Gates still has a long to-do list
For years, the Microsoft chairman has been a fiery advocate, inside the company and out, for the notion that computers should be controlled, not just by mouse and keyboard, but also by more natural means, such as voice, touch and digital ink.
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19.10.2007 After 5 long years Vista RTM's Now what?
After 5 long years Vista RTM's Now what?
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9.11.2006 Microsoft-Novell: What a long, strange year its been
In whats been a controversial (to say the least) partnership, the Microsoft-Novell technology partnership and patent-protection arrangement has reached its one-year anniversary.
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8.11.2007 How long will Microsoft support XP and Vista?
In the Talkback section to another post, a reader asks a question about when Microsoft plans to drop support for Windows Vista. I hear variations on this one all the time, so I figured its worth covering here.
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22.9.2008 Forget Vista. Long live Longhorn client!
Should old, abandonned operating systems just fade away? Or is there some way to breathe new life into them without running afoul of the copyright police?
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27.10.2006 Microsoft's MSN Search restored after hours-long outage
Microsoft Corp.'s MSN search engine stopped working for about four hours Thursday.
Microsoft spokesman Justin Osmer said in an e-mail that the company was still trying to determine what went wrong.
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7.4.2006 DreamScene RTM dated July 19, Microsoft: what took so long?
As reported by a bunch of shops, Duke Nukem Forever Dreamscene was finally delivered to consumers who shelled out mega bucks for the ultimate operating system offered by Microsoft.
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26.9.2007Can Dell Make Money Selling
AMD PCs?
PERSPECTIVE With
yesterday's rollout of the
long-awaited AMD-based
Dimension E521 desktop line,
Dell may very well have made
available one of the
best-performing value-class
systems under $1,000. But
with the company facing a
number of hurdles, how long
can it afford to keep margins
so low?..
betanews.com -
13.09.2006Symantec buys AppStream, but what took so long?
Yesterday, Symantec announced its acquisition of application streaming specialist AppStream, one full year after buying AppStream's long-time
partner, application virtualization vendor Altiris. So what kept AppStream waiting?..
betanews.com -
11.04.2008Cablevision rolls out muni Wi-Fi in Long Island, NY
New York triple-play telecommunications provider Cablevision announced that it has completed the initial phase of its municipal Wi-Fi coverage for the
Nassau and Suffolk county areas in Long Island...
betanews.com -
05.09.2008Windows 7: Measuring the "superbar"
One of the new things that anyone would notice immediately in Windows 7 is the new Taskbar. Microsoft internally calls it 'Superbar'. The
Windows Taskbar has come a long way since Windows 95 was released. With the help of the Taskbar, it becomes easier to see what are the programs
currently running, switching between applications and also to access your favorites using the Quick Launch. Image Courtesy: Windows 7 Blog For
many, Windows 7's Superbar looks bigger than the Windows Vista's Taskbar. Long Zheng has taken steps to prove that, after all the Superbar is
not that big. Long has found that the Windows Start button is actually shrunk by about 8 pixels.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
05.01.2009Star Wars MMORPG announced, future console version eyed
BioWare and LucasArts today officially announced the long-rumored story-based MMORPG for PC called Star Wars: The Old Republic . It was not long
before an EA exec began talk of creating a console version...
betanews.com -
23.10.2008XQuery Database Language for XML Achieves 1.0 Status
After its inception among
members of the World-Wide Web
Consortium as early as
September 1999, their proposed
crown jewel of the XML toolkit
had been scheduled for formal
adoption five years ago. Now,
at long last, the W3C has
formally adopted version 1.0
of XQuery, an XML-oriented
query language that, a very
long time ago now, seemed
poised to change the history
of Web applications...
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24.01.2007AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking
Nielsen/NetRatings plans to
drop its old methods of
counting pageviews to gauge
Web site popularity, instead
opting for a system where it
would measure how long a user
stays on a site.
With
the changing scope of Web
content, the old methods are
quickly becoming less
relevant. More important to
advertisers and investors may
be how long a user spends on a
site, Nielsen seems to
believe.
Technologies
like AJAX and other dynamic
page generation techniques
lessen the need for a page to
be refreshed, thus decreasing
the number of recorded
pageviews. Multimedia also
carries the same effect.
Nielsen/NetRatings will
begin reporting total sessions
and total time spent on a site
in order to figure out site
popularity. From this, an
advertiser could see how long
a site is able to hold onto
its users...
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10.07.2007Some Blu-ray BD+ Equipped Discs Now Duplicable, But For How Long?
A mere five months after the initial specification for the long-awaited BD+ copy protection system for Blu-ray Disc was formally released, the
manufacturers of the media disc backup utility AnyDVD HD released a beta that has apparently been proven capable of copying BDs equipped with BD+
protection...
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09.11.2007Pre release, Pre review and preview roundup
In case you've been living under a rock for the last few months, one of the most anticipated phone launches of the year is happening this
Saturday. On June 6, the Palm Pre will be available, exclusively on the Sprint network in the United States. It'll cost $199.99 with a
two-year agreement. The Pre has been a long, long, long time coming for Palm. The current Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was first released in
1996 and while it has been upgraded and modified over the years, it has been left in the dust by the likes of the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and even
Windows Mobile operating systems.
Read
full story.....
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04.06.2009Jajah provides shortcut numbers for long-distance calls
Internet telephony service provider Jajah introduced a service Monday that bypasses some operators' high long-distance and international charges by
providing subscribers with a unique local number for each of their contacts that they can dial from fixed-line or mobile phones.
Jajah will also extend some of the "free" calls plans it offers users of its PC-based VOIP service to subscribers of the new service, a
spokesman for the company said Monday.
However, the so-called free calls will only be free to customers who are not charged by
their regular telephone provider for carrying local calls. While that may be the case in the U.S., European telephone subscribers pay for most of
their local calls from fixed lines -- while calls from mobiles are typically charged at the same rate whether the call is local or long distance.
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19.11.2007MacBook Air Battery Issues Frustrate Users
It seems new MacBook Air owners, myself included, are experiencing strange behavior with the battery in the new MBA.
While the expected
usage of 3 - 5 hours is holding true, the time to charge the battery can be as long a 9 hours in some cases. While the cause of this strangely long
charge time is for the moment unknown, it is the apparent randomness in the time taken to charge the battery that seems to be causing the most
confusion.
For example, running the MBA down to within a few % of 0 and plugging in the charger one can get an estimated time to charge
from anywhere between 3.5 - 9 hours. There seems no apparent cause for these extra long times, but given that the next charge takes only about 1/2 the
time of the last, one can only suspect that not all is well in the MBA world.
Read full story.....
neowin.net -
11.02.2008The double-decker Windows taskbar
Long Zheng: To the untrained eye,
Ammunitions Longhorn PC concepts last week might look nothing more than standard industrial design renders. But if you stared at
it long enough as I did, youd notice the Windows Longhorn screenshot on the monitor shows a taskbar is nothing like anything youve seen before. Since
theres no official name for it, Ive dubbed it the double-decker taskbar.
Ive finally been able to track down the screenshot in
its original form...
winbeta.org -
05.12.2007Microsoft's 'big bang'
could be its last
When Microsoft
releases its SQL Server 2005
database on Nov. 7, it will
have been five years since the
last version debuted. If
Windows Vista arrives as
scheduled next fall, it too
will follow its predecessor by
five
years.
Tha
t's a pretty long time to
make customers wait for a new
release. Too long, concedes
Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer.
"We just
can't make our customers wait
three or four years for the
things which should have been
on more interim cycles," he
said at last week's Gartner
Symposium/IT Expo in
Orlando.
Although
many Microsoft products have
grown long in the tooth, the
company is headed into a cycle
that will see a flurry of big
releases over the next year
and a half. In addition to the
new SQL Server, Microsoft is
launching a revamp of its
Visual Studio developer tools
on Nov. 7. Next year will
bring new major releases for
both of Microsoft's core
franchises: Office and
Windows...
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28.10.2005Long-life Flash memory offers 100 million rewrites
Japanese scientists have developed a new form of Flash memory that could alleviate all our fears about just how long our Flash memory will last. These
new memory chips, called ferroelectric Nand Flash (FNF), can be written up to 100 million times, compared to todays Flash memory that is thought to be
limited to around 500,000 rewrites.
FNF has additional benefits as well. Current Flash memory is only now being produced at 30
nanometres, but FNF will work at 10 nanometres. It also uses significantly less power with todays Flash memory requiring 20 volts for rewriting, FNF
needs just 6 volts.
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15.07.2008Microsoft building new UI framework
Long Zheng: Not too long ago Microsoft described
Windows Presentation Foundation as the UI
platform for the next 20 years. Surprisingly work is beginning on an even newer Windows UI framework. My Windows Vista clock must be running slow.
Bearing in mind the arsenal of Windows UI frameworks that exists today - Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight, Windows
Forms, Win32, Media Center Markup Language, Microsoft Foundation Classes and more from third parties; Microsoft has decided to build yet another one
to enable new UI experiences in future versions of Windows. Here is the job advertisement...
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11.01.2008Yahoo Messenger for Vista finally launches
Long Zheng: Better late than never is overstated, what took so long?
A preview version of exclusive
Yahoo Messenger for Windows Vista is finally available today after almost 12 months of radio
silence. This application was
announced all the way back in January at CES 2007.
During the same amount of time, Microsoft has delivered five versions (3 beta, 2 final) of Windows Live Messenger.
However above
all, the new Yahoo Messenger is possibly the first real mainstream application to take advantage of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and a number
of Vista APIs for which I salute them for adopting new technology.
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06.12.2007Vista: Whats the hurry?
winbeta.org -
01.12.2007Microsoft sees long-life potential for Xbox 360
Microsoft Corp sees potential for its Xbox 360 video game console to stay on the market longer than the five-year lifespan that is typical for gaming
hardware, an executive said on Tuesday.
Asked about long-term prospects for the game industry, Mindy Mount, chief financial
officer for Microsoft's entertainment division that includes the Xbox, pointed to Sony Corp's PlayStation 2, which is still going strong after 7
years on the market.
"Look at the PS2; they've gone long-time and seem to have pretty good legs on what they are doing," Mount
told a BMO Capital Markets conference on interactive entertainment.
"If we were able to do that, as CFO I think that's great,
because every year you draw it out you increase profitability," Mount said.
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07.11.2007Windows 7 'HomeGroup': rebirth of Longhorn 'Castle'?
Long Zheng: Half a decade after its initial conception, Windows Codename Longhorn still proves to be a great source of ideas. One of which known as
Castle, appears to have been revived to be a
feature of Windows 7 as HomeGroup.
We know what
Workgroups are - Microsofts implementation of a
peer-to-peer computer network for Windows to share files, printers and other resources. So what are HomeGroups?
That mystery
didnt last very long as someone was kind enough to point me to some well-aged reading material which described exactly what Castle was, and the same
person claims what HomeGroups are about to become.
winbeta.org -
14.02.2008Lo and behold, the Internet Explorer 8 toolbar
Long Zheng: First, a few words about the following screenshot. To be perfectly clear, this is not an original image. The window and its contents
(address bar, tab, window title, page content) have been heavily recomposited to better fit in a smaller image size as well as to obscure any traces
where this might have come from. I did not take the screenshot nor do I have access to the beta (so no emails please but do send bribes regardless).
Having said that, I can easily vouch for its authenticity...
winbeta.org -
02.03.2008
