Edit: After announcements of policies regarding the publication of Metro-style apps that use the new WinRT API, some of the things originally written in this article no longer apply as it is clear Microsoft is looking at Windows 8 in a different light. Edits are added in italic.

I have heard multiple times now, especially from Mac users, that a hurdle Windows 8 will have to overcome is getting rid of its classic interface and legacy software. Apparently that is a problem in Windows 8.

My take is different. I believe the classic UI and legacy support is core to the success and brilliance of Windows 8. That Microsoft is ameliorating Explorer and the Task Manager is not bad news. It’s simply brilliant.

According to Steve Jobs’s own words, the current PCs are trucks, and it’s time to create compact cars for the majority of the population. If the PC is a truck, then the iPad is a compact car, and Windows 8 is a crossover SUV, although is it clear from the looks of it that this is clearly not what Microsoft intends. Rather, I think Microsoft is looking to make a variety of cars with Windows 8, rather than just a compact car, but certainly not trucks, SUVs or even crossover SUVs.

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With smartphones and tablets taking the computing industry by storm, the talk of operating system war has never been so hot. Like in the early 90s, we’re again seeing a plethora of platforms trying to grab the crown, from burgeoning new comers to aging oldies, in a ruthless fight.

A lot of talk goes into the merits of the individual platforms, but at the end of the day, it’s a fight of ecosystems. The platform’s success is not directly dependent on its merits, such as its ease of use or features, but moreover on the ecosystem of software and hardware that supports it.

For example, it’s difficult to explain the success of Windows by simply outlining its features. After all, when Windows first became popular, it was in a lot of ways inferior to competitors. Yet, it managed to grab market share and leave behind everyone else, mainly because it supported a larger ecosystem than its competitors. There are many reasons this happened, but in general the ecosystem factor is largely a domino effect. If you’re in the right place at the right time with the right combination of factors, you’ll create a domino effect that’ll push every other platform in obsolescence in a very short amount of time, regardless of external factors.

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In an effort to enhance the knowledge of the video-making community, I have compiled a list of all true 16:9 video resolutions, including their associated standard when applicable, as well as when the resolution is dividable by 8, which is useful for limited video encoders. The table goes up to 1080p and includes the common resolution for 27 inch 16:9 computer monitors and Super Hi-Vision.

If you’ve ever worked with SD content, you’ll notice that no resolution in here fits the DVD standard. That’s because DVDs were originally made to comply with the NTSC broadcasting resolution, which is a non-square pixel standard using the resolution of 720 by 480 pixels, stretched to accommodate either 4:3 or 16:9 content, never producing a true 16:9 resolution.

Interesting Mathematical Observations

While every simultaneous multiple of 16 by 9 generates a true 16:9 resolution, those dividable by 8 are only generated every simultaneous jump of 128 by 72 pixels, which is the lowest true 16:9 resolution to be dividable by 8.

* Stats from StatCounter
* Some numbers are rounded for purposes of clarity

Looking at Web browser usage statistics over a year gives very interesting insight on what the landscape of the Web may be in a few more years.

For example, the following statistics can be observed:

Over a period of one year, Internet Explorer has been losing an average of 0.755% market share per month, to end at 45.44% market share in February 2011. If the trend continues, by 2014, Internet Explorer market share should have dropped to only 18%. Continue reading →

Note: As mentioned by Alex in a comment, the code used in these examples is far from being efficient, which means the benchmark in question is more or less useless. In fact, it’s very difficult to properly benchmark two technologies that are fundamentally different. The only real usefulness is that of a comparison between browsers themselves, for HTML5 only. In any cases, all indicators point towards Adobe actively developing HTML5 technologies to take over Flash, so I think the point of comparing performance between the two is now pretty moot considering where the industry is heading in general.

Back in March of 2010, you might have been reading The Man in Blue’s post on Flash vs HTML5 performance with quite a bit of disappointments, with news that even Flash 10.0, the current release at the time, was as much as twice as fast as HTML5′s latest.

Read-on to see if this is still the case

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Today, I’ve been unzipping the contents of over 90 GB of data from one hard drive to the same drive. Unfortunately, I’ve seen time and again huge bottlenecks happen whenever large quantities of data are being dealt with.

In fact, if you don’t know the details of how an operating system works, you’ll be more than surprised to see your computer grind to a halt when moving a large file. This especially happens when extracting resources from a zip file, typically when doing so from one drive to that same drive, since both input and output are intensively used on the same disk.

I’m not a user of Linux or FreeBSD, the later of which I heard had better management abilities regarding file handling, especially given its main use as a high availability enterprise server OS, so I cannot tell you how the situation is over there, but I can tell you that on Windows 7 and OS X Snow Leopard, the latest as of this writing, the situation is pretty bleak.

Because using so much I/O leaves little for most operations requiring data from the hard drive, which ends up being practically anything you do, the system generally stalls as a whole. It’s still usable, but you have to factor in the uber slow load speeds caused by a saturated hard drive I/O.

However, I was thinking that this is kind of weird. Shouldn’t an OS be intelligent enough to balance the use of the file transfer’s I/O and that of loading applications so that you can continue working while transferring or extracting data. It’s amazing to me that it’s almost as if there was no SMP on the system. Yes, my computers used to stall when they only had one processor and when software was not well optimized to do SMP (multi-processor stuff), but I’m still stunned by how dumb Windows and Mac are in regards to hard drive I/O (input/ouput of file data).

In any cases, this is what I learned:

1. A surprising amount of apps and processes rely excessively on hard drive instead of caching data in the large amounts of RAM
2. Windows’ memory management for applications that have already been opened isn’t very good; e.g. Google Chromes takes a lot of time to re-open when I/O is saturated, while it is not as bad on Mac OS X
3. The hard drive is a major performance bottleneck
4. Modern desktop OS have few capabilities in regards to the management of I/O; they’re horribly inefficient
5. Current HDDs are slow, really slow

If I have the chance, I will be testing this out on other operating systems, notably Ubuntu, Fedora and FreeBSD.

Today, one might think that computing, all of which relates to our computers and our use of them, has become stagnant. Some users are even, to this day, still using Windows XP, an operating system almost 10 years old, which is an excruciatingly long time for such a young and effervescent industry.

However, in reality, unbeknownst to a large population of users, computing is now changing faster than ever, and operating systems known to be as polished as their peripherals can be are now fading quickly into obliviousness. In order to more clearly understand what is happening, I urge you to read the following as a quick guide to the future of computing.

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There’s been a surprising amount of changes in the landscape of Web browsers under a year during 2010.

Back in December 2009, more than 55% were still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, while about 32% were using Mozilla Firefox. The nascent Google Chrome had just passed Safari at a little more than 5% while the later was at more than 3%. In the meantime, Opera stuck around 2% market share.

Also back in December 2009, Internet Explorer 7 was still more popular than version 8. Version 6 still had 14% market share and most Chrome users were now up to Chrome 4.

In December 2010 however, only 6% of IE users are still at version 6, while version 8 has since then become by far the most popular, and the most popular browser as well, at a little under 30% usage.

Also in December 2010, Chrome is now at version 8, and at a staggering almost 15% market share, triple its share in one year. Internet Explorer is down to about 47%, certainly not a great outcome for Microsoft, Firefox has seen little change is at about 31%, and there doesn’t seem to be any tendency for it to decline radically, nor is there any tendency for Firefox to jump in market share. Safari has almost reached 5%, showing the adoption of Mac OS by more and more users, while Opera is still stuck at 2%, probably its same niche market as last year.

To any company wishing to win me over to their phone, as well as many other Android smartphone users, sell a phone that is as vanilla as possible with a guarantee to update its Android OS for at least 3 years (anyone buys a new phone after that typically).

Oh wait, isn’t LG doing that already. I’m guessing this Tegra 2 equipped LG Optimus 2X (aka the LG Star) will be my next phone.

Seriously, updatability should be a feature.

In recent tech news, you might have been hearing more and more about these walled gardens of software.

They sound mystic and evil. The term “walled” evokes restriction and limiting of liberties. Nothing good in particular.

For a world where freedom is as expanding as ever, why would you want to go back to a world with less liberties?

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