X-Nico

51 unusual facts about Microsoft


400 George Street

Office tenants in the building include Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Barristers Chambers, Conrad Gargett Riddel (Architecs), Cooper Grace Ward Lawyers, Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (Queensland), Department of Justice and Attorney General, Department of Human Services, InterGen, Microsoft, Newcrest Mining Limited, NTI Limited, Smarter Kids and Queensland Reconstruction Authority.

A.P.N.G. Enterprises

Starlight Runner Entertainment and Jeff Gomez produced the Story Bible for James Cameron's sci-fi feature Avatar for Twentieth Century Fox and developed the Story Bible for the video game HALO for Microsoft and for the Tron franchise.

Accton Technology Corporation

In April 2009, it was revealed that CSIRO reached a settlement with 14 companies including Accton plus other major technology companies —Hewlett-Packard, Asus, Intel, Dell, Toshiba, Netgear, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, 3Com, Buffalo Technology, Microsoft, and Nintendo— on the condition that CSIRO did not broadcast the resolution.

Alfaskop

From 1994 these companies were co-operating closely and delivering network technologies, Microsoft solutions, and systems integration.

August 2006 in video gaming

In a discussion at Microsoft Gamefest, security development engineer David Weinstein warns of active organized crime on MMORPG servers.

Binary search algorithm

Microsoft's .NET Framework 2.0 offers static generic versions of the binary search algorithm in its collection base classes.

Bpeace

Bpeace's primary donors include grassroots support members who pay dues, family foundations, and corporations such as Citibank and Microsoft.

Brendan Sullivan

He also sued Microsoft, on behalf of nine state attorneys general who were unhappy with the federal government's decision to drop the Microsoft antitrust case.

Cambridge Network

Chairman of Cambridge Network Ltd is Bill Parsons recently EVP of ARM, and current Board Members include founder Hermann Hauser, Prof Lynn Gladden Pro V-C of Cambridge University, David Halstead of Deloitte, Hugh Parnell of NW Brown, Prof Michael Thorne V-C of Anglia Ruskin University, Peter Taylor of TTP Group and Ken Woodberry of Microsoft.

CellarTracker

CellarTracker was created in 2003 after creator Eric LeVine, then a programmer at Microsoft, had made the program for himself, tracking his wine.

École des technologies numériques appliquées

Students of ETNA can prepare major certifications (Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Oracle).

ECustoms

Visual Compliance includes online adhoc denied party screening, restricted party screening, batch screening as well as screening solutions that can be integrated into most ERP and CRM systems including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Salesforce and most in-house developed systems.

Find My Phone

Microsoft's My Windows Phone service offers a free facility called "Find my Phone" for phones running Windows Phone.

Finjan, Inc. v. Secure Computing Corp.

3. Secure Computing disagreed with the $9.18 million damage amount for infringement of three patents by identifying the fact that Microsoft acquired a license to Finjan's complete patent portfolio for only $8 million.

Fort Gay, West Virginia

In 2010, Fort Gay was in the news when a resident of the town had his Xbox Live account suspended for writing "fort gay WV" as his location, as Microsoft has language policies that prohibit references to homosexuality.

Game Center Arashi

In 2004 Microsoft Tokyo used the character of Arashi as a mascot to boost Xbox sales and image.

Harriet Miers

As a commercial litigator, she represented clients including Microsoft and the Walt Disney Company.

Home Energy Saver

Microsoft, the first organization to license the Home Energy Saver, uses it to drive Microsoft Hohm.

HomeRF

The group was disbanded in January 2003 after other wireless networks became accessible to home users and Microsoft began including support for them in its Windows operating systems.

Introsort

The Microsoft .NET Framework Class Library, starting from version 4.5 (2012), uses Introsort instead of simple QuickSort.

January 2006 in video gaming

Microsoft lowers its estimate of Xbox 360 sales in its first 90 days from 2.75–3.0 million units to 2.5 million due to supply shortage.

July 2006 in video gaming

Microsoft announces that it will release a handheld to rival the iPod.

June 2006 in video gaming

Peter Moore, Microsoft's head of the Interactive Entertainment Business, is named Chairman of the Association of Electronic Interactive Marketers (AEIM).

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Microsoft founder and chairman Bill Gates announces he will be stepping down from day-to-day responsibilities to be more active in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Kent School

In 1995, Kent partnered with Microsoft, Toshiba and 29 other pioneer schools creating the Anytime Anywhere Learning program.

Microsoft Mail

Microsoft Mail (or MSMail) was the name given to several early Microsoft e-mail products.

Microsoft Max

Microsoft Max was the codename for a prototype software application developed by Microsoft.

Microsoft Music Central

Microsoft Music Central was a music encyclopedia on CD-ROM produced by Microsoft, similar to their Cinemania product and part of the Microsoft Home range.

Microsoft Schedule Plus

Microsoft Schedule Plus (or Microsoft Schedule+) was a time management software product developed by Microsoft, but was discontinued as part of Microsoft Office when most of its functionality was incorporated into Outlook 97.

Microsoft UI Automation

Microsoft UI Automation (UIA) is an Application Programming Interface that allows one to access, identify, and manipulate UI elements of another application.

Mohawk Voice

Mohawk also enables users to use the Microsoft text-to-speech engine, which gives them the ability to have what they type in chat, and what is typed to them, spoken out loud in the voice of Microsoft Sam.

Pancake sorting

The problem is notable as the only well-known mathematics paper ever written by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (as William Gates), entitled "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal".

Parc Bit

Many innovation research centres of enterprises related with tourism are placed here, such as Trivago or Microsoft.

PBA Bowling Tour: 2000 Season

In other news this season, the PBA was sold to three former Microsoft executives in April, who planned to make the PBA a for-profit business.

Picture Perfect Morning

The video for Good Times was included as part of the multimedia samples included on Microsoft's Windows 95 Companion CD-ROM.

Project Gotham Racing

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates has described Project Gotham as his favorite video game.

ROOD

ROOD also criticised the fact that this site was obviously linked to MSN, which means free publicity for Microsoft.

Sack of Aquileia

This sack appears as part of the final scenario in the Attila the Hun campaign in the Microsoft computer game Age of Empires II: The Conquerors.

Service Pack 2

Note: Service Pack 2 may also refer to patches released for a number of other Microsoft products.

Suginami, Tokyo

Microsoft has a branch office in the Daitabashi Asahi Seimei Building in Izumi.

Taguspark

In an area of approximately 3.6 km², 2 km² of which are occupied by the Park, there are several research and development labs, innovative startups and business incubators in a range of fields such as information technologies (e.g. Microsoft, MIPS Technologies), telecommunications, electronics, materials, production, energy, environment, biotechnologies and fine chemistry.

The Code-Breakers

Intel, IBM, Sun and Microsoft all seem to agree that FOSS is a welcome presence in computer software.

The Timothy Plan

Among the better known companies that don't meet the plan's guidelines are General Electric, The Coca-Cola Company, Microsoft, Starbucks, Time Warner and Walt Disney Company.

Threedegrees

threedegrees or 3° (frequently referred to as Three Degrees) was a communication and P2P application produced by Microsoft.

Tim Lees

He has performed and choreographed many football skills commercials including Coca-Cola Street Striker where Wayne Rooney headed the campaign later shown on Sky One, a Toni & Guy UK tour and at Wembley Stadium for Microsoft.

UK Council for Child Internet Safety

On 29 September 2008 Children's Secretary Ed Balls and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith announced the launch of UKCCIS, which was supported by organisations including Google,Yahoo, BT, Microsoft, and Facebook, and which had an initial brief to deliver a "Child Internet Safety Strategy" to Prime Minister Gordon Brown in early 2009.

Upstate South Carolina

Clemson University, BMW, IBM, Microsoft, and Michelin have combined their resources to create International Center for Automotive Research (ICAR), a research park that specializes in the development of automotive technology.

Wazimbo

The song was featured first in a Microsoft commercial in California and in 2001 was part of the song track for the movie 'The Pledge' directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson.

Windows Mobile Smartphone

The Windows Mobile OS was born out of a brief partnership between Sendo, a British telecommunications manufacturer and Microsoft.

WorldMark

Some of their renowned landmark buildings include ITC Green Centre, ITC Royal Gardenia, Grand Hyatt, Maurya Sheraton, Corporate offices in Delhi NCR of Ranbaxy, Microsoft & Ericsson etc.

XM1216 Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle

The XM1216 can either be remotely manned, or manipulated through use of a Microsoft Xbox 360 gamepad fitted with speciality drivers.


Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated AI2) is a research institute funded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen to achieve scientific breakthroughs by constructing AI systems with reasoning, learning and reading capabilities.

AMD mobile platform

Both low-power APU versions feature two Bobcat x86 cores and fully support DirectX11, DirectCompute (Microsoft programming interface for GPU computing) and OpenCL (cross-platform programming interface standard for multi-core x86 and accelerated GPU computing).

Amped: Freestyle Snowboarding

The video game also contains three songs from band Ink & Dagger's album The Fine Art of Original Sin. In 2005, former drummer Ryan McLaughlin sued Microsoft, claiming that they were used without the band's knowledge.

Appleseed Foundation

The current co-chairs are Eric Koenig, retired from Microsoft and Susan Haller of Sprint Nextel.

Beetroot Design Group

Clients include cultural institutions such as the Benaki Museum, the Onassis Cultural Centre and the Thessaloniki Museum of Photography, as well as multinational corporations such as Lidl, Microsoft, Corbis and Nestlé.

CellarTracker

Created in 2003 by Eric LeVine, a former Microsoft program manager, CellarTracker has grown to be one of the world's most comprehensive wine databases.

Comparison of the Java and .NET platforms

Rather than using Java, HD DVD (the defunct high definition successor to DVD) used a technology jointly developed by Microsoft and Disney called HDi that was based on XML, CSS, JavaScript, and other technologies that are comparable to those used by standard Web browsers.

Derrick Fung

As part of the undergraduate program, he interned at Microsoft in Marketing, BNP Paribas in Equity Derivative Sales and on the trading floor of Merrill Lynch in 2009 as the first class after the merger with Bank of America.

DV

DV Audio/Video data can be stored as raw DV data stream file (data is written to a file as the data is received over FireWire, file extensions are .dv and .dif) or the DV data can be packed into container files (ex: Microsoft AVI, Apple MOV).

Dynamic DNS

Microsoft developed alternative technology (GSS-TSIG) based on Kerberos authentication.

Ensemble Studios

Ensemble Studios was a video game developer initially established in 1995 as an independent company by Tony Goodman, Rick Goodman and John Boog-Scott, but was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 and operated as an internal studio until 2009, when it was officially disbanded.

FON

Bill: (named for Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft): has a Fonera router, shares Wi-Fi, gets free roaming at any Fon Spot, and can get 50% of the net revenues when a visitor purchases a Fon pass at their Fon Spot.

Franz Guenthner

Guenthner's research interests include computational linguistics, and has collaborated to the development of a number of online search platforms since 1996: AltaVista, Fast Search and Transfer (now purchased by Microsoft), RealNames, JobaNova, Exorbyte, All The Web, etc.

Gatesian

Bill Gates (born 1955), American businessman and co-founder of Microsoft Corporation

Gwen Bell

The story of the early history of the computer museums as The Digital Computer Museum at Digital Equipment Corp. in Maynard MA (1975), The Computer Museum Marlboro MA (1979-1984), moving to Boston (1984-1999) prior to its move to Silicon Valley as The Computer Museum History Center (1995-2000) and becoming the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA (2000) is given in Gordon Bell's Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2011-44, Out of a Closet: The Early Years of the Computer Museums.

In Search of the Pope's Children

He then made the claim that 87% of Ireland's exports generated by multinational companies such as Microsoft, Apple Computer, Dell, Intel, and Google, implying that decisions made in New York boardrooms have a far greater effect on the Irish economy than decisions made in the Dáil.

InstallFree

The InstallFree MiniBridge executables can be distributed using existing Electronic Software Distribution (ESD) utilities such as Microsoft's System Center Configuration Manager and other MSI based software distribution platforms.

Institut de recherche et d'innovation

Originally founded by Bernard Stiegler and the Centre Pompidou, the IRI became an independent body in 2008, co-sponsored by the Centre Pompidou, the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona, and Microsoft France.

International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad

It is close to HITEC City (a centre housing software development centres of companies like Microsoft, Oracle Corporation, Motorola, Infosys and GE Capital) and the presence of IT majors from across the globe right on the campus through their schools and research centers.

J Allard

Allard headed up the team at Microsoft that created the two-screen tablet prototype called Courier.

Java Champions

In 2006, the Java Champions supported Michael Kölling in his attempts to get Microsoft to withdraw their patent application that would have stopped BlueJ.

Ken Nicholson

He was the founder of GamePC Consortium and inventor of the technology used by Microsoft as the basis for Windows' DirectX graphics.

Language Interface Pack

Unlike MUI packs which are available only to Microsoft volume license customers and for select SKUs of Windows Vista, a Language Interface Pack is available freely and can be installed on a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows or Office and a fixed base language.

Lori Elberg

Lori's video "Spiderman Gets No Love" was featured on Cinemanow.com and Microsoft's Windows Media, was on the cover of Britain's New Media Age and featured in The Wall Street Journal in an article about internet video in 2001.

Marco Iansiti

Iansiti and Sinofsky discuss the approach Sinofsky took within the Windows and Windows Live Group at Microsoft to bridge this gap during the development of the Windows 7 operating system.

Michael Cowpland

In 1996, he offered a challenge to Microsoft with a move into productivity software, acquiring WordPerfect from Novell for $158 million.

Microsoft Binary Format

In computing, Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) was a format for floating point numbers used in Microsoft's BASIC language products including MBASIC, QuickBasic and GW-BASIC.

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft now appears to be positioning a combination of Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Live Communications Server, Live Meeting and Sharepoint as its collaboration software of choice.

Microsoft Live Labs

Live Labs was headed by Dr. Gary William Flake, who prior to joining Microsoft was a principal scientist at Yahoo! Research Lab and former head of research at the Web portal's Overture Services division.

MinWin

Several months after Traut's demonstration, some confusion arose from an interview by Ina Fried of CNET's News.com with Steven Sinofsky, the vice-president of Windows engineering at Microsoft.

MoviePlus

The latest release, MoviePlus X6, runs on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7.

National Film Festival for Talented Youth

Once again Nike sponsored a 48-hour student filmmaking competition, and the keynote panel, moderated by Nicholas de Wolff, featured "Social Network" Producer Dana Brunetti, Web series pioneer Hayden Black, Studio marketing leader Valerie van Galder, Microsoft head of Global Community Affairs Tim Dubel, and documentary filmmaker Stan Emert.

OpenVMS

Roger Gourd was the project lead for the Starlet program, with software engineers Dave Cutler (who would later lead development of Microsoft's Windows NT), Dick Hustvedt, and Peter Lippman acting as the technical project leaders, each having responsibility for a different area of the operating system.

Rémy Belvaux

On 4 February 1998 he was one of the four people (including Noël Godin and Jan Bucquoy), one of which who threw a cream pie in the face of the American businessman and Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, during Gates' visit to Brussels.

System Center Advisor

Microsoft System Center Advisor (SCA; formerly Codename Atlanta), is a commercial software as a service offering from Microsoft Corporation that helps change or assess the configuration of Microsoft Servers software over the Internet.

Tina Wood

Tina was the Show Production Executive Producer for Microsoft's nightly "Xbox @ E3 Live" 2013 streaming coverage on Xbox Live, which reunited her with former G4 personalities Kevin Pereira and Morgan Webb.

Tokyo Opera City Tower

The fifth through fifty-second floors are devoted to office space; the building's best-known tenants are NTT East Corp., Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc.

Trusted Computing

The Microsoft products Windows Vista and Windows 7 make use of a Trusted Platform Module to facilitate BitLocker Drive Encryption.

Two-sided market

Relative to Apple computer’s initial pricing, Microsoft also steeply discounted systems developer toolkits (SDKs) leading to more rapid development of applications for MS Windows.

Van Wolverton

Wolverton has written other computer books, addressing MS-DOS, IBM OS/2, Microsoft Windows, WordPerfect, Netscape FastTrack, VisiCalc, QBasic and more.

Virtual chargeback

While numerous tools exist for tracking asset utilisation in a traditional sense (such as Microsoft's Operations Manager), they are considered by some to be of limited use when it comes to virtual machines.

Windows Meeting Space

For collaboration over the Internet, Microsoft has released Microsoft SharedView, which can work through firewalls using HTTP if necessary.

XPS

Open XML Paper Specification (XPS or OpenXPS), an open royalty-free fixed-layout document format developed by Microsoft

Xuedong Huang

From 2000 to 2004, Huang served as general manager of Microsoft's Speech Platforms Group, where he led both the business and engineering teams that shipped Microsoft Speech Server and other voice technologies used in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Windows Mobile and Microsoft Exchange Server.