Code freeze for Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, release as soon as next Wednesday
The Mozilla organization's developer's wiki has sent out the call for a code freeze for what will very likely be the final beta of Firefox 3.5 -- now fully renumbered -- prior to the first Release Candidate. The Quality Assurance process for the frozen code will begin Friday, which means it will be another busy weekend for developers and testers.
See your voice mail: Microsoft's next Exchange Server will make speech visible
Download Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Public Beta from Fileforum now.
Perhaps you've heard about this service that carries your voice across wires. It could become all the rage very soon, as new e-mail server functionality will give users the ability to see the text of messages callers have just spoken, and then to speak the contents of menus that users have just now written.
It's Office 2010: First technical previews due in Q3
Microsoft confirmed to Betanews Tuesday that the first technical previews of the applications suite we can now call Office 2010, will be distributed to special participants -- probably in limited number at first, just like before -- in the third quarter of this year.
Julia White, a product manager for the Exchange Server team (which also has a major announcement this week), told Betanews that this limited number of initial testers will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands, suggesting that it will go beyond the usual MSDN and TechNet subscriber crowd. In tandem with this development track, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will all also enter technical preview during the same timeframe, especially since they will need to be tested together in order to take advantage of new features.
ODF, PDF become part of Microsoft Office on April 28
In a post this afternoon in an unusual location -- the Microsoft Update blog rather than the Office blog -- the company officially gave its heads-up message that Office 2007 SP2 will be officially released in two weeks, on April 28. In it, users will have the ability to export their open OOXML and "compatibility mode" documents to Open Document Format and to Adobe's PDF format, in the company's first implemented stage of its support for alternate and interoperable document formats.
This will not yet be the same as adopting .ODT documents, .ODS spreadsheets, and .ODP presentations as alternate standard formats for Office applications -- that feature is coming in the next edition of the suite, now due sometime next year. Up to now, the ability for Office 2007 apps to save to PDF and to XPS -- Microsoft's own try at an interoperable display format -- has been available as a downloadable add-in. Now, that functionality will be available to new users without the add-in needing to be installed.
The pendulum swings toward Microsoft in the Alcatel-Lucent IP battle
The intellectual property war which at one point had Microsoft owing Alcatel-Lucent a penalty of over $1.5 billion, may end up with the latter actually owing the former. First that penalty was reduced in light of new Supreme Court guidelines, and then last September an appeals court overturned the jury verdict, ruling in favor of Microsoft.
Yesterday, Microsoft was handed another victory, as first reported by my friend and colleague Liz Montalbano at PC World, with the US Patent and Trademark Office overturning the validity of two Alcatel-Lucent patents, concerning methods for how a user selects calendar entries from an onscreen menu. Microsoft had owed the France-based holder of the Bell Labs patent portfolio some $357.7 million, which has since accrued interest.
Amid the minus signs, Intel says there's a bright side
If it wasn't the general state of the economy taking a toll on Intel this quarter, the numbers from Santa Clara would send stockholders racing toward the nearest open window: Operating income nosedived 68% over the prior year's first quarter, to $670 million on $7.1 billion in revenue -- and that revenue number is less than three-quarters of what Intel was making this time last year.
But in desperate need of a plus sign, Intel is seizing upon one this afternoon: After all that cost-cutting is taken into account, net income was up 176% over the disastrous fourth quarter of last year, to $647 million. That's enough to have CEO Paul Otellini proclaiming the worst is over, telling investors, "We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns."
Ooma's service provider denies a role in outage
During yesterday afternoon's complete service outage at private VoIP service provider Ooma, along with the simultaneous hold-up of e-mail delivery for some BlackBerry customers, the provider's chief marketing officer, Rich Buchanan, told both customers and reporters through his Twitter feed that Internap, a data co-location services provider, was to blame. But in a statement to Betanews this afternoon, an Internap spokesperson denied any kind of service problem on its side of the network.
The spokesperson told Betanews, "There was a ticket opened with Ooma at Internap regarding this issue...Our NOC personnel determined that there was nothing happening within our network and that it probably was a problem after the hand-off was made from Internap to the Ooma network itself. The Ooma personnel are still investigating...The packet loss they were experiencing during the approximate 90 minutes they were having issues, likely caused dropped calls to their customers (as VoIP is very sensitive to packet loss)."
EC may sue Great Britain to stop a sweeping data interception law
"Do you want the Internet to turn into a jungle?" asked European Commissioner for the Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, to open her weekly English-language address this morning. "This could happen, you know, if we can't control the use of our personal information online."
Comm. Reding's message accompanied an announcement that the EC has launched the first stage in what could be a long, drawn-out series of proceedings against one of its own member nations, the United Kingdom. At issue is the UK's handling of online privacy laws, under the nearly two-year-old administration of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The surface issue is what made news in the UK, at least in the general press: The EC has been concerned that the behavioral advertising service Phorm, a service built in association with leading UK carrier BT, may be enabling data collection policies that go beyond the limits mandated by EC directives.
New desktop virtualization scheme will enable hybrid Windows deployment
Just one month after its acquisition of a partner company called Kidaro, which produced desktop virtualization software, Microsoft yesterday announced the immediate availability of a greatly enhanced version of its own desktop virtualization package for its volume license customers. As part of its latest update to Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP), Microsoft's new Enterprise Desktop Virtualization software (MED-V) will let companies deploy software running in older versions of Windows, to appear on clients running newer versions such as Vista.
What this means is, software that ran fairly well in Windows XP or Windows 2000, and Web-driven software that runs using Internet Explorer 6 but not IE7 or IE8, can now run in a virtual envelope that leverages Virtual PC. Meanwhile, clients' users won't notice anything unusual; legacy apps' icons will appear on clients' desktops as though they were installed on their local systems.
VoIP provider Ooma recovers from complete service outage
12:45 pm EDT April 14, 2009 - This afternoon, a spokesperson for the data center co-location service Internap -- a name brought up in connection with both the Ooma and RIM service failures yesterday, which took place at approximately the same time -- denied any service outage, though admitted to some routine router replacements and maintenance.
Ooma's single data center, mentioned by its technical VP in his blog post yesterday, is located on the West Coast -- Internap, meanwhile, is located in Atlanta. Any service issues related to both services may have had to have been incidental.
eBay to unload StumbleUpon, and that might not be all
According to a statement today from its chief architect and founder, Garrett Camp, the business relationship between content location service StumbleUpon and auction service eBay has ended.
"This change will help StumbleUpon move quickly and stay true to its focus: helping people discover interesting Web content," Camp wrote. "Our goal is to make StumbleUpon the Web's largest recommendation engine, and we think this is the best way to get us there."
Rather than submit to new Korean law, YouTube turns off user uploads
In the midst of a Draconian new South Korean law passed April 1 that could force some ISPs to enable lawmakers to suspend their customers' Internet accounts or face fines, Google's YouTube division has turned off some features that could, if misused under the new law, land its customers in prison.
The South Korean National Assembly narrowly passed a sweeping new law whose purpose was to create a system of accountability for the nation's Internet users. While ostensibly the new law is designed to discourage piracy, Korean journalists such as Korea Times' Kim Tong-hyung provide evidence that the law's true purpose may be to enable government authorities to keep tabs on all kinds of online behavior, including political and social networking.
IE8 automatic update option likely to begin next week
In a heads-up message on the company's IE blog over the Easter weekend, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 lead program manager Eric Hebenstreit warned users that as soon as next week, some Windows users will be automatically given the option of downloading IE8. It will not be a massive land rush, and as Hebenstreit repeated, the company's new Web browser will not automatically install itself.
"IE8 will not automatically install on machines," the program manager wrote, emphasizing what will be Microsoft's general policy in this new and more careful era of interoperability. "Users must opt-in to install IE8."
Too easy: A common cross-site scripting technique tangles Twitter
A self-proclaimed 17-year-old whose identity hasn't been particularly confirmed -- so therefore, neither has his or her age -- has taken responsibility for deploying cross-site scripting code through Twitter. That code, embedded in its users' profiles and masked to look like ordinary hyperlinks, resulted in messages being 'tweeted' through those users without their knowledge. Those tweets, when their links were followed, resulted in the same code being injected into the followers' profiles.
It sounds sophisticated, especially when it's being explained by a novice TV news anchor. In fact, the concept itself is something that is easily Googled, and example code similar to that created by the fellow calling himself "mikeyy" is readily available.
Analyst Roger Kay takes a cue from the NAB, with the 'Mac Tax'
It should be no surprise, especially to long-time Mac users, that noted analyst Roger L. Kay, currently with Endpoint Technologies, is a supporter of the Windows "ecosystem." His opinions with regard to Windows are very much on the record, and he and I have often joined together with our colleagues, in brisk, lively, but fair discussions about the relative value of software and hardware on different platforms.
So frankly, Kay's latest white paper (PDF available here) which is a cost examination for home users planning complete at-home networks on Windows vs. Mac platforms (which Microsoft admits to having sponsored), comes to conclusions which should be no surprise to anyone on two fronts: First, Kay illustrates how much more individuals are likely to pay for Apple versus brand-name equipment from suppliers such as Dell and HP. Second, Kay takes Apple to task for charging a premium, and that he's done so isn't news either.
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