#microsoft

I think about this sometimes when I'm writing in Vim at midnight, just me and a blinking cursor and a plain text file that will still be readable when I'm dead. No filesystem-within-a-filesystem. No sector allocation tables. No 5,039-page specification. Just words, a few hash marks, and never having to think about it again.

Are you forced to work with Linux? Do you miss the convenience of Microsoft spying on you and keeping track of everything? Fear not! This amazing tool will bring back all those great Windows Recall features that you have been missing:

In order to provide both security and portability, it was decided to move away from add-ons distributed as DLLs in favour of add-ons distributed as WebAssembly modules.

I hate Microsoft Word. I want Microsoft Word to die. I hate Microsoft Word with a burning, fiery passion. I hate Microsoft Word the way Winston Smith hated Big Brother. Our reasons are, alarmingly, not dissimilar ...

Add Clippy or his friends to any website for instant nostalgia. Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two.

Yahoo Inc. has been quietly trying to find a way out of its struggling Web-search partnership with Microsoft Corp., a person familiar the situation said, but has so far failed in that effort.

Here’s the tl;dr version. The MacBook Air 128 gives you 77.3 percent of the advertised storage space for user data. The Surface Pro 128 gives you 75.2 percent of its advertised capacity for storing data. And with one minor tweak that doesn’t affect the system’s capabilities in any way, you can increase the amount of data storage space on the Surface Pro to 81.8% of the advertised capacity.

Here’s the tl;dr version. The MacBook Air 128 gives you 77.3 percent of the advertised storage space for user data. The Surface Pro 128 gives you 75.2 percent of its advertised capacity for storing data. And with one minor tweak that doesn’t affect the system’s capabilities in any way, you can increase the amount of data storage space on the Surface Pro to 81.8% of the advertised capacity.

This tutorial teaches you how to use the Split App Visual Studio template to create a blog reading app.

The Internet Explorer process on W8ARM has special privileges and is the only one allowed to run a JIT compiler to speed up JavaScript. No other browser will be able to compete on performance with IE on W8ARM. That sure simplifies keeping up with the competition ... ;-)

Cool. If you have Windows 7 now then you can "boot to a virtual hard disk (VHD)" and get all the loveliness of Windows 8 running on hardware without any risk to your hard drive. Don't like it? Delete the VHD and update your boot record.

"Did you see those great ads pushed out the other day from Palm? It looks like Microsoft, who forgot to borrow copy & paste or multi-tasking, has the same ad team or at least the same great idea. Now it’s time for Palm to creatively borrow a few elements from the Microsoft ad. How about adding a few different demographics and have the people in the ads carrying webOS phones."

Oh god, I hope MSFT never buys Palm. I'd be in the market for an Android phone, then. "RIM seems like a natural fit, in terms of its customer base and the whole look and feel of BlackBerry software. Palm would be the bolder play."

"I just returned from the Microsoft campus (well, I stopped for a panini), where students from Carnegie Mellon University are showing off their awesome project, a version of D&D that runs on the Surface. Now, before you start rolling your eyes, just recognize that this isn’t just a holy grail for tabletop gaming nerds. I mean, it’s that too, but really it’s a proof of concept that shows how fun and intuitive something like this can be, and how accessible a team can make it. I honestly think that if they had these things scattered around like Golden Tee cabinets, they’d get a huge following. "

"The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. Preparing printable text using a word processor effectively forces you to conflate two tasks that are conceptually distinct and that, to ensure that people's time is used most effectively and that the final communication is most effective, ought also to be kept practically distinct. The two tasks are The composition of the text itself. TThe typesetting of the document. "

"For most of the special, however, MacFarlane and Borstein made typical "Family Guy"-style jokes, including riffs on deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest. Such material was apparently a bit much for Microsoft."

"Microsoft learning it can get away with charging $60 for $30 worth of new content"

"I've noticed that as I copy data/install programs on my Laptop, the weight of the Laptop increases. I have a bad back and am medically limited on the amount of weight I can carry so I need to be very carefull not to inflict injury upon myself."

When was the last time the resources of a console actually got completely exploited? "The 360 evolves back towards its PC heritage: a machine that is awesome not simply because of its processing power, but because of the things you can adapt it to do, and the modularity that it demonstrates. A device you can bend to your interests, rather than its stated purpose."

"IE8 is certainly leaps and bounds better than IE6, but neither claiming to support nor actually supporting the functionality of Firefox’s top add-ons is the best way to compete with Firefox’s add-ons ecosystem. Web slices sound delicious, but my personal opinion is that most new features of web browsers today should be implemented as add-ons and not as core features. That’s not to say I think Firefox is there, but I think we’re going in the right direction. As we like to say, one size doesn’t fit all."

"I am not in a business with a 4-6 year document retention cycle. I am in a business where I hope that what I wrote ten years ago will still be accessible a century hence. Microsoft's policy was deliberately destroying my life's work."

"Microsoft is trying to put together a patch, but in the meantime computer users have been advised to update their security settings or switch to unaffected browsers such as Firefox or Opera. ... The flaw in IE allows criminals to gain control of computers that have visited a website infected with malicious code designed to exploit it. While restricting web surfing to trusted sites should reduce the risk of infection, the malicious code can be injected into any website. Users do not have to click or download anything to become infected, merely visiting an infected website is sufficient."

"I hope you're convinced, by now, that programming languages with first-class functions let you find more opportunities for abstraction, which means your code is smaller, tighter, more reusable, and more scalable."

I don't think I know what I just watched here. Was it an ad for delicious.com?

"Netflix subscribers, if you've got an Xbox 360 and a Windows Vista PC, you don't have to shell out $99 for Roku's Netflix Player box to get your Watch Instantly library on your TV screen—you already have everything you need."

"Microsoft intended Vista to be more user friendly, but it is only more user friendly for beginner users, from what I have learned."

"This article describes situations where you may have to configure port settings on your networking hardware to connect to Xbox Live."

"This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance."

"This confirms the rumors that have been circulating all week that Bungie was going to once again become an independent company"

"I was still somehow brainwashed, though, as perhaps many people still are today, into believing that Word was the “serious” word-processor: the professional tool for anyone who did heavy lifting with language."

"breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation"

"As more and more lawsuits rock the industry, we should ask if software patents are stifling innovation. Bill Gates certainly thought so in 1991, even if he won’t admit it today."

"Litigate or shut up."

"Does anyone worship the Gods of Redmond?"

"We also don’t make you sign licensing agreements to get the format specifications, or prevent you from competing with us. We don’t tell you where you can and can’t install the software. We don’t tell you what you can and can’t tell people about

"Sigh. I used to have the strength to argue against such foolishness. Nowadays I’m reduced to nothing more than Grey’s-Anatomy-esque catchphrases."

"They're clearly aware that contributing to the community is important but they have no problem stabbing us in the back at the same time."

"The bad news is that after about ten minutes of running with both VMs open, I started to smell burning electronics."

"The Microsoft patent agreement has put [Novell developers] outside the community and there is no positive aspect to that fact, and no way to make it so"

"The bottom line is that Microsoft should have waited until it had a more compelling product to sell. I can't imagine what they were thinking."

"We don't want this technology to be available to every hobbyist. We need to keep the number of licensees down to a manageable number. We charge a license fee to keep the number of people we have to deal with down to a level we can handle."

"David Bradley describes how he invented CTRL-ALT-DEL. Then tries to packpedal after he inadvertantly slams Bill Gates for making it famous."

"If it gets built, someone will try to make a hole in it," said Pescatore. "That's the world of security."

Wow, what a horribly desperate spin: "we're set up to pleasantly surprise people who don't have super-high expectations for Longhorn."