[ lofo’s weblog ]

The first web based email I ever used was Hotmail. I used it exclusively for years until a tech savvy friend of mine sent me an invitation to create a Gmail account. I had reached my 2 MB limit with Hotmail at the time and was tired of trying to manage my inbox so I created the account and started trying it out. I became so enamored with the amount of free storage, fast interface, and ease of using Gmail that I eventually switched completely. Though at first I was switching back and forth between the two accounts trying to keep them both going but eventually my Hotmail account expired.

Recently I reactivated my old Hotmail account and because I found that some people were still trying email me through it. To make things simpler for myself I wanted to set my Hotmail to forward messages over to my Gmail account so I wouldn’t miss out on those people who inadvertently continue to use my old Hotmail address.

So, I fumbled around for about 10 minutes until I finally found the forwarding option under the “more options” link under the “options” button. Yet another reason I don’t use Hotmail anymore. Anyhow, I forge ahead and plug in my trusty Gmail address as the forwarding address and hit the save button upon which I am greeted by the following message;

“You’re only able to forward mail to a custom domain or an e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, or live.com. Please try again.” (Click here to see for yourself)

“Are you kidding me?”, I gaffed aloud at the screen.

This must really show that Bill Gates knows his new Windows Live™ Hotmail is worthless. I thought, “Well lets see if Gmail will allow me to forward emails to Hotmail.” I sign in, go to forwarding, plug it the Hotmail address and hit save… No problem! I know Google and Microsoft are at odds with one another but this is definitely a telltale litmus test that shows whose really afraid of who.

I guess I could short circuit the anti-Gmail feature by forwarding my Hotmail to a custom domain and then forwarding it from there to my Gmail account but this begs the question, “Why is Hotmail making my life harder while Gmail is making my life easier?” Could it be that Bill is feeling threatened by Gmail?
What do you think?

A friend of mine recently emailed me a link to the youtube video below with “‘Windows Vista Paint - ‘The Photoshop Killer’” in the subject line.

I was honestly very intrigued and thought “Could Microsoft have really improved Paint that much!?”. Well, you’ll have to watch the video to see for yourself.

[youtube v/Hxx2KcPWWZg]

Later that same day I received an RSS feed from Guardian Unlimited about a new technology two Israeli computer scientists developed that pretty much puts Microsoft Paint to shame and could very well be the real “Photoshop Killer”. The following video displays this technology that Dr. Shai Avidan and Dr. Ariel Shamir have written about in their research paper entitled Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing.

[youtube v/qadw0BRKeMk]

Now that you’ve been fascinated beyond all belief that something like this even exists, why not try it for yourself? TechCrunch has reported of an online working demo created by Patrick Swieskowski in which you can try resizing your own images using the very same Seam Carving technology as shown in the video above.

It seems that this new way of editing images is already causing quite a debate regarding the authenticity of images seen by viewers online in places such as news reporting sites. The majority of images used online today are edited in some fashion. Crop here, remove the red-eye there, change the contrast of the whole image, and so on. However, will this technology go too far in infringing on the truthfulness of the images we see reported to us online? Where do you think the line will be carved for the use of this incredibly unique new technology?