What happens when you boil down one company's history into a series of keywords? We collected dozens of key Microsoft-related speeches, interviews, internal e-mails and other documents from the past three decades, and put them through a program that generated a timeline of tag clouds showing the 64 most commonly used words in each.

Microsoft's evolution, in keywords

Most of the times I'm at a lack for words to describe something, it's because it's something incredibly absurd or stupid. Here, it's because THIS IS SO DAMN RAD!

Stop whatever you are doing. Go watch the video of this, right now. I don't care how important what your doing is... Watch this video, right fucking now.

You are about to see the best thing thats happened to the GUI since the pixel.

Update: Ok.. So only people who litter their desktop seem to think this is as cool as I do. We are apparently a fringe minority. To those like myself, this is fetish UI porn. I currently have 68 files and folders (no app launch shortcuts) on my desktop. I would _love_ this.

BumpTop Prototype

This article is worth a read. Based on interviews with researchers at Microsoft, it examines the role that interruptions play in computer UI design. In short, computers as they are today do not have a way to determine if you are busy or not when they decide to interrupt you, or let others interrupt you. Researchers are trying to learn as much as they can about how we work so they can address this problem.

The theme is a relatively old one. These days, we are always dealing with a deluge of information. Now, rather than just efficiently displaying it to us, its also necessary to determine if it's the right time to notify us about it.

On the other side of the coin, I think that computers should do what they are told to do rather than try and make decisions for us. This area of study walks that line. I can envision numerous problems that will not likely be accounted for in the first generation of computers designed to anticipate our work habits.

A good first step may be something as simple as "smart status" for Instant Messaging. There are time when I really don't want to be bothered with messages at all. Other times, I'd like them to be displayed, but not in the forefront of my desktop. In other cases, some discussions take place over hours with messages every several minutes, instead of a traditional dialogue. In all these situations, my status is simply "available". Idle and Away only appearing when I'm not actually active at my terminal. Just addressing this issue with IM would both make IM more useful, and milk more productivity out of people.

Meet the Life Hackers - New York Times

] Start-up Orion Multisystems has begun shipping computers
] for those engineers, graphic designers and biologists who
] need 96 processors and 192GB of memory at their desks.

I just bought one of these. Its nice. It doesn't get bogged down like my Dual G5 does when I have a dozen or so web browsers open displaying porn sites with animated banners. Java apps still run slow. My room is noticeably warmer.

Orion Multisystems ships 96-processor workstation | CNET News.com

] "It was a completely internal issue," the spokesperson
] says. The problem had nothing to do with hackers or the
] security patch for MSN Messenger that Microsoft released
] earlier this week, she adds.

"We will screw up all by ourselves, thank you very much".

Hehehe.. I still remember when one of the NLUG folks renewed passport.com for them.

PCWorld.com - Outage Hits Hotmail, MSN Messenger

] An ordinary desktop PC outfitted with six PCI cards,
] each containing four of the chips, would perform at
] about 600 gigaflops (or more than half a teraflop).

] At this level of performance, the PC would qualify as one
] of the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

] "At 3 watts, you could put it in a PCMCIA card," said
] McIntosh-Smith. "With two chips on a PC Card, you can
] have 50 gigaflops on a laptop, running off a battery.
] That's equivalent to a small Linux cluster on your
] notebook."

Its the FPU from hell!

Wired News: Turn That PC Into a Supercomputer

If you use bash as your shell, you will love this.

The RPMs they have up here work perfectly with RH 7.x & 8.x.

Bash Programmable Completion

] Camfield Estates, a rebuilt 102-unit public housing
] development, has trimmed bushes and groomed grounds. What
] also sets it apart from other low-income complexes lies
] hidden behind its walls, atop its roof and in the
] airwaves.
]
] For the past two years, Camfield has been the site of a
] project aiming to span the "digital divide" between
] impoverished Americans and those with easy access to
] technology.
]
] Called the Creating Community Connections Project, it has
] given residents free computers to connect to the Internet
] using high-speed cable lines wired into every home.

CNN.com - Low-income housing goes wireless - Feb. 24, 2003

] Exciting new networked applications are being written.
] Time is not standing still. Microsoft must survive and
] prosper by learning from the open source software
] movement and by borrowing from and improving its
] techniques. Open source software is as large and powerful
] a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into
] a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be
] harnessed. To avoid dire consequences, Microsoft should
] favor an approach that tolerates and embraces the
] diversity of the open source approach, especially when
] network-based integration is involved. There are many
] clever and motivated people out there, who have many
] different reasons to avoid buying directly into a
] Microsoft proprietary stack. Microsoft must employ
] diplomacy to woo these accounts; stubborn insistence will
] be both counterproductive and ineffective. Microsoft
] cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island,
] with a defenses built out of litigation and proprietary
] protocols.

Microsoft and the Commoditization of Software

] Microsoft and MSN have a history of trying to stop people
] from using the Opera browser. When trying to access
] MSN.com using the Opera7 browser, there are two visible
] problems. First, for the user it looks like Opera7 has a
] serious flaw so that many lines are partially hidden.
] Second, the page shows less content than users of
] Microsoft's Internet Explorer (MSIE) see.
]
] The purpose of this page is to document, in technical
] terms, what is going on. Did the Opera programmers make
] grave mistakes? Or is it something wrong on the MSN site?
] If so, is the Opera browser targeted specifically?
] (Executive summary: no, yes, yes)

Pure evil.

Why doesn't MSN work with Opera