Jack Goldman died this month. Mac? Windows? X11? You may think of visionaries who shaped technology as you know it. You might imagine that they were the original thinkers or visionary businessmen. You're wrong. The guy who laid the foundations started out trying to invent the electric car
at Ford, before being hired to Xerox creating the legendary PARC labs that invented computing as we know it; he lived to see
his prediction that "...any electric car produced in our lifetime will have to be a hybrid" come true.
posted by rodgerd
on Dec 24, 2011 -
17 comments
A new form of wireless network known as
White Spaces will come online next month, the
FCC announced today.
White Spaces has been called "WiFi on steroids". White spaces are unused spectrum between broadcast television channels. It is faster than WiFi so it can handle more data. It can bring (nearly) free Internet access to the most remote areas of the country, places that can't get WiFi. Because it uses broadcast television signals, any place that can pick up a broadcast TV signal should be able to tap into
White Spaces.
posted by cashman
on Dec 22, 2011 -
34 comments
IE6 was released to the world 10 years ago. Now Microsoft is saying "Goodbye".
(from the
MSNBC Article) "To help expedite the farewell (or rather, the execution) of its ancient Web browser, Microsoft says next month it will start to upgrade Windows customers automatically to the latest version of IE available for their computer."
[more inside]
posted by kellygrape
on Dec 15, 2011 -
87 comments
Today marks the 10th birthday of the Xbox. VentureBeat takes an in-depth
look back at its history, from its rocky inception to the Kinect.
Part 2.
[more inside]
posted by kyp
on Nov 15, 2011 -
24 comments
"The story begins unambiguously. A group of IBMers, working on a secret project to build a personal computer, flew to Seattle in August, 1980, to see if [Bill] Gates could supply them with an operating system. He couldn't -- and referred them to [Gary] Kildall [of Digital Research Inc.] When they showed up at DRI's offices the next day ... the company's business manager ... refused to sign their nondisclosure agreement.... [IBM] did get together with Kildall ... a short time later, but they couldn't reach an agreement. At around the same time, [IBM] saw Gates again. [IBM] and Gates both knew of the operating system [Tim] Paterson had built at Seattle Computer Co.... "Gates said: 'Do you want to get [QDOS], or do you want me to?' [IBM] said: 'By all means, you get it."' Gates bought Paterson's program, called QDOS, for $50,000, renamed it DOS, improved it, and licensed it to IBM for a low per-copy royalty fee."
Tim Paterson, the man who created DOS, the operating system that dominated the computer industry between 1981 and 2000, has an occasional
blog that provides a fascinating history of the microcomputer industry:
Is DOS a Rip-Off of CP/M?;
The Contributions of CP/M;
Design of DOS;
The First DOS Machine;
IBM PC Design Antics; and
All Those Floppy Disk Formatsโฆ
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Jul 9, 2011 -
77 comments
Although
ATM's has been recently identified as playing a part in high unemployment, Switzerland's
Anti PowerPoint Party believes the country loses approximately 2.1 billion Swiss Francs (2.5 billion $USD) through the use of PowerPoint. If they can obtain the signatures of 100,000 voters as needed under Swiss law the group can call for a national referendum to ban the use of PowerPoint and other presentation software throughout Switzerland. Edward Tufte (and
others) also had a
problem with PPoint...
posted by wallstreet1929
on Jul 6, 2011 -
56 comments
Then, coming on six o'clock, Mr. Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft and an inventor with hundreds of patents to his name, came in, wearing chef's whites, and ushered us into dinner. Boy, people eat early around here, I thought. Little did I know I would be eating non-stop for the next three hours. (previously: 1,2) [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Jun 28, 2011 -
31 comments
Who owns the term "app store"? Apple
wants to, but
Amazon and
Microsoft, among others, think it is generic. Will Steve Jobs's
own words come to haunt him? In any case, the first casualty of the fight between giants seems to be
Amahi, a small open-source media server.
[more inside]
posted by kmz
on Jun 22, 2011 -
98 comments
Microsoft Mathematics is a free
Computer Algebra System (CAS) available from Microsoft. A
CAS is a program that can solve purely symbolic mathematical equations. For example, the program can tell you that the derivative of 6x^2 + 12x is 12x + 12. The program has functions for calculus, statistics, linear algebra, and graphing. One interesting feature of the program is that in some cases it can show and describe the intermediate steps involved in solving an equation. Hereโs a
16 page tutorial (in MS Word docx format) showing how to use the program. The program can be downloaded from the
Microsoft download page. Thirty-two and sixty-four bit versions are available. The program only works on XP/Vista/Windows 7.
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on May 23, 2011 -
56 comments
Trash cans, landfills, and incinerators. Erasure, deletion, and obsolescence. These words could describe what has happened to the various building blocks of the video game industry in countries around the world. These building blocks consist of video game source code, the actual computer hardware used to create a particular video game, level layout diagrams, character designs, production documents, marketing material, and more.
These are just some elements of game creation that are gone -- never to be seen again. These elements make up the home console, handheld, PC and arcade games we've played. The only remnant of a particular game may be its name, or its final published version, since the possibility exists that no other physical copy of its creation remains.
As a community of video game developers, publishers, and players, we must begin asking ourselves some difficult but inevitable questions. Some believe there is no point in preserving a video game, arguing that games are short-term entertainment, while others disagree with this statement entirely, believing the industry is in a preservation crisis.
Where Games Go To Sleep: The Game Preservation Crisis [more inside]
posted by timshel
on Feb 9, 2011 -
44 comments
Google set up a sting operation to prove that rival Microsoft search engine Bing is cheating, using Internet Explorer to track users' Google search results and mining that data to improve Bing.
Here's the proof.
posted by 2bucksplus
on Feb 1, 2011 -
166 comments
Contrary to a lot of idle criticism, Bungie's
Halo series of video games has
a surprisingly rich backstory -- a universe complex enough to support
seven bestselling novels,
a wiki with over 7,000 articles, and
one of the most successful ARGs in history (including
a full-fledged radio drama). The series has also turned out sweeping audiovisual work, from the games'
cinematic cutscenes and
epic music (lots of free previews) to
top-shelf anime and the Hollywood-quality short films --
ODST,
Believe,
Deliver Hope,
Landfall -- that were made to promote the games (the latter of which, produced by Neil Blomkamp,
inspired District 9). And that's apart from all the material produced by Bungie's dedicated fan base:
genuinely hilarious machinima from
Red vs. Blue,
professional-level graphic novels (table of contents at the top),
gorgeous artwork,
hours of recorded dialogue,
complete transcripts of
hidden apocrypha, and more
factual analysis,
story speculation, and
casual discussion than you can shake an energy sword at. But most of these pale in comparison to the latest and greatest exercise in Halo beanplating: the
Svmma Canonica, a 40-page, 17,000-word formal treatise on the nature of canon in the world that Bungie built, and how it will fare once Bungie moves on and the franchise is managed by 343 Industries. Discussion
over at Bungie's official site, or at decade-old fan forum
Halo.Bungie.Org.
posted by Rhaomi
on Jan 31, 2011 -
71 comments
We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chromeโs HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in
no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (
previously).
Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw
on Jan 13, 2011 -
145 comments
Chasing Pirates: Inside Microsoftโs War Room - From the special thread that Chinese factories counterfeit in mile-long spools that adorns software authenticity stickers, to near-perfect bootleg discs leaving microscopic evidence of their factory origins, to Mexican and Russian gangsters who are dealt with very carefully, the NYT covers Microsoft's multi-pronged, international war on piracy.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Nov 7, 2010 -
30 comments
Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie
resurfaced some of Microsoft's history in a recent post on his
personal blog. In a sealed packet in his office, he uncovered the original press kit for Windows 1.0 and decided to put the
documents online. It's a fascinating look into the beginnings of computing and into a technology that has fundamentally changed our world. from
Yahoo News.
posted by Blake
on Oct 15, 2010 -
32 comments
Russia Uses Microsoft to Suppress Dissent - Adding to its
long-running series on corruption and abuse in post-Communist Russia, the New York Times has reported on Russian authorities using the pretext of software piracy to seize computers from journalists and political dissidents critical of current policies. In a surprising twist, lawyers representing Microsoft have been found working with Russian police, despite reporters and NGOs providing evidence of legitimate software purchases. An
official response to the NYT piece suggests impostors claim to represent Microsoft in Russia, and notes the company's offer of free software licenses to these and similar groups.
posted by Blazecock Pileon
on Sep 12, 2010 -
25 comments
In February of 2008, Microsoft
acquired the maker of the Sidekick, Danger Inc.,
for $500 million dollars and rolled the company into its Premium Mobile Experiences division, led by
Roz Ho. The Sidekick retained a dedicated following after the merger despite some
hiccups along the way. Twenty-six months after the acquisition, Microsoft
unveiled the KIN One and KIN Two devices which would launch in May. The devices were backed by a huge and
mildly controversial marketing push aimed at the young, hip social-networking addict niche. Reviews were
generally negative and often cited needless complexity, software that was lacking basic functions and no support for third party applications. The devices ran a fork of
Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's rewrite of their aging mobile operating system that had been
rapidly losing ground to RIM, Apple and Google. Just seven weeks after launch,
the KIN is dead. Engadget has some
insight into the failure and the subsequent shake-up at Microsoft.
posted by cgomez
on Jul 1, 2010 -
98 comments
Did you install a Windows patch Tuesday? Listen, and understand. That
mystery update is in there. It can't be uninstalled. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are assimilated.
posted by pjern
on Jun 9, 2010 -
55 comments
