News Topic - Windows

Microsoft hints about new profile-centric Win Live wares
The blogosphere was atwitter pun intended over the past day or two about Facebook's recent revamp designed to make user pages more profile-centric. But Facebook isn't the only one going this route. It sounds like Microsoft is going more profile-centric in a couple of different ways with its upcoming Windows...
ZDNet  –  Jul 22, 2008 4:00 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology: Software

Intel updates parallel development tool
InfoWorld - Intel on Tuesday will unveil at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, what it described as a substantial upgrade to Intel Threading Building Blocks. TBB 2.1, a developer tool that features a C++ template library for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, ??enables developers to add parallelism to C++.
Yahoo!  –  Jul 22, 2008 3:55 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

SanDisk CEO: Vista is Not a Friend to [Our] SSDs
SanDisk CEO blames its SSD performance woes on Windows Vista
DailyTech  –  Jul 22, 2008 3:19 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Games for Windows Live Multiplayer Now Free
PC Magazine - At the Gamefest 2008 event on Tuesday, Microsoft announced that all Games for Windows Live multiplayer features are now free.
Yahoo!  –  Jul 22, 2008 2:57 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology: Video Games

Longview Vandals Leave Messages Of Hate
Vandals leave behind Nazi graffiti and broken windows in a Longview neighborhood.
KPTV.com  –  Jul 22, 2008 2:32 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Oregon: Portland

Naomi Alderman: Why Microsoft makes us want to scream 'Exterminate!'
We human beings get nervous if we don't know what's going on. It's the rule for creating scary stories: the unknown is always more frightening than the known. Think of The Turn of the Screw, or M. R. James ghost stories. They're frightening because, even at the end of the story, the reader still doesn't know quite what happened. And the opposite is true too: once something has been explained, the fear is gone. This is why childhood shows like Doctor Who are paradoxically so comforting: at the end of each story, all the scary things that had us cowering behind the sofa are explained and thus made safe. People respond to technology in much the same way. Most of us don't really know what's going on inside the black boxes of our computers, games consoles or mobile phones. We entrust to these devices our data, our entertainment, our ability to communicate, but we don't know how they're doing what they're doing. Which makes us afraid. To reduce that anxiety, we need to be given the impression that we do understand, that we can see inside the black box. We like to see a progress bar, a loading screen, or a transition animation. But when putting these elements in place, developers have to take account of some very peculiar quirks of human perception. Take Windows Vista. In many areas, it outperforms Windows XP, but it doesn't feel that way. In fact, Vista often feels more sluggish. Why? Because the designers at Microsoft haven't addressed the user's perception of Vista's performance. Human beings, it turns out, don't perceive time in a perfectly linear fashion. We perceive that things are progressing more quickly if that apparent progress is smooth, and if it speeds up towards the end. Because the Vista copy progress bar doesn't move smoothly, and slows down toward the end, it's perceived as slower than it really is. Gmail has done better. Its developers have recently included a loading screen with a progress bar. The transition from the login screen to this intermediate screen makes the load-time feel faster, even if it isn't. Of course it's not news that human beings are irrational. The peak-end rule of memory formation, for example, says that when we're evaluating experiences in our memories, our evaluations are based purely on how good, or bad, the experience was at its peak, and how it ended. In a similar fashion, when we evaluate software performance, we don't focus on the average response time; instead we focus on the slowest 10% of response times. It's unfair on developers, but if their products are really slow only 10% of the time, users will perceive them as constantly slow. This is one thing that Apple gets right. When a user clicks an application icon on the iPhone, the phone's graphics unit performs a short transition animation in which the application icons whoosh out of the way before the chosen application is brought up. This gives the impression of quick performance: because we can see that something is happening, the anxiety is reduced. We feel we know what's going on. Apple may not make perfect systems. It has hardware problems, and distribution problems. But there's a reason that people spend a whole day in the queue to get a new iPhone: Apple understands what makes us happy.Related StoriesPaul Lewis on why Bluetooth technology is raising fears about privacyNetbytes: Girl Power blogger takes Singapore by stormAnother view: Roboticist Noel Sharkey on Wall-EDas Wikipedia - online resource goes into printBSkyB and Universal to launch digital music service
The Guardian  –  Jul 22, 2008 1:02 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Oracle Database 11g Architecture on Windows
(Source: Oracle) Oracle Database 11g for Windows provides an optimized database solution for deployments that require enterprise scalability, reliability, and high performance. Learn more about the architecture of Oracle database on Windows and how it differs from its counterparts on UNIX and Linux, in this new whitepaper.
Computerworld.com  –  Jul 22, 2008 1:00 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology: Software

Windows Home Server Finally Fixed
The fix for Windows Home Server's broken file system finally is released to market
DailyTech  –  Jul 22, 2008 12:43 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology

Public Safety 7/22/2008
Public safety report for July 22, 2008 POLICE, FIRE, RESCUE Windows broken — Someone broke the windows of at least three cars late Friday or early Saturday in a parking lot of an apartment complex in the 1700 block of Springfield Road, Bloomington Police said.
Pantagraph.com  –  Jul 22, 2008 12:01 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Local: Illinois: Peoria-Bloomington

Do we need to wipe the slate with x86?
A few days ago an industry colleague and I were having a discussion about Linux and whether or not it is necessary for it to be application compatible or simply just "interoperable" with Windows from a protocol and data exchange standpoint. His view is that Linux...
ZDNet  –  Jul 22, 2008 12:00 PM [GMT]  ¦  comment?
found in Technology: Software