In theory, Microsoft Research developed a new, free, high-quality mean for live TV distribution over the internet. In practice, Livestation will play only content that Windows Media Player already plays on your computer, and you will have to install Silverlight to figure that.
I recently read with interest the FT article on recent developments at CME (”Communism to risktaking”, July 10). Adrian Sarbu, a Romanian manager in the company, gets a well-deserved praise from his boss, Michael Garin. However, I found intriguing the inset mentioning that Pro TV, the main CME channel in Romania, “broadcasts 24 hours a day online”. Visiting the ProTV website today is an experience no different than many years ago: three-minutes news and new book reports, five-minutes show fragments, and a huge amount of 30-seconds promos. The horoscope is broken down into signs, probably to save bandwidth or on a need-to-know basis. The station still does not stream live at all and does not to offer full records of any but a few shows, while the two main competitors offer both these services freely. This hardly makes an “internet virtuoso”. It is true that another CME station, ProTV International, a niche channel for the diaspora, streams over the internet, but it is not much of a technical accomplishment, when looking at a price tag starting at 9.50 dollars a month for a program including soaps that were on ProTV two years ago. One theory would be that ProTV uses geographic filters in order to prevent access me and anybody outside Romania from viewing for free its most valuable programmes. That is uncommon in Romanian market, but resembles iPlayer’s unavailability outside UK. Another, more likely, interpretation is that we are witnessing a return to practices from Communist times. During the last years of the Ceausescu regime, rationing and hour-long queues for bread were common across the country; at the same time, a large majority of the state-owned farms’ managers reported to “the Centre” and bragged on TV about yields of more than 20 tonnes of wheat per hectare, in order to be awarded medals as “Heroes of the New Agrarian Revolution”. We know the outcome of that “revolution”: the Centre saw it as a success, the deprived citizens - less so. In December 25, 1989, a more real Revolution, supported by millions of New Agriculture unsatisfied consumers, lead to the execution of Ceausescu. Oblivious, until his last moment, the man at the Centre did not believe there were bread shortages. Alas, with the fall of communism, that is a trial the London-based CME Centre and the credulous Mr. Garin will not have to go through.
A reading of the interview of the AOL Europe chief manager, Dana Dunne, makes your day. I will not delve into the long passages which describe at great length his life experiences, as they indeed sound very well and also boring at times. More interesting is what AOL pretends to be.
The interview, edited in the FT manner, says AOL is a well-established, well-respected brand whose name, in the US at any rate, is practically synonymous with service provision over the internet. No, in US AOL is known an internet provider, not as an internet-borne services provider - and a cheap and lousy if we get to that. Also AOL is a CD provider - they will send you a CD right away, too bad it will be already written.
(more…)
A recent article from Microsoft’s website writer sdfJuliaasdasd Francis shows how "Office XP is great for Home users". From the Knowledge Base article 556099, summarized "Office is so handy, I love it", one may learn that in fact "sadf asdf" and various other things that one can type with only four keys. This makes sense especially when read backwards, or upside down.
According to the FT, in a new show of disorientation, Yahoo outsourced one of its core products, the highly successful Yahoo IM, to the no-name three-coders-and-a-PR-rep company Jajah. The pretext: they will focus from now on on core products. Like what? Hotjobs? Yahoo Movies?
I learned today I wasted one full week by trying to work around some stupid bug of a ill-written, ill-documented software package that I use at work. I know that for a fact most visitors come to this blog to search workarounds for similar bugs in Microsoft Windows, Ahead Nero, Sun NetBeans, or Microsoft Visual Studio. I keep getting emails from crooks like SAS (emails without unsubscribe instructions, if we come to it) inviting me to join user groups and do the work that they are supposed to do - that is, explain the stupid programs that they wrote with its lack of documentation and its unjustifiable quirks to their frustrated, over-charged, and over-worked customers.
I know that people who make this software, both coders and (especially) managers, make far more money than, say, rice growers, although, arguably, they work less. They make so much because they can do so much; and surely they are productive when I, in my naivety, have worked for them, providing the world with the documentation they didn’t write.
What if I stop doing their work? I am thinking of calling it a day.
VMWare, the maker of virtualization software, is fighting a hard battle against Microsoft. Microsoft has all the money in the world in order to ruin the efforts of its fly-weight rival, and only MS’s lack of consideration for Linux prolonged VMWare’s very existence to this day. Thus VMWare decided to spend some of its small budget into some weird type of advertising. (more…)
Next thing, Behemoth will tell you how many gmails you read from your zero folders. I don’t think anybody would care about such features or enjoy such privacy intrusions, even if the system would work.
Apparently, the Sharp/Danger/T-Mobile Sidekick is a Microsoft phone. Now I understand why the poor phone runs out of memory so often. Microsoft buying Danger is one of those moves that MS employs in order to replace lack of innovation. In the old days, the software created by the 3-4 Danger employees should be written by the Windows CE team in two days. Should Apple make that software, it will take a week for the code and three months for filming the ads. The purchase will achieve even less than the buyouts of aQuantive or GIANT - can anybody point what exactly those companies were producing? As usual in recent years, Microsoft (under the appearance of desperation) divests again money from the shareholders into so-called investments.
Recently, the Yen stood strongly against the decline of the majority of the Western currencies. This is why you might want to move your savings into an Yen account. Citibank Japan does just that: anybody can use this web form to open an account. When I say anybody, I really mean anybody - including citizens of the long-gone countries such as the Byelorussian SSR and the Socialist Republic of Romania.