Tag Archives: Microsoft

Always connected

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Sitting in the Coffee Zone, slurping some Rocket Fuel, connected to the world. The way it was meant to be. In all fairness, I rarely lugged my Thinkpad around. Just too heavy. Not IBM’s (at the time) fault. I bought one of the heaviest models they offered. No idea why. But on the few occasions I took the thing on the road and attempted to connect wirelessly, it was usually something of a chore. Again, probably not the fault of Microsoft or IBM. I just never took the time to learn how to make it all work. It was too much trouble.

This morning I fired up the new Mac…it saw the open hotspots…I picked one…and here we are. All things in life should be so easy. Why wouldn’t a boy just keep his laptop with him all the time? Stay tuned.

Photo Story 3.0

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Photo Story is a nifty little program that turns images and sound into wonderful little videos. It used to be part of Microsoft Plus! and cost $20 but is now free. I’ve posted a couple of Photo Story files here at smays.com but this new version is the best yet. I grabbed some pix form KBOA830.com (the first website I did, back in the day) and tossed ’em in with some jingles that Jeff Wheeler saved. The 5 min video (3 meg .mov download) could have been better if I had taken the time to try to match images to audio but I didn’t (keep your Media Player at 320×240). It’s still a nice look/listen back to the golden days of KBOA. If you don’t have a copy of Photo Story 3.0… download it today.

Bill Gates on education

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Bill Gates to the nation’s governors at the National Education Summit on High Schools: “America’s high schools are obsolete.” Some data points from Gates’ keynote: The US has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. Only 68 out of every 100 ninth-graders graduate from high school on time, and most need extensive remediation after that. Only 28 of the original ninth-graders make it to their sophomore year in college. “When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow,” said the Microsoft chairman, who is hiring about half of his new talent overseas.

Microsoft’s new search engine

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I took Microsoft’s new search engine for a spin tonight and can’t say I was impressed. Looked a lot like Google but it’s hard to knock them for that. And it probably does some things that Google doesn’t but I didn’t take the time to try find out what they might be. I did an image search for “Steve Mays” and came up with two photos that truly capture the real me. But I’m a Google Boy to the very end.

MSN Direct on your watch

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Beginning this fall, Microsoft plans to offer a new wireless information and messaging service that will run on evolving smart watch devices. The software company’s MSN Direct division says the service, which costs $9.95 a month, is geared to deliver customized information to a new category of watches. MSN Direct said the service would provide consumers with information including news, weather, sports scores, stock quotes, movies, dining, and games. Microsoft is expected to leverage some of its original content and existing media licensing arrangements in order to provide the data for the wireless watch information service. [InternetNews.com]