The judge in Microsoft's appeal of the antitrust measures imposed by the European Commission questioned the wisdom of those sanctions, as the two-day hearing wound up yesterday.
Judge Bo Vesterdorf of the European Court of First Instance appeared skeptical of the open-ended nature and practical effect of the sanctions as he questioned lawyers for Microsoft, its competitors and the European Commission.
"Isn't it inadequate to impose a remedy when you don't know what the effect is going to be?" Vesterdorf asked lawyers for the commission.
Should Microsoft decide to challenge Vesterdorf's ultimate decision, it would have one last appeal -- to the president of the European Court of Justice, Europe's highest court.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates on Friday started out a busy day in the Bay Area by talking to college students about a range of topics, from open-source software to malaria to the next Xbox.
The next Xbox "may not be good for productivity, but it will be fun," he said. While not offering too many details on the device, he said communications will play a bigger part in the gadget, as will the idea of having an audience in addition to just players. "It's not just one person sitting there shooting at artifacts," Gates said.
A software slipup in RealNetworks' music player means that Windows, Mac and Linux computers could be compromised by a fake movie file, a security company said Friday.
The problem means that fake movie files could be created that, when played by vulnerable Real software, would run a program instead. The flaw appears in RealPlayer 10 for Windows and Mac OS X, the RealOne Player for Windows and Mac OS X and the Real Helix Player for Linux.
Microsoft plans to offer its own anti-spyware software, Chairman Bill Gates said Friday. Gates said Microsoft will offer software to detect malicious applications and that the company will keep it up-to-date on an ongoing basis. He did not say when the software would be available or whether Microsoft would charge for it. Although progress is being made against spam and viruses, Gates said the adware and malware problem is getting worse.
A European judge must sort through competing ideas on the balance between intellectual property and fairness to decide whether antitrust penalties against Microsoft should be suspended.
But Microsoft warned the court that if the penalties stand during what could be a lengthy appeal, Europeans will bear the brunt, having to pay more for a modified Windows operating system.
Judge Bo Versterdorf of the CFI has the sole authority to stay the judgment while Microsoft's appeal plays out before a three-judge panel of the CFI, a process expected to take as long as five years. Vesterdorf is expected to rule in two or three months.
"You can't go wrong in computer science," Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates told University of California, Berkeley students on Friday. Some students, however, were unhappy with the way Gates responded to questions about increasing competition for jobs from China and India.
But while Gates' regular university visits are meant to evangelize the field of computer science, several students felt Gates did not address their concerns about outsourcing and the growing number of engineers in lower-wage countries like China and India.
"Gates sort of glossed that over. As chairman of a corporation, does he care where he hires his employees?" said Anatoly Smolkin, an electrical engineering and computer science student at the university. Jobs will move overseas and salaries for computer scientists and engineers will fall as a result of competition with countries such as India and China, he said.
This week the processor giant said it would soon ship a new front-side system bus for the high end chip that will dramatically increase its performance. Currently, P4EE systems are somewhat hobbled by the 800 MHz system bus used by today's motherboards, but Intel will soon ship a new bus that's capable of 1066 MHz, removing a key performance bottleneck. Of course, you still have to be Aristotle Onassis to afford one of these darned things: The P4EE, which is essentially a Xeon chip (wolf) in Pentium 4 (sheep) clothing, commands an impressive stipend over similarly equipped P4 chips. For example, at Dell.com, replacing a 3.4 GHz Pentium 4 with a 3.4 GHz P4EE in the company's Dimension XPS system adds almost $650 to the price of the machine.
A select group of testers next week will get an early look at MSN Messenger 7.0, the next version of Microsoft 's popular instant messaging client. The software will be made available to selected testers in the U.S., U.K., France, Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea in what Microsoft calls a "limited beta" test. Then, probably before the end of the year, a public beta version will be released, said Brooke Richardson, lead product manager for MSN at Microsoft. MSN Messenger 7.0 will offer users a more personalized messaging experience, Richardson said.
Microsoft is quickening its march into search by setting up an advisory group of industry insiders to preview its search-engine plans and research. Microsoft's Internet division has invited dozens of Webloggers, researchers and others to its Redmond, Wash., campus next week for an event called "Search Champs." They are scheduled to hear about and test upcoming features for MSN Search and to meet researchers from Microsoft Research, according to several people invited to participate.
As part of a re-examination, the U.S. Patent Office has issued a preliminary rejection for a patent previously granted to Microsoft for a Windows file format. The agency ruled that, based on existing inventions at the time, the ideas behind the FAT (File Allocation Table) patent would have been obvious and are therefore not subject to patent. Microsoft now has 90 days to respond to the filing and make its case for why the patent should be upheld.
The Patent Office's ruling, known as an "office action," is not final, since Microsoft has further opportunities to respond before an ultimate decision is made.