A federal judge yesterday likely saved Microsoft Corp. millions of dollars by shielding it from class-action antitrust claims. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled that consumers who bought Microsoft's software directly from the company aren't a large, nationwide class. He made that ruling because, he said, the consumers' lawyers hadn't identified a group of plaintiffs typical of U.S. customers who bought Microsoft's Windows and Office programs.
Yesterday's ruling was a blow to plaintiffs' lawyers who sought to use the prospect of a multimillion-dollar damage award, won on behalf of millions of consumers, to press Microsoft into a costly settlement. Motz criticized the plaintiffs' attorneys, saying they "view this litigation as a chess game in which lawyers, not their clients, are the players."
Storage vendors are starting to sign on with Microsoft to implement the RADIUS protocol as a way to increase the security of data storage, Microsoft officials said Monday at the StorageNetworking World conference, held here this week.
Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) is a protocol which was previously adopted as a standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), said Zane Adam, director of product management and marketing for Microsoft's Enterprise Storage Division.
Two institutional shareholders said on Monday they filed suit against AOL Time Warner Inc. accusing Chairman Steve Case and other top executives of insider trading while using "tricks, contrivances and bogus transactions" to inflate the company's share price. The University of California, which said it lost $450 million in its investment in the world's largest media company, and Amalgamated Bank's Longview Collective Investment Fund said in a statement they filed the suit in California state Superior Court in Los Angeles.
Microsoft is among companies approached by Vivendi Universal Music Group executives in their bid to find buyers for the unit, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The report comes a day after a Paris-based source told Reuters that talks between Vivendi Universal and Apple Computer had entered a crucial phase which could make or brake a deal for the world's largest record company.
The Reuters source played down speculation the sale of Universal Music to the firm run by California computer guru Steve Jobs -- for up to $6 billion as first reported by the Los Angeles Times on Friday -- was a done deal.
When Microsoft launches its 64-bit version of SQL Server at the end of April, the database will cost the same as the 32-bit version, perform better, and be part of the company's bid to oust Oracle and IBM's DB/2 on high-end systems.
SQL Server is widely regarded as suitable for smaller systems, while larger databases are the province of Oracle or DB/2 running on RISC systems. However, Microsoft has been quietly creeping up the rankings, and in March a prelaunch version of 64-bit SQL Server reached No. 2 in the nonclustered TPC-C benchmark performance table running on an NEC Itanium 2 mainframe.
Microsoft's stunning new Windows Media Video (WMV) 9 format has been used to digitally project movies, and now the format has caught the attention of major Hollywood movie studios. When the upcoming "Terminator 2: Extreme Edition" DVD hits stores this June, it will include a High Definition (HD) version of the film encoded in WMV 9 Professional format. The WMV 9 Pro version of "Terminator 2" features 1080p resolution (1920 x 1080) and a Dolby Digital 5.1 EX audio track, and will require at least a mid-level Pentium 4-based PC for playback. But the WMV version's quality far outstrips the standard DVD version--it's encoded and presented in about six times the resolution.
Microsoft posted to its Web site for download late Friday a first beta of its Visual Studio Tools for Office product, code-named "Trinity." Microsoft released the beta a few weeks later than it had hoped. Earlier this year, Redmond officials said to expect the first beta in March. The final version of the tools is expected to ship this summer. Visual Studio Tools for Office allow programmers to use Visual Basic .Net and/or Visual C# .Net to write code that will run behind Word 2003 and Excel 2003 documents.
Initially, a number of people within the XML community assumed that X# would be an alternative to the W3Cs XSLT transformation language, used widely to convert XML into HTML or different XML formats. However, this appears unlikely given Microsoft's emphasis on imperative programming models on the .NET platform. Moreover, the need for such an alternative transformation language doesn't really exist-the core audience for XSLT, a rich but admittedly complex language to learn for most programmers, has stayed fairly small compared to the number of .NET developers.
The number of sites running Windows Server 2003 has overtaken Solaris 9, in spite of the fact that Windows Server 2003 does not launch until later on this month.
Solaris 9 launched in May 2002. However, Sun seems to take relaxed view about envangelising new operating system versions; even www.sun.com is still running Solaris 8. www.microsoft.com is at the opposite end of the product advocacy spectrum and started running Windows 2003 last July.
Microsoft on Monday will detail a future version of Windows that will make it easier to detect and isolate viruses. The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant will also show off new features in Microsoft Word 2003 and Exchange 2003 for fingering viruses and spam during this week's RSA Conference 2003 in San Francisco.
The Windows Filter Manager Architecture is a set of application protocol interfaces (APIs) and code that will be added to Windows to handle some of the basic operational tasks of antivirus applications, such as how the application sets up an ordinary hard drive scan, according to Jonathan Perera, senior director of Microsoft's security business unit. In a sense, Filter Manager is analogous to printer drivers, he said. In the past, printer makers did their own drivers. Now, they write to a common set of APIs.