Microsoft

Key Windows man leaves Redmond

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One of the most important figures in Microsoft’s history, David Weise, is to leave Redmond after an illustrious career with the software giant. Weise was one of the developers responsible for a technical breakthrough upon which much of Microsoft’s success today is founded.

In 1987 IBM and Microsoft were pouring vast resources into OS/2, the successor to MS-DOS. Back then, Microsoft’s Windows was a functionally-crippled GUI running on top of an operating system that offered no pre-emptive multi-tasking or long file names and that was limited by DOS’s 640kb memory limit.

After Weise’s breakthrough, Windows was still a functionally-crippled GUI running on top of an operating system that offered no pre-emptive multi-tasking or long file names, but it was no longer limited by DOS’s 640kb memory limit. Windows could take advantage of the 80286 Protected Mode.

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Tablet PC bug ‘fills computer with ink’

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A major bug in the Tablet PC version of Windows eats up all the memory in your computer until it crashes. Redmond has yet to acknowledge the problem with a public disclosure about the issue – or even offer a feeble blogshrug [*].

The culprit is the application Tabtip.exe, the site Tablet PC Talk confirms –

“The program Tabtip.exe increases in size due to a memory leak. It starts out at approximately 10MB. I have seen it zoom up to over 150MB after a couple of weeks of suspend/resume.”

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All at sea, Microsoft axes flying car project

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It’s official: Microsoft’s flying car project is in peril, the company’s US PR agency Waggener Edstrom told us today. The mysterious vehicle that’s thrilled so many readers this week now faces the axe.

The good news is that we finally have official confirmation of these strange sightings of amphibious craft making sometimes very slow, and sometimes incredibly quick, but always unplanned detours across Europe, thanks to MapPoint or Autoroute.

But the bad news is that the fun might end soon. No longer will Norwegians, Latvians and Estonians be able to press the web equivalent of Asteroids’ “hyperspace” button and find themselves in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England. There are no surface-effect vehicles, modeled after Alexeev’s Caspian Sea Ekranoplan, being tested in the Baltic.

Or at least, not by Microsoft. This is what we were told.

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