Microsoft announces Surface Tablet

Well the big Microsoft announcement is here, and what do we find behind the curtain... a tablet! (see details on the Verge) The Microsoft Surface is a 10.6 widescreen tablet with an optional keyboard cover (very slick). Unlike most tablets, it is running Windows 8 on Intel chips. So what was missing from the be launch event?



Price

Microsoft stated the new tablet would be priced competitively with other ultrabook offerings. That is very interesting given that you can get an iPad starting at $399 and most ultrabooks cost around $999. If the device is overpriced I just don't see it selling.



Voice

No mention of a Siri type agent or anything like that. That would seem to be a big oversight.



Battery Life

Running Intel chips, one wonders what the battery life will be. But given that the new Macbook Air runs for about 7 hrs on battery, I would think this is probably not gonna be an issue.



Summary

An interesting device. Will it dethrone the iPad, probably not. Will we get some slick keyboard covers for our iPads? Hopefully!

Microsoft's Pricey Tablet Gamble

Business Insider has this story on Microsoft's plan to charge vendors desktop prices for Windows 8 on tablets. The end result of this would be all Windows tablets would cost $100 more than their iPad counterparts.



I got agree with the story, if Microsoft doesn't change their stance, their tablet efforts are doomed before they even start.

Sky Drive and Google Drive take on DropBox

Big news in the cloud computing world. Yesterday Microsoft announced new updates to its Sky Drive and today Google announced Google Drive. Both of these products are direct competitors to Dropbox which is one of my favorite Internet products.



How the Products Work

Installing the software sets up a special folder on your hard disk. Any files copied to this folder are synced to the Internet. So I have an online backup, big deal. Right? But what happens when I install the same software on my iPhone, my iPad, my second laptop? Suddenly all my devices are automatically synchronized with all my data. Powerful stuff.



What do SkyDrive and Google Drive do better than DropBox?

Well first, both services offer a lot more disk space than Dropbox. For $120/yr, Dropbox gives you 50gb of disk space. Google and Microsoft are offering 100gb for around $50/yr. That is quite a discount.



Google Drive offers Google Docs integration. You can edit Word and Excel files on the web and then have them synced to your devices. In addition, Google Drive looks to have some very interesting photo and video sharing features that seem to be unique.



SkyDrive offers Microsoft Office integration with their online office offering.



What don't SkyDrive and Google Drive Offer?

First off, Dropbox offers support on pretty much all mobile devices (iOS, Android) and operating systems (Windows, OS X, Linux). The new contenders do not. Issues include:

• Neither new product supports Linux


• Google supports Android but not iOS, though it is coming soon


• SkyDrive supports iOS and Windows Phone but not Android


• Google docs can only be edited from the Web. You can't edit them from your local copies. In fact, you only get links to your docs and no local copies.


• Sharing features for SkyDrive do not work on the Mac OS X version

Bottom Line

These moves are gonna shake things up both for the cloud drive market and for the online backup market. Dropbox is still way easier to use and is much slicker than its two rivals. I would expect a price cut or a storage increase very quickly from Dropbox.



Apple has everything in place to be a competitor in this space. However, if they stay isolated in their ecosystem, they surrender this market to their competitors.



In the end, this means more options and better deals for us end users. Hooray for that!



Reviews and General Posts

The Verge: Hands On

Google Drive FAQ



Cloud Drives Compared

Here are the articles comparing cloud drive features.

PCWorld: Google Drive vs the Rest

Laptop Mag: Cloud drives compared

The Verge: All the Cloud Drives Compared

Engadget: Google Drive vs the Rest



Google Terms Controversy

Late in the day there was some controversy about Google Terms of service. My take is it was much ado about nothing. Once your read Google Terms of Service everything looks ok. But if you want to make up your own mind check out these links.

ZDNet: How far do Googles terms of service go?

CNET: Who owns your files?

Google Terms of Service

Bing Copying Google Results?

The official Google Blog has this post on how Microsoft is copying Google results for failed Bing searches. Its is very interesting reading. The evidence seems to be quite damning.



However, I am not sure what Google can really do about it. Bringing attention to the issue seems to be about it.

PowerPoint Crashes when Typing Anything on a Mac Running Windows 7 and Bootcamp

Problem: PowerPoint Crashes when Typing Anything on a Mac Running Windows 7 and Bootcamp 3.2



This problem is bizarre. About an hour ago, I tried to start working on a PowerPoint presentation I started on Friday. Whenever I type anything PowerPoint 2007 crashes. Everything worked fine on Friday. (Ahhh!!!! Sometimes I really hate computers.) I'm using a MacBook Pro running Windows 7 64bit and Bootcamp 3.2.



Solution:

The bug appears to be with BootCamp 3.2 and Windows 7. My HP laptop has no such problem. Only my Mac.



Thanks to some smart folks on the Apple forums, there are workaround solutions to this bug. The problem seems to be with Windows, Bootcamp, PowerPoint, and the keyboard driver.



PowerPoint 2007

For PowerPoint 2007 on Windows 7....

1. Open Control Panel


2. Press "Change keyboards or other input methods" from "Clock, Language, and Region"


3. Press "Change keyboards..."


4. Press "Add..."


5. Scroll down to and expand "English (United States)" (if it's not already expanded)


6. Select "US"


7. Press "OK"


8. Press "OK"


9. Press "OK"


10. Close the Control Panel

See Forum Post Here



PowerPoint 2010

Another user performed these steps to fix the problem on PowerPoint 2010.



In PowerPoint 2010..

1. Go to "File", "Options", "Language"


2. Under a the heading "keyboard layout" note the hyperlink which says "not enabled".


3. Click on the hyperlink and select a keyboard layout and the keyboard's language.


4. Once you complete the process it will say "enabled" under the keyboard layout heading.

This should fix the problem.



I can confirm the PowerPoint 2007 fix worked for me. Given the Posts date back to late November it appears this bug has been around a while.

USB Mouse on Acer Aspire One

I recently tested the functionality of a USB mouse attached to my Acer Aspire One (AA1). I attached a Microsoft Optical Mouse Blue USB and PS/2 Compatible mouse and started the AA1 without issue. Both the left and right mouse buttons worked as did the scroll wheel and center mouse mouse button (scroll wheel).

The output from from dmesg is:


ALC INIT<6>usbcore: registered new interface driver hiddev
input: Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input8
input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM)] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2



Unplugging the mouse and reattaching while the AA1 is running again was no problem and produces a dmesg output of:



usb 2-2: USB disconnect, address 2
usb 2-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
usb 2-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
input: Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb2/2-2/2-2:1.0/input/input9
input: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM)] on usb-0000:00:1d.0-2

Visual Studio turns 10 years old

It's hard to believe that Developer Studio turned ten years old on March 19th. While I'm not big time Developer Studio Power User I do use it each and every day to write server side software and have so since 1999. Here's why I like Developer Studio.

1. MSDN -- w/o a doubt the best online C++ help
   
2. Intellisense
   
3. Debugger

What I don't like.

1. Resource Hog
1. Leaving the IDE running long term (multiple days) consumes memory and becomes sluggish
2. Sometime Intellisense freaks out and takes minutes to rebuild its database

I still use ddd and Emacs when programming in the unix world and quite honestly I could easily go back to the world of emacs-man-ddd instead of using an integrated IDE like Developer Studio but as long as my employer insists on running the data center on Win32... so be it.