Windows

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 - 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.

Overheard: Zombie army is not just a scary Halloween story

“What’s scarier than a Zombie flashmob at an Apple store? John Naughton’s article about how the Storm worm is being used to assemble a Zombie Army.”   This is really scary stuff.

‘If Storm were a disease,’ says Bruce Schneier, ‘it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will come back years later and eat your brain.’

Naughton writes: Storm has been spreading steadily since last January, gradually constructing a huge botnet. It affects only computers running Microsoft Windows, but that means that more than 90 per cent of the world’s PCs are vulnerable. Nobody knows how big the Storm botnet has become, but reputable security professionals cite estimates of between one million and 50 million computers worldwide. To date, the botnet has been used only intermittently, which is disquieting: what it means is that someone, somewhere, is quietly building a doomsday machine that can be rented out to the highest bidder, or used for purposes that we cannot yet predict.

Storm is different. It spreads quietly, without drawing attention to itself. Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can lie dormant for a long time.