David Coursey

When I first heard on the radio that secret information had been found hidden in a document given to media by the U.S. military in Iraq, my first thought was Microsoft Word. Most people dont realize how much information Word (along with PowerPoint and Excel) stores with your document, including previous versions and some changes. […]

Jim Allchin, group vice president of Microsofts Platforms Group, says todays anti-virus software isnt doing the job and shouldnt be the first line of defense against malicious software. During a wide-ranging interview at the WinHEC conference this week in Seattle, Allchin said hes noted a rise in the incidence of small attacks—perhaps targeted at only […]

Enterprise customers may go to 64-bit computing and Longhorn not so much for what they are as for what they arent. Count on it (because Microsoft is): Longhorn and 64-bit will sell because they arent Windows XP and 32-bit. They will sell not because they are loved or because they get people genuinely excited, but […]

Am I alone, or is Microsoft Longhorn pretty much an amorphous ooze? I mean, weve been hearing about the wonders of Longhorn, and more recently the incredible shrinking wonders of Longhorn, since 2003. The one part of the new OS that got me excited, the object-oriented file system, has been delayed, and the rest, despite […]

The first three months of 2005 have been a special time for Apple Computer. If you dont believe it, look at the companys financial results, which were released Wednesday. Among the highlights: CPU sales were up 43 percent from year-ago numbers and iPod sales increased by 558 percent! This isnt a column about the iPod, […]

Whats smaller than a Tablet PC but larger than a Pocket PC? I dont know, at least not for sure, but I am expecting Bill Gates to clue me in real soon. My colleague, Mary Jo Foley, has been hearing rumors of a new small form factor device thats been making the rounds at Microsoft. […]

One of the most important decisions each of us makes—and we do this hundreds, maybe thousands of times each day—is who or what to trust. Who or what can I trust? Thats the question I ask myself when someone presents me with a research study or when I seek the opinion of an industry analyst. […]

A research report landed on my desk this week, the conclusions of which will be controversial to a few readers. But for the rest of us the report independently confirms what we already knew or suspected. It also tends to confirm what Microsoft has been saying, slaps down some zealots and reminds us that media […]

What do you suppose our enemies would pay for a device capable of identifying all the Americans walking down the street in a foreign city? And why might the U.S. Department of State be making such a weapon possible? Were talking about a plan to embed RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips into U.S. passports, which the […]

This morning I turned on my computer and had barely sat down when an IM from my friend and fellow Microsoft SBS admin, Susan Bradley, appeared. “Dont install SP1,” it read, the service pack in question being the brand new release for Windows Server 2003. It turns out that Microsoft Small Business Server, which is […]