Next Week on Global Geek News: MIX 2010
Greetings fellow geeks!
As I mentioned on this week's podcast, I will be traveling to Vegas to attend Microsoft's MIX 2010 c0nference. There will be a ton of MIX coverage right here on the Blog and I am even going to try to do a podcast live from the event with whatever special guests I can grab from the conference to join me on the show.
What kind of coverage will we have? Myself and my fellow Student Insiders will be doing a live blog of the keynotes on both day one and two (Monday and Tuesday) and I will be doing a number of interviews with various people of great influence that will be posted here as soon as I can get them posted (I'm not sure what bandwidth is going to be like). I expect there to be announcements regarding Internet Explorer 9, Silverlight and what I am most looking forward to, Windows Phone 7 Series. I plan to focus most of the coverage around Windows Phone 7 Series but I will have to wait and see what the big announcements are to know for sure where the focus will be.
Bandwidth permitting, I will be posting lots of pictures and videos from the event and blogging most of the time as well. If you want to make sure you catch all of the conference coverage, make sure to subscribe with the great big button above!
The first keynote kicks off at 9AM PST on Monday morning, so make sure to be here for the live blog!
If there is anything specific you would like to see me cover or somebody you want me to interview, leave it in the comments and I will do my best to satisfy your request!
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Microsoft Student Insider Training Day 1: Travel
Greetings everybody!
Sorry for my recent absence from the blog. Between my trip to Microsoft that I am about to tell you about, finals, my grandmother's cancer and a few other things, my life has been all kinds of crazy lately. Hopefully, starting today, I can get back to blogging regularly like I vowed at the first of the year. Anyway, lets talk my trip to Microsoft!
Since technically, the first day of the trip was the travel day, I will talk about the travel day in this post and then the extra exciting stuff will start in the next post. As of right now, I expect to do a series of at least 4 posts about this trip which will likely have a few other posts sprinkled in and some major news about the Global Geek News Podcast to wrap everything up before we get back to your regularly scheduled blog. Anyway, lets talk the travel day!
Wednesday morning I woke up far earlier than should be allowable by law to make sure I made it to the airport in Colorado Springs with plenty of time to go through the theater that is the TSA and wait at my gate for a couple of hours. Normally the only part of this that I would hate would be the TSA experience but having a bad case of the runs did not make things pleasant. Luckily, I had probably the easiest experience with the TSA that I have ever had. I did have to remove my Kindle from my bag but that was to be expected since they have had issues seeing through it before. Apparently listening to the TSA's guide on how to pack your bag that is posted on their site is quite helpful if you want to have an easy time getting through their checkpoint. The flights from Colorado Springs to Denver and from Denver to Seattle were nice flights but I was rather annoyed that there was no TV in the headrests of the planes which has always been the case on every Frontier flight I have flown in the past. I am still rather irritated about this but now I know to be a bit more picky about what planes I fly on. Other than this, the only scary part of the flight was when we were over Seattle, getting close to landing when suddenly we hit a bad pocket of air or something and the plane went 45 degrees to the left and then 45 degrees to the right before we leveled back out. I am sure we had a decent drop in altitude with it as well.
After the flight, it took me longer than expected to meet up with my driver that was supposed to pick me up and go to the hotel. After waiting around for a while with no sign of anybody holding a Microsoft Student Insider sign, I finally received a call from the driver wondering where I was and where to meet me. Turns out, he was apparently on the other end of the baggage claim area that was no short distance away, but luckily we met in the middle and headed to the car. At this point, I had the pleasure of meeting up with two of the other insiders, Tom Ziegmann (Twitter) and Joe Osborne (Twitter), a couple of great guys that I felt right at home with.
After a decent drive to the hotel which was the Mariot hotel in the Redmond Town Center, we checked in to our rooms and received a backpack full of goodies like an MSDN cup and some spending money for food and whatever else on our travel days. We then decided to kill some time and go walking around the Redmond Town Center to see what the area had to offer. I was quite impressed with how nice the area was and just what kind of stores where there. They had all kinds of restaurants, and stores ranging from a board game store to a Victoria's Secret. Yes, there was even a Starbucks. After walking around for a while, we decided to go our separate ways for the night. I went and had dinner with a couple of my cousins at a restaurant in the town center while they went into Seattle to have dinner at Anthony's. My food was good, but I think they got to eat a lot better than I did that night.
After that, I went to the board game store with my cousins and then called it a night. Having woken up at 4:30am that morning, I was quite tired. That was the end of the travel day and the best was yet to come. Check back tomorrow for day 2, my first day at Microsoft!
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Microsoft’s CES Keynote was a major snooze
Greetings Readers!
As I am sure many of you are aware, last night was Microsoft's CES 2010 keynote and if you watched it, you know that the most exciting thing that came out of the keynote was the power failure that delayed it close to 30 minutes (We live blogged it here). As I stated last night, I would give my thoughts, both good and bad right here (Disclosure: I am a Microsoft Student Insider), so here we go.
I was rather surprised at the lack of announcements coming out of the keynote compared to years past. For those hoping for a big announcement regarding the rumored new features behind Ford's Sync, you are out of luck. Those are apparently being saved until Ford's keynote. Hoping for a major announcement about the Zune HD? Nope, nothing here either. Windows 8? Wishful thinking. A portable version of the Xbox? This will remain every gamers fantasy. What was announced? Ballmer really didn't announce much. He gave some lines about Windows 7 being the fastest selling OS of all time and some analyst speculation that PC sales will increase considerably this year but I don't really call those announcements. Steve announced that the HTC HD 2 running Windows Mobile will be coming to T-mobile but I am not sure anybody cares since we are talking Windows Mobile after all and T-mobile doesn't help either. Steve said they would talk more about the future of Windows Mobile at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona next month. Ballmer did show off some prototype "Slate PCs" that will hopefully combat anything Apple announces later this month. The one he really demonstrated was an HP prototype that was running Windows 7 and the Kindle PC software to demonstrate how good of an e-book reader it could be and it looked to be about the same size as the Kindle 2. Sounds nice and I will definitely buy one, but if you are going to try to compete with Apple, you need to show something that will come out a little sooner rather than some prototype. Wait, you really wanted to know what was announced? Ok.
As far as REAL announcements go, there are a couple fairly minor announcements. Bing is now going to be the default home page and search engine for all HP computers. Excited yet? They also demonstrated what a Cable Card and a pc in your tv could do and said that with it, you can record 4 HD channels simultaneously which was probably the most impressive thing from they keynote. They talked a bit about Media Room and some partnership with AT&T's U-verse that I still don't understand and finally they had a couple interesting Xbox announcements. Besides all of the interesting number like units sold and games sold, Robby Bach announced that Project Natal will ship as an attachment to existing Xbox 360 systems in time for Christmas 2010. No price although I would expect that around E3. There was also no demo which was kind of disappointing. They also teased a new Halo game only to have it turn out to be a trailer for Halo Reach which was announced back at E3. I was rather disappointed but the audience seemed to love it since they could see the trailer and everybody watching the stream could not. The big Xbox 360 announcement was Game Room.
What is Game Room? Game Room seems to be a virtual space similar to the PS3's Home where you can run around a giant arcade as your avatar and buy and play old arcade games that look like the arcade units you would spend tons of quarters on in years gone by. Over 1000 games are planned for the next year that will be released in weekly batches that you will have to purchase. The coolest part is that this will be not only for the Xbox 360 but for PCs too! How much are these games going to cost you ask? If you want to play an arcade game on both platforms, you will be paying 400 Microsoft points aka $5. To get it on one platform, it is 240 points or $3. If you really want the old school experience, you can pay 40 points or $.50 and get two quarters worth of playing time on the old machines. The games can be played with other people, in 1080p and there are cross-platform leaderboards and achievements. This is coming in the Spring update to Xbox Live. Personally, I am really looking forward to this because lately I have had the urge to start buying old arcade machines and turning my basement into a small arcade but now I will be able to do it virtually instead of having to completely redo the basement. This was the only real announcement with any cool factor to it other than the HD recording. If you would like to see the demo that the people watching the live stream couldn't watch, you can check it out here.
That was pretty much about it. It was a very boring keynote and ended kind of out of nowhere. It certainly doesn't make me super excited about Microsoft this year but hopefully that will change. What did you think about the Microsoft CES 2010 keynote? Good? Bad? Boring? Exciting? Let us know!
PDC 2009 Day 2 & 3: Silverlight 4 and IE 9
Greetings Readers!
For those of you who missed my PDC 2009 adventures for Day 1, you can check those out here because now it is time to talk about the rest of PDC.
Day two started off identical to the first except I didn't have to register. I immediately headed toward the keynote hall and waited in line with everybody else for the keynote, a keynote which I found to be more interesting than the first keynote.
The day 2 keynote consisted of announcements such as Internet Explorer 9 being in the works for just a couple of weeks and already is making considerable progress on the Acid 3 test. While that is good to hear, I was most impressed with the fact that according to their very early benchmarks, it has nearly caught up to all of the other major browsers in terms of speed. They are also bring GPU acceleration to IE 9 to help take some of the computational burden away from the CPU which is something I have been asking of basically every internet associated software for a long time now. For only 3 weeks worth of work, they are making some amazing strides in the new version of the browser. As impressive as that may be, until I get to play with it and test it out, I will still refer to it as Internet Exploder and point people to Firefox or Opera.
The announcement that I was really excited about was Silverlight 4. As many of you know, I have a hatred for Flash and pretty much anything created by Adobe so it is easy to see why I am so excited about Silverlight 4 and the new features it brings. What are those features? Silverlight 4 is twice as fast as Silverlight 3 and has a 30% faster start time. Silverlight 4 can now access your webcam and mic so now streaming sites like Ustream or Justin.TV have the option of moving to a platform that I believe is faster, more efficient (especially with the GPU acceleration) and more secure than Flash. They showed off some of the awesome things that Silverlight 4 can do including basic DVR functionality on live streams which I can't way to get my hands on. I was also impressed to hear that Silverlight is now available on 45% of all internet connected devices. I can't help but wonder how high that would be if Apple would allow Silverlight on the iPhone/iPod Touch but since it won't even let Flash on there, I don't see it happening anytime soon. While that is a great number, I think it can be greatly improved with some strategic partnerships.
The rest of day 2 and 3 were filled up with sessions although I didn't go to very many on day 3 just because there wasn't much that was in my fiend of interest. I did go to several sessions related to Windows 7 which were quite interesting. A couple of the sessions had to do with DirectX 11 in Windows 7 and how programmers could use it for parallel computing and how it worked to improve graphics in games and stuff. Probably the most interesting Windows 7 related session was about changes to the kernel. Although I was interested in most all of the changes whether they were for security or performance or whatever, I was most interested by the changes made to help battery life. It was interesting to find out how unused cores would be put into a sleep state when they aren't being used as a way of conserving power. I was also fascinated by the fact that since most processes don't need the precision being checked every so many milliseconds, that processes would be group to fire around the same time so that there can be a period of rest in between the process check-ins which also saves battery life. There are truly some great changes with Windows 7 and since I am told video of the session(s) have been uploaded to the PDC site, I will likely link to them at a later time since I can't now because the PDC site seems to be offline.
I was going to talk about the GeekFest that took place on the night of day 2 in this post, but since I have video to go with it, I will make it a separate post that I will post later this week. I might also write another post on a couple of other topics but for now, this will be my last PDC related post that doesn't have pictures or video which will likely be in posts of their own once I get around to editing the video. It was am amazing experience and I look forward to sharing more of it with you in the videos to come.
PDC 2009 Day 1: Three Screens and a Cloud
Greetings readers! This is the first of a several posts and a number of videos from my experience at Microsoft's PDC for 2009. Disclosure: I am a Microsoft Student Insider (Find out a little bit more about this in one of my previous posts). Day 1 of PDC started off great despite the fact that a few minutes after arriving that I had forgot my camera back at the hotel (so no pictures from day one). Registration was as simple as handing them my ID and they gave me my badge. I found out the hard way that being there for Microsoft, I don't get any of the goodies like the Acer bag and whatever came in it. The big disappointment as far as free goodies came on Day 2 which I will talk about in the next post. Anyway, shortly after getting my badge, I followed the signs through the huge maze that is the Los Angeles Convention Center. For those that haven't been here, this is quite the huge, impressive structure and when you are going from hall to hall, you will be doing a fair bit of walking. I managed to find they hall for the keynote and jumped into the line that was weaving its way down the long halls. Despite the long line, once the doors were open everybody flooded in and took a seat rather quickly. After a short wait, Ray Ozzy, the top architect at Microsoft since the stepping down of Bill Gates, came on stage and presented us with the idea of "Three Screens and a Cloud." The keynote focused on having the same experience on a computer, mobile device and tv and using Microsoft's cloud OS, Azure, to do that. Since last year's Azure announcement was in fairly cloudy terms, I never really got excited about it but after seeing what it can do and how it can scale, I think if all goes as planned, it is going to be amazing. The major announcement in terms of Azure is that it goes into service at the first of the year and billing begins in February and that you only pay for what you use. If you have a company with a large web presence, this is definitely something to look into, especially if you have traffic spikes and want to be able to scale up to those spikes but not have all of the server overhead when you don't need all of the power.
After the keynote, I spent the rest of they day going to sessions, eating, and having fun with the vendors that were there. Although this was the case all three days, some of the sessions were interesting while others were so far above my head that I thought they were speaking in another language. Although there were some sessions throughout the event focused on aspects of Windows 7, compared to other topics like Azure, there was very little talk about Windows 7 which I found kind of disappointing since it just came out a few weeks ago. I also was disappointed but little to no mention of the next version of Windows. Apparently Microsoft sees the future as everybody having their head in the clouds.
For the sake of keeping these posts short and to the point, I will talk more about some of the sessions I attended and what I learned in a separate post from my daily summaries. I will post the happenings from day 2 at PDC in the next post to likely come out tonight or tomorrow and day 3 shortly after that. I also have a number of photos and videos to upload when I get home too. It might take a few days to get everything up as my school quarter started yesterday and now that this trip is coming to an end (I am sitting in LAX as I write this), I need to focus on making sure i don't fall behind in that. I also have a number of other things to talk about as well as soon as I get a chance including the new Chrome OS. Stay tuned!
Microsoft’s PDC 2009 Coverage
Greetings Readers!
In the last post, I alluded to the fact that Microsoft has sent me to PDC 2009 (Professional Developers Conference) in LA since I am now a Student Insider and as part of that, I am going to be writing numerous blog posts throughout the week about the stuff that is being announced and talked about here. I have also been equipped with a Flip Ultra HD camcorder to take video of what I see. Since I got the Flip this afternoon, I will have to wait until tonight to charge it up and try it out but I should be able to shoot some video the next two days and I will likely have to wait until I return home on Friday to begin uploading them as internet speeds around here seem to vary somewhere between dial-up speeds during the keynote and around 1.5mbps at other times.
I am mainly focusing on Windows 7 stuff and various developer technologies that interest me and alter how I do my pet programming projects. If there is anything specifically that you would like me to report on, let me know in the comments. Feel free to check out the schedule at the PDC 2009 site and point me towards the sessions you would be most interested in me reporting on. Also, once I get the video working, I will be doing interviews as well, so expect some cool stuff from that. There are also a number of the Microsoft Surface tables here so I will get some videos of those too.
I am getting ready to go into another session so I will blog more tonight about what I saw today and just what I think about everything that is being shown off. Stay tuned!
I am now a Microsoft Student Insider, changes are coming
Greetings Readers!
I have some absolutely amazing news to share with all of you. As of today, I am officially a Microsoft Student Insider. What is that you ask? Essentially, it is an unpaid job to blog about various topics that they would like me to blog about. There is one student insider to talk about a specific topic. In my case, I am the chosen one to speak about all things Windows 7. Normally, I wouldn't take an unpaid position, but the perks of the job are good enough that I don't mind it.
While I will be writing a minimum of 15 blog posts for Microsoft over the next year, I am also being sent, all expenses paid, to whatever conferences they want to send me to cover. While I don't yet know a schedule of everywhere I am going to be sent, I do know that I am being sent to cover PDC in LA all of next week. It seems a bit fast considering I just got the job today, but I don't think I can complain too much about a free trip to LA and entrance into an expensive conference and I am getting some awesome stuff too. As part of being a Student Insider, to help me cover the event and others like it, I am being given a Flip HD camcorder, an ASUS eee pc netbook, a Microsoft shirt and some various other things to help with cab fair and such. I am also told that I will have access to talk to higher up people within Microsoft like various product managers and stuff, possibly even some board members either next week or at other times.
I will tell the story of how I got the position in either another post or on the next episode of the podcast which is at a time to be determined since I will be en route to LA at our normal recording time, but I do want to address what this means for the blog.
Although I have wanted a sponsor for some time for the show or the blog or whatever, mainly to help pay for my hosting fees, domain fees and such, at the same time, I have always dreaded the idea. I have build the podcast and this blog on a goal of being 100% honest, 100% of the time with no BS. I have always dreaded the idea of the sponsor because I don't like the feeling that I can't say what I want to say about a topic because I don't want to worry about offending them. The last thing I want to do is open up my mouth and scare way people who want to throw money at me. When I found out more about this position, I hesitated for a bit because of this, but I have decided that despite what I am being given or where I am being sent, I will do everything I can not to allow it to influence my opinions so that I appear to be nothing but a mouthpiece for a company. I will gladly blog about the topics that they request I blog about, but in the end, I will express how I really feel. I will do my absolute best not to censor myself. I will allow Microsoft or anybody else to present their case to me and I will forward it on to my audience, but in the end, my opinion is my own.
If all goes the way I hope, the type of content on here and the podcast will not change, there will just be more Windows 7 related stuff and when it is something that Microsoft wants me to talk about, I will make that very clear so that you can factor that into your judgment of my writing when you read my posts.
I primarily see this as an opening door that I have been trying to work my way into for the past 2 years. As many know, I have been trying to get a job at Microsoft for nearly 2 years and I see this as my way in and I will do whatever I can to achieve my dream while keeping my integrity in regards to Global Geek News but I suppose we will see how it plays out. Anyway, there may or may not be a podcast next week. Since I will likely be in flight when the show is recorded, it will definitely not be released on Tuesday like normal. There is a small chance of recording on Wednesday but at this point, I am not holding my breath. It is most likely the case that we will end up skipping a weeks show but I don't yet know. I will keep you all informed.
More to come!
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Reminder: Windows 7 Beta to begin bi-hourly shutdowns next week
Greetings Readers!
This is your friendly reminder that if you are still running the Windows 7 beta, you need up upgrade to the RC. Starting Monday, July 1st, the Windows 7 beta will begin shutting down every 2 hours as a way to alert you that it will expire soon and you should get all of you important data off before it does. The beta expires on August 1st, so if you don't upgrade by then, you could be in real trouble.
Windows 7 RC users won't have to worry about this until March 1st 2010 and expiration on June 1st 2010. That should give you plenty of time to get the retail version which ships in late October. If you aren't on the RC yet, I recommend it as it has several great features that the beta doesn't. I am running Windows 7 on all of my machines now and I don't think I could be happier.
Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
Russia launches anit-trust probe against Microsoft because it hates Vista
Greetings Readers!
Russia's state anti-monopoly service has decided to launch an antitrust probe of Microsoft because it hates Vista. Apparently Russia is complaining that Microsoft is cutting back on its shipments of Windows XP even though there is still demand for it. It seems Russia would rather use an old, far more insecure operating system than use Vista. They claim it is because there is still a demand for it which doesn't make a whole lot of sense because Microsoft certainly isn't the only company to have ever killed or in this case slowed down shipping a product that still had a demand for it. I have come up with two theories as to why this is happening. First, they really hate Vista. Despite the fact that it has been giving me trouble as of late, Vista isn't bad enough that it would warrant this kind of response. My second theory is that the botnet and virus writers have infiltrated the Russian anti-monopoly office and are doing everything they can to keep people on an insecure operating system they can more easily exploit. Personally, I favor the second option.
The hearing is set for July 24th so hopefully more will be revealed then. What is your theory?
Check out the latest Global Geek News Podcast!
-Jeremy "pcnerd37" Bray
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