Believe it or not, up to November 1st many could and still were buying licenses for Windows 3.x (mainly for embedded systems like cash registers and airline entertainment systems from companies like Virgin). But on that day, Microsoft discontinued their licensing of the product. After 18 years, the iconic Windows platform is no more.
Requirements for the OS included a 8086/8088 processor with clock speed of 10MHz, 7MB of storage (better move Police Quest to a floppy) and 640KB of RAM. And when you realize that Vista requires a minimum of 1GHz processor and 20GB of storage, it’s easy to see why at least some low end systems will miss the platform…until they just grab a copy of Linux instead.
The New Xbox Experience—which we just gave a stellar review—will not only stream Netflix movies. It will be streaming Netflix movies in HD. Whaaa? Nobody else does that!
Well, maybe they don’t. But Engadget confirmed that when NXE hits on November 19th, 300 HD movies will be available to stream from Netflix (as opposed to just the movie 300). That’s obviously not every movie in the Netflix digital collection, but it’s a start.
Seeing as I found SD streaming flawless on the 360, I’m really curious to see if Netflix and Microsoft can deliver the same short buffer times and easy fast forwarding in high def.
Like Elvis in ‘68, Microsoft is itching for a “comeback,” and Windows 7 is the perfect excuse. In fact, this week in LA at the Professional Developers Conference, Windows 7 officially shoved Vista aside. Having suffered through the often deserved criticisms of that ill-fated OS installment, Microsoft’s people are thrilled to tears to be able to talk about something (anything!) else. On Sunday, they took journalists through a lively 7-hour orientation on Win 7, then handed off a Dell XPS M1330 loaded with pre-beta Build 6801. Thankfully for the overworked, underappreciated developers at Redmond, it’s surprisingly stable, and its look and feel already puts Vista to shame.
Here’s a walkthrough of the system I’m looking at, some videos showing its basic performance, and then shots of more interface and system details demoed at PDC that will show up in the first beta build.
New details have emerged on #3 cable provider Cox Communication’s plan to enter into the wireless business. Apparently, subscribers will be able to control their DVRs, watch television, and automatically sync their address book with home PCs via their cellphone. Cox will be riding on the back of Sprint to get things going in the second half of 2009, but they are planning to take control of their own 3G network and even test 4G technologies down the line. Full details are available in the press release after the break.
Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience, the upcoming dashboard system that’ll let you create avatars and social network, now has a set date for its worldwide launch—November 19. The guys from Redmond showed a completed version of the NXE at the Tokyo Game Show, with a little XBox Bill Gates announcing that he’s “a PC.” In about six weeks, you’ll get the ability to create your Xbox mini-you, as well as get access to themes and a new games channel, including new games details pages.
The box took 14 hours to build. It includes a Mac Mini with a 250GB hard drive hack, with the system drive being an ESATA drive. The Hackintosh running Mac OS X, the second computer inside the box, uses:
2.4GHz Intel Q6600 Quad Core
Gigabyte ep35-ds3l motheboard
BFG NVIDIA 8800gt with 512 Mbytes
2GB of 800MHz RAM
750 and 400GB harddrives
Processing is an open source programming language designed for visual artists, “created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool.” Originally developed at the MIT Media Lab, it’s a free alternative to fancy, expensive, proprietary software tools. And man, can you make some cool stuff with it. This video, created by Glenn Marshall using Processing, is called Metamophosis. Featuring music by the incomparable Boards of Canada, it’s a remarkable testament to what you can create with a simple programming language if you’ve got the chops.
In a presentation made at Nvidia’s NVISION show this week, Adam and Jamie unveiled a 1100 barrel paintball gun and—in an instant—painted a pretty convincing (if slightly drippy) Mona Lisa. In typical MythBusters fashion, the incredibly elaborate experiment was only tenuously linked to their hypothesis. The presentation was intended to represent the difference in operation between single and multicore processors, referring to current gen CPUs versus GPUs, respectively.
Of course, the reality of parallel computing is much more complex than the MythBusters are making it seem here, but as with many of the experiments on their TV show, the sheer ridiculousness of this demonstration makes its questionable veracity completely, totally, seriously excusable. Now that they’ve built this thing, the MythBusters have a clear and undeniable responsibility to turn it on a human and put the results on TV. Thanks in advance, guys.
• He asked Congress to spend $1 billion to monitor peer-to-peer activity. (In fairness, much of this is to prevent child pornography, but the tactic is apparently a little blunt.)
• Two Biden bills have been explicitly anti-encryption, because you know, encryption makes it hard for the FBI to read people’s e-mails.
Last week, the 174th Air Force Fighter Wing flew its last manned combat sortie over Iraq in F-16s, which have now been mothballed in favor of MQ-9 Reapers. This makes it the first combat-specific wing to ditch conventional aircraft entirely in favor of unmanned robo-drones piloted from the ground. Welcome to the Skynet era, everyone!
There are a few Wings currently manned by Predator UAVs, which can indeed carry Hellfire missiles, but unlike the Reaper, their main mission is reconnaissance. Quite the contrary, the Reaper is the first true hunter-killer UAV, and its 66-foot wingspan and the ability to carry up to 1.5 tons of laser-guided bombs and other ordinance makes the Predator look like a fluttering sparrow.
Add this to my “Things to hyperventilate over” list: British police are on the lookout for something called a WASP Knife, a weapon that injects a ball of compressed gas into its victim that then expands to the size of a basketball, instantly freezing and exploding their internal organs. The blade, which was designed to help hunters and divers bring down large wild animals quickly, could possibly be bought on the Internet by serial killing-minded crooks. Look at what it does to a watermelon!
The WASP website states “the effects of the compressed gas not only cause overinflation during ascent when used underwater, but also freezes all tissues and organs surrounding the point of injection on land or at sea.” It’s like a freeze ray out of a superhero movie… Only it’s real, and thus infinitely scarier. Somebody hold me.
AT&T chief tech officer John Donovan has told Wired that they’re going to test bandwidth caps in the fall, making them the third of the four major ISPs to do so. (Verizon stands alone, but for how long?) He lays out the familiar rationale, a small group of users (5 percent) pillage the network (40 percent) and they’ve got to stop them. But then he slips what’s probably the real reason they’ve moving to caps: “Traffic on our backbone is growing 60 percent per year, but our revenue is not.”
The transfer of secrets
By claire on November 6, 2008, 4:10 pm
wonder when how long before you (you=president elect) get to find out about the sekrit to turning thin air into...
