Could Windows 7 use on touchscreen tech?

Microsoft revealed earlier this week that Windows Vista's successor - codenamed Windows 7 - is scheduled to be released in 2010. But what the company is not making clear is what new features the OS will have, a topic that has become fodder for educated speculation. Analysts said Microsoft is probably keeping tight-lipped about what Windows 7 will look like because at this point, company engineers and executives don't even know. "They don't want to commit because they don't have a good idea what's in it," said Gartner analyst Michael Silver. "We're three years out, so you can't really expect that much detail."Michael Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, said with so many people still in the midst of upgrading to the latest client OS, Windows Vista, he's hesitant to speculate on what might be in Windows 7. "We barely know the features of the one we just got," he said. Windows Vista includes new features such as desktop search and a new user interface, which also are two areas that leave room for expansion in Windows 7, analysts said.Microsoft has shown the direction it's going with the latter with its Surface computer, introduced in late May. That form factor looks like a coffee table with a touchscreen interface that lets users move photos around by hand synchronise devices by placing them on the table. View: Full Article @ PC Advisor Read full story...

 


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With Black Hat approaching, Apple in a rush to patch?

With security researchers set to reveal details of a critical security flaw in the iPhone at the Black Hat 2007 conference next week, Apple Inc. now has fewer than seven days to patch a critical vulnerability in the product. The iPhone hack is one of several disclosures planned that could lead to fireworks as more than 3,000 hackers and security professionals converge at Caesars Palace Las Vegas for the annual confab. The iPhone hack, which was first reported Monday by Independent Security Evaluators, showed how hackers could retrieve data from a victim's iPhone, by tricking them into visiting a malicious Web site. If Apple were to patch the iPhone, it would be the company's first ever software update for the product, which began shipping in late June. Apple representatives couldn't say whether or not a patch should be delivered by the time researchers from Independent Security Evaluators disclose their findings next Thursday, but according to Black Hat Director Jeff Moss, the iPhone maker has had "plenty of time" to patch its product. "It would be nice if they patched it," he said. Patching the iPhone flaw would also show that Apple had made the right decision in reserving the right to patch the phone itself instead of handing over control of the iPhone software to the mobile carrier companies, as is common practice with mobile phones.  View: The full story News source: ComputerWorld Read full story...

 


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Mozilla, Thunderbird Facing Trial Separation

Mozilla may separate from Thunderbird, its stand-alone e-mail client, the company's CEO has disclosed. In a posting to her blog Wednesday, CEO Mitchell Baker said that Mozilla's first priority is, and will continue to be, its open-source browser, Firefox. "As a result, Mozilla doesn't focus on Thunderbird as much as we do browsing and Firefox and we don't expect this to change in the foreseeable future," said Baker.Thunderbird's community, which includes a large number of unpaid programmers, should be cut loose "to determine its own destiny," she said. The e-mail app, which was just updated to version 2.0.0.5 last week, is Mozilla's answer to Microsoft Outlook and Entourage, and other stand-alone e-mailers such as Mail, which is bundled with Mac OS X. Like Firefox, it's free to download, and comes in editions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. View: The full story News source: PCWorld Read full story...

 


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Windows Vista unreadiness revealed

Microsoft has finally outlined the extent to which Windows Vista was unfit for the marketplace when it launched six months ago. A mere 650 applications were certified for Vista when it launched, compared to 2,000 now. Seventy "critical" enterprise applications from corporate mainstays such as Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks, McAfee, Citrix Systems, Oracle, SAP and IBM are "being resolved daily."On hardware, 600,000 devices have been certified in the six months since launch, now making Windows Vista compatible with 2.1 million devices. The numbers were offered by chief operating officer Kevin Turner, who tried to rally Wall Street analysts to the Microsoft flag of software - including Windows Vista - plus services. View: The full story News source: The Reg Read full story...

 


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AMD silences quad-core critics

AMD has released benchmark data for its upcoming Barcelona quad-core server processor, and has demonstrated a quad-core Phenom desktop processor running at 3GHz. Barcelona is scheduled to ship in August. Phenom is slated for release in the fourth quarter of this year, although AMD has yet to say at which clock speeds the first chips will run. AMD came under fire last month when it announced that its Barcelona quad-core server processor would ship at 2GHz, sparking speculation that it would not be able to deliver on an earlier promise to outperform Intel's chips. Intel, by comparison, is shipping a 2.66GHz X5355 Xeon quad-core chip as its fastest server processor and has a 3GHz model for workstations. The chip maker has gained market share in the server market in recent months. AMD boasted at its Technology Analyst Day at its Silicon Valley headquarters that its processor outperformed a 2.33GHz Intel Xeon quad-core processor by 25 per cent in the SPECfp_rate2006 benchmark, and claimed a 30 per cent advantage on the performance-per-watt metric. View: The full story News source: vnunet Read full story...

 


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AMD Promises "DirectX 10+" Graphics Chips Next Year

Advanced Micro Devices said on Thursday that even though its ATI Radeon HD 2000-series graphics chips family has experienced massive delays, the company is still positioned to deliver competitive graphics solutions to the market place. ATI, graphics product group of AMD, will concentrate on releasing "DirectX 10+" graphics chips next year as well as on improving the multi-GPU technology. "In the enthusiast segment you can't sit still. So, we will refresh Spider [AMD's 2007 enthusiast platform - Editor] and will certainly bring quad-cores on 45nm in 2008, we will have a new enthusiast chipset and certainly we will have a new high-end GPU family as well in 2008 on the Leo platform," said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of graphics product group, at AMD's Technology Analyst Day. Unfortunately, not a lot of information is known about AMD's code-named R700 graphics product family. What was released was that the new graphics cores will support DirectX 10+ capabilities, PCI Express 2.0 interconnection, ATI Avivo HD video engine, universal video decoding (UVD), DisplayPort connector as well as ATI CrossFire multi-GPU technology. View: The full story News source: Xbit Labs Read full story...

 


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Will The Chip War Be Lost In The Margins?

Sometimes it pays to just miss living down to the analysts' worst expectations, and it can cost to fall just short of fulfilling their rosiest ones. In the week following the second-quarter earnings reports from chip rivals Advanced Micro Devices and Intel, the market has seen fit to mildly punish Intel despite impressive net income, while giving AMD a slight bump despite an operating loss of $457 million. How could this be? The answer, analysts say, is in the margins. Intel reported 2Q gross margin of 46.9 percent, more than a point lower than the chip giant's projected figure and three points lower than the 50 percent rate that the market seems to consider a crucial jumping off point. Meanwhile, even as AMD's gross margin came in at an unimpressive 33 percent, that figure was a marked increase over the first quarter's 28 percent -- even if it was a far cry from the heady days of 2006, when the vendor reported 57 percent margins in the second quarter. Going forward, one has to think that hitting the mark on margins has to be a major concern for Intel and AMD as the chip rivals head into the second half of the year. In last week's earnings call, Intel projected 52 percent gross margin, plus or minus a couple of points, for the third quarter. With a much steeper path to the magic 50 percent figure, AMD nevertheless targeted that number for some point in 2008 during its call.  View: The full story News source: CRN Read full story...

 


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Microsoft Rolls Out Key Development Tool Betas

Within the next few days, Microsoft will release key development technology to help developers build applications across a variety of platforms, including the Web, desktops, servers and mobile devices. In an interview with eWEEK at the Microsoft campus here July 25, S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the developer division, said Microsoft was about to release Visual Studio 2008 beta 2, the .Net Framework 3.5 beta 2, and Silverlight 1.0 RC (release candidate), "and we're going to make available a Visual Studio add-in so you can use Visual Studio to target Silverlight 1.0, the RC version." "All of these things are coming out and we're putting on the very, very final touches," Somasegar said. "We're going to provide Go Live licenses both for Silverlight 1.0 RC as well as for Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 betas, so that as you as a customer or developer or early adopter want to take a bet on any of these technologies and be able to build and deliver experiences and applications in a production environment. You can do that with these products and we will work with you on that."  View: The full story News source: eWeek Read full story...

 


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Dell Software Promo Rankles Microsoft Partners

Dell is quietly selling Microsoft Open License software at cost as part of a three-week promotion that runs until the end of July, CMP Channel has learned. In an email viewed by CMP Channel, Dell approaches customers directly and extends the offer to products such as SQL, Exchange, Office 2007, Windows Vista, Windows Server Standard, Small Business Server, Client Access Licenses, Project, and SharePoint. However, Microsoft isn't aware of any Dell promotions that offer Open License software at cost, according to a company spokesperson. Dell did not return emails and phone calls seeking comment. Customers typically buy licenses for Microsoft software through a volume license agreement, which can be an Open License, Select Agreement, or Enterprise Agreement. While partners can buy Open License agreements from distributors and sell them to customers, customers can only buy Select and Enterprise Agreements only directly from Microsoft's large account resellers (LARs), one of which is Dell. What's puzzling about the promotion is that it's not listed on Dell's website and doesn't appear in Google search results, said a solution provider who partners with both vendors. "It seems to me as though Dell is quietly soliciting their customer base and trying to capture the business, without attracting much attention in the process," said the source.  View: The full story News source: CRN Read full story...

 


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New Intel IGP Driver to deliver boost? Mobo makers say no!

Although Intel will try to deliver better graphics performance by introducing new drivers for its integrated graphics processors (IGPs), motherboard makers in Taiwan generally doubt the advancements that Intel is claiming. Intel plans to introduce new drivers for its G965, GM965 and G35 chipsets to support Vertex Shader 3.0 in August. Two new drivers, 15.6 and 14.31, will be introduced to support Windows Vista and XP respectively.These new drivers are claimed to enhance stability significantly and support Shader Model 4.0. The drivers are also said to add better support for games including Stalker, UT2004 and Guild Wars, allowing the IGPs to deliver a noticeable performance leap. Although the upcoming drivers mark an improvement, motherboard makers from Taiwan note that the revealed information from Intel shows that these drivers still do not support a certain number of well-known games. This prompts them to believe that the drivers will not actually deliver much of a difference. View: The full story News source: DigiTimes Read full story...

 


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Mozilla flaw attack code published

Mozilla is working on patching its Firefox browser after a hacker posted details of a flaw that could let criminals run unauthorized software on a victim's machine. The flaw lies in Firefox's URL handler component, which was the source of another bug Mozilla disclosed Tuesday. This second flaw was disclosed Tuesday by Billy Rios and Nathan McFeters, security consultants with Verisign and Ernst & Young respectively. Like the first flaw, this one could be exploited by attackers to launch programs on the victim's PC without authorization, said Tyler Reguly, a security research engineer at nCircle Network Security. "They're both related to the URL handling process," he said "It's just different errors within that handling process." Even though the code posted by Rios and McFeters can only be used to launch software that is already installed on a victim's PC, it could be very dangerous if used by criminals, Reguly said. "It's still letting you run any program that exists on the user's computer," he said. "You can make it do some fairly bad things. For example, having it use command-line FTP to download a malicious file off a server somewhere and then execute that file."  View: The full story News source: InfoWorld Read full story...

 


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U.S. Standards Committee Still Undecided on Open XML

A key U.S. standards committee remains undecided about whether it will support a document standard proposed by Microsoft Corp., even while the company asserted that the committee has already signalled its "yes" in an upcoming vote. The International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) said this week it still hasn't decided whether it will vote in favor of Open XML in the upcoming ISO vote that would make the file format an international standard. However, Microsoft believes the U.S. vote will be in favor of Open XML, a format it created for its Office 2007 suite, because of a proposed ballot it said the INCITS executive board put out last week.The INCITS represents U.S. interests in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a global standards body that is scheduled to vote on standardizing Open XML on Sept. 2. Open XML is an alternative to Open Document Format for XML (ODF), which has already been approved by the ISO and is used in rival Office suites from IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc.  View: The full story News source: PCWorld Read full story...

 


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Apple, Sony sued over faulty batteries

Apple and Sony are being sued by a Japanese couple for shipping defective batteries.Sony says this is the first lawsuit regarding its defective batteries. Many vendors were affected by this matter when ten million Sony-made batteries had to be recalled because of defects.The litigants in the court case are demanding two million yen [£8,108] in settlement. The case claims the male party "suffered burns to his finger after his laptop battery burst into flames at his home in April last year," Associated Press reports.His wife claims she then had to get medical treatment for shock as a result of the accident.The battery problems were caused by a manufacturing glitch which saw microscopic metal particles left inside faulty batteries that could cause them to short circuit.Apple was forced to recall 1.8 million iBook and PowerBook batteries, as used within 12-inch iBook G4, 12-inch PowerBook G4 and 15-inch PowerBook G4s. Affected batteries were sold worldwide from October 2003 through August 2006. News source: MacWorld Read full story...

 


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US, China Bust Huge Software Piracy Ring

Raids in the southern region of China have exposed a 2 billion dollar global software piracy syndicate, believed to be one of the largest in the world.The FBI and China's Public Security Bureau led the investigation. Microsoft, as well as its customers and partners, also assisted in providing information, which led to the arrests and confiscation of the software of those involved. The group's power was far-reaching -- software produced by it was found across five continents and 26 countries. 13 different products in at least eight languages were pirated, including Office 2007 and Windows Vista.Investigators were able to trace about 55,000 quality copies of the software back to the group. However, the discs seized through raids represent only about 1 percent of the estimated output of the syndicate."This case should serve as a wake-up call to counterfeiters," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said. "Customers around the world are turning you in, governments and law enforcement have had enough, and private companies will act decisively to protect intellectual property." Microsoft said that countries around the world will likely see a significant decrease in the amount of pirated software as a result of its actions. View: Full Article @ Betanews Read full story...

 


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