As a typical Apple user I have to bash Microsoft. It comes with the territory. Windows gets most of the hate. Microsoft isn’t all bad as far as products go. Microsoft Office is an excellent office suite, which is only just now being matched by products like OpenOffice. Their keyboard and mouse group make excellent products. Some of the software they have in their labs looks very promising, like Photosynth.
One of their releases from the labs is getting a lot of attention. Unfortunately it’s not the good kind of attention. Microsoft released a piece of audio software called SongSmith. It allows you to sing into your computer microphone and then uses its artificial intelligence to select appropriate backing music. Apparently computers have the same taste in music as 10-year old. I’m not sure if some of the results are hilarious or just painful.
Hello, there. My name is Matt, but on this website I just refer to myself as m@. I love all things Star Wars, food, beer, and music, especially The Beatles. I'm one who likes to be noticed and will sometimes say or do inappropriate things to get your attention. I'm perfectly complimented by my online and real life partner
I know it’s gotten better in the recent past, but I used to have to do an extensive amount of work in Microsoft Word, and that was partially the tipping point for me making the actual switch to Apple and never even springing for Office software.
What Word did, that I hated with similar passion to how I feel when I have to wake up at 5 in the morning, is tried to use its autocorrect function and autoformat function on me constantly. Sure, I figured out ways around it, but Microsoft is much less friendly when it comes to setting preferences like this. I want what I say I want, and the guesses it spewed out were not what I wanted 99% of the time. See? It’s been a good 5 years since I’ve used Microsoft Office on a regular basis and it still pisses me off. :-P