"C++ has been a power programming language since it was born," says Ami Vora, Microsoft's program manager for the Visual C++ IDE in Whidbey. "Use its power for good and not for evil!"
Developers who choose C++ for a project are looking for more than Visual Basic's convenience or C#'s intimate relationship with .NET. Often, these developers are looking for performance, the ability to control very specific functions, and raw programmer productivity. Certainly, you can fine-tune an application in C++ better than in other languages.
In an example of the new economy taking a page from the old, MSNBC.com adopted a longtime newspaper strategy yesterday, starting an online classifieds site. The service, part of the broader joint venture between Microsoft and NBC News, lets users search for employment, real estate, personals, merchandise, and other types of listings from sites including eBay, cars.com, HomeGain. com and Match.com.
Microsoft has decided to suspend the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) via Automatic Updates in order to provide its corporate customers with more time to install an SP2 download blocking mechanism that the company provided last week. For this reason, XP Home users will start receiving XP SP2 via Automatic Updates starting on Thursday, August 18, while XP Professional users will start receiving the update via Automatic Updates on Thursday, August 25. Under the original schedule, both sets of users would have started receiving the update today.
Microsoft released on Monday a new version of Works, its low-priced productivity package for consumers. Like previous versions, Works 8 includes basic word-processing, spreadsheet and database applications, plus e-mail and calendar tools. New features in version 8 include a stand-alone dictionary and an application for viewing PowerPoint slides.
Microsoft said Monday that it has extended a four-year deal with French consumer electronics manufacturer Thomson to make a new set-top box for the software giant's MSN TV service.
Though Microsoft did not disclose details of the product, MSN TV General Manager Sam Klepper said in an interview with CNET News.com last week that a new MSN TV 2 box that targets the Internet-savvy buyer rather than the technology neophyte is being developed. According to a source, the device will have an estimated price of $199.
European antitrust regulators have extended a deadline for deciding whether to conduct an in-depth review of Microsoft and Time Warner's plan to jointly acquire ContentGuard, a digital rights management company. European Commission regulators will now make a decision by Aug. 25, said a representative for the European Commission. Previously, the deadline was Monday.
ContentGuard, which holds a portfolio of digital rights management patents, has previously licensed its technology to industry titans such as Microsoft and Sony. Additionally, standards bodies, like the Motion Picture Experts Group, have adopted some of these patents.
The majority of entertainment companies, unsure of the Redmond software maker's motives and wary of its tough tactics in the battle for the computer desktop, have preferred to maintain an arm's-length relationship with the software Goliath.
But these days, studios fear digital piracy more than they fear Microsoft and have slowly begun to make deals to use its software tools, albeit on a non-exclusive basis.
We are told that Microsoft won the legendary operating-system war against IBM's OS/2 because of dirty dealing. Forget that Big Blue was utterly incompetent in marketing its software against Windows. Forget that Windows finally improved to the point where it became a better product. All that pales in comparison with the Microsoft's indelible malevolence that attends the company's business dealings. Similar ravings have informed the debates about Microsoft versus Mac or Microsoft versus Linux--or Microsoft against anything, for that matter.
So-called normal Windows XP users will start gaining access to the Automatic Updates version of the XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) upgrade on Monday. But I've gotten a lot questions about the wait. Specifically, why has Microsoft opted to stagger the availability of XP SP2 when so many people want to get it quickly? The reason may surprise you, and it has nothing to do with bandwidth issues. Instead, the big issue with SP2 is support. And while the software giant's support lines have been relatively quiet as of late, the company's partners fear that SP2 is going to unleash a torrent of support calls, calls which will come to them and not to Microsoft. So out of deference to its partners, Microsoft is staging the rollout of SP2 in a bid to prevent a massive amount of support problems all at once.
The European judge deciding whether to suspend European Union sanctions against Microsoft Corp. has told the software giant to beef up its claim that compliance with an order to share some technical information would cause it irreparable harm, a source close to the process said Thursday.
Bo Vesterdorf, the president of the Luxembourg-based Europe's Court of First Instance, asked Microsoft for more evidence to back up its contention that its intellectual property rights were under threat if forced to divulge information on its server systems, the source said on condition of anonymity.