DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano has appointed Phil Reitinger as deputy undersecretary of the National Protection and Programs Directorate. Reitinger will be charged with protecting the federal government's computers and networks from cyberattacks.
Reitinger has been responsible for improving and protecting the security of information and infrastructure at Microsoft, where he has served as chief trustworthy infrastructure strategist. In that role, he worked closely with government agencies and other private companies on cybersecurity programs. He's a member of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Advisory Committee and considered an expert on computer crime and policy.
Microsoft said Thursday it settled a patent-infringement suit in which a New York company was demanding $90 million in royalties on the Xbox video game system.
Financial terms weren't disclosed, Microsoft spokesman David Bowermaster said, adding that it was an "amicable agreement." The settlement cuts short a trial that started this week over the suit, filed by closely held PalTalk Holdings Inc.
"The parties have settled the case, and PalTalk is quite pleased with the outcome," Max Tribble, a PalTalk lawyer, said in a phone interview.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates regained the title of world's richest person on Forbes magazine's annual ranking of billionaires worldwide, as the global recession slashed the size of the list by 30 percent.
The number of billionaires fell to 793 from 1,125 last year. It was the first time since 2003 that the number of people on the list decreased, and the biggest drop since the magazine began the ranking 23 years ago.
The total net worth of the list fell to $2.4 trillion from $4.4 trillion last year, with the average billionaire worth $3 billion, down from $3.9 billion. The three wealthiest -- Gates, Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chairman Warren Buffett and Mexican telecommunications magnate Carlos Slim Helu -- lost a combined $68 billion in the past year.
Microsoft still hasn't shipped a public "release candidate" for Windows 7 ? that's expected next month ? but another preliminary version of the code has leaked to BitTorrent sites.
A release candidate, RC for short, is the final test version of the code before Microsoft releases the product to manufacturing and delivers the final product to vendors.
The latest build to leak purports to be Windows 7 build 7057. The most recent leak occurred less than two weeks ago, and was numbered 7048.
At next week's MIX09 conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft officials plan show off the latest and greatest technologies and products for designers and website developers.
Near the top of the list will be the first public demonstration of Silverlight 3.0, Microsoft's streaming media technology. Other likely featured technologies include Internet Explorer 8, and Windows 7.
The event, hosted at the glitzy Venetian resort, is in its fourth year.
What's coming in version 3 of Microsoft's Adobe Flash competitor? Silverlight is barely two years old yet it carries Microsoft's hopes of supplanting Flash on users' PCs, laptops, and phones ? a daunting task that requires Microsoft to evolve the technology quickly..
Microsoft has set a goal for reducing its carbon emissions and has plans to support the development of software that can help
address climate change issues, the company's chief environmental strategist said.
Bernard said that CEO Steve Ballmer has also charged employees around the world with helping to accelerate the development
of software and advance research in the areas of energy and climate change.
Microsoft has already begun offering products for companies to use to help them control their carbon footprint. An application for Microsoft's Dynamics AX enterprise resource management software, introduced in February, lets businesses
find out the carbon footprint of various aspects of their operations.
New laptop and desktop designs are on tap as PC and hardware makers start tweaking components to take advantage of improved
features in Microsoft's upcoming Windows 7 OS.
Windows 7 will definitely impact the way hardware is designed, and Fujitsu hopes to engineer its hardware to implement the
improved wireless communications, security and touch capabilities, said Paul Moore, senior director for mobile product marketing.
The company hopes to build improvements into laptops it sells to vertical markets and customers. Fujitsu has plenty of experience
with tablet PCs and the company is definitely thinking about adding touchscreens, Moore said. He didn't provide a timeline
on when the company may release touchscreen laptops.
Microsoft on Monday announced that it has tapped Harvey Mudd College president Maria Klawe for its board of directors. At the same time, the company said its board authorized a dividend of 13 cents per share for shareholders of record as of May 21, 2009.
A native of Toronto, Klawe is one of the world's top Canadian-born computer scientists. She was the first woman to serve on the board of the Computing Research Association, and she formerly headed the computer science department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Klawe is also a past president of the Association of Computing Machinery; a trustee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, Calif.; and a board member of Math for America.
In an attempt to retain recession-hit companies seeking to opt out of their software maintenance contracts, Microsoft is wooing
them by cutting the price of leasing software by as much as 26 percent.
"A lot of enterprises will say, 'You're not giving me anything anyhow, so kiss that revenue good-bye,'" an analyst told Computerworld
last fall.
While cutting maintenance contracts can lead to trouble down the road with some software vendors, it's relatively painless
for companies to cut SA and stay on the current version of software, which they own the right to run indefinitely, anyway,
DeGroot said.
Microsoft will expose the network protocol from its SQL Server database as the service protocol in SDS,
the cloud-based version of the database, thus enabling customers to use a full relational model in the cloud.
The company is accelerating delivery of relational capabilities in SDS through use of TDS. "With this evolution, SDS will
become the first relational database service in the market to provide customers with the ability to use existing investments
in T-SQL development and use a full relational data model in the cloud," Microsoft said in the blog.