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Back at the beginning of last summer Microsoft did a public preview of the Windows 8 user interface, and the world got a look at Metro apps for the first time. A number of people in the software business, myself included, came away with the impression that, at least as far as the mobile platform [...]

I’m one of those dinosaurs whose computer still exists as a collection of components mounted in a large aluminum box. Therefore, unlike the mobile device users who are laughing at the crusty immobility of my platform, I don’t have to throw the whole thing out when it gets too slow. I can fix it! Desktop [...]

I have to admit, I’m a complete space geek. That’s one reason why I was thrilled to read this week about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s grand initiative to seek the fundamental science of interstellar travel, with the goal of developing the enabling technologies by 2111, one hundred years from now. This is good [...]

Here’s a question: what do you do after you’ve made it? I don’t mean had a couple of wins and put a few bucks in the bank. I mean absolutely, unequivocally, ball-out-of-the-park made it? Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, the former Chief Technology Officer at Microsoft, has definitely made it. He leveraged his massive intellect and first-class [...]

At D9 Microsoft showed the Windows 8 UI for the first time. All the attention was on the touch-oriented “Live Tiles” interface. Business Insider and some other pubs have taken to calling it “Windows 8 for Tablets.” I don’t know if that’s what it is. About all I can tell is that the Live Tiles [...]

I got a kick out of this. It was revealed this week that the share of downstream Internet traffic generated by Netflix customers’ streaming movies reached thirty percent in the last measuring period. Thirty percent. But as eye-opening as that figure is, it’s not what I got a kick out of. In some bit of [...]

Google has always had to walk a fine line between profiting from search results and giving users more power over what appears in them. They try to make sure that what we see is relevant to us, while at the same time legions of SEO specialists and their clients try to game the system to [...]

Looks like it might. Hard on the heals of my excellent first impressions of IE9 RC I had a little bit of a jarring return to earth in the matter of installing Beta/RC versions of products. I started Windows Media Center and activated Netflix so I could watch another espisode of my current obsession, “Rescue [...]

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 RC (Release Candidate) today, and after finishing up some work hacking up a Windows installer script, I downloaded and installed the new version to take it for a spin. IE hasn’t been my default browser for awhile now, and I wondered whether MS could regain that coveted slot in the system registry. I switched [...]

So what gives with SyncToy 2.1 on Windows 7 64-bit? Last night I manually closed Outlook, then after it had exited cleanly I executed my folder sync. As mentioned previously (here, and here, and here) the sync command runs all my “active for sync” folder pairs in SyncToy 2.1, of which there are two. The [...]