Category: Tech

Yesterday Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's outgoing CEO took the opportunity at what is undoubtedly his last company meeting, to take a swipe at Apple and a couple of other competitors that have largely stolen Microsoft's thunder in the new age of computing. Apple, Ballmer said, is about being "fashionable," while Amazon is about being "cheap," and Google is about "knowing more." Microsoft, Ballmer said, is about "doing more."

Ballmer's swipes and the company's Siri-bashing ads are just the latest in a string of dismissals from Microsoft toward the company's rivals, even as those rivals have gone on to greater heights in the areas where they are head-to-head with Microsoft. Apple, described as a "low-volume player" last year by Ballmer, is the most profitable firm making smartphones and tablets, which appear to be the future of popular computing. Google, too, has been the target of barbs from Ballmer, even as that company maintains a massive market share lead over Microsoft's Bing search engine.

Microsoft has a search engine? Seriously? Who knew? /snark

Sorry Microsoft. No one cares about this one either.

"So Microsoft unveiled its Surface 2 tablet on Monday and there were absolutely no big surprises. The device is priced at $50 less than the original Surface RT at $449 but overall this is basically the Surface RT with better specs and a presumably improved Windows RT 8.1 operating system. It goes without saying that this will once again not end well for Microsoft.

"Microsoft has done virtually nothing to add consumer appeal to the Surface 2. Throughout its presentation on Monday the company kept stressing that the Surface 2 was a tablet for people who want to be 'productive,' and emphasized that it came with the full Microsoft Office Suite… People who need to use Office at home can do so by bringing their laptop home with them. What they will not do, however, is spend $450 on a tablet for their own personal use just because it comes with Office. In fact, they are probably buying a tablet for their own personal use as a way to escape Office and other work-related productivity software.

"The Surface 2′s other problem is Windows RT itself… The Surface RT was a commercial flop, OEMs fled from Windows RT and app developers are less than enthusiastic about making apps for it. Simply making hardware upgrades and implementing very small a price cut to the Surface 2 would have been an acceptable strategy if the original Surface RT had been even a modest hit. But it wasn't a modest hit: It was a massive bomb that forced Microsoft to write off $900 million." ~  Brad Reed

Yes, I'm in a mood today.

Spotted on Ars Technica:

"We'll be liveblogging Microsoft's Monday morning Surface 2 event"

To which I respond, "Why?"

Are you ever going to fix the constantly-crashing flaming pile of shit that is Bridge?

I bought these as a birthday gift for Ben about three weeks ago. Apple has a two week return policy, so I had to give them to him early (his birthday isn't until tomorrow) in case he hated them and wanted to take them back. It worked out well because he got to  fully test them out on his recent unplanned trip to Phoenix and ended up loving them . Last night I asked if I could have a listen, and I was amazed at the sound. AMAZED.

I've had to make multiple trips down to our lovely Colorado Springs office this past week (with one more in the works for Monday), so I have a very healthy amount of mileage reimbursement coming my way and decided to pre-spend a chunk of it and got my own pair today.

To be honest, I was initially very frustrated with the purchase because I just couldn't get the phones to fit properly and the sound was nothing like what I'd heard last night, but I finally happened upon the optimal earbud size and after about an hour's listening all I can say is OH. MY. GOD. It's like I have 19-year old ears again. My music has come back to life in a way I haven't heard in years. These would be excellent headphones if they were wired, but the fact that they're wireless is just…well…amazing!

Yes, they're pricey, but worth every penny if you're a "serious" listener (or an aging 1970s-era "audiophile").

This sums up almost exactly where I am in regard to technology these days and kind of a followup to my post from a couple days ago.

"Over the years I've spent far more time than I care to count compiling scripts, screwing hardware into place and generally tinkering with technology.

"But then I got tired of it.

"I had reached the point to where, when I turned on a device, I just wanted it to work. I didn't want things to break so that I could find out how to fix them. I no longer wanted to play with my phone, my computer or my iPad. They were tools, to be used to complete a job. Sometimes they are in use as entertainment devices, but even then the entertainment is the content that they allowed me to access, rather than the devices themselves." ~ Brad McCarty,  The Next Web Top Stories

And yet Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, isn't lowering (or even extending their introductory price) of Windows 8, they're raising it back to their ridiculous $199 price point next month.

I know we have absolutely no intention of upgrading at my workplace, and from what I've been reading, most sane I.T. departments aren't touching it with a ten foot pole.

And speaking of work, I can't tell you how many people there have told me they want or need to buy a new computer, but don't want Windows 8. "What do I do?"

"Buy a Mac."

To be filed under One of Those Things I Never Thought I'd Want or Need Until I Had One:

I bought one of these for Ben for Christmas, and liked the sound so much I went out yesterday and bought one for myself. Until now I'd been (quietly—open cubes, don'cha know) listening to streaming audio at work through my Air's speakers to try and drown out some of the inane chatter that comes from the pre-cert nurses on the other side of the cube walls. The sound from the Air was okay and did what it needed to, but once I heard this little beast I knew what I'd been missing.  I don't know what manner of black magic is being invoked to achieve it, but even at the low volumes I'm forced to listen to at work, this speaker puts out a good amount of bass that makes music sound so much better.

"Professional" reviews can be found here and here.

$70 at your local Targhey…

And the world collectively responds, "Who the fuck cares?"

RIM, you are irrelevant.

Day-um! Using my iPhone5 4G LTE as a hotspot via a USB connection to the Mac. This is faster than my internet connection at work (but pretty much anything is faster than that) or at home.

Test here.

Microsoft shoots…and misses. Again.

Gizmodo:

In the end though, this is nothing more than Microsoft's tablet. And a buggy, at times broken one, at that, whose "ecosystem" feels more like a tundra. There's no Twitter or Facebook app, and the most popular 3rd party client breaks often. The Kindle app is completely unusable. There's no image editing software. A People app is supposed to give you all the social media access you'd ever need, but It's impossible to write on someone's Facebook wall through the People app, Surface's social hub; the only workaround is to load Internet Explorer. Blech. Something as simple as loading a video requires a jumbled process of USB importing, dipping in and out of the stripped-down desktop mode, opening a Video app, importing, going back into the Video app, and then playing. What.

BGR:

Imagine booting up an iPad for the first time, seeing the OS X desktop exactly as it appears on a MacBook, and then finding out you cannot run any OS X software on the device. As odd as that scenario sounds, that is exactly the situation Microsoft is facing with the next-generation Windows OS…

From Business Insider:

At first blush, Microsoft's entry-level Surface tablet seems like a good value compared to the iPad and other tablets. That's because you get double the storage (32 GB versus 16 GB) for the same price as the iPad, US$499 (C$519).

But the reason Microsoft started the Surface at 32 GB instead of 16 GB is because the operating system,Windows RT, takes up approximately 12 GB of space.

Those numbers come from a Reddit AMA session with members of Microsoft's Surface team. When asked how much space Windows RT takes up, Microsoft's Surface test manager, Ricardo Lopez said there will be about 20 GB of free space after Windows RT, Office RT, and "a bunch of apps."

It's not a straight answer, but it's pretty clear Windows RT is a massive operating system. For reference, Apple's iPad operating system takes up less than 1 GB. If Microsoft had made the entry-level Surface a 16 GB device, you'd only have about 4 GB free to play around with.

Remind me again why I should care about anything Microsoft does?

No surprise there. Until about a year before I left my previous place of employment, all the fetal monitors in the patient rooms had no anti-virus software whatsoever.

From Ars Technica:

Drug-resistant bacteria aren't the only pernicious bugs that hospitals need to worry about.  MIT's Technology Review reports that hospitals' computerized equipment—such as patient monitoring systems, MRI scanners,  and nuclear medicine systems—is dangerously vulnerable to malware, and many systems are in fact heavily infected with viruses.

That's because many of these systems run on older versions of Windows—such as Windows 2000. Medical equipment manufacturers often won't support security patches or operating system upgrades for their systems, largely out of concern about whether such changes would require them to resubmit their systems to the Food and Drug Administration for certification.

The scope of the problem was the topic of a panel discussion (PDF) at a National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board on October 11. Mark Olson, the Chief Information Security Officer at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, told attendees that malware had infected fetal monitors in his hospital's high-risk pregnancy ward, to the point where they were so slow they couldn't properly record data.

"Fortunately, we have a fallback model," Olson said. "They are in an (intensive care) unit—there's someone physically there to watch. But if they are stepping away to another patient, there is a window of time for things to go in the wrong direction." The systems have since been replaced with new ones—based on Microsoft's Windows XP.

"The systems have since been replaced with new ones—based on Microsoft's Windows XP." Oh, that's reassuring…

Connected through my Verizon MiFi…

I guess I shouldn't complain and just enjoy it while it lasts!