Microsoft Windows

Overheard - VMware vs. Microsoft

“The video has ignited a longstanding debate within the partner communities of Microsoft and VMware over which company has the better approach to virtualization. In Microsoft’s view, virtualization is a feature of the operating system, while VMware represents an unnecessary — and expensive — extra layer. VMWare counters that Microsoft’s virtualization isn’t sophisticated enough for the needs of enterprises.” Kevin McLaughlin, VMware Apologizes To Microsoft For Hyper-V Bashing

Scott Drummonds, a technical marketing manager at VMware, admitted that he exercised bad judgment in posting the video and said he has removed it from Youtube. “Unfortunately, my intention to stir the pot with eye-poking banter has put my credibility and by association VMware’s credibility in question among some of you. For this I apologize,”

Overheard: Memristor is the missing link of integrated circuitry

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. Leon Chua as quoted in ‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

A memristor can be thought of as a resistor that changes its resistance depending on the amount of current that’s sent through it — and the big deal is that it retains its resistance even after the power is turned off.  Memristors are in the news again because engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed flexible memristor-like electronic memory chips.  It could be big news for consumer electronics because it opens up the possibility that memory chips can be printed just as simply and inexpensively as overhead transparencies.

Bing - Your new verb

[Microsoft] is set to launch an $80 million to $100 million campaign for Bing, the search engine it hopes will help it grab a bigger slice of the online ad market. Abbey Klaasen, Microsoft Aims Big Guns at Google, Asks Consumers to Rethink Search

Microsoft has updated and rebranded LiveSearch with a new name. Bing. According to Ballmer,  they picked the name because it was short, it could be used as a verb and didn’t have negative connotations.

In spite of Ballmer’s good intentions, there’s a lot of buzz about “why THAT name?”

I don’t know….If someone said to me “I don’t know what iguanas eat — let me go Bing it,” I think it would sound ok.  I could see people using Bing as a verb.

I do wonder, though, if Microsoft people working on the engine secretly thought of Kumo (the old code name) as Beta Bing?  And btw, Abbey Klaasen is the only pundit I’ve read who describes the new search engine correctly — it’s a vehicle for generating ad revenue.

Windows 7 - Get your free ‘release candidate’ tomorrow

“The promise of Windows 7 is that laptops may be transported to work, become ‘business PCs,’ and be enrolled with all their enterprise-level Active Directory privileges; then be taken home, become ‘home PCs,’ and be open to all the family’s shared files, aggregate libraries, and other conveniences; and ne’er the twain shall meet.” Scott M. Fulton, III, Top 10 Windows 7 Features #10: Homegroup networking

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Windows 7.  Microsoft is making the Windows 7 “release candidate” available to the general public tomorrow.  That’s about five months earlier than expected!

A release candidate is a ‘tween’ version  — it’s between the first Beta and the final release — and it’ll probably be the last version of Windows 7 that we’ll see before the final product ships in October.

The reviews for Windows 7 seem to be pretty good. Two features we’ll be adding definitions for in the near future: Windows 7 Homegroup and Windows 7 XP mode.

The Windows 7 RC license will only be available until July. The license will expire in June 2010, so that means you can have a pretty-close-to-final-version of Windows 7 free for a year.   Here’s a link to the official Microsoft 7 homepage.  And Ed Bott’s put together a great QnA for those of us who want to learn whether we have the right stuff to try it out.

Overheard - The role of ActiveX in browser exploits

Because so many ActiveX controls turn out to be malicious, Microsoft designed Internet Explorer 7 so that it displays a warning every time a site attempts to use an ActiveX control. The problem is that the casual user does not typically understand what an ActiveX control is, or what the consequences of allowing an ActiveX control to run might be. Brian Posey, ActiveX security improves with Internet Explorer 8’s security features

Experts are predicting that there’s no end in sight for ActiveX exploits.  It makes sense — because even criminals want to be cost-efficient.  If you’re trying to find vulnerabilities to exploit, you to make sure you can affect the highest number of people — and IE is still #1.

Overheard - Wikimedia and Mozilla hook up to shake up

Today, video and audio on the web are dominated by proprietary technologies, most frequently patent-encumbered codecs wrapped into closed-source player widgets. Wikimedia and Mozilla want to help to build a web where video and audio are first class citizens: easy to use and manipulate by anyone, without compulsory royalty schemes or other barriers to participation. Erik Möller, Mozilla and Wikimedia Join Forces to Support Open Video

Mozilla and Wikimedia share a strong commitment to open standards. Version 3.1 of the Mozilla Firefox web browser will include built-in support to play audio and video in the open source Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats. All audio and video in Wikipedia is stored in these formats.

This is interesting. Mozilla gave $100,000 to the Wikimedia Foundation to “help coordinate improvements to the development of Ogg Theora and related open video technologies.”  That’s not a lot of money, but it’s generating a lot of buzz because it’s a step towards open video standards.  Christopher Blizzard (Mozilla) does a nice job explaining how a better Ogg would potentially open up the market for streaming video and knock both Adobe (Flash) and Microsoft (Silverlight) off their proprietary thrones.

Ogg isn’t a file format — it’s a container format.  What’s that? Well, when you order something from Amazon, it’s put in a box and the UPS guy delivers the box to your house.  On the Web, when you order a streaming video, think of Ogg as the virtual box that’s used to deliver the video to your computer.   Wikipedia has a handy chart that compares container formats.

Overheard - Confliker / Downadup worm alert

Security vendors from across the spectrum have warned that a stingy worm has been successfully exploiting a hole in Microsoft Windows server service. Known as Confliker or Downadup, the worm spreads by exploiting a remote procedure call (RPC) vulnerability. Robert Westerfelt, Confliker, Downadup worm hype? Get the facts

There’s a new variant of the Conficker worm. It’s known as ‘Downadup.’ Microsoft issued a patch for the worm last October but it’s still spreading and mutating.

The worm, which some authorities say has been able to build the largest botnet on record,  works by exploiting a vulnerability in remote procedure calls that allows remote code to be executed once a vulnerable machine receives a specially crafted RPC request.  In plain English, this means that if an end user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer, his computer will request malicious code to be executed. Like many of its malicious predecessors, this worm denies infected machines Internet access to security vendor websites.

Microsoft added routines to clean up Conficker infections to the January edition of its Malicious Software Removal Tool.  Customers in the U.S. and Canada can receive technical support from Microsoft Product Support Services at 1-866-PCSAFETY. There is no charge for support calls that are associated with security updates. The National Cyber Alert System recommends that to prevent further infections by infected USB devices, users should disable the Windows auto-play feature.

Overheard - Move over Second Life. Web Alive has come to town.

Lenovo unveiled a virtual world called eLounge, which is powered by Nortel’s recently announced virtual world platform, web.alive. Lenovo appears to be using this venue as a social and interactive platform for providing information on their products and services — notably, their laptops. Dennis Shiao, Review: Lenovo’s eLounge Virtual World

When I woke up this morning, I felt like I’d been out late to a party at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (Unfortunately, I was still in upstate New York surrounded by snow.)

You see, last night I went to virtual trade show hosted by Lenovo. They are using a platform called web.alive. It’s Web-based and like nothing else I’ve experienced in browser-based virtual world software. I actually felt as if I had been at the conference, meeting people, looking at laptops and Lenovo’s new netbook. The only thing that was missing from the conference experience were the free pens and the chance to enter a raffle.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Second Life. I’ve probably installed it and uninstalled it at least five times over the past year. I’ve been to virtual events at Cisco and IBM. Second Life for business is interesting, but nowhere as exciting as what I experienced last night at Lenovo’s virtual store.

There’s something different about web.alive’ platform.  For one thing the navigation is intuitive and it only takes a first-time visitor a few minutes to figure out how to get around. You don’t see avatars standing around with their heads down and arms out — wiggling their fingers as they type on some invisible keyboard.  That’s what happens when you visit a business site in Second Life — everyone looks like zombies.

At Lenovo’s eLounge, however, you see energetic people walking around with their heads up. You can talk to the software developers, you can talk to the Lenovo sales representatives or you can talk to other people who’ve wandered in and are marveling at the experience of being in this rather wonderful virtual world. And if you’re not all that social?  You can just wander around and eavesdrop. The experience feels real.

I’ve been to other virtual trade shows on line. They’re interesting, but they’re flat.  Literally flat, clickable images. And the experience is flat.  Here’s a tour of AMD’s virtual trade show last year, for example. It’s nice, but it’s so…last year.

The architects at web.alive are on to something big. And they’re marketing it to the right audience — business people whose budgets are tight — who need to collaborate — who want to stay on the cutting edge.

If you have a few minutes today I strongly suggest you stop by Lenovo’s virtual store.  You’ll view the virtual environment as a Web page after you download and install a small browser plug-in.

I think you’ll be surprised, not only by the high quality graphics and the amazing audio, but by the real feeling of community you’ll experience.

Oveheard - Google Chrome is out of Beta

It’s not too often Google shocks people these days, but declaring its Chrome browser a finished, 1.0 product after only four months was sure one of those moments. Google, the land of the perpetual beta (five years and counting for GMail, three years for Docs), declared the bits golden code after 100 days of public consumption. Andy Patrizio, Does Google’s Chrome Need More Polish?

Google may or may not have a secret operating system project in the works, one that mimics the interface of the Android operating system for mobile phones, but for PCs. If it does, it would fit with Google’s revised mission statement for Chrome, “to build a browser to give users a better experience of the Web.”

Overheard - Top 5 tech stories in Australia

In case you weren’t one of the readers stampeding these stories, here’s are the most popular tales from across TechTarget’s five Australian sites in 2008:

1. SearchCIO readers could not get enough of this story comparing virtualisation wares from Microsoft and VMWare.

2. Career advice clearly appeals to networking professionals, who stampeded this piece about how certifications can improve your prospects at work.

3. Old-school is still big for security pros, who loved this piece about five command line tools to detect Windows hacks.

4. The blend of open source NAS and virtualisation proved the most popular mix for our storage-oriented readers.

5. Bluetooth for Business was the story of most interest to SearchVoIP ANZ readers in 2008.