Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ Category
When Vista was first released late last year Microsoft announced that they were to tighten their Windows Genuine Advantage system by making it so that if a user was found to be using a non-genuine version of Windows, they would slowly have their copy of Windows limited.
Since this system has been setup, Microsoft has had many complaints from their customers that their genuine operating systems have been limited due to this system being put in place.
WGA has been used in Windows since Service Pack 2 was released August 6, 2004 where they made you activate your copy of Windows with Microsoft. This could either be done online or over the phone. Microsoft has no plans of removing this feature, but in the latest build of their service pack (Windows Vista Service Pack 1) they are going to remove the system that limits users without a valid copy of the OS. This could either be a good thing for Windows hackers or it could mean that they are going to replace this with an even tighter system.
Whatever happens to the WGA system, this will all be revealed early next year when the service pack is released via Windows Update.
Take a close look at the following two pictures. The first one represents a picture of the Microsoft staff 29 years ago in 1978. Here are the members from the portrait, from left to right.
Top row: Steve Wood, Bob Wallace, Jim Lane.
Middle row: Bob O’Rear, Bob Greenberg, Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin.
Bottom row: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen.
Yes, that little kid in the bottom left corner is actually Bill Gates. He was just a teenager then, but he grew and had an important contribution to what Microsoft is today. Who would have thought back then that those geekish people would propel Microsoft into the large corporation it stands as today?
Easy to see they were all ‘hippies’ back then (or were people dressing like that 30 years ago?) There were some at Apple Corporation as well, so maybe we could say that hippies created the personal computer industry. For those interested, the history of the personal computer is (at least partially) interwoven with the 60’s counterculture. An excellent book on this topic is John Markoff’s “What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer”.
Either way, “Would you have invested back then?”
The second picture presents Microsoft’s senior leadership roles.
From left to right:
Bill Gates, Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer), Ray Ozzie (Chief Software Architect), Steve Ballmer (CEO).
They were at a news conference announcing plans for Ozzie and Mundie to assume increased roles in the company. The picture was taken about a year ago.
Notice the difference.
Just I was talking about Google’s initiative to increase storage space for a small fee, Hotmail took measures of its own. Now Hotmail offers 5GB of storage space. It’s quite a big jump from the 2GB it previously offered, but this is surely not the only new improvement.
“We’ve spent more time in this release identifying what parts of the product are slowest and fixing those. We hope that you notice an improvement when this update is released to your account, and we’ll continue our work on performance in future releases.”
So from now on you can expect your Hotmail pages to load faster and make you save time. Besides that, other improvements were made to the contact list, now you can keep track of a person that uses multiple login names within one contact entry. Not only that but there is even a wizard to help you make the change.
Also safety features were added, such as blocking images and links in emails that come from unknown users. This should prevent phishing fraud and other malware related actions.
For now Yahoo! seems to lead the free email market with its ads supported, unlimited storage space webmail, and now comes Hotmail with it’s 5GB, so it’s Gmail’s time to show that it’s the best.
I know it sounds weird, but feel free to try it out. Click here if you are using IE6 and if you’re willing to experience a full browser crash.
This is the piece of code embedded in that page:
< style >*{position:relative}< /style >< table >< input >< /table >
The weird thing is that the code renders correctly in Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE7, but when accessed with IE6, it pops in a fatal error mshtml.dll. Special thanks to Hamachiya2 (a Japanese blogger) who actually discovered this.
Bill Gates declared for the New York Times that he doesn’t believe Google can really challenge Microsoft’s share of the market, referring to mobile phone software. They say Microsoft now has ten percent of the market so it really is going to be hard for Google to match, much less overtake such a strong showing.
“How many products, of all the Google products that have been introduced, how many of them are profit-making products? They’ve introduced about 30 different products; they have one profit-making product. So you’re now making a prediction without ever seeing the software that they’re going to have the world’s best phone and it’s going to be free?”
All that might as well be true, but the way I see it Microsoft should not boast about profit from entertainment. Just take a look at how well Xbox sales are going. Nevertheless Google has some hard work to do if it wants to be a top dog in this market.
After Sony’s price cut on the PS3 it seems logical that now it would be Xbox’s turn to get cheaper. It would be a somewhat predictable step on Microsoft’s part, but for now it’s all rumors.
The news are based on two ads, one seen at Wal-mart and the other at Toys R Us. The guys at Cheap Ass Gamers noticed them, and this is how it all started. But even if it would be so I’m not sure that a $50 will mean too much. But of course that’s for the buyers to decide. So it could be a hoax, but I seriously doubt it. Anyway we’ll wait and see.
Throughout the last year, Federated Media had been serving and selling ads for digg.com. Yesterday, that partnership ended and Kevin Rose signed a deal with Microsoft.
I wanted to give you a heads-up before the official announcement is made later today. We’ve signed on Microsoft as our new partner to sell and serve the ads on Digg. It’s a deal similar to the one Facebook signed with Microsoft last year.
This move gives us an advertising partner with a larger organization and a more scalable technology platform to keep pace with Digg’s growth. Best of all, it lets the Digg team completely focus on new feature development. Federated Media, which has been an awesome partner for the last year and a half, will continue working with Digg focusing on integrated sponsorships and custom programs like the Arc project in labs.
It’s important to say that we’re as focused as ever on a great user experience. So, no dancing monkey ads, and the design will remain uncluttered.
New (big) features coming soon…
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It’s been a while since people started complaining about Xbox gaming consoles that were scratching their DVDs. But it was only recently that the first legal issues started for Microsoft on this matter.
The lawsuits was initiated in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and it concerns disks that were damaged by Xbox consoles that were handled in “reasonable, foreseeable, normal and intended use”. To be clear about this, this was the first lawsuit regarding the DVD-scratching batch of consoles, if we consider the big picture there are numerous legal quarrels related to the Xbox, but this is the first of them concerning the fact that some Xboxes really damage DVD’s.
The accusers claim $5 million and brings in front once more the Dutch video (shown here) that shows users with broken DVDs due to the Xbox. I bet Microsoft isn’t that happy anymore for extending the warranty on its consoles, but in the same time I’m sure they’ll manage to get out of this without much hassle.
Everybody agrees that Ubuntu is really great, and part of that good image is due to Dell. They are now shipping in parallel computers with Windows XP, Vista but most important, Ubuntu. Dell is one of Microsoft’s long time partners that postponed the migration to Vista until after SP1 is released.
Also I bet Microsoft is not OK with all the popularity Ubuntu is getting from this. Although Dell officials didn’t actually say they’re going to promote Ubuntu outside the US, it’s only natural they’ll use it, since it’s been such a great success. But they won’t stop at Ubuntu, it’s quite probable that Dell will start using other Linux distributions as well:
I wanted to be clear that Dell does have plans to offer Linux to more consumers in additional locations outside the United States. More details to come later this summer. We will also offer Ubuntu to small business customers in the future.
But it seems the Dell-Ubuntu combination was so successful, that HP is interested in making an offer too. If this is true, then Microsoft may lose another ally in its ‘war’ against Linux. HP would be a very big fish for Ubuntu to catch, and I’m sure that if Dell and HP would go this way, other manufacturers are going to choose Linux distributions to deploy.
A while ago I was discussing the possibility of Vista SP1 appearing somewhere in 2008. Well things just might not be that way. Lately, rumor has it that the first beta for SP1 will be released somewhere in mid-July (and that’s somewhere next week).
On one hand this would be a little awkward considering the last court encounter between Google and Microsoft. Given the changes that should be made, everybody thought it will take Microsoft much more time to release the beta for SP1. On the other hand if they launch the beta now, that means we can surely expect a stable version somewhere around November 2007. And that’s just great because that’s when Windows Server 2008 is being released (and that’s what the guys over at Redmond wanted from the beginning).
But until SP1 is released (whenever that’ll be) here are some features you can expect:
- Performance tweaks lessening the amount of time it takes to copy files and shut down Vista machines
- Improved transfer performance and decreased CPU utilization via support for SD Advanced Direct Memory Access (DMA)
- Support for ExFat, the Windows file format for flash memory storage and other consumer devices
- Improvements to BitLocker Drive Encryption to allow not just encryption of the whole Vista volume, but also locally created data volumes
- The ability to boot Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) on an x64 machine
- Improved success rate for firewalled MeetingSpace and Remote Assistance connections
