really sad. Live Labs was probably the greatest innovation out of MS.
If anybody from the Live Labs team that's been re-assigned doesn't want to go back to working on shitty products...i could use some of that brilliance.
no, no, no. Microsoft is far from dead. PG is simply wrong.
Just look at the work that Live Labs is producing. No "Web 2.0" company can compete with the brilliance behind photosynth. They are kidding themselves if they think they can.
I'll tell you why Microsoft won't survive. It's because Microsoft isn't a leader in innovation. Steve Ballmer doesn't have any balls. He's simply satisfied with being #2 and playing it safe while letting Steve Jobs create new markets and dominating them (with style).
Again, Microsoft isn't dead. If anything, this whole "Web 2.0" and Ycombinator incubation thing is dead. If the big boys think that there is any serious competition coming out of these programs then they have another thing coming. The recession has reduced a lot of this noise, and the real animals have been let out of their cage.
Microsoft Research is not Microsoft; it's like the Honors College at a large state university a small enclave of excellence set against a larger backdrop of mediocrity.
The larger culture at Microsoft is still operating under the assumptions of the 1990's when they were large and in charge. They have been coasting on the monopoly for some time. But, they are not the hundred year computing culture; by their very nature they can't be.
I find it funny how Arrington links to previous posts where he cites himself having some profound knowledge about the importance of a company or product.
Hey mike, you're a journalist, not a CEO.
When it comes to business, you really don't know your head from your ass.
Ummm...actually, TechCrunch may have started as Mike posting stories in his underwear years ago, but it's a thriving startup in its own right today, between TC, Crunchbase, TC50, Crunchgear, etc, etc. I bet the whole mess is worth $50 - 100m.
Btw, for comparison, HuffPo raised at a $75m pre-money valuation (announced Dec 1 but negotiated and finalized possibly before the economy went haywaire) and they have about 4x the traffic of TechCrunch.
I don't know, but this is the type of shit that really makes me mad. If you decide to do business with a large corporation that has enough internal resources to deploy a half-assed product that is based solely on the decision to add competition to an existing market, then this is what you get.
What kind of crap is netflix(and microsoft) trying pull here?
-There is no reverting back to the old-player (a subtle TOS)
-No Mac support
-Silverlight has to be installed on all PC's that use the netflix service
...this list goes on
Microsoft's primary focus has always been to use tacky business strategies that will increase shareholder profits rather than building great, dependable products....and it really needs to stop.
SMSGYAN Looks like a really cool application. I'm glad to see some innovation in God's country. However, I have just one recommendation. After reading some of your team bios, it seems that you guys are also enjoying some of the perks that come with success (partying, beautiful women, etc) and this is great, but i've noticed that two of your team members have the same blog theme (the one with the shirtless guy flexing his back muscles). I would suggest changing that theme because you come off as a little gay.
All in all, except for that slight suggestion, keep up the good work and keep innovating!
jgrahamc,
That is some very impressive stuff. Do you know of any good places to start to get into image processing? (specifically the mathematical tricks (DCT's and such))
I didn't know anything about image processing at all until I read her paper. It took my quite a while to get to grips with all the terminology and ideas. I actually went through that paper line by line as I built my code and looked up every term I didn't understand on Wikipedia and then used links from there to understand what it was all about.
One thing that she needs to be commended on is the clarity of that paper. I was able to follow it and implement her algorithm starting from zero knowledge. She then provided me with the actual images that she had used so that I could verify that my implementation worked.
As with anything I'd suggest finding a project that inspires you and the inspiration will be enough motivation to make you learn anything.
Learning the specific feature space of digital images is no big deal. You might explore wavelet transformation and different image formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG2000). Pixel intensity, color, edge detection, high and low pass filtering, connectivity between objects, pattern recognition... there are a lot of topics.
And then there are disciplines built on top of image processing, like face detection, watermarking, image retrieval/search, editing/transformation (think Photoshop)... and of course video is another can of worms, adding time-series data.
There are strong connections between higher-level image processing and statistical AI and data mining, so you might consider exploring those topics too.
I recommend the book "Two-Dimensional Imaging" by Ronald N. Bracewell. I've looked at many signal and image processing books, and I prefer this one by far. Almost all others seem to either shy away from math to the point of absurdity or revel in it to the point of forgetting the practical aspects.
Image processing is one of those fields where there is an incredible amount of stuff online, but it is so fragmented, its almost useless to someone who isn't already an expert. A good book builds a consistent set of notation and terminology so that (once you've gotten used to it) you can understand the links and connections between different topics.
If anybody from the Live Labs team that's been re-assigned doesn't want to go back to working on shitty products...i could use some of that brilliance.
brandon (at) qds-systems.com