Unapologetically opinionated views on technology, in the office and out
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
Every time someone gets fed up with their rural DSL or the slow pace of fibre rollout, they wonder if wireless broadband isn't the solution. I often feel like Scottie on the Enterprise ('the laws o' physics willnae take it, Cap'n').
If the rumours are true and Nokia really is looking for someone to replace CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (usually referred to as OPK, for the obvious reason), then they're suffering from what I call Steveism (for the equally obvious reason); the belief that all you need is Steve.
There's a conversation I've been having with many different people over the years. It revolves around trying to understand how we use context to make IT easier to consume.
There's a big problem facing the IT world: Where are all the new developers going to come from?I'm from the 8-bit generation.
Apple's explanation of why the iPhone 4 shows a drop in reception when you grip it 'in a certain way' has me even more confused.To a phone, as Simon puts it, you are a large bag of salt water.
Mozilla's new iPhone app isn't just smart; it might herald a real change in the way we think about what a browser is and does.
Tired of the endless 'but what have you done for us lately?' comments that follow Microsoft's every move, no matter how successful, communications head Frank Shaw rounded up some fun statistics to underline the fact that Microsoft is still the heart of the PC industry and the PC industry is still the heart of mainstream computing.