WinInsider

Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc, announced the creation of a major new joint book development agreement with Microsoft's Xbox video game system to create a fiction publishing program. The titles will be published by Ballantine's Del Rey imprint. Under this agreement, Del Rey has acquired exclusive, worldwide rights to publish paperback, hardcover, audio and electronic books based on Xbox game titles developed by Microsoft Game Studios. On a related note, Prima Games, also a division of Random House, Inc, recently announced a deal to be the exclusive worldwide publisher of first-party strategy guides titles for the Xbox games.

Microsoft Corp. is considering bundling in the next version of Windows a pared-down version of its next-generation SQL Server database and the relational file system that goes with it.

Microsoft executives have been briefing the company's largest corporate clients and partners about their plans for the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, and have included mention of a new SQL-based file system, sources said. That would require a SQL engine.

Microsoft is marshalling a frontal assault on opponents and state trustbusters in its antitrust battle, disclosing plans to bring Chairman Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer to testify at a remedy hearing and accusing AOL Time Warner and Oracle of helping to draft a harsh remedy proposal.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company fired a barrage of legal briefs Friday, some expected and others not by the court. But in all of them Microsoft made clear the only acceptable resolution to the nearly four-year-old antitrust trial is a settlement deal cut in November with the Justice Department and nine states. Nine other states and the District of Columbia rejected the deal and have returned to litigation.

So Oracle (and most likely Sun, AOL, and others) are pulling the stings behind lobbying anti-Microsoft litigations. So all the talk of "benefiting consumers" is really about "benefiting few rich people", since I do not see any "common people" pulling the stings, only Microsoft competitors.

Attorneys for Microsoft Corp. said on Friday an executive at Oracle Corp. helped write the tougher antitrust sanctions being sought by some state attorneys general against the company. In a federal court filing, Microsoft said Oracle vice president Ken Glueck was one of the "prime movers" behind the remedies being sought as an alternative to a settlement of the government's antitrust case against the world's largest software company.

Despite the vendor's claims, Oracle's Oracle9i database is breakable, a U.K. security firm reported Wednesday. Several security flaws were discovered in the company's software, including one that could allow a hacker to gain access to Oracle's database server without a user ID or password. The flaws were discovered by a security expert from Next Generation Security Software Ltd., based in Sutton, U.K.

Former General Electric Chairman Jack Welch told Hewlett-Packard Chairwoman Carly Fiorina that he sees the potential for "chaos" surrounding HP's plan to acquire Compaq Computer Corp. that competitors would exploit. Welch said in a television interview with Fiorina that support for the deal among HP's competitors helped explain why European regulators had given the go-ahead to HP's proposed deal while rejecting GE's bid under Welch to buy Honeywell. "Your competitors want this deal to go through. It will create chaos. They will clean both your clocks while you're doing all this," Welch said.

Microsoft's security-assurance group has become the software giant's taskmaster for the next month. Under a new push to secure software code and convince customers that security is a top priority, Microsoft is putting its Windows developers, testers and program managers through a crash course in secure programming. Over the next month, the software giant's security-assurance group expects the training to pay off as more than 70 developer teams audit the various software components that make up Windows XP and the upcoming Windows .Net server operating systems.

"This is an extremely serious and encompassing effort for us," said Steve Lipner, director of security assurance for Microsoft and a lead manager in the effort. "We are going to get a lot of testing done. We are going to have a lot of people who are really, really hard-core about security distributed throughout the organization, and that's going to change how products get built in the future."

Speaking of problems in Linux land, Red Hat Chairman Bob Young said this week that he's amended his position about Linux beating Windows on the desktop. He used to tell open-source crowds that Linux would never replace Windows on the desktop, but then they'd boo him off the stage. So now he says that Linux will never replace Windows on the desktop but will instead be "successful" on the desktop. What successful means, I don't know. But if Linux can beat Apple's 3.5 percent of the market, I'd consider that a success.

From WinInfo Short Takes: Week of February 11

The federal judge overseeing the Microsoft Corp. antitrust case agreed on Friday to hold a hearing on the U.S. Justice Department's proposed settlement of the landmark case in early March, but said she may not make an immediate decision on whether to endorse the deal. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly quizzed lawyers from the company and the government on whether they would present her with issues common to both the settlement hearing and tougher sanctions against Microsoft sought by some of the states in the case.

Coders around the world will be flexing their digits over the coming weeks in an effort to write software whose sole purpose is to propagate across the Internet and battle similar pieces of code to the death.

Terrarium is not a virus, says Microsoft, which created the game to show what can be achieved in peer-to-peer applications -- particularly those using the company's .Net Framework -- but it does share some similarities with the way viruses work. For instance, the object is to propagate as many pieces of code - or creatures - as possible in the three weeks that the competition will last for.

The best way to think of Terrarium, says Microsoft developer tools product manager Gavin King, is as a game like Age of Empires. The word Terrarium means a glass case for small animals, or a sealed globe for plants. In the Terrarium world, each creature represents a piece of code. Once written, it goes out into the world to do battle and the gamer has no further control over it.