This article was published on September 9, 2011

This week at Microsoft: Twitter, Windows 8, Samsung, and the ban hammer


This week at Microsoft: Twitter, Windows 8, Samsung, and the ban hammer

Ladies and gentlemen, it is Friday, and you know what that means. Yes, it is time for the ever-running TNW Microsoft weekly roundup of all things Redmond. This has been a week of throat clearing for Microsoft, as the company hunkers down for the coming BUILD event.

BUILD is set to dominate the entire scene next week, with a deluge of Windows 8 and related news. TNW Microsoft will be onsite Monday through Friday, to cover every little aspect of it live. At least until my fingers wear off and my brain explodes. That might be on Tuesday. Conferences are fun.

More to the point, let us know in the comments as to what sort of coverage you would most like to see from us. We know what we are interested in, but that might not be what you want to hear. We can’t tell you all that we know about the event, yet, but it should be quite the show.  That aside, make sure that you are following us on Twitter and Facebook, and let’s get into the news.

Twitter and Bing are still in love

Through a very awkward, and somewhat hard to parse exchange on Twitter, the search engine and the social service confirmed that they would be reupping their information deal that provides Bing access to the ‘firehose’ of tweets. Google had very publicly not renewed its deal with Twitter previously, and had then scrapped its real-time search product.

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Bing, perhaps looking for any edge against Google, seemed quite content to continue paying Twitter’s light bill. The language in the exchange hinted at an expansion of previous integration.

Facebook, ever Bing’s best friend, could perhaps soon have a competitor inside of the Microsoft search engine’s results. For now, nothing is known past that Microsoft decided to keep things where they were. When we hear more, so will you.

Windows 8 boot times

Windows 8 news. You knew that we were going to have some of it, right? This week’s best Windows 8 tidbit is that it boots much faster than previous editions of Windows. From our coverage:

In surveying Windows users, Microsoft found that 57% of desktop users and 45% of notebook users completely power down their machine when not in use, instead of using the sleep function, primarily to eliminate power draw.

Keeping that in mind, the company has created a hybrid of completely shutting down the machine and its previously existing hibernation mode to come up with a solution that decreases the time it takes the OS to boot from a completely shut down state by 30 – 70%.

There is a video, which you can find here, that shows off just what this means in practice. Sure, it’s a Microsoft demonstration, but the clip is still impressive. Perhaps we are leaving the days of two minute boots behind us. Let’s hope.

Samsung Windows 8 tablets coming

A hot rumor this week is that Microsoft is set to give away Samsung tablets running Windows 8 to attendees of the BUILD event next week. That would get the operating system, in tablet form, to thousands of developers in one fell swoop.

It would be a somewhat daring move, as Windows 8 is not even at the beta stage yet; the build of the OS that is to be distributed at BUILD has long been rumored to be a developer preview, and little else.

Oh, and remember that quad-core tablet rumor? We are not sure if the Samsung in question is that device, but if it is, wouldn’t that be slick? Whatever the case, we’ll know on Tuesday morning, right after the first keynote. Microsoft has arranged to have every eye in the technology world focused on them, so it’s time to deliver.

Microsoft drops the ban hammer

This week Microsoft shut down many a kid’s dream, by mass-banning a host of LIVE users who had been stealing from the store. The company did not divulge how the thefts had been carried out. From our previous coverage:

Microsoft, in a very terse statement, made it known today that it had banned a number of Xbox LIVE users who had ripped off content from the console’s Marketplace. Users who suffered the ban have reported that they are suspended until, get this, December 31, 9999. That is quite the sentence, if we can say so ourselves.

The crime that we are dealing with, according to Microsoft, is that some users “illegitimately accessed Xbox LIVE Marketplace downloadable content.” In other words, they made off with it sans payment.

We wonder how many kids, aged around 12, just got their first dose of what a repercussion really means. You can’t help but chuckle a bit.

That is all for this week folks, stay strapped in for next week, it should be a humdinger.

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