The other day, unable to take it anymore, we sucked it up and ordered HBO. We needed our fix immediately. When the order went through and we were ready to binge watch, it wasnt our cable box we turned on, but our Xbox. This news, I am sure, would be music to Microsofts ears. It may have launched the Xbox 360 in 2005 as a gaming machine filled with games for gamers, but somewhere in the middle of that long lifecycle it decided to focus what seemed to be the majority of its efforts on making Xbox...

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Microsoft on Wednesday confirmed that the next Xbox video game console, codenamed Durango, will be revealed to the public at a special event at its Redmond campus on May 21. That event will kick off a multi event unveiling which will continue through June, and then the release of the device, which is expected in early November. On March 28, I exclusively revealed via Twitter that Microsoft had changed the original reveal date for the next Xbox from April 24 to May 21. So yesterday’s...

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According to an internal Microsoft e mail sent to all full time employees working on the next Xbox, Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today Internet. It continues, There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should just work regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu ray disc, watching...

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If you were hoping to play your vast collection of Xbox 360 games on Microsoft latest creation, weve got a spot of bad news. Microsoft Xbox Live VP Marc Whitten confirmed to that the new Xbox One console will have no backwards compatibility whatsoever. No, there not, said Whitten, when we posed the question. The system is based on a different core architecture, so back compat doesnt really work from that perspective. Technologically speaking, it not wholly a surprise that backwards compatibility...

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The panel will pick 3 grand prize winners who each will receive a Windows Phone 8 and a Surface Pro, and 17 first prize winners who each will receive a Windows Phone 8. All winning apps will be evaluated for featured slots in the Windows Phone Store. The challenge starts today, May 20, 2013. You have through June 30, 2013, to submit your app for this porting challenge. Winners will be announced July 19, 2013, at the PhoneGap Day event in Portland, Oregon. The challenge is open to developers in...

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Microsoft’s Windows 8 platform hasn’t exactly been the catalyst PC makers were looking for as sales continue to slide, but the new operating system does seem to be making some progress. IHS-owned market research firm Displaybank says that of the 46 million notebook computers that shipped during the first quarter this year, 4.57 million of them included touchscreens, Digitimes reported. That figure is good for a 10% share of the global market and is up a healthy 51.8% from the fourth...

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If you think the private messages you send over Skype are protected by end to end encryption, think again. The Microsoft owned service regularly scans message contents for signs of fraud, and company managers may log the results indefinitely, Ars has confirmed. And this can only happen if Microsoft can convert the messages into human readable form at will. With the help of independent privacy and security researcher Ashkan Soltani, Ars used Skype to send a four Web links that were created solely...

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As you can see from one of the messages, apparently there was an image link at the bottom of the Bing Home page that opened up this chat window.  Only going by what we see here, this doesnt appear to be a connection into your Microsoft account or Skype messaging contacts, but rather a way for anyone searching for a particular search term to anonymously? connect with others searching for the same thing. Would you use Bing Live chat?  The mind reels at all of the unseemly ways this might be put to...

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