April 27, 2006

MS ImpotencePoint

I don't really now why I have to struggle with this software everyday! I may really end up starting a business just to make a presentation software. Then I realize that Apple has already produced keynote that! well, god damn PowerPoint! have you ever copied and pasted a picture into your slide and then used the "Set transparent color" tool from the picture toolbar, then selected the white background.

At this point two problems may occur. first, the "Set transparent color" tool is dimmed and unselectable randomly (at least I couldn't figure out the pattern!). Second, you select the color you want to be transparent, everything seems fine, you save the presentation and take it to your presentation confidently (you can never be so on windows!) then while you are going through slides there you have an ugly slide (like the rest of MSPP slides are not!) with the white background everywhere!!!

anybody got an idea, what is the problem. I'm so busy I can't investigate it myself!

Posted by Shauheen at 08:04 PM | Comments (1)

April 12, 2006

SAN/NAS

To me it didn't seem like a full year, but I attended the SAN/NAS summit again, after one year.

May be the first thing to notice is that, the technology in this sector has not been shaken during the past year at least not on the commercial scale! Rather there are two major changes, firstly as promised and expected, the amount of money and request pointed towards storage solutions is rising exponentially. Second, there are better business models in effect, better user interfaces and better management. So overall it looks like people are reluctant that the technology surpasses the requirement, and it is now a matter of who can be more artistic in taking a bigger share of that money, which sounds OK, at this time.

On the Apple side things were a little different though. Even after one year, Apple prices are by miles lower than anyone else in the market (although they are still not claiming for the mission critical usage). However what I saw at Apple was a zero derivative. They were there with exact same products as one year ago, The guy had not even bothered making new slides for his presentation, which was a complete mess, as he forgot what he wanted to say many times, and his live experience with building a raid on two USB flash memories on his laptop ended up in saying: "I'm sure it will work! Lets continue with the presentation!!!".

I guess Apple has been so busy on the iPod and intel transition and other fronts that they have not really been able to touch the server side. Furthermore as I thought, and the Apple guys also acknowledged, their sales has dropped noticeably, mainly because people are not buying XServe with a G5 in it! rather they want to see the product updated with the new line of Intel processors, which unfortunately unlike the G5 is still not available in 64 bit version.

What I see at the moment is that they are just surviving somehow, so that they will have something to say when they settled the other fronts! By that time they could either be out of market or unstoppable.

Posted by Shauheen at 04:45 PM | Comments (0)

April 06, 2006

Boot Camp

It's official now! Macs will have an official, Apple provided solution to run Windows! bootcamp.PNG It sounds funny! It's like Apple is saying if you are so stupid to run windows when you have already seen OS X, then let us take a few hundred dollars from you while we keep expanding our potential framework!

In other words this wise decision is because there is no point in not letting users do that! I bet they have spent less than a few hours in producing Boot Camp. Having said that I still would prefer to see something like VirtualPC to run any windows application necessary natively from within the OS X. What remains a question is that if Apple will ever officially let non mac users to install OS X on their machines? This could effect Apple in big ways, and of course is like taking out the swords to the face of Microsoft, it could even change Apple into a pure software company, which will prevent the world from getting more innovations on the hardware side. BTW interested to know how will Boot Camp work with other OSs?

Posted by Shauheen at 01:09 AM | Comments (0)

April 05, 2006

Third

It was always interesting to see that third person in the US presidential elections, yeah Ralph Nader. So when I saw that he will be at Concordia to give a lecture I decided to attend and see what he thinks.nader.jpg

Although he has made a good progress from the first time that he ran for office, but it is very clear why he will never be able to win the game. Simply he is neither stupid enough nor intelligent enough! he can hardly speak to the general audience, and what he is looking for is simply a fatal path to US. I am not a capitalist but you can not run a country with no business and no science and technology! and yes it comes at a cost! In other words I like some of his ideas but obviously not that radical! In the QnA period, there came an interesting question I always wonder. Those 2 million people who voted for Nader where definitely not going to vote for Bush! This way Nader has taken away the success from democrats which he himself refers to as less worst, and practically achived nothing! he answered that the goal is to fight a double party dictatorship, Well his answer did not sound convincing to me!

Posted by Shauheen at 01:36 AM | Comments (0)