Gates without Microsoft

Yesterday was Bill Gates’ last day at Microsoft as a full time employee. A lot has been said and is being said all over the world about Gates, Microsoft, the impact the two have had on the world over the last 30 years and what lies ahead for both over the next few years. A couple of those that I really found interesting were this article on BBC featuring the original Microsoft employees, who got together to recreate that famous photogaph, and this one on CNN featuring some rare photos from Microsoft archives, accompanied with a commentary by Gates himself. And, of course, there is a whole lot of stuff over at Engadget, who declared June 27 to be the Bill Gates Day.

Will Microsoft survive without Gates? And Gates without Microsoft? If Microsoft is not doing too well a few years from now, will he be tempted to jump back in and take control? It’s certainly happened before.. Steve Jobs and Michael Dell are two names that come to mind, there are probably others that I’m forgetting. Of course, only time can tell..

Great Expectations

Sunday evening and not much to do, so I decided to play some games over at Live Search Club and managed to accumulate enough points for a nice little pair of Zune premium headphones. I’ve heard quite a bit about them, both positive and negative, and thought it will be nice to check them out! (that and the fact that the rest of prizes are totally useless for me) All my excitement vanished, however, when I got the confirmation email..

Please note, in most cases prizes will be delivered 6-8 weeks from the date your order is processed, unless your prize is in limited quantities or backordered

6 weeks?? wow! I guess the shipping department needs some serious looking into.. or someone has taken the Scotty Principle to heart. Ah well.

Wacky Races!

Even before the start of the race, the commentators called it the ultimate Wacky Races, and they were absolutely spot on! If there was ever a list of the best ways to crash out of a race, Lewis Hamilton will be the undisputed leader! The incident is supposedly under investigation, it was clearly Hamilton’s mistake and it’ll be interesting to see if he incurs any sort of a penalty.

Once that piece of drama was done and over with, it was clearly BMW’s day. A lot of history being made, with BMW’s first victory as a constructor, first victory also for Peter Sauber who remains on the team as an advisor, first victory for Robert Kubica and first victory by a Pole. Also I think it’s only the second time a team has managed a 1-2 with their first victory. Jordan did that back in 1998 Belgian GP with Damon Hill and Ralf Schumacher.

To say that Kubica won because of the incident after the first pit stop would be a little unfair, especially after those consecutive flying laps he did to open up the gap from Heidfeld. In the post-race interview he said it was like doing 7 qualifying laps one after the other. In the end that proved crucial as he came out of his second pit stop in the lead. One year after his horrific crash on the same track, this is surely a victory he’ll never forget.

A Revolution is coming!

Civilization Revolution, I mean Just got done playing through the demo, it’s not that long but it’s full of promise!! Not like I expected anything less from Sid Meier!

All in all the game looks more-or-less like Civ 4, with the interface and controls optimized for the console. I must say I was impressed by how they managed to squeeze in all that functionality into the limited number of buttons available.. I am a bit skeptical of the online multi-player part, though, especially over XBox Live. I can understand local multi-player.. I still remember playing it in our labs during those good old college days, shouting at people when they attacked me, laughing maniacally when I took their cities. Fun times! I think it’s time for a second game..

Btw, is it just me or does Catherine The Great look a bit like Cameron Diaz’s long lost cousin?

Live.com is not that obscure after all!

Just happened to quite randomly land up on the Mozilla Add-ons page, and scrolling down the list past the obvious first few entries, I got quite a start when I noticed this at number 5!

One of the biggest criticisms leveled against Live.com has been the simple fact that nobody seems to even know what it is! 6K weekly downloads! Maybe there is still hope..

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On the topic of search add-ons, I find the top few in the list quite interesting. Of course, Google and Yahoo are missing from there because they come installed by default, but that’s a separate issue..

2 out of the top 3, IMDB and M-W have a couple of things in common.. Both are extremely useful websites, chock full of information, and both of them are completely and positively unusable. I think M-W may have cleaned up a little recently, at least I don’t see the gazillion popups anymore, but the ads..! And as for IMDB, gods forbid if you have to visit that website on the weekend of a big movie release! No wonder they make such great add-ons!

So you think you can drive an F1 car?

This is a picture of the steering wheel of Ferrari’s 2007 F1 car. Clearly they’re not big on usability studies! But Ferrari is not alone, apparently all the teams have such complicated steering wheels, thanks to the limited space available. Maybe they’re right when they say F1 is not so much about driving anymore.. Maybe they should start hiring engineers instead (wink wink .

More here.