Microsoft

You probably know about the "hidden" administrator account in Windows XP. It's the only account on XP systems on which no other accounts have been created.

Until you add a new account, you zip right to the desktop when you boot the OS, with no stop at the Welcome screen. Once you set up one or more new accounts, the default administrator disappears, though you can bring it back in both XP Home and Pro. (More on this below.)

After a number of delays, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) finally has Office 2008 for Mac ready for release Tuesday; it's the first update to the platform in four years and the first Office product to run natively onIntel (NSDQ: INTC)-based Macs.

Office 2008 for Mac includes Word, Excel for your spreadsheet needs, Powerpoint if you want to create a presentation and Entourage for email and time management. The bundle also includes Windows Messenger, but considering it was barely updated, I'm choosing to focus on the four major programs.

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) on Tuesday released 11 Security Bulletins that address 17 potential vulnerabilities. Six of the Security Bulletins are rated critical; five are rated important. Microsoft did not include a fix for a JScript vulnerability that the company mentioned in its pre-patch guidance last week.

The affected software includes WebDAV Mini-Redirector, Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) Automation, Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office Publisher, and Microsoft Office. The OLE and Word vulnerabilities affect both Microsoft's Windows and Mac customers.

Following the announcement that Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) had been shipped to manufacturing, Microsoft confirmed over the weekend that it seeded another build of Windows XP SP3 to a closed-set group of testers.

"Yesterday, we released Windows XP SP3 RC 2 to private beta testers," a Microsoft spokeswoman said in an email. "This release catches the build up on previously released hotfixes and responds to critical feedback from previous betas."

It's been more than a year since Jim Gray went missing Jan. 28 on a solitary sail from San Francisco Bay to the Farallon Islands.

Microsoft said its $US44.6 billion offer to purchase Yahoo is "fair" and hinted that it may pursue a hostile takeover of the Internet company, according to a statement Microsoft made Monday in response to Yahoo's formal rejection of its buyout offer.

In a statement, Microsoft said it's "unfortunate" that Yahoo "has not embraced" its proposal to combine the two companies, and the rejection of the offer "does not change our belief in the strategic and financial merits of our proposal."

Near-perfect knockoffs of 21 different Microsoft programs began surfacing around the world just over a decade ago.

Soon, PCs in more than a dozen countries were running illegal copies of Windows and Office, turning unwitting consumers into criminals and, Microsoft says, exposing them to increased risk of malicious viruses and spyware.

With Windows XP having a cut-off point for new XP licenses on June 30th, Microsoft are being told by analysts to keep selling XP till 2009.

The story is that most customers are not ready for Vista and the June 30 cut-off date for new XP licenses will still be too soon, Richard Jones from Burton Group’s said “any OS transition should have the original and new products available for at least two years to handle customer migration needs” read more on that here.

To some IT security gadflies, Microsoft's latest "unpatched patch" incident involving a transfer protocol bug in the Windows Kernel is a sign that Redmond should change not only its security priorities but also the manner in which it discloses vulnerabilities.

But from Microsoft's perspective, the impact of a flaw disclosed last week involving Windows Kernel TCP/IP/IGMPv3 and MLDv2 -- mainly affecting supported editions of Windows Small Business Server 2003 and Windows Home Server -- merely represents the cost of doing business.

Microsoft Corp.'s online advertising researchers will spend this year teaching computers to be smart about sticking ads into video clips, and to be even smarter about targeting ads to specific Web surfers.

Microsoft showed off a handful of early-stage advertising projects at its headquarters Tuesday that may or may not turn up as part of Microsoft's Web advertising platform.

The demonstrations come just days after Microsoft's $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo Inc., which, if successful, will boost the software maker's Web traffic and online ad revenue.