ctrl.altered.mind

The day has finally arrived, and Microsoft is leaving no stone unturned in its quest to market its brand new offering.

Engadget is hosting their own welcome party with a generous heap of pictures in a Vista gallery. One of the screen grabs did catch my eye: look at the window shell in this particular screen capture. It surely indicates that we may have not seen the last of the classic Windows GUI that has been around since Windows 95. So much for interface redesign from the ground up.

Engadget: Vista Gallery

I couldn’t resist. I found a book that is well crafted for its market segment.

Amazon.com: MySpace For Dummies: Ryan Hupfer,Mitch Maxson,Ryan Williams

rs6 sent me this ad a few days ago. I just got around to watching it, and was instantly blown away.

view | Ads of the World

Google recently announced a new contest that should, among other things (like quantify the Sketchup geek quotient across campuses nationwide), generate significant and useful content for use with Google Earth.

The contest requires its participants to map and build a 3D model of their respective college campuses, that would show up in Google Earth, of course.

Google Sketchup is a software tool that lets you build 3D models rapidly, and is remarkably simple to use (without compromising on features and the level of desired complexity). Its ease of integration with Google Earth needs no mention (and yes, Sketchup is also available as a Mac universal binary app).

What caught my eye was the sample picture used on the webpage announcing the contest. It looked strongly familiar. Where have I seen that building.. oh yes, its the Duane Physics building! Google has featured the University of Colorado at Boulder campus. Yippee!
A little more digging shone light on the fact that the CU campus is actually one of the more detailed and well-mapped virtual campuses on Google Earth, and most of its models are displayed in amazing detail in the Sketchup 3D Warehouse.

Build Your Campus in 3D Competition

You’ve got to love the two-tone body styling by ABT, even if you are unfazed by the awesomeness under the hood and the beauty of legendary Quattro handling that are the soul of the new Audi TT-R. This chubby baby packs in 355 horses - enough power to take you nada to 60 in about 5.1 seconds. woop!

 
More pictures on Autoblog

Anyone who says station wagons can’t be fun to drive, is probably correct unless (s)he is talking about an Audi. Check out some (sub)urban A6 Avant quattro drifting action.

Dasher is a free universal binary app for OS X Tiger that lets you run Dashboard as a screensaver. It adds a preference pane that pulls up your widgets after a certain amount of system idle time. If you’d rather have your screensaver display something useful, instead of some really slick OpenGL mathemagical beauties like these.
Dasher by Splasm Software

Trusted Computing is controversial. “Trusted” does not necessarily mean the same as “trustworthy” from a user’s perspective. Rather, “trusted computing” means that the computer can be trusted by its designers and other software writers not to run unauthorized programs. Advocates claim it will make computing devices less prone to malware. Opponents (such as the Free Software Foundation) believe this trust in the underlying companies is undeserved and the technology affords too much power and control in the hands of the designer.

[LAFKON] - A movie about Trusted Computing.

Learn more about Trusted Computing on Wikipedia.