Cascade Investment, a venture and investment firm funded by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, has finalized an $84 million investment in Pacific Ethanol, as the momentum for clean technology grows.
Fresno, Calif.-based Pacific manufactures a corn-derived ethanol that can be mixed with gas to power cars or, potentially, in hydrogen fuel cells. The company also sells chemical byproducts created in ethanol production, a key sideline for the profitability of ethanol companies.
The investment will help Pacific fund the construction of a plant in Madera County, which is slated to open in the fourth quarter of this year, and subsequent plants. By the end of 2008, Pacific expects to be operating five plants in the Western U.S. capable of producing 200 million gallons of ethanol.
Microsoft plans to give customers a peek at the next version of its Windows Server Update Services software at the Microsoft Management Summit conference in San Diego next week.
Windows Server Update Services 3.0, which is expected to be released in the first half of 2007, will include a more dynamic user interface based on the Microsoft Management Console framework and will have several features designed to make the software easier to use, according to Joseph Dadzie, a Microsoft group program manager.
It's not the consumer Community Technology Preview, designed to go to as many as two million testers. But Build 5365, with user-interface enhancements, is expected to go to a smaller select subset of testers the week of April 17.
Microsoft is expected to roll out to testers, the week of April 17, a new test build of Windows Vista.
Microsoft is expected to make available for download the new release, Build 5365, by Technology Adoption Program and TechConnect testers this week, according to Vista testers.
Chinese President Hu Jintao doesn't arrive at Microsoft until this afternoon, but already his visit isn't looking too shabby for the company.
PC maker Lenovo Group Ltd. announced plans Monday to spend $1.2 billion on copies of the Windows operating system over the next year -- the largest in a series of deals between Microsoft and China's major computer companies before Hu's visit.
Lenovo plans to use the Windows versions in computers worldwide, but a sizable portion of them will be in China, where Lenovo leads the PC market. In that way, it's part of a broader effort to combat piracy in China by ensuring that legitimate software is installed on PCs before they're released.
With the recent release of the Team Foundation Server component of its Visual Studio 2005 Team System, Microsoft bolstered its effort to take its mass-market software story into the enterprise, and the company says this is only the first step.
Rick LaPlante, general manager of VSTS, said, "This is a mass-market approach. We go to customers, and we talk to them about this mass-market playthis mass-market price point, this mass-market ease of use."
However, LaPlante added, "I don't think the enterprise tools business will ever be mass--market in the way Visual Basic was. But should we sell more than 30,000 licenses a year or whatever the market is doing? Yes."
An injunction that could disrupt the distribution of the Xbox 360 game console is possible because of a patent suit that Lucent Technologies has filed against Microsoft, according to attorneys who practice intellectual property law.
Lucent filed suit against the software vendor last month in a U.S. District Court in San Diego. The networking company, which currently is in the process of merging with Alcatel, says Microsoft has violated a patent it holds on the built-in MPEG-2 decoding capability of the console. At issue is patent number 5,227,878, "Adaptive Coding and Decoding of Frames and Fields of Video."
The biggest barrier to users upgrading existing PCs to Windows Vista will be the new operating system's graphics requirements, analysts agree.
Microsoft has designed Aero so that it scales to the graphics capability of the PC. According to information it's released to partners in a Vista Product Guide and posted on its "Vista Capable PC Hardware Guidelines" Web site, Aero will require a video adapter that supports WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model) video drivers and DirectX 9; it must also have a graphics memory bandwidth of at least 1,800MB per second.
The Chinese government recently passed an operating system mandate to cut down on software piracy. The government is requiring that all computer sellers include paid and pre-installed operating systems with purchases, according to Chinese media.
Most news reports attributed the information to Microsoft Vice President Pamela Passman who granted interviews as Chinese President Hu Jintao prepared to visit the United States this week, including a visit with Bill Gates' at the Microsoft chairman's home near Microsoft headquarters in Washington state.
Microsoft has initiated a new program to push its software into the health-care industry, the company announced at the World Health Care Congress, which begins Monday in Washington, D.C.
Microsoft said 22 other software vendors and health-care companies are backing Knowledge Driven Health Plans, an initiative which it says aims to improve service and decrease costs.
The goal, Microsoft said, is to allow different health-care organizations to exchange information across disparate IT systems.
The move is not unlike efforts in many other industries that seek IT systems to more easily share information.
Microsoft will move its entire collection of Web servers running Microsoft.com to x64-based hardware, with each server running an x64-based version of Windows Server 2003. The company started making the transition back in March 2004, when the x64 versions of Windows 2003 were still in beta. The company cites the massive memory address improvements of the x64 platform as its primary incentive in moving from 32-bit servers to 64-bit servers. If you're interested in knowing more, Microsoft has published a white paper about its migration, which you can download at the URL below. I think it's fair to note that Microsoft is way ahead of the curve: Though many businesses and individuals are indeed using x64-based PCs and servers, only a tiny minority are running x64 OS versions. What's the hold-up?