I've been incredibly busy in the last few weeks with our software development team! From trips to Atlanta, Phoenix, Denver, Chicago, Las Vegas, it has kept me swamped, and as such, very little posting on the blogosphere! Anyone that has been on business trips before knows that they are not always as sun as some might think! Hours in the airport... delayed flights... lost luggage... cancelled flights. If you need any help or tips when travelling, feel free to read these articles, as they could really help!
Last few weeks have been incredibly busy with work and other things. Joining a Ball Hockey team this winter didn’t help the schedule, but it is helping the lacking physic. It also gives me some good quality time with my wife. Nice to see her kicking butt on the hockey rink.
Anyone else out there running Vista? I just installed the final version a few weeks ago on my laptop and two desktops at home, and I have to say, this is quite possibly the best Microsoft Operating System I have seen come out of Redmond, ever! It installed on my Asus V6V like a dream, didn’t need any new drivers at all! On my custom built home machines, also very few issues (K8N Diamond Plus, and a P965 Platinum with a Core 2 Duo chip) other than a sound card issue on the older of the two. That was easily resolved by buying a new creative PCI soundcard.
Many industry experts have made high claims that Vista will finally push the personal computer into the living rooms, and from my first experience on using media center, I tend to agree, on the software side.
On the hardware side of things, I disagree. Software used to be so complex to use. From punch cards, to command prompts, to booting games with boot disks to get more "conventional memory", software used to be so complex to get running! Who can forget the Windows Blue screens of death, or the complexity of loading drivers to get things to work correctly? Software interface screens also used to be so complex to use. Vista seems to make everything so much easier to use! Security is vastly improved; the user interface is much more user friendly, and the graphic capabilities just make the whole overall experience of using the computer much more enjoyable! Media Center is now embedded into the Operating System. Simply setting up your computer with Vista, clicking the Media Center remote buttons, and you’re on your way to enjoying your media files in a hugely more interactive and easy to use way!
Hardware on the other hand, is getting more complex. As software makes huge improvements, all focused on making it easy to use the software, hardware seems to be sacrificing ease of use, for quality. It used to be hard enough to learn to hook up your VCR and television, and maybe set up the clock and set a few programs to records! Now, you’re faced with a multitude of various cables, connection methods, to hook up your TV to a simple DVD player. S Video? Component? RCA? Coax? Plain video cable... and then once you have figured out which cable you would like to use, you have to choose the quality... Ok, I will go with S Vide, Monster cables... still not enough! Now I am forced to decide on the quality of S Video monster cable I would like! You start to get the point... Although I do realize that quality is extremely important, especially when you are talking about audio and video, but it still has to be easy to use to make it to the mass market!
To make the next leap in audio and video, where we are putting computers and DVR devices everywhere, hardware makers need to standardize and decide on common platforms! For my parents to be able to use a Microsoft Windows Media Center PC, I need to be able to build them or buy them a Media Center PC, which they can literally place beside their television, and have the television detect the new device. Once detected, everything should be configured for them. No wires except for power. You might say this is not achievable, but the thought of having everyone have power and lights in their houses some hundred years ago was also unheard of. And even if we can’t go completely cordless, at least let’s go to a single cord!
Here's to hoping next year brings simplified hardware! After all, what good is easy to use software, if the hardware that runs the software, is impossible to configure!
Happy Holidays!