Displaying items by tag: Microsoft

One of the most interesting things in the software market is he EULA (End-User License Agreement). These wordy and boring multi-page documents are always attached to every game, application, and even operating system that you buy or use. They are intended to outline the specifics for use of the software, but often can end up pushing their way into the realm of the ridiculous. A close cousin of the EULA is the T&C (Terms and Conditions) which was intended to serve the same purpose and has become almost as useless as the former.

Not that long ago (when Microsoft was still hammer out the details of their Office 15 offering) there was a small stir on the internet about the possibility of Office for the iPad and for Android based tablets. At the time Microsoft completely denied the rumors and stated that they were not working on working on office for iPad and that the pictures floating around were faked.

This just in from the Microsoft is being foolish again desk. We have told you that Microsoft is seriously pushing their vision of the PC again. They have dropped all pretenses that the PC is all about you and are now rushing headlong down the tunnel with the thought of monetizing your PC usage with the cloud. To do this they are shoving their new UI Metro down your throat whether you like it or not. There have been some that like Metro calling it sleek and slick. However, while Metro is manageable it is also very dull and lacks any kind of elegance or class. It looks like a kid designed it and like XP brings images of Fischer Price to mind instead of a high-performance operating system.

Two days ago we wrote an article that stated quite plainly that confidence in cloud services is actually beginning to fade as security and privacy concerns mount. At the time we talked very briefly about one of the leading reasons for the push to the cloud. That is “ownership” of your data in all of its forms. We are not just talking about files here though. We are talking about ALL of your data. This includes companies like Facebook, Google, Bing, and more. They want your information because it is worth money to them.

As we have continued to work with Windows 8 in all of its x86/64 forms (we have it on desktop, virtual and tablet hardware) we have found one item that is both amazing and annoying all at the same time. No this is not the MetroUI, we are still not happy with that piece. No what has frustrated us at the same time we are very impressed with it is the fast boot time. On our Asus EEE Slate EP-121 the normal boot time is something like 5-6 seconds from off, to sign in screen. This is an amazing feat from Microsoft considering how long it can take to boot up older versions of Windows.

It looks like we might have done our Windows 8 coverage the wrong way around as we are now seeing a host of articles that are showing off the new look of the desktop, the Metro UI News, Sports and Weather apps and more. This is very odd as we have been talking about much this since the Build Conference. Still it is very possible that some of these sites are now listing these items in a new PR push for Microsoft. After all the most recent one we saw on the new Desktop Look had a direct quote from them on Aero and the “vista” look.

Today was an interesting day in gaming. Considering that it is a Saturday in the US (May 19^th 2012) which is normally not a big new day we found some of the information interesting to say the least. One of the first is a bit of news from Microsoft. Here the title in question is Halo 4, the next episode with the now famous “Master Chief” in a new “trilogy” of Halo games. The new was an interesting counter to the claim that the November 2012 launch date for Halo 4 was going to signal the launch of a new XboX.

One of the things that has always bothered us with the way that many companies involved in the “war on piracy” behave is that while they talk about the amount of money they lose every year to piracy they are always willing to dump even more into schemes that have almost no chance of doing any real good. It also bothers us that many of these companies stretch the laws and legal guidelines (to put it mildly) to achieve their goals.

After reporting on the potential for Congressional involvement in the “issue” over Windows RT we are hearing that Mozilla is trying to drag this into a new area simply because the new software will have the name “Windows” in it. You see Mozilla’s argument revolves around Microsoft’s promises to make “Windows” more open to other developers. When asked how Microsoft’s new way of handling Windows RT differs from what both Google and Apple are doing they claimed that by not allowing access to certain Win32 APIs that Microsoft has ported to WindowsRT (the actually only exist in the desktop mode) they are locking out competition.

When Microsoft first announced that only Microsoft based products would have access to the “desktop” mode in Windows on ARM (Windows RT) we began to wonder just how long it would take for Mozilla, Google, Opera and others to chime in about how wrong this is. We now have heard from Mozilla who seems to feel that this lock out from the desktop is nothing more than Microsoft being unfair to the competition and, according to Mozilla, is in violate of the promises Microsoft made to both the EU and the US DoJ.