Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Apple vs. Microsoft: Two Opposite Approaches to Building an OS

Microsoft recently published a blog post that addressed specific issues that Windows 8 developer preview users had with the start screen.
The Windows 8 team specifically tackles the complaint that the new Windows 8 start screen, which uses the app-style metro interface, isn’t effective at organizing apps (it was originally organized alphabetically) and doesn’t display enough apps on one screen (it originally displayed about 20 apps). Microsoft dives deep into the UX issues of start menus, even calculating how many apps Windows 8 can theoretically fit onto one display at different monitor resolutions.
In the end though, Microsoft concluded that its users were right about the Windows 8 start menu and made two important changes to it as a result. First, it now supports folder-style organization of apps. Secondly, Microsoft is making the start screen denser, meaning that more apps will be visible on a single screen.
The Apple Approach to OS DevelopmentMicrosoft’s approach lies in stark contrast to Apple‘s approach to OS development. The notoriously secretive company doesn’t like unveiling products until they are polished. It doesn’t publish detailed stats about how people are using its products. And it rarely makes dramatic changes based on user feedback.
It’s an approach that has worked just fine for Apple (more than fine, in fact). Steve Jobs and his team have been able to develop products and features that users wanted long before users they even knew they wanted them.
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups,” Steve Jobs told BusinessWeek in 1998. “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
This is why you won’t find an Apple blog that details user behavior in iOS. This is why Apple only gives developers a few months to play with new versions of Mac OS X before they get released to the public, while Microsoft will release a new version of Windows to developers more than a year before its official debut.
Both companies are wildly successful with their operating systems. Windows is still the world’s most popular OS, while Apple keeps selling iPhone and iPads by the millions. But we’re about to see what happens when these two opposing philosophies to development butt heads. Microsoft is preparing for war against the iPad, and Windows 8 is its weapon of choice.
Will Microsoft’s philosophy to development trump Apple’s approach? We don’t know the answer to that question yet, but we do know that the fireworks are just getting started.
Check out the galleries below if you want to do a side-by-side comparison of Apple and Microsoft’s approaches to building an OS. Let us know which philosophy you prefer in the comments.
Gallery: Windows 8
Windows 8 Metro Home Screen
This is the Metro interface in Windows 8
Click here to view this gallery.
Gallery: iOS 5
New Home Screen With Notification
Notifications are a big deal in iOS 5. Taking some cues from Android, iOS has finally unified the notification system and made it less clumsy and intrusive.
Message now appear at the top of the screen (though you can choose to allow them to display in the middle) while you are using the phone and they don't interrupt what you are already doing.
Click here to view this gallery.
23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021
WHEN LOOKING AT THE present as an indication of where we’ll stand a year from now–much less a decade–feeling optimistic may not come easy. We look out to the universe and see an infinite, lifeless abyss enfolding upon our own small pocket of civilization, while the people we look to for guidance and information seem to be little more than straight-faced bearers of bad news.
Yet while we can’t predict what the future holds for our unending political discourses, we can look at how far we’ve come with technology in merely the last decade and realize the present we know now will, very soon, find itself memorialized in nostalgia. Here’s some technology emerging down the road that’s poised to change your life on a much greater scale than any outcome of a political debate.
2012
Ultrabooks – The last two years have been all about the tablet. Laptops, with their “untouchable” screens, have yet to match any tablet’s featherweight portability and zippy response times. However, by next year, ultraportable notebooks–Ultrabooks–will finally be available for under $1000, bringing a complete computing experience into areas of life which, until now, have only been partially filled by smaller technologies such as tablets and smartphones. They weigh around three pounds, measure less than an inch thick, and the hard drives are flash-based, which means they’ll have no moving parts, delivering zippy-quick startups and load times.
The Mars Science Laboratory – By August 2012, the next mission to Mars will reach the Martian surface with a new rover named Curiosity focusing on whether Mars could ever have supported life, and whether it might be able to in the future. Curiosity will be more than 5 times larger than the previous Mars rover, and the mission will cost around $2.3 billion — or just about one and a half New Yankee Stadiums.
The Brain Cap, from U of Maryland.
The paralyzed will walk. But, perhaps not in the way that you’d imagine. Using a machine-brain interface, researchers are making it possible for otherwise paralyzed humans to control neuroprostheses–essentially mechanical limbs that respond to human thought–allowing them to walk and regain bodily control. The same systems are also being developed for the military, which one can only assume means this project won’t flounder due to a lack of funding.
2013
The Rise of Electronic Paper – Right now, e-paper is pretty much only used in e-readers like the Kindle, but it’s something researchers everywhere are eager to expand upon. Full-color video integration is the obvious next step, and as tablet prices fall, it’s likely newspapers will soon be fully eradicated from their current form. The good news: less deforestation, and more user control over your sources.
4G will be the new standard in cell phone networks. What this means: your phone will download data about as fast as your home computer can. While you’ve probably seen lots of 4G banter from the big cell providers, it’s not very widely available in most phones. However, both Verizon and the EU intend to do away with 3G entirely by 2013, which will essentially bring broadband-level speeds to wireless devices on cell networks. It won’t do away with standard internet providers, but it will bring “worldwide WiFi” capabilities to anyone with a 4G data plan.
The Eye of Gaia, a billion-pixel telescope will be sent into space this year to begin photographing and mapping the universe on a scale that was recently impossible. With the human eye, one can see several thousand stars on a clear night; Gaia will observe more than a billion over the course of its mission–about 1% of all the stars in the Milky Way. As well, it will look far beyond our own galaxy, even as far as the end of the (observable) universe.
2014
A 1 Terabyte SD Memory Card probably seems like an impossibly unnecessary technological investment. Many computers still don’t come with that much memory, much less SD memory cards that fit in your digital camera. Yet thanks to Moore’s Law we can expect that the 1TB SD card will become commonplace in 2014, and increasingly necessary given the much larger swaths of data and information that we’re constantly exchanging every day (thanks to technologies like memristors and our increasing ever-connectedness). The only disruptive factor here could be the rise of cloud-computing, but as data and transfer speeds continue to rise, it’s inevitable that we’ll need a physical place to store our digital stuff.
The first around-the-world flight by a solar-powered plane will be accomplished by now, bringing truly clean energy to air transportation for the first time. Consumer models are still far down the road, but you don’t need to let your imagination wander too far to figure out that this is definitely a game-changer. Consider this: it took humans quite a few milennia to figure out how to fly; and only a fraction of that time to do it with solar power.
The Solar Impulse, to be flown around the world. Photo by Stephanie Booth
The world’s most advanced polar icebreaker is currently being developed as a part of the EU’s scientific development goals and is scheduled to launch in 2014. As global average temperatures continue to climb, an understanding and diligence to the polar regions will be essential to monitoring the rapidly changing climates–and this icebreaker will be up to the task.
$100 personal DNA sequencing is what’s being promised by a company called BioNanomatrix, which the company founder Han Cao has made possible through his invention of the ‘nanofluidic chip.’ What this means: by being able to cheaply sequence your individual genome, a doctor could biopsy a tumor, sequence the DNA, and use that information to determine a prognosis and prescribe treatment for less than the cost of a modern-day x-ray. And by specifically inspecting the cancer’s DNA, treatment can be applied with far more specific–and effective–accuracy.
2015
The world’s first zero-carbon, sustainable city in the form of Masdar City will be initially completed just outside of Abu Dhabi. The city will derive power solely from solar and other renewable resources, offer homes to more than 50,000 people.
Personal 3D Printing is currently reserved for those with extremely large bank accounts or equally large understandings about 3D printing; but by 2015, printing in three dimensions (essentially personal manufacturing) will become a common practice in the household and in schools. Current affordable solutions include do-it-yourself kits like Makerbot, but in four years it should look more like a compact version of the uPrint. Eventually, this technology could lead to technologies such as nanofabricators and matter replicators–but not for at least a few decades.
2016
Space tourism will hit the mainstream. Well, sorta. Right now it costs around $20-30 million to blast off and chill at the International Space Station, or $200,000 for a sub-orbital spaceflight from Virgin Galactic. But the market is growing faster than most realize: within five years, companies like Space Island, Galactic Suite, and Orbital Technologies may realize their company missions, with space tourism packages ranging from $10,000 up-and-backs to $1 million five-night stays in an orbiting hotel suite.
The sunscreen pill will hit the market, protecting the skin as well as the eyes from UV rays. By reverse-engineering the way coral reefs shield themselves from the sun, scientists are very optimistic about the possibility, much to the dismay of sunscreen producers everywhere.
Back from extinction. Image by JenJeff.
A Wooly Mammoth will be reborn among other now-extinct animals in 2016, assuming all goes according to the current plans of Japan’s Riken Center for Developmental Biology. If they can pull it off, expect long lines at Animal Kingdom.
2017
Portable laser pens that can seal wounds – Imagine you’re hiking fifty miles from the nearest human, and you slip, busting your knee wide open, gushing blood. Today, you might stand a chance of some serious blood loss–but in less than a decade you might be carrying a portable laser pen capable of sealing you back up Wolverine-style.
2018
Light Peak technology, a method of super-high-data-transfer, will enable more than 100 Gigabytes per second–and eventually whole terabytes per second–within everyday consumer electronics. This enables the copying of entire hard drives in a matter of seconds, although by this time the standard hard drive is probably well over 2TB.
Insect-sized robot spies aren’t far off from becoming a reality, with the military currently hard at work to bring Mission Impossible-sized tech to the espionage playground. Secret weapon: immune to bug spray.
2019
The average PC has the power of the human brain. According to Ray Kurzweil, who has a better grip on the future than probably anyone else, the Law of Accelerating Returns will usher in an exponentially greater amount of computing power than every before.
The Web Within Us. Image by Anna Lena Schiller.
Web 3.0 – What will it look like? Is it already here? It’s always difficult to tell just where we stand in terms of technological chronology. But if we assume that Web 1.0 was based only upon hyperlinks, and Web 2.0 is based on the social, person-to-person sharing of links, then Web 3.0 uses a combination of socially-sourced information, curated by a highly refined, personalizable algorithm (“they” call it the Semantic Web). We’re already in the midst of it, but it’s still far from its full potential.
Energy from a fusion reactor has always seemed just out of reach. It’s essentially the process of producing infinite energy from a tiny amount of resources, but it requires a machine that can contain a reaction that occurs at over 125,000,000 degrees. However, right now in southern France, the fusion reactor of the future is being built to power up by 2019, with estimates of full-scale fusion power available by 2030.
2020
Crash-proof cars have been promised by Volvo, to be made possible by using radar, sonar, and driver alert systems. Considering automobile crashes kill over 30,000 people in the U.S. per year, this is definitely a welcome technology.
2021
So, what should we expect in 2021? Well, 10 years ago, what did you expect to see now? Did you expect the word “Friend” to become a verb? Did you expect your twelve-year-old brother to stay up texting until 2am? Did you expect 140-character messaging systems enabling widespread revolutions against decades-old dictatorial regimes?
The next 10 years will be an era of unprecedented connectivity; this much we know. It will build upon the social networks, both real and virtual, that we’ve all played a role in constructing, bringing ideas together that would have otherwise remained distant, unknown strangers. Without twitter and a steady drip of mainstream media, would we have ever so strongly felt the presence of the Arab Spring? What laughs, gasps, or loves, however fleeting, would have been lost if not for Chatroulette? Keeping in mind that as our connections grow wider and more intimate, so too will the frequency of our connectedness, and as such, your own understanding of just what kinds of relationships are possible will be stretched and revolutionized as much as any piece of hardware.
Truly, the biggest changes we’ll face will not come in the form of any visible technology; the changes that matter most, as they always have, will occur in those places we know best but can never quite see: our own hearts and minds.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Worldzzz Cheapest Tablet ... India Rockzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz............
Just a few hours after the launch of Iphone 4S, and a few hours before the death of “The father of IPad – Steve Jobs”, India came up with the world’s cheapest android tablet.
At a time, when pads are considered as the most expensive gadget in the world, India has come up with the cheapest android tablet – “Aakash” (means SKY). Aakash is the world’s cheapest tablet, which you can easily find for Rs. 2200 ($45).
This device is made jointly by an Indian IIT institute, in collaboration with UK based company – “Datawind”. Its founders, Raja Singh Tuli and Suneet Singh Tuli, developed it to help Indian Students in their studies.
The price of an IPAD is 12 times more than that of Aakash TAB. So, don’t expect it to be as cool and stylish as IPAD. Plus, it is not as powerful as your home PC.
But still, it is not a bad device, especially at the price it is offered. It can do a lot of things that an IPAD can, but yes in its own way. After all, it is a tab for common men, who can’t afford Apple’s or Samsung’s.
Of course, it can’t match the quality of Apple, Samsung or HTC. But, even they can’t match the happiness that this tablet will bring on the faces of “middle income group” people. So world, please step aside for Aakash, the cheapest android tablet of the world.
Aakash Android Tablet for just $45
This device is made jointly by an Indian IIT institute, in collaboration with UK based company – “Datawind”. Its founders, Raja Singh Tuli and Suneet Singh Tuli, developed it to help Indian Students in their studies.
That is why, Indian Students can buy it for a special price of Rs. 1400 ($28). Government, by providing this tablet for Rs. 1400 ($28) to 100000 college students, is trying to revolutionize Indian Education System.Datawind is also planning to sell this Tablet in partnership with different Telecom companies, with Rs. 99 ($2) per month Internet Services. It is retailed under the brand name UbiSlate
Aakash – Is it an IPAD killer?
I am sure you guys are intelligent enough not to consider it as an IPAD killer. Because, it is not.The price of an IPAD is 12 times more than that of Aakash TAB. So, don’t expect it to be as cool and stylish as IPAD. Plus, it is not as powerful as your home PC.
But still, it is not a bad device, especially at the price it is offered. It can do a lot of things that an IPAD can, but yes in its own way. After all, it is a tab for common men, who can’t afford Apple’s or Samsung’s.
Aakash Android Tablet – Key Features
At such a low price level, you can expect a tab to provide a lot of features. And this is where, Aakash Tab is so good. It provide some really good features, some of which are as follows:- It has a 7 inch (18 cms) touch screen.
- It has 256 MB RAM.
- It has a memory card slot, with 2 GB memory card. You can expand its memory up to 32 GB.
- It is WIFI and GPRS enabled, that means you can also browse Internet on it.
- It is a fully functional multimedia player – that means you can view movies, listen to songs and play games on it.
- It runs on Android 2.2 Froyo version, with full access to the Application Market.
- It provides 3.5 hours of battery backup.
- You can access to 70000 ebooks and 2100 E-journals across 1500 colleges in India.
- It also has a dedicated card to process 1080p videos
- It is very lightweight, and weighs only 350gms.
- And, at just $45, its very cheap.
Features Comparison – Aakash Vs. The world
The following figures shows the comparison of ”Aakash” with world’s popular tablets:| Aakash Tablet | Other Tablets | |
| Screen | 7 inches | 7-10 inches |
| RAM | 256 MB | 256 MB – 1 GB |
| Storage | 2GB (32 GB Expandable) | 4-64 GB |
| Price | Rs. 2200 ($45) | Rs. 15000 – Rs. 30000 ($500) |
| Ports | 2 Full USB | Micro USB |
| OS (Operating System) | Android 2.2 | IOS & Android 2.2 / 2.3 |
Aakash Tab – For Children of the World
While launching this tablet, Indian HRD minister named it as a device for the children of the world. I am a big criticizer of Indian Government, but this is one great step that they have taken for “not-so-rich” students of the world. Just imagine, a person, who can’t afford high end tablets, can also have a tablet of his own.Of course, it can’t match the quality of Apple, Samsung or HTC. But, even they can’t match the happiness that this tablet will bring on the faces of “middle income group” people. So world, please step aside for Aakash, the cheapest android tablet of the world.
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