studio

I found this article on O'Reilly's (Microsoft-sponsored) Port 25 page fascinating. For all Microsoft's attempts to own the budding minds of students, it may well be that Microsoft has become too corporate, too sterile to be of interest to the creative mind:

Even back in my day, you could go to a "Windows lab" and work with Visual Studio or go to a "UNIX lab" and use vi and gcc. And you know what? All the fun was in the UNIX lab. And not just for me. There was just a difference in the attitudes and ethic across the two lab environments. People in the Windows lab were trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM, while people in the UNIX lab were goofing off, playing with code, and... trying to get their project in before it was 11:59 PM.

What is it about UNIX, vi, emacs, gcc, perl, and INSERT-HERE that makes it fun to play with, while Visual Studio just makes you want to... well, work?

In the enterprise, this alleged Microsoft attribute might be considered a Very Good Thing. But is it? Do enterprises really want automatons that punch in and code to spec? Or do they want innovation that changes the game?… Read more

Article updated at 8:05 p.m. PST.

Greetings, Earthlings. There's big, round news in the world of software, and its name is Google Earth. Hot on the heels of major improvements to Microsoft Virtual Earth, Google Earth has had a few big announcements of its own. On Monday, KML, the markup language behind Google Earth, was approved as the international standard by the Open Geospatial Consortium. The Google Earth Blog also announced a research project to simplify placing images into precise locations within Google Earth. Anyone who's tried this knows it requires some advanced photo-matching techniques, so … Read more

Google SketchUp landed with a big splash last year, but it's not the only freeware option for budding 3D designers. From the makers of the popular scene-rendering program Bryce comes DAZ Studio for Windows and Mac, a powerful freeware 3D modeling and CAD program that looks great, but is a resource hog and can be sluggish for the average user.

The publisher recommends at least 256MB of RAM, but I found that to be wishful thinking at best. The program runs choppily on anything less than 1GB, although some of the more complex rendering was processed more slowly than … Read more

Finally, an ant farm that even PETA wouldn't protest.

No ants were harmed in the making of the "Ants Life Studio" from Japan's Bandai for a good reason: They're not real. Instead it's a colony of virtual ants that presumably do all of the same slave labor and other functions of their living counterparts, allowing you to satisfy your entomological curiosities without risking any arthropodic karma in the afterlife.

The viewing takes place through an LCD that includes backlighting so it can be used as a night light too. As OhGizmo notes, it seems … Read more

Jeremy Kipnis' $6 million home theater caused quite a stir back in February; so much so that he's now proposing guidelines for others to build a dream home theater for a mere 1 percent of his original price. Kipnis didn't recommend much in the way of specific brands or models of equipment, just the design goals for a $60,000 ultimate home theater.

Here's a brief rundown of what you would need to get close to the performance of Kipnis Studio Standard:

All of the speakers must be identical.

The six or seven-channel layout must be completely … Read more

Two Turkish engineers have built a prototype of an autonomous rescue helicopter equipped with Microsoft robotics and mapping software so that it can capture video of disaster sites and stream it back to command centers. The engineers Oguz Bayrakdar and Omer Celik began developing the robot, called RoboTurk, last year with the help of the Istanbul municipal government and Microsoft Robotics Group, which makes commercial software for autonomous applications that could range from a child's robotic Lego set to an unmanned helicopter.

It's an independent project from motivated developers, but RoboTurk is a boon for Microsoft's young … Read more

LOS ANGELES--Microsoft brought out former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw on Wednesday to kick off the launch of Windows Server 2008.

In explaining his appearance at a server launch, Brokaw said he was trying to redeem himself after his recent Saturday Night Live appearance, in which he was interviewed by Will Farrell as Anchorman character Ron Burgundy.

"I'm not here to write new code, to design new apps," Brokaw told the crowd at the tony Nokia Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Instead, Brokaw spoke for several minutes on the radical transformation of society being brought about by … Read more

Microsoft wants more students using its software tools and it thinks it has hit on the right business model.

It's going to give away its software.

Starting this week, college students in 10 countries will be able to get Microsoft's Visual Studio and several other programs for free as part of an effort dubbed DreamSpark. Over the next year, Microsoft plans to offer the program worldwide for college and high school students.

In addition to giving away its Visual Studio tools, Microsoft is also providing no-charge access to its Expression Web design tools and its XNA studio for … Read more

If your typical high-end home theater with rows of plush seats, velvet wallpaper, and popcorn machines offers Cadillac levels of performance and luxury, then Jeremy Kipnis' $6 million ultimate home theater is more like a fire-breathing Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorano, the fastest production Ferrari ever built.

This home theater is all about aggressively advancing the state of the art of picture and sound presentation. Yes, it's comfortable and beautiful, but its prime directive is a quest for the very best. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is overlooked. Kipnis won't settle for second best. … Read more