People viewed Bill Gates anouncement last week of his future retirement from Microsoft as a significant item. Gates will in fact remain in the Chairman’s role of the company, but will cease his active day to day functions in other capacities. Microsoft has been on a buying spree picking up software companies and technologies left and right. Just as Windows Live is launching, a typical corporate restructuring occurred with none other than the head of the Windows Live group, Martin Taylor. Taylor is now reported to have been an up and coming star and a Steve Ballmer protege.

It would appear in hindsight that Taylor has been on the outs since last Friday, as he was suddenly unavailable for reporters and then his email was shut down and finally the anouncement and the corporate websites offered up the obvious, Martin was gone.

Ballmer Bids Adieu To Windows Live Exec - Forbes.com: “Taylor’s sudden departure has left many scratching their heads. Some observers believe Ray Ozzie, the man set to take over Bill Gates’ role as chairman in 2008, may have had a hand in trying prepare his own team of executives.”

The question that is foremost in the media is “Does this signal a shakeup by Ray Ozzie, slated to replace Bill Gates in 2 years?” or is something else going on?

My money is on the idea that something else is going on at Micirosoft and with Taylor. Two years is a long way off and would leave pleanty of time to make a better transition without casting a cloud over a new product roll out.

Did Taylor find a sweeter deal somewhere else? Did he feel passed over somehow? Were unpublished mistakes made or efforts sabataged?

Most importantly how does this fit in the grand scheme of things with all of the other efforts, purchases, and actions by Microsoft this year?

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In an attempt to respond to allegations that Apple’s Manufacturer, Foxconn, might be exploiting workers to manufacture the popular Apple iPod, The Apple Insider has posted the following story with 2 pictures.

I’d like to ask our readers, based on the information available to you and your knowledge of the world, What do you think is happening here?

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Video Conferencing has been around for a few decades. Its become economical within the last decade. Some people use it to chat a bat online, but all in all it hasn’t been adopted by the masses.

When will this technology really take off? It definitely hasn’t reached a tipping point yet despite the advance of VOIP systems, which are popping up in more corporate areas even. However, video conferencing just hasn’t achieved that necessity, not even for many telecomuters. There was a time when most people didn’t have cell phones and even a time when those that had them would only use them in limited conversations. This is very similar to the plight of the web cam. A few people have them and not everyone uses them.

Microsoft has anounced a webcam that is supposed to make chatting easier(see article excerpt at bottom). Now I didn’t realize that this was hard even, but I don’t use one myself. I’ve got about 3-4 webcams in the closet that I’ve purchased over the years, tried out with relatives or friends once or twice and then left them sitting, until a computer upgrade forced me to recognize that I’d wasted another $50 on gadgets that just weren’t useful.

So what about your O reader of Maven Mapper’s, what say you? What will it take for a web cam to come into its own?

Microsoft Gets Chatty With New Webcams - Microsoft Informer - Blog - CIO: “The Webcams come bundled with LifeCam Dashboard software, which lets the user zoom, tilt and pan the Webcam. An optional software service called ‘One-Touch Blogging’ automatically publishes pictures free to the user’s blog on Microsoft’s MSN Spaces. After the LifeCam snaps a picture, the software automatically logs a user in to MSN Spaces and posts the picture as a new blog entry, Cowan said. Users can add text to the photo blog entry before publishing it.”

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In this day and age of swarms of people, wars and terrorists, too much technology with too few people to focus on the noise of data overwhelming us at every point, it is much hard to find justice.

Check out this article How NOT to steal a SideKick II

Its a chronicle or diary of a person who’s friend lost their sidekick in a cab only to have the sidekick used by someone that found it. Their attempts to get the Sidekick back have been extraordinary. Sometimes it takes a real thoughtful fight to prevent things from getting physical and to prevent situations from devolving to the point that someone gets hurt.

This chronicle talks about the steps that this person took to get their property back, and expose the people that took, kept and used it. Its a great chronicle about their fight for justice and the steps we all have to take to fight for our humanity.

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Researchers find hidden Greek text on ‘world’s oldest astronomy computer’: “A team of Greek and British scientists probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism has managed to decipher ancient Greek inscriptions unseen for over 2,000 years, members of the project say. ”

Researchers were able to decipher an additional 1,000 characters off of the shoe box sized device. The brass box found near the Southern Greek island of Antikythera - hence the name. The box was found in 1900 after sitting in a shipwreck under the sea for about 2000 years. It is very corroded and so the translation of text and characters as been a slow and difficult task.

A Scientific American article from June of 1959 describes the works and the concepts of the device at that time, which was suspected of being a mechanical calculating device aka a computer even back in the late 50’s.

There are two definite results that will come of this most recent decipherment of the Antikythera Mechanism.

1. Researchers will keep researching the device hoping to prove its computing capability and push the date of the first computer back by more than 1800 years in execution and take away from Davinci the title of first diagram of the device (maybe he saw an old text of this device, which was described by Ancient Greeks of the day.)

2. Neil Stephenson will write another great novel.

I find the first to be intriguing and the second to be fantastic.
Neil if you heard about this story here first, how about an autograph on one of your books? I’ll supply the book, not looking for any freebies.

Additional comments on Digg.com : An ancient Greek Computer

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