Latest In Tech » Microsoft

Show Dynamically Created HTML in Internet Explorer

sarvinc — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:56:56 +0000

Code, Code, Code Everywhere has come up with a bookmarklet that works in IE.

The Web Developer plug-in for Firefox also does this. Install the plug-in, It’s under “Tools” -> “Web Developer” -> “View Source” -> “View Generated Source”

Youtube on the Motorla Q (Part 2)

sarvinc — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 23:42:33 +0000

An ever prevalent thread here is youtube on this or that. Forum poster Zbop has an updated how-to at Treocentral.

Youtube on the Motorla Q

sarvinc — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 04:37:36 +0000

More info can be found here

Linux on the Palm

sarvinc — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 05:08:31 +0000

It looks like Linux hackers had to do what Palm has been promising for years now; release Linux for the Palm platform. If I had seen this coming, I probably wouldn’t have moved to Microsoft’s Smartphone OS. Of course, if I had known how bad the Smartphone OS was going to be, I probably would’ve just killed myself. At this point I’m not sure if anything will save this sinking ship, but at least it means there’s life, after Palm Inc. dies, for our Palm OS devices.

Hitler Gets Banned

sarvinc — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:24:15 +0000

Did I already post this? It’s too funny to pass up, enjoy.

SVN for Visual Studio

sarvinc — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:18:18 +0000

Recently I’ve been using Visual Studio to write some C# application. I have to say that Microsoft put a lot of work in to the IDE, so much work that there’s actually published books on the use of Visual Studio. For example, did you know that VS was built to work with repositories.Thanks to Dreamhost, I have an svn repository available online. Of course, being a Microsoft product, VS doesn’t support SVN out of the box. That’s where the wonderful, and free, AnkhSVN comes in. AnkhSVN is a Subversion add in that is compatible with VS.NET 2002, VS.NET 2003 and VS 2005, but doesn’t work with the Express versions of any as far as I can tell.

Download the latest AnkhSVN here, go visit the blog here, or the wiki here.

In addition TortoiseSVN is a useful Explorer shell extension

Video on the Xbox 360

sarvinc — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 02:40:54 +0000

So you’ve got an Xbox, now what? You could install MCE on a computer and transcode video on the fly. Joystiq has a few more solutions for you. Even better, I’ll be posting an updated batch file with VLC’s default install location.

The Silverlight Bug

sarvinc — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:38:00 +0000

Silverlight is pretty amazing stuff for several reasons. I think it’s ground breaking simply because Microsoft chose to give it a name based on something other than the genre it competes in; i.e. Office, Smartphone, Home Server Edition, Media Center Edition… Apple users can get their fix here, Linux users can get Moonlight; a Silverlight implementation built on Mono, Windows users can get theirs here.

Some of you OS X users have probably already noticed that Microsoft’s installer gets confused by the new update 10.4.10, theirs already a convenient fix for that as well.

Microsoft’s Surface, the sarcastic version

sarvinc — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 21:52:20 +0000

Thanks Andrew

Is Vista a Failure?

sarvinc — Sat, 12 May 2007 16:33:56 +0000

It’s been going around the office that Microsoft has admitted failure, Paul Grahm even thinks Microsoft is dead, but I’m not convinced. Loss of relevance; sure, but death, failure, I don’t think so. From the Inquirer,

Dell announced that it would be offering XP again on home PCs. The second that Vista came out, Microsoft makes it very hard for you to sell anything other than Me II. It can’t do this on the business side because it would be laughed out the door, but for the walking sheep class, well, you take what you are shovelled. [...] What happened is, the OEMs revolted in the background and forced Microsoft’s hand. This is a big neon sign above Me II saying ‘FAILURE’. Blink blink blink. OK, Me II won’t fail, Microsoft has OEMs whipped and threatened into a corner, it will sell, but you can almost hear the defectors marching toward Linux. This is a watershed.

First, let’s face it, no one’s marching towards Linux. We’re totally avoiding Linux by backtracking and using Windows XP. People don’t like change and that’s what this boils down to. This shouldn’t even be seen as a failure, it’s really a conflict of interests. Microsoft has an interest in pushing people to move to their newer OS, hardware manufacturers have an interest in seeing that you don’t move; a new OS means a new investment in development. Neither probably has your best interests in mind. Let’s not mistake someone else’s interests for our own.

The other equally monumental Me II failure? Gates in China launching a $3 version of bundled XP. [...] What did MS do? It dropped the price about 100x or so. I can’t say this is unprecedented, when it made Office 2003 hard to pirate it had to backpedal with the student edition for about $150. This time though, things are much more desperate.

Dropping the price of an OS in China seems like an obvious choice. Clearly the price of Microsoft’s OS was too high, why not drop it and continue to make a profit. Plus, we get people used to paying for software. It’s never really explained why the Inquirer sees this as a failure.

The bottom line; Microsoft is generating a ton of profit.