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."
Nokia asks employees to lay themselves off
Nokia today announced a series of voluntary measures for "reducing personnel-related costs" during the global economic crisis, starting with an unusual deal called the Voluntary Resignation Package.
The new package is available for Nokia employees worldwide, except for direct labor and senior executives.
Harvard file-sharer's fight against labels rescheduled
Though the hearing of accused file sharer Joel Tenenbaum and his Harvard Law counsel headed by Professor Charles Nesson is on hold while the issue over broadcasting the trial on the Internet awaits resolution, Massachusetts District Court Judge Nancy Gertner last night ruled on a timeline for other parts of the case.
The pre-trial conference and trial date, originally March 24, has been cancelled until a proper rescheduling can take place. All of the Rule 26 disclosures, which include supporting evidence and expert testimony for both parties involved in the trial, will be heard on March 30, depositions may be taken thereafter by each party. The hearing on Tenenbaum's counterclaims, -- which include abuse of process by the litigant record companies -- and motion for the RIAA to join the suit, is stayed until April 30.
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.
Irish ISP to block P2P and music sharing sites
Eircom will be blocking the Pirate Bay and sites of that nature under threat of legal action from the Irish Recorded Music Association.
In late January, Irish ISP Eircom adopted the now famous "graduated response" to illegal file sharing pioneered by the French, where suspected file sharers are given three strikes and then cut off from the Internet entirely. Now, Ireland's Sunday Business Post reports that Eircom is working with the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) to block all music swapping sites from general user access. The ISP's move was reportedly made under threat of legal action from IRMA.
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.
Confirmed (via Twitter): HTC's Touch HD coming to America
Using just a few tweets on Twitter, HTC has confirmed that its Touch Pro2 is coming to North America.
The news wasn't any great surprise, really, because the press release for the Touch Pro2 did mention something about "global availability." Still, in a series of three tweets, HTC made future availability of the Windows Mobile-based phone on the North American continent definite, although without being specific about when, which carrier, or even which country.
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.
Apple debuts a new way to pre-pay in iTunes
Apple's iTunes today opened the first iTunes Pass purchases, which lets users pay a fee up front to receive every piece of content an artist releases for a certain period of time.
While this has not officially been announced by Apple yet, a diligent Mac Forums reader located details on it in the Spanish iTunes store terms of service:
Vudu makes HD titles downloadable
Highddefinition video-on-demand service Vudu has been making an honest play at becoming the set top box that brings streaming video to the home theater enthusiast market. Today, the company has begun to offer HD movies as downloads in addition to streams.
Vudu's library of high-definiton titles is around 1,400 and downloads will cost between $13.99 and $23.99. Vudu set top boxes are all equipped with HDDs, which could conceivably fill up quickly when downloading HD movies. For example, the company's top-of-the-line STB, the XL, can hold approximately 500 standard definition titles on its terabyte drive. Vudu however, reinforces the user's account with a free cloud storage service called Vudu Vault. Archival in the Vudu Vault is currently limited to select movies, but all television content can be stored there.
OneSwarm network improves file-sharing control, anonymity
University of Washington researchers this week have released a peer-to-peer file-sharing technology that actually does, or can, limit one's sharing to one's actual peers. The client, called OneSwarm, uses a "friend-to-friend" (F2F) model that gives users extremely granular, extremely hard-to-expose sharing capabilities.
The OneSwarm technical paper, (PDF available here) submitted by graduate students Tomas Isdal and Michael Piatek and faculty members Arvind Krishnamurthy and Tom Anderson, is quite explicit in its concerns about the dangers of indiscriminate sharing. "Although widely used, currently popular P2P networks expose the sharing behavior of their users to scrutiny by third parties," the paper's conclusion states.
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