Will Windows 8 sticker shock leave Microsoft unstuck?
"Sticker shock" is a US phrase that denotes a shopper’s surprised and generally disgusted reaction upon discovering the true price of an item they’re buying.
Microsoft experienced a different kind of sticker shock a few years back with Windows Vista: such a memory and CPU hog was Windows Vista that most PCs of that time struggled to run Redmond's latest client operating system.
A lot of software and many peripherals also didn’t work with it. Read more...
Celebs and Twitter: Do they have to go together?
So, Simon Cowell is now on Twitter. That was the big news in social media Wednesday. What was your first reaction? I'll tell you what mine was not: "Amazing! He'll have so many insights to share, and we really don't see that much of him on any of his other media platforms."
With all due respect to Cowell, who I do believe is quite an influential man about television and music, I don't see the need for him to be on Twitter. Here's the thing: most celebrities do their best work in the platform in which they became famous. Very few actually gain something by becoming more accessible via the internet. Take one of Cowell's inaugural tweets, for example: "Melanie --incredible but Josh just stole the show." Does this sound like the Cowell we've all come to know and love/hate? No. That comment about the "X Factor" contestants could have come from anyone, and arguably doesn't serve as any sort of meaningful extension of Cowell himself. Read more...
Visual Studio 2011: Developers’ first reactions
With Microsoft readying a beta version of Visual Studio 11, the next major upgrade to the company's IDE, developers are interested in HTML5 backing as well as in basic functional fixes. Visual Studio 11, available as a developer preview since last month, is set to feature accommodations for the upcoming Windows 8 OS, as well as the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, along with capabilities such as code cloning and enhanced unit testing. No release date is yet scheduled.
"I do like the HTML5 stuff they're showing and also some of the intelligence enhancements they have for CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] 3," says Joel Padot, a developer at Florida Farm Bureau Insurance. His company is looking at HTML5 and Web applications as way to support mobile devices. (HTML5 features are planned for the HTML editor in Visual Studio 11.) Padot also praised code review capabilities planned for the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server application lifecycle management server. Read more...