REDMOND, Wash. — On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.
Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft's history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft's DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained.
"They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending," said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees.
Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered along the way, and certainly isn't perfect today.
"When we miss a big change, when we don't get great people on it, that is the most dangerous thing for us," Gates said. "It has happened many times. It's OK, but the less the better."
Gates, who will remain Microsoft's chairman on a part-time basis, said he would still take on Microsoft projects picked by Ballmer and two other executives who have assumed most of his day-to-day tasks, Craig Mundie and Ray Ozzie.
One of those will be Web search, where Microsoft lags far behind Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. in market share. With an acquisition of Yahoo now again apparently off the table, Gates threw his weight Friday behind a strategy of assembling a team of smart people and combining Microsoft's own breakthroughs with what competitors are already doing.
"Search is the place where people probably really think, will Microsoft ever do anything there? We'll be the very best," Gates said. "That is in full motion."
Gates also reinforced his intent to stay out of the company's day-to-day affairs.
"I do think with my not being here full time there is some opportunity that people will really step up. There's somewhat of a vacuum created there," he said. "I have got to get out of the way, and let that new thing step in there."
The most poignant moments came when Gates dropped out of technology prognostication mode — the coming switch to using ink, voice and gesture to interact with computers, for example — and shared candid and sometimes self-effacing banter about his early days with buddy Ballmer.
Freshman year at Harvard, Gates said, "I was in this dorm up at Radcliffe, where the anti-social math types hung out. I belonged there."
He was introduced to fellow freshman Ballmer by a mutual friend. On their first outing together, they went to the movies to see an unlikely back-to-back showing of "Singing in the Rain" and "A Clockwork Orange."
Ballmer, who has famously danced and jumped around stage at conferences, described a similarly silly and uninhibited Gates that evening.
"So we come back from the movie, we're kind of dancing, we're both kind of playing Gene Kelly, and some guy wrestles me to the ground in our dorm," Ballmer said. It fell to Gates, who hardly qualifies as burly, to fend off the fellow student.
Ballmer also gave Gates grief about leaving for vacation in the middle of Ballmer's job interview, and forgetting to pack a tie for their first meeting with IBM.
Gates, playing up his absent-minded professor side, cracked up the employees in attendance — they won a seat at the event in a lottery — when he said Microsoft was so central in his life that he often found himself driving to its campus even when he was supposed to be headed somewhere else, like delivering his kids to school.
When it came time for Ballmer to make his public farewell to Gates, he joked about the inevitable inadequacy of a thank-you gift, and presented him with a large scrapbook embossed with Gates' signature. Then, the tears came.
"We've been given an enormous, enormous opportunity. And Bill gave us that opportunity," Ballmer said, his face reddening. "I want to thank Bill for that."
As the employees rose to their feet, Gates swiped at tears of his own.
COURTESY : FOX NEWS
Sunday, June 29, 2008
MICROSOFT CORP : BILL DECIDES TO PUT AN END....
Saturday, June 28, 2008
THE JAPANESE MAKES A LONG CHERISHED A DREAM COME TRUE
Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.
Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka recently, saying that a litre of any kind of water -- rain, river or sea -- was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km.
"The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time," Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.
"It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars," he added.
Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.
Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.
Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel.
PETS : LITTLE MR.HOPE
This tiny puppy may have been born without front legs but there's no way that is holding her back.
Hope, the appropriately named two-legged Maltese puppy gets around by using a specially-designed device which features wheels from a model aeroplane.
The energetic pup uses her hind legs to boost her body forward onto her chest and operate the wheeled prosthetic limbs.
The beloved pooch was born with only two legs and has small wriggling nubs where her front legs should be.
At first Hope moved around by hopping but experts said her her natural mode of moving eventually would damage her bones and spine.
The wheeled device was created by orthotist David Turnbill free of charge with makeshift shoulder joints connected to model airplane wheels.
Each of the device's 'arms' can move up or down independently of the other, allowing Hope to pivot and turn.
The spring-loaded prosthetic arms hook to a custom-fitted chest plate to allow Hope to lay down or sit up without removing the prosthetic.
The wheels she uses as front legs took some getting used to and at first the tiny lap dog would tip over to one side.
However practice made perfect and now the persistent puppy has mastered the art of wheeling herself around, there is no stopping her.
In fact she can bound across a room at a surprisingly break-neck pace.
'She gets around fine,' said the puppy's rehabilitation specialist Cassy Englert.
'She never knew anything other than hopping like she did. The hardest thing is teaching her a new way to get around that's going to actually be better for her,' he added.
Hope was taken in by Southern Comfort Maltese Rescue in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA when she was six weeks old.
When the puppy grows bigger she will need to have another device made for her.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
HUMOUR, FUTURE PEEP : Don't Cheap Out On That New Gas Saving Incentie
With soaring gas prices, employees will get disgruntled when they find out how bad the companies new gas incentives suck!
I personally feel this is what is gonna happen in future offices...
Updated: Second Angle... This whole thing is probably bulsh, but it's still fun to watch.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
SCI - TECH : CHEAPER i-PHONE
Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave the Apple faithful and the business community what they wanted Monday: a faster and much cheaper iPhone.
The new models will feature GPS satellite-tracking chips, third-generation (3G) cellular Internet access, better audio, longer battery life, metal buttons and a regular flush headphone jack.
The 8-gigabyte model will retail for $199 in the U.S., its 16-gigabyte sister for $299 — and the latter variation will also come in white.
It hits stores on July 11 in the U.S. and 21 other countries, including Canada, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong and most of western Europe.
Third-generation Internet connectivity is crucial to the iPhone's success in Europe, Japan and Korea, where cheaper phones have had the feature for years.
It'll be like "going from dial-up to broadband" for iPhone users, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster told USA Today in an article published Monday before Jobs' speech.
Admission of defeat
The price cut was in a way an admission of defeat for Apple. It had tried to buck the U.S. cellular-market model of discounted handsets heavily subsidized by the carriers, which make back the money on service charges and add-ons.
It was a "tacit acknowledgement ... that its previous sales strategy was not sustainable," the Financial Times said Friday in a story breaking the news of the price cut.
For the past year, Apple charged users full price for the iPhone, initially $499, and then $399 for a higher-capacity unit.
The trade-off was that AT&T offered relatively inexpensive voice and data plans to go with it.
And indeed, Jobs neglected to mention one little thing during his speech Monday -- AT&T's iPhone plans would be going up, with the base voice and unlimited data monthly plans starting at $70, up from $60.
Apple aims to sell 10 million iPhones worldwide by the end of 2008; it's sold only about 6 million since the device went on sale in the U.S. nearly a year ago.
That goal will be aided somewhat by a rapid overseas rollout.
By the end of the year, the iPhone 3G will be available in 70 countries, including almost all of Latin America, South Africa, Kenya, several West African countries, Egypt, Turkey, India and the Philippines.
Noticeably absent on the big iPhone map of the world behind Jobs during his announcement were two of the iPhone's biggest "gray markets" — China and Russia.
Both countries are full of iPhones bought elsewhere and "jailbroken" to work on networks other than the ones they were hard-wired for.
Dependable showmanship
Jobs, looking noticeably thinner than usual, bounded onto the stage of the Moscone Center in San Francisco just after 10 a.m. PDT Monday morning.
The online Apple Store had gone "dark" worldwide a few hours earlier, with variations on "We'll be back soon" greeting potential customers.
That wasn't news to anyone wanting an iPhone — Apple stores, both online and offline, ran out of the old-model devices more than six weeks ago.
Jobs began his keynote address at the start of the tech firm's Worldwide Developers Conference by listing the number of companies that had tried out the iPhone's enterprise software.
Apple hopes to take a big chunk of the giant, lucrative corporate smartphone market with the iPhone.
Right now, Research in Motion's BlackBerry devices dominate that market the way Apple's iPods dominate the MP3 player market — there simply isn't any worthy competition.
According to Jobs, 35 percent of Fortune 500 companies had tested the software, as had the U.S. Army.
After a jargon-heavy presentation detailing the technical achievements of Apple's software development kit for the iPhone, a brand new batch of third-party applications were debuted.
Several games, including Sega's "Super Monkey Ball," that used the iPhone's own motion sensor to substitute for a four-way joystick, were demonstrated.
"These graphics look unbelievable compared to anything we've seen on a cellphone before," commented Engadget's Ryan Block on his Web site's live event blog. "Seriously, these are [Nintendo] DS-quality graphics, easily."
Other applications were shown off — one that keeps track of your iPhone-toting friends in your general vicinity, another that updates baseball scores, a third specifically to bid and post on eBay, a musical-instrument emulator, a medical guide and even a mobile blogging application.
Existing third-party applications have to be downloaded via a PC or Mac from the Apple Web site, and all are free, but the new AppStore connects directly to iPhones wirelessly — and most of the applications will carry a purchase price.
A decade after "push" software briefly became the Next Big Internet Thing, and the next Internet bust, Jobs introduced push software updates, e-mail and calendar and contacts information — all tied into an overhaul of Apple's .Mac online service, to be retitled "MobileMe."
Computer can access the service at the easy-to-remember www.me.com, which Apple evidently bought from a smaller company. A visit to that site during Jobs' address brought up a note that the social-networking startup previously there had moved to a new URL.
MobileMe keeps each user's information on a central server, to be accessed via Mac, PC or iPhone — and any changes made will instantly be pushed out to all the user's devices.
Like .Mac, MobileMe costs $99 per year. Existing .Mac users will be upgraded for free.
All the software will be standard on the new iPhones, a free download for existing iPhone units and a $9.95 upgrade for existing iPod Touches.
source : Associated Press
WHY PAY WHEN ONLINE TVs RUN FOR FREE?
Many have wondered how it was possible that TVLinks was busted recently, when all it did was merely list links to tv shows but, never actually hosted any material. Yes I too have wondered why read on here. Anyways the main point for this post was to bring you a list of some alternatives and even better video streaming sites like good old TV links.
TV links is back
The statement above is not so true anymore tvlinks is back up looks like two of them are up and running, tv-links.eu which looks very similar to the original tv-links website from the design and tv-links.cc. The question now is how long will it be up again before getting shut down.
- TVU player
- scifi.com
- boxsweeper
- fnuz
- flixflux
- sidereel
- fomdb
- Probably the best out of all the links I have provided, download-able video content, and an assortment of various genres of movies to documentaries and for you music lovers, plenty of music videos to keep you entertained for days. Having a faster broadband connection will definitely make the whole experience worth while.
- tv-life
- surfthechannel
- Vator.tv a YouTube for entrepreneurs looking to pitch their business ideas. It is a professional network and marketplace for ideas and businesses, where anyone, across all industries, at any stage, can share ideas, products, services and businesses with the rest of the world, mainly through video.
- tvlinkvault
- ABC TV
- sharetv
- wwitv Tv around the globe
- beelinetv Another wwitv clone site
- videolemon
- movies-on-demand
- peekvid
- aknof
- Alloftv
- joox
- quicksilverscreen
- videolemon
- nabolister
- flickpeek
- showstash
- teevee4me
- wheeya
- emuduel
- findago
- watch-movies
- chooseandwatch
- Free tv project
- chicktv online tv for women
- footytube
- watchthesimpsonsonline
- justvids
- joox
- take247
- bodocus.com
- joost
- zattoo
- dontwatchme
- tv-video
- veoh
- craftytv
Monday, June 9, 2008
FUEL, TRUE : FIELD TRIPS GO ONLINE..???
When seventh graders in Stockton took a field trip this week to see elephant seals, they didn't even step outside their school. Instead, with the help of a projector and a video camera, the students teleconferenced with a state park guide on the California coast.
Across a distance of 100 miles, students on the so-called "virtual field trip" got to talk with the guide, watch seals throw sand on themselves, and hear the blubbery beasts belch and bark – all without a yellow bus or permission slip.
"If you can't go somewhere, this can be the next best thing," says Craig Wedegaertner, an administrator at Marshall Middle School in Stockton. "Or, it can be used to prepare [students] before they go there."
As the days grow long and the school calendar short, field trip season is in full swing. But with fuel prices rocketing, some schools are discovering virtual field trips as a cost-effective way to add new – or farther afield – excursions.
HUMOUR, TRUE : THE GIANT WHO EATS MAGNETS...
Last month, 8-year-old Haley Lents of Indiana swallowed 10 magnets and 20 steel balls from a Magnetix toy set. The magnets and balls attracted one another within her digestive tract, ripping a total of eight holes in her intestines and forcing her parents to rush her to the hospital for emergency surgery. Lents later told reporters that the magnets and steel balls "looked like candy."
Did they taste like candy too? you'd think by the 20th marble or 10th magnet they would lose there appeal.
Source: ABCNews
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
TRUE, HUMOROUS : DREAM DRIFTS AWAY
French skydiver's latest attempt to set a new free-fall record ended when his ride to the sky left without him. The Helium balloon the 64 year old Michel Fournier was going to use, detached from the capsule he was going to use to jump from 130,000 feet. It happened after the balloon was inflated on the ground at the airport in North Battleford, Sakatchewan. The balloon drifted away into the sky without the capsule. Adissapointrd fouriner left his capsule and moved towrds the hanger...
There he was greetedby his friends and family members...
"It was like having a hammer over my head", he said. The launch team members said static electricity may have caused a small shock which set off one of 5 charges designed to release the capsule from the balloon after the jump. FournIer isn't giving up, saying he'll try next time with two balloons. However the balloon cast him around $400,000 and he has already compleately exhauster more than half of his finances.The jump he planned was supposed to be three times higher than a commercial jetliner...
IMAGE GUIDE
$ Above : MICHEL FOURNIER
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
IN NEWS : Phoenix Mars Lander Starts Digging Into Red Planet
LOS ANGELES — NASA's newest spacecraft got down and dirty on Mars, taking its first practice scoop of Martian soil ahead of the actual dig expected later this week, scientists said Monday.
The test dig made Sunday by the Phoenix Mars Lander's 8-foot-long robotic arm uncovered bits of bright specks in the soil believed to be ice or salt.
"We see this nice streak of white material," said Pat Woida, senior engineer at the University of Arizona, Tucson, which is directing the mission. "We don't know what this material is yet."
Phoenix landed in the Martian arctic plains May 25 on a three-month hunt to study whether the far northern latitudes could support primitive life.
Its main task is to excavate trenches in the permafrost in search of evidence of past water and organic compounds considered the chemical building blocks of life. The cost of the mission is $420 million.
Close-up images beamed back by the lander over the weekend revealed that its three legs are resting on what appears to be a slab of ice. It apparently was uncovered when the spacecraft's thrusters blew away the topsoil.
• Click here to view photos.
Also over the weekend, engineers fixed a nagging short-circuit problem on one of the lander's instruments.
With the practice dig out of the way, scientists will scour the landscape for a prime spot for the lander to perform three side-by-side digs.
Phoenix will deliver the scoopfuls of dirt to its miniature ovens, and vapors from the heating will be analyzed for traces of organic compounds.
Later digs will focus on bringing samples to its microscope and wet chemistry lab.
"We're ready to go," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University, who is known by team members as the "dig czar." "We're pretty excited to get on with business here."
Since Phoenix's arrival, scientists have roped off no-digging zones to preserve parts of the landing site.
They've also named rocks and other geologic features after fairy-tale and nursery rhyme characters, including "Humpty Dumpty" and "Alice."
SCIENCE : Brain Interface Lets Paralyzed Man Walk in 'Second Life'
A Japanese man, almost fully paralyzed, can walk again — in the virtual world "Second Life."
Researchers led by Jun'ichi Ushiba of the Keio University created a brain-computer interface (BCI) that let the 41-year-old patient operate a PC using only his thoughts.
• Click here to see video of the system being used.
Previous BCI studies have had patients simply move cursors around a display. Ushiba took it further by letting the unnamed patient, crippled by a progressive muscle condition for most of his life, take control of an avatar, or virtual person, in the popular online environment.
The BCI was implanted in the man's motor cortex — signals that would have made his own arms and legs move instead went to the avatar's, which in effect became a virtual body.
Ushiba said the next step would be to let users who are unable to speak to "type" through brain activity.
• Click to read more about this from Agence France-Presse and the Pink Tentacle blog.