2010: The Year We Make (Email) Contact
It's been an interesting few days here in our office, as I took the opportunity of the end-of-August lull to do some major network reconfiguration and upgrades.
500 words into the future
Unapologetically opinionated views on technology, in the office and out
Simon Bisson
Simon Bisson is a freelance technology journalist. He specialises in architecture and enterprise IT. He ran one of the UK's first national ISPs and moved to writing around the time of the collapse of the first dotcom boom. He still writes code.
Mary Branscombe
Mary Branscombe is a freelance tech journalist. Mary has been a technology writer for nearly two decades, covering everything from early versions of Windows and Office to the first smartphones, the arrival of the web and most things inbetween.
Latest Posts
How do I hate Smartphone OSs; let me count the ways
I've been trying out Hotmail's new Exchange ActiveSync on multiple smartphones today and it occurs to me that I hate all of them.Windows Mobile 6.
Over-sharing on social networks; do we care more about it when it's Google?
Why do we give Facebook less hassle for proxy sharing in Place than we gave Google for Buzz?I was furious about Buzz on a personal level; it did the initial turn-itself-on thing on a Gmail account I don't want to have share anything with anyone and I had the emotional response to having the system interfere in my personal life.
Smart, but not in a business suit.
Earlier this week I suggested that the name "smartphone" seriously underestimated the capabilities of today's pocket computers. The latest ARM-based mobile processors (especially thise with GPU support, like Nvidia's Tegra and Qualcomm's Snapdragon) have plenty of horse power to handle what just a few years back were complex computational problems.
Why all that crapware will kill the PC
Turn on a brand new PC - like I did for my mother-in-law last weekend - and the first thing I do is close a popup from a security app. Then I close another popup from the same app.
Microsoft's data-driven black hole
Microsoft has the telemetry religion; the development of IE 9, like Windows 7 and Office before it, is driven by data about what people actually do. In IE 9's case, it's things like a list of the 7,000 programming APIs that are in use on the most popular Web sites (the most popular JavaScript API, incidentally, used in 91% of them extracts a substring from a string).
Browse Tomorrow, Today.
You can't criticise Microsoft for not having a sense of humour. The latest set of demo web applications that have arrived with the release of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 4 stress your browser while letting you de-stress with a good laugh.
Privacy: what Windows Live knows about your friends
The way that Windows Live lets you control your privacy online is a model other social networks and aggregators would do well to follow. You can easily make things private, shared with just close friends, open to friends of friends or public to the world and you don't feel like you'll have to write your own social network to do it.
How to open the OneNote cache file
EverNote is great for using on smartphones but for keeping track of anything and everything on my PC, I love OneNote. I can write on my tablet screen and have my handwriting recognised, I can record audio that's time-synced to my typed notes, I can clip in sections of Web pages or dialog boxes I want to use as screen grabs, I can print in documents to annotate...