Microsoft next week plans to unveil a prototype PC that would function as a central communications console. Developed with Hewlett-Packard, the new "Athens" prototype is intended to be the hub for communications and collaboration built around voice, video and text messaging capabilities. It will also feature a more streamlined design, Microsoft said in a statement. The software giant is set to present the Athens concept at its annual WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference) event, taking place in New Orleans.
At the conference, Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman and chief software architect, plans to show off the prototype in a keynote address, the company said in a statement. Athens will likely be one of several PC concepts presented at the conference.
I found this interesting article from the OpenHack 4 contest which was held 4 months ago, but I haven't posted anything about it back than, although the results are most interesting... Both Microsoft and Oracle were ask to developed eCommerce web applications for the hackers at large to attack. Microsoft off course was running on Windows 2000 Advanced Server with .NET Framework for ASP.NET and Oracle was running Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1. The result of the competition were 46,800 hacks attempted, 2 succeeded on Oracle, were 82,500 hacks attempted, but
0 succeeded on Microsoft platform. Interesting...
On the very first day of the test, Jeremy Poteet, chief technology officer at IT consultancy Technology Partners Inc., in Chesterfield, Mo., discovered two places in the Oracle OpenHack test application where he could manipulate the application into sending arbitrary (and possibly malicious) JavaScript code back to a user.
Poteet describes how a functionality bug in the application tipped him off to a possible weakness in the code that he was later able to exploit. He was also able to perform a second cross-site scripting attack by manipulating a URL field to take advantage of the way the application checked unusual data types.
In both cases, Poteet was able to discover exactly where several undiscovered bugs lay in the application simply by careful observation combined with his own experience. He was also able to do this without access to source code.
Reports mounted Wednesday that Microsoft is negotiating to buy video game assets of financially troubled French media conglomerate Vivendi Universal. The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, said the two companies are negotiating a buyout of some Vivendi game divisions. Investment bank Investec, citing unnamed Vivendi executives, painted a similar picture in a report released late last week, saying Microsoft could pay as much as $2 billion for all of Vivendi's game-related businesses.
The company's games business has been seen as a prime sell-off target. Vivendi has three major game publishers: Sierra Entertainment, Blizzard Entertainment and Universal Interactive. The studios have produced major PC hits, such as the Warcraft series and the Diablo series, but they've produced few hits for the more lucrative game-console business.
As part of its growing portfolio of .NET services, Microsoft will expose its Passport authentication service as an XML Web service this summer, officials said. The forthcoming Microsoft Passport Web Service, which will support XML and the delivery of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) messages over HTTP, joins existing Microsoft Web services such as .NET Alerts and MapPoint Web Service.
The Passport Web Service will also support WS-Security, a specification designed to secure data stored by in the online authentication service. Microsoft, IBM and VeriSign submitted the latest version of the Web Services Security (WS-Security) specification to the Organization for the Advancement (OASIS) last June.
A new DVD version of the Arnold Schwarzenegger hit movie "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (T2) will feature a second disc with a high-definition (HD), full surround sound version of the film encoded in Windows Media Video 9 (WMV 9) format, Microsoft and Artisan Home Entertainment revealed today. The DVD, called T2: Extreme DVD, is due June 3 and will give consumers with Windows XP-based PCs a significantly improved version of the film which features almost 3.5 times the video resolution of the normal DVD and previously unseen extra footage.
MCI and Microsoft have agreed to integrate Windows Messenger with MCI Advantage, the companies said Wednesday. Windows Messenger's realtime communications capability, or instant messaging, will be integrated with MCI's Advantage converged communications solution.
By using the two services together, customers will have one communications tool handling voice, data and Internet information realtime via MCI's IP network. The deal follows MCI's disclosure of plans Tuesday to focus its investment and services strategy on converged networking solutions.
The Microsoft Business Portal is just one of five different portal servers that the Redmond software vendor is fielding. Microsoft announced Wednesday that its Microsoft Business Portal (MBP) product, developed by its Great Plains Software team, is commercially available. But MBP is hardly the only portal package that Microsoft has on its price list.
There's also the Axapta Enterprise Portal. There are two Navision portal products: User Portal and Commerce Portal. And to top it all off, there is Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server, which is part of the Office 2003 System family of products. And Redmond has no portal consolidation plans in sight, company officials say.
A top European competition official said on Wednesday that the European Commission was talking with Microsoft about its antitrust investigation and still had outstanding concerns. The Commission has been investigating Microsoft for abuse of a dominant position for nearly three years. It is concerned that Microsoft has designed its dominant Windows operating system to work better with its own servers than those of rivals.
Competition Director General Philip Lowe, asked about Microsoft, said "there is dialogue going on" with all companies being actively investigated by the EU executive.
I'll take Ballmer's comment one step further. The operating system is generally available now, and pre-release deployment has been rapid, according to Microsoft. Nonetheless, the vast, vast majority of the installed base of Windows systems is older software developed under Microsoft's pre-Trustworthy Computing product development philosophy -- liberally paraphrased here as, "pack it with as many new features as possible and enable most of them by default." It will be several years before Trustworthy Computing-inspired server operating systems account for even half of the installed base, and a few years longer on the client side. And that's assuming Microsoft continues, as I believe they will, to prioritize security over features for the long term.
You can complain about a lot of things Redmond does. But its strategy for adding XML support to Office isn't one of them. With all due respect, Mr. Dvorak, you should stick to spinning tales of your Mac woes. In his PCMag.com column this week, John C. Dvorak takes a whack at Microsoft Office 2003's XML support.
"Now we are seeing news stories that say Microsoft is actually focusing on XML as a semi-proprietary format that will have all the same bugaboos we have with the .DOC format. Something called WordML may replace XML. Here we go again!" opines Dvorak.
Where to start with this sentence? Problem One: Dvorak is basing his comments on a growing number of mostly misinformed reports that Microsoft is pulling back from its XML commitments with the next version of its desktop Office suite due out later this summer.