Microsoft To Alpha Test Office 14 Before End Of Year

Microsoft will begin alpha testing the next version of Office in November or December, according to a blog posting by a Microsoft employee that was later pulled from the Web. According to the blog posting, by Hayley Rixon, who works on the Microsoft business intelligence team, Microsoft is calling for people to be part of a technology adoption program (TAP) that will give them an early opportunity to test the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server. The TAP for this product will be a part of the TAP for Office 14, the alpha test of which will begin in the "November/December timeframe this year," according to the blog posting. Office PerformancePoint Server is business performance analysis software that will be a part of the Office 14 release. While the blog posting was live on Microsoft's Technet site on Monday afternoon Eastern time, by afternoon on the West coast the Web site was no longer working. The post also no longer appears on Rixon's blog. Microsoft could not be reached for comment Tuesday about the site no longer being active. However, on Monday through its public relations firm Microsoft said that while the Office team is working on the next version, "it is too early to discuss specific features, capabilities or timing" for the product. The deadline for submissions to be a part of the Office PerformancePoint Server TAP is Aug. 28, according to the post.

IE8 Demands More Memory Than Windows XP

Microsoft's latest browser Internet Explorer is a memory hog it gobbles more than double the system memory of its main rival Firefox, 52% more memory than its predecessor IE7 and uses almost three times as may threads. In a test involving IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 10 rich media sites were opened in each on a machine running Vista with 2 GB RAM. In the end IE8 sucked up 380MB of memory, IE7 260MB and Firefox accounted for 159MB. You would be surprised to know that when Windows XP starts it takes 130 - 150MB, then start IE8 and suddenly you would be looking at a larger memory print than Windows XP. Its not all brickbats for IE8 as it did score high than its peers when it came to CPU utilization. On average, Firefox consumed 33% of the CPU's time under XP, and 48% under Vista. Meanwhile, IE8 Beta 2 took 22% of the CPU in XP, 33% under Vista. IE7 was the least aggressive at utilizing the processor: its averages were 13% and 24% under XP and Vista, respectively. "If a multi-threaded application is designed well, and runs on a heavily parallel system, like a multi-core machine with four or eight [processor] cores, you can get additional performance. My guess is that Microsoft is targeting IE8 at the next generation of hardware."

The Great Windows XP SP3 Rip Off

It takes a fair bit of nerve to charge anything to fix up a botched product, but Microsoft's $14.95 price to get a physical copy of Windows XP Service Pack 3 really takes some beating for sheer gall. While it was released earlier this year, XP SP3 has only recently started being pushed out to Australian users as part of Microsoft's Windows Update service. If Windows Update can install the update successfully, then you're typically looking at 70MB or so of downloading — painful, but not impossible. If the install chokes, though, Microsoft recommends downloading the full version of SP3, which is a rather less cosy 316MB. For a corporate, that's not necessarily a problem, but for individual consumers on a slow connection, or with a minuscule download limit, it's a major pain. In the past, Microsoft has offered to send out CDs containing large patches, and it is doing that for SP3. What's shocking is the cost: $14.95 for a CD that will apparently take between two to four weeks to arrive at an Australian address. At that speed, even a dial-up download might be quicker. When I asked Microsoft how it could justify this ridiculous state of affairs, I got the following reply: "Microsoft manages duplication of its software, including Service Packs, at regional duplication facilities. As such, the copy of Windows XP SP3 you are ordering is coming from Singapore, which reflects the shipping costs you've referenced as well as the time to delivery." That partially explains the shipping delay, but it's a lousy excuse for the price.

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Today there was a comic book in my mail, sent by Google and drawn by no less than Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics. Within the 38 pages, which I’ve scanned and put up, in very readable format Google gives the technical details into a project of theirs: an open source browser called Google Chrome. The book points to www.google.com/chrome, but I can’t see anything live there yet. In a nut-shell, here’s what the comic announces Google Chrome to be : Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.

Google 'Feels Your Pain' After The Latest Gmail Outage

Yesterday, many Gmail users found themselves unable to access their mailboxes, as Gmail returned a "Temporary Error (502)." Google later posted an apology in the official Gmail Blog that gave a clue as to how big the outage was. "We don't usually post about problems like this in our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted," Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson posted. About 20 million users visit Gmail daily, and there are more than 100 million accounts in total. A number of prominent bloggers were affected by the outage, some of whom claim to be users of Google Apps Premier Edition that has a "99.9% uptime guarantee." If taken literally, the 0.1% in the guarantee would constitute 8.76 hours per year.

Microsoft Starts To Talk : Engineering Windows 7 Blog is Live

Microsoft has thus far been very tight-lipped on Windows 7; everything that we know about Vista's successor—which is very, very little—has been carefully disclosed to us by Microsoft. The software giant has already been heavily criticized for not having any public channels of communication open. Even Microsoft's own partners have complained that the company isn't telling them much, and they're the ones that really have to know the details so they can align their products accordingly. Anyway, it seems that the stance over at Microsoft is changing, but very slowly: the Engineering Windows 7 blog (E7 for short) is now live. E7 has two authors,both of whom are senior engineering managers for Windows 7. Steven Sinofsky is in charge of the Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group and Jon DeVaan heads the Windows Core Operating System Division. Other members of the Windows 7 engineering team will also post, comment, and participate on the blog.

Kaspersky Detects New Worms Attacking MySpace and Facebook

Kaspersky Labs, has detected two variants of a new worm, Networm.Win32.Koobface.a. and Networm.Win32.Koobface.b, which attack MySpace and Facebook users. The worms transform victims machines into zombie computers to form botnets which are used to create DDOS attacks and send spam email. Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.a infects the user when they access accesses their MySpace account. The worm creates a range of commentaries to friends' accounts. Net-Worm.Win32.Koobface.b, targets Facebook users, creates spam messages and sends them to the infected users' friends via the Facebook site.".

Microsoft's Plans For Post-Windows OS Revealed

Microsoft is incubating a componentized non-Windows operating system known as Midori, which is being architected from the ground up to tackle challenges that Redmond has determined cannot be met by simply evolving its existing technology. SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems. Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process. According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates' technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005. A Microsoft spokesperson refused comment.

SP3 Under Suspicion Again

I find myself suspecting that there is something very strange wrong with Windows XP SP3, or at least with the installation procedure for it. I had been running this Fujitsu Lifebook S6510 with Windows XP Professional for several months when SP3 came out. I installed it, and everything seemed to work just fine. However, because I have started to use Linux quite a bit more, and I wanted a multi-boot system with Windows and Linux available, I bought a new SATA disk, and reloaded everything from scratch. As described previously, the first time I reloaded XP, and I just let it go through the update download and installation from the Microsoft Update server the way it wanted, I ended up with three updates which would not install. So I went through the entire reload procedure again, and this time I forced those three updates to install before allowing SP3 to install. That seemed to work ok, but within a few days I started getting BSOD crashes, system hangs, and various other unpleasant surprises from XP. This laptop had most certainly not done that before, so I went back and reloaded one more time. This time I didn't let it install SP3 at all, I just forced it to install all of the SP2 updates. Since then, the laptop has run flawlessly, not a single BSOD. I don't necessarily think there is anything wrong with SP3 itself. But based on this experience, and what has been posted here by several others, I think there may well be something wrong with the installation procedure for XP3 when you are loading a new system from scratch. I have no idea whether it is a sequencing problem, or an interaction problem, or whether letting SP3 install early in the update sequence causes some critical updates not to be installed.

Microsoft Promises Predictable Schedule for Windows 7

Is that spin I smell? Despite earlier rumors to the contrary,Microsoft seems now to be standing firm behind a 2010 release date for the next-generation version of Windows, currently known as Windows 7. Nobody is being too specific just yet, but a letter sent by Microsoft senior vice president Bill Veghte reiterated that the new OS would ship "approximately three years after the January 2007 general availability launch date of Windows Vista." The really amazing part, however, is Veghte's explanation for the date. "You have told us you want a more regular, predictable Windows release schedule," he writes. Ask and ye shall receive-- but I wonder, exactly how does Microsoft plan to pull that one off?