Shortages of Xbox 360 consoles in the U.S. and Europe aren't expected to be resolved anytime soon, a Microsoft executive said Saturday after the company launched the console in Japan.
"Eventually we will catch up, who knows when that will be. Demand is just stunning, overwhelming," said Peter Moore, marketing and publishing corporate vice president of Microsoft's home and entertainment division, in an interview.
Demand Started Strong
When Microsoft launched the console on November 22 in North America, long queues of people formed outside many retailers.
Last week, Microsoft engineers detailed changes to Internet Explorer 7's security model, which will include new security zones not found in IE 6. IE 7 is currently on track for a wide release in 2006, and an even safer version will be included with Windows Vista.
According to a posting by Microsoft's Vishu Gupta, Rob Franco and Venkat Kudulur on IE Blogs, IE 7 will increase its protection of security zones in order to prevent "zone spoofing" attacks, where Internet-based code will attempt to run under the lowered security rules of a different security zone. The Internet zone, where most users browse, will be tightened down with two very notable changes," the post reads.
This isn't your 1990s-era Hotmail. In fact, it's not even Hotmail anymore. Microsoft, facing strong competition in the Web-based e-mail market, is working on a service to replace MSN Hotmail, one of the Internet's longest-running brands.
The service, dubbed Windows Live Mail, reflects the push by Microsoft and others to make online programs run in Web browsers almost as if they were standard programs stored on PC hard drives. For example, Windows Live Mail and an upcoming revamp of Yahoo! Mail will let users drag and drop messages into folders, use keyboard shortcuts and navigate more quickly among messages in a Web-based in-box.
Standards body Ecma International accepted on Thursday Microsoft's application to produce a standard for office productivity applications that is compatible with Microsoft's Office Open XML Formats.
"At the General Assembly meeting held in Nice on December 8, 2005, Ecma International has created Technical Committee 45 to produce a formal standard for office productivity applications which is fully compatible with the Office Open XML Formats, submitted by Microsoft," Ecma International Secretary General, Jan van den Beld, said in a prepared statement.
You might recall that Microsoft had originally planned to deliver three versions of the new UI, called Aero Glass, Aero Express, and Aero To Go. Those plans have been revised. Now, Microsoft will offer two modes only, called Windows Vista Aero (which includes the glass effects) and Windows Vista Basic, which is roughly like the Windows XP display. However, the capabilities of the three previous modes are still there: Vista Aero is the equivalent of Aero Glass, and you can get the equivalent of Aero Express by turning off the translucency effects while running Vista Aero. The best news? Contrary to rumors, you'll need only a 64MB video card with 3-D capabilities to run Vista Aero on a typical PC (higher resolution displays will require more video RAM).
Microsoft estimates that a U.K. company sold £3 million ($5.2 million) in counterfeit software before legal action, followed by a settlement, shut the site down earlier this year, a company antipiracy official said Friday.
Zoobon, an online trader, was closed down in January following an out-of-court settlement, said Macha Alexander, head of Microsoft antipiracy in the U.K. Microsoft notified law enforcement in March 2002 after customers called about the legitimacy of the products they bought on sites such as eBay, she said.
Microsoft has announced plans to make several key default changes to Internet Explorer 7's security zones to further harden the browser from malicious hacker attacks.
The built-in zones, used in IE to enforce security rules for Web sites by grouping them into categories, will be changed to scrap the use of the "Intranet" zone unless the computer has joined a domain.
According to details posted on the official IE Blog, Microsoft will also making significant default changes in the "Internet Zone" and "Trusted Sites" zone to provide defense-in-depth against some dangerous IE attack vectors.
As SAP AG and Microsoft hammer out the 1.0 version of Mendocino, their combined development project to offer mySAP process functionality in Microsoft Office for a seamless working environment between the two platforms, they're also pounding out the second iteration.
Mendocino 1.0, expected in July of next year, will hone in on four scenariosbudget monitoring, time management, leave management, and organizational managementthat expose process logic and workflow from mySAP applications to Office. That means users can, for example, use the cost center management scenario to access employee files, see pay information and issue pay raises, using SAP workflow that is exposed in Office.
Microsoft will launch its Xbox 360 game console in Japan on Saturday, completing a three-continent launch that began in North America on Nov. 22 and continued in Europe on Dec. 2.
The launch is important for the software maker as its previous Xbox console never gained much traction in Japan despite doing well in the U.S. and European markets. Not only does success in Japan mean higher sales for Microsoft, but it also gives the console a better image among Japanese software developers, and that could mean more and better games on sale everywhere.
The first Firefox 1.5 security vulnerability, made public Thursday, is not as critical as initially perceived, but a patch will be available to fix it early next year, a Mozilla executive said Thursday.
Mozilla plans to repair the hole in the latest version of its open-source browser when it releases its next regularly scheduled stability build of Firefox. That should happen in late January or early February, said Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 was released Nov. 30.