This is just dang cool and once again shows us how the world does not stand still.  Innovation continues apace.

http://translator.live.com/Default.aspx?MKT=en-US

So you say...big deal that's just like babel fish from years ago.  Well yes and no.

techRivet Translated

Voila'.  There's techRivet translated for you.

Still you doubt it.  Been done already.

OK, check out the techRivet homepage.  Look up in the top of the right hand column see the translator drop down?  For the vast international audience of the techRivet blog, this must be a welcome relief.

Choose language, click and go.

And for techRivets IT staff it was a simple implementation.  I didn't even have to get the Project Managers involved just spoke to the developer directly and he had it up and running in a matter of minutes.  (The layers of bureaucracy over here is mind numbing).

The UI is intuitive and easy and configurable.  All goodness.

Windows Live is starting to bear fruit for Microsoft.  Once the Office suite goes online it will be an interesting change of the playing field.

ht: Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

They sure on their last legs those scrappy kids from Redmond.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2163005,00.asp

key graph

The install base of Windows computers this coming 12 months will reach 1 billion," Ballmer told the group. "If you stop and just think about that, parse that for a second, by the end of our fiscal year '08, there will be more PCs running Windows in the world than there are automobiles, which is at least to me kind of a mind-numbing concept.

Unbelievable. That's 1 windows installation for every 6 people in the world. Does that count the illegal copies? Does that count active versions or just all copies sold? Is Windows 3.1 in those figures? 95? I'd be ok if they are counting 98, NT, XP and Vista.

Quite an accomplishment

The closest thing we have in the tech/geek world resembling a world sport is bashing Microsoft.  There are sites dedicated to it, world-wide efforts to bring and end to its products, bias that runs deeper and stronger the geekier you get.

In a way to gain street cred in the tech world you need to hate MS.

But here is something that MS does better than practically anyone else: It knows how to support independent developers (via Sawickipedia.com).

The Sawicki references a Scobleizer post talking about how Apple is playing true to type and how this may jeopardize its long term strategies. Why? At least in part because [Apple] told developers to go pound sand.

The one piece of this pie that I'd like to add is the fact Visual Studio is the best IDE on the market and has been for a decade. They Visual Studio Group at MS has consistently produced a high quality product. The MSDN program and associated sites, Channel 9, all the team blogs...Microsoft knows how important the developer is and wants to make sure their needs are met.

We're wrong and MS is doomed

Now for a countering opinion I send you over to someone with almost the same weight as Scoble: Joel on Software - How Microsoft Lost the API War. In which he basically states that the change to .Net has removed the primary advantage that MS had which was the desktop as a programming environment.  Now that everything is migrating to the web what does it matter the underlying technology.

My opinion is that Microsoft appreciates the developer more than most of its competitors.  And in the long run this will result in continued strength in the developer community maybe not dominance anymore, but still a strong presence.

Ya know when you shut down Windows and it sits there for a minute and then notifies you that a program isn't responding and what do you want to do about it?

You know how irritating that is to me?

I just want to tell Windows, "I said shut down so SHUT DOWN!"

Well here's the fix. All it takes is a little registry work.

1. Click Start > Run and type regedit, then hit Enter.
2. Navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop
3. In the right hand pane, change the following String values:
   
   • AutoEndTasks=1
   • HungAppTimeout=4000
   • WaitToKillAppTimeout=4000
   • WaitToKillServiceTimeout=4000

And if the value doesn't exist just right click and add a new string value of the same name.

Sweet.

More detail here and here.