Microsoft on Tuesday released a Zune software upgrade that provides wireless access to the Web at no charge from more than 9,800 McDonald's restaurants across the United States.
In addition, version 3.0 of the software makes it easy to buy music heard on the portable media player's FM tuner by letting users click on a song they hear on the radio, and then immediately buy and download it on the device from a Wi-Fi hotspot. If the device is not online, then songs are stored in queue and are purchased the next time the player is on the Web, either through a wireless or wired connection.
Microsoft on Wednesday said it is ready with a new update to its Windows Live suite of applications.
The so-called Wave 3 releases include updated versions of Windows Live Mail, Windows Live Messenger, and Windows Live Writer, as well as a new online movie making tool. Windows Live Movie Maker brings some, but not all of the features found in the movie-making application built into Windows, adding the ability to post videos to Microsoft's Soapbox video-sharing site, but notably not to Google's much larger rival YouTube.
"You'll find new features across the products and most notably, Windows Live Messenger has been almost entirely redesigned," Windows Live VP Chris Jones said in a blog posting.
The government of Peru will run the first ever trial of the One Laptop Per Child association's low-cost XO laptop running on Microsoft's Windows XP operating system, putting the nation at the heart of a software controversy.
The little green laptop, which OLPC is trying to reduce to just US$100 per device, will be given out to school children throughout Peru for use over the next nine months as part of the trial. Currently, the XO costs around $200 each to build.
Kids and their teachers in the country will use the laptops as part of efforts to introduce more technology into classrooms in Peru, including Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite of software, which includes Microsoft Office 2003 as well as Learning Essentials 1.0 for Microsoft Office.
In a highly anticipated move given that Japan and North America have already been treated to price cuts, Microsoft UK is relieving the burden for British gamers, dropping the basic 60 GB HDD-equipped Xbox 360 to ??169.99. Microsoft confirmed to BetaNews this morning that a wave of price cuts that began two weeks ago in Japan and then followed up the following day in the US and Canada, has now officially reached Europe. Beginning this Friday, customers should expect to see price drops of about 15%.
Microsoft and Cray on Tuesday unveiled CX1, a compact, competitively priced supercomputer that the companies said they developed jointly for customers who perform tasks such as simulations that require compute-intensive environments.
Cray's CX1 computer runs Windows HPC Server 2008 and is available for customers to order now for delivery in October at a starting price of US$25,000, said Kyril Faenov, general manager of Microsoft's HPC team. Faenov said that people in markets such as financial services, aerospace, automotive, academic and life sciences who must do simulations and modeling that require a certain level of computing performance have two options, neither of which is easy.
Within the next 12 months, Microsoft will start extending SQL Server to support very large volumes of data, based on technology it acquired from DATAllegro. Microsoft announced plans to acquire the developer of large-volume data warehouse appliances in July and said on Tuesday that the deal has closed.
It plans to begin by offering community technology previews within the next 12 months of a product that integrates DATAllegro technology so that SQL Server users can support hundreds of terabytes of data, Microsoft said. The final product should become commercially available in the first half of 2010, the company said.
Microsoft will soon release tools and methods it has used over the last few years to reduce the number of security problems in its software.Microsoft began to take security seriously around 2001. Coding problems in its software opened the door to an intense new wave of malicious worms, or self-propagating programs that crashed e-mail servers, created botnets and stole user passwords, causing costly damage to businesses.
In response, Bill Gates launched the Trustworthy Computing Initiative in early 2002. Two years later the company had refined what it calls the Security Development Lifecycle, or its processes to ensure it writes near-bulletproof code.
Publicly, Microsoft has said Windows 7, the successor operating system to the firm's much maligned Windows Vista, will not ship until early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, InternetNews.com has learned.
Also, Microsoft will use its Professional Developer's Conference in late October as the launch platform for the first public beta of Windows 7. Microsoft plans to release the first beta on October 27, the first day of the show, when Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie will be the keynote speaker.
A CA Inc.-sponsored survey shows that investment in .NET solutions for the enterprise is outpacing that for enterprise Java applications. The survey also points to the need for application performance management solutions, which CA's Wily Technology unit happens to sell.A recent survey indicates that investment in .NET-based enterprise applications is now outpacing that for Java-based enterprise applications.
Of course no survey 100 percent reliable, but what is interesting about this survey is it is not a Microsoft-sponsored survey. CA Inc. sponsored the survey, which was conducted by Evans Data The survey targeted enterprises with 1,000 or more employees and queried 350 developers and managers involved in creating or managing business-critical .NET applications.
Research In Motion Ltd. agreed to put Microsoft's Internet search engine on BlackBerrys, giving the software maker a foothold on the top-selling e-mail phone in the U.S.
Microsoft's Live Search will be available on BlackBerrys this year, the companies said Thursday in an e-mailed statement. BlackBerry customers can use the search engine to find nearby businesses and attractions.
The deal may help Microsoft prevent competitors Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. from staking out a dominant share of mobile-phone searches, a market projected to increase almost tenfold over the next three years. This week, AT&T Inc. said it chose Yahoo as its default search engine for handsets.