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Live Sync does a fair job of syncing folders in Windows (sorry) hosts. Whenever both computers have internet access, the folders sync. Live ID required (again, sorry.) Few limits on data (no files larger than 4GB, no more than 20,000 or so folders?)

Live Mesh is a similar Microsoft offering, but also give you web access to your files and stores a copy on the cloud. Sadly, there is a 5GB limit on total data.

Theora is over a decade old; it definately can beat H.264 in software decoding.

But if you didn't see this:

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare

As for "if it was good enough in the past..." rule, most web video gets reecoded every 18-24 months to take advantage of more efficient codecs to improve qulaity or reduce bitrates. For real businesses counting.

I recommend people don't focus on YouTube too much as an example of the web video industry. It's very much an anomly in both business model and particualr being subsidized by Google at such a sceale and getting access to Google's very cheap bandwidth. Also, Most YouTube clips aren't watched even a dozen time, so the cost of encoding time can be bigger than the cost of delivering the bits, so they don't tune their encodes for maximum efficiency, but for rapid transcoding.

YouTube does plenty of things that wouldn't make sense for anyone else. They're not really an example of much beyond YouTube.

It's not just about quality, it's about efficiency.

Assuming a threshold for "good enough" quality and buffering time, a less efficient codec means:

Users need 2x the bandwidth to have adequate buffering time

Bandwidth costs are 2x higher.

So, there can be a real impact in terms of reduced audience and increased costs.

Also, comparing Theora with H.264, I think 2x may actually be understating the diffrence.

I made these samples, comparing to Xiph's examples. As you can see, x264 was able to deliver quite a good experience with better per pixel quality, at 640x360 at the bitrate Theora struggled at 400x224 with.

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare

I'd say current versions of Ogg Theora take 100-200% more bandwidth to deliver "good" quality as current versions of x264. Codecs converge at higher bitrates, and no doubt Theora is techically capable of good quality at a sufficiently higher bitrate. But it'll take a lot more bits to get there than other codcs. Theora's bitstream is based on VP3, which is over a decade old now, and we'd generally expect a refined vresion to come out as MPEG-4 part 2 efficiency (like Xvid/Divx without B-frames).

The past discussions were based on a relatively easy clip (Big Buck Bunny), and compared to YouTube encodes in H.264 Main Profile and H.263.

But if you compare what you could do at the same bitrate with a quality-tuned H.264 High Profile, H.264 can do a quite nice 640x360 at the bitrate Theora used for 400x224 AND with higher per-pixel quality. WMV with the current VC-1 implemenation also outperforms Theora (although not by as much as x264).

I made some samples (the .ogv files were made by Xiph, the others were encoded by me to similar specs):

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare

not to use Linux or Mac.

If they do they'll get their "Air Supply cut off"... their per/unit price will jump significantly, making them uncompetitive with their competitors ...

I could go on but space is limited. Microsoft is full of dirty tricks. Just ask James Plamondon and his "Technical Evangelists (TE):
http://platformevangelism.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
http://platformevangelism.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!37F174267DC274C!155.entry
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf

Or the training materials he used, which taught the "Slog" and the "Stuffed Panel":
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20071023002351958

And financial dirty tricks:
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html

Here is a summary of a LOT of Microsoft's dirty tricks, and the reasons why so many "independent" corporations behave as wholly owned subsidiaries of Microsoft:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

So, ya, it is no surprise when NVIDIA knucles under to Microsoft, otherwise their video chips would suddenly fail to work as well as those from other video chip vendors, just the way DRDOS "failed" to work as well as MSDOS when users tried to install Win3, which was one of the first of an unending examples of how a copy without ethics operates. An people were surprised that Capitalism exhibited a "flaw" in the current economic crisis?

not to use Linux or Mac.

If they do they'll get their "Air Supply cut off"... their per/unit price will jump significantly, making them uncompetitive with their competitors ...

I could go on but space is limited. Microsoft is full of dirty tricks. Just ask James Plamondon and his "Technical Evangelists (TE):
http://platformevangelism.spaces.live.com/default.aspx
http://platformevangelism.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!37F174267DC274C!155.entry
http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Comes-3096.pdf

Or the training materials he used, which taught the "Slog" and the "Stuffed Panel":
http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20071023002351958

And financial dirty tricks:
http://www.billparish.com/msftfraudfacts.html

Here is a summary of a LOT of Microsoft's dirty tricks, and the reasons why so many "independent" corporations behave as wholly owned subsidiaries of Microsoft:
http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/Dirty_Tricks_history

So, ya, it is no surprise when NVIDIA knucles under to Microsoft, otherwise their video chips would suddenly fail to work as well as those from other video chip vendors, just the way DRDOS "failed" to work as well as MSDOS when users tried to install Win3, which was one of the first of an unending examples of how a copy without ethics operates. An people were surprised that Capitalism exhibited a "flaw" in the current economic crisis?

Given the original comparisons between Theora and YouTube's H.263 and H.264 encodes, I thought I'd do some samples showing what H.264 is capable of doing. YouTube doesn't use High Profile (no 8x8 blocks) nor CABAC entropy coding, and so leaves a lot of bits on the floor.

Note the third sample uses the high bitrate frame size and the low bitrate data rate, and still outperforms all the YouTube and Theora clips in video and audio quality.

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public/BBB%7C_Compare?lc=1033

Heck, just whipped out some short 320x240p30 400 Kbps encodes for WMV, x264, and xvid. To avoid arguments about tuning, I pretty much just turned on ever expensive feature that might improve quality; these are all much slower settings than you'd use in production, but shows what the best current implementations are generally capble of.

Looking at the VC-1, I recall we've been much more focused on higher bitrates and resolutions than this in the last few years. But even still it outperforms xvid.

http://cid-bee3c9ac9541c85b.skydrive.live.com/embedrowdetail.aspx/.Public/SMPTE%7C_320x240%7C_400Kbps

M$ tends to tell the OEM's what to put on the HD.

If that were the truth, they'd come with Windows Live OneCare, not Norton AntiVirus.

If you're going to try this, you also need to set your country to United States. Just click the link along the top for the list of choices. I don't know which other countries, if any, the daily background image works for. Today's shot is a nice one of the Rio Grande..

http://www.live.com/hps/RioGrande_EN-US822195324.jpg

People archive the backgrounds so you can search for past ones too if desired.

Nothing. It was a camera glitch. Notice, because Alaska isn't high priority, that all levels of zoom are from the same photo set? Watch the clouds, they never move.

Then check other sources like Microsoft's Virtual Earth and see what is "hidden".

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=62.244908~-141.222382&style=h&lvl=12&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1

That would explain why Google Maps has deliberately obfuscated the US Naval Observatory: http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&ll=38.921448,-77.066914&spn=0.005451,0.011373&t=h&z=17 The current image (if you look closely) does not match the surrounding imagery - that's because it was taken prior to the start of construction. The previous image on the site was pixellated to reduce detail. LiveMaps Bird's Eye view is still at a lower resolution: http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=qgm4g18kb2c9&style=b&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&scene=24019178&encType=1

It wasn't Google, it was Microsoft.

It wasn't a satellite, it was an Airplane.

It wasn't secret info any more, and hadn't been for several years.

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCC&cp=ryqjpf4s57kc&style=b&lvl=2&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&scene=10352732&encType=1

I didn't experience any issues updating to IE8 but I did experience MS hijacking my firefox search and homepage when I installed their Live stuff.

I restarted my computer after installing the latest updates including the Live stuff and when I restarted Firefox, the addons window popped up with something called "Microsoft Choice Guard." With a name like "choice guard" it sounded like spyware to me and I was basically right.

It turns out that if you aren't paying attention MS will install this http://help.live.com/help.aspx?market=en-us&project=wlinstallerv3&querytype=keyword&query=draug_eciohc

This isn't going to win MS any friends...

You can often count on MSFT to sell you a partial solution to a problem they sold you.

Oh, that's right, they sell anti-virus software now, don't they?

On Strict, it does not, as some parents wouldn't want their kids using Google that WILL RETURN DONKEY PORN VIDEOS because there is no way to intelligently filter the Google results.

Then why doesn't it also block Microsoft Live search? Simply typing "hot babes" into a Microsoft Live search returns hardcore porn as the very first link.

This smells of antitrust to me.

I tried it on my own machine. On Web Filtering Basic, it allows www.google.com, and on Strict, it does not. It logs my access to Google if Activity Reporting is on. It looks like Strict uses a white list, so blocking Google can be reasonably expected by a user.

The biggest problem with long URLs would be in e-mails as they usually get word wrapped. So when they click on it may not properly cut/paste the full URL into the default browser.

Every try cut and pasting this LONG URL from e-mail to the browser if you're using a small monitor, i.e. laptop?

http://maps.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&FORM=LMLTCP&cp=37.827041~-122.422875&style=h&lvl=18&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&phx=0&phy=0&phscl=1&encType=1

OneCare was a paid subscription service for the consumer market. To be replaced by a free - lightweight - solution code-named Morro.

It's likely your ISP already offers something similar to its residential customers. There just isn't any money to be made here.

The last-mile physical wiring hasn't improved much over the last 10 years, and I doubt it will over the next 10. Fiber to the home ain't coming soon.

Eh? 10 years ago, I had the best DSL money could buy - 640 Kbps for $120/month. Today I have the best DSL money can buy - 20 Mbps for $60/month. I think a 30x improvement in a decade is pretty darn material :)! Although the copper to my house isn't different, Qwest has brought in fibre to the node, so that there's a much shorter loop between my house and my internet access.

When we move over the summer, I'll have 50 Mbps cable.

20 Mbps is PLENTY to delivery perfect 1080p quality. Really, 10-12 Mbps is enough for most movie content, and it'll be 8-10 Mbps next year due to further codec improvements.

Here's a sample I did a couple months ago with some widescreen movie standard test content at 6 Mbps average 8 Mbps peak, including 5.1 audio. Other than the opening "confetti credits" shot, which is purposely designed as a codec-buster, the quality is quite good throughout.

http://silverlight.services.live.com/31260/StEM%206-8%20Mbps%201280x800p24/video.wmv

Given the intersecting curves of improving bandwidth and improving codecs, 1080p delivery to more than half of USA households should be possible in 2010.

Will Microsoft's phone be the Zune of phones or the Vista of phones or the Microsoft Bob of phones?

Will Microsoft's phone cost $50 per year to protect it against sloppy, unfinished programming?

Will customers have to wait for the phone's service pack 3 before it works as it should?

Will the phone have DRM?

Will the billionaires who own Microsoft assume that anyone who isn't a billionaire is a criminal, and allow government to spy on the customers?

This technology isn't windows 7 specific, notice that you can use it on: https://sync.live.com/

Remember, a few years ago, when Google's satellite view showed a US Submarine in drydock with its propeller fully visible? That was a huge, huge deal.

Actually, it was Microsoft's mapping service that had this: Here's the picture.

And yeah, apparently it was a big deal.

Try Microsoft's version: http://maps.live.com/
The imagery tends to be higher-resolution in most areas than the goog's.

http://skydrive.live.com/

The general procedure I use is:

1) Get and install Debugging Tools for Windows for your platform.

2) Run kernrate.exe from the resource kit tools to determine if the problem is an I/O or CPU limit. (See here for how to get symbolic usage information.) If you do not see anything hogging the CPU, it's an I/O problem and you should go to step 5.

3) It's a CPU problem, so use the information from kernrate to figure out who's bogarting the CPU. If the process is services.exe, rundll32.exe, or System, you need to use something like Process Explorer to determine which file actually contains the code which is executing.

4) If that doesn't work, it may really be an I/O problem or a rootkit. If you suspect a rootkit, your main options are reinstallation or forensic analysis using something like a boot CD, TSK, and the NIST hash database to audit your machine for bad files.

5) Run Process Monitor and see who's responsible for all the I/O.

6) If that doesn't reveal anything, it might be a driver problem. Use Process Explorer to see if you have excessive DPCs (the Windows equivalent of a top half interrupt handler). Use kernrate to zoom in and see which driver is causing them.

Windows Mail isn't going away. It's going into the downloadable Live addons. The explanation is that by not integrating it into the release, Mail and the other bits of client software aren't tied into the Windows release cycle.

They already DO sell antivirus software. Windows Live OneCare.

Microsoft Office Live?

This isn't quite true. You can do full web-based previews and rudimentary editing without Office installed locally.

http://workspace.office.live.com/

They don't even have streetview of their own building!

No, but Microsoft does. More recent photo, too. Looks unfinished in the Gmaps photo..

Yep. Microsoft OneScare to the rescue.

Why did the size of so many Sysinternals utilities increase in size from 1-200K to over 1MB for no change in functionality?

They added a EULA and a call to iexplore http://www.live.com./ In Redmond, that's about 800k.

A Microsoft press release distributed courtesy SlashDot...who would have thought.

More visible on a maps.live.com shot taken from a plane.

the local.live.com images are nice and clear.
Especially the birds eye view from the satelites with wings ;)

http://maps.live.com/#JnE9eXAucnllJTJjK25ldyt5b3JrJTdlc3N0LjAlN2VwZy4xJmJiPTU2Ljc1MjcyMj g3MjA1NzQlN2UtMzkuODE0NDUzMTI1JTdlLTguNjY3OTE4MDAyMzYzMTIlN2UtMTIzLjA0Njg3NQ==

I hate to admit it, but Microsoft has a great solution for this. https://fss.live.com/ Parents can use their existing passport accounts add the kids own hotmail.com or live.com email adresses, and then the parents are in control of every contact they can receive or send from. The kids can make requests, and then parent can grant them. It also works for Windows Live Messenger, only the contacts the parents approve are allowed to talk. I have been using it for my 10 and 8 year old. Works great. Even on Linux. You just have to live the stigma of giving your kids hotmail.com accounts.

Silverlight Streaming?

http://streaming.live.com/

It's free for up to 1 GB of storage and 1 TB of transfer a month. File max size is 105 MB, which is plenty for even a short HD clip.

You have to upload in WMV, but an uploaded file is available as both an embedded Silverlight player (Win/Mac, with Linux coming via Moonlight) and a straight link to the WMV playable by tons of tools, including VLC. And Windows Media Player and other tools will let anyone "Save As" from the web link if they want a local copy.

I've got a sample/tutorial on my blog:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/Direct-links-to-files-on-Silverlight-Streaming-and-new-All-Stars-clip/

It's one of the few free services that'll give you a straight, ad-free link to the media file.

If, for instance, Saab released a new hybrid car which ran on hydrogen, and there was no infrastructure in place to supply that.

It's the check or the egg problem, all over again.

Check out Photosynth from Microsoft, as seen in this TED talk.

Why don't you see for yourself. It works by intelligently looking at photos and constructing a 3D model out of the photos, entirely automatically. You can't load your own photos yet, as it's still in beta. The demo is the output of their previous tests, as it has not yet been updated with the latest version. And no, it can't be easily faked with flash, as this is 100% automatic, and faking in flash would require a massive amount of work by hundreds of people.

It wasn't pirated. The following link (in Chinese), which is traced from this other link (which comes from the Gizmodo article) says they were 120 HES Axon Media Servers running XPe (Windows XP Embedded).

Regardless, I can see some heads rolling as result from this failure.

Just for clarity, I don't want to use a VOIP solution; I need to use my plain old landline. My reason is this: if I'm watching a movie or listening to an MP3 while I'm waiting for a call, I don't want it to ever be apparent to the person who is on the phone with me, and I want to route all the audio I use through a single headset.

I use an LX-3000 headset I won with points from Live Search Club. There is no "Stereo Mix" option so WAV audio is totally separate from microphone input. Your callers will never hear your media.

1. Sign up for a number with FreeDigits or GrandCentral.
2. Configure X-Lite to use either service.
3. Forward your POTS line to your VOIP number.

The process is totally transparent to incoming callers. Only one USB headset required.

It's 1567 Oakridge Ln, Pittsburgh, PA 15237, but depending on whether you're using Google Maps or Live Search Maps you'll get different houses, so I'm not positively sure which one it is. I think the imagery both of them use is old, anyway... you can't see the pool in either of them. MapQuest and Yahoo both point out the same house as Google Maps, but the imagery they use is different from each other and different from both Google and Live Search...

Overall, comparing the layout to the pictures from Street View I think the property is the one at 40.575888,-80.079721 (where Live Search indicated) and Yahoo maps seems to have the best view of it (there's even a smidge of blue approximately where the pool should be... it's a bit hard to see, but the picture was taken in the wintertime, so the pool might have been empty or covered, plus a couple of big evergreens were casting a dark shade on it). Notice that it looks a lot better in Yahoo's pictures than it did in the ones Google Street View took... it must have still been under construction. I can understand how they'd have been less-than-flattered if they ever intended to sell the property.

Also, the photos aren't taken from satellites in space. They are taken from airplanes.

That's partly true but not entirely; they're actually taken from both. Google's satellite view is taken from satellites for the lower zoom settings and from airplanes at the higher zoom settings. Street view is taken from the street.

Interestingly, maps.live.com doesn't have "street view", just "aerial" (which is the same as Google's satellite view) and "bird's eye" (which is what you described: low altitude aerial photos at an angle suitable to see the side of the house). I wonder if they did it for that very sort of legal reason? It was probably a lot more expensive than Google's street view...

Cuil is not even as good as Yahoo's search or Microsoft's search.

Yahoo:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=aes+zip+linux

Microsoft:
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=aes+zip+linux

These two are actually competitive in search quality nowadays and they still have trouble getting Google's share.

So what are the odds Cuil is going to get anywhere?

When Google first started, I recall they _were_ significantly better than their competitors (Altavista, Infoseek, hotbot etc).

Seriously what does Cuil do better for users than Google, Yahoo or Microsoft?

I searched for "problems with linq to sql" on google and only got 21 to 23 hits depending on which google site). e.g.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&safe=off
http://www.google.com.sg/search?hl=en&q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&safe=off
http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&btnG=Search

On search.yahoo.com I got 135 hits ( http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&fr=sfp&ei=UTF-8 )

Microsoft's search: http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=%22problems+with+linq+to+sql%22&go=&form=QBLH

I think cuil has a very long way to go.

I don't have any huge loyalty to Google, just like I didn't have any to Altavista or Infoseek or Hotbot or whoever else did search in the old days.

I won't pay Google as long as there's one other that's almost as good and doesn't charge.

Yahoo's search engine is OK ( http://search.yahoo.com/ ). In fact it can be better than Google's at some queries. I just use Google because they are still good enough for me not to bother switching (they're not as good as the old days because of all the spamming and fake sites).

I haven't bothered using Microsoft's search engine much: http://www.live.com/

But if they're the only "no charge" one left, I might use them.

I suspect if private corps didn't do search for free, Governments might start to do it. I'm sure the Chinese Government will be very happy if only the Chinese Government was "willing" to provide search services to people living in China.

If I were the equivalent of the NSA in a country and there were no free search engines, I would certainly provide search services via a front company - pay the front company millions for ads that hardly ever get shown etc. Always good to know what people doing, and a good way to keep people from finding stuff you don't want them to find is to provide them other stuff to find instead ;).

I'm almost embarassed but I was so tired of the results from Google that I switched to the http://search.live.com/ as my homepage. (Yes, I open a new tab for searching and seldom use the brower's search box.) I find that the results that I get there are quite appropriate for my search terms usually though I'm thinking of finding a new search engine because over the past two months their quality has done the opposite of what it had been doing and that is not good. The results *are* getting worse than what they were just a couple of months ago. I'll give them a while longer to get back on track but, for now, I'll actually be looking for a new search engine/home page.

live has fairly unbiased results :)

search for IE6 on live, check out the 4th result :
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=ie6