Microsoft Releases Next Wave of Windows Live Services

Microsoft has released a new wave of Windows Live services that adds more social-networking qualities to its set of online services.

The company unveiled last month a plan to add Facebook-like qualities to its set of online services, which include e-mail, calendaring, instant-messaging, photo-storage and sharing and collaboration services, among others. At the time, the company said the new services would be available to users before the end of the year.


Microsoft first revealed the Windows Live brand for its online services and a plan for a major overhaul and to add new services in November 2005. The services are aimed at competing with Google by making Windows Live Web users' entry point into the Web and ultimately allow Microsoft to sell more online advertising.


The new version of Windows Live services lets people users have designated as "friends" see activities they are doing in other Web applications through Windows Live Hotmail, Windows Live Messenger and other Live applications and services. The capabilities will be similar to the way Facebook allows users to be notified via e-mail or on its Web site about what their friends have been doing in the applications they use on Facebook, a feature called the "news feed."


To provide the new "activities" feature, Microsoft has partnered with popular third-party Web sites to link their applications with Windows Live, including Flickr, iLike, LinkedIn, Yelp, Flixster, Pandora, Twitter, Photobucket and Tripit.


In addition to updates to existing services, such as Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Spaces, there also are several new services available to users with Tuesday's release.

They include Windows Live Groups, a service for letting teams, clubs or other groups of people collaborate and engage in online discussions; Windows Live Photos, a new photo-storage and sharing service; Windows Live Profile, a way for people to share information about themselves with more than 50 partner sites; and Windows Live People, which allows users to store and manage Windows Live contacts.

Users can access the new services online now.

source:pcworld.com

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Watch for a Vista Update in April

Microsoft Corp. will deliver Windows Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) to manufacturing in April 2009, two months after it issues a final test version to users, according to a Web site that accurately predicted several Windows ship dates in 2008.

TechARP.com, a Malaysian Web site that nailed the release-to-manufacturing (RTM) dates for Vista SP1 and XP SP3 earlier this year, said that Microsoft will post a release candidate -- the final test version -- of Vista SP2 in February 2009, finish the service pack next April and offer it to users via download from the Web at some point afterward.

The last was necessarily vague, if only because Microsoft has had trouble this year synchronizing service pack RTM dates with availability on Windows Update. It took six weeks last winter to get Vista SP1 in the hands of most users -- and then only after a ruckus when Microsoft initially denied access to subscribers of its for-pay developer services -- and a week to issue Windows XP SP3 in the spring. XP SP3 was delayed because of a data-corrupting compatibility bug with Microsoft's own point-of-sale software.

Although Microsoft issued the beta of Vista SP2 to a limited number of testers a month ago, company officials have so far only committed to shipping the update sometime in the first half of next year.

According to Microsoft, Vista SP2 will include Windows Search 4, Bluetooth 2.1 wireless support, faster resume from sleep when a wireless connection has been broken and support for Blu-ray. Some of those features, including Windows Search and the Bluetooth support, have been available to Vista users for months through individual updates.

The service pack will update both Vista, the client version of Windows, and Windows Server 2008, the company's corresponding server software.

Vista SP2 will require SP1 as a prerequisite, a factor that played to Microsoft's ongoing recommendation that users deploy the first service pack as soon as possible.

SOURCE:pcworld.com

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Microsoft Warns of Worm Attack on Windows

Security researchers at Microsoft Corp. last week warned of a significant climb in exploits of a Windows bug it patched with an emergency fix last month, confirming earlier reports by Symantec Corp.

Microsoft again urged users to apply the MS08-067 patch if they have not already done so.

The new attacks, which Microsoft's Malware Protection Center said began last weekend but spiked in the past week, use the same worm Symantec first spotted Nov. 21.

Dubbed "Conficker.a" by Microsoft and "Downadup" by Symantec, the worm exploits the vulnerability in the Windows Server service, used by all versions of the operating system to connect to file and print servers on a network. Microsoft patched the bug in an out-of-cycle update five weeks ago after it discovered a small number of infected PCs, most of them in Southeast Asia .

According to Ziv Mador, a researcher with the Malware Protection Center, the new wave of attacks has spread in corporations and hit "several hundred" home users. Most of the infection reports have come from U.S. users, said Mador in a post to the center's blog , but his team has received calls from users in several other countries too. The worm avoids infecting Ukrainian computers, Mador said, which may indicate the malware was written by a Ukrainian; hackers often purposefully skip systems in the country where they live, hoping that will postpone or eliminate any reaction by local authorities.

"It is also interesting to note that the worm patches the vulnerable API in memory so the machine will not be vulnerable anymore," said Mador. "It is not that the malware authors care so much about the computer as they want to make sure that other malware will not take it over too."

The worm also resets the machine's system restore point, said Microsoft in its technical write-up , which may make it difficult or impossible to "roll back" Windows to a pre-infection state.

PCs that have been patched with the MS08-067 fix are protected, Mador stressed.

Last week, Symantec bumped up its ThreatCon security alert status from "1" to "2" in response to attacks it had tracked hitting its customers and honeypots. Others security vendors, however, disputed the uptick.

source:pcworld.com

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Google Chrome vs. Internet Explorer 8

Randall C. Kennedy, InfoWorld

Vs.

They're back! Just when you thought the "browser wars" were over, with the two camps -- Microsoft and Mozilla.org -- settling in for a kind of intransigent détente, along comes Google to stir things up all over again. Clearly Google is unhappy with the current state of browser geopolitics and feels it needs to roll its own in order to ensure a robust base for its myriad hosted applications (e.g. Gmail, Google Docs, etc.)

To that end, Google has designed an almost completely new Web browser. In fact, other than the core rendering engine -- which is based on the open-source WebKit standard of Safari fame -- everything in Google Chrome constitutes a rethinking of how you engineer a browser application. For example, with the current versions of Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, individual Web page tabs are hosted in a single process -- a model that is efficient (in terms of memory and resource consumption) but also prone to catastrophic failures: A single crashed tab can easily take down the entire browser application.

Chrome seeks to eliminate this problem by isolating each tab within its own application process and then leveraging the built in memory protection capabilities of modern, preemptively multitasking operating systems to keep code and data in a failing tab from stomping on other processes. So now, when that buggy Flash applet on your favorite humor site goes belly up, it won't necessarily take down the entire browser -- the processes running in other tabs will keep chugging along.

This is a big deal for Google, which is banking on wider adoption of its hosted application offerings and battling the perception that browsers are unreliable, especially when you start running multiple Web applications in a tabbed format. Nobody wants to trust their line-of-business applications to an unstable environment, so Google hopes that Chrome will provide the kind of robustness that can assuage customers' fears.


Double Stuff Browsers

Of course, few technology ideas are truly original, and the case of the multi-process, tabbed browser is no exception. In fact, Google can't even claim to be the first to market with this model -- Microsoft beat them to the punch by a week when it released its own take on multi-process browsing in the form of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2.

Like Chrome, IE 8 uses multiple, discrete processes to isolate and protect each tab's contents. However, while Chrome takes a purist approach and literally launches a new process with each opened tab, IE 8 uses more of a hybrid model: It creates multiple instances of the iexplore.exe process but doesn't specifically assign each tab to its own instance. Thus a look at Task Manager under Windows will show an equal or greater number of Chrome instances than running tabs, whereas IE 8 will generate a fewer number of instances -- for example, six copies of iexplore.exe to support 10 discrete tabs -- and share them among the running tabs.

How these two variations on a theme will hold-up in the real world remains to be seen. My take is that Google's purist approach will ultimately prove more robust, but at a cost in terms of resource consumption. In fact, both Chrome and IE 8 stretch the limits of current PC hardware by gobbling up enormous amounts of RAM while saturating the system with lots of concurrent execution threads.

This new development -- browsers chewing-up more memory than their host OS -- is something I documented in my Enterprise Desktop blog earlier this week. At the time, I was shocked by how bloated IE 8 had become, consuming 332MB of RAM to render a simple 10-site/10-tab browsing scenario. Then I evaluated Google's Chrome and my expectations were reset yet again. Not only did the "fresh start" Chrome use nearly as much RAM (324MB) as the legacy-burdened IE 8 during peak browsing loads, it actually "out-bloated" IE 8 over the duration of the test, consuming an average of 267MB versus. IE 8's 211MB (you can read more about these test scenarios at the blog).

Clearly, these are products targeted at the next generation of PC hardware. With nearly 20 percent of a 2GB PC's memory consumed by Web browsing, and with IE 8 spinning more than 170 execution threads on Vista to complete the same aforementioned 10-site scenario (Chrome spins a much more conservative 48 threads), we'll need to rethink our ideas of acceptable minimum system requirements. At the very least, you're going to need multiple processing cores and many gigabytes of RAM to support this new, more demanding take on Web-centric computing.

To be fair, I must mention that both IE 8 and Google Chrome are still in the Beta stages of development. Chrome, in particular, is in its first public test release cycle, while IE 8 is only now being made available in a "feature complete" form (previous IE Betas were notably short on innovation). And it's also important to consider all of the non-architectural changes that these browsers bring to the table -- most notably, enhanced rendering performance and usability.



source:pcworld.com

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Microsoft's IE Market Share Drops Again

Gregg Keizer, Computerworld


Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer (IE) lost nearly a full percentage point in market share during August, the browser's biggest drop in three months, a Web metrics firm said today.

IE's rivals -- Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox, Apple Inc.'s Safari and Opera Software ASA's Opera -- all extended their shares at IE's expense last month.

But all those browsers, Microsoft's included, now face competition from Google Inc., which yesterday launched a new browser, dubbed "Chrome," that immediately grabbed 1% of the market, Net Applications Inc. said today

According to California company, IE accounted for 72.2% of the browsers used in August to access the 40,000-plus sites Net Applications monitors. That was a drop of about 0.9 percentage points from July, and a departure from the month before, when IE maintained its share for just the third time in the past year.

IE's August drop was the second-largest for the year, lower only than May's 1.1-percentage point fall.

"I can't really explain what happened," admitted Vince Vizzaccaro, Net Applications' executive vice president of marketing. "Perhaps there was some relationship with the launch of IE8 Beta 2. If users are looking at IE8, maybe they're looking at other browsers at the same time, trying to decide which one to use."

Meanwhile, Firefox increased its share by about half a percentage point, climbing from 19.2% in July to end August at 19.7%. Other browsers also boosted their shares: Apple's Safari went from 6.1% to 6.4%, while Opera's share hit 0.74%, up slightly from July's 0.69%.

Within IE's and Firefox's totals, however, there were shifts from one version to another.

As Vizzaccaro hinted, Microsoft's share for its IE8 browser -- still in beta -- leaped by almost 500% in just a few days. Before the Aug. 27 launch of IE8 Beta 2, the browser accounted for only 0.04% of all browsers connecting to Net Applications-monitored sites. By Tuesday, IE8's share had climbed to 0.22%.


The number of users running Firefox 3.0, the latest version of Mozilla's open-source browser, also jumped last month, moving from 5.7% in July to 7.7% by the end of August.

Mozilla started offering Firefox 2.0 users an update to Firefox 3.0 last week. Not surprisingly, Firefox's month-to-month gain came in increases to Firefox 3.0's portion of the browser's share.

IE7, officially released in October 2006, slid slightly in August, falling from July's 47.1% to 46.8%. It was only the second time that IE7 lost market share in the last 24 months, according to Net Applications.

The even-older IE6 continued to lose share in August, ending the month at 25.2%, off from July's 25.7%.

Google Chrome, which debuted Tuesday around 3 p.m. Eastern, accounted for 1.04% of all browsers as of 1 p.m. Eastern today, said Vizzaccaro.

"But their numbers will be a lot easier to grow quickly," he said, "than, say, Safari or even Firefox did." Vizzaccaro cited Google's name recognition and dominance in the search field as two reasons why it would be able to show rapid uptake for Chrome.



source:pcworld.com


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Microsoft Releases SQL Server 2008

Microsoft has released SQL Server 2008 database to manufacturing, including with the release a new Web edition of the product aimed at its hosting partners, the company said Wednesday.

SQL Server 2008, which has been in beta testing for some time, is now available on the Microsoft Developer Network and Technet. An evaluation download will be available on the company's Web site on Thursday.
The product is available in seven editions, each designed for the needs of different customer segments. More information about the editions is available on the SQL Server 2008 Web site.

One of the editions that is new with the 2008 release is SQL Server 2008 Web. SQL Server 2008 Web is designed for hosting companies, providing the tools necessary to support low-cost, large-scale, highly available Web applications or hosting environments, according to Microsoft.

On a conference call Wednesday, company executives explained how feedback from customers spurred them to release a major upgrade to the database a mere three years after its previous release, SQL Server 2005.

They also felt the need to provide 10 reasons to justify upgrading to SQL Server 2008 when some companies have just begun to adopt the 2005 version of the product.

Customers might wonder "why would I upgrade?" only three years after the release, said Dan Jones, a SQL Server group program manager. He then went on to outline reasons -- including a new performance analysis tool and a resource governor that eases management of concurrent uploads -- for customers to adopt the new database.

In a press release, Microsoft cited several large enterprise customers who are testing SQL Server 2008, including Xerox, Siemens, Clear Channel Communications and Fidelity Investments.

Microsoft is trying to close the feature gap between its SQL Server product and Oracle's 11g database, and entice enterprise customers to use its software over Oracle's with a lower price point.

The company also is pushing SQL Server as much more than a database. The product is becoming the central data repository for Microsoft's data-management and business intelligence strategy. The company has made several recent acquisitions to achieve this end, including that of data-quality vendor Zoomix and data warehouse-appliance vendor DATAllegro.



source:pcworld.com


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