Like its predecessor, Windows 7 can be used for up to 120 days without providing a product activation key, Microsoft confirmed today.
Although Microsoft generally touts a 30-day time limit for users to activate their copies of the company's operating system, a little-known command designed for corporate administrators can be used by anyone to "reset" the countdown up to three times.
Late yesterday, the Windows Secrets newsletter published step-by-step instructions on using a single-line command to add an additional 90 days to the stock 30-day grace period.
Microsoft shared the stage with Chinese security researchers at a Beijing hacker conference on Wednesday, aiming to build ties in a country that produces a growing number of threats to Microsoft products.John Lambert, a team head at the Microsoft Security Engineering Center, spoke to an audience of a few hundred people about security features in Microsoft products and tools used by the company to find vulnerabilities in its software.
Since January, when I switched to Windows 7 (Beta and later Release Candidate), I have sought an answer to that question. To my surprise, I have yet to find a Microsoft lifestyle -- not one that fits me. So I ask Betanews readers: What is the Microsoft lifestyle? What is your Microsoft lifestyle? Please answer in comments.
Perhaps Microsoft's lifestyle is enterprise computing, something I don't participate in. I've never worked for a company that required SharePoint and often, because of older deployed software, neither has there been mandate to use Exchange Server. When I was an analyst, writing in Word was a must, but not before or since.
The ruling by a Texas judge that Microsoft has to pay more than $240 million in a patent infringement suit has emboldened patent trolls everywhere. Now two more firms have crawled out of the woodwork to sue Microsoft in the same court. The judge may as well put up a Web site that says "Click here to sue Microsoft.
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Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas recently ruled that Microsoft had impinged on a patent of i4i covering, "A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations.
Microsoft on Tuesday released technology previews of SQL Azure, the database for its Azure cloud infrastructure platform, and SQL Server StreamInsight, its entry in the CEP arena.Also announced was a SQL Server driver that provides Azure support for PHP, a language popular among Web application developers.
MSDN and Technet subscribers gained access to the previews Tuesday; they will be generally available Wednesday. SQL Azure Database is available at no charge until Azure's commercial launch in November, at which point it will be offered in two tiers. The Web edition will cost US$9.99 a month and allow up to 1GB of data, while the Business Edition will include up to 10GB and cost $99.99 per month, according to an official blog post.
This morning, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company will be making available the first public release candidate for its Exchange Server 2010 e-mail server today. As of late Tuesday morning, the links still pointed to the last ES 2010 public beta.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews at 11:40 am EDT that the company is aware of the issue and is working to resolve it. The news comes just a few days after the company made the first release-to-manufacturing bits for Windows Server 2008 R2 available to TechNet and MSDN subscribers.
Late Friday, Microsoft filed an emergency motion with the US District Court for Eastern Texas in a bid to block a ruling that could force it to stop selling its dominant Word application in 60 days. Judge Leonard Davis ruled against Microsoft last week, ordering the company to pay about $290 million in fines and stop selling Word, which the judge says infringes on a patent owned by i4i
The ruling against Microsoft and its Word application has garnered worldwide attention, but legal experts say there's little chance that Microsoft will actually have to stop selling the product. A host of legal and technical workarounds exist, and Microsoft can next begin what could be a lengthy appeals process, which would push out the stop date by a year and a half.
Novell is making it easier for Linux users to use content developed with Microsoft's Silverlight media framework.
The company today rolled out a new milestone release of Moonlight, its effort to bring Silverlight to Linux. The new Moonlight 2.0 beta adds critical new security and performance features to the release as it tracks Microsoft's ongoing development of Silverlight for Windows version 2 and 3.
Moonlight 1.0 officially debuted in February, while the first Moonlight 2 preview went public in May. With the Moonlight 2 beta, Novell is now declaring the release to be feature-complete, and the software now enters a bug-hunting and stability phase ahead of a general release.
Giant Microsoft doesn't often find itself having to play the feisty upstart. But that's the situation when it comes to its mobile application storefront.
Apple is the big kahuna when it comes to online storefronts, having leveraged its iTunes music store expertise to develop the world's most successful mobile storefront, the iPhone App Store. The App Store now boasts over 65,000 applications and over 1.5 billion downloads since its debut a bit more than a year ago.
But Microsoft is hardly new to wooing developers. Exhibit A is its years of experience attracting millions of developers to the Windows platform, and to a much lesser degree, to its Windows mobile platform.
It sounds like a joke. But, it's real and it's anything but a joke for Microsoft. Judge Leonard Davis, of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, has issued an injunction that "prohibits Microsoft from selling or importing to the United States any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files containing custom XML."
Microsoft had been sued by i4i, a collaborative content solution and technology company. Its founder, Michel Vulpe, owned a patent covering a way of reading XML documents. XML is the basis of Microsoft's controversial Open XML document formats. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas is infamous for supporting patent lawsuits and fast-tracking them.