How Fast Will AMD 'Barcelona' Be?
LOS ANGELES - Much of the talk among reporters and analysts here at WinHEC concerns oft-repeated claims emerging from AMD last week concerning preliminary estimates of the relative speed of its new "Barcelona" server processor generation, especially compared to Intel equipment.
Multiple sources have quoted slightly different variations on the claims they'd heard from headquarters, so this afternoon, during an interview ostensibly about hardware-based virtualization (more on that later), BetaNews sought to clarify the claim.
Windows Server 2008 'The Last 32-bit Operating System'
LOS ANGELES - During this morning keynote sessions at WinHEC 2007, Microsoft general manager for Windows Server Bill Laing officially proclaimed Windows Server 2008 "the last 32-bit operating system" the company will ever release, for either servers or clients.
"We're in the middle of a transition to 64-bit computing," Laing told this morning's audience. It was inevitable that this would happen, he went on, but now's as good a time as any given the fact that memory prices are continuing to fall. Historically the transitions to 16-bit and 32-bit computing were difficult to make, he said - perhaps he could have called them excruciating. "But once we get through it, you look back and realize all the benefits, and realize it was the right thing for the industry.
Microsoft: Windows Server to Outpace Linux 3:1 by 2010
LOS ANGELES - A video just shown here during the Day 2 morning keynote session at WinHEC showed Microsoft's "crack" server team working hard on the critical task of naming its new server operating system. After considering such candidates as "Windows Server Server Edition" and "I Can't Believe It's Not Windows NT," the team leader ends up tinkering with the name "Windows Server 2003" on the whiteboard, changing the "3" to an "8."
The message of the video was well-taken: Microsoft's taking itself a little less seriously now, coming to grips with its own legendary geekiness.
WinHEC 2007 Day 1: Why are Hardware Vendors Still Playing Catch-up?
LOS ANGELES - During a roundtable meeting of analysts and reporters here at WinHEC 2007, well-known Endpoint Technologies analyst Roger Kay gave an assessment of the state of the Windows Vista ecosystem at four months after consumer launch.
There, Kay and others began discussing one of the more pressing problems facing the Vista community at present: Since Microsoft had more than enough time to get Vista beta tested and under way, why is it so many supporting hardware vendors were behind the ball getting drivers out on time?
WinHEC 2007 Day 1: Craig Mundie: 'Clearly Something is Going to Give'
LOS ANGELES - At the keynote sessions at WinHEC this morning, Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie took over the stage from Chairman Bill Gates. There, Mundie spoke about the evolution of computing in certain vertical markets, beginning with the health care industry.
In perhaps one of the most...unique breakthroughs shown thus far, Mundie demonstrated a touch-screen checkerboard that would be used by an elderly person in a home care system whose various rooms are linked together by home servers and Active Directory. There, an elderly lady can play checkers using physical checkers on the touch-screen board, which is horizontal. The computer player uses red checkers, and although Mundie described it as another human in another room, in the demo, the voice and reaction may be provided by computer.
WinHEC 2007 Day 1: Gates: 'The Phone is Going to Be the PC...'
LOS ANGELES - The keynote sessions have begun at WinHEC 2007, with Chairman Bill Gates taking the podium at about 9:05 am this morning. Soon thereafter, he began a kind of retrospective, including a look not only at how the serial port looked in 1992, but how Gates himself looked (like many of us, he had more hair).
What's the theme? About five minutes into the speech, it looked like Gates was fishing for a theme. His retrospective is already treating Windows Vista as a milestone that has already passed. While developers here are looking for guidance in how to start developing hardware drivers and interoperability tools for Vista, some starting even now, at ten minutes into the speech, Microsoft began showing a quick-cut retrospective tape of last January's launch of Vista and Office 2007.
WinHEC 2007: Time for Vista to Deliver the Goods
LOS ANGELES - The reason Microsoft puts on a PC hardware-specific hardware conference every year, even though it's technically not a PC hardware manufacturer, is to appeal to its single most important and influential class of customers: system builders. An unavoidable truth in the personal computer industry is that consumer PCs are designed to run Windows. The way they handle the PCI Express bus, the way they manage graphics drivers, the way they connect to peripherals are all directly connected to how Windows works.
This is where Microsoft capitalizes on its inherent advantage as a commercial producer of operating systems. Windows is the principal driver of the personal computer economy. If Linux had more than half the PC users in the world, this would still be the case: Windows is built to sell. For this reason mainly, manufacturers such as Intel and AMD, nVidia and ATI, and Asus and MSI take Windows more seriously than anything else.
AMD Finally Answers the Challenge with Phenom: Four Cores on One Die
After about ten months of watching somebody else marching ahead as the all-around leader in both price and performance, AMD this morning stopped making purely defensive plays, and at last launched its counter-offensive. It will be introducing a new CPU architecture for the second half of this year, aimed at performance-hungry customers perhaps willing to pay a premium.
With the Phenom processor series, which will include a single-die quad-core and a double-quad-core package, AMD will soon be managing three consumer desktop CPU lines, as Athlon moves into the midrange, mainstream space, and Phenom assumes the company's high-performance mantle from Athlon FX.
HBO: Stop Calling It 'DRM'
A report in Broadcasting & Cable yesterday quoted Bob Zitter, Chief Technology Officer for HBO, speaking at a cable broadcaster's conference in Las Vegas last Tuesday, as suggesting that customers might accept the concept of digital rights management if it were named something else.
Zitter suggested, according to the report, that the technology should be marketed in such a way that it conveys a message that viewers could "use content in ways they haven't before." For that reason, he is suggesting the term "Digital Consumer Enablement."
Google Shareholders Reject Anti-censorship Resolution
A Google shareholders' resolution put forth by representatives of New York City pension funds, which would have mandated the company would not store personal data on servers housed in countries where Internet management may be monitored by the state, was apparently rejected yesterday during the company's annual stockholder's meeting, after the company's board of directors voiced their disapproval last month.
The petition specifically listed Belarus, Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam as countries that "block, restrict, and monitor the information their citizens attempt to obtain." On that basis, the resolution implied, those countries should not be trusted not to interfere with private data on US citizens.
Voting Paper Trail Requirement Clears Committee
A bill that would require all polling places for federal elections to produce paper ballots for voters' inspection prior to casting their vote, passed a critical test in the House Administration Committee on Tuesday. From here, the bill proceeds to a vote of the full House, which could come as soon as next week.
"The voting system shall require the use of or produce an individual voter-verified paper ballot of the voter's vote that shall be created by or made available for inspection and verification by the voter before the voter's vote is cast and counted," reads the bill's first section. It goes on to mention electronic voting machines parenthetically, as one of the possible producers of the paper ballot.
SQL Server 'Katmai' Lacks Anticipated WinFS Features
When last June, Microsoft decided to discontinue work on its radically redefined relational file system, then called WinFS, the team announced some of its work would be forked off and merged into the next version of SQL Server, code-named "Katmai." After Bill Gates had proclaimed WinFS in 2005 to be the game-changing component for his future vision of Windows Vista, developers were curious to find out how something that monumental would manage to move mountains as part of a database manager rather than an operating system.
How much of Gates' vision survived the exodus? The answer came on Wednesday, and it's not much.
Record Labels Propose Extending Royalties to All Radio
As a means of eliminating the appearance of disparity between the performance royalties about to be charged to US Internet streaming music providers such as AOL Radio and Pandora, and what terrestrial broadcasters pay for the same privilege - which, for that category, is currently zero - lobbyists representing the recording industry, according to Billboard magazine, are pressuring Congress to resolve this problem by extending essentially the same sharply higher performance royalty rates to all broadcasters.
If such a measure were to become law, an industry which once had the problem of overcoming the appearance of paying off radio broadcasters to increase the airplay for their songs -- a practice known as "payola" -- would begin charging broadcasters in all media for the privilege of having their songs played.
Critical Features Cut from Windows Server Virtualization
Facing what he called "universal truths about product development," Microsoft general manager for virtualization strategy Mike Neil concluded a multi-page blog post this afternoon touting the progress made with Windows Server Virtualization, code-named "Viridian," by announcing the removal of three of the service's most highly anticipated features: live migration of running virtual machines between servers; "hot-adds" of virtual components such as storage, processors, and memory; and support for more than 16 logical processing cores.
"With all this progress comes the occasional tradeoff," Neil wrote this afternoon. "Earlier this week we had to come to grips with some universal truths about product development: *) Shipping is a feature, too; *) The quality bar, the time you have, and the feature set are directly correlated."
Microsoft: Silverlight Demo Was in Jscript, Not C#
During a presentation to analysts on Tuesday in Seattle, as BetaNews reported yesterday, Microsoft technical product manager Brian Goldfarb, standing beside his boss, Chairman Bill Gates, demonstrated an application produced for Major League Baseball, showing how fans can keep track of multiple games from stand-alone consoles that include graphics of the current diamonds, and can show multiple video clips simultaneously. Gates cited the demo as an example of what could be achieved by Silverlight developers who move beyond AJAX, which he described as "problematic" and "very complex."
But a spokesperson for Microsoft on behalf of Goldfarb told BetaNews today that, as it turned out, the specific MLB demo shown Tuesday was actually "written in Jscript," and was not the same demo that was written "entirely in C#" and described by Microsoft developer Robert Unoki on his personal blog this week. That C# demo was tailored to be portable so that it runs with .NET Compact Framework, which Unoki is helping to produce for Windows Mobile 6.
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