IT deadlines often slip badly. So running a project where the live presentation takes place before a billion people could be unnerving.
Yet Gerry Pennell, technology director of Manchester 2002, is confident the 17th Commonwealth Games, opening in the city on 25 July, will pass without a glitch. This will be the UK's largest ever sporting event, bigger than the recent Winter Olympics in the US and nearly half the size of the last summer games. It will feature over 5,000 athletes from 72 countries, reported on by 5,000 journalists. A million visitors will attend at 15 separate venues, supported by 15,000 volunteers - nearly 900 of them working with the IT infrastructure. The public web site is expected to receive up to 200 million hits a day.
Microsoft's decision to move away from Java is tied to their settlement agreement with Sun, which places several restrictions on Microsoft that haven't been widely reported. At the top of the list of restrictions: Microsoft is only allowed to ship the ancient 1.1.4 version of Java. Microsoft has taken a lot of grief for this from uninformed observers, but in fact you can blame Sun. At the time Sun sued Microsoft many years ago it stopped delivering code to Microsoft as well, which is why Microsoft's VM has never advanced beyond version 1.1.4. Microsoft actually counter-sued over Sun's refusal to deliver under the contract, but the counter-suit was thrown out along with the rest of the suit. What's more, Microsoft's removal of Java from new Windows versions starting in 2004 isn't exactly a decision it made--that, too, is mandated by the settlement agreement. But Sun's still not happy. Now Sun argues that Microsoft should ship Sun's Virtual Machine with Windows XP. Wouldn't that be nice for Sun.
Microsoft said Thursday that it has enhanced its software program that helps companies adopt RosettaNet e-business specifications. RosettaNet is a consortium of high-tech companies developing e-business standards based on Extensible Markup Language (XML). The consortium recently released a new version of its specifications that guide how computer companies and their suppliers use the Web to share information such as inventory levels, delivery schedules and sales orders. The new version of Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for RosettaNet is a component of BizTalk Server, Microsoft's business integration software that competes with applications from IBM, Oracle, Tibco Software, Vitria, WebMethods and SeeBeyond.
A popular open-source program for encrypted communications has a serious flaw that could let Internet attackers slip into servers running the software, said its creators and a security company this week.
The program, Open Secure Shell (OpenSSH), is included in many widely used operating system distributions, such as OpenBSD 3.0, OpenBSD 3.1 and FreeBSD-Current, all open-source variants of the Unix OS. Such operating systems appear on networking equipment and security appliances, among other things. Slender said the flaw involves OpenSSH's inadequate handling of "buffer overflow" attacks, in which a message sent to a program is much longer than the program is designed to expect. Attackers exploit such holes by flooding programs with more characters than they can accommodate and running the excess characters as executable code.
This week at the TechXNY conference in New York, Microsoft gave attendees a sneak peek at its upcoming next-generation office suite, currently named Office 11. Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes discussed the new Office in his keynote speech, touting increased XML support that will better link data between programs. Raikes demonstrated a new interface in Outlook, Microsoft's flagship e-mail software, which splits the message window vertically instead of horizontally. He said the next version of Outlook will utilize a database-like backend to store e-mails. SharePoint is also expected to receive a slight makeover in Office 11. Office will more tightly integrate with the SharePoint portal server to support online meetings and more easily track changes made to documents. The first beta of Office 11 will ship late this summer with a final release slated for mid-2003. Microsoft is aiming to get Office 11 on store shelves by next May.
One of the companies making Xbox "mod chips"--add-on components that modify the game machine so it can run illegally copied discs and homemade software--has gone out of business, possibly because of legal pressure from Microsoft. The information site for Enigmah-X, the second Xbox mod chip to go into commercial circulation, was replaced late Tuesday with a brief message: "After speaking to lawyers we feel that we must not do this project anymore. There are many other chips and methods for guys to play with anyway so have fun and good luck to everyone out there." "Sony has been dealing with mod chips for the PlayStation 2 for years," Olhava said. "They're probably losing some game sales, but I've never heard Sony raise that as a major concern."
Being Microsoft means never having to take no for an answer. Despite the DVD Forum's reluctance to embrace the new Windows Media technology (dubbed "Corona"), the folks in Redmond still think their new package of codecs, players, and tools has a big part to play in the future of DVD.
Corona's biggest bragging point is the efficiency of its video codec, which promises to deliver high-definition video compression (up to 720 lines per inch) at 1/2 to 1/3 the bandwidth required by MPEG-2, according to Michael Aldridge, lead product manager of Microsoft's Windows Digital Media Division. Though it's content-dependent (video with more action requires more bandwidth), Aldridge said it can deliver the DVD-standard 480 lines per inch (lpi) with ease, meaning that in hard storage (rather than streaming) applications, Corona would let DVD manufacturers put more movies at 480lpi on a single DVD, or put higher-definition movies on standard consumer DVDs all without switching to blue-laser technology.
Although devices using Microsoft's Mira technology are still a few months from hitting shelves, the software giant said Wednesday that it has settled on its name for the software that will power the Web-surfing tablets. Microsoft says that the software technology previously known as Mira will now be known as Windows CE for Smart Displays. The tablet devices themselves will be known as Windows-powered smart displays.
Mira, which was first unveiled in January, lets LCD screens act as a portable screen in conjunction with a nearby desktop computer, enabling people with the device to surf the Web or play music that is stored on the desktop PC. The devices themselves run software based on Microsoft's Windows CE.Net operating system, while such tablets require an 802.11b wireless connection to a nearby PC running Windows XP Professional.
The PC industry's woes may be cured by taking two tablets and calling your local laptop vendor in the morning. Beware, however. The side effects of these tablets may still give some users bad headaches. Tablet PCs, subnotebooks running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows XP Tablet Edition, are best defined by their pen interfaces. Users' experiences with the pen are what will determine the Tablet PC's success. In eWEEK Labs' tests, we found the experience to be satisfactory, although many improvements are necessary before Tablet PCs become a full-fledged success across the board. The pen input device is impressive: The Acer features a tablet developed by Wacom Technology Co. that is pressure-sensitive (and thus writes darker when users press harder) and it produces fluid anti-aliased text.
After entering text in block form or cursive, most users will want to test the device to see how well it can read handwriting. For most people, it's a good experience-but for some, it's abysmal, recognizing only 70 percent or so of the characters entered. Optimally, with good handwriting, the recognizer should correctly transform 95 percent of all text-less than OCR, but still excellent considering the wide variations in handwriting.
Just a few years ago, one of the hottest topics at this annual confluence of PC hardware and software makers was the so-called "open source" alternative to Microsoft's industry-dominant Windows operating system. Soon, open source proponents argued, PC users would be liberated from the burden of paying for software. The Linux operating system, and other "open source" alternatives written by devoted bands of volunteer programmers, would be available to anyone for the cost of a download. But today, Windows is still running on the vast majority of PCs. So what happened?
Linux hasn't gone away [not yet anyways, but soon, lets hope]. But after attracting widespread attention and generating several moonshot initial public offerings during the tech boom, purveyors of Linux software and support have fallen back to earth - along with their stocks. Earlier this month, Red Hat, which sells about half of all Linux software, reported a loss of $4.3 million on an 8 percent drop in revenues in the latest quarter as corporate customers continued to squeeze every penny of their computer budgets.