Almost anything involving computers falls over once in a while, but it’s how you handle it that makes all the difference.
I spotted this in Newcastle airport the other day. I see a crappy broken Windows system almost every time I travel. I imagine travellers going through Heathrow’s Terminal 5 saw quite a few too.
Now, not only could someone have done a better job of handling the error on the application coding side, it’s also such shitty branding for Microsoft. Every time I see one of these I think: “Microsoft products can’t run enterprise systems without falling over – I wouldn’t let them near any project of mine.”
(Sorry about the crappy picture – I wasn’t too sure about taking photos in the airport. You know, just in case I got shot by the British Police or something).
Nice to see Microsoft doing something truly groundbreaking, or at least acquiring something truly groundbreaking. The above demo of Photosynth and Seadragon by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (now that’s a name) is remarkable for both it’s smart computation and sewing together of images to create a navigable space, that is relatively resolution independent (in terms of processing speed at least) but also for its potential interface ramifications. I’m starting to see how something like that connected to Surface would be pretty nice to have around. Remarkably there is a demo available to try (for those of you with XP SP2 and Vista).
But it’s also a great example of how tiny contributions to the group pool add up to far more than the sum of the parts. As Blaise says, once someone tags your images with extra metadata, they become instantly more rich and useful. Words are relatively useless here, take a look at the video above or the video on the Live Labs site.
