Microsoft removes the blinders from the front end of VS 2010
At an independent Visual Studio developers' conference in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft's VS 2010 general manager Jason Zander revealed the first publicly distributable screenshots of the new front-end display for the latest build of Visual Studio 2010, the company's commercial software development suite.
The first official look at the revised IDE screen was posted on Zander's blog last week. And the public's first taste of VS 2010 came last October, when the Community Technology Preview of VS 2010 was first shared with developers. That version revealed the suite's first use of Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) -- the graphical library now used by Office 2007 -- for the display of new, graphics-rich features such as database visualization tools, document editing tools, and team scheduling. But the front-end -- the main screen of the IDE where all the coding takes place -- had not yet been transferred from its old homebase in Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) to WPF, even though Visual Studio is the principal development tool for applications that use WPF.
EC to Microsoft: We may still fine you
In a statement earlier today, European Commission spokesperson Jonathan Todd is quoted by two sources, the International Herald-Tribune and the AFP, as having publicly renewed the EC's warning to Microsoft that it could impose more fines and force the company to offer competing Web browsers as an alternative to Internet Explorer, for the company's European edition of Windows 7.
The warning is not news; Microsoft made clear it had already received that warning from the EC in its latest Statement of Objections, as Betanews reported last month.
Confirmed: Office 14 delayed until 2010
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that CEO Steve Ballmer did indeed make a "passing remark" during his appearance at an analysts' conference in New York this morning, associating Office 14 -- the company's principal applications suite -- with next year as a release timeframe rather than this year; and that Ballmer's comment was accurate.
The text of Ballmer's comment was first reported by PC Magazine's Mark Hachman, who quoted the CEO as saying, "The next big innovation milestone is Office 14, our next Office release, which will not be this year."
Hitachi changes the Fabrik of its consumer HDD strategy
The fastest growing sector of the storage industry these days is personal external storage, where consumer demand is being triggered by the growing availability of multimedia and the increasing need to procrastinate before deciding how to keep track of it all. It's what's helping keep Western Digital and Seagate afloat in a time when business orders for equipment have plummeted; and it's making competitors with lesser market share like Hitachi GST have to play catch-up very quickly.
This morning, Hitachi announced its solution to that little problem: It's acquiring Fabrik, a (re-) manufacturer of fashionable external hard drives and backup systems. The move will probably immediately ensure that Fabrik's good-looking, environmentally-friendly models use Hitachi GST internals; but it also means that a key former Maxtor veteran -- a refugee following its acquisition by Seagate -- will join Hitachi's executive team, in a thus-far unnamed capacity: Mike Cordano, Fabrik's founder and CEO, will be in charge of helping Hitachi assemble a more consumer-oriented brand for storage, frankly for the first time. Hitachi has suffered in this department in the past, trying in previous years to be the first to unveil high-capacity storage for the system builders market, but failing to match Seagate's and WD's performance numbers.
Ballmer: Could netbooks rescue Microsoft after all?
Dow Jones is reporting this afternoon that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made comments to financial analysts in New York this morning, reiterating his company's warning of continued weakness in the negative economy, coupled with uncertainty as to the degree or extent of the ill effects.
According to the Associated Press, Ballmer went on to say that his company's strategy out of this dark period will resemble that of one of America's former technology giants, RCA, when it resorted to investing heavily in research that enabled the US to become the leader in television production after the end of World War II. As an example, Ballmer -- according to the AP -- appeared to change course on a key technology, alluding to the possibility that Windows 7 could eventually appear on netbooks, and even referring to "netbooks" by name -- something Microsoft spokespersons had earlier been cautioned not to do.
One way to end a lawsuit: Visto gets Good
What started out as a move by Motorola to become a serious contender in the mobile e-mail services space has ended up playing into the hands of a company with a familiar name among certain attorneys.
Visto -- which held several patents in mobile e-mail, whose litigation against Research in Motion is still pending, and which settled its suit against Microsoft last year -- has agreed to acquire Good Technology from Motorola, which only purchased it in 2006.
Chernin's exit from FIM casts doubt on monetizing social search
This morning's announcement of the June exit of Peter Chernin from the Chief Operating Officer's post of News Corp. -- a post that's more influential than most COO positions in the world -- is probably more than what financial journalists are speculating this morning: a way for CEO Rupert Murdoch to pave the way for a line of succession for his immediate family. Chernin's position put him in effective operational control of Fox Interactive Media, with the mandate to work out some kind of workable business model for the operation.
Square one for Chernin came in August 2006, brokering a deal with Google that led to Google paying FIM's MySpace $900 million to be its search provider. But every other component of the business model -- some way to monetize the indisputably high-traffic business of social networking -- never came together. During its last earnings call, Google said it was having trouble monetizing the business of search with social networking, and Google's biggest deal to date in that department was with MySpace. In response, Chernin attempted to reassure analysts last Feburary 4 (our thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript) that FIM and Google were still trying to work out a way to make that business profitable.
Gmail service outage points to a hole in the cloud
A service outage that impacted users of Google services including Gmail for approximately 75 minutes early this morning, is calling attention to a potential kink in the cloud: While an estimated 113 million Gmail accounts were forced to resort to Google's new offline mode, introduced last month, a number of Google service users were also forced to wait, since Gmail also serves as the company's central source of service authentication.
The outage came at the worst possible time for users in Western Europe, including Great Britain, where users were just getting settled to work. Google Apps can work offline, though the degree of offline functionality they offer has only been increasing in small steps. Calendar functionality through Google Gears, for instance, was only introduced earlier this month, although the company announced its trend toward the "offline cloud" in April 2007.
Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrades: Difficult, but not impossible
It shouldn't surprise many testers that Microsoft has shrewdly closed the upgrade channel for users who will -- probably sooner this year than later -- be making the switch to Windows 7. Many who had chosen to steer clear of Windows Vista and hang on to Windows XP -- by all rights, a decent operating system, at least for Service Pack 3 users -- are pondering the nightmare scenario of having to upgrade to and validate (which usually means, pay for) both Vista and Windows 7, if it so happens that Windows 7 proves to be desirable or simply necessary.
This led us to thinking: Windows Vista can run without being purchased and activated, albeit for a limited time (usually 30 days). During that time, it behaves as though it were a fully operational trial edition (except for the Ultimate SKU, where several of the "Extras" aren't available except after validating). But it doesn't take a month to install an operating system; so what if a valid XP user could simply borrow the promotional edition of Vista, if you will, to make the skip over to Windows 7?
Vizio in a showdown with Funai over an HDTV patent
With the switch to digital TV (at least until a few weeks ago) having been scheduled for this month, and with more families having scrambled last Christmas to make an affordable upgrade to high-definition, the bad economic season ended up being a windfall for US-based Vizio. Its strategy of selling low-priced HDTVs mainly through Wal-Mart helped it improve its market share to clinch a strong second place in the US (with 14.3%) against Samsung, according to figures released just last week by hardware analysis firm iSuppli.
But that victory may have only managed to paint a red target on Vizio, with its competition now aiming for the heart of the company. Last year, an administrative law judge (ALJ) with the US International Trade Commission issued an initial finding in favor of Japan-based Funai, the long-standing also-ran in the electronics business which late last year acquired the right to use the Philips brand name for CE components in the US -- including for Blu-ray drives. Funai holds a key patent, issued in 2000, for a mapping system used by cable TV and satellite service providers -- essentially a way for set-top boxes and digital-ready HDTVs to tell which incoming video stream belongs to what program. And Funai has been charging TV manufacturers for the right to use that stream, even though -- as Vizio now contends -- the concept of the stream itself is critical to an ATSC standard that every manufacturer must follow.
Vista SP2 update sent to testers, but is it really an RC?
What really, really looks like a release candidate for Windows Vista Service Pack 2 -- which first entered beta in December -- is officially being called an "update" this afternoon, after Microsoft declined to give it a more formal title.
A Microsoft spokesperson kinda, sorta confirmed to Betanews this afternoon the release of "an update to Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 SP2 testers, in an effort to gain additional feedback." The company appears to be officially declining to call it a release candidate, although Ars Technica's Emil Protalinski unearthed evidence yesterday that this is exactly what it is.
Adobe acknowledges another JavaScript issue with Acrobat, Reader
An independent security research firm is warning of a non-ingenious JavaScript buffer overflow ploy that modern Web browsers would probably filter out, but which impacts recent versions of Adobe Reader for PDF files.
The surprise about the latest Adobe Acrobat issue is that there doesn't seem to be much new about it, at least in terms of methodology. A group called the Shadowserver Foundation announced yesterday that it was aware of an active ploy using malformed PDF files. Embedded JavaScript in those files can trigger a kind of managed buffer overflow, the group said, which leaves the heap full of shellcode that can be executed without the need for privilege.
Shareholders approve AMD's foundry spinoff gamble
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View the full AMD chart at WikinvestIt is perhaps the most colossal gamble in the history of the semiconductor industry, and now, the chips are down. AMD shareholders yesterday voiced their approval for a deal that effectively spins off the crown jewel of their company -- its processor foundry operation -- to a new corporation run by the government of Abu Dhabi in the UAE.
Judge knocks the thunder out of 'Vista-capable' class-action suit
Though the likelihood of Microsoft's prevailing actually looks worse than it did last week, if it ends up losing, it might not be much after the judge says plaintiffs failed to prove its actions harmed a plurality.
When Microsoft decided to present consumer editions of Windows Vista with multiple versions, some of which lacked the very features the company advertised as defining the product, was it with the willful intent to defraud the public? An internal e-mail from then-president Jim Allchin to his colleagues suggests he was indeed afraid that the multiple versions could lead to consumer confusion and frustration...but that memo, made public during the discovery phase of the "Vista-capable" class-action case in Washington state district court, also appears to indicate a lack of willfulness on the part of at least one of the company's senior executives to deceive the public.
A veritable absence of panic after some TV stations throw the switch
The US Federal Communications Commission reports that, after 421 of the nation's analog television stations ceased transmission on February 17 as originally planned, its call centers received a grand total of 28,000 calls from viewers, with a great many of those apparently concerning the proper use of converter boxes already received.
This afternoon, the National Association of Broadcasters reported that stations opting to make the switch yesterday also received phone calls, but nothing beyond what they were already equipped to handle. For instance, in Madison, Wisconsin -- whose major affiliate stations were first denied the option of switching on 2/17, and then granted nearly at the last minute -- three of the city's stations reported a combined viewer call count of 400. Some of those calls were from folks who hadn't installed their converter boxes properly.
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