Audible at five miles, painful at three and lethal at one
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Microsoft shows off a Tablet
WHILE THE TAME Apple press has been jumping up and down about its rumoured forthcoming Itablet, Microsoft has shown off what it can do first.
The Microsoft Courier, which is bizarrely named after a typeface, is a prototype. Microsoft will not confirm that the final version will be called Microsoft Times-Roman.
Gizmodo has got its paws on a picture of the Courier and we have to say it looks jolly nice.
It is a dual-screen tablet with both pen input and multitouch capabilities. It is being designed by executive J. Allard.
The Vole has been trying to keep the project secret and located Allard's team well away from the rest of Microsoft's main Redmond campus. Few people knew it actually existed.
Apple fan boys on various sites who have seen the pictures claim that Microsoft had nicked Steve Jobs' design, which no one has seen either.
However both outfits will have their work cut out in pushing the Tablet onto the great unwashed. Generally tablet PCs are expensive and hardly worth the effort.
It might be this more than anything that will keep Microsoft from releasing it.
However ZDNet's sources say that the Vole is interested in getting it into the shops. It claims that the whole thing is part of the Vole's touch-themed Surface effort.
The new Tablet is part of "Alchemy Ventures" and ZDNET is waiting to see what Apple pulls out of the bag. If Apple releases an expensive tablet with limited functionality then Microsoft will try and use "Alchemy Ventures" in a dash to top Jobs' Mob on functionality and price.
But it seems that both outfits now have a tablet although either could end up as vapourware and Jobs' Mob will probably have to make the first move.
If no one buys Apple's tablet then Microsoft can mothball the project and pretend it never happened. µ
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Not Real
Since when have "Not Real" halted the progression of armchair pontifs?
"Alchemy Ventures" are the 'thing' responsible for the origin and continued paradigm shift; the nut within the shell; Venus on a Half-shell with a side of chips.
Consider a boy as using a shell to pour seawater into a little hole. When he's asked what he is doing, he replies, “I am emptying the sea into this hole.”
Skunkworks attracts, err, more skunks? For it is not by work alone, by which we are skunked. And they PlaysForSure.
The art of transmuting leads to goals, has too long made a clean slate of bulleting pragmatamnesiacs.
You'll stay at home and you'll be alone, so why be lonely?
Slippin' away, sittin' on a pillow, swotting up the leaves of a 3 rings binder,
as the residivists spew the hacktivism of the Grand Old Propagandists'
reality bites from a Fox News, hounded, waiting for the death panels to come.
You must take a tablet and get on cloud 9. Change your portrait to landscape.
If you are doing the work it is more important than any tablet you might hold. It is that you are carving your own path through the intellectual information and finding your own direction within a system.
Would Moses come down from {where was he from?} without his tablets to break? I think not; it should be oblivious.
Would Daniel have ventured into the fiery Dragons' Den, had he not had the Boxerballs to do so?
And you lot that complain about the font must have an agenda to carry out a personal verdana!
You realise that's not a real device, don't you?
Just look at the video
- it's not a 'fake' - it never claims to be real
- it's just a product concept mock-up...
Whether or not it becomes a real product is anyones guess, but MS have always been good at these product mock-up
- remember the Origami project??
I have to say that if it comes out anything like the sample shots then it looks both very clean / stylish and a very usable machine - whilst still being small enough to still fit into a handbag. Depending on the cost I'd be interested - but it doesn't look like it's going to be cheap...
I have Times Roman, theirs more than one type of times in that font family. Looser!
This has hardly been a secret, Ken Hinckley of Microsoft blogged about this almost a year ago, showing off an early software version referred to as Codex.
As for tablets being "expensive and hardly worth the effort" that is a stereotype commonly spewed by those who have never bought or used one. There are a number of inexpensive tablets just as there are inexpensive laptops, and just like laptops the best devices (giving the best user experience) are often more expensive. Once you have used a decent tablet its hard to think about going back to just a laptop.
To add to the confusion about fonts, "courier" is not just a font name, but also "a person or company employed to deliver messages, packages and mail. Couriers are distinguished from ordinary mail services by features such as speed and security... etc.".
Why the derisive, half-defined jab from the outset of your article?
Come on NF, get the basics right here. Since when is Times-Roman a Font? It's Times New Roman.