WinInsider

When you play with the Media Player in Windows XP, Mark Rolston wants you to feel more than the music. He wants you to feel the music machine. As the vice president of Creative for frogdesign, a renowned design firm, he led a team that worked seamlessly with the design folks at Microsoft. Their task: to reimagine an operating system. "It was obvious that the new functionality of Windows XP would demand an equally exciting look and feel throughout the product experience," says Steve Kaneko, Microsoft's design director for platforms. From the start, the defining concept was that everything in XP had be tangible--to look and feel like a physical product.

After months--if not years--of hype, Microsoft has finally shipped Windows XP, the long-awaited release that finally brings the Windows NT kernel to consumer operating systems. Formally introducing Windows XP in New York last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates symbolically typed "exit" and logged out of DOS for the last time, marking the end of an era for Microsoft's DOS-based operating systems, from version 1.0 in 1981 all the way through Windows 95 and Windows Me. This is a huge step for the computer industry. According to Gates, 400 million people use products built on the DOS code base, compared with 70 million people on the Windows 2000 and Windows NT code base. This move to a new, more stable code base is long overdue. In fact, Microsoft's original plan was to combine the Windows NT and Windows 9x code bases back in 1998. (You can still type "cmd" into the Run dialog of Windows XP or Windows 2000 to access the familiar command-line interface, but the underlying OS isn't DOS.)

I take personal satisfaction every time shit happens to AOL :) Finally put end to those annoying AOL-CD.

A federal judge has ordered America Online to temporarily stop distributing a recent version of its popular service, AOL 6.0, saying the software likely violates copyrights for computer code used to play back MP3 files. If upheld, the ruling could force the AOL Time Warner division to pay millions of dollars in damages, marketing expenses, and costs related to retrieving or altering existing copies of AOL 6.0. At issue is software copyrights owned by PlayMedia Systems. AOL subsidiary Nullsoft holds a software license from PlayMedia for use in its Winamp MP3 player, but the court found AOL may have gone too far by including the code in a different media player bundled with AOL 6.0. According to the decision, the agreement limited Nullsoft's right to use the software "within Winamp."

Using the Microsoft Platform, Healthaxis Built a Solution For The MEGA Life and Health Insurance Co., Allowing MEGA to Adopt Three HIPAA-Mandated EDI Transaction Sets in Only 70 Days.

Microsoft Corp. today announced the availability of the Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for HIPAA, a solution designed to address the requirement that all covered healthcare organizations be able to submit and receive HIPAA-compliant transactions by Oct. 16, 2002. Microsoft made the announcement at the Windows on Healthcare VII conference sponsored by the Microsoft Healthcare Users Group.

Microsoft has invested heavily in Visual Studio .NET extensibility. This is an important part of Visual Studio .NET, because it lets customers easily tailor the tool to their personal working style and enables them to accommodate team practices. You can simply capture several steps in a regular process you have to follow (say, for checkins, creating new projects or forms, or updating code) and make that process available as a single command to invoke. Independent software vendors (ISV)s can implement whole new features (including groupware, profiling tools, work flow, or life-cycle tools) that fit into Visual Studio .NET as seamlessly as if they were built into the shipping Visual Studio .NET product.

BetaNews was in attendance as Microsoft kicked off its latest Windows operating system Thursday. We have posted a few of the pictures that captured the event as it transpired, with more to come. A press-only CEO panel featured some of the greatest minds in the industry, and Bill Gates followed with his keynote address.

Windows SuperSite: It was a product launch like no other: Microsoft's launch of Windows XP was held at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, New York City. The company held special events, parties, and meetings before and after the launch keynote, with key company executives making themselves available to the press. Here are some of the sites we saw this week in New York City.
The events were held in two stores on Columbus Circle, the Gateway Country and CompUSA stores. The Gateway event included CEO Mitch Waite and a live cow, so there you go. At CompUSA, across the street, eager XP users waited in line for the store to reopen at midnight.

Bloomsburg University students were recruited for this research from communication classes. Student volunteers were randomly divided into two groups: Group 1 was asked to complete a series of 30 tasks using the Windows 98 Operating System. Group 2 was asked to complete the same series of tasks using the new Windows XP Operating System. Students were assembled in a Bloomsburg University Computer Lab, the Windows 98 Group separately from Windows XP Group. This research was conducted between September 27 and October 4, 2001. As instructions for each item were given to participants, words were carefully selected so as to not 'tip off' research subjects as to how they might do each task. For example, rather than tell participants to 'shut down the computer,' they were told 'you are done using your computer for the day and don't want to leave it on overnight. Please do what is necessary to do so.'

With the growth rate of multi-PC homes increasing to nearly the rate of new single PC homes, equipment for networking the home is under high demand and new technologies are emerging to help consumers and businesses make their networks faster and more portable. The most substantial problem for homes that are preparing to network their PCs is cabling. Although new homes are occasionally wired with in-wall Ethernet, such homes are very uncommon and the task of running Ethernet through the walls of an existing home is both difficult and expensive. For many readers, the simple option is to run CAT5 cabling under the carpet or along the baseboards, but for people who do not want to deal with visible and exposed cabling, wireless and phoneline networking may be a perfect alternative.

As if Microsoft hasn't had enough exposure in the last week or so, the company's famously ebullient chief executive, Steve Ballmer, has been giving the Sunday papers an insight into his high-powered world. Anyone who's seen the video clip of Mr Ballmer leaping around a conference stage like an over-eager baboon, telling the crowd just how much he loves Microsoft, may wonder what makes him tick. Well, courtesy of the Independent on Sunday, we have a few hints...

Ballmer at Home
"I normally get up at around 5am, work out, go for a jog and then get the kids ready for school. I drop the kids off at school on the way to the office," he told the paper's interviewer.

Microsoft Great Plains Business Solutions today announced the introduction of the Certified Professional Program, a program that provides individual certifications for its reselling channel partners. In providing thorough and convenient testing and certification to partners, the Certified Professional Program demonstrates and extends Microsoft Great Plains' ongoing commitment to maintaining a well-educated and equipped channel, helping to sustain high levels of customer satisfaction.