Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It’s just a kooky, Surface-related R&D project for now, but Microsoft’s SurfaceWare holds the promise of optimizing your time-to-alcohol consumption ratio. Combining software with a level-sensing tumbler, SurfaceWare effectively measures the amount of liquid remaining in your glass. The specialized drinking glasses are fitted with a prism that works in combination with Surface’s infrared detecting camera to reflect light as it rises above the level of your beverage. As it empties, Surface will alert bar staff of your progress or automatically purchase another round at just the right time. You certainly don’t want to be wasting time in Vegas waiting on your disco fuel. Video walkthrough after the break.

[Thanks Divesh J.]

Continue reading Microsoft’s SurfaceWare gets you drunk faster than drinks through a straw

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Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Networking

According to a report, Microsoft isn’t just looking at the next version of Windows (no, not Mojave) for future OS possibilities, but is looking beyond the Windows architecture altogether with a project known as Midori. The new OS is still in the “incubation” phase (which puts it slightly closer to market than R&D projects), but Microsoft has admitted to its existence, and the Software Daily Times says at least one team in Redmond is actively working on the new architecture.

The basis for the platform centers around research related to Microsoft’s Singularity project, and envisions a distributed environment where applications, documents, and connectivity are blurred in a cloud-computing phantasmagoria which can be run natively or hosted across multiple systems. The researchers are working to create a concurrent / parallel distribution of resources, as well as a method of handling applications across separate machines — religiously-dubbed the Asynchronous Promise Architecture — which will set the stage for a backwards-compatible operating system built from the ground up, with networks of varying size in mind. Says the SD Times, “The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.” Like it technical? Hit the read link for an in-depth look at the possible shape of Microsoft’s future.

[Via Yahoo!]

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Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment

Another month, another round of layoffs over at Moto. This time, we’re seeing 120 out of the 600 positions in Motorola Labs — the unit responsible for researching pretty much everything ranging from handsets to radio technology — slashed; another 180 are “being reassigned to work in individual business units.” According to the company, the moves from Moto Labs “will help R&D teams work with their business partners to optimize R&D investment and focus on projects that deliver the greatest value for Motorola,” though your guess is as good as our as to what that actually means. Granted, we wouldn’t normally support hacking off a good part of your innovation department, but considering that it’s been stuck in fail mode for far too long, maybe this really is for the best.

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