The Metaverse (minus legs, and a few other things)

Judging by the Wall Street Journal’s Joanna Stern’s Trapped in the Metaverse video, Meta (and Microsoft, and every other tech giant hoping to get into the avatars-pretending-to-share-a-virtual-table market) have a really long way to go to turn the current state of the art into an enticing experience. Start with adding virtual legs to the avatars,… Continue reading The Metaverse (minus legs, and a few other things)

Meta

Having watched the highlights1 of Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that Facebook are changing the name of the company to Meta and working towards a new platform that will combine Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, I think Nick Heer sums it up best: The metaverse is me making a list of chores to give to the staff… Continue reading Meta

So Wrong on so many levels

The article title says it all. How to Install Windows 3.1 on an iPad: Recently, we noticed FastCompany editor (and friend of How-To Geek) Harry McCracken on Twitter experimenting with running Windows 3.1 on an iPad. With his blessing, we’re about to explain how he pulled off this amazing feat. That poor, poor iPad. What… Continue reading So Wrong on so many levels

Emotional about Windows

Rumour has it that Windows 11 is much more than a new theme slapped onto Windows 10: Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay ties the new look to eyebrow-raising statements about emotion: “We understand the responsibility of [functionality and practicality] more than ever before, but it must also be personal—and maybe most importantly, it must… Continue reading Emotional about Windows

Chinese Typewriting

Thomas S. Mullaney tells us the story of How Lois Lew mastered IBM’s 1940s Chinese typewriter (and of how he eventually met Lois Lew, to reveal the backstory of the woman who demonstrated the system as part of IBM’s attempt to market a Chinese-language typewriter in the late 1940s): The IBM Chinese typewriter was a… Continue reading Chinese Typewriting

COBOL (still) rules

Clive Thompson on the stranglehold that COBOL code has on the older/bigger end of the finance business: In fact, these days, when the phone rings in the house [retired COBOL wizard] Thomas retired to — in a small town outside of Toronto — it will occasionally be someone from the bank. Hey, they’ll say,_ can… Continue reading COBOL (still) rules

Seen

Reading stories about Amazon omitting order details in emails, apparently in order to stop other suppliers from scraping the email content, a few months ago I wondered: The mystery isn’t about why Amazon are doing this: I’m just wondering why I seem to have missed out? Yesterday I placed my first Amazon UK order in… Continue reading Seen

Robot delusions

Courtesy of Medium’s algorithms flagging this as a story I might like, Lost Letters From Cassini reveals the sad truth behind the fate of the Cassini probe: At last the REAL story of the Cassini spacecraft can be told. Read the letters NASA doesn’t want you to see! […] September 15th, 2017 My Dearest Geneviève:… Continue reading Robot delusions

Team commuting

Driven mad by the way lockdowns have given Microsoft Teams a chance to snag a portion of the enterprise software market, it seems that Microsoft may have over-reached themselves if this Wall Street Journal article about changes to Teams is anything to go by: Microsoft Corp. is developing an update to its Teams package of… Continue reading Team commuting

Button pressed

I’m a tad unclear on whether building a device that lets you press a button in order to press another button is quite the great leap forward it’s being painted as here: I showed this to someone and they said, “So.. you built a button that you press that will press a button? Why not… Continue reading Button pressed