With possibly the worst-designed website promoting a computing industry event, the eGames & Entertainment Expo is going to be kicking strafing off in Melbourne from the 17-19th of November 2006. I have high hopes for this event because the E3 has been scaled down, giving a great opportunity for any entertainment exhibition to gain a large amount of visitors and exhibitors. But the seriousness and professionalism of the organisers has me worried.
Did anyone actually check-over and approve this website? Look at the document title, “Entertinment”?
Who designed the site? If you turn off CSS styles, it actually looks better. Did this designer know how to use padding?
The lack of content about anything is distressing.
The “Visitor Info” page has “computers” listed as some of the things you’ll see at the expo.
“Video games” and “computer games” are different somehow?
There isn’t even a list of exhibitors. Is anyone coming?
Under “Exhibitor Info – Floor Space”, apparently there is “Space only available”. It kills me to ask, what isn’t available?
It’s always frightening when one of the pages has the heading “under construction”. Did someone bring back Web 1.0?
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. To the organisers, if you’re reading this, I wouldn’t mind a press-pass for the VIP media event on the 17th.
This is the Microsoft Partners marketing video for Windows Vista. I had a look to see what all the fuss is about. Apparently Windows Vista is all about “see(ing) the difference”, and I definitely see it.
0:11 — Shiny. I get the whole Aero Glass thing, but this is just iCandy. 0:18 — Afro girl! Funky music begins. 0:20 — Superman! 0:25 — Revenues makes the chairs go spin-spin! 0:33 — You look left, you look right. Then BAM, the red guy comes out from the left and knocks you out. 0:37 — Doing the whole Matrix thing is cool, but doing it in an air-tunnel is not on. 0:43 — Everyone spin 270 degrees and walk like you knew where you were actually going. 0:52 — Crossing your arms makes all the virii and trojans go away. 0:56 — I hope someone catches the red guy. He’s awfully confident. 1:01 — Steal my laptop! Steal my laptop! 1:17 — Let’s collaborate on the smallest IKEA desk you can find. 1:27 — Must be some really groovy music to get that sort of reaction. 1:29 — I’ll change the channel, flick my hair AND rotate 360 degrees left. It’s that fun. 1:36 — Did I just see a hybrid of ballad and ice skating?
Looks like someone hired the wrong creative agency.
It’s all over. After 4 days with 2520 attendees, everyone from Microsoft and Jack Morton needs a big hug and a million thanks. TechEd is the only technology event I’ve been to, but it has set the standards pretty high. I went in thinking TechEd Australia was going to be the forgotten child of the big TechEd family, but it turned out to be a rather special.
Having no major announcements or any product launches with most of the technology showcased already been on the market for quite some time, nothing really “wow”ed me, but didn’t suck either.
The most interesting part of TechEd for me was Student Day. Not because I got the opportunity to present something to an audience, but because when you try to compact all of Microsoft into a 6 hour event, you end up with the very best.
I think TechEd could be better with the following improvements:
Kinder security guards
More varieties of food (or rotational daily menus)
Bigger venue for closing party
Closer distance between expo and session rooms
More product showcases
More freebies
More chairs
After the expo closed at 3:15pm on Friday, it felt like evacuating a war-zone.
Suddenly, everything was gone and ready to be shipped off.
For the CompletePC image backup demo, the presenter asked an attendee to break his hard drive. Which he did. Then in about 30 minutes, he restored his entire volume. This was made possible by the hybrid incremental/image backup solution in CompletePC. One first backup, it takes an image of your entire volume. Then at every update, it uses Volume Shadow Copy to create a record of all the updates to each block on the drive, not files. And because it tracks drive block changes, and not the file system, it is more comprehensive and much faster. He was able to make an incremental update in only second, and restore that system in under an hour.
There was also another speech recognition demo. It went flawless. The presenter had a USB microphone which he could mute, so that helped. I think he was also using a new build, with a new wallpaper it seems.
Of course no Microsoft party is complete without XBOX demo machines and novelty XBOX case mods.
http://blogs.technet.com/steriley/
I had a chance to attend one of Steve Riley’s sessions today and it as one of the best presentations I’ve seen. Steve Riley is a security expert at Microsoft and has been involved in the work that has gone into BitLocker and other Vista’s under-the-hood security features. The content of Steve’s presentation was not all that out-of-this-world, but his personality and way of presentation was so captivating. He would not use the stage, instead he walks just over a metre infront of the first row of the audience. He would walk back and forth and often stopping infront of people, looking at them right in the eye and kept talking. Sometimes he’d even walk up half way the sidewalks to get closer to the people at the back. It sounds weird, but it felt like he wasn’t presenting to the audience, but more having a chat with the audience.
http://blogs.msdn.com/frankarr/
Frank, the DPE group manager of Microsoft Australia, He hasn’t been on digg, techmeme or Wikipedia, but he sure knows how to communicate. One in every three persons at TechEd wants to talk to Frank, and Frank will always respond with their name (apart from it printed on their badge) and know what they do.
He can start a conversation with anyone and everyone, and make sense. He knows pretty much every field of work and research at Microsoft Australia and is passionate about every single one of them. He’s always relaxed, whether it is minutes before an unprepared presentation or the keynote, he makes it seem like he doesn’t even have to present at all.
He’s one of those people that you feel comfortable with whenever, wherever. And it’s fun working with him.
TechEd Day 2 started with a opening address/keynote by Anne Kirah, a Microsot anthropologist. The keynote was sort of a let down in terms of technology geekiness, there was no live demonstration or video of Windows Vista or Office 2007. But on the other hand, there was a good insight about how Microsoft cares about it customers, although she only focused on a small fraction of those customers.
She explained a story about how Microsoft invited a range of beta testers for Windows XP, including two elderlies above 75. She higlighted the misconceptions of a “user” and “information worker” as commonly labelled by developers, the real users are the people who may not be IT pros. The general consesus of the beta testers are IT pros, who may encounter bugs and difficulties and view them as hurdles instead of submitting bugs. So it was important to Microsoft to invite people who you would normally exclude from a beta. And that’s also why Microsoft needs anthropologists too.
Windows Vista performance enhancements
I attended a session on Windows Vista performance enhancements. Saw a demo of SuperFetch, ReadyBoost and prioritised I/O. There were live benchmarks on Windows Vista using a script, you could see the obvious time diffrence when you plug in the flash drive for ReadyBoost. With prioritized I/Os, you can actually run the search indexer and fragmenter while you’re working. Not only will it run in low CPU priority, it will also have low I/O priority to make sure it doesn’t affect your disk write/read performance.
SuperFetch is interesting because he explained how it worked. Not only is it an improved caching system, but it will also monitor your software usage (user, hour, day) to track patterns in your usage. Then it will proactively cache popular programs at bootup or resume from standby/hibernation. But this will all be running in low priority I/O to have no effects on performance if you need it.
Also, got a good screenshot of the RC1 build (5487.winmain.060726-1810) he was using.
