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Microsoft's Windows Business Senior Vice President Bill Veghte delivered what may very well have been one of the more disappointing keynote addresses to TechEd 2009 in Los Angeles this morning, judging not only in terms of features but in pure speech quality. But one hour and fifteen minutes into the address, he answered the key question he called one of two "elephants in the room:"

"When are we going to ship? This is a question that I get a lot," Veghte said. "We're going for holiday and we're tracking very, very well for it."

All indications are that today is the day Microsoft will officially launch Windows Mobile 6.5, the incremental update from Redmond that seeks to bring the resistive touch OS up to speed with the "finger friendly" capacitive touch devices that led the market last year.

Since last November, when CEO Steve Ballmer announced Windows Mobile 6.5 at a conference in Australia, the OS has been on a hurried path toward launch. It was introduced at Mobile World Congress, and then received a graphical overhaul in time for MIX 09, when the trademark on-screen "honeycomb" was eliminated. Shortly thereafter, Ballmer essentially dismissed the whole update as a provisional release prior to Windows Mobile 7, forestalling his marketing team's effort to build up momentum prior to today.

The big difference in using Verizon Wireless over its competitors, its current wave of TV ads suggest, is that every user is backed up by "the network." With Windows 7, Microsoft is working to create a similarly distinguishing value proposition. It'll be given its biggest test to date tomorrow, as "the network" from Microsoft pushes out a series of 10 placebo system updates, to see how well it can handle the heavy Patch Tuesdays yet to come.

As the Windows Update Product Team blogged on Friday, the boatload for the Win7 RC's first Patch Tuesday will contain ten update patches. Nine of them will run automatically and should run flawlessly. One won't, but that's part of the plan.

Early in the history of Windows Vista's promotional campaign, before the first public betas, Microsoft's plan was to create a desktop environment unlike any other, replete with such features as 3D rendered icons and buttons, and windows that zoomed into and off the workspace as though they occupied the space in front of the user's face. That was a pretty tall order, and we expected Microsoft to scale back from that goal somewhat. But for several months, journalists were given heads-up notices that there would be several tiers of Windows performance -- at one point, as many as five -- and that the highest tier, described as a kind of desktop nirvana, would be facilitated by the 3D rendering technology being called DirectX 10.

DirectX is a series of graphics libraries that enable Windows programs to "write" graphics data directly to screen elements, rather than to ordinary windows. While the operating system's principal graphics library since version 3.0 has been the Graphics Device Interface (GDI), its handles on memory are tied to window identities and locations. But it's DirectX that makes it possible for a 3D rendered game to be played in the Windows OS without having to be "in" a window like, say, Excel 2003.

Now that the Kindle DX is available, the E Ink Corporation has made its 9.7" E-paper display prototype kit available to the public.

Targeted mostly at midrange customers who might otherwise turn to Windows, the new IBM Express Advantage products rolled out this week include newer and faster models of IBM's BladeCenter Express servers, along with a new hardware/software bundle called the "Comprehensive Data Protection Solution,"
said Bob Kelly, TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) product manager, in a briefing with Betanews.

In a separate announcement this week, IBM launched WebSpan, a fee-based, service-oriented software environment that's already drawing a lot of comparisons with Microsoft's Azure.

More than a year and a half after suing 22 companies for infringement of three of its Wi-Fi/ODFM patents, Ottawa, Canada-based Wi-Lan Technologies has just settled with one of the defendants, Infineon Technologies, who has agreed to a licensing deal.

As a part of the settlement, Infineon will license several Wi-Lan patents in wireless and wireline technology, including xDSL and Wireless LAN. While most terms of the deal are confidential, a separate transaction occurred between the two companies this week, in which Wi-Lan purchased a number of patents from Infineon.

It was announced in late March, but only as Lenovo owners get around to updating their systems are they becoming aware that ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU), the power behind the "big blue button," has been discontinued, eliminating the line's beloved automatic-update capability.

One-click driver update capability has been a longtime feature of the ThinkPad line, which include a large programmable button (labeled "Access IBM" on IBM-era machines and "ThinkVantage" on the later Lenovo models) set up for that purpose. Clicking the button after boot-up fired up the TVSU process, which downloaded many if not all of the driver updates required for that particular machine.

In Web usage statistics now expanded to include mobile platforms, Windows is slipping against not just Macintosh and Linux, but also against iPhone, iPod Touch, and Java ME. This according to the latest live statistics from Net Applications, which samples global Web traffic from its clients.

Among visitors to all of Web sites tracked by Net Applications, Windows has dropped nearly 3 full percentage points in under a year, falling from 94.8% to 87.9% between June 2008 and April 2009. Apple's Mac OS rose from 7.94% to 9.73% over the same time frame, while Linux clients broke the one percent hurdle for the first time ever, stepping from 0.80% to 1.02%.

Following in the footsteps of TiVo and DirecTV, Dish Network today launched Dish Remote Access, which lets customers access and program their home DVRs from any Internet connected device.

Users can search for, and schedule to record, content on multiple receivers up to nine days in advance. Searches can be filtered by genre, channel, content rating, language, and more. There are currently a few limitations to the service, which include a lack of control over external hard drives, no ability to switch between Tuner 1 and Tuner 2, and over-the-air listings that are subject to irregular availability.

Granted, Microsoft's not accustomed to scaling back operations as drastically as it has had to this year, so it's understandable when a company gets the first-time jitters. But as of this morning, not even the people who direct the development of .NET Micro Framework -- Microsoft's innovative development platform for small devices -- can give a definitive answer with regard to what's happening to the project, shedding only selective rays of light on already fuzzy explanations.

On Wednesday, ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley was first with a story saying Microsoft had made the decision to release the .NET MF project to "the community," though the company left the true definition of that term to the rest of the world to ponder. Foley's original source for her story -- as is typical for the veteran journalist -- was Microsoft itself, whose spokesperson had told her and others in the press, "Microsoft also intends to give customers and the community access to the source code," She also quoted portions of the statement saying the business model for .NET MF was changing to "the community model."

Electronic Arts' MMORPG-centric studio Mythic Entertainment, is now accepting applications for the closed beta of Ultima Online: Stygian Abyss, which will begin later this month.

Ultima Online is one of the most popular and longest-running massively multiplayer games in existence, which according to EA was the first of its kind to reach a subscriber base of more than 100,000 active users. Stygian Abyss focuses on Gargoyles, characters that have been central to the Ultima series since Ultima VI was released nearly 20 years ago for DOS, Amiga, Atari ST, and Commodore 64.

Ever wondered who the heck uses AOL's proprietary software in 2009, or if anyone's seriously still on Yahoo? A first-ever survey from Wakoopa holds the intriguing promise of looking primarily at the computer habits of People Like Us. For now, anyway.

Wakoopa, which provides a social-networking and application-search space for software users, garners its data through a (voluntary) desktop tracking program that clocks which apps users use and for how long, along with apps users recommend and share with each other. So far, over 75,000 users have installed the tracker.

One day before closing arguments are scheduled in the Hollywood suit against RealNetworks and its RealDVD product, RealNetworks' CEO gave out some tantalizing information about its Facet set-top box -- both confirmation of what it is and financial numbers that indicate how much it means to the company.

Glaser described Facet to analysts on the company's quarterly earnings call as Linux-based hardware running a software stack "designed to be the successor to the consumer DVD player." We knew that. In fact, it's generally thought that Facet represents a consumer-ready DVD jukebox -- rip once, watch forever, and with control equivalent to a decent DVR (at least).

My best friend Jeff saved me a copy, because he knew I'd not only want to see it but dissect it, the way a hungry crow goes after a freshly slammed armadillo in the middle of I-35. I was a Star Trek fan the way a New Yorker is a fan of John McEnroe or an Oklahoman is a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, loving to see them in the spotlight but always critiquing their style. Jeff was the assistant manager of a movie theater with four (four!) screens, so he got the advance promotional kit for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Jeff saved me the first promo poster with stills from the movie. Between the premiere and my high school graduation, the premiere was -- at least at the time -- the more exciting event.

I can't think of Star Trek movies today without picturing the gang of us seated around the linoleum tables at Big Ed's, chomping down a heap of fresh-cut fries and taking apart the pictures from the promotional kit for clues. What was the meaning, for example, of Uhura's and Chekov's sweater collars being blue-gray, while Sulu's and Scotty's were mustard yellow?