Most people wouldn't want a message from work disrupting their day at the beach. But Eric Horvitz was so happy when it happened to him that he took out a camera and captured the moment in a photo.
The e-mail message had been singled out and sent to the Microsoft senior researcher's mobile phone by a special program that he and others in his group developed.
The message for Horvitz was from a journal editor who hadn't received an abstract the Microsoft researcher had sent her. Examining the message, the system considered a long list of factors, including Horvitz's relationship to the sender, the length of the message, key phrases, dates and times mentioned in the text, whether the message was written in past or present tense and whether it included questions.
After describing Java as a stable technology with no great surprises likely to come, Java experts during a conference panel session fielded questions about the competitive power of Microsoft's rival .NET platform.
Speaking during a session Saturday at TheServerSide Java Symposium, panelists acknowledged the vitality of Microsoft .Net development technology but defended their prized Java platform. The session was entitled, "Future of Enterprise Java Keynote Panel" and featured executives from companies such as Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems.
Despite earlier assertions that IE 7 will be available only to XP SP2 customers, Microsoft will also ship IE 7 with Windows 2003 SP1 and XP Pro x64 Edition. The company is looking into Windows 2000 support but so far has no plans to make an IE 7 version for that platform. And there won't be a Microsoft Office Outlook Express 7 release to coincide with IE 7. Instead, the Outlook Express team is concentrating its efforts on Longhorn.
Microsoft is back-porting its WinFS file-system technology to Windows XP, the same way that it is doing with its Windows presentation and communications subsystems, according to company officials. The acknowledgement is significant, given that Microsoft has been reticent to offer any details on WinFS since the company decided in August to cut the WinFS information storage and retrieval feature from both the client and server versions of Longhorn.
One of Microsoft's key Windows architects has defected to Google. But at least so far, no one is talking about what Marc Lucovsky's new role will be at one of Microsoft's major rivals.
A 16-year Microsoft veteran, Lucovsky was one of a handful of "Distinguished Engineers" at Microsoft. He is credited as one of the core dozen engineers that came from Digital Equipment Corp. to Microsoft and built the Windows NT operating system. He was charged with building the Windows NT executive, kernel, Win32 run-time and other key elements of the operating system. NT was the precursor to Windows Server.
Microsoft, already the biggest software company, is looking for a video-game programmer to help "in our quest for world domination." The ideal candidate: a "megalomaniac genius with severe god-complex," the company says on its Bungie Studios Web site.
The artificial-intelligence engineer Microsoft seeks is one of about 60 people the Redmond company is hiring to create the next generation of "Halo," the top-selling video game for its Xbox machine. "Halo 2," the $50 game the company introduced in November, pits players against "a terrifyingly aggressive alien civilization" called the Covenant.
Microsoft could be about to pull out of cable news network MSNBC, according to a report.
Microsoft and NBC, joint owners of the network and its companion news portal, are in "advanced discussions" over the sale of the software giant's stake to NBC, according to The New York Post.
Under the potential deal, NBC would take sole control of the news company, with Microsoft having rights to use some of its online news content, according to the paper.
Microsoft's involvement in the venture, which cost it an initial investment of about $250 million, has never seen the hoped-for returns. The channel, which was created in 1996, saw its first quarterly profit last year.
Researchers at Microsoft showed off some forward-looking technologies on Wednesday, including new ways to protect systems against Internet worms, prevent hacker attacks and measure available bandwidth on home networks.
At its fifth annual TechFest, Microsoft Research presented about 150 projects at the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters. The event was expected to attract about 6,000 Microsoft employees. Its main purpose is to promote the exchange of ideas, or "tech transfers," between Microsoft Research and product teams at the software maker.
After releasing 12 security bulletins in February, Microsoft has zero new security bulletins on tap for March. Microsoft disclosed its plans not to release any bulletins on Thursday as part of its advance notification service, which warns users three business days ahead of time how many bulletins might be coming in that month's "Patch Tuesday." The notifications tell users how many bulletins to expect, what products are involved, how severe the bulletins will be and whether they will need to reboot systems.
Microsoft on Thursday released its third Community Technical Preview of the SQL Server 2005 database. The new code drop, the first CTP since December, includes the new Report Builder and Management Studio features as well as 64-bit support, Microsoft said. The company also will post more Visual Studio 2005 bits to ensure that the recently released Visual Studio CTP works with this latest code.
A Microsoft spokeswoman said the third--and hopefully final--beta of the database is still on track for the first quarter, meaning that it must be released by the end of March. The CTP for the first SQL Server 2005, code-named Yukon, dropped in October, when Microsoft said it was adding another test round to the delayed database.