Microsoft's Xbox 360 will be available in two versions costing $300 and $400 when it is launched later this year, the company says.
The announcement, which was made at the Games Convention event in Leipzig, Germany, fills in one of the last and most important pieces of information about the console.
Capable of high-definition video, the Xbox 360 is considerably more powerful than any gaming console available at present. At a recent event in Tokyo the company showed previews of several Xbox 360 games and all featured stunning graphics that bring a new level of realism to computer gaming.
Less than a month from now, Microsoft will gather thousands of software developers from around the globe in Los Angeles and kick off Professional Developers Conference 2005, a highly-anticipated event that will center on Windows Vista, Office 12, and other upcoming Microsoft technologies. PDC 2005 will begin September 13 and feature a keynote address by Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates and appearances by several other Microsoft executives.
Single sign-on. Symbolically at least, it may be a kind of grail for IT staffers who today need to administer thousands of user accounts -- often a jumble of weakly-related identities stored in a dizzying variety of directory management systems in different environments.
Corporate end users have an average of about 16 separate passwords that they need to remember, according to a 2003 Gartner survey of more than 300 enterprises. "Some vertical industries will have higher numbers of passwords because they have more internal applications, but between one and two dozen is a good [ballpark figure]," says Earl Perkins, analyst in Gartner's security and privacy group.
Less than a week after Microsoft patched a critical hole in a common Windows service, a new worm is circulating that exploits the hole in unpatched Windows 2000 systems and uses it to proliferate.
Two new variants of the worm, "Zotob.A," and "Zotob.B" appeared on Saturday and use code released on the Internet last week for attacking a hole Microsoft patched on Aug. 9 in the Windows Plug and Play service.
Microsoft is readying at least two new products aimed at professional designers as part of an aggressive push into the graphics software market.
On Monday, the company is expected to release a second test version of a program code-named Acrylic that's aimed at allowing designers to easily create art for Web pages. Microsoft released an initial prerelease version of the Acrylic software in June. So far, there have been 200,000 downloads of the product, said Forest Key, a group product manager in Microsoft's developer division.
A Microsoft Network executive is defending Microsoft's rebranding of RSS into "Web feeds" after a flurry of Microsoft bloggers accused the software giant of trying to recast the Web-site syndication technology in its own image.
In a recent post on his Web log "Torres Talking," Mike Torres, MSN Spaces lead program manager, made a clear distinction between the branding of the RSS technology and the underlying technology itself. He also said that Microsoft is adding its own functionality to RSS in the version the company is implementing in Internet Explorer (IE) 7. Because of this, its renaming of RSS is not a sign the company is trying to remake the technology for its own purposes but rather a way to make a distinction between RSS and a feature of IE.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer halted the steady market share advance of The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser in July, a Web site monitoring company announced Friday.
Last month, IE, by far the most used browser, regained lost ground and pushed back the upstart Firefox for the first time since version 1.0 of the open source browser debuted late last year, according to NetApplications.com, an Aliso Viejo, California, maker of applications for monitoring and measuring Web site usage.
Firefox's share shrunk to 8.07 percent from 8.71 percent in June, while IE grew its market slice to 87.20 percent in July from 86.56 percent last month.
After having been stalled several times already, it would seem that the last thing developers would want for the Visual Studio 2005 toolset is another delay. Nonetheless, a request from some developers for a new beta release would, if granted, potentially hold back the product set yet again.
Microsoft, however, is sticking to its guns, eyeing a planned November 7 release date. The product set was to have been released in the second half of 2004, but the date slipped to the first and then second half of 2005.
On its team blog last night, the Internet Explorer (IE) team at Microsoft revealed the final branding for both the standalone version of IE 7 and the version that will be included in Windows Vista. The team also shared the final logo for the standalone IE 7 version. What you won't read anywhere else, however, is why Microsoft is changing the branding for such an established product.
Logos are fun for the kids, but Microsoft doesn't arbitrarily change such things. The important news around this announcement is that company also subtly revealed that IE 7 would henceforth be referred to as Windows Internet Explorer 7.
You've probably heard about Microsoft's lawsuit in which the software giant is attempting to prevent one of the people who helped found its China-based research center, Kai-Fu Lee, from starting a similar enterprise for Google. What you might not know is that Microsoft's legal case is apparently based largely on a file the company found in the Recycle Bin of one of Lee's XP computers. The document describes terms of the hiring agreement between Google and Lee and notes that Google anticipated Microsoft's lawsuit. That's pretty hilarious because Google's public comments about this case are quite different. The company at one time noted that Lee isn't a "search expert" and therefore shouldn't be bound by the employment agreement he signed when he originally joined Microsoft. So if he isn't a search expert, why would Google believe that Microsoft would attempt to block his hiring, based on the fact that the employment agreement prevented him from seeking a job at a direct competitor of Microsoft? More important, why wasn't Lee smart enough not to load Google documents on his Microsoft work PC and not delete them properly? He must not be a PC expert, either.