Some days, the comics are just so right on the money.
Tags: Humour, Dilbert, customers, customer feedback.
Category: Uncategorized
As I Twittered (tweeted? I’ll get this right), sometimes you forget to do something: pick up milk on the way home, feed the cat or empty the dishwasher. On the whole, not so serious. And with a digital vide recorder or a Media Center PC, you shouldn’t have to worry about missing an episode of your favourite show.
That is, unless you forget to program the system to record your favourite show.
That happened to me this week, as I neglected to restart recording of The Office on NBC.
Luckily, 
NBC Video Rewind is available on the NBC 24/7 Video page, where you can view full-length episodes of NBC shows (posted the morning the day after they air), including 30 Rock, Heroes and others. You can also watch quick recap, two-minute replays that provide a Cliff Notes video clip of the show.
As we found with Hulu.com, we were able to find episodes of The Office on the web, available for streaming for free to your computer, live over the web. ABC and CBS also make many of their popular shows available for viewing on ABC.go.com and on CBS.com respectively, with many available in HD.
But most interesting over the compressed streaming video (fine for travel and desktop viewing) is full SD and HD video, downloaded to your PC. Normally relegated to Bit Torrent file downloads, we’d rather have a network blessed (read "legal") way to get vide to our Media Center computer (or any PC for that matter).
Thankfully, there’s the beta for NBC Video Direct, where full episodes are available for download. Using NBC Direct (now in beta), you can download full episodes to your Windows PCs. We first installed the NBC Direct player (available free) and then after registering were able to download HD versions of current and past favourites (do you miss Erin Gray in Buck Rogers?). For The Office one hour premier, it took about 10-15 minutes or so at home to get the full HD file.
Last fall, the New York Times said that the NBC Direct Beta was "not quite ready for prime-time" but a lot changes in a year. There’s a full list of shows available, the performance was flawless and overall our experience this week has been quite positive.
So, next time you neglect to program your DVR or PC to record a show from cable, satellite or broadcast, remember that there is a fallback for many of your favourite shows.
Tags: NBC, Windows, Media Center, television, DVR.
Thanks to Bethany for her question sent via email…
"I just installed the Live Toolbar beta and now I can’t find Form Fill. Do you know where I can find it?"
Well, short answer is you can’t: the Form Fill and Windows Live Favorites add-ins aren’t available on Windows Live Toolbar beta. This from the Help documentation:
"When you upgraded Toolbar beta, your Form Fill and Windows Live Favorites add-in settings were preserved on your local computer. To use these features, you must uninstall all of your Windows Live beta downloads and reinstall your previous version."
To the Live team: a great beta product but It would be nice if you were informed prior to installing the beta. Maybe you included the notice, but I missed that reference.
How do you get it back? Sadly (for now), the advice is to go back to the release version…
To uninstall Windows Live Toolbar beta:
In Windows XP, click Start, and then click Run.
–or–
In Windows Vista, click the Start button, and then click in the Start Search box.
- Type appwiz.cpl, and then press ENTER.
- Click Windows Live Beta (all programs), and then click Remove or Uninstall/Change.
- Click Change, and then click Continue.
- Under You haven’t installed these yet, clear all of the check boxes.
- Under You installed these earlier, clear all of the check boxes, and then click Continue.
- Follow the on-screen instructions
To install the previous version of Toolbar beta:
- Go to the Windows Live website, and then click Get it free.
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
Tags: Microsoft, Your questions, Windows Live.
Before I head off with my youngest to his guitar lessons and the skatepark, a few words on one of my favourite topics at the office: Windows 7. Maybe I can get him an opening set gig.
You may’ve heard the hoopla that we will provide Windows 7 pre-beta bits to attendees at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in late October, on a snazzy new 160GB external USB hard drive. True. Also true: included will be all the SDKs, binaries, whitepapers and more distributed at the conference.
The PDC team also announced additional information on the PDC web site (at http://www.microsoftpdc.com/) such as…
- a major lineup of executive keynote speakers representing most of the core Microsoft businesses.
- more than 20 Windows 7 sessions, plus
- distribution of the Windows 7 bits
Personally, I am looking forward to hearing Bob Muglia and Ray Ozzie reprise their talk with their thoughts and goals for Microsoft’s application architecture and distributed computing (also in the cloud). These guys are not to be missed.
I’m also on Twitter following the PDC 2008 tweets, recently tweeting on another interview with the Brain in The Jar (also at http://tinyurl.com/3uc57g). Fun stuff.
Tags: conferences, PDC2008, Microsoft, Windows 7.
Just received this article on Steve Ballmer’s visit to Silicon Valley where he spoke at the Churchill Club, saying that global markets should help shield companies through the financial crisis… this from Joseph Tartakoff of the San Francisco Chronicle…
Although the technology industry is not immune to the troubles facing the U.S. economy, it is positioned to weather a downturn, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer said in a talk Thursday evening in Santa Clara, Calif.
"As I travel and talk to people in the industry, I would say given the current circumstances, people still see a certain buoyancy in the market," he said.
Ballmer added that the industry is global, shielding it in part from the crisis in the U.S. In addition, he said so far the consumer side of the market has been less hard hit than the business side.
Steve spoke at the Microsoft Venture Capitalist Summit 2008 and spoke on several topics,noting this on connecting the cloud with devices…
“But we’re moving to a world in which computation is distributed between the cloud, the servers, the client devices, be they phones or PCs, and you really get a world that can be more efficient, get more done, enable new scenarios; just amazing amounts of innovation.
“So, people say, are you a desktop company, are you an enterprise company. No, we’re a software company. We think we’re good at doing software, and we’ll follow that broadly.
“This talk is not just about PCs or servers; this talk is about a world of devices: TVs, phones, PCs, servers are all very interesting. And it puts the Internet, of course, as a central part.”
… and this on market opportunities…
“It turns out our biggest growth opportunity is the sale of more PCs. This is a dollar statement, not a percent statement. The more PCs that sell with a legitimate copy of Windows, it turns out if you take a big number and you multiply by a modest percent, you still get a big number. And we’ve got a lot of absolute growth opportunity, because the PC market continues to grow in a stunning way. I mean, it’s a market that’s at 300 million and is still growing double digit — still growing double digit. And despite things or including things like the EEE PC and these other kind of low-cost $300, $400 notebooks, the market continues to explode.
“China will become the largest not manufacturing company but consumption market for PCs within the next two years. It’s number two today, about 45 to 50 million PCs a year. The U.S. is 65 million, but within a couple of years China will be kind of the number two market, and yet I think most companies need to have kind of a very different strategy to really think through what goes on in China.”
Steve talked a lot about personal devices, specifically the work on phones…
“Mobile is fascinating — fascinating. One of the big questions right now to me is what’s the long term shape of the Smart Phone market. The world today is largely what we would call feature phones or very low-cost phones. About 1.2 billion phones sold, but only 150 million that we would refer to as Smart Phones. At least in countries like the U.S. and Western Europe within the next three or four years pretty much 100 percent of the phones will be smart. It might take five years.”
Being a VC forum, he also discussed growing the company through investments and acquisitions…
“Just to give you a little bit of perspective, we continue to ramp a little bit certainly in value, but number of deals we do continues to be in kind of the 20 deal a year range. Right out of the bubble we weren’t doing much, because we had screwed up a little bit on some of our investment and deal making, so we kind of slowed down a little bit coming out of the bubble, but we’ve picked back up 17 deals in our fiscal year ’07 ended June, 24 deals last year.
“I don’t think you should think of 9.1 billion as projectable. The Danger acquisition, which was more expensive than many of ours; I don’t know if TellMe made fiscal year ’08 — or fiscal year ’07; I suspect it’s in ’08. So, some big acquisitions for us.
“But we’ll continue I think. Probably my guess is we’ll buy another 20, 25 companies. The sweet spot for us is under a billion more than over a billion. That’s not actually a financial statement. But companies under a billion are basically usually technology and people. Once you get to a billion, you’re buying customer-based and sales force and brand and all of the rest. We tend to like and do better with the former than the latter. But we’ve done some bigger deals that have had more of the other characteristic, and here you get a list of some of the deals from the last year.”
But my favourite part of his address was on tenacity, and his (personal vafourite) use of ‘fu’ and ‘bar’…
“And then, of course, long term tenacity. Tenacity is a thing I almost shy away now from talking about with investors, but I’ll talk to you about it. I think at the end of the day more companies get screwed up by not staying on point and just continuing to try and try and try. People screw up more by giving up than by doubling down.
“Almost everything we’ve ever stopped doing I wish we hadn’t. I mean, I can go through a list of things that we used to do, and I say, gosh, if we had kept doing it, we might have gotten to FU earlier or BAR.
“We had this business we called Sidewalk. It was local entertainment guides. We sold it to City Search. It was all wrong. There was nothing right about the idea, not a thing. Today I wish we hadn’t sold it, because I think we would have gotten to local search and doing local search well sooner.
“So, in a sense I’d tell you, you ought to continue to expect a lot of tenacity, patience and persistence out of us.”
Steve also had a few thoughts on other topics (as noted here) including…
On the virtualization market: Steve said that “it is still in a very early stage, with less than 5 percent of the servers virtualized. "I see real opportunity to bring virtualization to a much higher percentage," Mr. Ballmer said, adding that the company’s Hyper-V virtualization technology and also its systems management platform have been received with great enthusiasm.”
And on Apple: "Apple’s a good company, […] but they have a certain kind of strategy. They believe in putting the hardware and software together, they don’t believe in letting other people make it."
Additional links of interest:
- Ballmer: Tech industry can weather downturn (Seattle PI)
- Stanford Graduate School of Business speech
- The Churchill Club speech
Tags: Apple, Microsoft, Steve Ballmer.