journal: win

Microsoft Acquires iView Multimedia

By Mac Fan, June 27, 2006

Will Mac users be content with software only from Apple?

iView has been purchased by Microsoft. iView’s flagship product is MediaPro, which is a great digital asset management application.

I’m sure the next version will be Windows-only, which is only fair considering Shake and Logic Pro are now Mac-only.

Will Mac users be content with software only from Apple?

	7	1608
	comments	views

WinFS is dead

By Nick, June 24, 2006

From the “Could have been that never really was” desk…

WinFS, the long-awaited data storage system for Microsoft Windows, will no longer be delivered as a standalone product, according to Quentin Clark of Microsoft’s WinFS Blog. However, while the WinFS project is dead, bits and pieces that were completed will be rolled into ADO.NET (a developer technology for data access) and Microsoft SQL Server.

For those who haven’t been following WinFS’s development, it was being developed by Microsoft to replace or supplement today’s file systems with a data management system based on relational databases. Organizing data would no longer have to be done manually, but by metadata attributes (for example, author, keywords, and such). Current operating systems have some of these capabilities through technologies like Mac OS X’s Smart Folders, but WinFS would have gone beyond this. There are other aspects beyond this, such as making sharing data between applications easier. The Wikipedia entry on WinFS provides (lots) more information.

WinFS has its roots in Microsoft’s failed Cairo project from the early 1990s, which was an attempt to develop a next-generation operating system. WinFS was initially meant to be included with Windows Vista, then codenamed Longhorn. It was actually included with an alpha release of Longhorn, but suffered from serious performance problems. Microsoft separated WinFS from Longhorn in August 2004, and announced that it would ship later.

Deep Thought’s Take: What doomed WinFS? If you were to ask me, I would guess that is simply was too ambitious of a project.…
(Continue)

	10	2161
Nick	comments	views

Photoshop is in the fonts

By Jay, June 23, 2006

No background needed, just fonts.

Well this is my first blog as an offcial staff member. So I intend to make it good. Here we go…

Recently I acquired a copy of Photoshop CS2, it being the most widely used photo editor/whatever-you-want program out there. I quickly set to trying to make stuff. Soon I realized that with my limited fonts this was a hopeless task, so I typed “fonts” into google and clicked the one with the coolest name. Coincidentally it was the coolest font too. This was where things got good for me. Now, I’ve never picked up a copy of Photoshop before and the interface is quite confusing for about a week, but I want all of you to check out two sites, first one where I designed all of the designs, and second, a site where I designed about 95% of the designs, so if it sucks, it probably wasn’t me. Now the designs are all using only fonts and background colors so check them out.

Now on to how to make beautiful stuff wiht Photoshop using only fonts. Ill sum it up in 3 easy steps.

1. Think of what your design will say.
2. Find an appropriate font
3. Add a backing theme

A cool font to get is Split Splat Splodge. This font has painball splat-like shapes. Just go crazy with the fonts. Also you can use basic lines for a nice geometric design. Look at my designs and try and gauge from them. Peace out guys.

	7	2283
	comments	views

Taking the Plunge: The Biggest Beta Trial I’ve Ever Done

By Liam, June 12, 2006

Here we go.

It’s 11:45 PM, June 11th. I am anxiously watching the progress bar creep, little by little, hoping that nothing goes wrong. 3.12 gigabytes is most likely the single largest file I’ve ever downloaded. With each passing percentage, the time remaining conferms my estimation: the download will complete at 3:45 AM. Since I have plans for the next morning, I go to bed, but not before rigging up my air filter to pull the warm air out from under my desk and prevent the PC from freezing hard, as it has done once before during an attempt do download the file; Firefox was unable to resume the download, so I started over.

Fast forward to 8:15 AM, June 12. I get up and turn on my monitor, hoping that it had completed. As the LCD lit up, I saw that there was now progress bar. On my desktop lay the icon for the disk image. I checked the file size: all 3.12 gigabytes were there. I wanted to merge the ISO with a DVD, but I had other things to take care of.

Travel forward in time once more; this time to 12:00 PM. I have cleared my calendar, and I sit down to begin the installation. First I open disk copier and select the image; a blank DVD+R goes in the waiting tray. 10 minutes after clicking “Burn” the disk is ejected, and I insert another, this time opening Roxio Easy Disc Creator. I move everything I want onto the disc,…
(Continue)

	2	1699
Liam	comments	views

Steve Balmer defeated by Malware

By SogniX, June 5, 2006

Saw it on MacDailyNews,

“Allchin says Ballmer, the world’s 13th wealthiest man with a fortune of about $18 billion, spent almost two days trying to rid the PC of worms, viruses, spyware, malware and severe fragmentation without success,” Frith reports. “He lumped the thing back to Microsoft’s headquarters and turned it over to a team of top engineers, who spent several days on the machine, finding it infected with more than 100 pieces of malware, some of which were nearly impossible to eradicate.”

Brings a smile to my face and a tear to my eye.

Article on MacDailyNews

Original article on Australian IT News