Auri's Blog

Do you need someone to look at your computer and help you troubleshoot an issue? Well, sheesh, how do you do that? Well, Microsoft has made this pretty easy:

1. Get Windows Live Messenger (http://get.live.com)
2. IM your friend.
3. From the Actions menu click Actions, then Request Remote Assistance.

   

4. Let your friend control your computer and figure out the problem.
5. Buy your friend dinner.

Enjoy!

Best,

-Auri

So, you need to check if that file is on your home computer, but you’re at work. Boy, it sure stinks that you’d have to buy software for such remote access. The free stuff has a lot of issues getting through firewalls.

Or does it?

Welcome to Windows Live Mesh. Enjoy free remote access to all the computers in your mesh, and synchronize files across all of them. Start a document at home, save it to a Mesh folder, just like any regular Windows folder, and access the document when you get to the office. How cool is that? No need for a thumb drive! Best part – it’s free!

Get it now at www.mesh.com.

P.S. It runs on Macs, too, although the remote desktop isn’t offered for the Mac. If a Cupertino computer is part of your lifestyle, you don’t have to worry about file accessibility. Thanks, Redmond, that’s cool. You get five gigabytes of free storage as well.

(Hopefully cloud-based file sync will be coming soon… ping!)

Recently, many of my friends have been considering adding a netbook to their stack of portable computers. Their reasons:

• Small
• Great Battery Life
• Does just what I need on the go

Those of us who are early adopters know better than to get the first generation of any product genre. Remember MP3 players? Mmm… that Diamond Rio sure was nice, if you liked listening to 12 songs! Those BluRay players were cool, until you realized resuming a movie from where you left off was a nightmare. And what about disc playback being a crapshot?

A Trend Emerges: Given two years, we see a lot of great products build on their "promising" technologies. The iPod made a huge difference in market acceptance for digital music players, and costs for portable hard drives and flash media came down as the product gained popularity. The BluRay players of today are finally coming down in price, but the media has yet to become affordable. However, the media affordability issue has spawned a renewed interest in movie download services. Give it another year – about the time the HD optical format war ended – and the two year mark will prove once again that the technology will likely be ready for mass consumer adoption in one form or another.

The same, too, goes for netbooks. Right now they’re inexpensive, but that’s it. Battery life sucks, unless you pay more money. Processors are dogged slow. Screen resolution isn’t on par with consumer expectations. Yet, Intel is making strides on the processor front, and Via continues to innovate. Apple has patents pending on ARM processor designs. Interesting! Give it another 18 months and let’s see what happens when we hit the two year mark. Sony’s P series netbooks already show promise, but at a higher price than most consumers will accept…

So, in 18 months time, we should have:

• The third or fourth generation of Intel’s Atom processors, and competitor’s processors
• Windows 7, with its svelte streamlining for mobile devices, maybe even SP1
• Probably more Windows Live services geared towards Netbooks and Mobile devices. Live Mesh 2.0, anyone?
• Better battery technologies for longer battery life and less battery weight. Look at Toshiba instant charge batteries and Maxell fuel cells.
• Higher resolution, lower power, thinner LED displays

What do you think? I’d love your comments…

I just want to throw this out there – WHY can’t a BluRay Disc Pause Properly? It runs more like a computer application instead of a movie.

On my laptop’s BD player, my Samsung player, and my Sony player, if you lose power you can’t just "start back up" where you left off. No, the entire menu system has to load, then you have to select the scene that was closest to where you left off, if you even know…

HD DVD had no problem with resuming play. Why can’t a bunch of CE companies get simple playback right? 30+ seconds just to start a movie unless you have a PS3 or PC, and those are now more than twice as expensive as a cheap BD player.

BD is an IP camel. It’s designed by a committee saying "let’s stick every piece of bloated IP in here just so we have something to compete with and who cares about the customer… they’ll buy it." Yeah, BD looks better than any streaming video out there, but the usability – not functionality – pales in comparison to DVD, which starts up instantly, and works flawlessly.

Hey, don’t give me a "it’s still a young technology" line – this is an evolutionary technology, not revolutionary. It’s simply the result of a lack of proper human interface engineering.

Will it ever be fixed? Yes. As CE manufacturers improve the software with patches to get around this stuff, and as much more powerful processors become cost effective to include, then sheer processor speed will help solve the problem. This is evident in the PS3 working like a champ – 8 processor cores and never sleeping during playback – and my dual 2.5 GHz core laptop, except for when it comes back from sleep. However, for the majority of consumers searching for a high definition video delivery format to adopt, stuck with the $200 BD players instead of the $399+ PS3, they’re still the victim of this poor planning – the "lipstick on a pig approach" for now.

Well, I couldn’t login to do time tracking, invoicing, nada today… I would get server errors from every Intuit service I use. Intuit’s Web site wouldn’t help – it had nothing about an outage. Finally, after fidgeting with their URLs, I found the following message:

We’re sorry. We are currently experiencing network difficulties and working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible. For help with your product, please call 888-222-1276 and reference case number 054-884-29244. You might experience longer than normal wait times.

So, if you’re unable to hit time tracker, invoicing, or what have you, and are getting Service Unavailable messages, try the above number…

Someone should tell Intuit to post a big, obvious message on their home page, instead of burying everything and frustrating customers.

DTS had a cool demo of 11.1 sound. Unfortunately, the room was way too small for such a demo. Way cool, though, just the possibilities. They chained two receivers together for the demo.

The best part was the DTS-HD Master Audio demo… It’s supposed to be 7.1 96 KHz audio. Umm, but they played it through a Playstation 3, which doesn’t actually output DTS-HD, it only decodes it and transcodes it to Linear PCM 48 KHz. So, end result: Linear PCM 7.0 instead of DTS-HD 96KHz 7.1. Ouch. Oh, and they didn’t believe a word I said.

I’d like to know which engineer did the setup on this. If he or she had simply looked at the receiver, they would have seen the audio wasn’t being decoded as intended. All they had to use was a different player. I applaud DTS for having fairly affordable equipment for the demo, though – that’s cool that they’re showing that consumers could readily buy at an upscale A/V store.

Guess they should have read my blog post from a year ago… The PS3 doesn’t support bitstream DTS-HD, so it downsamples it and transcodes to Linear PCM. Funny thing is, their PR brought out a technician who told me they passed the PS3 with extensive tests. Wait, but the technician didn’t actually know this when I pressed him on it, so it was pretty obvious he was flat out making things up. Wow, that’s lame. All I wanted to do was help them so they could do a proper demo of their technology, and they dissed me.

Found a few interesting items today:

• ZeeVee ZvBox – Takes Internet video and pipes it over your in-house cable connections via Clear QAM. So, start streaming video on any PC in your home with a ZV box, and any television with a cable jack capable of tuning Clear QAM – most sets from the past year + can – and that content will start playing on that TV, or any TV. Way cool. $250 for show attendees, or folks using the special code CES91173 on their Web site. They have a higher end model that also accepts component video input and spreads that across the home, no DRM other than an embedded watermark. Hmmm, interesting…
  • From the Press Release: …ZvBox, a device that broadcasts everything on your computer display to all the HDTVs in the home by building a new HDTV channel. ZeeVee’s free Zviewer software provides a “living room” video browser to any content. ZvRemote and ZvKeyboard help play that content from the couch.
• Ipevo showed off Wi-Fi capable video frames, something I’ve wanted to see for a long time. I believe Sony has them as well, but possibly not as many, and these can be either portrait or landscape. Send them an RSS feed, or multiple RSS feeds, and they display. Nice. Now all we need is a device with cell phone data network capabilities so we don’t need the WiFi connection. Hello, grandma & grandpa – your photos have arrived!
• Speck had a great laptop bag with perfect pockets for all different document types, adapters, and more.

View Full Album

I was able to visit Palm’s “private” lounge and get my hands on their new Pre (with a bar over the “e”) phone. This new phone runs on Linux instead of PalmOS, a derivation Palm is calling WebOS. It doesn’t sync with your computer. No, it syncs with “any” computer with data you need. The cool part is it supports multiple calendars, something sorely missing for many executives looking for a phone.

There were limited technical details at the demo. Asking software development kit questions, I was met with “we’re not disclosing that level of technical information at this time.” Come to think of it, that was often the case when delving deeper. No matter, this is a sweet phone.

I have uploaded a video of the demo, given by Peter Skillman, Palm’s Vice President of Design. You’ll be able to learn a lot just by watching, so go do that already!

Details I gleamed, and there’s more on Palm’s web site:

• Available first half of 2009, initially a Sprint exclusive.
• 8 GB built-in flash, non-expandable.
• Way cool conductive charger – just lie the Palm on the thing and it starts charging. No fidgeting around with power cables. From what I can tell, this is an accessory, but I hope they decide to include it.
• Wireless sync. 802.11 b/g. GPS.
• Multi-touch right out of the box. Hey, Google, ever gonna get multi-touch running on Android?
• No legacy Palm application support, although Peter said Palm wouldn’t have any problem with someone writing an emulator. He was mum on any SDK, using the line I mentioned above, although he said Palm is working with developers to transition their code.
• The box is beautiful – nice angles and the legal docs are hidden on the bottom, under plastic, “where they should be” according to Peter.
• 320×240 display. Hmm, a bit low res for a modern smartphone.
• 135 grams.
• 3.1 megapixel camera with software auto-focus. No word on video support.
• Apps don’t appear to “sleep”. They keep running in the interface, updating little widget versions of themselves. Peter said they have patents pending for dealing with the obvious drain on battery life this type of feature has. When I asked if it was effective, I was met with a stern look. I hope it works well – this is a nice looking phone with lots of design wins – more on that in a moment – but it wouldn’t be good if it dies early just to have a pretty interface. Remember, Palm, at the end of the day, it’s a phone!
• This is cute: The sliding back of the phone is a mirror. Yes, the entire sliding back. No more half-dime-sized mirror. Cool.
• I didn’t see him use the stylus once.
• Yes, there’s a USB port.
• There was some info like "HTML for content, Javascript for functionality, CSS for format" – I don’t know if that was for development.
• I didn’t ask about third party accessories.
• Bottom of charger is micro suction cups that apparently don’t get gunked up by dust and so forth. Stick it to anything. Peter says "it’s like gecko feet.”
• It was hard to get Peter to let me hold the device. I finally did, but could only hold it a little and not move it. It felt good in the hands.
• No, they did not get rid of the awesome vibrate on/off switch at the top. Thank you, Palm.
• Peter was very proud of their industrial design.

Below is a photo album of the Pre, so click it to see the full size photos.

View Full Album

I spent a few more hours on the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) show floor in the afternoon. Interesting items over at the LVCC:

• Outside the show floor, Samsung had a "Mobile Concierge Center." They were handing out free 2GB MicroSD cards with USB reader adapters. Even better: If you have need for a Samsung phone battery, they were giving out free batteries for all recent models. Nice. (You’re welcome, Mike.)

  

• Sony’s ultra-thin netbook, the VAIO Lifestyle PC, a.k.a. the P Series, is just the epitome of svelte. 1600×768 display in a 1.4lb package a bit larger than a standard paycheck. Built-in WiFi and even 3G and GPS asking only $899 MSRP for the base model. Frackin’ beautiful. It’s available for pre-order now and will supposedly ship in February, but I’m guessing it’ll ship closer to March.

  

• Ok, Sony released a product I want (again): An affordable 1080P HD camcorder with image stabilization and solid state recording. HDR-CX1000 = $600 well spent. Available in March.
• A rep at the Sony booth told me almost every new Sony video-capable product, such as TVs, PS3, PSP, BluRay, and so forth, will come with the XMB interface. Yes, that’s the interface used on the PS3, PSP, and Mylo. Come to think of it, I don’t recall them showing Mylo. I’m not a fan, especially since I think they should roll a lot of that functionality into the PSP 🙂

  

• YooStar.com was out in the hallway showing off their cool product that enables you to insert yourself into movie clips. The $150 (ok, $149.95, whatever) software and hardware combo kit will be available in a couple months, and includes a green screen, web cam with microphone, the necessary software and some clips to get you started. Yes, this means you can insert yourself into movies like Saw, The Godfather, Scarface, Frankenstein and more. Additional clips will cost you, and I (whoops) didn’t ask how much. I imagine it will vary. You can then post your newly created clips on YooStar.com. Studios offering content include Paramount, Universal, MGM and Lions Gate.
  

   

• Sony was also handing out free bags made out of recycled bamboo. Cute.

  

• No, I haven’t seen Palm’s new WebOS yet. I’m looking forward to checking it out tomorrow.

Things to take away from this keynote:

• Windows 7 Beta "Officially" Available – He didn’t address whether the beta’s availability on torrents was coincidence, but hey, now we have the slick new OS to play with for ourselves. MSDN and TechNet subscribers can get it now. The public can download it FRIDAY, January 9. Cool – ready? I know I am.
• Windows Live Essentials Available – Windows Messenger, Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Windows Live Mail are now available. I’m guessing he means the new versions, which are pretty cool. Their interface has changed a little – a bit flatter. I was surprised he didn’t discuss Live Mesh and Live Sync and so forth. With all the talk about connectivity, that was pretty strange. Get it here. You should really get Live Writer, too – it’s awesome. I’m using it for this post! Oh, and Live Movie Maker appears to still be in beta… I hope they finish it soon, unless that’s just a site update issue.
  • I saw this link, too, so it may be related: http://home.mobile.live.com/home.mvc/ShowServicesIntroduction/Spaces
  • And another link: http://windowslive.com
• Windows Live Spaces Integrates with FaceBook – Now you’ll have an option for all Facebook updates to sync to your Live Space (http://spaces.live.com). He didn’t say it goes both ways. I wonder if they’ll buy Facebook.
• Windows Mobile Live Update – Not what we’ve been hoping for yet, such as Live Mesh and all, but hey, it’s a start. Get it here. BTW, this link wasn’t super easy to find.
• Windows Live Will Ship on All Dells – All new laptops and desktops will get Windows Live Essentials, which will help PC manufacturers compete with Apple’s iLife suite and give much more functionality out of the box. Also, all Dells will use Live Search by default. Cool for Microsoft.
• Long Term Partnership with Verizon – With over 11 new SmartPhones running Windows Mobile in the past year and selling over 1M units each, Microsoft is "committed to innovation" (paraphrased, yes) in the mobile space. No major announcements, though. For example, nothing again about Live Mesh for Mobile being available. Boy, I want that Mesh software for Mobile so I can auto-upload my photos and sync my docs across all my devices, just like the demos I’ve seen throughout 2H08! Let’s get out of the private beta, please!
• Bodu (sp?) Game Creator for XBox 360 – They showed the really cool XBox 360 programming tool for kids @ PDC. Microsoft’s taken it one step further and released a Game Creator based on the same Bodu system. We should all applaud Microsoft for this – there’s been practically zero innovation in teaching programming to kids and young adults, and this is absolutely a stunning breakthrough, and a wonderful gift to a society that needs more engineers.
• Yes, there was a demo of Windows 7. Yes, it’s cool. No, there wasn’t anything I haven’t already seen 😛
• Tip for better presentations in the future: Give links in your slides. If something’s available NOW, give the bloggers something to post right away!

>> Watch the keynote and get more info here.

Videos are coming…