Right before I left tonight a consultant we work with on occasion was in and showed me his Win8 tablet and some of the stuff he’s been working on.  The software doesn’t look terribly different from his older stuff just formatted for the touchscreen, but what I was interested in was his tablet.  Although he didn’t say so, it looks like the Surface Pro which is the Microsoft tablet that has a desktop class processor in it (which means it competes against laptops as opposed to the slower ARM based Surface RT which competes more with the iPad and a slew of android tablets.  The two models are discussed in this article. My first thoughts follow…

Read the rest of this entry »

In one of the more embarrassing Microsoft stories I’ve heard in a while, Computerworld is reporting that Microsoft has issued a warning that editing files stored on Microsoft’s Home Server using any of a bevy of Microsoft programs (and potentially many non-Microsoft programs) may corrupt those files! Home Server was Microsoft’s (inept, we find) response for the home and small business market to the growing popularity of NAS (network attached storage) for backing up the huge amount of digital detritus we are all accumulating.

This embarrassing video showing a Microsoft Vista voice recognition feature demonstration gone awry brought me back. Microsoft is blaming ‘ambient noise’ for the snafu, but having personally set up and used Dragon Voice recognition software for my boss who used it for several years (and that was several years ago now), this is truly horrible stuff. Dragon, an English company, could recognize my boss’ *very* heavy 1940′s-esqe New York Irish fireman’s accent better in about 5 minutes than Microsoft’s product could understand a clear-speaking, neutral voiced demonstrator who probably trained with it for hours beforehand. Very sad.

I had some reservations about writing this story up at all. A friend at work found an old discarded HP pavilion on the side of the road, fired it up and couldn’t log in as Administrator because somebody (smart) had changed the normally default [blank] password for that account. He had already asked several PC-smart folks to help him get in somehow to no avail, and had finally decided to impose on me. I love a challenge, and I thought it would be easy, so I hooked the machine up to my KVM at my work desk. I had some ideas about how to go about it, and as usual it included Linux.

Read the rest of this entry »