Microsoft is reinventing the mouse wheel, adding "Tilt Wheel Technology" for horizontal scrolling and smoothing the vertical scroll motion, the company said Tuesday. The tilting wheel allows a user to scroll left and right as well as up and down without having to use the on-screen navigation bars. This can be handy when working on a large spreadsheet or trying to view an unwieldy Web site, Microsoft said in a flyer announcing its discovery.
Microsoft is planning to launch three mice with the new tilting wheel on Sept. 3, one corded and two cordless operating at 27MHz, a company spokeswoman said. The mice will also have a feature that lets users toggle between open applications on a PC by pressing down on the wheel, she said.
Software maker SCO Group fired back at Linux leader Red Hat on Tuesday and revealed steep licensing prices for Linux users who want to steer clear of the company's legal wrangle with the open-source operating system.
In a teleconference with media and financial analysts, SCO CEO Darl McBride bluntly accused Red Hat of distributing Linux software that illegally copies SCO's Unix code.
"Red Hat's lawsuit confirms what we've been saying all along--Linux developers are either unable or unwilling to screen the code" that goes into the Linux kernel, McBride said. "Red Hat is selling Linux that contains verbatim and obfuscated code from Unix System 5."
If SCO is successful with its intellectual property claims, however, such licensing prices will help kill Linux, Haff said. "If you take away the price advantage and essentially eliminate the open-source development model, what do you have left?" he asked. "There's nothing magical about Linux from a technical perspective... And you're probably cheaper behind Windows or using Solaris," Sun Microsystems' version of Unix.
When Microsoft rolls out its Office 2003 productivity suite this fall, it will allow some Office Standard Edition enterprise customers to use select applications from the Professional Edition for free, and provide a migration path for them to the more expensive Professional, the Redmond, Wash.-based developer said Monday in a document posted to its licensing Web site.
The offers, Microsoft hopes, not only will encourage customers to upgrade to the pricier Office Professional Edition, but also will address concerns of enterprises surprised by the new split in functionality between the two Office bundles, said Simon Marks, product manager for Office.
Microsoft is beefing up the peer-to-peer capabilities for its Windows XP operating system. The software giant recently released a development kit for building peer-to-peer applications and an update to Windows XP that adds support for the Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) networking protocol. As previously reported, both of these Windows XP tools are aimed at simplifying the creation of peer-to-peer applications. The tools are available for download from Microsoft's Web site.
When Microsoft announced that its Windows 2000 operating system had been awarded the highest possible grade in the Common Criteria (CC) security certification last fall, open source advocates downplayed the honor as insignificant and unrelated to real-world security analysis. This week, however, Linux was also awarded with CC security certification, and as one might expect, this announcement greeted with cheers from the open source community. There's just one catch: Linux got a lower security rating than Windows 2000 did last year.
Microsoft revealed a "step up" promotion Monday for its new Office software, offering advanced versions of Office applications for business customers enrolled in a controversial new licensing plan.
The promotion applies to business customers who have signed up for one of several licensing plans imposed two years ago that lock customers into periodic upgrades and who are set to receive the standard version of Office 2003 when the software is released in a few months.
Office Standard Edition 2003--one of the six main packages of the revamped suite--consists of the Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. Under the step-up promotion, customers will be entitled to use the versions of those applications included in Office Professional Edition 2003.
Microsoft has fulfilled a long-held request of Mac OS X users by allowing them to access corporate e-mail and calendar information stored on a Microsoft Exchange server. The new feature was made available Monday as part of a free upgrade to the Entourage e-mail, calendar and address book program that is part of the Mac version of Microsoft Office.
Microsoft had promised in February that such an upgrade would arrive sometime this summer. Mac OS X users have been asking for Exchange support since Mac OS X debuted more than two years ago.
That's the only way to describe the party that Microsoft threw here Thursday night at the close of the Black Hat Briefings. The gathering was billed as a thank-you for all of the people who have helped the software giant improve the security of its products over the years. Given that agenda, one would have reasonably expected to see a crowd of current and former Microsoft employees with a few outside experts thrown in for good measure.
To call Microsoft's relationship with the security community strained would have been a vast understatement in years past. But, the combination of the company's massive internal effort to improve the security of its software and the outreach and communications work done by the Microsoft Security Response Center has apparently thawed relations between the two sides considerably.
LinuxWorld, the annual confab of open source advocates, opens this week in San Francisco with an unwanted shadow hanging over the event, the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) instigated by SCO's $1 billion lawsuit against IBM. Typically, LinuxWorld events have been self-congratulatory affairs, with the Linux faithful celebrating its ever-increasing market- and mind-share, and various proponents opining that, yes, this indeed will be the year of the Linux desktop. This year, however, the underlying attitude is one of concern, though few vendors are willing to admit it publicly.
Microsoft has laid plans for a server version of Longhorn, the next release of Windows. But it remains unclear what the software will include and when it will debut. The software giant has said relatively little about Longhorn--the next desktop version of the Windows operating system--and even less about the server version. All Microsoft will confirm is that a server version is indeed back in the company's product plans.
The desktop version of Longhorn has been described by company executives as revolutionary and even as a "bet-the-company" proposition. Microsoft will also link the shipment of new versions of Office, server software and many other products to Longhorn's debut.