Say, I’ve got a Windows Mobile phone with a touchscreen. What is the simplest way for me to draw something on it to save and upload to my computer (free software preferred, open source even better)?
Real Media, taking advantage of their settlement with Microsoft, has announced plans to release open source code for Linux that can play Microsoft’s Windows Media formats, specifically Windows Media Audio and Windows Media Video. While some closed source solutions exist, as well as questionably legal solutions, this will be significant as it is totally above board, legal, sanctioned by Microsoft and produced by a major competitor. The code will be released for the Helix Community client project, which also aims to bring Real’s codecs to Linux.
(via Slashdot)
Microsoft has put out an opportunity for those that missed out on the short public availability of Windows Vista Beta 2 to get a DVD of the developing operating system, for free, in the mail. Even those who signed up during the initial public availability had to pay for DVDs, so consider this quite the treat.
What do you have to do? Go to this Microsoft.com page and answer eight trivia questions. If you get enough right, you’ll be asked to enter your information in a form so Microsoft can send you the DVD. Considering that if you don’t, you’ll be given the answers (and you can just hit back and enter them in), I won’t even bother printing them here. However, the questions are:
Q. 1 The new operating system being launched by Microsoft in 2006 is called
Vision
Vista
Visio
Q. 2 Windows Vista brings _____________ to your world
Confusion
Creativity
Clarity
Q. 3 Windows Vista will be available first to businesses in
November 2006
March 2007
January 2007
May 2007
Q. 4 Windows Vista Enterprise edition cannot be bought as an OEM license, it can be acquired only through Software Assurance.
True
False
Q. 5 The glass effect in Windows Vista is called
Hero
Aero
Zero
Aqua
Q. 6 Windows Sidebar boosts your personal productivity by
providing instant access to gadgets
providing a wide variety of engaging, easy-to-use, and customizable mini-applications
provide easy access to frequently used tools.
All the above
Q. 7 The scenarios for businesses through which Windows Vista brings value are:
Find and Use Information
Enabled Virtual Workforce
Infrastructure Optimization
All the above
Q. 8 The minimum RAM requirements for a Windows Vista machine is
256 MB
512 MB
2 GB
4 GB
When in doubt, all of the above is usually the right choice.
Hmm. If you get all of them wrong, it looks like you can still get the free DVD. Nice!
Boy, Xbox 360 owners are getting so many goodies lately. Besides the future promise of homebrew XNA games, you can get, straight up, a free Xbox Live Arcade game next week. For the first two days, August 23-25 (6pm), Texas Hold ‘Em will be free, after that it’ll retail at its regular 800 Microsoft Points price. No one can resist this deal, I tells ya!
Besides that, Microsoft has announced a free Arcade game for the Xbox Live Vision Camera. The camera, which will drop around September 19 (according to reports) for $39.99, will include a game called Totemball, which is controlled entirely by pointing the camera at yourself and gesturing.
TotemBall is controlled almost entirely through gestures; that is, the game tracks a player’s arm movements to control a rickety, wheeled totem pole tower around each level, collecting items and trying to reach the exit within a time limit. Gesture-based gameplay is not foreign to Freeverse, who previously developed ToySight for the Macintosh, compatible with Apple’s iSight camera.
Microsoft debuted Windows Live OneCare to the marketplace at the end of May at a retail price of $49.99 (and many stores offering it for as little as $19.99). In June, OneCare accounted for an astounding 15 percent of the market, amazing for a brand new product. Clearly, OneCare has a decent chance of winning this thing very quickly, gobbling up market share every month from the established players.
This may also be an indication that (a) other security software is overpriced at $100 for a suite, considering that the operating system costs less than that and (b) the other companies, like Norton, have developed almost no brand loyalty, due to buggy, resource-hogging software. Of course, even though Microsoft grabbed 15% of sales, it only got 8.2% of sales dollars, showing that price doesn’t help. Conversly, Microsoft’s $20 costs Norton $100 with every sale.
Microsoft’s new product — which includes a two-way personal firewall, anti-virus scanning, automated backup, and PC tuning utilities — hit Symantec’s sales the hardest. According to NPD, Symantec’s unit share of the consumer suite market dropped from 69.9 percent in May to 59.8 percent in June; its dollar share also fell, from 74.1 percent to 68 percent. The other vendors that sell at retail, including McAfee and Trend Micro, weren’t as affected by Microsoft’s entry.
Hopefully, Microsoft can market OneCare well enough to the legions of new PC buyers who let their initial Norton trial subscriptions expire and pick up those customers as well. The simplest way to grab that market: Make sure Windows Vista bugs the hell out of users, on a daily basis, if they don’t have an active antivirus. Those annoyed users will hop down to Best Buy, and when they see OneCare on the shelf for twenty bucks, they’ll pick that up.
(via Digg)
I’ve been using an HTC Wizard phone the last few weeks (branded as the T-Mobile MDA) and I love it. This thing does so many things, and even if it doesn’t do them perfectly, it does them all well enough to satisfy, and the price can’t be beat: $0 with a new service plan. Looking at the coming products from HTC on Gizmodo, I think it is quite clear that it isn’t the Microsoft Zune that will beat the iPod, but the Windows Mobile-based devices from HTC.
The HTC Melody, due at the end of the year, looks like a Creative Zen Micro. It comes packed with 4 gigs of NAND Flash memory, like the $250 iPod Nano. It has Wifi, Bluetooth, a 2 megapixel camera, an FM radio, a sweet 2.8 inch touch screen and Windows Mobile 5. It runs thousands of software programs, including Internet Explorer/Opera Mobile, office apps, games, GPS software, and pretty much anything you’d expect.
With carriers subsidizing the cost, this thing can easily replace anyone’s iPod. If you think about it, you might not prefer an HTC device over an iPod, but if it is free and the iPod is overpriced, and you get the HTC device, you are not getting an iPod, plain and simple. Convergence is a dirty word in the mobile phone business, since it does jam too much crap into a device that people just want to make calls with, but when a phone does the music thing this well, how is Apple to compete?
I’ve been using an HTC Wizard phone the last few weeks (branded as the T-Mobile MDA) and I love it. This thing does so many things, and even if it doesn’t do them perfectly, it does them all well enough to satisfy, and the price can’t be beat: $0 with a new service plan. Looking at the 
