desk-projected keyboard (though I will mostly use on-screen keyboard and speech input). Even though I am a Microsoft shareholder, I can’t seem to justify the “Windows 7″ premium for choosing that OS. In fact, I have a suggestion for Microsoft, why not simplify the tough choice consumers are faced when they walk into Best Buy today? Instead of them having to choose between Google OS, Mac, Windows 7 or Ubuntu, just give them “Windows 7+” option (Just don’t call it ULTIMATE!!). Beat Googlers at their own game, and pre-install the Open Source Google OS, alongside Windows 7, tightly integrating the two. That should also make it feasible to justify your price premium!
• Finally, I was as excited as many of you to hear that they are taking pre-orders on Robo-girl this holiday season. Though the thought of never cleaning, washing dishes or doing laundry again is very appealing, I found the price to be a deterrent for me. I think I’ll give it another year to mature, and for the price to come down a bit. Of course, I am afraid to ask what my wife thinks about the idea…

To conclude, I want to remind everyone the gloom and doom atmosphere of a year ago. Back in 2008 when all you heard around the holiday time was Recession, Depression, etc. Oh, how quickly we tend to forget, and how readily we spent a record 15% more year-over-year, this holiday season. Now that economy is booming, I suppose it is only natural for people to “overcompensate” for such a dismal holiday last year…

PS: More Editors Note – Kudos to Matt and the team at Automattic. This new Time-warp feature you guys put together, is really amazing. At first I tried accessing a post from 1988, just for the fun of it, but it was coming in too slow over 2400 kbps modem..

Happy Holidays and Have Fun!