Microsoft and SpeechWorks Form Strategic Alliance To Bring Speech Technology to Millions of Web Developers.
Today at the Telephony Voice User Interface conference, Microsoft Corp. and SpeechWorks International Inc., the global leader in speech recognition and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies and services, announced a strategic alliance aimed at fostering widespread use of speech technologies in the development of enterprise applications. The alliance will make industry-leading speech platform technologies from SpeechWorks and Microsoft available to millions of developers, making it faster and easier for them to build speech-enabled Web applications and services for enterprise customers. The technologies to be developed will be based on the Speech Application Language Tags (SALT) specification, which enables users to access these applications via the telephone and multimodal devices such as cellular phones, wireless PDAs and emerging new technologies such as the Tablet PC.
Thanks Rod! Microsoft Corp. today introduced its first Wireless Desktop for customers looking for the convenience of a wireless keyboard and an ambidextrous wireless mouse. The new Microsoft Wireless Desktop includes Microsoft's first Wireless Keyboard and new Wireless Wheel Mouse. Together, they deliver a complete set of integrated, clutter-free desktop hardware. The package will be available this February for $74.95 (U.S.). The Wireless Desktop package features the following: 1) Wireless Wheel Mouse; 2) Wireless Keyboard; 3) IntelliType Pro keyboard and IntelliPoint mouse software.
Thanks Rod! Microsoft Corp. is wasting no time implementing the Trustworthy Computing initiative that Bill Gates outlined in his all-company memo last month. Speaking to a group of privacy and security officers at the Privacy and Data Security Summit here Friday, Richard Purcell, Microsoft's corporate privacy officer, outlined an extensive privacy program that requires every department to survey itself on a prescribed set of policies and produce a so-called PHI (Privacy Health Index).
Having kept their initiatives on hold while competitors tested the waters, Microsoft Corp. and its licensees are readying Pocket PC handheld devices that feature integrated wireless voice and data capabilities. The move comes as interest in integrated handhelds grows among corporate users and competition in the industry heats up.
"Any rumors of us not doing wireless devices have been greatly exaggerated," said Ed Suwanjindar, product manager for the mobility division at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash.
Integration With Visual Studio .NET Provides Additional Support For Orchestrating XML Web Services; Tyco International Deploys BizTalk Server 2002 Solution in Less Than Four Months.
Microsoft today announced the general availability of Microsoft BizTalk Server 2002. Building on the landmark release of BizTalk Server 2000, which has become one of the fastest-growing integration software solutions in the industry, BizTalk Server 2002 adds additional support for orchestrating Web services through Visual Studio® .NET; revolutionary new SEED technology for rapid business partner connectivity; and new tools for advanced management, monitoring and deployment capabilities within the enterprise. Tyco International Ltd. chose BizTalk Server 2002, Commerce Server 2000 and SQL Server 2000 to build its supplier enablement solution for one of its largest companies, Tyco Valves & Controls.
According to a report in Government Computer News (GCN), at IT publication aimed at federal, state and local governments in the U.S., Microsoft has halted all new software development for one month so that the company's programmers can focus instead on fixing existing bugs. The revelation came during a privacy and data security summit in Washington that was sponsored by the Corporation of Privacy Officers.
"We are not coding new code as of today for the next month," Richard Purcell, director of the Microsoft's corporate computing office (whatever that is) is reported to have said at the summit. "It's time to get the garage cleaned out."
McKinley, Intel's upcoming server processor, will be huge, at least in terms of surface area. The processor, which will come out commercially toward the middle of this year, will cover an area of 464 square millimeters, according to Intel specifications. That's larger than expected and larger than most chips ever made. As a result, the chip won't be the easiest or the cheapest product Intel has ever produced. Big chips cost more to make because fewer can be carved out of a single wafer. Yields--the number of good chips produced from a wafer--also typically declines as chip size increases because of the greater potential for defects.
Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Sunday that he sees no global economic recovery this year, countering a budding groundswell of optimism tied to economic data pointing to a fast rebound. Gates, co-founder of the world's largest software supplier, said that corporate capital spending cuts and a glut of excess capacity in hard-hit sectors such as telecommunications may keep the economy moving sideways through the rest of 2002.
"I don't see any big uptick in this year. Japan certainly won't be, and the U.S. won't be," Gates told an audience of editors and reporters attending the five-day World Economic Forum summit of political and business leaders in New York.
In its ongoing effort to strike entertainment and media partnerships, Microsoft's MSN portal will power the Web sites for two popular TV shows produced by NBC, according to sources familiar with the deal. The deal, expected to be announced Monday, will allow MSN to produce and promote Web sites for the popular "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno," and the flashy entertainment news show "Access Hollywood." The Access Hollywood site, which has already launched, will feature music videos, movie trailers and entertainment news headlines. The Tonight Show site will not launch until the spring, the sources said.
Thanks Robert. A new worm is spreading through the Internet affecting Linix/Unix Boxes. Adore is a worm, that spreads in Linux systems using four diffrent, known vulnerabilities already used by Ramen and Lion worms. These vulnerabilities concern BIND named, wu-ftpd, rpc.statd and lpd services. When Adore is running, it scans for vulnerable hosts from random Class B subnets on the network. If vulnerable host is found, attempts to download the main worm part from a web server located in China, in a similar way that Lion worm does.