Microsoft will release just one more build of Windows Vista for testing before the code goes gold, said Brad Goldberg, the general manager for the Windows client business group.
That build will be made available to a limited group of between 50,000 and 100,000 testers in October, and follows the interim Vista build that Microsoft released on Sept. 22.
Goldberg declined to say if this final test build would be known as Release Candidate 2, adding that the company is focused, from an engineering perspective, on targeting the group of testers from whom it most wants one last set of feedback.
Microsoft is predicting that Windows Vista will be adopted by companies at twice the speed as its predecessor, Windows XP.
Twelve months after the release of Vista, Microsoft expects that usage share of the oft-delayed operating system in businesses will be double that of XP a year after it shipped, said Brad Goldberg, general manager for Windows product management at the software maker.
"Vista is built for businesses," Goldberg said. "We're giving businesses the tools they need to get out of the gate faster with Vista...Our goal is to have twice as fast deployment of Vista than for any other operating system."
Microsoft's Zune digital media player will ship in the U.S. on Nov. 14 for $249.99, the company said Thursday, in line with
the price of video iPods already available from Apple Computer.
Microsoft announced its Zune player and the accompanying music store, called Zune Marketplace, earlier this month, but it did not provide pricing at the time.
Some industry insiders believe Microsoft had to rethink the pricing after it learned that Apple was about to lower the price
of its video iPods, which it recently did. Like the video iPods, the first Zune players will come with 30GB of storage.
A Microsoft-sponsored test of eight anti-phishing tools put Internet Explorer 7's filter at the top of the list, the Redmond, Wash. developer said Thursday.
3Sharp LLC, a technical services company with offices in Redmond and Toledo, Ohio, pitted IE 7 against Firefox, Netscape 8.1, McAfee's SiteAdvisor, tools from EarthLink and GeoTrust, and toolbars from eBay and Netcraft.
IE 7's anti-phishing filter, one of the still-under-construction browser's biggest additions, scored 172 out of a possible 200; the composite scoring system was based on the accuracy of each tool in detecting real phishing sites and its error rate in incorrectly blocking legitimate URLs.
Microsoft made a beta release of its Forefront Security for SharePoint software available on Sept 28, introducing a new version of the security applications built to defend the enterprise content being incorporated into its next generation of Office.
The set of anti-virus and content filtering technologies is being pitched by the software giant as a layered security system for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services, elements of the Redmond Wash. company's 2007 Office system, which is also currently available in beta.
The mobile phone is already good for mundane things such as making calls and sending messages. But Microsoft's latest vision of the future elevates the device to the status of magic wand.
A new version of the futuristic Microsoft Home lets people use mobile phones to control room lighting, temperature, music, television and other parts of the house -- all the way down to the lock on the front door.
"It becomes kind of the ultimate universal remote control," said Jonathan Cluts, director of consumer prototyping and strategy for the Redmond company.
Microsoft is shipping Release Candidate 2 of its PowerShell 1.0 command line environment and scripting language for Windows Server 2003.
According to statements on the company's PowerShell team blog, the RC, which is the final stage of testing before releasing a product to manufacturing, addresses numerous customer requests based on their evaluations of both Beta 3 and RC1.
The changes include direct support for Active Directory Service Interfaces in order to simplify Active Directory administration, as well as improved support for Windows Management Instrumentation by adding the ability to change WMI properties via methods.
The BBC has signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to work together on next-generation digital broadcasting technologies.
The agreement could give the software giant a major role in the state-owned British broadcaster's delivery of Internet-based digital content in the future.
The memorandum was signed by BBC Director General Mark Thomson, the BBC's director of new media and technology, Ashley Highfield, and Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Wednesday in Seattle.
The memorandum does not commit the BBC to buying any Microsoft technology to underpin the introduction of digital services in the future. A BBC representative said this was "definitely on the cards," but insisted that the broadcaster won't be favoring Microsoft at the expense of its rivals.
Today at X06 in Barcelona, Microsoft officially announced pricing and release dates for the anticipated HD-DVD add-on drive for the Xbox 360. The drive will hit retail in North America in "mid-November" and will retail for $199.99. Europe will also receive the drive in a similar time period, where it will retail for $129.99 in the U.K., France, and Germany. For a limited time, all 360 HD-DVD drives will include a copy of Peter Jackson's "King Kong" on HD-DVD as well as the Xbox 360 Universal Media Remote.
Intel's "Santa Rosa" notebook platform will hit the streets in the first half of 2007, bringing improvements in processing
power, battery life and wireless connectivity over the current Centrino architecture.
Intel has enjoyed strong sales with Centrino, which combines a low-wattage processor and wireless ability with an efficient
chipset. Now the company will upgrade those ingredients to a more efficient version of the "Merom" Core 2 Duo chip and "Crestline"
ICH8M chipset, together code-named Santa Rosa.