From the category archives:
Microsoft has announced the system requirements for Office 2010.
That’s news in and of itself. Once upon a time, system requirements (at least, ones that anyone paid attention to) were strictly for high-end professional software, cutting-edge games and the like: software that actually needed powerful hardware. But the real news here is that Office 2010 requires a DirectX-compatible graphics card.
Now, I don’t think Word is going to be offloading word counts to a GPU anytime soon. But Microsoft’s announcement is making waves nontheless — and I think it’s actually great. It means we’ve reached a point where our computing history is so mature that even our mass-market word processors have achieved a level of sophistication that we need to make sure of their compatibility. That’s exciting!
Certainly, Excel is an obvious candidate for hardware acceleration, which, besides accelerating simple tasks like opening large files and parallel tasks like running many equations, could finally bring true vector operations to the versatile software.
But there is bad news. I’ll let Microsoft break it to you:
If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog).
Yes, the true motivation behind the graphics upgrade is supercharging those awful 3D pie charts we know and despise.
(If you click the PowerPoint link, you’ll notice that Powerpoint 2010 looks a lot like Keynote. Just sayin’.)
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Here’s an interesting case study in internet behavior dynamics: when Engadget publishes a story — any story — about 3D TVs, the comments are filled with fans and excited (potential) consumers. When the NYT publishes a story called “Do Consumers Really Want 3-D TV’s?” the comments overflow with doubters and pessimists.
Thanks to the magic of social comments, each sub-population reinforces its own beliefs. The result is that viewing either story in isolation would convince you that it represents the majority opinion. If the NYT story were a little more critical, crossing some invisible line in the virtual sand, then the fanboys would come running to defend their turf. But it isn’t. Engadget’s stories, on the other hand, have a broad enough audience that they do attract a few nay-sayers — but their opinions are quickly drowned out.
For me, the clincher is that the NYT author seems to be worried that he will be forced to watch old shows in 3D:
And what happens when I want to watch shows like “Seinfeld,” or “Everyone Loves Raymond”? Will I really want to experience these in 3-D too?
3D screens do not automatically make everything into 3D. The spatial processing that would require has not been developed on a supercomputing scale, much less a consumer entertainment device. Moreover, they can display 2D content without any problem – in fact, the “3D” content is nothing more than a specially (and spectrally) oriented 2D image which, when viewed through the polarized or shuttered glasses, is rendered differently by your two eyes. The result is the perception of 3D from 2D – and the key point is that there’s nothing preventing the good old 2D images we know and love.
I have seen a 3D TV – there’s one at the Sony store in midtown Manhattan. It is extremely impressive and yes, you’ll own one one day (though they’re going to be expensive at first). Depending on the intersection of technology and regulation, you actually may have to (a la digital and de facto HDTV).
I completely agree that the glasses are impractical and a little annoying. But I’ll limit my critique to that accessory rather than the entire industry. The NYT article actually notes that glasses-free viewing may be “two to three years away” (personally, I’m less optimistic about that timeframe). Indeed, auto stereo TV’s exist (I saw one in Bloomingdales, of all places!) and certainly will be the norm. Will consumers be ready then?
The NYT article concludes:
Maybe the consortiums and manufacturers are right, we’ll see these images popping out of our TVs in our homes and never look back to a 2-D world. But I’m about as geeky as they come, so are most of my friends. We all wait in line for the latest iPhones or video games and we spend an exorbitant amount of time sharing links about the latest digital cameras, video game consoles and the Apple rumors. But I can’t recall a single geeky friend saying anything, with any excitement, about 3-D televisions.
I have to wonder if those “geeky” friends have ever read Engadget.
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There’s a lot of speculation out there regarding the form of Apple’s tablet OS: will it be the iPhone OS in an expanded resolution? Will it be a stripped down version of Snow Leopard? Will it be something new entirely?
If you’re using a Mac right now, hit F12. That’s my bet at what the forthcoming tablet will look like: Snow Leopard’s dashboard.
Dashboard is an environment which runs multiple widgets of various sizes and functionalities. Widgets must be written as small web apps, using html, CSS and java, but there’s not a good reason that full featured and self-contained applications couldn’t run on the dashboard as well.
In other words, I could run a bunch of iPhone apps at once on my dashboard. In fact, since many apps scale to match the iPhone’s orientation, they could presumably scale to an arbitrary footprint as well.
Just my two cents.
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This could be extremely interesting.
Especially if it looks like this.
But it might not.
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From the “that’s a feature, not a bug” file: I always thought my iPhone’s ability to continue email searches on the server (as opposed to emails stored on the phone) was broken, since it never returned any results even for emails I knew existed. Today, I learned that remote search is explicitly not supported, according to the Google Mobile Sync fine print:
Searching Gmail for messages that have not been synced to your phone is currently not supported.
As a workaround, I’m experimenting with syncing more emails to the phone…
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Engadget has gotten their hands on Google’s Nexus One phone and while further details will be forthcoming at Google’s press event on Tuesday, they have a pretty in depth preview.
The most important takeaway is that despite the iPhone-launch-esque frothing of the technology media at large, this is not a revolutionary phone. A couple weeks ago, I posted my disagreement with TechCrunch et al, saying that the Nexus One (in contrast to the TechCrunch headline) doesn’t change much at all. And now Engadget confirms:
The thing that’s struck us most (so far) about the Nexus One thus far is the fact that it’s really not very different than the Droid in any substantial way…. Don’t get us wrong, the phone cooks — but it’s not some paradigmatic shift for Android.
Furthermore, Android’s chief limitation in the new smartphone arena persists:
One other note: multitouch has not been included here, so while the functionality is supported in Android 2.0 and up, we’re still dealing with a one-finger-at-a-time experience… which leaves something to be desired when you’ve got a beautiful touchscreen like this to play around on.
As expected, Google has not split Android onto a new trunk for Nexus development, though they have advanced the OS somewhat – mostly in terms of small efficiencies aimed at improving overall usability. It remains to be seen, however, if those changes will remain exclusive to the Nexus line or distributed to all of the Android models.
Last and certainly not least, it looks like the Nexus will be a T-Mobile device – so much for the grand unlocked plan. It also won’t be compatible with AT&T’s 3G network, which further compromises its portability.
Engadget will be posting a full review shortly – this is just a collection of their first impressions. Nonetheless, it’s clear that the Nexus One is not a game changer.
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Following a post by Aleks Jakulin, I found a great site that presents an interactive Ruby prompt married to an extremely user-friendly tutorial: Try Ruby.
I don’t know Ruby at all, but I followed the tutorial for a bit and quickly felt comfortable with the basic syntax. I’m not a perfect candidate to judge this for a novice because I’m proficient in a number of other languages, but this is the best tutorial I’ve ever seen for any language, period. It makes me cringe when I think of days spent with a fat book propped open, trying to understand some obscure nuance of a language’s syntax that, somehow, was obvious to everyone except me.
So, if you’re looking to learn Ruby specifically or just want a better understanding of what it means to program, look no further than this easy 15 minute tutorial. The colorful page and everyday language make the process much less intimidating than, say, Try Python.
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Slate has posted a great interview with James Cameron and Peter Jackson – arguably the two leading directors when it comes to special effects in film (in fact, Jackson’s Weta Workshop executed most of the FX shots for Cameron’s Avatar).
Of course, the discussion centers on an enthusiastic embrace of CGI, reflecting a belief that it is nothing more than a new form of makeup or costume and requires as much if not more labor and care to execute properly. Most blatantly, Cameron states:
If I did Titanic today, I’d do it very differently. There wouldn’t be a 750-foot-long set. There would be small set pieces integrated into a large CGI set. I wouldn’t have to wait seven days to get the perfect sunset for the kiss scene. We’d shoot it in front of a green screen, and we’d choose our sunset.
They admit that some filmmakers may have run ahead of solid plots and characters to play with their toys (here’s looking at you, Star Wars prequels), but it’s clear they want their audiences to realize that CGI is not a shortcut or gimmick; it’s an intense process which gives the filmmaker total control and requires the actors to more fully abstract the essence of their performance, when done properly. From a technical standpoint, only in the last decade has processing power approached a point where CGI can be used believably amidst – or to replace – live action shots.
(Via Kenny Herman)
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We’ve come a long way since Powers of Ten…
(Also see the AMNH videos that this one is responding to for some more amazing visualizations.)
(via Infosthetics)
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