Developages - Development and Technology Blog

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

What’s that? You didn’t take the risk and upgrade your PC to some crappy Intel-based machine Microsoft may or may not have known wouldn’t run Vista as promised? Well, at least now you can get in on the latest version of Windows a little cheaper than yesterday: Ultimate full looks to be officially headed down to $320 from $400, and the upgrade is down to $220 from $260; Home Premium is now at $130 from $160. Will the dip be enough to entice plenty of new OS upgraders? Perhaps, but we think most of those that haven’t already upgraded will probably just wait until their next PC so they can get Vista “free”. But if you’re looking to buy it boxed though, give it a bit for the new prices to propagate through the retail network — not even Microsoft’s site reflects the new Vista price points.

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Original post by Ryan Block

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

So now that the “Vista Capable” lawsuit is a full-blown class action, the judge has unsealed all 158 pages of emails between Microsoft execs trying to sort out what went wrong with the sticker program. While bits and pieces have been blacked out, what remains is still fairly incredible — although Intel’s 915 chipset was initially rejected as compatible with Vista, MS execs flatly admit that “In the end, we lowered the requirements to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with the 915 graphics embedded” and “We are caving to Intel. We worked the last 18 months to drive the UI experience and we are giving this up.” On top of that, it seems that the company was getting direct feedback from retailers that the stickers were confusing, with Wal-Mart appealing directly to HP to pull Vista Capable stickers from low end machines, and an MS exec saying that “I was in Best Buy listening to people and can tell you this did not come clear to customers. We set ourselves up.” That’s pretty damning, if you ask us — and the complete emails, linked below, are full of similar bombshells. Looks like this case may have some serious legs after all.

Disclaimer: Nilay’s a lawyer, but he’s not your lawyer, and none of this is legal advice or analysis.

Read - Seattle Post-Intelligencer coverage of the case
Read - PDF of all the emails

 

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It looks like that little lawsuit over “Vista Capable” stickers on PCs could now be about to get quite a bit bigger, as a federal judge has now bestowed class-action status on the suit, which accuses Microsoft of misleading marketing. More specifically, as the AP reports, the suit alleges that the “Vista Capable” stickers slapped on PCs during the 2006 holiday season created an “artificial demand” for the computers, and “inflated prices for computers that couldn’t be upgraded to the full-featured version of Vista.” As we’ve seen, those stickers even took in at least one higher-up at Microsoft itself, who has made his thoughts on the program quite well known. While things are still obviously in the early stages, the law firm that filed the suit is now looking for others that feel they’ve been burned by the stickers, and ComputerWorld has the details on you can get involved at the link below.

[Via ComputerWorld]

 

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Not a whole lot to say here, but if you′re running Vista on an x64-based system, you′ve probably already noticed a little surprise courtesy of Windows Update, which today started pushing out the x64 edition of Vista Service Pack 1. If you’ve been following things in SP1 land, you’ll notice that’s actually ahead of the neat and tidy Windows Update launch for non-⼠ systems, but behind the unofficial options already available. On the upside, that should mean that all the bugs have been ironed out, but you can never be too careful, so take all your usual pre-update precautions and let us know how it all works out in the comments below.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

It looks like at least some of those that got their hands on the Vista SP1 update one way or another got a bit more than they bargained for, with DailyTech reporting that the update process wreaked some considerable havoc on some users’ PCs. Specifically, the SP1 update process took it upon itself to automatically a prerequisite Windows Update, which apparently caused some folks’ PCs to dive into an “unbootable loop,” the only solution to which is a complete system restore. For its part, Microsoft has now pulled the prerequisite update in question (which apparently means it wasn’t much of a “prerequisite”), although that’ll likely be of little consolation to those that have already seen their PC put through the ringer.

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Original post by Donald Melanson

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

We heard a lot of different performance claims about Vista SP1 in past few month, and now that it’s finally (sort of) here, it’s time to bust out the stopwatches and see what’s what. According to CNET, early tests of SP1 indicate that while there are some performance enhancements to be had, they’re mostly driver related — so if you’ve been updating all along, you won’t see much of an improvement. What’s worse, certain tasks like copying files to USB 2.0 hard drives have gotten around 50 percent slower, a speed hit that overshadows the other filesystem improvements in SP1. All in all, though, it looks like SP1 is a worthwhile update — just don’t expect anything to get noticeably faster.

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Those “Vista Capable” stickers certainly caused consumers a lot of confusion, and it looks like they even tripped up some senior Microsoft execs. According to internal MS emails introduced as evidence in the ongoing lawsuit over the program, several MS managers expressed concern that they were misleading people, with the VP of Windows product management saying “I PERSONALLY got burnt… I now have a $2,100 email machine” and Jim Allchin saying MS had “really botched” the program, and that it “had to do a better job with our customers.” Of course, the main reason for all the confusion is the multiple editions of Vista that run with different capabilities depending on your hardware, but that’s a subtle point to make with a sticker — or, as one Microsoft employee admitted in an email, “Even a piece of junk will qualify” as Vista Capable. That’s some pretty damning stuff, but the case isn’t anywhere near resolution yet — the judge has yet to decide whether to certify it as a class action, which looks like it’ll depend on a technical reading of what exactly Microsoft was advertising throughout the Vista Capable program. We′ll know in 10 days, when the judge has said she′ll issue a ruling — we′d imagine the plaintiffs’ legal team has plenty more of these emails in store if the case goes through.

[Via Slashdot]

Disclaimer: There once was a man named Nilay / Who was indeed an attorn-eye / He wrote this post, but he′s not the lawyer of most / And this post is not legal advice or analysis and should not be taken as such.

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Original post by Nilay Patel

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Don’t want to wait until March for Windows Vista SP1, but not feeling the whole torrent thing? Microsoft has posted a disc image to its OEM partner site with a full copy of SP1 on it, and the download is free — if a bit slow at the moment, thanks to all y’all grabbing a copy. The 1.2GB disc image requires you run it as a clean installation, so you′ve gotta ask yourself it’s just worth waiting a few more weeks for an easy peasy update courtesy of Windows Update. Decisions, decisions.

[Via Download Squad; read link is the disk image]

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Original post by Paul Miller

Après les techdays, un retour sur Windows Vista SP1 ici.

Original post by Benjamin Gauthey

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Media PCs

Oops. One of the Microsoft’s big goals in releasing Vista SP1 is the closure of a pair of known Vista activation exploits. While the OEM BIOS hack and grace timer hacks are now indeed now useless in the face of S̡, a third remains. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes over at ZDNet tracked down a hack that required “a few seconds in the command prompt″ to trick Vista SP1 into thinking it was genuine. Now that SP1 is riding the torrents, we can’t say we′re surprised.

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Original post by Thomas Ricker

En train de terminer les sessions, vérifier une dernière fois que les démos fonctionnent
correctement! Et c’est parti pour 3 jours au palais des congrès avec plus de 15 000
personnes pour les Microsoft Techdays! Pour ma part, cette année
sera accès autour de Windows Home Server(Session d’Intro et développement
d’add-ins) et également des sessions sur Microsoft et l’innovation pour le
grand public avec au menu: HDView, Seadragon, Photosynth.

Original post by Benjamin Gauthey

DVRMSToolbox For Vista 1.2.1.1 was just released. DVRMSToolbox is a very cool video converter utility for converting TV programs (in Microsoft DVR-MS format) on your Vista PC to .wmv for playback on the Zune video player. Even cooler it can auto-detect and strip out the commercials. With the proper profile setting it converts to a .wmv file with the proper settings such that the Zune software doesn′t need to transcode the .wmv video file again (time-consuming). There’s also a Windows XP version available that runs on Windows MCE 2005, the first version of Windows with Media Center Edition (MCE) built-in for capturing & playing bck TV programs, but that version is a little older. Looks like Vista is getting priority in development.

Relatedly, ZuneTVWatcher is another cool of software that also automatically converts DVD-MS and removes commericals and it sets the correct meta tags (TV, movies, etc). Encod𘯰 is one of my favorite utilities for converting videos. I can rip a DVD into a single .VOB file and then use Encode360 to convert the .vob file to .wmv (with Zune bitrate settings) so I can sync it to my Zune. One final cool utility is dCut which lets you manually cut out commercials using the MCE remote control and then compress the DVD-MS format to .wmv, which can also have a profile set to download to a Zune.

Anyway, here’s what’s new in the latest version of DVRMSToolbox:

Along with the new features in bold below, a regression bug was fixed when writing meta data.

Version 1.2.1.1
- Key handling is only triggered while recorded tv is played back.  Should address sluggish UI issues.
- More attempts to detect playing file are made before giving up
- Addin will fall back to using Restart Manager if unable to detect the file using prefered method
- Changed wording on file can’t be detected message to be more accurate given new detection method
- Waiting to process messages more descriptive
- Status writing is more timely
- Fixed a problem with DVR2WMV usage, should [finally] resolve hanging issues
- Added reprocess functionality to the addin (press 4 on the remote)
- Fixed meta data not available during recording issue
- Added FileName to meta data returned, will not be persisted in file
- Removed dependancy on Toub dll
- Removed m71 support
- Migrated all DirectShow code to use DirectShow.Net interfaces
- Fixed lost status messages when process ends quickly
- FindCommercials action waits one minute before scanning file.  
- Added ChangeRecordedDate action to MceActions.  Action sets record date to original air date; useful for series recordings on "Marathon" showings
- Added ChangeMCMetaData action to MceActions.  Alters meta data used by MC to display runtime slider none destructively (i.e. doesn’t alter tracking ids); hopefully will allow spliced shows to be managed as series by MC for recording limits.
- OOTB mpeg "conversion" using DShow method deprecated
- Comskip 0.79.113 included and configured for live detection
- Added FixDvrmsDuration action
- Added resolution meta data attributes

Tags: DVR-MS, DVRMSToolbox, DVRMSToolbox For Vista 1.2.1.1, Microsoft, video converter, Zune

Original post by Ryan

Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Laptops

It might be a bit early for us to be talking Windows 7 feature cuts, but that said, isn’t it a bit early for Microsoft to be talking Windows 7 feature cuts? If The Inquirer’s “reliable sources” are to be believed, Microsoft is giving DirectX 11 the boot from its next version of Windows to keep hardware requirements down — apparently the DirectX 10 requirements of Vista were enough of that sort of trouble for one decade. Obviously there’s no official word on Microsoft at the moment, so we’ll reserve judgment for the time being — and hey, maybe no DirectX 11 wouldn’t ruin our year — but with the endless quantity of features cut from Vista still fresh in our memory, this is certainly not an encouraging sign if true.

[Thanks, Isaac]

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Original post by Paul Miller

PlainBlack writes “Possibility isn’t limited by technology. And it’s certainly not limited by human imagination. What makes something impossible is the lack of cold, hard, cash. Wired blog takes a look at 10 science fiction technologies we could build, if they weren’t so expensive. ‘New York-L.A. Maglev Express - Cost: $70bn (Based on established construction costs). At $70bn, it’s tantalizingly affordable by the standards of this roundup: a train that could beat airliners from one side of the country to the other. Many agree that Maglev has enormous potential. Bite-sized examples are in operation all over the world. Birmingham, England, had the first in the 1980s, though the promise of airliner-like speeds on land is still unrealized. The British system sped along at a pathetic 26MPH and was designed to get air travelers to the planes, not to outrun them.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by Zonk

DeviceGuru writes “Harvard University’s tiny microrobotic fly, hailed by its creators as ‘the first robotic fly that is able to generate enough thrust to takeoff,’ will be showcased at New York’s Museum of Modern Art starting Feb. 24. The life-sized ‘Flybot′ reportedly has a wingspan of 1.2 inches (3 cm) and weighs a mere 0.002 ounces (60 mg). This project of the Harvard University Microbotics Lab has received funding from DARPA, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which hopes to gain access to micro-miniature surveillance technologies.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Original post by Zonk