Results tagged “microsoft”

Did we ever get a wake-up call. Boston.com, the website for the Boston Globe has metamorphosed overnight. A little box on the right-hand side of the home page asks, "Notice anything different?" In case you didn't notice, the Globe has thrown in a letter to readers and an FAQ. The letter also mentioned what's coming--a "Things to Do" section. How that is different from the "Sidekick," the little insert that already explains things to do,...

Mike Daisey was the first to note that there were a few messy spots in his Tuesday night performance of "Tongues Will Wag," the monologue workshopped before a rapt American Repertory Theatre audience at the Zero Arrow. He remarked upon that fact as soon as the standing ovation applause subsided. He was right. "Tongues Will Wag" has a few rough patches - an overly used reference here, a missed identification there. But for a monologue...

Mike Daisey is a monologuist. It’s a term that can be broken down into the act of telling stories to an audience through the uses of narrative structure and spontaneity. The Mainer-turned-Brooklynite has a table, glass of water and rough story outline available to him to weave together elements of his life, history and surroundings. "Invincible Summer," currently in a run at the American Repertory Theatre's Zero Arrow in Cambridge, touches upon Daisey's adaptation...

Hey, tonight's the night when you set your clocks forward an hour before you go to bed. Daylight Savings Time has arrived - and soon we'll get to enjoy spring, which begins on March 20. Finally, you can start shaking off the winter blahs.

We'd like to start this week's run-down by wishing a very happy birthday to parent blog Gothamist, which turned four on Friday. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be here. They celebrated their birthday by nabbing an interview with Entourage star Adrian Grenier, who misses NYC public transportation when he's working in LA. They also reported on NYU students protesting a band whose name is also known as a slur,...

Rumors have been blowing around in the windy Back Bay streets by their corporate headquarters for weeks. In 2002 the company was purchased for about $1.7 by three private equity firms, two of Boston, Thomas H. Lee Partners and Bain Capital, and the Blackstone Group of London and New York from the then French owners, Vivendi Universal. The publisher came back to the Boston roots they put down in the mid-eighteen hundreds. Today a deal was reached that will put Houghton Mifflin in the hands of the Irish based Riverdeep for a mere $3.4 billion. When the deal is finalized the new joined company is expected to operate under the name Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep Group PLC, though it's not quite clear if subsidiaries Houghton Mifflin Company and Riverdeep will continue to operate independently.

Tuesday 11/21

think. It just made us wonder: if it were up to the -ist-a-verse, what would we be voting for?

Perhaps the headline is a bit overstated, but the news this week that Microsoft was making grants available to Massachusetts public schools and universities that would figure to be about $800 per high school student and $2,400 per university student it seems a bit suspicious. The grants would provide Microsoft's advanced software-writing and Web-building technology to students across the state. Last year there had been much chatter about abandoning any format that did not comply...

DCist helps us make more sense of the world this week. Posts like this concert review are the reason for Scott Stapp. DCist also enumerates the reasons for playing ultimate frisbee, Condi's tight buns, their love of a local convenience store, and their jealousy of a person in Seattle calling the city. LAist documented graf artist Banksy's most recent visit to LA in one two three posts. They also found the best possible use...

No longer is Bostonist's passion for cartography, especially on the interweb, a closely held secret. We could go ahead and link to all those times we've talked about Google Maps in past posts, but that would be a long list and we'd rather point you towards our new search tool, Rollyo, at the bottom of the page. Mapquest used to be the standard for online mapping, yahoo encroached, but Microsoft was slow to the...

On the eve of Rivalry Weekend, a Bostonist favorite, the tilt and the rest of college football, the Sox have announced some RIVETING news to their legions of fandom. Al Nipper, old Sox pitcher known best for his headbutt he gave Roger Clemens a couple hours after the Olde Towne Team clinched the AL East in '86, will serve as bullpen coach to the Sox in the 2006 season. Al Nipper is "...very excited,...

Bostonist is patiently awaiting our first birthday. It'll be upon us when the temperatures are, gasp, way colder than they are today. As we wait, there is something of a milestone being celebrated elsewhere on the Boston web right now. Boston.com turned ten years old. Geeks and Academics alike may remember the web back when Lynx was the best browser available and only navigated around using text, quite fine when connecting with that fancy Hayes 2400 modem. Netscape came on the scene with it's first few incarnations showing Bostonist a world through images that loaded line by line on our screens. Soon the browser wars would begin with Netscape 2.0 and the release of Microsoft's Internet Explorer 1.0. This is all still pre-Google and when Windows 3.1 was the slickest OS on the market. Boston.com, however, became the Boston Globe's home on the web that year, 1995.

Mitt Romney may have hid under his desk when his aides reported to him that the state had been slashdotted yesterday. The post on SlashDot filed a report on the Commonwealth government's possible future dumping of Microsoft Office in favor of software that would support an open document format compliant with OASIS. Bostonist has been using OpenOffice for a while now, and since our last computer didn’t come with office and dropping two bills on a CD seems a little insane, we don't blame the state for taking this route. Sure it's not the same as Microsoft, with which we've become very familliar, but it does the trick. Perhaps it'll end up keeping the state out of trouble too. The Financial Times, Forbes and the Inquirer had stories backing up the post, pointing to the Mass.gov website where documents are linked for public review of the proposal. (More in today’s Boston Globe.)

Since Bostonist can’t read German we’ve got no idea what they’re trying to get across to us, but we may be a target. Some have speculated that bloggers may be the targets of the latest spam attack. We’ve been reading some blogs that have actually even helped us understand what the spammers are talking about with their statements in German. The latest attack seems to be hitting GMail users worse than others. This is perhaps because GMails spam definitions haven't kept up and the Sober.Q messages are making it to the inbox. Google might not keep our mail safe but with Google's language tools we can find out what our spam is saying.