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GamesPosts Tagged: ‘Microsoft’
If you are more than 30 years old, there is a high probability that you have been witness to the complete evolution of Microsoft Windows, starting with version 1.0 and extending all the way through to today’s Windows 7. In the following video, the author tries an experiment: Starting with MS-DOS 5.0, he installs Windows […]
Just a few years ago, if you had told me you owned an HTC phone I’d have to ask you what that meant. The company has been around since 1997 but I wasn’t aware of it until 2008. That’s when HTC came out with the G1 Android phone, the first Android-based smartphone available in the United States. Earlier HTC smartphones had Windows Mobile as an operating system.
It’s no secret I love Microsoft Kinect hacks — I’ve posted videos of some on here in previous blog entries. Now I’d like to include a pair I discovered while browsing other tech sites. The first I learned about on CNET. It’s a video of a Roomba robot following gesture commands given by a human using the Kinect device as a camera. Click through to see the video.
Saturday tends to be a quieter day for CES compared to Thursday and Friday. There were fewer people on the show floors, making it much easier to maneuver through and get a close look at tech. This morning, I set out to take a look at the North Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I don’t have much to report — the North Hall is filled with cars and sound systems as well as gadget accessories like smartphone cases and skins. There were some fun, innovative products in the Mommy Tech section that I liked.
Yesterday, CES 2011 officially began. Never mind that I had been attending press events for two days leading up to it. Thursday was when the show floors opened for the first time to all attendees. I’ve seen various estimations of how big CES is this year. A conservative guess was that the exhibits encompassed more than 1.5 million square feet. And it feels like at least three people are in every square foot — it’s packed!
Version 2.0 of Microsoft Surface is a lot cooler that version 1.0
by Marshall Brain | January 6, 2011
Watching this video it is apparent that Microsoft has made great strides with its Surface project. The most amazing part of it is the fact that the surface of the screen can now see: The demonstration shows how the screen can detect and read a piece of paper. Here’s what Surface looked like 3 years […]
On November 29, 2010, Microsoft announced it had sold 2.5 million units of its Kinect control system for the Xbox 360 within the first 25 days of the peripheral hitting the market. The device is selling well despite the reports that you need a large room with sufficient lighting to take advantage of the Kinect controller. Compared to the overall Xbox 360 video game library, there are only a few titles that take advantage of the Kinect’s capabilities. But that hasn’t stopped some enterprising hackers from tweaking the Kinect.
Touring Bill Gates’s House and Talking About Batteries
by Jonathan Strickland | November 12, 2010
On Monday’s TechStuff, Chris and I decided to take a virtual tour of Bill Gates’s home. The co-founder of Microsoft owns a large estate on Lake Washington across from Seattle. Added together, the buildings comprise more than 60,000 square feet of space. But it’s not all excess and extravagance at Chez Gates. The design incorporates environmentally friendly features to reduce the carbon footprint of the home. It also has a wetlands area designed to provide wildlife access to important, dwindling resources.
How Microsoft Kinect Works – an amazing use of infrared light
by Marshall Brain | November 5, 2010
Whether you love or hate the User Interface that the Microsoft Kinect implements (some people just don’t like to wave their arms to change channels), the technology behind it is incredibly interesting. You get a sense of how interesting it is by watching this video, where a guy uses his night-vision goggles to see the […]
Microsoft Refocuses on Smartphones with Windows Phone 7
by Jonathan Strickland | October 11, 2010
Earlier today, Microsoft held a press conference in which Steve Ballmer announced the new Windows Phone 7 platform for smartphones (I missed the announcement but CNET’s Caroline McCarthy has a great writeup). The new OS marks a new direction — previously, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile OS had been the company’s contribution to cell phone technology. But Windows Mobile hasn’t stacked up well against other smartphone operating systems: StatCounter doesn’t even break out Windows Mobile in its charts on mobile operating system market share.
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