Zune head-to-head with iPod

While reading reviews, I came across an interesting point - How is Microsoft going to erode Apple's market share, when happy iPod users are locked in with Apple's DRM? Uhmm, with this "Locked-in" monopoly, Microsoft can only compete with the 25%+ market share that Apple doesn't already own. Ouch! Zune marketeers cannot expect iPod users to throw away hundreds if not thousands of dollars worth of Apple DRM'd content.

Call to action:
Microsoft needs to either create or endorse porting kits/incentive or creative licensing to lure iPod user's to the neat Zune platform. Say, port the DRM over with the consent of the music industry backers - the 'owners' of the IP.

Just food for thought.

Congrats Zune! - but i think you need to loose a bit of weight

Today's the day that Zune debuts! W00 hoo! I've been eyeing this little device for quite sometime. I mean there was all that hype at the Company Meeting, people were soo excited! Cheering whenever there was a whisper of Zune mentioned on stage.

Anyway, so 11.14.2006 Microsoft officially enters the consumer digital media player market. This lucrative market has made and broken many players. From the failures of S3/Diamond's RIO to the hyper success of the iPod. Everyone's asking, is Microsoft next in line to take over the throne?

Here's my take in a few parts:
1) First impressions
2) Look and feel/Sex appeal
3) Service + offerings

First impressions - Zune, you need to trim the fat...
Well today, I rushed off to go take a peek at the Zune right after work at the local Circuit City. Overall, the buttons take a minute to get used to - things are not exactly where you think it would be... after all I'm an avid iPod user.

The video resolution is beautiful and the real estate is generous. I couldn't really get a sense of the weight of the thing as it was tied down in the kiosk, but i did get a chance to really check out it's exterior. The two tone casing is decent, but is it really worth the 3mm extra layer of "Fat?!". I could definitely do without it, especially to make it look slim and sexy compared to it's killer competitor.

Tactile comparison:

• Plastic - feels cheap, talks cheap
• Polished metal - speaks money and value

• Thin - feels refined, minimal, is not intrusive to carry around
• Thick - bulky archaic, undesireable

Overall, I kinda got a so-so feeling about the device after fidgeting with it for a bit. Not an overwhelming impulse. The I got to HAVE this thing reaction - as encountered with the v1.0 Nano.

2) Look and sex appeal

Two tone look is nice, but is it sexy? - I can't get over it's chunkiness - Zune you're fat. Also, what can you say about this user experience?! Installation Error and you show this girl who looks a) having so much fun her stomach hurts b) is having an orgasmic of a time listening to the music (wait no Zune or headphones) c) is in so much pain because of this error message she wants to cringe - yikes! bad image to burn into the user's minds.




3) Servicing + Offerings
Welcome to the social - Great selling point, but will it be as pervasive as marketing and business strategy hopes? I can only hope, over time the service will enable Zune not only to exchange music wirelessly, but also purchase music and eventually access rich online services - be it, a personal digital wallet :)

I still gotta check out the Zune music service - aside from the pain point above, the screen shots look awesome.

Vista compatibility is limited yes, but hey this thing's gotta ship right? I'm sure Vista updates will be out and ready by the time Vista for the consumer is ready in Jan '07.

Subscription based music leasing - Dude! Make this a selling point! for 15 bux a month I can lease any music I want?! I wonder what the cost would be to convert those music leased to music bought. This is a key differentiating factor from iTunes and iPod - I hope that Zune's Music service exploits this difference.

Overall, my impressions of the Zune is that it's an average music player. Nothing to de-throne the iPod from it's overwhelming 75%+ market share, yet. Hey Microsoft's always in it for the long haul, let's see what V2 is like.

Vista RTM'd

Yeppie! Vista is locked, loaded and ready to go. Enterprises, here Vista comes!

Now this begs the question, as a consumer should I go get Business Ed. For my desktop? Or should I wait till Jan for the consumer versions: Home Basic, Premium and Ultimate?

Well, Microsoft not just going to hold their breath from now until Jan. There are going to be subtle improvements on the way for sure. The bottom line, it's always worth the wait for quality... Right?

Speaking of quality check out these sweet new boxes:


What's cool in Vista that I like?
1) Organization via search - no more poking around to find your app and docs, just search!
2) Eye candy: Aero (glass), improved Alt-Tab (sticky is a nice feature), 3d-flip (kinda gimmicky), sidebar gadgets
3) More security conscious - reduced access while running software (UAC), IEs security offerings
4) Somewhat faster network access
5) DX10, yet to be seen what kind of awesome games this can help produce

With that said... how many people out there are going to be lining up at Best Buy to get a copy come January??

My guess.... not too many. The feedback i've been getting from the consumer land is that:

1) "...This product has been pegged with delays, and they still don't have it all right.. "
2) "...Microsoft never gets the OS right on the first try, I'm going to wait for SP1 or even SP2..."
3) "...Where are all my drivers? I want to game, use cool hardware, do things i could do on XPSP2, but better!..."

I guess you can't argue with those above points. ISVs (Independent software vendors) and IHVs (Independent hardware vendors) need to catch up and revise their products to be compatibile with Vista.

My take...
Well, my finger print reader software doesn't work, but most of my other peripherals work out of the box. My iPod (Zune isn't out yet so chill), my SD card reader, my webcam and all the little gadgets on my motherboard, all seem to work with Vista. I'm ready for it. I say try it out.

Wikipedia has an entry that describes the new features quite well: [link]

Music I Like: Kaskade - Love Mysterious

Arist: Kaskade
Album: Love Mysterious
Genre: Electronic, Down-tempo

Seductive, cool, and chill, what more can you ask for soft easy listening while driving to work or just hanging out on a Sunday afternoon reading a book. This guy can really produce awesome tracks, from his ground breaking In the Moment and his double 'best of' album Here and Now. On Love Mysterious, I find myself listening to the catchy club antheme 'Be Still' and chilled out track of 4am. Never the less, another great production, good job!

In search of sashimi

Ah... Winter is starting to settle in. As I sit here blogging, I stark crave for some SUSHI. In a recent trip back home I had the fortune of making a trip to an all you can eat buffet @ Masion du Japon in Toronto. (Go figure with the french name for Japanese cuisine).


MMMMMmm (pulpy salivation), doesn't this look awesome!

I gotta find a place here in the NW with similar offerings.

Music I Like: Hello Goodbye - Here in your arms

Artist: Hello Goodbye
Album: Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!
Genre: Electronic, Rock
...

I like,
Where we are,
When we drive,
In your car.
I like,
Where we are;
Here.

Cause our lips,
Can touch,
And our cheeks,
Can brush.
Our lips,
Can touch;
Here.

...

Hello synth pop! On my drive home, I couldn't help but to have a big *smile* across my face as the song Here (In your arms) pumped my radio. Something about how the melody and chorus stirs up nostalgia and warm fuzzy feelings of the now.

I think I'm going to have to check them out... As for now, this is my tune of the moment.

Wiki for Gentoo

Man, installing has never been easier. Just searching for your favourite package, live or google it, check the portage tree and emerge. Yeppie! I have my new wiki.

Link:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Wiki

Incidently, I chose moinmoin, being the most popular.

xGL - desktop composition for Linux

Watch the video, all I can say is *wow*. You can really make a bleed edge looking desktop with high quailty 3D and 2D desktop effects.

I happened upon the video from here.



More info:
Ubuntu Howto
Gentoo Howto

Note to self, I gotta get me a distro and try this out!

Liquid Desktop

You can do it yourself! Check this out, the parameterization of screensavers allow you to pass in arbitrary HWNDs to parent the screen saver. Meaning.. hmm what if I used the desktop as the parent?

Check this out:


yourfavscreensaverhere.scr /p 65552 and voila, you have an animating desktop!

Congee Explained!

Wow, talk about learning something new everyday. Congee, a rice porridge typically eaten at breakfast, is a word derived from the Tamil word kanji. I've always been puzzled how that term came about.

In Cantonese, one would phonetically pronounce it as "jok" or in Chaozhou it's prounced "mwyeh". It's funny how sometimes the Chinese phonetic pronunciation never make its way to the Latin/English phonetic-based word.

On the same 'word history' topic, it appears that China, a term used to describe porcelain and the nation the People's Republic of China. It could have been derived from the name Qin (may be pronounced as Chin), the first imperial dynasty that ruled the region in around 200BC. Curiously enough, today in mandarin, it is pronounced "ZhongGuo" -中国 literally middle country.

Bats in Downtown Seattle?!

There are bats downtown Seattle?! Well, I suspect at least near the corner of 4th and Pine st.

While walking home from the flick 'Departed' (which is a mighty good show might I add), my friends and I noticed hundreds if not thousands of chirping nocturnal creatures fluttering about in the trees on 4th across from Macy's. On ground near the inhabited trees, I found what looked like drops of bat poo aka guano. Hmmm... I wonder if Batman is lurking around the corner somewhere.

I Live'd it and found, yes indeed there are bats to be found downtown and up in Greenlake. Unfortunately, with Google I had a tougher time in coming up with relative hits.

UAC & IE7 Toolbar hell

Now with Vista's security, and User Account Control (UAC) are our PCs really much more safe?

I just read this amusing article on how a user experimented with toolbars on IE6. Quite a telling tale: [link].

My bottom-line opinion:
Yes, Windows has created features to make it more difficult to accidentally hose your PC.

However, when it comes down to it.. NO users still need to have a great deal of knowledge to make decisions about whether installing X will be safe. Also whether installing safe X will come with an annoying Y.

User account control is just that - it gives users control to decide when to install something or not, while running in a more restrictive default environment. IOW, I can't accidentally install some foreign ActiveX control that causes spontaneous pop-ups, but I can however still do it, after clicking several dialog boxes.

I would still argue that Windows Vista is probably the most secure version of Windows ever produced. The problem with installing and running software, unfortunately is still a guessing game.

p.s. I'm glad to see a neat reset feature obfuscated in the Internet Options [advanced] Panel.

Reset Internet Explorer settings....
Deletes all temporary files, disable browser add-ons and resets all the changed settings. You should only use this if your browser is in an unstable state.

Mail In Rebates woes

Great marketing plan! Let's sell consumers products at a 'discounted' price, but infact charge them full price, and where applicable collect taxes on the full inventoried price. So, let's sell goods and services for full face value, give our customers a coupon that gets thrown into a rebate system. After which, it'll take 6-8 weeks of 'processing' time to which we may or may not decide to cut a cheque based on eligibility ;^)

Sound familiar? Ughk, it's such a pain in the butt...

Why do retailers do this?
1) Manufacturers or wholesalers want to rush out inventory through incentive based liquidating
2) Stores will co-market this inventory liquidation
3) Manufacturers + stores will co-market to produce incentive and buzz to buy a particular high value product

The process of photocopying receipts, meticulously cutting out the UPC and mailing several forms with several pieces of info to various mailing addresses can become daunting. On top of that, you may have thought you've fulfilled the retailers + mfgr's requests on the rebate forms, but you may in fact may not have checked the right box, or neglected to sign a dotted line somewhere. Thus invalidating your rebate request, hence after all this processing - the goods or service purchase becomes much more expensive than anticipated and desired.

Bottom line, something advertised for 59.99, may infact be 149.99 with serveral stacked coupons, let's say 50$ from mfgr + 40$ from retail hq. On top of that, you may or may not get these rebates. Sounds like a professional 'scheme' to me. As of lately, I try to avoid these like the plague.

Mozilla meet Microsoft

Oh what a cool night, I got to have dinner with the core Mozilla team. It's amazing how organized open source projects can coherently bring a project together to strive towards the same vision and goal. To bring the ultimate browsing experience to consumers.

My experience with software development has mostly been in the domain of commercial/for profit software. It's amazing how much co-ordination goes on with open source projects like Firefox and to see the organization ship version after version in a relatively short time period (12 months).

Overall, the meet and greet was very humbling, we talked shop - browsers, extensions, plugins DOM interactions and talked about how to integrate in the next revision of Microsoft Windows aka Vista.

There's nothing like swapping tech stories and drinking stories a like over steak and gorges of wines and spirits.

I gotta say, Chris Ruth's steakhouse has a decent selection of single malt scotches and unique desert wines. *yumm*

On top of all that, I learnt that they have facilities in Toronto! How about that, it's one of their core centralized dev centers. Way to go T dot. Their operations are pretty small there compared to those in Mountain View, CA. It's still an HQ in Canada.

Tomorrow morning, I get to meet with the core Mozilla team to talk more about UAC. I'm excited to see a fully Vista capable release of Mozilla products, like Firefox and Thunderbird.

Category

Wii + Twilight Princess = Awe inspiring

Wow - I'm pretty excited about this new gaming system, I mean who wouldn't be with capabilities like nun-chucks, sword fighting, fishing, archery all in a full featured adventure action game. I WANT ONE!

Check it out:

Where did I go today?

International District

After some Dim-sum I whipped my camera out on the hunt for some photo ops.


Distinctively Asian - Walk about the I-district it can become very apparent the differences between Chinese and Japanese architecture. In particular, the cultural significance of the colour red as well as the larger accents tend to be traits of Chinese structures. Whereas Japanese structures will tend to stay more towards neutral colours, with accents that are not as bold.


Supportive pillars

Gene Coulon Beach Park

After poking around at Fry's - I decided to take a random road and see where it would lead me.


Mighty powerful sun! - pretty blinding actually was seeing dark spots after taking this shot.


Distinctive poise - Her arched back can almost be conceived as aristocratic.


A conversation to be had - to be shared with a loved one or a good friend

E-Commerce the love/hate relationship

E-Commerce, the 90's answer to superfluid commerce for the purpose of exchanging goods and services over a ubiquitous network 24/7/365. The utopian dream suddenly bursted early in 2000 when vendors realised they have to keep expensive inventory and stay on top of the logistics of fulfillment, VC's realised that not all [dot] com ideas were worth 10s of millions and not all customers were wired to the internet.

Anyway, enough of history today 10/01/2006 we as consumers are exposed to a variety ways of conducting business through a mash of mediums with a variety of currencies. Business through the internet, over the phone and in good 'ol brick and mortars. Here's my take on why I like and dislike about buying stuff over the net.

What I like about online transactions:
1. Instant gratification (zaaaaap, in an instant I've bought new songs, movies, e-books, and game/movie/show tickets) - As digi-cams have become extremely popular as I can preview my shots right away or decide if need to re-take another shot. Instant gratification works great for services and electronic media delivery. Instantly you can receive what you want the instant you want it.

2. All the convience sans the drive - I can do everything from the convience of work, home or an internet cafe (wifi permitting). I can go out and pre-order the next new video game, book or whatever without having to change from my PJs.

3. Best prices EVER - No tax, free shipping competitive pricing what more can you ask?

What i don't like about online transactions:
1. What you see isn't always what you get - buying shoes, shirts, jackets or pants isn't the same if I can't physically try them on.

2. The waiting game - the cat and mouse game with the mail/post dude. The game becomes especially irrtating when they leave those delivery notes stating that they'll be back between the hours of 9am-5pm. Alternatively, instead of waiting for the package, I could go out of my way to the delivery center to pick it up. *ughk* this system is defintely not tailored for those who work during core business hours or those who do not have someone at home to help sign packages.

3. Shifty deals - I find myself scouring craigslist.org and eBay.com often. However, buyer beware there are a lot of con artists/bad vendors out there. There's nothing to say other than proceed with caution.

Anyway, this is just a silly rant that came about when I was decide to a local electronics store to buy a new SD card reader.

Music I Like: Bitter:Sweet - The Mating Game

Artist: Bitter:Sweet (Kiran Shahani & Shana Halligan)
Album:The Matting Game
Genre:Trip-Hop

Dance with me across the ocean floor,
Sail away to heaven's open door...

A hint of latin, a bit of funk, soothing chilled out downtempo, a mix of sultry, funky and cool, Bitter:Sweet. I happened across Bitter:Sweet while watching Grey's Anatomy and again on Nip/Tuck. I couldn't help but find myself 'Google'ing the lyrics (sorry Live, you're still not quite there yet).

Tracks on my playlist: Don't Forget to Breath, Our Remains, Salty Air and of course The Mating Game.

Cool features in Windows Vista !! Folder redirection and sync

I'm so-called 'self-hosting' Windows Vista RC1 and I came upon a neat expanded feature, falling under 'Documents management'. Check it out!

[Location] under the properties of some key special [Explorer] folders like:
Documents, Downloads, Pictures to name a few.

What does this do?! - well not only does it redirect your documents to some arbitrary location, IT ALSO, 'syncs' with a network share if you point the darn thing to a fileshare somewhere, utilizing Windows Sync center. It automatically sets up a partnership with the network share. HOW COOL IS THAT!

Look for the Sync Center sync-up - to know your documents are being replicated.



Screenshot of how to get this all setup.


It's really super easy, just select the location you want to point to, and Windows takes care of the rest. ta da!

Ah, all is not perfect. Even though there is syncing with Explorer and the network share, I suspect there's still lots of traffic between the two when you conduct file i/o on your redirect documents.

Recently, I tried manipulating large RAW (NEF) Nikon images, these things are 10MB 10MP monsters. As a result, you should expect application hangs, delays and worst yet Explorer.exe hangs which may lead to Explorer restarting :(.

Also, if you so happen _not_ to want to sync with the remote share, but keep everything living remotely and not replicated then you can unselect offline files.

Screenshot

You might find it annoying when sync center has to de-select each individual object from syncing. Ughk! This was quite painful when I pointed it to my music collection.

All in all, a really cool feature. Especially, if you're going to have a network appliance/data server sitting in your closet somewhere to keep your data backed-up in some raid configuration.