In the light of the
Microsoft/Sidekick data disaster, it might be a good time to take a look at just what's happening with Microsoft's half billion dollar investment in Danger. Despite already having a mobile phone operating system (Windows Mobile) and an entire division (Zune) just itching to go head to head with Apple's iPhone. Microsoft decided to turn Danger into a skunkworks for "
Project Pink," named, apparently, after
the pop star.
Now,
According to MobileCrunch, the project is two years late, most of the team has left or been fired, Microsoft hasn't managed to create an app store, and the demoralized team is more enamored of their iPhones than their own product.
[more inside]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll
on Oct 11, 2009 -
42 comments
Google Chrome OS: Google says it will release a new operating system, built around its Chrome browser, which will be open source and will initially be targeted at netbooks. Shipment is expected second half of 2010. No response yet from Microsoft.
[more inside]
posted by Chocolate Pickle
on Jul 7, 2009 -
227 comments
Reinier van der Ende, an x-ray technician at the largest hospital in the northern part of the Netherlands, decided to combine his work with one of his hobbies and proceeded to x-ray his collection of video game consoles, peripherals and game cartridges.
Here are the fruits of his labour.
[more inside]
posted by Effigy2000
on May 2, 2009 -
20 comments
A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered.
Yet another reason
not to use Excel as your "database".
posted by orthogonality
on Mar 4, 2009 -
153 comments
Microsoft announced today, it will open a small number of stores to compete directly against Apple. Some think it's a
dubious idea. "In a statement, Microsoft said the first priority of Mr. Porter, who is also a 25-year veteran of Wal-Mart, will be to define where to place the Microsoft stores and when to open them."
posted by Xurando
on Feb 13, 2009 -
115 comments
The National Security Agency is building a
data center in San Antonio that’s the size of the Alamodome. Microsoft has opened an
11-acre data center a few miles away. Coincidence? Not according to author
James Bamford, who probably knows more about the NSA than any outsider. Bamford's
new book reports that the biggest U.S. spy agency wanted assurances that Microsoft would be in San Antonio before it moved ahead with the
Texas Cryptology Center. Bamford notes that under current law, the NSA could legally tap into Microsoft’s data without a court order. Whatever you do, don't take pictures of it the spy building unless you
want to be taken in for questioning.
posted by up in the old hotel
on Dec 8, 2008 -
42 comments
Facil, an open-source community based in Québec, is
suing the Québec government for buying Microsoft software when free alternatives are available. Facil's
press release says, in part, "From February to June 2008, FACIL has noticed sales of proprietary software for more than 25 million dollars. These purchases were made for products offered by large multinational enterprises, with no regard to suppliers in Quebec. ... While most of the developed countries have started, a few years back, migrating their technological infrastructures to Free Software, Quebec's public administration is far behind." Some
applaud Facil's move. Others,
not so much.
posted by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing
on Aug 28, 2008 -
47 comments
The Day the Music Died The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) [...] has also been warning anyone who would listen that they should not “purchase” encrypted music from these services, since if these services go under then all that “purchased” music will no longer… what’s the word… “play”. But mostly people ignored them (and me), because, you know, Microsoft was at the center of it all, and nobody ever got fired for “buying” from Microsoft.
posted by desjardins
on May 7, 2008 -
67 comments
Wheel of branding, turn turn turn, tell us what resonates with our target demographic. Lego… anime… pokémon!
Windows Vista Sensei spends his time "traveling from place to place in a quest to help the underprivileged global citizens… With his sense of clarity he possesses the things that legends are made of." If that marketing copy isn't compelling enough, there's a
game, a
conference, a
web comic and a series of "webcasts" you can complete to earn the "311t3"
Source Fource figures. Collect them all!
[Compare][Contrast]
posted by Rictic
on Feb 20, 2008 -
28 comments
Microsoft offers $44.6 billion for Yahoo! The grand old man of Redmond has finally come out of the closet to woo the loveliest lady in Sunnyvale, offering a staggering $44.6 billion in cash or shares. Cash or shares? Wow! Bearing in mind the...ah...disappointments both companies have
suffered over the
recent past, is this a marriage made in heaven? Or
hell?
posted by Duug
on Feb 1, 2008 -
199 comments
You want me to eat what?!? It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about
something else. To see if you have permission,
sign in. Or just add northpole@live.com to your IM. Failing that, see what
Howard has to offer.
posted by gman
on Dec 6, 2007 -
20 comments
Microsoft buys stake in Facebook. Microsoft has paid $240m (£117m) for a 1.6% stake in
Facebook that values the hugely popular social networking site at $15bn (£7.3bn). Facebook spurned an offer from Microsoft's rival
Google, which was also keen to invest the site.
Microsoft will also sell
internet ads for Facebook outside the United States as part of the deal that took several weeks of negotiating.
Mark Zuckerberg started the online social networking site in his Harvard University dorm room less than four years ago.
[more inside]
posted by Tommy Gnosis
on Oct 25, 2007 -
114 comments
The Open Content Alliance poses a threat to Google and Microsoft's competing library digitization projects. OCA was founded by the
Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history. OCA's mission is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search by digitizing books and making them as widely accessible as possible.
[more inside]
posted by richards1052
on Oct 22, 2007 -
9 comments
No PC should be without MS DOS 5 - apparently because it has mouse support, a full-screen editor, and an utterly inexplicable
music video. Guaranteed to save you at least 45K!!!
of RAM, that is.
[more inside]
posted by Afroblanco
on Sep 12, 2007 -
55 comments
In the world of conversation killers, talking about Excel to the average person ranks up there with the best. At the same time, there is always a chance that you wish you could have that conversation at work when it gets down to the wire. Even as a pro, you might need that brush up on
Array Functions,
calculation tricks,
VBA examples or some examples from one of the
well known authors on Excel. There is also no shortage of people who dedicate their working lives to this arcane program and are more than willing to assist others for free by posting solved issues on their websites. People like
David McRitchie,
OzGrid,
Rob Bovey,
Ron de Bruin,
John Walkenbach,
Dick Kusleika,
Joseph Rubin and
Chip Pearson.
Or if you just want to be a Debbie Downer at the next party, just take page from any of the following, memorize it. and recite it when faced with that nudge you don't want to talk to:
Excel Support,
Jon Peltier,
Colo's Junk Room,
Scriptorium,
Andrew's Excel Tips,
Andy Pope,
Anthony's VBA Page,
Rodney Powell,
Array Formulas,
Erlandsen Data Consulting,
Excel-it,
ExcelUser,
JKP's Excel Page,
John Lacher,
McGimpsey,
Bill Jelen,
Stephen Bullen,
Tushar Mehta,
VBusers.com,
The Excel Nexus,
The Excel Logic Page, and
Anthoney Does Excel. It’s a fast and easy way to ward off lounge lizards.
posted by lampshade
on Aug 18, 2007 -
42 comments
Wired presents an extraordinary look at "
one of the most ambitious search-and-rescue missions in history," after one of Microsoft's researchers,
Jim Gray, and his boat, the
Tenacious, went
missing in the Pacific Ocean outside San Francisco in January 2007. Cartography meets law meets
2.0 technology. "First the Coast Guard scoured 132,000 square miles of ocean. Then a team of scientists and Silicon Valley power players turned the eyes of the global network onto the Pacific." Eventually, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, the US Navy, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium jumped in – "as did astronomers from leading universities." To this day, Jim Gray has
never been found, and his disappearance
cannot be explained. Read
Wired for more.
posted by BLDGBLOG
on Jul 22, 2007 -
35 comments
