Microsoft has made further headway in the market for advanced digital-television services offered via telecommunications providers. The software giant's TV division announced a deal Friday with Telecom Italia, which will begin testing the division's Internet Protocol Television, or IPTV, software. The announcement was made at the International Broadcasters Convention in the Netherlands.
IPTV is designed to let phone companies offer new, television-related subscriber services via their two-way broadband networks. Such services make it possible to equip a standard television set with video-on-demand, interactive programming guides with integrated video and multiple picture-in-picture capabilities.
Now you can access recordings of the Microsoft DevDays 2004 sessions. Microsoft DevDays 2004 was presented in over 40 locations worldwide and trained tens of thousands of attendees on best practices for Web development, smart client development, and writing secure code.
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Microsoft has been granted a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on a process known as tabbing through a Web page in order to find links.
Although the patent award has raised the ire of some in the open source browser community, the implications for the widely used technique are unclear. Microsoft filed for the patent in March of 1997. It covers the process of shifting between links on a Web page using the computer's tab button.
At this week's Intel Developer Forum (IDF) Fall 2004 conference in San Francisco, microprocessor giant Intel unveiled two of the products the company expects to drive sales in the future: dual-core processors and WiMAX, a so-called "broaderband" wireless technology. Intel says that all its microprocessor product lines will offer dual-core variants in 2005, significantly improving performance. Intel will also offer multicore processor variants, which are chips that integrate the processing power of three or more CPUs into one chip. As for WiMax, also known as IEEE 802.16-2004, Intel says the wireless technology will provide faster connectivity than today's Wi-Fi solutions and do so over very wide areas. Intel predicts that WiMAX will do to today's cable modem and DSL broadband solutions what cell phones did to terrestrial-based telephones (i.e., kill them). "We are on the cusp of the WiMax era," Intel President Paul Otellini said.
U.S. software giant Microsoft is aiming to get its audio and video software into mobile phones before it is beaten to the 650-million-handsets-a-year market by rivals like Apple. Microsoft has quietly made preparations to make its media software available to chip and handset makers, enabling consumers to play music they have saved in the Windows Media format on their PCs on their handsets.
"We've been hush-hush about it, so far. But we understand this is a major market opportunity," Erik Huggers, director of Windows Digital Media division, told Reuters in an interview on the fringes of the annual International Broadcasting Conference.
The Washington Post announced Friday that former software executive Melinda French Gates, wife of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, has been elected to the publishing and media conglomerate's board of directors. The company said that with the election of Gates, 39, its board has grown in size to 10 members.
The company highlighted Gates' work with charitable organizations in announcing her appointment, in particular her efforts with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has worked to furnish health care and educational opportunities to the world's underprivileged.
Microsoft may choose never to release its vaunted and long-overdue project WinFS, following its removal from the next version of Windows, according to analysts Gartner.
However, the firm is sticking with its recommendation that companies standardize on Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), so that they have a choice to shift to Longhorn if it turns out to be worthwhile.
Along with delivering Longhorn in the second half of 2006, Microsoft is releasing parts of Longhorn's WinFX developer interface, which will give Windows XP compatibility with Longhorn's Indigo middleware subsystem and Avalon user interface graphics subsystem. Analysts have questioned what the difference will be between Longhorn and Windows XP with WinFX.
Microsoft continues to tweak a controversial architecture for securing PCs but still plans to include the feature in Longhorn, the next release of Windows. The software maker stressed that Longhorn will work either with or without enabling the Next Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB), a technology designed to make PCs more secure by shifting sensitive data and operations into a separate part of the computer's operation. The software maker also continues an overhaul of the technology, which is already quite different from the code that was given out to developers at Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference last year.
Microsoft has finalized the code for Virtual Server 2005 and will soon make the product generally available to customers. The long awaited release, available in both Standard and Enterprise Editions, virtualizes server installs to software-based environments that are more easily managed. The product is similar to the desktop-based Virtual PC software that Microsoft purchased from Connectix last year.
"Our customers are looking for ways to cut infrastructure costs and make better use of their IT and development staff time," says Microsoft senior vice president Bob Muglia.