April 2004 Blog Posts
Snippet from a newswire article about Microsoft's recent quarterly results:
Separately, Connors said the company would offer details at its July analysts meeting on plans for its $56 billion in cash and short-term investments.
Yep, I've been waiting for this. C'mon! They have got to either use the money or give it out to share holders. Any kind of large company purchase would meet huge resistance given their monopoly rulings. They'll get rapped if they try to get into any new business (banking?). The institutional stock holders must be pushing for getting a piece of it through a dividend. I doubt the...
I've been spending more time on ebay and it's auctioning procedure seems rather flawed to me. By having an auction end at a precise time, everyone is encouraged to withhold their bids until the last moment and then snipe at the last second before the auction closes. You get a flurry of activity at the end and even if there's a buyer willing to pay more, they get shut out because the clock runs out.
Instead, wouldn't it make more sense for the auction to accept bids after the scheduled end of the auction as long as the bids are...
I did it again. Lost my mobile phone. It's about my third or fourth lost phone in the same number of years. That's the flipside of mobility: lose-ability! I called the phone and it rang a couple of times before it suddenly stopped so I've got a sneaking suspicion that someone else picked it up. It was a very old Nokia - my wife's old one in fact - so I'm not particularly choked. I learned after losing the other phones that I shouldn't be on the bleeding edge of mobile technology.
So now I'm trying to find a new mobile...
From this article on Tom's Hardware, there's this interesting snippet found in a Microsoft presentation on XNA:
"One slide of particular interest in Microsoft's presentation hinted at a PC gamer playing online against Xbox gamers."
Of course that makes perfect sense and seems to be a no-brainer. It expands the player base and brings in more revenue. It also provides further differentiation with Sony. And since the underlying technology isn't radically different, it's not so hard for a game developer to support both platforms. I think you can count on this happening.
On the Microsoft XNA FAQ, there's also this statement:
"Microsoft XNA lays the...