A power outage struck New York and other Northeast cities on Thursday, shutting down companies, hitting airports and clogging cell phone service in certain areas. The outage reportedly also affected the electric supply in neighboring New Jersey, as well as in Toronto and Ottawa, Canada, on Thursday afternoon. Other areas--such as Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio, and Detroit--also suffered a blackout, according to television reports.
News outlets reported that the outage was the result of a failure in the Niagara Mohawk power grid. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told news outlets that the blackout could last into the evening.
In January, 2002, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates declared security to be the new top priority at the world's biggest software maker. In a speech to employees and in a public statement, he declared war on bugs and vowed to shore up product security. Of course, the bugs keep popping up, and serious security vulnerabilities continue to be exploited in Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system and applications. Witness the horrific MSBlaster worm that crashed untold thousands of Windows 2000 and XP machines worldwide during the week of Aug. 11.
The service-oriented-architecture (SOA) buzzword is taking hold inside the Redmnd software giant. Microsoft has been talking at increasing length about service-oriented architecture (SOA) and how the company plans to implement SOAs that are grounded in .NET. A SOA is a collection of services that communicate with each other. Microsoft's Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) and the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) are examples of SOAs.
The SCO Group Inc. on Thursday reported a boost in profits and revenue for its fiscal third quarter, including $7.3 million of revenue from its controversial Unix-licensing efforts.
In fact, the company's SCOsource licensing efforts boosted the company to a profit. SCO reported net income of $3.1 million on revenue of $20.1 million, versus a loss of $4.5 million on revenue of $15.4 million for the same quarter last year.
SCOsource generated $7.3 million in revenue and contributed $5.6 million to gross margin, while SCO's operating systems produced $12.8 million in revenue, the company said.
Retail availability expected at launch on Oct. 21, sources say. Microsoft is expected to announce on Friday that several versions of its forthcoming Office 2003 suite have moved from development to manufacturing. Delivery date for the shrink-wrapped productivity suite: Oct. 21, sources said.
Microsoft will announce that some, but not all, of the six Office 2003 SKUs will go to manufacturing this week, say sources. The six SKUs are: Professional Enterprise, Professional, Standard, Students and Teachers, Small Business, and Basic.
Leading Microsoft architect Don Box said the world of services and service-oriented architectures will eclipse object-oriented programming as more developers become familiar with the technology.
Taking a cue from Brad Cox (inventor of the Objective C language), Box, XML architect with Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft, likened objects to software-based integrated circuits and said programmers would do better to focus on services. Box spoke at the XML Web Services One conference here.
"Very few people work in a chip plant, and they all wear hairnets," Box quipped. "There are so many more people who are needed to take the chips and put them onto boards."
A new pay-by-the-song music service is launching in Western Europe, putting an iTunes-like digital download store inside Microsoft's Windows Media Player. Branded variously as the MSN Music Club and Tiscali Music Club, the service is actually run by online music company OD2, rather than by Microsoft itself. As with Apple Computer's iTunes, the stores will be accessible inside the music-playing software itself. In this case, each may be accessed by a tab in the Windows Media Player premium services section.
Graphics chip underdog ATI Technologies said Thursday it has signed a contract with Microsoft to produce components for future versions of the Xbox game console, beating out market leader Nvidia. ATI said it entered a technology agreement with Microsoft to develop "custom, leading-edge graphics technologies" for the console.
"We selected ATI after reviewing the top graphics technologies in development and determining that ATI's technical vision fits perfectly with the future direction of Xbox," Robbie Bach, senior vice president of Microsoft's home and entertainment division, said in a statement.
A patent-infringement judgment against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser has raised speculation over which company in the Web browser market might be the next target of Microsoft's pursuer.
Eolas Technologies, a University of California spin-off with one employee, no products, a handful of patents and 100 investors, on Monday prevailed in its $521 million patent-infringement suit against Microsoft.
Microsoft said yesterday that it planned to change the way it distributes its flagship Windows XP operating system software, in response to a malicious software "worm" that has spread over the Internet in recent days attacking tens of thousands of personal computers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Windows.
Dissemination of the worm, a viruslike program, slowed yesterday as network administrators and individual computer users around the world took steps to protect their machines, even as Microsoft's critics stepped up their complaints that the company's industry-dominant software puts its customers at risk of such outbreaks.