The content below is taken from the original (TechCrunch), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, Jordan Crook & Copyright.

Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and now co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has held his very first AMA on Reddit.

He’s surprisingly good at it, answering over 30 questions and verifying his identity in a number of cute ways (photo at left, video below).

For the record, Gates’ preferred computer is the Microsoft Surface Pro, which he just got a week ago. He also believes that Windows 8 is better than Windows 7: “higher is better.”

“I am using a Perceptive Pixel display right now — huge Windows 8 touch whiteboard,” he wrote. “These will come down in price over time and be pervasive.”

Shockingly, the Microsoft founder also believes that Bing is “the better product at this point, seriously.”

Concerning the future, Gates believes that “robots, pervasive screens, speech interaction will all change the way we look at ‘computers’. Once seeing, hearing, and reading (including handwriting) work very well you will interact in new ways,” he wrote.

As can be expected, a Redditor questioned him about his relationship with Steve Jobs, and he had this to say:

He and I respected each other. Our biggest joint project was the Mac where Microsoft had more people on the project than Apple did as we wrote a lot of applications. I saw Steve regularly over the years including spending an afternoon with him a few months before he tragically passed away.

The software genius mentioned that he doesn’t code as much as he’d like to. “I write some C, C# and some Basic,” he wrote. “I am surprised new languages have not made more progress in simplifying programming. It would be great if most high school kids were exposed to programming.”

Surprisingly, the product Gates was most excited about at Microsoft, but which never made it to release, was WinFS. In essence, WinFS is a smart cloud storage system (a relational database) that would organize files automatically based on various attributes inferred by the system. WinFS was originally meant to ship with Vista, but according to Gates, it was “ahead of its time.”

Gates was also quizzed on his thoughts regarding an open Internet:

Q: What are your thoughts on the push against the open and free Internet that we have been seeing in the recent past and present (such as sopa, etc)?

There are two things this could reference. One is the free/pay for software mix. The Internet has benefited from having lots of free stuff and lots of commercial software. It has been interesting see people inventing hybrid models. Even stuff that is pretty commercial often has free versions for some audiences. Even the most open stuff often have services people choose to pay for.

The second thing is the anonymous versus identified tension. This is another one where both will probably thrive since you want anonymity for some things and full identity for others. I am surprised how little progress has been made in the identity space but it will improve.

He said that the cheapest things give him pleasure now that he’s insanely wealthy. His fave things include cheeseburgers, helping kids, and taking Open Course Ware courses.

You can catch the whole thing right here.

The content below is taken from the original (Geek.com), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, Russell Holly & Copyright.

Even if you’re not the biggest fan of Windows 8, it’s hard to deny that Microsoft’s Surface Pro is an impressive piece of hardware. Fortunately, as was confirmed recently by Microsoft’s Panos Panay shortly before it’s launch, you can install other operating systems on the Surface Pro. After unboxing my new Surface Pro this weekend […]

The content below is taken from the original (The Register), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, (author unknown) & Copyright.

Why you should always see it coming

Analysis I used to know a finance director who had a favourite mantra: “Minimise fixed costs.”…

The content below is taken from the original (TechCrunch), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, Sarah Perez & Copyright.

Google Reader, the RSS feed-reading service Google has long since benignly abandoned, has gone completely mad, and Google has yet to acknowledge the problem even as it heads into its second day of unusability. Users are reporting inaccurate read and unread counts, the reappearance of thousands of old, unread items as new, and, in some cases, the return of feeds users had previously unsubscribed to.

According to mentions on Twitter, the problem started at some point yesterday, but many users are just now noticing it this morning, as they return to work and their usual Monday morning routines. The issues, documented to some extent here, effectively make it impossible to use Google Reader, as you can no longer tell which items are new and which are old. Even timestamps seem to be affected. This is unfortunate because Google Reader remains one of the best pure, feed-reading services on the market, and it also powers the backend of many other news-reading apps, such as Reeder or Feedly, for instance, as well as others like Flipboard, which allows for more casual ways of reading RSS feeds.

It’s fair to say that Google Reader is no longer a priority at Google, given the company’s focus on developing Google+ in the midst of an overall shift to consuming news via social feeds, not the “geekier” RSS technology. RSS, as a consumer-facing tool on the front end never caught on with mainstream users. Most still have no idea what RSS means, or why there are little orange “feed” icons on their favorite websites.

That being said, Google Reader continues to have a core, highly engaged audience of more tech-savvy folks. These people, self included, may be holdouts from a previous era of the web – a time when there weren’t Twitters and Flipboards and Google+’s, even, for social news reading and sharing.

Yet while these users are members of a small community (and dwindling), they tend to be active users and influencers. According to some of our previous posts on Google Reader, there are at least a few hundred of these people left who cared enough to comment about Google Reader’s changes – that is, its forced transition to a part of the Google+ infrastructure back in fall 2011.

The beloved network, eventually steamrolled by Google+, was also the focus of a BuzzFeed profile on “Google’s Lost Social Network” just a couple of months ago, demonstrating that there continues to be an ongoing interest in the service, even if Google no longer cares much about its existence…or apparently, its continuing functionality.

 We’ve reached out to Google for comment earlier this morning, and are awaiting a response. A message from on the Google Reader forum states: “The Google Reader team has been notified and someone will be looking into this.” Originally we said that message was from a Googler; that is not the case. 

The content below is taken from the original (Geek.com), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, Matthew Humphries & Copyright.

Speed cameras on major highways have caught many a driver breaking the speed limit, but in South Africa, they’ve also recently flashed a skateboarder going a little too fast. However, he was on a skateboard, not driving a car, so you’d think he would avoid prosecution. But that’s not the case and he’s now facing […]

The content below is taken from the original (Citrix Blogs), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, Lori Serure & Copyright.

Attention Partners: My Citrix will be replaced on February 28 when it evolves into Partner Central, a new, exclusive web portal for partners. At Partner Central, you’ll find everything you need to manage and enhance your Citrix partnership, including partner-specific resources, tools and programs to help you successfully sell Citrix solutions and products. You’ll still have access using your current password and once you’re inside the new…

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The content below is taken from the original (TechCrunch), to continue reading please visit the site. Remeember to respect the Author, Darrell Etherington & Copyright.

Microsoft’s $999 128GB Surface Pro has sold out in the online Microsoft Store in the U.S. (via WinBeta), just a few hours after going on sale today, February 9. The 64GB version is still available as of this writing, and the Surface Pro is still likely in stock at physical retail locations like Best Buy, where it also went on sale today, although checking the stock levels via their online tool reports the Surface Pro as “Unavailable” across the board.

The Surface Pro is Microsoft’s more powerful, Intel-powered Windows 8 tablet, which runs the full version of Windows 8 unlike the Surface RT and can handle full-fledged Windows desktop applications. In the TC review, John Biggs said that the Pro was a much more compelling device than the RT, in part because of its ability to run software that enterprise IT departments depend upon from legacy windows installations.

The Surface RT sold out of the $500 32GB model within one day, but the Pro’s more expensive model has sold out even faster. That could indicate that users are placing a higher value on storage with the Pro, which is marketed as a device much more suited to getting serious work done than the Surface RT. The 64GB model remains in stock for now, and given that there’s only $100 price difference to trade up to double the storage capacity with the 128GB version, that’s not surprising.

Storage was recently the subject of a number of back-and-forth reports regarding the Surface, with some claiming Microsoft left little room on-device for personal files once you accounted for the Windows 8 OS install. Ed Bott reported earlier todays on the actual storage numbers, which beat the original estimates by a fair amount, but the free space on the 64GB version still represents a 200 percent increase from the actual usable space on the base Surface Pro model.

The 128GB Surface Pro is still available to order from the Microsoft Store online in Canada as of this publication date, and you may still be able to grab one by visiting a physical retail location.