For those that haven't seen what Microsoft Surface is all about have a look at on10 for a demonstration of some different applications running on it. It'll be shipping this year at $10000, so very much aimed at the commercial space at the moment, but hopefully within 5 or so years it'll start becoming more mainstream. I want one of these as my coffee table, and we need some cool applications for it too....
From AllThingsDigital: The great Silicon Valley soap opera has come full circle. Not since Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously interviewed Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a possible suitor during the "Macintosh Dating Game" back in 1984 have the two men appeared in a joint bill. And at D5, the two shared a stage tonight for the first time in more than 20 years for what promises to be a historic discussion....
Dell has just announced that they will be entering the Tablet PC market later this year. Visually it's a nice looking machine, and it does somewhat go against the recent trend for heavier convertible Tablets, like the Protégé M400 (bigger and heavier than the M200). So what do I want from this? Screen resolution wider than 1024 pixels when in portrait mode, so something like 1400x1050 like the M200. Although it looks like the shot in the video had perhaps 900 pixels wide, so if I'm right can we have an option for higher resolution screen please?...
Microsoft have announced that Halo 3 will start shipping on Tuesday the 25th of September, the European release will be Wesnesday the 26th of September. So I've released a Vista sidebar gadget for Halo 3. It's pretty simple, it countdowns to the release date. There's two versions for each region North America and Europe (126KB), download from Microsoft's gadget gallery North America and Europe.
I came across a recent blog entry by Nik Cubrilovic covering his recent switch from Mac OS to Windows Vista. I have been running Vista for a little less than 24 hours and I can’t believe I didn’t switch back sooner, the main difference is that the interface is much much smoother and neater and despite popular belief performance is actually fantastic. I was used to waiting on Mac OS X while my standards apps would open up - Quicksilver, Firefox, Skype, etc....
I see that Robert McLaws has done some digging to come up with the donations that tech company's employees have made to the two right-wing US political parties, the currently reigning Republican Party, and the Democratic Party. Google's employees it turns out is the most politically active, not that surprising really, with over $50 000 donated in total, Microsoft coming in second with just over $40 000. All the tech companies Robert covered gave more to the Democrats, except two, can you guess which?...
The video player uses Silverlight, so you'll need the plug in for Windows or Mac OS. Edit: I've decided to scrap the iframe and just have a link to the page here. This was put together (primarily the player) with Expression Media Encoder, once I can get my hands on RTM I'll be using that for Gamercast. Yes I know there's a big percentage thing in the middle when the video is playing and still downloading, when Silverlight supports Windows Media Server that'll go away, or when I edit it out of the player....
It seems Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars has a major issue with running as a standard user. Symptoms include standard users not being able to run the application, with the system reporting that it does not have permissions. In my experience this is due to the update application not setting the proper permissions on files after modifying them, it basically removes the users group from the CNC3.exe and other files....
This is in response to Robert Peston's whinge on his BBC blog. Mainly about how his iPAQ isn't supported on Windows Vista, and how Outlook XP makes him type his password in. My HP iPAQ PocketPC will never be compatible with Vista, even though the software it runs is Microsoft software. Hey ho. That's an expensive and serviceable bit of kit written off prematurely. That iPAQ would be running a very old version of Windows Mobile then....
In a sort of follow up to my previous post about Windows Vista being the most secure operating system. Jeff Jones has totalled up the number of vulnerabilities that have been discovered in the first 90 days of the Windows Vista launch (end of November), and compared it to Windows XP, Mac OS X.4, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Red Hat Linux Enterprise 4 Workstation and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10....