Microsoft is looking for a better way to make sense of your chicken scratch. The current version of its Tablet PC operating system, which lets computer users control their machines with a pen-like device instead of just a mouse and keyboard, matches people's scrawls against the company's own database of handwriting samples. The idea is to ensure that the unlimited variety of T's that human hands can produce will, in fact, be recognized as T's.

Even though the software, due to appear in devices Nov. 7, can match against the many different types of handwriting in its database, it can't adapt to an individual user's style of writing and learn, for example, that the person never crosses his or her T's. That's been a source of some debate within the company. Chief Software Architect Bill Gates is pushing to let the OS begin to recognize an individual's handwriting quirks and expand the database on that user's machine. But others within Microsoft say such a capability could do more harm than good, and the company would do better to just update the operating system's master database periodically. "There's a big debate about it," Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes said. "On the one hand, it seems obvious, (but) there is a question of if you (let users) put new samples into (their) database, are you going to improve the recognition or are you going degrade the recognition?"