WinInsider

Within days of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Washington D.C. last week, Microsoft has found itself at the center of a controversy because of reports that it's popular Flight Simulator game was used to help plan the attacks. Recent versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator include realistic city landmarks, including the World Trade Center in New York, and sensationalistic news reports have actually included footage of the software showing what it would have been like to pilot one of last week's doomed flights. However, Microsoft says that the software could only help hone the skills of an already trained pilot, and could not be used as the sole instruction for such an act. But future versions of Flight Simulator will remove the World Trade Center in deference to the victims of the recent attack.

Hewlett-Packard on Monday plans to debut new PCs loaded with Microsoft's Windows XP operating system. The company plans to begin shipping the systems next week. In a move following Gateway, HP also will take preorders on custom-configured systems starting Sept. 21, with anticipated delivery as early as next Monday. The company also expects to begin selling new Windows XP systems in retail stores on the same day.

There are three topics you just can't bring up in polite company without spoiling for a fight: politics, religion, and Microsoft. All three involve power, influence, wealth, and potential suffering. And all three can leave rationality and fairness in the dust. So it was a major break for Microsoft when the U.S. Court of Appeals recently let the company off the hook a bit and blasted Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's breakup plan and his character. Its critics rail about how Microsoft is planning giant, all-encompassing programs like .Net and HailStorm. What is Microsoft supposed to do? Think small? Produce doilies? Microsoft was sometimes nasty and heavy-handed in stomping competitors. But it won because its products were OK and its competitors' products were often crap. In the tech world, the company that gets there first with something that works, wins.

The most obvious change is a Windows XP-like user interface. This entails 3D icons, alerts that appear as bubbles atop your currently running application, and a skinnable Today screen (roughly equivalent to the Windows desktop). Pocket PC veterans will immediately spot the new X in the upper right corner of all screens, which makes the current application screen disappear. While it makes navigation feel much more like that of Windows, the button does not actually end the application and free up RAM. Instead, the OS is supposed to monitor RAM usage and close idle applications as necessary to keep things speeding along. Pocket PC 2002 appears to do a better job of this than its predecessor.

Something very important has been lost in the noise, however. XP is the most significant Microsoft product for consumers and small business since Windows 95 was released six years ago. With XP, Microsoft finally leaves behind the 20-year-old legacy of MS-DOS and builds instead on the much more solid foundation of the business-oriented Windows NT and 2000. And where networking was always a function grafted onto Windows 95 and its progeny, XP is built from the ground up as a networking operating system. An XP computer expects to be hooked up to a network, even if it's only a dial-up connection to the Internet. The payoff is especially great for laptops used in more than one networking setup, say at home and in the office. For corporations that have been running Windows 2000, XP is an incremental improvement. For consumers and small businesses, it's a big deal.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly extended the deadline for both sides in the Microsoft antitrust case, presumably because of the recent terrorist events in the United States. Originally, both Microsoft and the US government were to have filed briefs today outlining their suggestions for the remedy phase of the trial; they now have until Tuesday. Both sides asked for an extension on Wednesday.

Despite the initial delay, the next phase--a joint status report due September 21--is still on. And, of course, Microsoft is still trying to get the attention of the Supreme Court; earlier this week, the company once again asked the higher court to bypass the Appellate Court and throw out its entire verdict.

A federal judge on Thursday extended the deadline for a joint status report that Microsoft and the government have been drafting for the next phase of the landmark antitrust trial. The software giant, Justice Department and 18 states had been expected to deliver the document on Friday, but U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly extended the deadline to 12 p.m. EDT Tuesday. The government and Microsoft requested the extension in a filing late Wednesday.

If you're interested in saving $50 on Windows XP, Microsoft is offering a rebate for those people who attend a local launch event for the product on October 25. Microsoft will be holding local events in every state, the District of Columbia, and various international locations, so the chances are good that there will be event near you. Attendees will also receive a $50 rebate coupon for any version of Office XP. For more information, and to sign up for a local Windows XP launch event, please visit the Microsoft Web site.

Microsoft is making a new security tool, dubbed URLScan, available to customers immediately. The company says that URLScan is designed to help customer protect IIS-based web servers from the most common types of attacks by helping to ensure that they only respond to legitimate requests. "URLScan is effective in protecting Web servers because most attacks share a common characteristic--they involve the use of a request that's unusual in some way," the company says in its release about this tool.

Microsoft Corp. today announced that it is making a donation of $10 million in cash and technical services to support the relief and recovery efforts in New York City and other areas affected by the tragic events of September 11. 

"We are all stunned by these tragic events. Our hearts go out to the victims and their families, and everyone affected by this terrible situation. We want to support the recovery effort in every way that we can," said Rick Belluzzo, president and chief operating officer of Microsoft.