The latest beta releases of Microsoft Speech Server and development platforms add new features in preparation for a full launch in the spring. Microsoft, preparing for an aggressive push into the enterprise speech technology arena next year, released on Tuesday the final beta versions of its Speech Server and development kit for creating speech applications.
The Microsoft Speech Server, the newest addition to the Windows Server System, is aimed at broadening the reach of speech recognition and text-to-speech applications in enterprises, particularly small- and medium-sized companies, said James Mastan, director of marketing for Microsoft's speech technologies group. A full release of the server software and the Microsoft Speech Application Software Development Kit (SASDK), a set of tools for building speech applications in Visual Studio .NET, is expected in the spring of 2004.
On Tuesday, Microsoft announced its latest online service: MSN Premium. The new service, for use with broadband Internet connections, will be available to the general public on Jan. 8 and offer a wide range of online features including spam filters, anti-virus capability, a firewall, parental controls, photo management, exclusive multimedia content and multiple e-mail accounts. (Get an inside look at the new service in our hands-on preview.)
Microsoft has asked various people who posted photos and video clips of the company's Matrix spoof to remove them from their sites, citing the restriction on photography after the initial minute of Bill Gates' Comdex speech. Those people have obliged, which means relatively few people outside of the 7,000 or so who saw the speech have seen the full video. (The company's official transcript also omits any specifics about it.)
In the meantime, though, the spoof has been brought up by various people seeking to derive from it insights into Microsoft's psyche. (Including once in the comments to a Linux-related post on this weblog.) So, in lieu of the video, I went back and transcribed the film's dialogue from my audio recording of the speech, adding in brackets my general recollection of what was happening on screen. (Here again is Reed Stevenson's recap, as well.) Reading the transcript doesn't quite compare to seeing the film itself, but for now it'll have to do.
Excellent, ahahahhhaahhaaaa, best news of the day :)
Security professionals took note of a critical new vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could enable an attacker to gain root access to a vulnerable machine and take complete control of it. An unknown cracker recently used this weakness to compromise several of the Debian Project's servers, which led to the discovery of the new vulnerability.
This discovery has broad implications for the Linux community. Because the flaw is in the Linux kernel itself, the problem affects virtually every distribution of the operating system and several vendors have confirmed that their products are vulnerable.
According to Symantec, this weakness would allow any local user with shell-level access to the system to escalate his privileges to root. This would allow the attacker to perform just about any task he chose on the machine. Symantec warned that the new flaw could be combined with any number of remote vulnerabilities to allow remote attackers to gain root access, as well.
'The Spoke,' a new community site radiating from Microsoft's Academic Developer Division, is aimed at university students. Microsoft may not have an official corporate policy on Web logging, or blogging. But that isn't stopping the Redmond software vendor from setting up hosted blog communities, left and right.
The latest Microsoft-sponsored blogging site is called "The Spoke." It is a project of Microsoft's academic developer group and seems to be targeted primarily at university students.
Microsoft is extending its "total solution financing" option to Canada, the company said Monday.
The U.S. Total Solution Financing program was launched in September 2002 with much fanfare at the annual Microsoft Business Solutions (MBS) partner conference. Solution providers there literally applauded the news that the program would bankroll not just Microsoft software but services, hardware and third-party software as well. Integrators and resellers hoped that the low-interest financing, backed by Microsoft Credit, would jump-start sales in a stagnant IT spending environment.
A year after the debut of Microsoft's innovative Tablet PC platform, the software giant is keeping an upbeat tone despite slow sales, thanks to a powerful new hardware platform that will erase past performance and battery life issues and a new version of the Tablet PC software--Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2004, codenamed Lonestar--that fixes the few niggling technical issues with the original software. But a growing rift between the hardware makers that create the Tablet PCs and software-maker Microsoft may escalate into the biggest threat to the handwriting-capable systems. This week, PC maker Acer, one of the original Tablet PC makers, reiterated charges that Microsoft isn't doing enough to drive the Tablet PC market forward.
To aid users of older Windows versions with non-broadband access to the Internet, Microsoft is considering releasing a CD-based security update product that would bulk install the security updates the company now offers on Windows Update. A beta test of the potential product, dubbed the Windows Security Update CD beta, will start soon, according to an email the software giant sent to testers last week, and will be aimed at Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), and Windows Millennium Edition (Me).
Microsoft published a white paper on its Web site last week giving an overview of its internal security measures. While Microsoft's security is not perfect, and there have been highly publicized compromises of the company's network and Web sites, there are few IT organizations in charge of securing major enterprises that have more familiarity with the products they deploy than the Microsoft Operations and Technology Group.
In addition to supporting the IT operations of Microsoft, a Fortune 500 company, OTG also is tasked with being one of the earliest and most thorough testers of Microsoft technologies.
Malaysia's brazen software pirates are hawking the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system years before it is supposed to be on sale. Underscoring the scale of U.S. companies' copyright problems in Asia, CDs containing software Microsoft has code named "Longhorn" are on sale for six ringgit ($1.58) in southern Malaysia. Microsoft's current version of Windows, XP, sells for upwards of $100 in the United States.
The software is an early version of Longhorn demonstrated and distributed at a conference for Microsoft programmers in Los Angeles in October, Microsoft Corporate Attorney Jonathan Selvasegaram told Reuters.