Looking to inspire PC buyers to upgrade, Microsoft is hailing "life immersion" technology, featuring multimedia and other improvements that the company hopes will compel users to buy new boxes. Microsoft seeks to enable development of PCs with advanced graphics and sleeker, smaller designs that will entice users, said Will Poole, senior vice president of the Windows Client Division at Microsoft, in Redmond, Wash. Poole discussed the company's goals during a keynote presentation here at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) on Wednesday morning.
Microsoft gave hardware developers a taste of the Windows operating systems it is working on for AMD's 64-bit processors this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference. The pre-beta code is another sign that Microsoft's once questionable commitment to supporting AMD's 64-bit processors seems to be getting firmer.
The company distributed disks containing preview versions of Windows XP 64-bit Edition and Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition for AMD processors. The Windows XP version will support both the Opteron, AMD's server version of the 64-bit processor that is available now, and the Athlon 64, the workstation version that is expected to ship in the third quarter. The Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition version is designed to support Opteron-based systems only. The company also distributed debug disks for both the Windows XP and Windows Server versions.
Microsoft and Panasonic announced on Wednesday that their media access technology known as HighMAT will soon work with DVDs. The companies said they would extend support in their High-performance Media Access Technology (HighMAT) specification to DVD-RAM and other major recordable DVD formats by the end of the year. Currently, the technology, which is included in Windows Media Player 9 and Windows Movie Maker 2 for XP, only supports CDs.
HighMAT, developed jointly by Microsoft and Panasonic, is designed to let consumers easily sort through photos, songs and other digital files contained on a disc, whether they're using a PC or a consumer-electronics gadget such as a CD or DVD player. At the moment, consumer-electronics devices use a variety of different methods to read digital material that's been created using a PC, meaning they can botch music playlists or fail to capture certain features included on a DVD.
Longhorn, the next major version of Windows for desktop PCs, will debut in 2005 and will usher in a new level of graphics for PCs, Microsoft executives said Wednesday. While Microsoft plans to release "a couple of beta," or test, versions of Longhorn in 2004, the final version of the operating system won't come out commercially until 2005, said Will Poole, senior vice president of the Windows Client division at Microsoft. He made the comments during a speech delivered at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here. Previously, analysts and sources had speculated that Longhorn would come out in or late 2004 or early 2005.
Given that my brain happens to be stuck deep in programming la la land (as opposed to where it normally sits, which is in a jar, labeled "Abby Normal"), I'm going to take a detour from my usual obsession with the state of the software industry and discuss some of the ways .Net is an improvement over Java. As I've noted before in Talkbacks, I've been programming Java in some form since JDK 1.0. Java development has a number of advantages over traditional environments which output machine language. .Net has the advantage of hindsight, however, and has improved on Java in a number of areas. Here are some that stand out from my most recent project (I could tell you what that project's all about, but then I'd have to eat you).
It's worth noting that this article is somewhat more technical than my norm. This is unavoidable, as .Net, like Java, is essentially technology for enhancing developer productivity. Besides, at this point, I'd probably find a way to make Dr. Seuss stories sound complicated.
Microsoft has lowered the price on Windows CE.Net to encourage developers to squeeze the operating system into consumer electronics devices and industrial equipment. The licensing fee for Windows CE.Net 4.2 will now start at $3 per device, down from around $15. The $3 fee applies to only the core version of the OS; Microsoft will also sell more elaborate versions that come complete with complex interfaces or Messenger.
"It is still quite a bit less than it has been historically," Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said Tuesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) here. The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker also came out with a free version for noncommercial products.
During his keynote address on day two of the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC), Microsoft Senior Vice President of the Windows Client Division, detailed his company's roadmap for delivering Longhorn, the next major Windows version. Contrary to previous reports, Longhorn will not ship in beta form until early 2004, and will not be released to manufacturing until 2005, Poole said.
In his WinHEC keynote address Wednesday morning, Microsoft Corporate Vice President David Thompson revealed that the company's Blackcomb project will not be delivered as a major server upgrade as previously expected, but will instead be phased in over several years, beginning with technology that Microsoft will release this year as "out of band" upgrades to Windows Server 2003. This news confirms that Blackcomb is effectively the next "Cairo," a project that began life in the mid-1990's as a major revision to Microsoft's enterprise server line, but ended up quite differently, its various components scattered to other teams and projects at the company. Cairo technology was rolled into the Windows 95 shell, Active Directory, and the WinFS file system that will debut in Longhorn, the Windows client version that will debut in 2005.
A pre-beta version of Microsoft's Virtual Server product, which the company purchased from Connectix in February, is now available for public download from BetaPlace. The preview release, build 1.0.218, is the same that leaked out of Redmond late last month.
Microsoft Virtual Server enables businesses with large server clusters to reduce the amount of physical machines by running multiple virtual servers on each. Microsoft plans to also position Virtual Server as a migration path for companies still running Windows NT4 servers, which can be consolidated onto a single newer machine running Windows Server 2003.
In a case that began nearly a decade ago, lawyers for the states said the settlement was profoundly flawed and "does not fulfill even the most basic mission of stopping all of the practices" committed by Microsoft. Courtroom arguments before the appellate judges were to begin in November.
"The district court's remedy will not restore competition, deny Microsoft the fruits of its illegal conduct or otherwise satisfy this [appeals] court's remedial objectives," the states wrote. Microsoft noted that its legal filings were due next month.
"The district court thoroughly reviewed these issues last year and issued comprehensive rulings that represent a fair resolution of this case," spokesman Jim Desler said. "These rulings have been agreed to by the Department of Justice, virtually all the states that filed suit against Microsoft and only two states and a couple of competitor groups are pressing forward."