Practical Technology

In 1912, three of the ten biggest companies in the world were J&P Coats, Pullman, and U.S. Steel. They were giants in their day. Today, they’re either business history footnotes or shadows of their former selves. Why in the world should we think Microsoft will be any different? I wrote recently about Microsoft trying to [...]

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Microsoft and its vendor friends said that there’s no Windows 8 plot to lock other operating systems from Windows 8 devices, but now we know Microsoft was lying. Journalist Glyn Moody dug around Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Certification Requirements for Windows 8 client and server systems and found on page 116 that will Windows 8 Secure [...]

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you’ve read many of my articles over the past 20 years, you may have noticed that I don’t care for Microsoft or its products. That isn’t because I think open-source software or Apple products are unbeatably great. It’s because Microsoft’s products are usually awful. A lot of you are thinking I can’t possibly be right [...]

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Ace Microsoft reporter Mary Jo Foley swears she’s not drinking. Microsoft really is getting ready to enable customers to make Linux and Windows virtual machines (VMs) persistent on Windows Azure, its public platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud service. That Microsoft was going to enable users to set up persistent VMs on Azure came as no surprise. While [...]

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For decades now, we’ve been fussing about operating systems. “Mac OS X is better than Windows!” “Why upgrade to Windows 7 when XP works just fine?” “You’re all wrong. Linux rules.” Such arguments are about to become history. Thanks to advances in virtualization, cloud technology and the Web, it matters less and less to users [...]

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