If you are contemplating a PC purchase but concerned about waiting for Windows Vista, don't wait, said Microsoft officials at the DigitalLife conference here.
G. Michael Sievert, corporate vice president of Windows Client marketing at Microsoft, opened the DigitalLife conference on Oct. 12 with a keynote in which he laid out the company's plans for the rollout of the Vista operating system and the surrounding ecosystem of hardware and software that will support it.
Supporting Sievert in a demo role, Justin Hutchinson, group product manager, Windows Client, said "one of the things that lights up Windows Vista is the ecosystem of products that support Windows."
Still running Windows XP Service Pack 1? Then there's bad news: Microsoft officially ended support for SP1 and SP1a on Tuesday, Oct. 10.
Microsoft normally retires support for an older service pack 12 months after a new service pack comes out -- or, as in this case, 24 months later. That extension only occurs when Microsoft believes that customers will take longer to test and deploy a new service pack, according to the company. (Newer SPs incorporate patches and changes from previous ones.)
In this case, Windows XP Service Pack 2 came out in September 2004.
PatchGuard, a Microsoft technology to protect key parts of Windows, will be hacked sooner rather than later, a security expert said Thursday.
Hackers will break through the protection mechanism soon after Microsoft releases Windows Vista, Aleksander Czarnowski, a technologist at Polish security company AVET Information and Network Security, said in a presentation at the Virus Bulletin event here.
"It will probably take a year or so for it to surface publicly, but I believe it will be broken earlier," Czarnowski said. "PatchGuard will be broken pretty soon after the final version is released... A lot of people who would break it will probably not make it public immediately."
The timing couldn't have been better. Gas prices began to climb and celebrities such as Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio turned the Prius into a status symbol. The status symbolism surprised Toyota, Higaki said. Toyota had not invested much energy or time, at that point, in marketing the car, he said.
Toyota rides high these days. The company saw car shipments increase by 25 percent in the U.S. in September, at a time when other major manufacturers--from both the U.S. and Japan--reported declines. Analysts believe that the company, ranked second now, will surpass GM in the next few years to become the world's largest car company although it could face problems with quality and customer satisfaction as it grows.
The head of Microsoft's services unit is stepping down, the company said Wednesday.
The software maker said that Rick Devenuti, a former Microsoft chief information officer and a 19-year company veteran, will leave at year's end. A Microsoft representative said in an e-mail that the 48-year-old Devenuti is retiring to "focus his attention on his family and consider his next challenge."
A successor is expected to be named in the next month, Microsoft said. Devenuti will work with that new person "to ensure a smooth transition before his departure at the end of this calendar year," the company added.
With the help of Pharos Science and Applications Inc., Microsoft has improved the GPS functionality
in a new version of its travel and mapping software.
Microsoft Streets & Trips 2007 With GPS Locator includes a new Pharos receiver, the SiRFstarIII, for mapping locations to
GPS coordinates. The new GPS locator is 10 times more sensitive than the capability available in the previous version of Streets
& Trips, according to Microsoft.
To use the new locator, customers can plug the GPS receiver included with the software into a notebook PC's USB (Universal
Serial Bus) port to view maps and travel routes in real time. If they want to use the locator wirelessly, they can purchase
a Bluetooth dock or CompactFlash card adaptor directly from Pharos that will allow them to do that, Microsoft said.
Microsoft will close down beta testing of Office 2007 in two weeks and send the code to manufacturing by the end of October.
On Oct. 25, Microsoft will close the Office Preview Web site and remove the beta from its download servers. The Office 2007 beta has been available to public testers since May.
Also, the BetaPlace Web site -- which hosts newsgroup forums for products in testing -- will close Oct. 31 and migrate to the Microsoft Connect portal.
Microsoft and four set-top box manufacturers said Tuesday that set-top platforms supporting Microsoft's TV IPTV Edition are available. The move indirectly addresses criticism of its IPTV software.
Two of the set-top makers -- Cisco Systems and Motorola -- said AT&T will deploy their devices. Philips and Tatung Co. also said their set-top boxes will operate the Microsoft IPTV Edition.
Last month, widely published reports claimed that Verizon Communications was taking much of its TV set-top box work in-house, because the telecommunications giant wasn't pleased with Microsoft's effort.
As promised, Microsoft opened its newest build of Windows Vista to public downloading, but the short time that Release Candidate 2 was available irked left-out users.
Friday, Microsoft unveiled Vista RC2 to select testers, saying that it would be the last interim release before the operating system was released to manufacturing. That day, Nick White, a program manager with the Vista launch group, said that participants in the Customer Preview Program would also be given the chance to download the new code.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday that lines between on-premise software and Internet-delivered services are blurring, an industry shift the company is embracing.
Ballmer was interviewed Tuesday by Gartner analysts David Smith and Yvonne Genovese at the corporate technology research company's Symposium/ITxpo, under way in Orlando, Fla.
During his talk, Ballmer said many Web sites can be described as "click to run," where a service is delivered via a Web site but runs on a PC.
"I do think that we're in a transition where software goes from something that's in its pre-Internet day to something we call Live (Microsoft's hosted services), where you have click-to-run capability on a Web site... But software will still execute on a PC," Ballmer said in response to questions.