A common topic of discussion in the Windows world - in fact, in any operating system - is boot performance. Many systems take a long time to reach a usable desktop from the moment the power switch is pressed, and this can be quite annoying if it takes too long. In a post on the Engineering 7 blog, Michael Fortin, lead engineer of Microsoft's Fundamentals/Core Operating System Group, explains what Microsoft is doing to make Windows 7 boot faster.
The biggest news this morning (that doesn't relate to a German trade show) is that Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is out. It's still a developer's preview version, but it seems stable enough for consumers to test. I'll cut to the chase - you can get it here.
Microsoft today announced plans to track Australian delegates attending its annual Tech.Ed conference in Sydney next week using RFID tags embedded in conference badges.
The move comes months after 50 academics, researchers and students at the University of Washington (UW) began a social networking experiment, which has seen participants voluntarily tag themselves. The system records the location of tags every five seconds and publishes movements to a Web page.
Homer Simpson may have enjoyed his hot beef injections (for Homer these were hot dogs), but he would be far less fond of SQL injections, attacks upon SQL Server that can cripple Web sites.
A local security researcher is exploring several scenarios in which Windows Vista could be attacked and warns more protection is needed for users.
Ben Hawkes presented his findings at the Black Hat conference, held in Las Vegas this month, and will also present them at the Kiwicon conference, to be held in Wellington in the end of September.
Hawkes’ research has uncovered hacking techniques for attacking the Vista heap, which is a dynamic memory management component, used by every single application, from Microsoft Word to web applications, he says.
While the company only has a 10 percent share of the search market with its Live Search technology, Microsoft has big plans to enhance its platform regardless of what happens with its now-dormant proposal to buy Yahoo.
At the Search Engine Strategies 2008 conference in San Jose, California. on Tuesday, Microsoft's Satya Nadella, vice president of the company's search, portal, and advertising platform group, discussed the company's goals for search but did not want to talk about the company's Yahoo plan.That planned acquisition has not panned out.
The countdown to Internet Explorer (IE) 8 Beta 2 is on. Microsoft said the consumer-focused IE 8 test release would be available in August. There are just 11 days left….
No doubt, Microsoft has been holding back some features that will be added to the new test build. Istartedsomething’s Long Zheng blogged on August 20 about one such possibility: Private browsing, a k a “porn mode.” Private browsing is a feature that the Mozilla team ended up pulling from Firefox 3 (and 3.1), but one that Safari has had since 2005.
Although Windows XP was Microsoft's preferred desktop operating system for an unprecedented length of time, it became something of a PR nightmare for the software giant. Windows XP is full of security holes and is very easy to compromise. When Microsoft created Windows Vista, its primary goal was to address all of the security problems that have been plaguing Windows XP for so many years.
A year or so ago I wrote a post called Adobe AIR: 10 reasons to love it, 10 reasons to hate it. Here’s the same kind of list for Microsoft’s Silverlight, based on the forthcoming Silverlight 2.0 rather than the current version. The items are not in any kind of order - they also reflect my interest in application development rather than design. It is not a definitive list, so there are many more points you could make - by all means comment - and it will be interesting to have another look a year from now when the real thing has been out for a while.
It's often said that the greatest competitive threat to a new Microsoft OS release is the collective weight of all the past iterations of Windows. After all, if someone has a stable installation that he or she is happy enough with, why switch? Redmond has usually gotten around the inertia by ensuring that new machines ship with the newest OS, which ensures that the company's latest and greatest shows up on more machines as older hardware gets replaced. But indications from a variety of sources suggest that Vista is facing more resistance than usual when it comes to preinstalled sales.
