Microsoft's Security Response Center (MSRC), the part of the company that deals with security vulnerabilities, has a new manager, Microsoft said Wednesday. Steve Lipner, Microsoft's director of security engineering strategy, has handed over responsibility for the MSRC to Kevin Kean, an industry veteran who joined Microsoft as group product manager for management and communications products in 1996, Microsoft said in a statement.
Lipner drove the code-cleaning initiative last year which saw Microsoft take a break from writing code to examine its work for security flaws. Kean, most recently a senior group product manager for Windows Server 2003, played a key role in the code evaluation, according to Microsoft.
Microsoft is cutting the retail price of its Office XP Standard and Professional software suites and that of several stand-alone Office applications, the company said Tuesday. Effective Wednesday, the estimated price at U.S. retail outlets for a full license for Office XP Professional will drop from $599 to $499, and for Office XP Standard the price will drop from $479 to $399, Microsoft said in a statement.
The company also discounted the stand-alone versions of Word 2002, Excel 2002, PowerPoint 2002, and Access 2002. The estimated retail price for those products will drop from $339 to $229, Microsoft said. The prices are estimates because the retailers set final pricing, the company said.
Microsoft has pulled an update to security software from its Web site after some users who downloaded the code saw their Internet connections go down. A "handful" of users had problems after installing the update to Microsoft's IPSec (IP Security) software because of the way it interacted with some third-party software, according to a Microsoft statement. The problems caused the update to think it was under attack, so it responded by blocking all traffic. This behavior wasn't a security flaw, according to Microsoft.
A proprietary version of a meta language (ML) in development by Microsoft researchers is causing quite a stir in the developer community. The issue at hand is whether or not Microsoft is trying to co-opt another programming language for its own purposes, which is what some experts perceived the company did when it crafted C++ and C#.
Called F#, the ML is designed to solve extensibility issues and problems on the .NET Framework. Meta languages are used for writing tools and compilers, programs that translate source code into object code. The compiler produces an intermediary form called object code. Object code is often the same as a computer's machine language, such as C or FORTRAN.
While Apple Computer grabs publicity for its new 99 cent music download store, Microsoft is quietly preparing for a counterattack by improving its own technology for supporting subscription music services.
Services such as Pressplay, which uses Microsoft technology, have been put on the defensive with news that Apple has sold more than 2 million downloads since April 28, the day its iTunes Music Store launched. But Microsoft is betting that new security enhancements planned for later this year could make renting music, rather than owning it, more attractive to consumers.
This week, Intel released new processors and chipsets that bring increased performance to regular desktops. The new chipsets offer increased bus speeds (as fast as 800MHz) and Serial ATA hard disk-connection support, and add the Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz processor's Hyper-Threading Technology to the 2.8GHz, 2.6GHz, and 2.4GHz Pentium 4 processors. Dell, Gateway, and IBM marked the release by updating their desktop lines to include the new technology. The technology, which was previously available in higher-priced workstations, is now available in many $1000 and less-expensive desktops.
Hoping to ramp up its strategic appeal to corporations, Microsoft has updated its Visio diagramming tool. The latest version will make more efficient use of Office desktop applications and line-of-business data residing on servers. Down the road, Microsoft plans to deepen the tool's business-intelligence capabilities.
The newly named Microsoft Office Visio 2003, now an integral part of Microsoft's Office System, is aimed at its core technical users and also at business users to help them reduce the manual labor involved in pulling together and integrating information from multiple sources.
What is F#?
Some cynics say that there are no more completely "new" ideas. Well, in this instance they're right. F# is derived from a series of different imperative and functional languages as are most modern languages (including Java and C).
For background, an imperative language - like COBOL, FORTRAN or Pascal -- is one that allows the use of variables which can be assigned values which are then updated later in the program. These variables can hold intermediate values or other values at the developer's discretion. For example, in an imperative language, a developer might first define a numeric variable "X", and assign it an initial value of 3 (X=3). Then during the course of the program, X might be changed through addition, subtraction or other numerical operations.
More than 100 of the top business leaders from around the world gathered at Microsoft's corporate headquarters in Redmond yesterday to hear the company promote IT at its seventh annual CEO Summit. Microsoft created the annual gathering in 1997 to give business leaders a forum to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with business and technology. As in previous years, Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates opened the event with a keynote address. This year's theme was "The Agile Business: Balancing Strategy and Execution."
Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer is selling some of his holdings of Microsoft stock in order to diversify his financial assets, the company said on Friday. The world's largest software company said in a statement that as of Sept. 9, 2002, Ballmer held 470,968,074 shares of Microsoft stock.
"Even though this is a personal financial matter, I want to be clear about this to avoid any confusion," Ballmer said. "I remain excited about the potential for our technology to change people's lives, and I remain as committed to Microsoft as ever."