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In yet another Building Windows 8 blog entry by Steven Sinofsky, there is a demonstration of Microsoft’s upcoming operating system’s fast boot time. In the demonstration, Windows 8 boots up in less than 2 seconds. Pretty amazing.

Microsoft focused on three key goals for improving the boot time. First, there has to be effectively zero watt power used when off, there needs to be a fresh session after boot, and there needs to be very fast times between pressing the power button and being able to use the PC. Microsoft’s solution? A new “fast startup mode which is a hybrid of traditional cold boot and resuming from hibernate.”

“Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested),” Sinofsky states.

So this means Windows 8 will boot faster thanks to the less work done by resuming from a hibernated system session compared to a full system session. “We added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well,” Sinofsky mentions.

Below is the video demo.

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There has been rumblings throughout the online video world have been that Hulu is on the market and there have been many suitors from Amazon, Yahoo, and even the dish network. Well now it looks like Google is stepping in on this and making a play for Hulu. There is no confirmed bids yet and this could be either rumor or conjecture at this point. However the bids have been reported to be between $1.5 billion and $2 billion for Hulu. Google seems to want something much more than that, and is willing to pay much more to get it. If you want to speculate, you could imagine Google asking for access to more content, for a longer period of time, and perhaps offering up a couple billion dollars more.
Since that’s not what Hulu’s owners have put on the table, “normally we would have thrown people out if they’d said that,” says an executive familiar with the sales process. But Google “indicated that there’s enough money” involved so that Hulu’s owners are at least thinking about continuing the discussion.
One big problem with the Google proposal: Hulu was created in large part as the TV networks’ response to YouTube, and their fear that Google would swallow up the Web video ecosystem.
So could Hulu back off from Google to stop him from controlling the market or could we be looking at something were Google will get what it wants and take a strangle hold on the video web market. Only time will truly tell on this one.

So the phone market have been pretty miserable for Microsoft. 6% is where Microsoft is and let me tell you it looks like it is getting smaller. So what could Microsoft do to get people interested in this? Well they could be putting Windows 8 into their phones in the coming future. There are some clues that this is exactly what Microsoft is planning to do. When I first saw the preview videos of Windows 8, with its touch and tile-based interface, people thought immediately of Windows Phone, which has a very similar looking interface. Instead of app icons, both use tiles which can display data and images from the underlying apps without opening them. The tiles themselves become a dashboard displaying the real-time data behind every app. This could be a step in the right direction for Microsoft. The fact that they are late to the party is a bad thing but could of been a great thing. They could really make sure they had top tier product by learning from the mistakes of Android and iPhone but yet they seem to sticking to the bottom, so they weren’t able to leverage anything. Maybe this Windows 8 speculation will give their phones more buzz and a change to get a bigger share of the market.

First off I would like to say happy labor day to all my readers out there and of course I hope it is a happy and safe one, but I have hearing working over a hot keyboard to give you the tech information you need or perhaps want to be well informed going into the day. Maybe even talk about this at the grill today as your friends and family come over for a barbeque. Today I am talking about what everyone has been buzzing about and that is the iPhone 5 and the iCloud. The sources I have read is that the Apple store have begun it’s training on the iOS5 and the iCloud. This training is mainly done when a new phone is being released, which we all know that the iPhone 5 is being launched either this month or the start of October. Of course with that launch they will also be debuting the iCloud which right now is still under developer beta testing. It would seem that the iCloud and the iPhone 5 could go hand and hand with each at launch. If both launch in October, it will give the testers and the Apple stores ample time to be Geniuses at all of these products. For those who don’t know, the Apple store calls their employees Geniuses. Well that is it for now boys and girls, once again enjoy the holiday and we will chat tomorrow!

Through my travels online I always try to find the cool and great products coming out for consumers. The Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet A1 is a 7-inch Android unit and from what I have read it will be carrying the Gingerbread OS from Android.

Now there are plenty of poor excuses Android tablets out there, but most have weak construction and many are locked out of the Android Market — meaning no Gmail app, no Maps, and none of the other built-in Google goodies. That’s not the case with the A1, which is running Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a single-core Cortex A8 processor. It has front- and rear-facing cameras (the back one rated at three megapixels) and a 7-inch, 1,024 x 600 display. Not too shabby if you ask me.
For $199 you’ll get 8GB of storage, but a 16GB model will go for $249, 32GB for $299. Only the 16GB and 32GB models will be shipped to the US, which is a bit of a shame, as with both microSD and SD expansion it’ll be fairly easy to add more. Connectivity is limited to WiFi, but there is a GPS in there, so it could make for a passable navigation device. Don’t forget this is a Lenovo product so even though it is cheap you would have to believe it is quailty.

The Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, said recently that Google purchase of Motorala for $12.5 billion dollars wasn’t solely for the claim to patents that Motorala had but all to acquire the products they make as well. This no doubt is aimed at their biggest competition Apple who if you didn’t know already makes this device called the iPhone. I don’t know maybe you have heard of it. Though with this acquisition they now have over 17,000 patents that can help protect the Android OS. Although the one thing people are still not talking about mainstream at least is what this purchase could do for GoogleTV. I mean motorola does make up about 80% of the Cable/DVR box market these days, wonder if that was extra motivation. Just saying!

Netflix offered Starz more than $300 million per year to renew their agreement, but the pay cable channel was insistent on so-called tiered pricing, according to people close to the negotiations but not authorized to speak on the record. Tiered pricing would require Netflix subscribers who want movies and television shows from Starz and other premium providers to pay more than the standard $8 per month.

The 300 million dollar price tag that Netflix offered just doesn’t seem good enough for Starz, but what I think Starz has to understand that people who have Netflix most likely have a cable provider for their content. I am one of those people. I have Verizon for my provider and I also pay for Starz so I can watch the content I want faster than waiting on Netflix to see it. So should I be paying double for Starz if I can stream it on Netflix and watch it on my cable box? Does Starz think of people like me? There is tons of content on Netflix to watch outside of what Starz brings to the table. I think Netflix should bring up arguments such as this and with the price Netflix is willing to pay I say Starz needs to get their act together and take the money before more people get mad. Let us not forget the amount of money Netflix lost by people leaving because of their pricing break up of streaming and DVD to home subscriptions. Do they want to lose more by a price hike on a single service? Let’s hope Netflix sticks to their guns.

From sources that I have read it looks like the prototype for the new iPhone was lost by an Apple employee in a bar. It seems that this isn’t the first time a prototype has been lost.
Last year, an iPhone 4 prototype was bought by a gadget blog that paid $5,000 in cash. This year’s lost phone seems to have taken a more mundane path: it was taken from a Mexican restaurant and bar and may have been sold on Craigslist for $200. Still unclear are details about the device, what version of the iOS operating system it was running, and what it looks like.

About a day or two after the phone was lost at San Francisco’s Cava 22, which describes itself as a “tequila lounge” that also serves lime-marinated shrimp ceviche, Apple representatives contacted San Francisco police, saying the device was priceless and the company was desperate to secure its safe return, the source said.
Cava22, in San Francisco’s Mission District, where another unreleased iPhone apparently went missing last month.
Apple electronically traced the phone to a two-floor, single-family home in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, according to the source.
When San Francisco police and Apple’s investigators visited the house, they spoke with a man in his twenties who acknowledged being at Cava 22 on the night the device went missing. But he denied knowing anything about the phone. The man gave police permission to search the house, and they found nothing, the source said. Before leaving the house, the Apple employees offered the man money for the phone no questions asked, the source said, adding that the man continued to deny he had knowledge of the phone
So the moral of the story here is don’t drink and bring iPhone prototypes out to a bar. Most likely you will lose it and then you will be in deep problems. Who knows what this Apple employee will have to deal with after losing something so valuable as something the Apple corp has deemed priceless.