Microsoft on Tuesday made available yet another in a seemingly endless stream of interim product updates with the release of Windows Server 2003 Release Candidate Zero.
The software is a preview of technology that will be included in Release Candidate 2 of the server operating system, which is expected to be available before the end of the year, according to Microsoft.
Windows Server 2003 RC0 is available for evaluation. The release highlights advanced identity and access management features that will be available in the full R2 release, according to Microsoft's Web site.
Security experts have found a vulnerability in the Windows operating system that could allow malware to lurk undetected in long string names of the Windows Registry.
According to a security advisory by Denmark-based IT security company Secunia, the weakness is caused by an error in the Windows Registry Editor Utility's handling of long string names. A malicious program could hide itself in a registry key by creating a string with a long name, which would allow the malicious string and any created after it in the same key to remain hidden, according to Secunia. Keys are stored in the Windows Registry, which saves a PC's configuration settings.
Once heralded by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates as the future of laptop computing, Tablet PCs now appear to be a niche market that has slim prospects for significant growth even through the end of the decade.Forecasts at the time of the Windows XP Tablet Edition launch expected sales to hit 5 million in 2005, 9 million in 2006, and 14 million by 2007. However, sales so far this year are not even in line to hit one million.
Roger Kay, founder of Endpoint Technologies Associates and an IDC analyst, says indications are that sales of tablets will only amount to about 3.5 million by 2009.
A Connecticut man has pleaded guilty in federal court to selling Microsoft source code over the Internet.
William P. Genovese Jr., 28, of Meriden, Conn., entered his plea Monday in a Manhattan federal court to charges that he unlawfully sold and attempted to sell portions of Microsoft's source code for Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.
According to federal prosecutors, Genovese initially found the source code in February last year, after another party misappropriated the code and distributed it over the Internet without Microsoft's authorization. The defendant, who went under the alias of "illwill" and "xillwillx@yahoo.com," then posted the code to his site and offered it for sale.
Microsoft will give away as many as 9,222 Xbox 360 game consoles in a bid to whet appetites for the first new version of the gadget in five years.
Microsoft launched the "Every 10 Minutes" promotion on Monday with Mountain Dew, promising to deliver the new Xbox consoles to winners before the gadgets hit stores for the holidays. Participants will have a chance to enter drawings every 10 minutes for the next nine weeks, the company said.
To enter, players must enter a unique code printed under caps of Mountain Dew, Pepsi and Sierra Mist bottles into an online account at Yahoo.com. Participants can choose which drawings they enter. In addition to the next-generation game console, winners will also get to select a free video game--either "Madden NFL 06" or "Need for Speed Most Wanted." The estimated value of the prizes is $580.
A visit to MSN's beta site indicates that the online service has recently begun work on a new version of its homepage. The new site appears to be taking cues from MSN's Start.com test bed, as well as moving some features from its My MSN customizable page to the front page. From the current design, it appears that users will be able to collapse, add, move, and delete content modules.
Search boxes still appear at the top and the bottom of the site, and the listing of content sections has been moved from the left sidebar in the current design to the top. Prominent links have been given to Hotmail, Messenger and MSN in this top bar.
Microsoft has had a busy year in storage, in a quiet sort of way. The company partnered with Tacit Networks to offer wide area file services (WAFS) as an add-on to a Windows Storage Server foundation. It added high-end features to its iSCSI initiator. And at last spring's Storage Networking World, it launched the Microsoft Windows Simple SAN Program. The idea is to help Windows customers reduce the cost and complexity of their storage infrastructures by allowing them to easily install, deploy and manage networked storage.
While it's readying a new mid-market server, Microsoft is continuing to enhance Windows Small Business Server. Expect an SBS R2 release in 2006 and a 'Cougar' SBS update in 2007. While Microsoft is preparing its midmarket marketing onslaught, the company is not forgoing its small-business push.
Microsoft is expected to roll out a new Windows Midmarket Server bundle at a business summit for midmarket customers on Sept. 7. Although the midmarket server is not expected to ship until 2007, according to sources, Microsoft will talk up its plans for the new Windows Small Business Server (SBS) equivalent, sources added.
Many had written off Microsoft's next-generation Windows file system as little more than vaporware. But sources say the first WinFS beta code is to come within a month.
When Microsoft announced a year ago that it had decided to rip the next-generation Windows File System (WinFS) from Longhorn, many company watchers wrote off the feature as little more than vaporware.
But it seems Microsoft didn't simply shelve WinFS. According to sources close to the company, Microsoft just last week put the finishing touches on the first beta release of WinFS. And the company is moving ahead with plans to back-port the WinFS technology to Windows XP, the same way that it decided to do with the Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo) and Windows Presentation Foundation (Avalon) Windows subsystems.
Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference is expected to be a coming out party of sorts for the next version of Visual Studio, code-named Orcas.
Primary among the new features in and new direction for Orcas will be advances in how the toolset handles data, sources said.
Data becomes "cool" in Orcas, said a source familiar with Microsoft's strategy for Orcas. "Data becomes a first-class citizen in the tool."
Indeed, Anders Hejlsberg, Microsoft distinguished engineer and father of the C# language at Microsoft, will be delivering talks on just how this will work.