Microsoft has opened a beta of Windows Live Mobile Homepage, the Windows Live portal designed for use on mobile handsets. BetaNews tested the Live Mobile portal on a decidedly out-of-date Windows Mobile 5.0 device on the notably slow T-Mobile Web, yet it still gave a nimble performance.
From mhome.live.com, the user is prompted to sign into his Windows Live account, and given the option to access Windows Live Mail, Messenger, or MSN Mobile. Navigation is assigned to twelve numerical hotkeys (0-9, #, *), and although sites contain images, most text is digested into a single font style and size.
Microsoft on Tuesday released SQL injection defense and detection tools designed to help developers fight attacks on Web sites
that use ASP and ASP.Net technologies.
The tools include URLScan 3.0, which is in beta release, and Microsoft Source Code Analyzer for SQL Injection, available
as a Community Technology Preview. Additionally, HP on Tuesday released Scrawlr, a SQL injection detection tool developed by the HP Web Security Research Group and Microsoft.
Developed to help battle recent SQL injection attacks as per a Microsoft Security Advisory bulletin, the tools are intended to help developers build more secure code and promote a more trusted ecosystem, Microsoft said.
Microsoft is expected to launch its Hyper-V virtualization technology Thursday, two months ahead of the company's time line
for releasing it by the end of August.
Though Microsoft would not confirm the release directly, a representative from the company's public relations firm sent an
e-mail requesting a briefing about a "product milestone" Thursday. Another representative then hinted in an e-mail that the
briefing had to do with Hyper-V.
Although neither said exactly what the announcement was, several blogs reported Wednesday that Hyper-V would be released on
Thursday. Another source close to the company also said the technology was in its final stages, but asked not to be named.
In an unprecedented move, Microsoft has committed to providing support services for its soon to be retired Windows XP through 2014 -- a full 13 years after the operating system was originally released.
In a letter sent to customers this week, Microsoft senior VP Bill Veghte said the software maker will provide security patches "and other critical updates" for Windows XP until April, 2014.
"Our ongoing support for Windows XP is the result of our recognition that people keep their Windows-based PCs for many years," Veghte wrote.
Microsoft will ship Windows 7 sometime in or near Jan. 2010, according to a letter company senior vice president Bill Veghte sent to
Microsoft customers Tuesday.
The letter, sent to enterprise and business customers, will eventually be publicly posted on Microsoft's Web site.
In the letter sent to "Windows Customers" and titled "An Update on the Windows Roadmap," Veghte said "our plan is to deliver
Windows 7 approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista."
Veghte wrote, "You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule" and he said that was the impetus
for setting the 2010 ship date.
It's way too early to declare the battle between Microsoft and arch-rival Alcatel-Lucent over. Last week, a judge upheld a big jury decision against Microsoft and tacked on some interest. That just made the defendant a little angrier.
As court documents made public today indicate, Microsoft may be hoping it can pay off this latest judgment with a counter-claim it hopes will make everything a wash: a claim on a patent for a protocol used to send multimedia content over the Internet to mobile clients. For years, companies have been endeavoring to implement a standard engineered through the auspices of the IETF, for an IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) that uses Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) -- which is also one of the key communications protocols used in VoIP. This way, services can meter for multimedia transfers and charge customers for quality of service deployed, rather than bytes downloaded.
He is the cofounder of Microsoft, a Harvard drop-out, one of the world's richest men, and arguably the greatest philanthropist in history, but this week William H. Gates III--that's Bill Gates to you and I--will step away from full-time employment and enter a new phase of life. He's not retiring completely--Gates will continue advising Microsoft in a part-time capacity and will dedicate more time than ever to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which seeks to improve healthcare and reduce poverty around the globe.
How important is Bill Gates to Microsoft? Look at it this way: The company has essentially appointed three people to handle the jobs Gates used to fill by himself: Steve Ballmer as CEO, Ray Ozzie as chief software architect, and Craig Mundie as chief research and strategy officer. But none of these otherwise estimable men can really fill Gates' shoes, and its unclear how well Microsoft will perform in the months and years ahead without him.
I love stories like this because they confirm my belief that no story about Windows Vista can be negative enough... or baloney enough. An "analyst house" no one's ever heard of before-- Evans Data, if you're curious--is now the expert on such matters because, you know, they're criticizing Windows Vista. They say that only 8 percent of developers are working on Vista-specific applications (that is, applications that run only on Windows Vista) as opposed to almost 50 percent who are writing XP-specific applications. Wow, that is fascinating, and while I suppose it's shocking that developers would want to target, say, every single PC on the planet instead of the 8 to 10 percent that are currently running Vista, let's look at this another way. Back in 2002, please tell me what percentage of developers were writing applications that would run only on XP, and not on older Windows versions like Windows 2000 or 98? That's right: None of them. And now for bonus points, please tell me what those XP-specific technologies were that developers were supposed to be targeting back then. That's right, you can't. So this report is both pointless and non-newsworthy, and shame on everyone who treated it otherwise. Moving on.
In sharp contrast with the never-ending criticisms and increasingly baseless investigations it faces in the European Union, Microsoft is finding a surprising level of support from antitrust officials in the US. As part of a regularly scheduled status report on the software giant's 2002 US antitrust settlement, US federal and state antitrust officials recently praised Microsoft for its efforts to lower the cost of royalties associated with licensing its technologies to third parties.
In the jointly-filed status report, antitrust officials from the US Department of Justice and several states said that the "substantial reduction in royalties are positive steps [that will] promote interoperability with Windows clients.
Antitrust regulators are evaluating the forthcoming Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 8 as part of ongoing activities to ensure
Microsoft is in compliance with the final judgment in two landmark antitrust cases that involved individual states and the U.S. government.
Microsoft and antitrust regulators also said they were concentrating on revising and extending documentation the software
company is making available as part of its Microsoft Communications Protocol Program. Release schedules are also being
finalized.