Last night, Microsoft's recently revealed Project Natal was shown on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon.
Project Natal, in case you missed my earlier post, is an add-on for the Xbox 360 that will let you control games without using a controller; instead, your body in effect becomes the controller.
What I wanted to talk about today is the fact that this demo appeared on a talk show at all. Is this a sign that gamer culture has finally arrived? I should stress that the demo wasn't shown as some kind of sideshow goofiness -- Fallon was clearly excited and amazed by it. OK, the red jump suits were kind of goofy. Let's just put it this way, the demo was treated as seriously as anything else on Late Night.
If you thought Microsoft's partnership with HP in the Laptop Hunters ad series was a notable "outside of the box" relationship, another has shown up today: Microsoft has made its software available as direct downloads through Dell's five-month old online software shop. This makes Dell the first official non-Microsoft download shop since Redmond opened The Microsoft Store's downloads late last year.
The downloadable versions of Word, Excel, and Outlook are available for about 10%-15% less than MSRP, and because their serials are saved with a user's ID, the software can be re-downloaded at any time for no extra charge. Dell also offers volume licensing through the Microsoft Open License program.
Call me a shameless optimist, but I can't shake the feeling that the operating system arms race may finally be over. After countless generations of new-and-improved OSs that consumed every iota of additional performance built into ever-faster hardware, I think we're finally seeing a tiny light at end of a tunnel many of us thought would continue forever.
We've all had this experience: We replace a three-year-old computer running an older version of an operating system with something supposedly light years ahead of the old machine. By the specs, the processor is twice as fast and has twice as many cores. Memory is an order of magnitude larger and faster. Storage, video, network, wireless and other components are similarly rocket-powered compared to the old stuff. If we believe the numbers, our new machine should blow our suddenly obsolete one of the water.
Microsoft has joined forces with a host of advocacy groups to form a new organization dedicated to promoting broadband access in community anchor institutions.
The Schools, Health and Libraries Broadband Coalition, launched today, plans to press policy makers to deliver high-speed Internet access to public facilities that support activities such as distance learning and telemedicine.
"We're in a tough economic period and it's important to the extent that resources are spent, they're spent in a cost-effective way," Paula Boyd, Microsoft's regulatory counsel, told reporters this morning. "It's really important that the focus be on anchor institutions."
What Vista SP2 really is, when you get right down to it, is all the many fixes and patches that have been made to Vista since SP2. If you've been keeping your Vista system up to date, you won't need to update it.
That said, I tried Vista SP2 on two PCs to see what really was new and improved. The first PC was my tried and true Vista test box, a HP Pavilion Media Center TV m7360n PC with 2.8 GHz Pentium D 920 dual-core processor, and 2 GB of DDR (double-data-rate) RAM and a 300-GB SATA hard drive. In addition, I ran it on my Gateway DX4710 desktop PC with a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor, 6GBs of RAM, and a 640GB hard drive, which I usually use for Windows 7.
After three years of sluggish sales, Microsoft's Live OneCare PC health service is about to be replaced by a free service that will focus much more tightly on security and malware protection.
The free service, codenamed 'Morro,' is currently in internal testing within Microsoft and will begin public beta testing "soon," according to a company spokesperson. The company has said Morro will be released by the end of the year.
Microsoft first announced Live OneCare in May 2005. However, the service itself actually didn't launch commercially until almost exactly a year later.
Microsoft is getting ready to unveil a long-anticipated free antivirus service for personal computers that will compete with products sold by Symantec and McAfee.
A Microsoft spokesman said on Wednesday that the world's biggest software maker is testing an early version of the product with its own employees. Microsoft would "soon" make a trial version, or product beta, available via its Web site, he added, but declined to provide a specific date.
Symantec shares fell 0.5 percent on NASDAQ and McAfee fell 1.3 percent on the New York Stock Exchange, while Microsoft was up 2.1 percent. The NASDAQ composite index was down 0.47 percent.
Microsoft quietly revealed Wednesday afternoon that it plans to cut off sales of its long-running Microsoft Money Plus product as of the end of June.
"After suspending annual updates of Money Plus in 2008, Microsoft is announcing today that we will no longer offer Microsoft Money Plus for purchase after June 30, 2009" said a posting on the Money Website.
Additionally, Microsoft cautioned that any Money Plus products need to be activated before Jan. 31, 2011.
Microsoft said discontinuing the 17-year-old Money products resulted from changes in the market for personal financial software.
In a move aimed at heading off further punitive action by the European Commission, Microsoft has confirmed that it will distribute Windows 7 without Internet Explorer within European Union countries.
The story came to light Wednesday when one of Microsoft's PC OEM partners leaked a confidential memo to that effect to Reuters, later confirmed by the software giant.
"We're committed to making Windows 7 available in Europe at the same time it launches in the rest of the world, but we also must comply with European competition law as we launch Windows 7," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an e-mail to InternetNews.com.
A Chinese company showed what it calls the world's first mobile phone to run Windows XP at the Computex exhibition in Taipei on Friday.
The xpPhone can wake Windows from standby mode to receive calls and text messages. It has a battery life of seven hours when not in standby mode, and with a larger battery it can run for 12 hours.
A customized chip from Advanced Micro Devices powers this mix of a mobile phone and a pocket-sized computer, which is made by In Technology in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.