Since I got my work MacBook Pro, I’ve been using my Windows XP laptop less and less. I went three weeks without even opening it, at one point. When I did finally open it again, XP took so long to boot I knew it was reinstall time. A part of my Windows experience for as [...]
Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’
Microsoft U Rank
Posted: 25 October 2008 in UncategorizedTags: computational linguistics, google, information retreival, mahalo, microsoft, u rank, user-driven search, web search, wikia search
Microsoft just announced a research project called U Rank, which aims to do pretty much just that. You rank search results, share with friends, blah blah blah. Basically it’s Mahalo with Microsoft branding plus a few trinkets. And it’s backed by Live Search so you can feel confident the baseline results will be easy to [...]
Worldwide Telescope
Posted: 18 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: astronomy, astronomy software, google sky, hubble, microsoft, open source, stellarium, worldwide telescope
Rumors are brewing that Microsoft is going to announce the release of a new product called Worldwide Telescope later this month. WT should allow users to zoom in on parts of the sky for which data exists. Data will be drawn from a number of ground-based telescopes as well as Hubble. Google Sky does this [...]
Microsoft Yahoo! Live ™
Posted: 1 February 2008 in UncategorizedTags: acquisitions, google, mergers, microsoft, monopolies, research, yahoo
CNN is reporting that Microsoft is making eyes at Yahoo! to the tune of $31 per share, or about $44.6 billion. If such a deal ever materialized, it would definitely make things interesting for Google. Personally I consider both Microsoft Live search and Yahoo to be inferior products to the Google, but two wrongs make [...]
Bill’s Last Keynote
Posted: 8 January 2008 in UncategorizedTags: bill gates, humor, keynote speech, microsoft
I wonder if a campaign like this, executed a few years ago, would have helped endear him more to the public? He actually comes across as somewhat human.
Die, PC Speaker
Posted: 13 December 2007 in UncategorizedTags: complaints, humor, microsoft, pc speaker, troubleshooting, windows
Whenever I’m in the lab and mistype my password logging into my laptop, there is an insanely loud beep from the PC speaker. Why not use the actual speakers on the machine rather than resorting to the PC speaker, a relic from the times when computers and dinosaurs walked side-by-side and computers had to be [...]
Fair use is good for business, duh!
Posted: 13 September 2007 in UncategorizedTags: computing industry, economics, google, law, microsoft, non-profit, patent reform, patents, politics
The Computer and Communications Industry Assocation is a nonprofit organization with members including Google, Microsoft, RedHat, Sun, and the Linux Foundation. To boil it down: they’re a lobbying group for the computing industry. I’m not saying they are therefore bad: it’s the unfortunate state of Washington that everything and everyone has to have a lobbyist [...]
Supergeek to the rescue!
Posted: 31 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: bill gates, charity, developing nations, harvard, large hadron collider, microsoft, philanthropy, yellow journalism
Clive Thompson has an interesting article in Wired a short while back that explains why we can all rest easy: there are geeks like Bill Gates in the world who can have compassion on more than eight people at once. Phew. I can finally get some sleep. I was seriously worrying what’s going to happen [...]
Windows or else!
Posted: 24 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: bittorrent, constitution, law, microsoft, piracy, punishment
Movie pirate Scott McCausland must switch to Microsoft Windows as part of his sentence for uploading Star Wars: Episode 3 to a BitTorrent site. This is blatantly unconstitutional and I’m amazed any judge would do this. Here is the pertinent line from the constitution expressly forbidding this sort of thing: Amendments to the Constitution Article [...]
More confirmation that Vista blows
Posted: 18 August 2007 in UncategorizedTags: microsoft, quotes, software, vista, windows
Well, the now-former editor-in-chief of that great citadel of Microsoft-brown-nosing PC Magazine, is now swearing off Vista. You know when Microsoft’s lackeys begin jumping ship that something is wrong. This should certainly convince anyone if the fact that most businesses are reluctant to switch to Vista or that China will use XP for computer systems [...]
