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By SD Times News Team

September 1, 2008 — More than meets the eye with 'Midori'?
We delivered the goods on "Midori," a Microsoft project to create a next-generation operating system. Bill Gates' protégé and former senior vice president Eric Rudder oversees the Midori effort. While our coverage was comprehensive, a few details still managed to slip through the cracks.

One of the most significant revelations left to tell is that Brent Rector commented on one of the Microsoft internal documents that we viewed. Rector, founder of Redmond-based Wise Owl Consulting, is an expert on Microsoft development tools who has been working with Windows since its inception. A telephone call to Microsoft’s automated directory returned a listing for a Brent Rector.

If Midori is just “one of many Microsoft research projects,” as Microsoft’s PR folks insist, why are top people like Rudder and Rector involved with it?

– David Worthington

Absence (of service) makes the heart grow fonder…
I just signed up for the telephone-television-Internet package from Verizon, reducing my household bills by about a hundred bucks a month. But I'm seriously thinking about switching back.

I have no complaints with the FiOS picture, which seems more high-def than that served up by Cablevision, my old cable provider here on Long Island. And I've always had Verizon phone service, so that's not a switch. I haven't noticed any appreciable change in availability or performance with my Internet connection, either. Rather, the problem is with Verizon’s customer service.

I have a television set in my kitchen that apparently is on a "rogue" cable that was never run through the Cablevision junction box, so, I need to have a Verizon technician come to the house to rewire it. When I called, I was told I already had placed some earlier order that was still in their system, and as such, they could not take a second order until the first order was cleared.

Can you believe that? A company that won't take a second order until the first is fulfilled? Imagine going into Dunkin' Donuts to order two regular coffees and being told that you had to order just one regular coffee, wait to have it made and given to you, then pay for it before you could order the second, identical cup. It's insane! But I digress.

The folks at Verizon, it seems, not only can't clear my order out of their system, but they can't open it, either, to see what in the world I could have ordered, since I've only had the service since late June. So for weeks, I've been going back and forth with people who say they're working to get it fixed and then promise to call (like most guys after a bad first date) but never do. Oh—and when they finally do arrive, I'm told, it'll cost me about $80 just for the service call.

Just before I left Cablevision for Verizon, I was having a problem both with my television picture and my Internet connection. Cablevision quickly diagnosed the issue, sent service guys to my house on multiple occasions and readily fixed the problem, free of charge.

Those old adages are true enough. Good service is worth having. At any price.

— David Rubinstein

At least they played the NBA on NBC theme again
The Olympic flame will be extinguished by the time you read this. But for now, my downtime is spent trying to find ways to watch the games. With time inverted, that means live midnight sports, which is always fun.

So how come I can't watch live streaming events on NBC.com? Because Cablevision didn't pay the Mothership for the rights to it. So when I enter in my ZIP code and provider, NBC.com tells me to get lost (or I can watch highlights of things I've already seen—or, better yet, human interest stories).

Fortunately, there is a way around it, such as entering in a non-Northeast ZIP code and a non-Cablevision provider. But what is unavoidable is that the peacock purposefully kills the streams for marquee events, such as anything Phelps. In some instances, it saves those for primetime broadcast—15 hours after they've finished!

If you're like me, you can trawl the Internet for hijacked TV feeds from around the world, but it is very hit-or-miss. Only the Chinese feeds seem to be consistently up, but generally they have the lowest bandwidth.

With CBS doing a bang-up job streaming the NCAA basketball tournament, I wonder why NBC is blundering what should be a slam-dunk way to boost its Internet streaming prestige.

— Adam LoBelia

How do I work this thing?
I am still pretty ill-equipped for the iTunes explosion and will likely figure the whole thing out just as it becomes obsolete.

My most recent iTunes buffoonery came in the shape of a little green gift card that I received from a cousin. The iTunes card is redeemed by typing in a scratch-off code on the back of the card at the iTunes Store site. I received the card in June and had used the $15 card once before, but when I tried to get more 99 cent songs, I was told the card had already been redeemed. I am certain that I didn’t buy 15 songs with the card, so I know it isn’t used up.

Somebody needs to check the core of this Apple.

—Jeff Feinman

Related Search Term(s): Windows, Apple, Microsoft

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