Microsoft Kinect turns sign language into spoken language in real time
Microsoft has had its unsung products before, but the Kinect may prove its best worst product. By that I mean it's a great piece of hardware that the company can't seem to sell to anyone but gamers....
View ArticleHow helium will yield higher-capacity hard drives
Seagate and Western Digital are the two last big American names standing in the hard drive market, along with Toshiba in Japan, and all three face an existential thread in the SSD. More and more...
View ArticleInvestors want Microsoft to dump Xbox and Bing, and they have a point
Two of the top three shareholders at Microsoft are Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, and the two have a lot of sway. But there's a third, co-founder Paul Allen, and he has his own gravitational pull. Right...
View ArticleMicrosoft moves closer to unifying Windows and Windows Phone
Microsoft's cross-platform strategy is no secret. Much of the same code found in Windows 8.1 is also in Windows Phone 8, including the kernel. So it stands to reason that, in time, apps should be...
View ArticleMicrosoft continues green tech push with windfarm deal
As data centers grow in size, their owners have become acutely aware of the cost both in dollars and carbon emissions. Microsoft and other large data center providers have placed a lot of their...
View ArticleThe rush is on to bury Windows and the PC
Welcome to the era of web publishing, where hit counters are everything and sensational headlines are the norm to grab your attention. This has resulted in an explosion in blogging that's pretty much...
View ArticleBallmer's last decisions at Microsoft prove to be his best
Credit: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson An amazing article in Monday's edition of the Wall Street Journal gives insight into what happened to precipitate Steve Ballmer's departure from Microsoft. As many have...
View ArticleMicrosoft to finally euthanize Windows RT
Microsoft has made it semi-official: Windows RT will go away, eventually. It was a bad idea that never went anywhere, and now it looks like the company is giving up the ghost on this one. Word comes...
View ArticleWinAMP's long, strange journey may lead to Redmond
Only a few apps on my modern PC date back to the 1990s in regards to my own personal use, but WinAMP is one of them. One of the earliest MP3 players, WinAMP was made by a small company called Nullsoft...
View Article'Pawn Stars' take down the Chromebook, on Microsoft's behalf
Microsoft has hired what could be devastatingly effective new pitchmen to bash Google's Chromebook - the cast of "Pawn Stars." The show, which debuted on the History Channel in 2009, remains one of...
View Article2013 Tech Turkeys – Patrizio Edition
All around the tech press, this publication and others, people are picking their lists of turkeys for the year, just in time for Thanksgiving. Well, how could I pass up the opportunity to participate...
View ArticleRumored Microsoft CEO plan is a very bad idea
Credit: REUTERS/James Fassinger Image Caption Bloomberg reports that the Microsoft CEO search is coming down to the wire, and it's a race between Ford CEO Alan Mulally and Satya Na
View ArticleXbox One's potty-mouth crackdown suggests Microsoft snooping
Credit: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson As if your parents weren't enough, now it seems the Xbox One wants to wash your mouth out with soap, too.
View ArticleNot even Microsoft could kill the ZeroAccess botnet
Late last week, Microsoft announced it had taken down much, but not all, of a major botnet that has been operating since 2011 throughout much of Europe.
View ArticleStats don't lie: Windows 8 has failed
You want to give a company the benefit of the doubt, but after several months, a pattern starts to emerge. A negative one that you can't deny. And in this case, a year's worth of stats don't lie:...
View ArticleHow Microsoft should go about setting Windows Phone free
The Verge reports that Microsoft is considering taking a page from Google and giving away Windows Phone and Windows RT for free to device makers in the hope of grabbing more market share. Microsoft...
View ArticleNames shuffle in the Microsoft CEO shift
Just as it looked like the Microsoft board was ready to settle on Ford CEO Alan Mulally as the replacement for Steve Ballmer, his name is starting to fade while new names are popping up. Bloomberg...
View ArticleAnother potential Microsoft CEO bites the dust
No sooner had we published our blog on Friday tossing Qualcomm COO Steve Mollenkopf into the Microsoft CEO mix, Qualcomm took him out of it. In a surprise move, the company announced Mollenkopf’s...
View ArticleWhen bad things happen to good apps, Part 1
There are fewer disappointments worse than getting hooked on a piece of software and then, with one revision, seeing everything go wrong. Microsoft did that to us last year with Windows 8, and in 2013,...
View ArticleWhen bad things happen to good apps, Part 2
This is the second story on good software gone bad. The previous one was about a horribly failed development process that resulting in a broken, unusable piece of software. In this case, the software...
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