In Lieu Of Keeping Up

Some stuff of note. I have a personal RSS backlog that you wouldn’t believe

  • made a big thing out of Surface, which echoes a lot of similar technology that has been popping up here and there (Jeff Han springs to mind). It’s impressive, sure, but pushing it downmarket will be the truly impressive achievement.
  • got into offline web applications. I predict Gears will spawn a massive frenzy that will overtake single efforts like Slingshot within a few months, regardless of how cool (or language-specific) they are.
  • 7 is up for download. My current minimum demand for any sort of distribution is that it is able to do what my laptop does right now: Near-instant suspend/resume with dual displays attached (or not) and auto-detection of everything when it wakes up, including my 17” rotated (portrait) display (without restarting any applications). When is truly, demonstrably, reliably that good, I’ll have another go at it.
  • pushed out a bunch of updates, including the newfangled “DRM-free”:Wikipedia:Digital_rights_management , some security patches I haven’t gotten around to installing yet, etc. More to the point, they pulled the usual “rev 2.0” stunt and promised BTO configurations up to 160GB. At least they got YouTube to re-encode their stuff to H.264.
  • and Gates met. Mostly reminiscences, although it seems to have been quite entertaining.