Category: Computers, Science & Technology

Microsoft has changed its logo. I am underwhelmed.

Microsoft gets a new logo for the first time since 1987

“For the first time in 25 years, Microsoft is changing its corporate logo.

Microsoft, which has used its solid, boldfaced, italicized logo since 1987, is expected to unveil its new, more colorful logo Thursday at the Boston opening of the 23rd Microsoft store. It will also appear Thursday at the Seattle and Bellevue Microsoft stores, as well as on the microsoft.com home page.

The new logo, which incorporates a multicolored Windows symbol in addition to the ‘Microsoft’ name in straightforward, lighter type, is intended to ‘signal the heritage but also signal the future — a newness and freshness,” said Jeff Hansen, Microsoft’s general manager of brand strategy.

It’s coming at a time when the company is preparing to launch new or significantly updated versions of nearly every one of its products, from Windows to Windows Phone to Office.

Many of those products will feature a new look and feel — cleaner, with fewer borders and less clutter, and more colorful tile-based designs.

Given all that, ‘we felt it was a good time to express the newness in the Microsoft logo as well,” Hansen said.

The new logo features the name ‘Microsoft’ in the Segoe font — a font Microsoft owns and has used in its products and marketing for several years. The font also figures prominently in the new Windows 8 user interface.

The “f” and “t” in the name ‘Microsoft’ are connected in the new logo, just as they were in the old. “It was one of the subtleties we thought we could bring forward,” Hansen said.

For the first time, the company’s logo will also include a symbol: In this case, a square formed by four multicolored square tiles — reminiscent of the company’s multihued Windows logo in years past. (Ironically, Windows 8’s new logo is now single-colored.)

The colors in the squares — blue, orange, green and yellow — are those long associated with Microsoft and from which the company’s product brands draw.

The colors are also meant to convey ‘the diversity of our products and the diversity of people that we serve,” Hansen said.

The new logo also bears great resemblance to, and is an evolution of, the Microsoft Store logo, which was inspired by the Windows flag.

A lot is at stake when a company changes its logo.

A logo is the instant communication of a brand, said Barbara Kahn, professor of marketing at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s what is seen time and time again,” she said.

A strong logo, she said, needs to be ‘distinctive, clearly identified with the brand and consistently used over time.’

The new logo marks the fourth time Redmond-based Microsoft has changed it since the company was founded in 1975 and only the second time since Microsoft went public in 1986.”

So much of the Web runs on Linux, it only makes sense that Twitter would support Linux!

Twitter Joining the Linux Foundation

“The overwhelming majority of web-based services today rely on Linux. More and more of these companies are joining the Linux Foundation, the ‘nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux.’ The Linux Foundation provides a neutral ground for companies and users to discuss and collaborate on Linux’s development, so it makes sense for companies with large Linux footprints to get involved. Linux Foundation members include IBM, Intel, Google, HP, Oracle, and a raft of other names you’ll recognize. Twitter will be joining up next week.

With tens of thousands of Linux servers, Twitter will be joining The Linux Foundation to support its mission of promoting, protecting and advancing Linux. “Linux and its ability to be heavily tweaked is fundamental to our technology infrastructure,” said Chris Aniszczyk, Manager of Open Source, Twitter. ‘By joining The Linux Foundation we can support an organization that is important to us and collaborate with a community that is advancing Linux as fast as we are improving Twitter.’

Aniszczyk will be keynoting at the Linux Foundation’s LinuxCon event next week with a presentation titled ‘The Open Source Technology Behind a Tweet.’ I’ll be there. You should be, too.

Also joining the Linux Foundation are Inktank, a company that provides development and support of the Ceph distributed filesystem, and Servergy, manufacturers of efficient Power Architecture ™-based, enterprise-class Linux machines.”

Start downloading NOW! I got this notice just a few minutes ago!

“The Audacity Team is pleased to announce the release of Audacity 2.0.2 (https://audacity.sourceforge.net/download) for Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. It replaces all previous versions. A significant bug that caused clicks on split lines has been fixed, and there are improvements to several toolbars and to some Nyquist effects. See the 2.0.2 Release Notes (https://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Release_Notes_2.0.2) for details of the changes.

How many layers of AWESOME is this? Dewd! Can haz?

Coming soon: A Star Wars-like speeder bike?

“If you’ve ever dreamed of whizzing through the desert on a Star Wars-style speeder bike, you may soon get your wish. A team of aerospace engineers from a California company called Aerofex have built and tested a fully functional hoverbike that looks like a prop straight out of Return of the Jedi. In lieu of anti-gravity engines, the vehicle flies using enclosed helicopter rotors and a specially designed control system that allows first-timers to ride without any training, kind of like an ATV. Now the team is hoping to sell the flying bike, which has a max speed of 30 mph and elevates up to 15 feet, to the military, noting that the vehicle could prove useful for squeezing supplies through tight, helicopter-defying spaces or for traversing muddy terrain without leaving any tracks.

While it looks like high tech, the bike’s design actually dates back to the 1960s but was abandoned due to stability problems, says Jeremy Hsu at LiveScience. This version, however, utilizes an intuitive, completely mechanical steering system — controlled by two handlebars at knee-level — that ‘allows the vehicle to respond to a human pilot’s leaning movements and natural sense of balance.” ‘This is insane,’ says Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo. And just think: As slow as the bike looks now, remember this is just the first version, and the flying speeder bike will inevitably get much faster. Now, the only things we need are ‘light sabers, golden robots with English accents, and hyperspace engines.'”

Check out the YouTube video below:

Have you ever had a need to post an RSS feed from a YouTube Channel? It can be done, but YouTube doesn’t seem to share this freely! I am not sure why they would hold this close to their chest, it is pretty neat information, and helps publicize YouTubery! Anyway, here’s how:

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/{Your YouTube Username}/YouTube/uploads

Substitute your YouTube username in the “{Your YouTube Username}” space, being sure to remove the brackets. You can test this by pasting the resulting URL into Mozilla Firefox and see how it looks. For instance, here’s my Dr. Bill.TV shows:

https://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/DrBillBailey/uploads

Pretty neat trick!

It is a S-L-O-W Tech News week… sigh. Look, here is a tablet for kids. Ouch.

LeapFrog’s child-friendly LeapPad 2 goes on sale for $100, is ready for sticky fingers

“You might’ve already checked out our hands-on time with LeapFrog’s next-gen LeapPad, but starting today, now you can finally get your own palms on the kid-friendly slate. The company — who’s also introduced us to the Explorer — has announced its LeapPad 2 is now up for grabs at an array of online and brick-and-mortar shops, such as Target, Best Buy, Kmart, Amazon and, naturally, its very own site. Now, the $100 LeapPad 2 isn’t anywhere near the same class as Mountain View’s $200 Nexus 7, though for obvious reasons, as it’s targeted at a completely different audience. In other words, those 100 bucks might just be enough to keep kids away from your precious every-day tablet. We’ll let you decide that, however.”

Kodak has been a force in the camera and photography world for a very long time. It is amazing to see them reduced to where they are now. But their digital imaging patents may be their only real remaining asset.

Kodak: Maybe We Won’t Sell Our Digital Imaging Patents

“Kodak is having second thoughts about selling off its digital imaging patent portfolio.

The struggling photography pioneer, which for the past year has been gearing up to sell off some 1,100 patents as part of its effort to emerge from bankruptcy, said Thursday that it may not sell some — or all — of them, after all.

‘[Kodak] has not reached a determination or agreement to sell the digital imaging patent portfolio, and may retain all or parts of it as a source of creditor recoveries in lieu of a sale if it concludes that doing so is in the best interests of the estate,’ the company said in a statement.

Coming as it does on the ninth day of a patent auction that was originally scheduled to end this past Monday, Kodak’s statement suggests that the process is not going as well as it had hoped.

And, indeed, sources familiar with the auction say that bids for Kodak’s digital imaging patent portfolio thus far have come in below the $2 billion the company has been angling for. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that initial bids from the two consortiums favored to win the auction — one led by Apple, the other by Google — were only about $500 million.

How much the bids have risen since then, if they’ve risen at all, isn’t clear. Kodak says it continues to have ‘active discussions’ with potential patent buyers, and it has extended the auction in light of them. But the company clearly hasn’t yet managed to incite the sort of Nortel-style bidding-war blowout for which it had hoped. And now, with rival bidders mulling alliances that would keep bids on the portfolio low, Kodak may have lost its chance to do so.”

Ed Bott has an article on ZDnet that decribes what he found in teh official RTM (“Release to Manufacturing”) version of Windows 8. It makes for interesting reading.

Surprise! What you can expect from Windows 8 RTM

“On August 1, Microsoft released the final code to manufacturing. Today’s milestone is the first public availability of those RTM bits, to developers and IT pros who are subscribers to Microsoft’s MSDN and TechNet subscription services.

There’s a new build number, of course: 9200. (Trivia: Windows RTM build numbers in he modern era are always divisible by 16.) Its official version number is 6.2, making it part of the same evolutionary line as Windows 7 (6.1) and Windows Vista (6.0).

If you’ve spent any time with the Release Preview, you’ll see only small changes in the RTM code. The biggest difference is that the free previews are over, and you’ll have to pay (or find a trial version) to evaluate Windows 8 from here on out.

I’ve had a very brief head start with the RTM bits, long enough to install them on a couple of test machines and share some first impressions. It’s still too early to offer up a final review, with two very large pieces of the ecosystem still missing: the “modern” (nee Metro) apps, as well as what will presumably be a large number of devices built specifically for Windows 8.

I installed Windows 8 Pro on a pair of physical test machines and on one virtual machine, performing one clean install, one upgrade from Windows 7, and one upgrade from a Windows 8 preview. All three installations went quickly and without hiccups of any kind. (It’s worth noting that upgrading from the Windows 8 Release Preview migrates files and settings but does not preserve installed apps.)

One big change in setup: You can’t install Windows 8 without entering a product key.

If you’ve become accustomed to installing Windows 7 without entering a product key so that you can use it in evaluation mode for 30 days, you’ll definitely miss that option. After installation, activation is automatic. If you use a product key that’s already been used on another PC, you’ll be unable to personalize some parts of the Windows 8 environment.

On an unactivated PC, you’ll get regular notifications that you need to enter a valid product key. This message appeared in the upper left corner of the screen just now when I tried to visit PC Settings on an unactivated Windows 8 test PC. It didn’t appear to block any functionality, nor did the notifications degrade any features. It appears to be strictly a speed bump. (I’ll be looking into the exact implementation of activation and product key checking in the next few weeks.)

The setup routine includes one new element designed to address criticisms that the new user interface is unintuitive. While Windows creates a new user account, it displays a brief series of messages (starting with “Hi”) and an animated tutorial that point out how to find the new Charms menu.

One change is momentous in symbolic terms. The built-in Windows file manager, which has been called Windows Explorer for 17 years, is now called File Explorer. You might not notice unless you right-click its icon on the taskbar or search for it.

In my testing, performance was uniformly excellent, even on a nearly five-year-old Dell desktop PC. As was the case in the Release Preview, startup and shutdown are impressively fast, and every app I used was quick and responsive.

Most of the built-in apps have received only modest tweaks from their Release Preview predecessors. In a note to reviewers, Microsoft said, “The in-box Microsoft apps we have built for Windows 8 (communications, entertainment, etc.) will be continuously updated over time via the Windows Store. Some of the applications will be updated at our next milestone, when Windows 8 is generally available.”

My experience bears that out. The Mail app, for example, has no new features but a few UI changes. Music is now called Xbox Music and boasts new options in the Preferences pane (most notably an option that requires you to sign in before completing purchases).

One surprise in the Store was the first official appearance of the Xbox SmartGlass brand, which replaces the earlier Xbox Companion app.”

I am jazzed about the huge, new, nuclear powered rover that is now exploring Mars! Dewd! How cool is it to have sent a Volkswagon-sized rover to Mars! But, it is also using The Cloud!

NASA uses Amazon’s cloud computing in Mars landing mission

“Although it boasts having ‘Earth’s biggest selection,’ Amazon.com’s reach has stretched to Mars.

Better known for being an e-commerce giant, Amazon has become a major player in cloud computing, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory using the company’s Amazon Web Services to capture and store images and metadata collected from the Mars Exploration Rover and Mars Science Laboratory missions.

With so much large-scale data processing to be done, JPL is leading the way in the adoption of cloud computing in the federal government, said Khawaja Shams, manager for data services at La Canada Flintridge-based JPL.

“At this point, JPL’s data centers are filled to capacity, so we’re looking for ways to cost effectively expand the computational horsepower that we have at our disposal,” he said. ‘Cloud computing is giving us that opportunity.’

Using AWS’s cloud to operate the mars.jpl.nasa.gov website, Shams noted, enables JPL to get images, videos and developments to the public quickly, without having to build and operate the infrastructure in-house.

According to Amazon, AWS enabled JPL to construct a scalable Web infrastructure in only two to three weeks instead of months.

‘With unrelenting goals to get the data out to the public, NASA/JPL prepared to service hundreds of gigabits/second of traffic for hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers,’ Amazon said.

The mission will continue to use AWS to automate the analysis of images from the planet, giving scientists more time to identify potential hazards or areas of particular scientific interest, Amazon said.”

Soon, you will be able to listen to your Amazon Music via Cloud Player on your Roku! Very Cool! New Amazon Cloud Player features include:

“Amazon MP3 purchases — including music that customers purchased in the past — are automatically saved to Cloud Player, which means that customers have a secure backup copy of the music they buy from Amazon, free of charge.

Amazon scans customers’ iTunes and Windows Media Player libraries and matches the songs on their computers to Amazon’s 20 million song catalog. All matched songs – even music purchased from iTunes or ripped from CDs – are instantly made available in Cloud Player and are upgraded for free to high-quality 256 Kbps audio. Music that customers have already uploaded to Cloud Player also will be upgraded.

Any customer with a Kindle Fire, Android device, iPhone, iPod touch, or any web browser — and soon, a Roku streaming player or Sonos home entertainment system — can play their music anywhere.”

Press Release