This very well might be one of those moments that defines tech news in 2008, especially if Yahoo! accepts Microsoft’s 44.6 billion dollar offer. For the past few years Yahoo! has been suffering. In 2006, this became more widely known when Continue Reading »

I have been trying to ignore the Halo 3 coverage everywhere online as I don’t have an Xbox 360 and the hype has started to make me want one (even though my bank account is at -$44.63). But this type of stuff is hard to ignore when you go to a tech school and campus was noticeably void the Continue Reading »

Shortly after I publish this post, Microsoft will kickstart a campaign called The Ultimate Steal where Office Ultimate 2007 will be sold to students for a ridiculous $59 (retail is closer to $600). This is one of the best things Microsoft could do for students. Granted most of my classmates pirated Office 2007, use Google Docs or use OpenOffice, had Continue Reading »

Microsoft is the first major player to announce a surface computing computer. The device is dubbed simply Microsoft Surface and is comprised of a 30-inch acrylic tabletop powered by a special Vista computer, 5 cameras and a DLP projector. Surface finally brings multi-touch technology, first exhibited by Jeff Han, to the masses. Continue Reading »

My friend Dimitry has a post detailing the newest Google Maps feature - Street View. As the name implies, you can see an area at the street level as opposed to up above with traditional satellite views. At the moment, Street View is only for Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco. Continue Reading »

Last December there was a bit of ruckus regarding Office for Mac’s inability to work with Office 2007’s new XML-based document formats. While the promised Office for Mac-integrated converters have yet to arrive (6-8 more weeks), Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has released a standalone converter application that provides read-only access to Office Open XML files and converts Word documents to RTF.

If you’ve ever tried to tinker with something in Vista and received a “you need permission to perform this action” warning, you know how frustrating it can be. Vista’s new found “security” locks down a lot of things even if your user account has administrative privileges. I ran into a problem like this when Continue Reading »

Thanks to a comment from Jim Karagiannis, I recently discovered Intype. Intype will be pretty much as close as you can get to TextMate’s perfection on Windows. I say “will be” because Intype is only in the early stage of development, but I can already tell it’s headed in the right direction. Those familiar with TextMate Continue Reading »

From the Steve-Jobs-is-having-a-field-day-with-this department, Microsoft has confirmed a hole in Windows Vista’s speech recognition capability that allows a malicious site or email attachment to delete files remotely. But I would actually classify this hole as nothing to be concerned about. For your Vista PC to be in any danger you must have speech recognition activated, along Continue Reading »

Vista has finally arrived and it comes in an overwhelming variety of flavors. Wikipedia has a detailed chart comparing each version of Vista; on the high-end there is the Vista Ultimate full version retailing for $399 and at the low-end we’ve got the Vista Home Basic upgrade for $99. Then there is the Vista Ultimate signature edition for the uber fanboys out there. Continue Reading »

Last week I got a copy of Vista Business edition through my MSDN Academic Alliance account at Georgia Tech. Obviously, I was compelled to install it and test it out. I was able to successfully get a dual-boot OS X and Vista setup working so I bring to you today, The Vista Challenge. I will be using Vista for an entire day and will see if I can do so without booting into OS X. I will be chronicling my experience and Continue Reading »

APC mag reports that Microsoft Office 2007 makes use of Microsoft Office Open XML Formats, however there is nothing “open” about these formats to Office for Mac users. As I blogged about back in April, Microsoft is making use of four character file extensions such as .docx, .pptx and .xlsx. It seems like Microsoft wants to spur an industry-wide movement to XML based formats.. but why not use the already established ODF, Open Document Format? Continue Reading »

As mentioned earlier, Microsoft has been busy preparing Internet Explorer 7 for public distribution. It went live for download earlier today. You can read about it at the MSDN IEBlog or you can go to Microsoft.com/IE to download your copy now. Continue Reading »

In a few weeks, web developers everywhere will have a burden lifted from their backs. Microsoft will be rolling out Internet Explorer 7 to the public. Soon after the download is made available to the public, Microsoft will be pushing IE7 through XP’s Automatic Updates. Therefore there will be a massive migration from IE6 to IE7. Continue Reading »

Microsoft released Messenger 6.0 for Mac today. The most notable improvement has been the move to a Universal Binary with the ability to chat with Yahoo! messenger accounts and display your current playing track in iTunes trailing close behind.

Microsoft has released the beta for a spiffy looking RSS Aggregator codenamed Max. The Redmond folks have been doing some tech community-friendly things recently with the Windows Live Writer Beta blogging tool and now this. PC users can download Max Beta 1 here. Let me know what you think.

Microsoft shocked me when they recently released an interesting new blog authoring tool, Windows Live Writer (beta of course). The really interesting part is that, while geared for Windows Live Spaces users, Live Writer works with blog CMSs like WordPress, Movable Type, LiveJournal and Blogger. I have never been fond of using blogging tools and always stuck with the WordPress admin panel for two Continue Reading »

Run Windows XP and want to have the benefit of easier to read, less-jaggy fonts system-wide? Yeah, I thought so too. Right-click the desktop, select Properties, head over to the Appearance tab and click on the Effects button. In the window that opens up, check the second box that says Continue Reading »

There has been a lot of buzz around Microsoft’s new (hopefully) soon-to-be application, Photosynth. The new application manipulates photos in a unique way, allowing its users to create 3D structures based on the photographs imported into it. Now it’s time for the million dollar question - will there be an OS X version?

ArsTechnica has the scoop on a new feature Microsoft recently added into builds of Windows Vista. The new feature, called Previous Versions, is enabled for users with the System Protection setting enabled. Previous Versions is similar to System Restore points but on a per file and per folder scale. It shadows copies of files whenever they’re edited, allowing the user to revert to several previous versions Continue Reading »

From the this-would-have-come-in-handy-last-semester department comes an awesome tip from Microsoft themselves. It shows how you can create a log file in notepad that automatically adds the time and date stamp everytime it’s opened. Had I known about this earlier in the semester this would have been extremely useful when creating notes in classes. To play along, simply open up notepad and on the first line type in .LOG. Save and close the notepad file. Next time you open it, you’ll be greeted with a nice stamp in the form of 7:33 AM 7/7/2006.

IntelliAdmin explores a service released by Microsoft that can help your computer shutdown faster. The User Profile Hive Cleanup service discussed cleans up user profiles and therefore helps reclaim and distribute system resources once a task is closed. Continue Reading »

Open Office version 2.0.3, Apple iTunes 6.0.5 and Microsoft IE7 Beta 3 have all been released today. The Open Office update brings speed improvements, especially for Intel Macs, along with greater file compatibilty among Microsoft Office files. Meanwhile, the new iTunes release offers compatibilty for the Nike+ shoe thing. Microsoft’s third IE7 beta offers dragable tabs and the expected security and stability updates.

Many people browse the web copying and pasting passwords and other personal information to their clipboards for convenience. They might have just signed up for a new service and copied the randomly created password from the registration email so they can sign in for the first time, or when they have forgotten their password. Unfortunately, the default settings in Internet Explorer make it easy for any malicious site to read your clipboard information, with a Continue Reading »

Microsoft has decided to offer Windows Vista Beta 2 (build 5384.4) to the public for free. I can only assume this is Microsoft’s way of letting everyone know that they have an actual working product and that progress is being made regardless of the delays. This is a great strategy to let people know what to expect in the next version as well as get a sneak peek of what they will be paying so much for. Screenshots show that the beta is of the Windows Vista “Ultimate” type. Continue Reading »