Samsung, Microsoft Patent Deal

Samsung, Microsoft Ink Patent Deal - Informationweek

In May, market research firm Asymco estimated that Microsoft makes five times as much money from Android licensing deals as it does from sales of Windows Phone devices.
...
Motorola Mobility, a company Google is in the process of acquiring, as the only major Android phone maker in the U.S. that's not paying Microsoft.

Amazon Kindle Fire tablet with "Silk" web browser powered by "Cloud"

Amazon’s Tablet Leads to Its Store @ NYTimes

Introducing Amazon Silk | Amazon Silk

Amazon just introduced "Silk", an all-new web browser powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and available exclusively on the just announced Kindle Fire


The 7", $199 tablet is a "media device", not a communicator: no camera.

Android beats iPhone 2-to-1 in new smartphone purchases - Computerworld

Android beats iPhone 2-to-1 in new smartphone purchases - Computerworld

password vs passphrase

Coding Horror: Cutting the Gordian Knot of Web Identity - Jeff Atwood

The magic of truth and lies (and iPods) | Video on TED.com

Marco Tempest: The magic of truth and lies (and iPods) | Video on TED.com

The Story Behind Kinect, Microsoft's Newest Billion Dollar Business

The Story Behind Kinect, Microsoft's Newest Billion Dollar Business
Shortly after Kinect launched on November 4th, Microsoft revealed that it was selling about 100,000 units per day, and expected to sell 5 million by the end of the year. In fact, Microsoft shipped 8 million of them to retailers. At $149 a pop, that means Kinect contributed about $1.2 billion in revenue in less than a single quarter. And because each Kinect costs only about $59 to make (according to tear down estimates), that suggests it's a profitable business as well.

(Windows 8) WinRT demystified

WinRT demystified - Miguel de Icaza

Microsoft has created a cool new UI library called WinRT and they have made it easy to consume from .NET, Javascript and C++ and if you adhere by their guidelines, they will publish the app on their appstore.
...
With WinRT, Microsoft has followed a simple rule: if an API is expected to take more than 50 milliseconds to run, the API is asynchronous.
...
When you use C# and VB, you are using the full .NET framework. But they have chosen to expose a smaller subset of the API to developers to push the new vision for Windows 8.
...
What they did was that they only exposed to the compiler a set of APIs when you target the Metro profile.So your application will not accidentally call File.Create for example. At runtime though, the CLR will load the full class library, the very one that contains File.Create, so internally, the CLR could call something like File.Create, it is just you that will have no access to it.
...

HP board mess

Voting to Hire a Chief Without Meeting Him - NYTimes.com

...Hewlett-Packard board. “It has got to be the worst board in the history of business,” Tom Perkins, a former H.P. director and a Silicon Valley legend
...
when the search committee of four directors narrowed the candidates to three finalists, no one else on the board was willing to interview them. And when the committee finally chose Mr. Apotheker and again suggested that other directors meet him, no one did. Remarkably, when the 12-member board voted to name Mr. Apotheker as the successor to the recently ousted chief executive, Mark Hurd, most board members had never met Mr. Apotheker..."

HP's Stock During The Leo Apotheker Era


A Brand Value of an Individual Man


Without Context, Data is Meaningless

HP vs Dell

Agile Results | The Book

Getting Results the Agile Way | The Book
Free reading online...



Key 1. The Key to Time Management Is Energy Management

Managing your energy is how you produce more results in the same amount of time. You don’t get more hours in a day, but you can change your level of energy. If you can spend more time in your power hours or add more power hours to your week, you improve your results.

Key 2. The Key to Energy Management Is Passion

Living with passion is a key to your best results. When you think about energy, think of your mind, body, and emotions. You can eat right, sleep like a baby, and get ripped at the gym. In contrast, you can get physically drained, mentally drained, or emotionally drained. Your energy depends on fulfilling your passions. Your mind, body, and emotions play off each other.

Key 3. The Key to Results Is Time, Energy and Technique

The key to results is using your time and energy more effectively and efficiently. You can’t just throw time at problems. If you throw time at a problem, but you don’t have enough energy, you can spend way more time than you need to. On the other hand, if you have a lot of energy, and you throw time at the problem, but you don’t have the right technique, you can churn and burn, but never actually get the results you want. The key is to spend your time working on the right things with your best energy and the best techniques.

---

Getting Results the Agile Way is a way to make the most out of work and life. Agile Results™ is a simple system for meaningful results that combines some of the best methods for improving your thinking, feeling, and taking action. You unleash your best by spending your precious life force on the right things, at the right time, the right way, with the right energy. -- J.D. Meier

Light Bulb 2.0

podcast: The Light Bulb 2.0 | On Point with Tom Ashbrook

The Future of Light Is the LED @ Wired


This illuminated LED light bulb, made by Switch, has a liquid filled dome that prevents the LED from overheating. (Wired)

iPhone vs. Blackberry

The iPhone Is Absolutely Slaughtering The Blackberry - Business Insider

iPhone 4 release in June 2010 changed everything -- iPhone sales took off while Blackberry sales leveled off, then started to dive

Windows 8 More Resource Efficient Than Windows 7

Windows 8 Even More Resource Efficient Than Windows 7

all you need is an old Intel Atom netbook with 1GB of RAM

Windows 8 @ Microsoft BUILD Conference

Home - BUILD | September 13 - 16, 2011 | Anaheim Convention Center

Finally, some info about re-engineered and re-designed Windows 8,
that is merging HTML5 Web & "Native", JavaScript, .NET and C++.

"Windows reimagined"
"Metro style apps"
"App store"




Windows Developer Preview downloads
or
dev.windows.com

How to Download and Install Windows 8 Into a Virtual Machine (Oracle VirualBox)
VirtualBox Download

Windows 8 Also Has Tools for Power Users

Window 8 - the developer's take

The key ideas are that now there is the desktop and there is Metro.
The desktop is where the old apps live and it is a single tile in Metro
...
XAML and HTML will provide the presentation layer for Metro with the managed languages using XAML and JavaScript using HTML. However the whole lot is built on top of the new WinRT API. Banished, it seems, is the Win32 API which will only be used within the Desktop application world.
...
Arm version of Windows will not support desktop applications. So if you want to write an app and you want it to work on any version of Windows then it has to be a Metro app.

Microsoft's Build keynote: 5 key takeaways
Developers at the show will also walk away with what Microsoft is calling a "Developer PC." It's a Samsung slate with a developer preview version of Windows 8 meant for building and testing applications, including those made especially for tablets.


Samsung’s Reference Windows 8 Tablet at BUILD Comes With Intel Inside?

Samsung's Series 7 Slate PC hands-on
1366 x 768 11.6-inch capacitive panel, Intel's 1.6GHz Core i5 2467M CPU with integrated graphics and 4GB of RAM.

On the front there's a 2 megapixel camera and a light sensor, and around the back sits a 3 megapixel shooter. Connectivity comes courtesy of 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, plus there's a USB 2.0 port, micro HDMI, and a SIM slot for surfing waves of 3G
...
64GB SSD variants packing Home Premium for $1,099

The Samsung Windows 8 tablet: Here's how to get one

How algorithms shape our world @ TED

Kevin Slavin: How algorithms shape our world | Video on TED.com

...complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control
...
black box trading...also sometimes called algo trading, algorithmic trading.
...
(selling or buying large amounts) algorithms to do... break up that big thing into a million little transactions. And the magic and the horror of that is that the same math that you use to break up the big thing into a million little things can be used to find a million little things and sew them back together and figure out what's actually happening in the market.
...
What could go wrong is that a year ago, nine percent of the entire market just disappears in five minutes, and they called it the flash crash of 2:45.
...

Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library

Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - a centralized code sample library


The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is a free, centralized code sample library... typical code samples for all Microsoft development technologies, and reduce developers' efforts in solving typical programming tasks.

coding style guideline for native C++ and .NET (C# and VB.NET) programming used by the Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework project team

Windows 8 boots in 8 seconds

Can Windows 8 Save the PC?

At its upcoming BUILD conference, Microsoft will try to convince ... that the upcoming Windows 8 operating system will deliver “the best of both worlds” by combining a touch-friendly front end with the power of a traditional PC.
...
Windows 8 PCs won’t just run mobile apps. They’ll act like mobile devices. That’s because Microsoft says that it has found a way to boot machines to the OS in just 8 seconds. A new fast startup mode that’s a hybrid of the traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate will be able to get you to the Metro UI faster than you can say “This is a PC?”




Delivering fast boot times in Windows 8 @ MSDN

Apple iCloud runs on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services?

If iCloud Runs On Microsoft And Amazon, What The Heck Is Inside That Huge Apple Data Center?


...Apple recently finished building a (half?) billion-dollar data center in North Carolina...
This shot of the exterior gives some idea how huge the place is. See those tiny dots in the circle? Those are two people standing on the roof.

If true, this looks as a very good design.
Many data centers are more reliable than one. "It Just Works"...
This is similar to Netflix network architecture, that is using Amazon for distribution.

Apple's iCloud runs on Microsoft and Amazon services
Who says Azure isn't cool and trendy now?
@TheRegister, 2011-09-02

24 Nodes Available Globally for the Windows Azure CDN
@ MSDN.Microsoft, 2011-02-24

Some of best Microsoft people working on Azure, including
co-creator of .NET and ASP.NET Scott Guthrie,
creator of Windows NT Dave Cutler,
Windows internals and security expert Mark Russinovich...

Demand for "cloud" services is increasing exponentially...

Ever wander about the name?

Here is real "The Azure Window" at tiny but famous Mediterranean island Malta :)





Strange that Microsoft marketing never attempted to leverage
such a "beautiful by nature" picture...

Then, Amazon, or Google, or Apple, could use even more impressive
Delicate Arch

HTML5 Confucius: CSS3 corners

Confucius quotes

“Every truth has four corners:
as a teacher I give you one corner,
and it is for you to find the other three."
- Confucius

border-radius: 15px 5px 15px 15px;

Works fine in latest Firefox and Chrome, as well as in IE9,
but there is some issue with other page styles on the page
from blogspot.com site that I am using, so you can't see this page effect in IE9.

B

Border-radius: create rounded corners with CSS!

Translation APIs: Microsoft Bing vs Google

Roles reversed: Google charging for services, and Microsoft offering them for free :)

Recently, Microsoft announced availability of a free web API for translation.
This is a useful tool, and an interesting news, since not too long ago
Google announced discontinuing of their translation "labs" web API (apparently due to misuse/overuse).

In the meantime, Google has quietly re-activated translation API,
and this time as a commercial tool, with pay-per-use pricing.

Web APIs:

Using the free Bing Translation APIs


Google Translate API v2
Pricing and Terms of Service
1 M characters of text: $20.00

Interactive translation:

bing Translator


Google Translate