Above: Bill Gates looking envious of Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley movie . Today this situation is massively reversed, with Bill having much more money, and Microsoft still the undisputed leader in sales, and market share.
I recently watched the 1999 film, Pirates of Silicon Valley which is based around the creation of the personal computer. The plot is heavily focused on the rise of both Apple and Microsoft (and Xerox’s blunder) and the inspirational but flawed leaders, who set out to conquer the world with computers that are for everyone. The two main characters are of course Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I thoroughly recommend this movie, even if your not a geek it’s worth seeing, because there is no other movie like it. Oh and by the way, the trailer online doesn’t do the movie justice, and has a number of scenes, that were not in the final movie.
Here is a video tour of Autodesk Montreal, which was once a ship building warehouse. The 3D Max, Smoke, MotionBuilder, Flame, Softimage software development teams, are all in this one building!
Office 2010 Public Beta is now available. It seems Microsoft are really pushing collaborative document creation, and cloud based applications with this release (they must be feeling Google’s cloud strategy; Docs, Google Chrome OS, and basically everything Google makes) . With MS Office 2010 you still get the traditional installer, but you can additionally use the full version of the software online, from anywhere in the world. Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint get the largest makeovers. Outlook becomes a blended communication application, supporting real time chat and video chat, and a much needed tidy up and interface overhaul. Microsoft has achieved implementing the ribbon interface universally across all applications. I have the suite installed now, and it’s working beautifully! Microsoft must have worked out having public beta’s of very refined, almost final products helps build positive media through word of mouth. Office 2010 Beta is free to use for one year! http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/
Above: Outlook 2010 with ribbon interface, and new conversation view reducing clutter.
The men who stare at goats movie visual effects breakdown. The visual effects seem to be on a very small scale compared to most blockbusters, however this article has nice layered break down of shot http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=5351
Surely a great mass of the Internet must have witnessed the new Avatar trailer, but if not here it is. For a few extra snippets, and a look behind the scenes go here.Or check out a video explaining some of the human technology here.
World trade centres now exist in Augmented reality as an iPhone App. I’ve seen better Augmented reality demonstrations, However I just like the idea of seeing these landmark buildings again.
Unigine Corp show off world’s first DirectX11 (Win 7 or downloadable for Vista) benchmark, demonstrating how the tessellation feature, can add insane amounts of detail to games, without a huge performance hit
The super high-end and hugely expensive Unreal Engine is now free for students and education purposes.
For those PC users who havent experienced Windows 7 (RTM, RC or Beta), here is a video explaining some of the features of Windows 7. I have been using Windows 7 for many months, maybe 6 or 7 and the more I use it the more I like it. Definitely a good OS, and has some UI features unique from Mac OSX. Basically it’s Windows Vista improved in hundreds of subtle ways. Personally I never understood the utter hate the media subjugated towards Vista, I think all the journalists just copy from one another, and lack computer knowledge. If your machine was lacking RAM or was old, which many machines were because of the five year wait for Vista, you might have found the OS slow. Solution: Buy a new computer, the faster the better, thus Vista will become great. Now Windows 7 is out and it’s excellent, even on older computers. Windows 8 is due 2012 - no more 5 years waits between Windows OS’s.
Above: Windows 7 desktop as seen from hovering over the aero peek button. Active windows becomes transparent glass, and you can see through to your desktop and gadgets. Task Switcher (alt+tab), and hovering over task bar thumbnails is redesigned around this same paradigm - it feels exactly right for Windows, and the title of the OS itself.
10/GUI - A concept video for a redefined computer interface, relying on multi-touch capabilities.
What is Google Chrome OS? Here is a simple straight to the point video to quickly explain this cloud centric OS, and a simple overview here. For those who want more detail, see the Google Technical Conference here.
Above: Google Chrome OS early public demo interface
Google Wave Developer preview. See if you agree with what Google is heralding as a online communication revoltion (yes it’s very long, just skip the boring parts).
Above: Look out for Google Wave coming next year, heralded as the next step in digital communication (yes Google wants hype)