Back a long, long time ago, I had my first encounters with instant messaging, in the form of AOL’s Instant Messenger. An outgrowth of the way things worked with those original bulletin board systems, it sure was convenient, being able to have an online text-based conversation with someone without having to actually talk to them, […]

As OS launches go, Lion appears to be quite successful, particularly when it comes to sales. Yes, there are scattered reports of those infamous version 1.0 bugs, but not the show-stoppers some might have feared. Regardless, some are curious issues, such as the unfortunately predictable crashes reported by author Kirk McElhearn whenever he attempts to view […]

All right, Steve Jobs did show up at this year’s WWDC keynote, but VP Phil Schiller and the rest of the crew did the heavy lifting — at least for the first two parts of the presentation. But let’s get this little nugget out of the way first: Just last week, the Tech Night Owl […]

After talk arose this week about potential suitors for Skype, the popular (but debt-ridden) voice and video communications service, the news arrived that Microsoft would be acquiring the company for a whopping $8.5 billion, all cash. This happens to be the largest transaction ever for the fading software giant. That Microsoft’s stock price dipped after […]