At Day 1 of PDC 2008 in Los Angeles, attendees got their first look at a technology Microsoft introduced earlier this month into beta: a new way for building reformed Web applications.

The Web site StackOverflow.com is the latest example of a fully operational Web site, running today out of beta, using a technology from Microsoft that is still in beta: ASP.NET MVC, the new compartmentalization model for content-driven Web site programming.

Continue reading →

Microsoft announced on Monday that the company's Windows Live ID will support the OpenID digital identity framework, releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) at this week's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

The CTP allows relying-party sites and the developers of relying-party libraries to test their setups against the Windows Live ID OpenID provider endpoint. Testing now will help them to knock out bugs before the system goes live, most likely sometime next year.

Continue reading →

Canonical today announced that the 8.10 version of its popular Linux distribution Ubuntu will be available for free download on Thursday, October 30.

Both the desktop and server editions of Ubuntu 8.10 will be available for download on the official Web Site, and on FileForum.

Continue reading →

Twitter may make Army Intelligence nervous, but examples of two current online efforts by the Air Force and Coast Guard show that tech remains value-neutral, and vital to American military interests.

The news over the weekend that the 304th Military Intelligence Battalion worries that Twitter has become "a social activism tool for socialists, human rights groups, communists, vegetarians, anarchists, religious communities, atheists, political enthusiasts, hacktivists and others to communicate with each other and to send messages to broader audiences" induced a certain amount of eye-rolling around the Web. The Federation of American Scientists, which posted a PDF of the report on its site (PDF available here), snarked that Twitter was thus comparable to credit cards and can openers.

Continue reading →

Although PDC 2008 attendees won't receive Windows 7 Milestone 3 build 6801 until Tuesday, Microsoft has already issued a security patch for the pre-beta version of Vista's successor. This early version of Windows 7 is quite similar to Vista, and will likely require the same security fixes.

"A security issue has been identified that could allow an authenticated remote attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it," Microsoft says on the download page. x86, x64 and Itanium versions of the patch are available.

Continue reading →

Interest in how Microsoft would deploy an extension of the .NET Framework called Dublin in the cloud exceeded anyone's expectations today, as thousands of attendees literally spilled over into a spare room to watch the first Dublin demos on video.

Dublin is, as was already known prior to today, Microsoft's platform for extending .NET services as distributed architecture; but now we know that Dublin will be used for deploying custom .NET applications on Windows Azure. This afternoon, the company's Jacob Avital and Mauricio Ordonez performed live demonstrations of how a cloud-based .NET would asynchronously capture customer-generated events over the Web, respond to those events with code, and report on the results.

Continue reading →

Utilizing the 700MHz spectrum block it acquired in March and the Sprint network, Cox Communications today announced plans to launch its own wireless service.

The company plans to enter the market in 2009 on Sprint's network, and then roll out its own 3G network, which it is currently building. Cox's plans also involve testing LTE for 4G connectivity.

Continue reading →

The big news for day 1 at PDC 2008 was the introduction Windows Azure, Microsoft's "operating system for the cloud," and its associated Azure Services Platform. Microsoft also outlined future plans for its own online services. We've put together a quick FAQ to help you digest the news and what it means.

What is Windows Azure and the Azure Services Platform? Windows Azure serves as the foundation for developing applications that run in the cloud. What this means is that it essentially turns servers across the Internet into a massive distributed operating system, running applications that both interact with PC-based software and run within a Web browser.

Continue reading →

Anyone who thinks Microsoft isn't capable of responding to a serious challenge doesn't know Microsoft. It's the familiar puzzle, put together the same way: Let others blaze the trail, then wait for an opening and leverage resources.

Windows Azure, depending not upon whom you ask but instead upon when you ask the question, either is or is not an operating system. It is not a kernel designed to operate on a single processor and provide access to resources on the local machine, so in that regard, it is not Windows.

Continue reading →

Still very much the chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates is expected to try to convince an FCC commissioner to help quell an NAB proposal that would push back a vote on "freeing the white spaces" of the wireless spectrum.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and another high-ranking Microsoft official plan to call FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell later today to help sway the commission away from an demand by TV industry to delay its decision on the controversial "white spaces," BetaNews has learned.

Continue reading →

As perhaps the most abundant example to date of the platform's HD streaming capability, Netflix announced today that its "instant view" streams will be made available to non-Windows users through Microsoft Silverlight.

With Netflix placing increased emphasis on its streaming and instantly viewable library, a large swath of users has still largely been neglected. Though queues could be assembled in any browser and then viewed with one of the connected set-top devices, those without Windows Media Player 11 could not stream Netflix content directly to their computers.

Continue reading →

Airport full-body scanners which show people's private parts are a lot like a strip search, imposing "a serious impact on the fundamental rights of citizens," according to a resolution passed by European lawmakers late last week.

Although already in use at some airports in the US, the UK, and Netherlands, full-body scanning -- a security technology quite capable of showing people's unmentionables -- might now fade away as a specter facing Americans and other travelers in European airports, due to a lawmakers' vote.

Continue reading →

Yahoo on Friday forged ahead with a deal to build both a customer care center and a data center in Nebraska, even after reporting a 64 percent drop in third-quarter profits on Monday of the same week.

Regardless of 10 percent layoff plans and a huge fall in profits announced earlier that same week, eternally optimistic Yahoo said on Friday that it will open a new data center in Nebraska in 2009 at a price tag of $100 million, which may not include new salaries.

Continue reading →

On Election Day, November 4, Research In Motion is slated to finally release the BlackBerry Bold, the more traditionally designed of RIM's newest BlackBerrys. Market analysis firm iSuppli today has released a teardown of the device.

According to iSuppli's teardown, the costliest aspect of the Bold is Marvell's processor, at $34.34, or roughly 22% of the device's total cost. Recently, UK carrier Orange halted the Bold's sales, citing dubious software problems. Many wondered if the problems were really related to Marvell's PXA chipset, which is based on the Intel XScale microarchitecture. Almost all processing takes place on the chip, including applications processing, and digital/analog baseband.

Continue reading →

A few weeks ago, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer gave clear hints of a Windows-branded product that will be deployed in the cloud. At 8:55 am PDT Monday, Ozzie christened this service Windows Azure.

As expected, Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie began his first day keynote speech at PDC 2008 (he'll be back for Day 2) by staking his company's new claim to software as services. "The Web has become a key demand generation mechanism," he said in his characteristic high-flying style, "becoming Web services' front door."

Continue reading →