Microsoft does a virtual 180 -- no, wait, a 360
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A bizarre episode in which Microsoft announced, then rescinded, plans to change EULA restrictions on how consumers can use Vista made for a strange Tuesday for observers, and an unhappy ending for users hoping to use the OS on virtual machines.
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Microsoft has brought back its Sidewinder line of gaming peripherals, beginning with a mouse that is customizable to a userÃ¢â¬â¢s specific gaming needs.
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It isn't the features you can see in Vista, or the lack thereof -- it's the priority shift at Microsoft's core.
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(InfoWorld) - As Microsoftâs five-year-long development effort slouches toward completion, details began to emerge last week that showed the company is (finally) gearing up to release Windows Vista after the new year, as promised. Pricing information popped up on a Canadian Web site, and Amazon.com told visitors that the new OS would be going out on Jan. 30, only to replace that date with a squishier âEarly 2007.â Finally, by the time you read this, Microsoft has promised to release the penultimate test version of its Vista operating system, dubbed âRelease Candidate 1â to an army of testers around the world. Are anticipatory chills running down your spine? They shouldnât be. Because a Release Candidate must be stable enough to allow corporate buyers to evaluate the product for deployment, Microsoft will have done quite a bit of work to RC1 over Vistaâs previous beta incarnations; so get set for a number of improvements. On the other hand, because of this concentration on stability, donât look for any noteworthy new features. Hereâs what Vista RC1 will likely have to offer: Installation: A late beta release dubbed âPre RC1â received kudos from more than one online reviewer for the improvements in this area, and rumors out of Microsoft say RC1 is the first version of Vista (or any Windows version) that has seamlessly installed on a variety of new notebooks and desktops â no muss, no fuss, and with full detection of PC Card and USB peripherals. Graphical interface: Aero has reportedly given Microsoft quite a few Advil moments, and even Beta 2 users were reporting intermittent difficulties. Look for this to be smoothed out in anything that receives RC status. That doesnât mean, however, that you should try to run it on your anemic graphics subsystem from 2003. Microsoft recommends at least 32-bit-per-pixel graphics capability. To you and me that means that for really smooth Aero-nautics, you should have a DirectX 9-capable 3-D accelerator card with 128MB of dedicated video RAM. If your test box lacks this video muscle, RC1 will support a non-Aero interface for weaker or older PCs. Audio: Microsoft has been having trouble with audio in even its most recent Vista Beta release. Toolsmixer controls are intermittently absent, and audio playback is often interrupted or missing. This should be solved in an RC1 release. If youâre a systems or network administrator, RC1 wonât be much different from Beta 2. The new release will ship with Internet Explorer RC1 installed, but even that has few differences from IE7 Beta 2. There will be a new, easier-to-use integrated backup tool, but itâs of little interest to corporate users whoâll most likely be using a centralized third-party app or Windows Shadow Copy. The pricing and availability info â coupled with the OSâs slow march toward âgold,â aka a finished version of Windows Vista ready for manufacturing â shows that Microsoft is serious about meeting its ship date. However, the key criterion for Vista RC1 will be stability. If it installs smoothly, runs smoothly, and gives us the full Vista experience that Microsoftâs been promising, consider it a success. If not, itâs back to the drawing board.
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My Xbox 360 has a blog, and it's starting to get on my nerves.
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DRM restrictions may have caused Microsoft's Vista virtualization flip-flop.
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Microsoft is coming to your living room. Get used to it.
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How far is too far when it comes to the freedom of software? Plus: Palm slipping, Windows sliding.
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New virtual-machine technology can be used to test software patches and migrate aging Windows NT applications. By John Foley, Paula Rooney, CRN.
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First mod that's actually useful? Xbox 360 buffs who think their next-generation games console is just too darned bulky for gaming on move - not to mention the TV you'd have to lug around - should take heart from fellow fan Ben Heckendorn who decided enough was enough and re-configured his console into a laptop form-factor.â¦
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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Why did it take the world's biggest and most successful software company so long to revamp its flagship product -- and what do Microsoft's delays tell us about our growing dependence on balky software products?
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Blog: Device from Immersive Media may be  funny looking, but boy does it get all the angles.
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Microsoft has some serious questions to answer....
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Genuine Advantage not proven Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage is being updated today, in what the company claims is response to customer feedback.â¦
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Microsoft is taking the wraps off this week, but the notion of a table-like computer has generated interest at the company since at least 2001.Photos: On the road to Microsoft's Milan
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Triples Xbox Live Arcade game size too Microsoft will next month offer Xbox 360 gamers a 512MB memory module, a handy boost for owners of the hard drive-less incarnation's of the games console - they're currently limited to 64MB.â¦