Category: Stories
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Key Windows man leaves Redmond
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Andrew Orlowski
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One of the most important figures in Microsoft’s history, David Weise, is to leave Redmond after an illustrious career with the software giant. Weise was one of the developers responsible for a technical breakthrough upon which much of Microsoft’s success today is founded. In 1987 IBM and Microsoft were pouring vast resources into OS/2, the…
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Verity Stob – programming’s funniest memoir
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Andrew Orlowski
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As anyone who’s ever done it professionally knows, programming computers isn’t as glamorous as they make out in the movies. Take for example, Independence Day, where the hero lashes together a program in 30 minutes and conjures up a piece of code that saves the world. Have you ever seen anyone do in that real life?…
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The Cell chip – what it is, and why you should care
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Andrew Orlowski
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Part 1: A look at how it works No chip in years has caused as much excitement as the Cell processor developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba. It promises to be the most important microprocessor of the decade, with potentially enormous repercussions for how the industry computes, and how the rest of us use digital…
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Tablet PC bug ‘fills computer with ink’
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Andrew Orlowski
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A major bug in the Tablet PC version of Windows eats up all the memory in your computer until it crashes. Redmond has yet to acknowledge the problem with a public disclosure about the issue – or even offer a feeble blogshrug [*]. The culprit is the application Tabtip.exe, the site Tablet PC Talk confirms – “The…
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All at sea, Microsoft axes flying car project
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Andrew Orlowski
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It’s official: Microsoft’s flying car project is in peril, the company’s US PR agency Waggener Edstrom told us today. The mysterious vehicle that’s thrilled so many readers this week now faces the axe. The good news is that we finally have official confirmation of these strange sightings of amphibious craft making sometimes very slow, and…
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Google’s No-Google tag blesses the Balkanized web
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Andrew Orlowski
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Karl Auerbach’s prediction that the internet is balkanizing into groups of people who only accept traffic from each other took another step closer to reality today. The veteran TCP/IP engineer and ICANN board member has warned of the effect for years. “The ‘Net is balkanizing. There are communities of trust forming in which traffic is accepted only…