Daily news stories from around the web. Focusing primarily on Microsoft and related technologies and services, updated daily and throughout the day. Here’s what’s going on right now.
Microsoft has established a new BPOS Dashboard to notify users when/if the BPOS servers are down. This is an interesting development, especially when it follows closely three separate outages of the BPOS service. Mary Jo Foley provides a good description of the service, along with the official blog post from Microsoft.
The US Government is pushing for wiretaps of encrypted messaging services found on the Internet. This would mean the government would be able to force services such as Facebook, Skype, Hotmail, etc. to descramble their encrypted traffic if the government wishes to enforce a wiretap. You can read more from the original New York Times post or Editor-in-Chief of PCMag Lance Ullanoff’s point of view.
If you use a Mac, you may want to check out the new Office 2011 for Mac. There’s an excellent review over at PCMag that explains everything you need to know about Office 2011 for Mac. It offers the new Ribbon UI, which makes it a little reminiscent of Office 2007 or 2010. Personally, I’m a bit disappointed with how the ribbon turned out on this version of Office, it’s not as elegant as it is on Office 2010 (or 2007, for that matter).
Ed Bott recently dumped his Android and provides a number of good reasons as to why he did so. Many of them (well, maybe all) I agree with. For the average user who simply texts and plays games, an Android may be well and fine, but for the more technical aspects, I could very easily vouch on Ed’s behalf that these devices could seem a tad ‘confusing.’ All-in-all Ed makes some good points and it’s definitely worth reading if you’re considering purchasing one of these devices.
Windows Live Essentials 2011 RTW (Release to Web) is now available for download. This came much more quickly than I had originally anticipated, but I’m not complaining, I’ve loved every minute of using the beta. You can head over to the Windows Team Blog to find out more information, or simply try it for yourself.
I’ll keep updating this as the day progresses. Check back later today, or tomorrow for the next day’s Daily Tidbits.
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