Early on June 30, I woke up in the morning and drearily got to dress. The coordinator who I talked with told that we have to dress in full suite. Anyway, that wasn't a big deal, but going there on public transport isn't the easiest thing to do considering all the people that are staring at you. Anyway, the seminar was held at the Naval Convention Hall which was the site of the APEC meeting a few years back. By rumor, it was told to be one of the most beautiful conventional halls we have in the country, though somewhat underused. My route there was to get a short bus transit to the SkyTrain and then travel on to Saphan Taksin Station before boarding a boat there. Anyway, as Microsoft being as they are, they have catered boats to transit people from the Saphan Taksin station to the convention hall.
On my first experience on reaching the Naval Convention Hall, it is indeed a spacious and enticing architecture just as I saw on TV, and conveniently located on the banks of the Chao Phraya river. For today, there were many posters there were placed around the hall to show what was in store for later.
After registering at the counter, we were given a batch and a mousepad which was enclosed in the "Thailand Digital Imagine" case that you see below.
With our batches we were allowed to get a free lunch boxes which was catered by Le Concorde - Swiss Hotel. There were 4 types of lunch boxes which were Thai/Chinese/Japanese/Farang Food. I took up a Chinese box which contains Mafu Tofu, Fried Vegetables, Chicken, and peas which was pretty good. Microsoft seminars usually don't include free lunch for attendees so this is pretty good by Microsoft standards. Anyway on a side note, the best seminar on my own experience should have been the Nokia seminar which treated all attendees to free lunch at a 5 star hotel ;)
During lunch, I happen to meet a few of my collegues at work and a few other new acquaintances from both government, private, and free-lance people. We decided before the seminar to have a group photograph just for old times sake. If you noticed, I'm the only person wearing the suite (I have to blame the coordinator as it seems that not too many of the attendees were wearing it except VIPs.
On a side note, a startling note about this seminar is the lack of security. Though this seminar is entirely invitation only, it seems that there were no visible security measures other than the organizing staff. It would be easy for a terrorist with a suite to strap dynamite around their waist and enter the seminar without raising a ruckus, and later making a huge panic in the seminar later. I do find that the lack of security measures at time worrisome when there are numerous VIP in the seminar. Talking about VIPs, the first VIP was the minister of ICT, Mr. Suwit Khunkitti, who open the seminar with a keynote speak. During his opening remarks, there were a number of things that were mentioned, which was highly emphasized on Thailand cooperating with with Microsoft to come up with the Thialand.NET project in which he stressed that our PM Thaksin was interested in making Thailand completely e-government and wanted increased cooperation with Microsoft to see the matter out - in which he also stated that Microsoft has donated a sizable amount of money to help develop IT infrastructures in Thailand. When I heard that, its kind of strange to know that Nectec was pushing for an open-source solution, and later to hear the Minister of ICT looking towards a Microsoft future.
After his opening remarks, tension was rising as people were waiting for Bill Gates to appear on his speech on The Future of Software and the media and the seminar attendees were highly anticipating his first live appearance in Thailand. After a quick and interesting intro, Bill Gates appeared on stage and promptly started his presentation.
As noticed, his appearance was greeted with a alavanche of press officers.
During Bill Gate's presentation, he was talking numerous topics on what he considers the future of Software. There isn't much of interest, though it seems that he is looking towards PCs of the future to take a more mobile and tablet like with instant access to the Internet. Mobile phones would supplement the mobile PCs. Software also would change dramatically in nature due to physical changes. There isn't too much to note from the speech much more than the speculation of the future. He ended out his talk by previewing about numerous new products that would be launched by Microsoft that included LongHorn, SQL Server 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and how these applications can help develop the digital future.
After concluding his speech and exiting through the side exit, a huge exodus of cameramen, and VIPs in the front left the convention hall leaving the convetion hall ignoring the next few agendas. Anyway though the front third has turned rather vacant, the remaining attendees which were mostly developers and IT personnel were intent on listening to the remaining agendas.
The next agendas were focused mainly on LongHorn (the next generation Windows OS), and the MS Development tools (Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005). Colin Ping (MS General Manager) and Domini Carr (MS Senior Product Manager) continued the presentation on that topic. Though I haven't managed to pick much from the Visual Studio and SQL Server presentation, it seems that there has been several new tools that has been implemented in Visual Studio 2005. A key tool touted was the development of several GUI tools that would help in the software development including visual class diagrams that can autogenerate code and help visualize and seperate coding to different programming teams easier. The development of a successor to the notoriously bad SourceSafe was also mentioned. Deployment tools were also added. It seems that the new tools were pushing this towards huge cooperate development environment. As much of the tools were mostly screenshots, its hard to review if the tools are actually are as effective as they claim it to be - though there were numerous interesting ideas presented.
On an interesting note, the presentation on LongHorn was much more anticipated. It seems that the key underlining idea behind LongHorn is visual presentation and a huge upgrade in GUI and organizational issues. First of all, it seems that LongHorn was designed to utilize the GPU which is vastly underused in most applications. GPU utilization is used widely in games, but hardly in other applications, and they say that MS thinks that it would be good to utilize the GPU to help in rendering the OS elements. A good idea, though I wonder how difficult it would be to program considering the pains the Game Developers have to go through. Anyway, they mentioned that programming in LongHorn would move from an API based into a Service .NET based type of programming model. As on my own experience with .NET, I am not convinced that .NET would be good for system programming, so I'm going to remain partly a skeptic for the time being. The major visual improvement in the system seems to be with the ability of making transparent windows which is readily available in most modern graphical cards. Colin Ping demonstrated alpha windows, which was interesting due to other flavors of Windows lacking it. Though it is interesting, I wonder that feature would actually help you work. Though many people say its a memory hog, on an interesting note, that feature would use the GPU speedups, so that won't be a huge performance hit as the previous versions of windows that does graphical calculations mostly on software means.
The other highly interesting feature should be the file organization in LongHorn. It seems that in LongHorn, in additional to the physical file structure we have (drives/folders/files), MS is advocating meta-files or adding description to files to help organize files in the system. What happens is that in every file that is safed, it is possible to save meta data which is an XML file. Later the user can search and browse files based on their meta information without physical limitation quickly. It seems promising, though I do want to caution that its usefulness is only as good as the person's willingness to update meta data of files.
Searching in Longhorn seems to be easier due to adding Mozilla like search tabs at the address window along with intregrating all of the pages with search options.
The last feature that is nifty and useful in longhorn would be the resizable icons - that can show quite interesting previews of files. They can especially be useful when thumbnails are too small to be meaningful, and a larger preview can easily be made available without having to open the file itself.
All in all it was an interesting presentation, though I would figure there isn't anything seriously new with Longhorn.
The last session of the seminar was then conducted by Eric Feng, the Lead Program Manager of the Microsoft Research Asia Pacific. This last session was the most interesting to me, as it showcases a number of new technology under development from the Beijing lab. Just to make a long matter short, he presented 3 interesting tools/technology.
The first tool he shown was a cartoon maker from photographs. It is possible to get photographs from people, and import it with a wizard to generate carnicles (artistic portraits) which was rather funny.
The second program shown was a program that uses multiple video feed to provide an interactive video file, in which the user can actually change the viewpoint of the video on demand. Though I don't think this technology is interesting considering real 3D rendering could do that easily, well its interesting to see a video in a matrix effect look by just changing the video playback options.
The last program was the most interesting though, and it shows the usage of a tablet like style of computer. What the speaker did was to use printout of powerpoint files on a special live OCR and make notes on the paper. The changes on the note would then be reflected in the computer in the powerpoint in the actual correct position and page number. This allows collaborative work in a futuristic tablet PC setting easier. Also other interesting applications include a live demonstration of how Musicians can collaborate composing music online by writing notes on the same system, and have a quick playback system to review the song. It seems that these research were done in anticipation of what Bill Gates claim the future of software would be and is indeed an interesting visual presentation of the things that might come.
After the last presentation was over, the attendees started exiting the conventional hall. Contrary to most other MS seminars, this seminar lacked free evaluation and beta give-aways of MS software, and it was a darn shame considering that I was looking forward to actually try some of the newer software.
Though I didn't actually learn any new thing in today's seminar, all in all it was a good experience considering that its not often that you would see the World's Richest Person in person ;)
1 comment:
Nice photos, at least I think it's a good trip...go outside, see people and nice atmosphere...lunch looked yummy :O
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