WinInsider

Last week, I returned to using Windows 7 after spending the summer on a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple almost had me there for awhile, but I'm back where I belong and satisfied with the switch. Given that Apple released Snow Leopard a couple of weeks ago, Windows 7 officially launches October 22nd and there is plenty of geek debate about which OS is better, it's appropriate time to tell the story about how I went -- in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien -- "there and back again."

Microsoft called the claim by Canadian developer i4i Inc. that it plotted to drive the company out of business "distorted," and "a breathless tale" that was not supported by the evidence, according to a court documents.At the least, Microsoft told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District, it deserves a new trial.

"At minimum, a new trial is warranted," the company said in a reply brief filed Monday.But Microsoft also pressed the appeals court for a complete reversal, saying that decisions made by the Texas lower court led "to erroneous verdicts of infringement and validity, and grossly unsupportable damages."

Wireless News BetaNews > Wireless --> "We debated internally what exactly Mono for the iPhone would be," blogged Mono creator Miguel de Icaza this morning.

"We considered doing a Windows.Forms port, to bring Compact Framework apps to the iPhone, but that would have required a complete new back end for Windows.Forms and would have required also a 'theme' engine to make it look like the iPhone. We discarded this idea early on. We decided instead to go with a native binding the iPhone APIs.

One of the hottest buzzwords in technology is the ???Cloud'. Vendors across all types of computer applications and services are looking for ways to leverage the power of cloud computing. Microsoft takes that a step further by making it easier to move a different kind of resource to the cloud: people.

Actually, that egg may have come before the chicken. Laptop sales have steadily crept up on desktop sales, surpassing desktops in late 2008. That is a domino-effect from another chicken-and-egg conundrum in that the work force has become increasingly remote and mobile.

As it looks to ratchet up competition with market leader Google, Microsoft today unveiled an upgrade to its Bing search engine, featuring a way to "pivot" results to deliver a more visual search experience.

Microsoft has touted the work it has done in specific vertical markets, particularly shopping and travel, to give consumers faster results to common queries like pricing and product information.

In a demonstration here at the TechCrunch50 conference, Microsoft Senior Vice President Yusuf Mehdi showed how one click on a search for digital cameras produced a scrollable screen of 1,500 different camera models. Users can get brief product specs simply by hovering the mouse pointer on any of the models or clicking through for more related search options.

I'd hate to think exactly how many times I've installed some version of Windows 7 since its debut back at Microsoft PDC 2008. There was the Windows 7 pre-public beta (that didn't have the new UI and menu bar), the Windows 7 public beta, the Windows 7 RC and the Windows 7 RTM. On my daily use laptop alone I've installed each of these Windows 7 versions, some more than twice. Then there's all the Windows 7 installations I've done under Hyper-V and on test machines prior to using them myself. So let's conservatively say I've probably installed Windows 7 at least 8 or 10 times (but it's probably more like 15 or 20.)

Advanced Micro Devices will bring its latest graphics hardware based on DirectX 11 to laptops by early next year, aiming to make graphics in Windows 7 smoother and more realistic.

The technology is also designed to boost the performance of online and high-definition video playback, and it will let users instantly convert video clips simply by dragging and dropping them from PCs to portable devices.

Beyond graphics, DirectX 11 will help Windows 7 recognize multicore systems, which will speed up multimedia and other applications, Bergman said. The tools distribute tasks over multiple CPUs and GPUs for simultaneous execution. Such capabilities could reduce the strain on the CPU while offloading more tasks to the graphics processors.

Microsoft and Yahoo confirmed Friday that the U.S. Department of Justice has begun the process of examining whether the two companies' deal to basically gang up to go after Google's dominant share of the search market should be given the green light.

The scrutiny has been expected ever since Microsoft and Yahoo announced on July 29 that they would collaborate to take on search giant Google.

Antitrust approval is crucial to making the deal work.

"We received a request for additional information about the agreement earlier this week as expected," Jack Evans, a Microsoft spokesperson, told InternetNews.com in an e-mail.

Microsoft has won an appeal to overturn a US$358 million award it had been ordered to pay to Alcatel-Lucent in the latest ruling on an ongoing patent-infringement dispute that began in 2003.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld the ruling of a federal jury in San Diego that Microsoft infringed on the so-called "Day" patent at issue in the case. However, the court said there is not enough evidence to uphold the damages the lower court had awarded Alcatel-Lucent, according to its decision, which is posted on its Web site.

The court sent the calculation of damages back down to the trial court for further proceedings, according to its ruling.

Microsoft has built a new modular datacenter to house most of the servers the company uses for research and development of its products previously scattered around the campus. Its objective is to drive down costs related to those servers as well as to be easier on the environment.

Many global companies are going with green -- or "greener" -- datacenters, so Microsoft's move is just one of the latest, but perhaps one of the more innovative in that respect.

Dubbed Redmond Ridge 1, the recently-opened datacenter is designed to use one-third of the energy demanded by those same servers when they are located in individual labs in office buildings around Microsoft's sprawling Redmond, Washington campus.