NOKIA and Microsoft announce partnership for smartphones

NOKIA is one of the mobile phone giants that for the past ten-fifteen years dominated the industry with devices for all ranges. During the past two years, though, something was going really wrong for them as they had a really hard time catching up in the smart phone range with the likes of iPhone and Android devices. Earlier this week NOKIA's CEO, Stephen Elop, admitted in an internal memo that they are sitting in a "burning platform". Today they announced their partnership with Microsoft to fully incorporate Windows Mobile with their hardware.

I am not sure how this played out. It is sudden and happend a few days after the memo was leaked. Does this have anything to do with it? Or maybe the memo was leaked to pave the way for the announcement. Either way I am sure that NOKIA's CEO being an ex-Microsoft executive played a role.

Even though I am an Android user and respect what iPhone has brought to the industry, this is very interesting stuff. Micrososft was struggling for years to get decent Windows phones in the market and utilise(or capitalize on, if you prefer) their existing services. Crappy software and bad implementations was dooming the windows phones to annoying unusable gadgets. This is different though. NOKIA knows how to produce good hardware but they lack the services and the cutting edge software. Developers were limited on both sides since Windows did not have the install base to interest them and NOKIA did not have decent software to produce a wide range of apps like we see on iPhone or Android devices. Bringing them together creates a mobile phone ecosystem that can rival the other two big players in the market, namely, Apple and Google.

In the following video you can watch NOKIA's CEO and Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer , announcing the alliance. It is an interesting watch.

"World of Goo" and Windows 7 problem - SOLVED

A couple of days ago I decided to finally make the move from Windows XP to Windows 7. The installation was a breeze with no problems whatsoever and it took around 30 minutes for Win 7 to be up and running with the latest updates.

Although it is a bit early to judge, I have to say that my initial impression of Microsoft's latest OS is very good!

Ten minutes ago I encountered my first problem when I tried to install World Of Goo which I purchased some days ago through the pay what you want offer.

The installation started just fine but when it completed, windows informed me that the program may not have been installed correctly and asked me if I wanted to re-install it using the preferred settings. I did that and after the second installation tried to run the game. The screen went black and after a few seconds an error message appeared saying that World of Goo had a problem and windows needed to shut it down.

Running it in compatibility mode for Windows XP did not help so I decided it was time to exercise my google-fu! Sure enough after 2 minutes the answer was discovered on the official 2DBoy forums (thanks GMMan!).

I edited the config.txt found in the World of Goo folder and I changed the resolution from 800x600 to my monitor's native 1920x1080. That did the trick and now the game runs just fine.

Now I can enjoy an excellent game on a very good OS. But that is a story for a future post.

Windows 7 upgrade may take up to a day

Microsoft has done it again. It really never stops to amaze me how low quality software and insulting assumptions from the side of Microsoft quality assurance team result in crappy Microsoft products. A Microsoft engineer posted on his blog the results of internal experiments on how long it takes to upgrade Vista to Windows 7.

The experiments involved 3 different hardware configurations and 4 different system condition as far as the data and the installed programs where concerned. One of the experiments took 1220 minutes, over 20 hours to complete the upgrade and that was not even on the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario was not even reported.

Data Profile	Low End Hardware	Mid End Hardware	High End Hardware
Clean No data and 0 applications	32-bit: 40 minutes 64-bit: 50 minutes	32-bit: 30 minutes 64-bit: 35 minutes	32-bit: 30 minutes 64-bit: 35 minutes
Medium User 70Gb of data and 20 applications	32-bit: 175 minutes 64-bit: 185 minutes	32-bit: 115 minutes 64-bit: 95 minutes	32-bit: 100 minutes 64-bit: 85 minutes
Heavy User 125Gb of data and 40 applications	32-bit: 345 minutes 64-bit: 355 minutes	32-bit: 185 minutes 64-bit: 165 minutes	32-bit: 160 minutes 64-bit: 150 minutes
Super User 650Gb of data and 40 applications	N/A	32-bit: 1220 minutes 64-bit: 675 minutes	32-bit: 610 minutes 64-bit: 480 minutes

It is stated that the transition from XP to Windows 7 is more complex and it will take significantly more time. How much more? Are they kidding us?

Realistically speaking I would say that most users(at leats the ones I know) fall between the Heavy User to Super user. Even simple users have not formated their XP installation for years and have all sorts of crappy software installed on the machine(let alone the dll nightmare). How long will it take for them?

Comparing this with the upgrade process of Mac OS X or certain Linux distros such as Ubuntu makes me lough out loud. System upgrade is something that should be painless and automated but I guess in Redmond they have diffferent ideas(they still live in mid 90s wearing funny shirts).

Megan Fox on Xbox Live

EraserheadX will be buying an Xbox 360 Saturday morning as his dream girl Megan Fox will be playing the sorry-ass-excuse-for-a-game Transformers on Xbox Live this Sunday as part of a publicity stunt to promote Xbox 360.

You can fix my car any time you want

Megan will play Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: The Game using the gametag "Megan Fox 2009". In this rather stupid interview Megan declares that she is a gaming geek. In the interview we find out the Megan was a Nintendo kid back in the day. Take that Sega...that's why you pulled out from the console market...

Microsoft is running, for some time now, an ongoing promotion series called "Game with Fame" where celebrities play games on Xbox Live with other subscribers. Celebrities that have attended include Green Day, Dream Theater and Linkin Park.

Microsoft is trying to commit suicide

After the, possibly, worst IT product ever (yes ...thats Windows Vista), Microsoft is harrying out an new Windows version. After the first initial good ruser eactions to the beta of Windows 7, Microsoft simply couldn't wait to let everyone down with stupid decision-stunts.

Some time ago Microsoft announced that Windows 7 would come in 6 different versions with different features and price. That is the same strategy that was used for Vista that was heavily criticised because it confused the consumer and basically, it was plain stupid and looked as a scam to get more money. Microsoft simply unable to learn from past mistakes decided to "pull a Vista" on Windows 7 and do it again.

A few days ago Microsoft announced that the starter version of Windows 7 would only allow 3 applications to run at the same time. If you want to start a fourth one, well... you have to close one down. The argument behind this was that the average user has only 2 application open at any given time. Thus, providing you with a generous limit of 3 is super-sweat of them. I can picture it right now: You have A Firefox window open, winamp to play music on the background and you are killing time with solitaire. You want to open up a Thundebird to check your emails. Pop quiz: "Which one do you close in order to be able to lauch Thunderbird". Answer :"Screw you..." .

Why limit it to application? I say in windows 8 you restrict the number of threads that could run at the same time. A limit of 2 threads sounds reasonable. You could have 2 single threaded programms runnning or for "heavy" stuff you could have a single double-threaded application running. Sweat!....

Now lets be serious. What is microsoft trying to do? The only thing that I can think, is that microsoft is trying to commit suicide and that Ballmer has lost it completely. The company aims at being more rediculed and hated. Microsoft is literally trying to create worse products. What can I say...we live in a crazy world.

Flight Simulator "buys the farm"

Yeager air combat one of my favourite combat flight simulators would prompt me that I "bought the farm" every time I crashed my plane on a field. The oldest and best flight simulator series Microsoft Flight Simulator "bought the farm" a few days ago when Microsoft fired all the stuff of development studio (Aces) behind the series as part of a 5000 people job cut.

Flight simulator series crashed and burned

The series future is unclear but I am not very optimistic since all the people responsible for one of, the very few, Microsoft's, quality pieces, of software are jobless now. I suspect though, that soon enough these people will find a new home in another company to continue their work.

The series started in 1982, more than a quarter of a century ago, and span 12 major releases. I remember playing my first flight simulator game on my dad's 8086 computer. Such a shame for a historic game series.

Microsoft in the past year has closed almost all the game studios the company owned namely Bungie, Digital Anvil, FASA and Ensemble. All these studios produced hit games such as Age of Empires, Freelancer and Halo.

Microsoft insists on DRM (they just dont get it do they?)

Microsoft mobile music service in a surprising turn insists on using DRM. While Amazon and iTunes services have turned their back on music copy protection, Microsoft, the smaller of the players in terms of market share on music distribution, insists on something the users clearly have condemned. In addition the cost per track is almost double than the rest of the services. Do they really belive that this will work?

PC Pro has a mini interview on the subject. I could not believe my eyes when I was reading this one :

With the likes of iTunes and Amazon offering DRM-free music that you can play on any device, why would anyone choose the MSN Mobile service?

There may well be people who just want to listen to the track on their mobile alone.

WHAT? Who in their right mind would pay a double fee to play a song only in his/her mobile phone. Not only that who on earth would WANT to play a song that he/she bought ONLY in his/her mobile phone. Does Microsoft considers that as an actual argument on their ridiculous decision?

Zune 2K9 failure. Absolutely ridiculous!

Admittedly one of the most profound hardware sale failures ever, Microsoft's music player zune, made headlines these days not because it sold a piece or two more but because all the zune 30GB players failed all together due top a weird bug.
Since it was the end of the 2008 users dubbed it Zune 2k9 crisis.
Reports in various forums are like this:

Apparently, around 2:00 AM today, the Zune models either reset, or were already off. Upon when turning on, the thing loads up and... freezes with a full loading bar (as pictured above). I thought my brother was the only one with it, but then it happened to my Zune. Then I checked out the forums and it seems everyone with a 30GB HDD model has had this happen to them

During the first hours Microsoft said nothing about the issue but after it became apparent that all 30 GB zunes are failing, the problem was addressed officially.

We are aware that customers with the Zune 30GB are experiencing issues with their Zune device. We are actively working now to isolate the issue and develop a solution to address it. We will keep customers informed on next steps via the support page on zune.net (zune.net/support).

The official fix is ridiculous. They simply say: let the battery drain wait until January first and then charge it again. WTF?

Official Q&A:

Q: Why is this issue isolated to the Zune 30 device?
It is a bug in a driver for a part that is only used in the Zune 30 device.

Q: What fixes or patches are you putting in place to resolve this situation?
This situation should remedy itself over the next 24 hours as the time flips to January 1st.

Q: What's the timeline on a fix?
The issue Zune 30GB customers are experiencing today will self resolve as time changes to January 1.

Q: Why did this occur at precisely 12:01 a.m. on December 31, 2008?
There is a bug in the internal clock driver causing the 30GB device to improperly handle the last day of a leap year.

Q: What is Zune doing to fix this issue?
The issue should resolve itself.

Q: How many 30GB Zune devices are affected? How many Zune 30GB devices were sold?
All 30GB devices are potentially affected.

If you ask me this is ridiculous. It is ridiculously ridiculous!!

Microsoft's Office Web to support Linux and Mac OSX

Microsoft never liked open technologies and I am not just talking Open source here. I mean just having something that can play along with other companies' technologies. ActiveX or Frontpage extensions anyone? At this day and age though, even Microsoft has to reconsider past practices. With many users jumping train to other Operating Systems and other companies pushing web products in the market, it would stupid not to support them if you are building a web service.

Last month Microsoft introduces Office Web which is a lightweight version of Microsoft's office that runs as a web service. Microsoft now announces that the Office Web will be compatible with Linux and the iPhone. That means that users of Safari and Firefox will be able to use it as well. I am guessing here that Microsoft is becoming increasingly alarmed by Google's policy of run everything everywhere which is gaining momentum. With so many Mac OSX, Linux and iPhone user's out there Microsoft just could not afford to loose more users.

Skip Vista...What's Next?

A few days ago Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows will be called Windows 7. Not a very imaginable name if you ask me but I do not like or dislike an Operating system based on a name. I like it or dislike it based on performance, stability and features just like any other user. Vista lacked all of those things and I am one of the fortunate people that do not use it on my daily life.

Despite Microsoft's efforts to push it into the market Windows Vista is a technological and market failure. It simply sucks. Just after almost two years from its release very few companies have adopted it and even fewer are planning to do so. Most of them are waiting for its successor to move on from XP. Microsoft can just wait and loose money for years or harry out a new release.

The thing is that, up until Vista, all of Microsoft's releases were better than the previous version. None was perfect, but all where better than its predecessor. Vista was failure and for the first time in History Microsoft is loosing millions because of it. Will the new version be a marketing trick to get all those companies to move from XP and fill Microsoft's coffins with coin, or will it really be a better operating system than Vista. Only time will tell.