January 30, 2007
Vista is here. After more than five years of development, over 50 million lines of software code, a $6 billion investment and a few headaches, Microsoft’s Windows Vista finally reaches consumers tonight at midnight. The new 2007 Office is also being rolled out.
In the next 3 months, Microsoft expects to sell five times as many copies of Vista compared with the sales of Windows 95 in the same period after its launch.
Happily the introduction has not been packaged as a Hollywood celebrity carnival. But the subdued introduction does not diminish real advances. Vista coverage is available from:
PC Magazine put Windows Vista Laptops to the Test:
We also got our hands on three Vista-equipped laptops, namely the HP Pavilion dv9000t, Gateway NX570X, and Dell Inspiron E1705. In addition, we asked each manufacturer to provide a second hard drive with Windows XP, so we could swap out the drives and thus examine performance under each Windows version with our own benchmarks. Overall, we found that Vista is slower on specific tasks like 3D gaming scenarios and scripts from an industry-standard photo editor. The slowdown could be a result of the combination of early code, premature graphics drivers, and, perhaps, the resource intensive, Aero-dynamic GUI.
There are, of course, other tasks where Vista does live up to the hype, such as video-encoding tasks that take advantage of higher-end, dual core CPUs. We even nixed the rumor that Vista’s interface would drain more battery life. So there are performance advantages to look forward to besides just a pretty interface.
We were lucky enough to get laptops that offered graphics solutions from three of the major graphics chipset providers: nVidia, Intel, and AMD/ATI. These are midrange-to-entry-level graphics chipsets, at best. We also downloaded the latest drivers on the PC maker’s site. In a nutshell, nVidia (which had its GeForce Go 7600 graphics card in the dv9000t) and Intel (whose integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950/945 solution can be found in the NX570X) managed to keep 3D performance close with XP, whereas the ATI chipset on the E1705 (Vista) is still in need of another driver update.
Engadget asks, Why should you be left out of those three months of free T-Mobile WiFi just because you don’t kowtow to The Man?
Luckily for you, a simple bit of googling will quickly reveal methods for swapping the user agent on most major browsers, and once you enter the string “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)” you should be all good to go. Then all you’ll need to do is train your browser to http://hotspot.t-mobile.com/vista/ and start browsing those internets. Tell ‘em Engadget sent ya’, they’ll understand.
|
unmediated.av:
The Weekly Show
drawing from extrastruggle.
We've been having a back channel conversation amongst the trackers at unmediated about how/whether to update the way in which we aggregate, present, and make useable the content on the site, in light of all the various aggregators, digg and its clones, and role model group blog sites that we all consume/use/hate/love. Since we all primarily support open media movements and the freedom of bits and so forth, and with all of us being busy with our primary projects, we are looking for ways to make getting content on the site easier and more streamlined, while making it obvious that we are presenting other sources content. With the availability of open API's for just about any type of media aggegration literally getting past the saturation point, and mashups taking every possible form, we are wondering, is it time to take a step back, or a step forward with how/what we do at umediated? In the course of my surfing today, i found this new site, Boxxet Which just might be the straw that breaks the camel's back in how we all perceive the current mix and match nature of the web as it now stands. What's different about Boxxet from other aggregators and mashups like the newest entry popurls, (which aggregates digg, slashdot, reddit, newsvine, tailrank, and flickr) is that Boxxet is a Website generator. Thats right, just pop in all the urls u want to aggregate (and WHAT from them) choose how u want to format it, plug in the url that u want it to be accessed at... and whammo: Your own site with everyone elses content, and all thats left to do is decide whether googleplex or yahooza is going to be the source of your linklove revenue. And if u have on older domain that u plug this into...well, we all know how the pageranking with search engines work by now. It used to be that u had to have a bit of code knowledge to make all this stuff work. Eyebeam's Re-blog engine which powers this site was not a simple undertaking at the time that Michael Frumin and Michael Migurski put it all together... a half a year before Marc Broadband-mechanicked the term Reblog as his latest buzzword before casting his attention on the ourmedia-meme. (kudo's, kudo's) But now, with the cut and paste mentality of webculture that we at unmediated have helped create, the pace at which people are remixing and repurposing code is accelerating at a rate similar to the curve that we saw with pro-sumer desktop video... almost anyone can do it. I have this sinking feeling in my gut that we will arrive sooner than later at the same existential threshold that the film studios and record labels are squirming under to our joyful cries of "die, dinosaurs, die!". What i am wondering, is how long until my hero of the open-information movement, Cory Doctorow, and the rest of our pals at BB will tolerate re-aggregation and repurposing of his content, (now that he is investing so much more time at the site) before he (or any of one us) screams, "FOUL!" Stewart Butterfield over at Flickr is dealing with this beast at the moment...and i have to admire the dryness with which he states, "I loaded the FlickrCentral pool and firefox got up to using 240mb of ram before dying. So that's not a great user experience, but it's really terrible for Flickr. If it catches on and you don't limit it, we'll have to cut you off :\" Sure, Stewart, blame it on the user experience and firefox. ;) I admire your candor, and personal attention/approach to what has become one of the hottest new BRANDS in Web 2.0 ...that u still have time to be personal and all flickr-fuzzy even after being acquired, but I am sure that your jeans feel like they're fitting a bit tighter all of a sudden. Pretty soon, I expect, a lot of us bell-bottomed infornistas are going to wake up in a similar pair of Jordaches. I'm curious which of us will cut the inseams and sew in another totally different material to keep our style,and which of us will claim that now that we're wearing skintight jeans ("they're really really comfortable...REALLY! You think i should get a pair of Reeboks to go with 'em?"), that the manufacture of bell-bottoms should be forbidden. I point this all out in good humour only to illustrate a point: The times, they are('nt) a changin'>, and Cory just might wake up one day soon in his magic kingdom, and say "Hey, man, where'd all my whuffie go? And he's going to have no choice but to join Walt's pinstripesuits in pushing for copyright extension. It's a pill i hope he (and we) never have to swallow. So i pose the question to our community readers: How do you see unmediated-Are we crossing the boundaries in how we repurpose content? Would you like to see more editorializing? Narrower/Broader scope? Are we a repository of information that you come back to use, or just part of your daily information addiction? Let us know... I, for one, would like to have an idea about what pair of jeans to wear this year ;) michael
Featured Project
Berkeley Conference: Online Video and the Future of Television - Friday, September 30, 2005
This one-day conference brings together archivists, educators, technologists, entrepreneurs, producers, legal experts, and investors to explore the enormous promise offered by the availability of online video and television content. Demonstrations and interactive panel discussions will highlight new video technologies, services, legal issues, and economic models. Participants from diverse – and until now, largely disconnected – specialties will be especially encouraged to interact.
del.icio.us/tag/unmediated
[+]
About unmediated
unmediated is a group blog that tracks the tools, processes,
and ideas being used to decentralize media production and distribution.
|
flickr/tag/
citizenmedia
[+]
|
