Stanley Yao's Blog

The next revolution is gonna be the transition from mass media to personal media.

Live at the Windows Vista launch event - Engadget

One day earlier than promised, the long waited Vista was launched today in NYC. When the kids pushed the big button, all big screens on the Time Square are displaying Vista. Thousands of balloons fell at the same time on the MS campus celebration party. Congratulations! It's not a easy release.

The new version does improved in lots of areas. No need to repeat. You can see them here 100 reasons. The usability is basicly amazing. For example, in Outlook or Windows, type in a search term. The result come back almost at the same time when you are done typing. If you type multiple terms, it rolls out results on the fly while you are typing. This is the best part I like. Go vista!

MercuryNews.com | 02/17/2007 | Search for pioneering computer scientist called off

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This egg looking sleeping bench makes me think about the mass production chicken farm seen in the Science Channel where all kinds of method are utilized to make the chicken more productive from hatching eggs, growing chicks, egg producing, and so on. I'm think of a high tech bench for IT workers where you can can lay down in a really less stressful pose from neck to feet. No waist pain or back pain any more. Eyes are covered by a VR mask with magnifiers so you will have minimum eye fatigue. Eye tracking system will move the picture you see to reduce your eye's work to move your focus. You then basically have a huge virtual screen with pixel size of 10 times that of the traditional computer monitor, so you can look at much longer code blocks. The bench can do massage at the same time. When you feel tired, play some 3D game or MTV and you can get back to work again. It's like living in the Matrix inside the Matrix.  People need life!

“GTPH” gives us a hands-on preview of the LG KE850, which looks extremely similar to the iPhone. Technical specifications have not yet been released, but we do know that it sports a 240 x 400 touchscreen display, much like the iPhone. This is definately an iPhone clone. Who is cloning whom? According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_KE850), LG phone is announced before iPhone. It hasn't started being sold in the North America doesn't mean it didn't exist. BTW, check out this funny show (http://jpicune.wordpress.com/2007/01/14/funny-snl-iphone-steve-jobs-parody/) on SNL this past Saturday. I like the “20 min battery life” part. Battery life is the exact part why I don’t like my mp3 player and cell phone combined. Calling is mission critical while listening to music is not.

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More Pictures Of Possible Google Phone?

Wireless platform would be the next battle field of searching. The day of "technology" is past. In those days computers and software were invented to help people do more things faster. Those things is mostly about information processing. Given a bunch of input and the computers will follow the instructions embedded in the software and produce the expected results. When network was invented to connect computers, it was about transmitting information faster on a much wider scope.

Today, with the already advanced computing and world wide web as the infrastructure, almost all computer technologies are about information and people. Finding the right intelligence and talents. Sitting in front of a desktop or looking for a Wi-Fi hot spot for laptop connection is not efficient enough. A more mobile and slim device is more desirable, so that information is right at the tip of people fingers. Integration of wireless devices and Internet services would be really attractive. I'm imaging the future information searching is pervasive. For example, when you are talking with your friend on the phone and trying to set up a time to go lunch together in a new restaurant. The wireless phone will extract keywords and address from your conversation and you could ask the phone to create this appointment by either pressing a button or saying some voice command. After confirming this appointment, map and driving direction is created too. And you could use it as a GPS to guide you to the venue.  With search-enabled wireless phone, you can also ask the phone to find the closest drug store or coffee shop just by talking.  The search-enabled phone could also be your assistant when you are talking with your friends.  When you do not agree with some ideas in your conversation, ask the phone to do a search on the fly and join your conversation by telling you what it found.

Like partnering with computer manufacturers to pre-install search tool bars on the new computers. Wireless is another competition field. Moto Q with Microsoft Windows Mobile is out there. But I think there is still a lot that can be improved to integrate with Internet services. I look forward to seeing what google phone will bring us.

clipped from news.yahoo.com

One can enumerate hundreds of difference between software from open source community and companies like Microsoft.  There are fundamental things that cause the difference - the paradigm of programming, the architecture of software family, and development productivity, etc.

On the server side development platform for example, popular open source tools are the well known LAMP.  Four pieces are done by totally different groups of people, on different time schedule, and with different design style.  They are all good products without doubt.  They work together very well for sure too.  Coding something on LAMP feels super geeky, because you control everything from top to the bottom.  Commercial software makers like Microsoft have some different considerations.  For good manageability, installation, configuration, migration, and so on mostly have easy to use (at least try to) GUI.  For productivity, many of the routines are abstracted and hidden away from the application developers.  For example, in ASP.NET, post backs, event handler registration, page templating and all those kind of wiring work is hidden.  Writing server side code feels more straight forward like writing desktop application.  ASP.NET really evolves from a programming language up to a server side framework.  With the Visual Studio .NET's help like IntelliSense, debug tracing on both server and client side, visualized server control customization with sample data, and so on, developers are more free to focus on the business logic of the software, which is critical for business.

Talking about the hot AJAX.  Interestingly this technology was started by Microsoft when building the outlook web access.  Because it is majorly for business rather than the consumers on the Internet, it didn't surface that much until Google Suggest and Maps made the splash with it.  To code in AJAX there are a lot of plumbing work underneath to wire up the connections between the client side scripts and the server side handler, AJAX for ASP.NET wraps all these up and provide a few straight forward abstract controls to improve the productivity of the application developers.

There are debates in many companies and organizations about Wiki and SharePoint too.  Again like the comparison between PHP and ASP.NET, SharePoint is more of a platform that contains Wiki features and many other capabilities.  Wiki starts out to do collaborative web content editing, while SharePoint is designed to be the collaboration platform which integrates with Office suites, workflow, enterprise search engine, content management, SharePoint Designer (visual design tool), etc.

Open source software products are simple, developer-enjoyable, and inexpensive upfront.  Commercial products are more business friendly, enterprise infrastructure oriented, productiviey oriented (sometimes productivity and developer-enjoyable are not well aligned :) ), and more expensive upfront.  They have much difference in the fundamental design paradigm.  Comparing the two different types of products really depends on the specific requirements rather than a religious belief.

It feels kinda weird to see they describe the achievement of each other. :)  It's historical to see these two big guys sitting together on the stage.

Since a few years ago, I've been longing for a light portable library that can hold a couple hundred books, articles, and news papers in it and I can read anywhere when convenient.  I've tried a bunch of devices from Franklin to Palm and read about Sony's Reader which, although features electronic ink technology, didn't caught much popularity at all.  Amazon's newly launched Kindle seems to begin to light up the candles of the portable reading.

It take much to build a electronic book reading device that could compete with paper books.  First of all LCD still causes much more eye fatigue than natual ink on paper.  The electronic ink technology in the Kindle could simulate natual ink and the ability of changing the font size is a plus for eye comfort.  Content quality is the next most important thing.  For example, the Acrobat Reader for Palm has to transform normal PDF files into a special format to be displayed on Palm.  It not only take a long time to transform, but also lose a lot of formatting for graphics, tables, and math formula.  Content collection is also a challenge, where Amazon definitely wins with its unbeatable collection of books, partnership with large content providers, a aggregation of community contents (e.g., blogs).  And don't forget these can all be access wirelessly while you are on the go and they are fully searchable!  Isn't that cool?

Since this is only the first version, there must be a lot that could be further improved.  While I'm reading, I like to see more per screen.  So while not change the physical keyboard into a touch screen and let the screen be as big as possible?  Kindle won't have the dilemma as iPhone's small touch screen keyword, because Kindle has bigger screen.  Even many people got use to the iPhone keyboard after practicing, Kindle will be even much easier.

It has been reported that due to the burgeoning advancement in digital multimedia content on TV and Internet, reading and literacy capability of young generation is decreasing.  Hopefully this cool gadget could bring books back into the competition with TV and Inernet.