Wednesday, May 7, 2008
The Pioneers Lacrosse Team is making its Way into
Portable Advanced Windows Care Pro 2.6.0.943
Advanced WindowsCare v2 Professional provides an Always-On and Automated, All-In-One PC Care Service with anti-spyware, privacy protection, performance tune-ups, and system clean.With the powerful "Install It and Forget It" feature, it works automatically and quietly in the background on your computer, constantly keeps your computer safe, error-free and running at top speed.
Here are some key features:
· Install It and Forget It
· Removing Spyware and Adware
· Preventing Security Threats
· Privacy Protection
· Fixing Registry Errors
· Temporary Files Cleanup
· Startup Cleanup
· Repairing Windows
· Speeding up System
7mb
Portable Discover Painting for Kids 1.0
Kid Friendly Interface Encourages Exploration and CreativityDiscover Painting's unique interface is a virtual kid's painting studio where everything on the screen can be clicked and used to compose a picture. This studio layout uses brightly colored, rendered images of everyday objects to represent the various painting tools. Many of these easy to use tools are actually sophisticated image processing effects in disguise.Discover Painting features over 30 painting and drawing tools, in addition to a library of 144 stamps, visual special effects, sounds effects, and an expandable set of coloring pages and starter backgrounds.Parent Friendly TooDiscover Painting also includes an option specifically designed to conserve printer ink. Complete instructions are provided in the form of standard help screens and automatically appearing tool tips. The main window always opens full screen to maximize the painting area and to minimize the chance of kids accidentally clicking on something off limits.
http://w16.easy-share.com/1700003466.html4mb
From the first 15 years of the web to the next
Look how far we’ve all grown with the web over the last 15 years, since its birth. Amazing. Think in terms of people looking up information or how people keep in contact or how people track the news or the time they spend watching TV versus reading the news or how people decide to buy or do buy. It’s quite amazing how fast and far the web has impacted our lives. But as Tim Berners Lee–the co-creator of the world wide web points out, this is only the beginning. The web is in its infancy.
What might come next? As I’ve blogged about several times before, I see a growth in the amount of information we publish not constructed from words we type into an editor, but that gathered from sensors, which will give us an opportunity to automatically retain more of the context of the information and hence make it more discoverable and valuable later–not just by us, but by the computer. Yes, the computer will become even more of our coworker and companion on the web than it is today helping us to organize, collect, and communicate, and distribute what we want. We’ve only seen the beginning.
I also see that simultaneously as we push more and more content to the web, making it bigger and bigger, we’ll also see the web integrate into our lives in smaller and smaller ways. We’ll see connection points to the web that previously we would have considered too complicated and combersome to create. This will reach into cars, phones, radios, cameras, televisions, and so on. The trends are already there for all of these, setting a strong trend for the next 15 years.
I think we have a long way to go to transpose several publishing businesses to the web. They all have established business models that are unfortunately holding them and us back. Whether it’s music, movies, books, or proceedings from a conference, or the conference itself, we all need to work towards spreading more content, further. We will all benefit. How we use this content will expand too. For instance, I can see where if professional organizations unlock their control of conference proceedings and manuscripts, we’ll see an explosion of professional content impacting us all. Currently the print-and-publish oriented model is too locked down, too controlled. It shouldn’t be. Some schools are beginning to adapt to the way it should be, such as MIT’s online experiments with classroom content. I think their direction is good although I wonder where the sweet spot will be. The fact is simple: the economics is changing whether they want it or not. It’s going to happen. Which side of evolution do you want to be on?
A little perspective on the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger
I’ve blogged several times about the over-the-top thinking going on with the TechMeme Leaderboard crowd when it comes to the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo merger. The sensationalism might have encouraged traffic, but much of it sure was borderline business advice. Now that the deal is undone, maybe we can all get back to talking about tech.
Of all the posts I’ve run across, Danny Sullivan gives some of the best perspective on the proposed deal and where things go from here.
I would say that in terms of where I’d like Microsoft to go from here is where I’ve wanted it to go all along. The first step I’d suggest for them is to work with its many MVPs and build an ad system they’d like to use. Start there. It’s simple enough and small enough to keep nimble. I realize that an approach like this doesn’t have the charm that the top 15%, but hey, that’s exactly the thinking that’s gotten Microsoft this far–so it’s time for a change.
I won’t repeat myself yet again why and how this would all work, but it seems so obvious to me.
I’d also recommend to Microsoft to think less in terms of search in the classic Google way, because I don’t even think Google is doing it anymore. There’s more to search than search. Microsoft should think in terms of helping people get to the information that they want to get to and to use it they way they want. I think this suggests more services than just search. Why can’t someone programmatically get to the definition of a word in Live Search? Why can’t they get acceptable hyphenation via a service call? Or just the source code sample on MSDN that use a particular function–again via a call? This type of approach would get a developer like me to use Live “Search.” Is Google really the best at providing reference material? I don’t think so. That’s why Wikipedia had an opening. Microsoft has the same opportunity here, especially if they provide easily reusable components and services, which is something Microsoft is good at.
Virtual Earth is a fairly good example of this. It’s not quite right though if you ask me. Would I point any of my GPS-enabled programmer/bicycling friends to it? No. Why? Because it doesn’t do what they want and to make it do what they want is too much work.
And what about something like math? There’s a reason why my Silverlight-based Math Tip points to Google and not Live Search for getting math results. Microsoft misses the boat here again and makes it too hard to try to even kludge something up. It’s possible, but why bother. Just use Google.
Live Mesh or not, there are tons of these little services that are ideal for Microsoft or Google or Yahoo to do. Maybe some day.
Primary Theology
Does it occur to anyone that the processes unfolded and still unfolding in the Democratic and Republican parties are eerily reminiscent of the medieval Catholic church? Issues of great import are invented out of whole cloth, and debated endlessly by the learned and the mighty, even though those debates will very likely have little or no impact on the direction of future events?
Iraq? Shall we reclaim the Holy Land? Health care – shall the church use its vast resources to care for the meek and helpless, or are they better employed in building grander and more opulent monuments to the greater glory of the state? Abortion? When does life begin? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Was Christ poor? Did he own his clothes, or merely have them "in use?" Taxation? Can we buy our way out of our collective guilt for being such shameless hogs of the world's resources by granting indulgences to those who pay heavily for them? Carbon offsets? Ditto. Global warming? Not a prediction; merely a prophesy.
And even the electoral process seems strangely akin to the Holy See's. The democratic nominee will most likely be selected by the party's equivalent of the College of Cardinals, and the final victor similarly chosen, not by popular vote, but by the Electoral College.
With all this wind and noise about pastors, racial slurs, vast hidden conspiracies where the media replaces the Templars as the mystical and secretive wielders of power, is there anything actually happening of meaning or import? Does anything the candidates say have any real value? Or are they just more empty combinations of scripture and dogma?
Does any of this help us understand what may lay in our future, or are we increasingly shrouded in the mists of doubt and uncertainty? Quo vadis, America? No one knows.
The most interesting UMPCs right now all run OS X Leopard
What’s the most interesting thing going on right now with UMPCs? Running OS X on them.
Several people have tried running OS X on the diminutive PCs, including the OQO which
Engadget is linking to and today showing OS X running. Hmmm. This is getting interesting. Now if OS X would just add some decent handwriting recognition this would be even more interesting….
What have we seen so far? OS X on an Eee PC, Sony Vaio UX, and Mini-Note, Samsung Q1 Ultra, and I think James Kendrick did the same with the Fujitsu P1620.
This all beggs the question: Is OS X a good UMPC OS? So far I haven’t seen anything that says yes, which kind of points out the disparity between the experience in the iPhone and that in a UMPC running OS X. In terms of touch experience, I’d still say the iPhone wins out, Vista on a UMPC is in second place, and a UMPC running OS X trails a distant third.
How much would it take for Apple to catch up in the UMPC space? Or put another way, if Apple decided to go into this space, what might we see? Gets the brain spinning, doesn’t it?
Is Live Mesh a hyped up architecture?
Top notch programmer-blogger Joel Spolsky is not too sure about Live Mesh. Typically I fall into the skeptical category too when it comes to new architectures and SDKs promoted in the marketplace as the next big thing. Most big things are not. That’s just the way it is.
However, this time around I think Microsoft might be onto something–though I think there’s more to go.
Live Mesh isn’t just about file sharing as Joel points out. It’s a platform. How good the platform is, I don’t know–I haven’t gotten into the beta program as of yet. So I’m just extrapolating with much of this.
However, this platform may be what we need as developers to really excel with our next generation of apps, which will be more communication and context focused than what we’ve been used to. Both are crucially important to us as users as well as to computers as we try to most efficiently exploit all of what they can do.
In the old days, people would say I’m talking about collaboration here and yeah, it is…kind of. But this term is not only stale it really misses much of what’s actually going on. It’s like saying that IM or RSS is about collaboration. It is, kind of. But it’s also used in ways that go beyond what collaboration implies. The term collaboration also doesn’t hint at the importance of being able to share and exploit context. I mean context in terms of people from disparate locations being able to really appreciate the “context” of what others are doing. Yes, this gets a bit essoteric, so I won’t dwell on this, but let me just say maintaining context is a lot easier to do if you don’t have to, well maintain it, but rather use it because it’s so easily accessible from another computer. OK, enough about terminology. Back to terra firma and the real world of trying to develop apps that can be connected. It’s not easy enough today.
For instance, why isn’t there a drop dead simple way to easily create collaborative apps that support something like OneNote’s share feature? I’m totally perplexed why in .NET I can’t trivally call a Session manager, open a channel, pump standard as well as custom messages through it with payloads of standard and custom types (text, pictures, sound, movies, ink), and then consume data as needed on each end. This pattern is so obvious I don’t understand why it’s not out of the box in .NET. Yeah, I know there are classes here and there that purport to do this stuff, but it’s not trivial to assemble them to anything on par with let’s say what OneNote does. It’ not even close. Some of the problem is that existing APIs are too abstract, where there’s little gain. Unfortunately, APIs too abstract are not efficient and don’t get used.
Of course, part of the issue is that when it comes to connecting devices there are so many networking issues to decide upon and handle–firewalls, security, discoverability, and on and on. I get that. So here’s where Live Mesh might step in and help. If its communication is unknockably sturdy–as I hope it is–then maybe we have a platform that we can all accept and then place the app sharing pattern ontop of. (Never mind we could always have created an abstract pattern that supports multiple connection methods.)
So you see, by setting aside the network issue, maybe, just maybe we can standardize on two or three patterns for communicating between apps and get on with it.
There is a 100 pound guerilla in the room, however. And that’s performance. How much data can we push through Live Mesh and how fast I don’t know. I get the offline/online part with the feeds, but I hope the exact same communication model can be used to push data through fast–at least at IM speed.
It’s also go to be scalable to some interesting number too. For instance, it’s got to be reasonable to be able to share across lets say 100 people. If it’s a nightmare to manage, it’ll not reach its potential.
Now I think there’s a whole pending problem that Live Mesh doesn’t solve–and here they may be asking for trouble. I’m not sure if it enables the scenario of an adhoc network. I don’t know if it assumes that some server has to be pinged. To really be successful, Live Mesh needs to facilitate people sharing wherever they are–whether two kids in the back seat of a car playing a connected game or students working together in a library or cross campus.
Anyway, my hope is that Live Mesh lives up to its potential as a communication platform that can become a standard. It’s from this standard that the magic can really begin.
How It Works In the Real World
My Way News - Bernanke urges more action to stem home foreclosure crisis
Some 1.5 million U.S. homes entered into the foreclosure process last year, up 53 percent from 2006, Bernanke said. The rate of new foreclosures looks likely to be even higher this year, he said.
To provide more relief, Bernanke again called on Congress to give the Federal Housing Administration, which insures mortgages, more flexibility to help distressed borrowers at risk of losing their homes. He also again urged lawmakers to move ahead on legislation revamping Fannie Mae (FNM) and Freddie Mac (FRE), which finance mortgages. And, he called on the two mortgage giants to quickly raise new capital.
House leaders plan action on those and other housing measures this week.
The Dem-controlled congress has very little incentive to do much about the housing mess at this point. The calculus they see is simple: the worse Americans feel about the state of their economy, the greater will be the Democrat’s victory over the GOP this fall. Only after President Obama is in the White House will we then see sweeping measures to “rescue” the little guy and his exploding mortgage, courtesy of the “caring, feeling” new Dem administration.
Gosh, You Think?
Gates says big changes in store for Internet in next decade
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said there will be a vast shift in Internet technology over the next decade as he met Tuesday with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak.“We’re approaching the second decade of (the) digital age,” the software mogul and philanthropist told Lee at the start of their meeting at the presidential Blue House, according to a media pool report.
“The Internet has been operating now for 10 years,” Gates said. “The second 10 years will be very different.”
Really? Only 10 years? What was that damned thing I used to use to post to Usenet back in the late eighties?
But it’s good to know we can always count on Bill Gates for the really bleeding edge predictions. Next ten internet years to be different? Who could possibly have imagined that?
What a brain!
