Tag Archives: microsoft

I Played Kinect, and I Liked It

During my recent travels I came across a demonstration for the Xbox 360 Kinect in the Zurich Hauptbahnhof railway station. For those that don’t know, the Kinect is Microsoft’s latest peripheral for the Xbox 360 that allows gamers to interact with the console without the need of a controller. The Kinect is a sensor bar with a built in…

The console wars, back to the 16bit era

Bits. Eight of them or sixteen meant a world of difference to me when I was a kid. I didn’t know what a bit was and actually I still don’t. I tried looking it up but it’s a very tech savvy story I will never be able to reproduce here myself. But luckily it doesn’t appear to matter anymore since…

This Post is Best Viewed in Microsoft IE

Every web devoloper runs into this problem at one point and sadly, usually very often. Markup language that doesn’t get translated by certain web browsers. Negelence of the software developer to web standars etc. are still occuring more and more. The browser wars of the late 90’s between Netscape and Microsoft are now named the first browser wars. In this era of the world wide web it still seems logical that all the parties involved were still trying to define the rules of the playing field and therefor not entirely sharing the same web standards because of differing interpretations of what would be most efficient. Remember I’m talking about the period from 1995 onwards, when the World Wide Web was still up for grabs and nobody had heard of Google yet and most people didn’t even own a PC or were not connected to the internet.

How do you like them Apples?

Apple is back from the dead. How does Apple try to get on top of Microsoft? How do they take this advertising war and how are they promoting their products? Apple has a very strong fanbase and they have some pretty unique products but how do these hold up in the end? Are they really as revolutionairy as Jobs and his colleagues claim and is the way in which they try to win people over from other OS’es to Mac valid or are they basing it on stereotypes and myths?

Gambling With Open: A “How Bill Gates Made Money” Moment

Bill Gates is to new media as Rupert Murdoch is to old media–an atavistic force of economics, mad gambling, and vector misdirection. And right now he is lobbying hard to remove key provisions regarding open standards and open source from European Union policy proposals and, reportedly, winning.

Rethinking Googlization

In current search engine research the importance of Google as object of study seems to be inevitable. Google seems to be indexing parts of the physical and digital world, which we first thought to be unsearchable. Googlization, the term that is used to describe this, points out how Google is at the core of this research. “It is…

One Laptop Per Child; Is That Enough?

Isn’t it ironic that we’re trying to reduce the digital inequality and poverty with ICT, while it is the ICT that caused and augments this digital divide? We’re using technology to solve the problems it has caused…

NOVA College Tour: Interview with Steve Ballmer CEO Microsoft

Yesterday evening Steve Ballmer visited NOVA College Tour. Steve Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft and is well known of his flamboyant appearances at conferences.
In this interview with 500 students of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam he talks about his concurrents Apple and Google and how he wants to challenge them. About the sanction of…

Astroturfing on Wikipedia

As Wikipedia is currently the number 7 most visited website in the world according to Alexa, and a major source of information for all layers of society, it makes sense to engage in a critical review of its benefits, risks and impact on knowledge formation.

Cold war in RIA-land

Web 2.0 gave the old web a brand new face, and with that, it added cultural and technological changes. Cultural change in the form of weblogging and social networking/bookmarking, technological in the form of User Generated Content and Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

For a change a want to address the latter. Because I’ve got the feeling that there is a…