WinInsider

THQ announced a multiyear agreement with Microsoft yesterday, granting the video game maker rights to distribute titles including "Banjo-Kazooie: Grunty's Revenge." The title may not sound familiar, but THQ executives say Nintendo 64 users are well aware of Banjo-Kazooie from the game's popularity in the 1990s -- a memory they're hoping to capitalize on with the release of the Game Boy Advance version this fall. Among the other titles expected for release: "It's Mr. Pants," "Sabre Wulf" and "Banjo Pilot."

Hewlett Packard on Wednesday bolstered its expertise in Microsoft's .NET software with the acquisition of consulting firm Extreme Logic. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. If the purchase is completed, Atlanta-based Extreme Logic will become a subsidiary of HP, and Extreme Logic's 200 employees will work as a part of the HP Services organization trained on Microsoft software.

The deal, announced at the HP World conference, is intended to boost HP's services offerings for building custom applications based on Microsoft software, HP said. Extreme Logic is a Microsoft partner certified in the company's .NET products.

.NET is the umbrella brand for Microsoft's line of tools and Windows-based software for writing applications that adhere to a set of standards called Web services.

Personal computer heavyweights Microsoft and Intel will have their first joint mobile phone hit the market this autumn, as shown to consumers by Taiwan's on Tuesday. It is also set to be the first mobile phone to use a core chipset by Intel, the world's largest semiconductor maker. Samsung and Motorola will use Intel chips in certain mobile phone models due towards the end of the year. Intel, like Microsoft, has identified the 450 million units a year mobile phone industry as an opportunity outside the slow-growing PC market.

Microsoft Corp. has dropped a lawsuit and apologized to a British man it accused of sending out junk e-mail, a company spokesman said yesterday. The software giant said it "mistakenly" sued Simon Grainger, of Merseyside, northern England, when it filed 15 lawsuits in June against U.S. and United Kingdom defendants for allegedly sending out more than 2 billion junk e-mails. The highly publicized filings were highlighted as a component of Microsoft's campaign against so-called spam.

The first worm, which exploits the juicy RPC DCOM vulnerability in Windows that Microsoft released a patch for last month, went into the wild on Monday, crashing vulnerable computers, slowing down local subnets and sending scanning traffic on port 135 through the roof.

The worm goes by the name MS Blast (ISS X-Force), Blaster (Symantec and Sophos), Win32.Poza (Computer Associates) or Lovsan (McAfee and F-Secure). Symantec rated the urgency of the worm as "high," although most other anti-virus vendors deemed it a medium threat.

As corporate belt-tightening continues, many IT managers are taking second and third looks at open-source code, which offers low-cost or no-cost licensing terms. Linux is now being taken very seriously as a server operating system, even at large Windows shops. A survey of almost 800 IT sites conducted by ENT earlier this year finds that two out of five enterprise Windows shops also run Linux in some capacity. The Linux sites in the survey have an average of 625 servers in their organizations, and close to half have IT budgets exceeding a million dollars a year.

Microsoft is making it cheaper for Mac customers to have an Office. The software company is cutting the price of the standard version of Office for the Mac by $100, to $399. In addition, the company is introducing a "professional" version of Mac Office v. X that sells for $499 and includes the company's Virtual PC software for running Windows programs as well as the needed license for Windows XP professional. Microsoft acquired Virtual PC when it bought the assets of Connectix earlier this year.

A jury in a federal court in Chicago handed Microsoft a whopping $521 million legal defeat Monday after deciding that the company infringed on a Web browser-related patent owned in part by the University of California. The little-reported case centers on technologies that let allow browser add-ons such as plug-ins, applets, and ActiveX controls possible. The patent protecting this technology was awarded to the University of California and inventors Michael Doyle, David Martin and Cheong Ang in 1998; Doyle left the University and started a company called Eolas Technology, which became the exclusive licensee of the patented Web browser technology. Eolas originally sued the software giant in 1999, and the Regents of the University of California joined the lawsuit a year later.

Following in the steps of other computer giants like Microsoft, Apple Computer, Sony and Gateway, Hewlett-Packard (HP) announced a new initiative Monday that will refocus the products in its consumer product lines to work better together. Dubbed "Radically Simple, Better Together," the new strategy will see HP's consumer-oriented computers, digital cameras, printers, scanners, and other products adopt common user interfaces, physical connectors, and other compatibility-oriented technologies where possible. Not coincidentally, the company used a press event introducing the strategy to unveil its fall lineup of consumer-oriented products, which includes over 150 new devices.

Microsoft wants more details on how its products are used so it can make its applications "almost entirely crash-free" and build features users want, the company said Monday.

With the launch of Office 2003 later this quarter, Microsoft will also introduce a Customer Experience Improvement Program for Office. Users will be asked to volunteer to share information on feature usage, software and hardware performance and the type and frequency of errors, said Eric LeVine, group program manager for Office.