Sit back and Cry!

Right from the day since i saw the Photosynth demo in one of the TED talks, i wanted to get a feel of this wonderful application. It reminded me of my grad days when i was trying hard to get a 3-d reconstruction of a face from pictures taken at multiple perspectives. I was unable to come up with an algorithm due to the technology bottleneck and the associated memory requirements (Finally, i went on to propose a new algorithm for Face Recognition, but i wasn't satisfied with the results as i had made some assumptions which were not practical in the real life ...anywayz... life went on). My machine was just a 64MB, 733 Intel P3 machine. I knew that this was a very interesting area and anyone how could come up with a kicka$$ algorithm would rake in millions(and billions).

I went to M$ Live labs to check the progress made on this software and get a hands-on.

I was more than happy when i saw the 'Try It' link. The browser refreshed and i got this error :
"Windows XP SP2 and Vista Only

The Photosynth technology preview runs only on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.

If you feel you've reached this message in error, you can try anyway."

Am i pushed to the darkest corners of the Earth ... can someone hear me .... alllo.... why is this piece of software OS dependent!!!!

Image Searches

Being an ardent fan of Google(its philosophy-technology-products) sometimes does stimulate you search for some other product that tries to beat it. I did not expect M$ to even come close to Google ; for its the sheer simplicity of the latter coupled with amazing performance and features that has pushed itself to greater heights and better customer experience.

I was playing around with the Image searches being offered by Google and M$(Live) and i was surprised by the results and the performance/features of the Image Search Engines.To my limited knowledge , neither of the Image Search Engines support "Content Based" Searches and its mostly "Context Based" based searches (sic! wherez the intelligence!!).

I found that M$ Image Search experience to be highly satisfying when compared to that of Google's. The images are displayed in a neater format (without any verbiage) and when the mouse hovers on the images, the properties associated with the image is displayed. There is a sleek slider on the right-hand top that controls the number images and their size that is displayed in the page region.



Features in other Image Search engines :

AltaVista : Has an LoV(Drop down) at the top of the page wherein you can specify whether one wants B/W images or Color - this is really interesting!

Pixsy : really slow!! But has some dimensional refinements - on Content Type , Categories,Sources. But instead of showing all along the left hand side, i would allow the user to save the options in his/her preferences and hence allowing more space for the images to be displayed.

For a complete list of other Image Search engines - visit this

M$ and Spirituality

M$ has been ridiculed and teased at almost all instants of time since its inception.Hardly people know that it is one of the most religious organizations on Earth.They are in fact both spiritual and religious :) I would like to substantiate it with an example.

People have questioned(read 'ridiculed') on M$'s philosophy or intent on having the shut-down button in the Start Menu. Well perfectly valid Q - why would anyone want to shut down by clicking on the start button.David Pogue also mentioned this in his TED Talk... but there is nothing to laugh out here.

According to Hinduism, the AATMAN(self) belongs to THEE(ascends from HIM) and after death agains joins the THEE.So the both the start and the end is associated with the THEE. Its very much normal then that the system START and the END should again be associated with START :)