David Swatland, captain in the U.S. Coast Guard for the San Francisco Bay region, looked puzzled and dismayed by a simple question at the Stanford University symposium Wednesday, "The Search For Jim Gray."
The Coast Guard never recovered any debris or spotted any sign of his bright-red-hulled boat with its black mast and the name "Tenacious" in bold white letters on the side, he said. It had been one of the most intensive searches ever mounted off the San Francisco coast, he added.
What's more, Gray's wife, Donna Carnes, and family, after the search of the ocean's surface ended, quickly mounted a survey of 300 square miles of the seafloor between the Golden Gate and the Farallons, extending out to the most likely places that Gray's boat might have reached. This search also turned up nothing, even though the side scanning sonar was able to draw a map of rocks and sand bars on the ocean's floor.
In an effort to make it easier for scanners and all-in-one device makers to interface with Windows Vista, Microsoft announced Thursday it is contributing a set of Web services protocols it has developed for scanners to a standards group working on that issue.
Microsoft is contributing the protocols to the Printer Working Group, a program of the IEEE Industry Standards and Technology Organization, according to the organization's Web site.
"The purpose of the protocols specification was to enable network scanning in home and small business environments," Mike Fenelon, a technical lead in Microsoft's documents experience group and author of the spec, told InternetNews.com.
Microsoft plans to demonstrate integration Friday between its new Silveright browser plug-in technology for rich Internet
applications and the Ruby on Rails Web framework.
The integration will be done via a plug-in, according to a Microsoft representative. Microsoft officials will detail Ruby
on Rails efforts at the RailsConf 2008 conference in Portland, Ore., which is happening now through the weekend. The plug-in
will be free to conference attendees.
Silverlight is Microsoft's entry into the rich Internet application space, where the company will battle Adobe's Flash technology.
Admins now have immediate access to any of Sysinternals utilities from any Windows computer, without having to install anything first. There really aren't all that many EXE files that people would automatically feel are safe enough to run from a remote Internet server, directly from the command line. But probably taking up most of the spaces on that short list are the invaluable utilities of Mark Russinovich, who maintains the Sysinternals brand now for Microsoft.
Even though it's Symantec that absorbed Peter Norton's brand, it's Russinovich who has clearly assumed his mantle. Chances are, Mark has probably left his Windows utilities live and exposed on one of his servers, just so he can have access to them from anywhere.
Microsoft late last week launched a revamped iteration of its highly trafficked resource sites for developers and IT professionals. Word that the company was in the process of overhauling its MSDN site was first reported last month when officials from Redmond visited user groups to gather feedback from the developer community.
Behind the scenes however, Microsoft's development team had been well into much of the architectural changes that led to this week's launch. In a blog post on May 22, S. Somasegar, senior vice president of Microsoft's developer division, revealed the new appearance for both MSDN, the company's developer-focused site, and TechNet, the IT professionals content site.
Microsoft next quarter plans to launch a consumer beta test version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser -- showcasing its upgraded compatibility with current standards.
The most obvious feature for consumers in IE8 Beta 2, as it's known, is likely to be the browser's new default rendering mode. The new mode will kick in for sites built using the most recently ratified Web standards -- a so-called "super standards" mode that the company agreed to support in March.
However, besides supporting and potentially encouraging use of these standards on the Web, the change may also force Web developers and administrators to make modifications to what could be many of their sites.
Microsoft's chief software architect dislikes the limelight but his role is crucial to shaping and coordinating the company's far flung product and services plans.
That's why it seemed a little odd for Ray Ozzie, who took over the job from the retiring Bill Gates two years ago, to hold forth on his vision of where the software behemoth is going to a group of financial analysts Wednesday at the Bernstein Strategic Decisions conference in New York.
"I'm more kind of the man behind the curtains so to speak, but I spend a lot more time hands-on with the product groups," Ozzie said ? never mind the subtle pun on his name and the wizard with a similar moniker.
Microsoft yesterday issued a public preview of Windows Small Business Server 2008 RC0. Those signing up for this release can use it to evaluate the product (formerly code-named "Cougar"), although SBS is not designed for live deployment yet. The product is scheduled for public release sometime in the latter half of this year.
SBS is part of Microsoft's Windows Essential Server family of solutions designed for small and medium-size organizations. SBS supports companies with "up to 75 users or devices," according to Microsoft's literature.
Sometime this summer, Microsoft plans to roll out Service Pack 1 for its Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 product, according to a team blog announcement issued today.
ISA Server 2006 is part of Microsoft's Forefront security solutions and is used to enable secure remote access over the Internet. It's an "integrated edge security gateway" that provides Internet security while also enabling access to company networks by users located outside the firewall, according to an overview description. The product is available in Standard and Enterprise editions and runs on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2.
With less than two years to go before it ships, Microsoft has started revealing new details about the next major release of Windows ? or at least revealing what will not be new.
In a posting Tuesday on the Windows Vista Team Blog, Chris Flores, a director on the Windows Client communications team, said that the successor to Vista ? codenamed "Windows 7" ? will not be all that much different from its predecessor.
"The long-term architectural investments we introduced in Windows Vista and then refined for Windows Vista SP1 and Windows Server 2008 will carry forward in Windows 7," Flores said.