WinInsider

Microsoft will display a beta version of Windows XP next week that will run on Tablet PCs, a new breed of computers that have touch screens and can read handwriting. According to sources close to the company, Microsoft will unveil details of the new operating system at next week's TechXNY trade show in New York as it assists manufactures in having the machines on store shelves by October. The announcement will likely come during a Tuesday morning keynote by Jeff Raikes, group vice president for productivity and business services at Microsoft. Tablet PCs are essentially modified notebooks: They will weigh about three to four pounds, can connect to the Internet wirelessly, and may or may not include keyboards. Unlike notebooks, though, Tablet PCs will come loaded with new applications, such as Microsoft Journal, that let users input words or drawings into the computer by writing on the screen.

Just before closing arguments in its antitrust case, Microsoft Corp. delivered a broadside to one of its bitter software rivals, declaring Tuesday it will stop supporting Sun Microsystems' flagship product by 2004. Microsoft cited Sun's opposition in the case as the reason for the decision to remove support for Sun's Java programming language from future versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. "The decision to remove Microsoft's Java implementation was made because of Sun's strategy of using the legal system to compete with Microsoft," Microsoft spokesman Jim Cullinan said in a statement.

Current versions of Windows XP do not include Java, though users can download it if they need to run programs written in the language. But Microsoft did say it would temporarily restore support for Java in the upcoming update to Windows XP, expected this fall. That decision may further anger Sun because Windows XP will include Microsoft's own version of Java rather than having users download the version made by Sun.

Intel will manufacture complete servers and other components based on its upcoming Itanium 2 processor as a way to smooth acceptance in the market for the server chip. The upcoming product family, code-named Tiger, will include motherboards, chipsets, enclosures and a complete four-processor Itanium 2 server, according to a company representative. Intel will not sell these products to the general public, but to computer manufacturers, which will then re-brand them as their own or incorporate them into their own products. The Tiger family will come out in the second half of the year. Itanium 2, formerly code-named McKinley, is expected in July.

Easing acceptance for Itanium 2 is a leading obsession at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. The chip will go into servers that directly compete against the higher-end Unix machines from Sun Microsystems and IBM. Four-processor Itanium 2 systems will sell for between $20,000 and $72,000.

MASS use of Bluetooth for short-range wireless communication is years away. The technology's backers hyped Bluetooth and, back in reality, now predict that it will be eight years before Bluetooth is as commonly used as a mobile phone is today. "We did overheat it a lot," said Mike McCamon, executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), in an interview at the fourth annual Bluetooth Congress that ended here on Friday. The Bluetooth SIG trade association comprises hundreds of organizations working on Bluetooth products and applications.

Bluetooth was invented in 1994 as a cable replacement technology. It offers data transfer rates of about 400Kbps and operates in the 2.4GHz frequency band, the same as many cordless telephones and 802.11b wireless LAN technology. Vendors predicted that Bluetooth would be everywhere by now, but the number of devices with Bluetooth support remains limited and early adopters are the only ones using Bluetooth today.

It's one of the oldest jokes on the Internet, endlessly forwarded from e-mailbox to e-mailbox. A software mogul - usually Bill Gates, but sometimes another -makes a speech. "If the automobile industry had developed like the software industry," the mogul proclaims, "we would all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon." To which an automobile executive retorts, "Yeah, and if cars were like software, they would crash twice a day for no reason, and when you called for service, they'd tell you to reinstall the engine."

"Software's simply terrible today," says Watts S. Humphrey, a fellow of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute who has written several well-known books on software quality. "And it's getting worse all the time." Good software, in Humphrey's view, "is usable, reliable, defect free, cost effective and maintainable. And software now is none of those things. You can't take something out of the box and know it's going to work." Over the years, in the view of Edsger W. Dijkstra, an emeritus computer scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, the average computer user "has been served so poorly that he expects his system to crash all the time, and we witness a massive worldwide distribution of bug-ridden software for which we should be deeply ashamed."

A buffer overrun vulnerability in the Apache HTTP server included with many popular Web servers enables an attacker to execute code on vulnerable machines. The flaw lies in the way that the server handles data transmissions of unknown size. Typically, these transmissions are broken into "chunks" for easier handling. But Apache's HTTP server misinterprets the size of the chunks, which leads to an overrun of the heap memory, according to an advisory published Monday by Internet Security Systems Inc.'s X-Force research team.

The vulnerability can be exploited remotely by way of a carefully crafted invalid request to the server, and the flawed functionality is enabled by default. Exploiting the flaw could either lead to a denial of service on the machine or the execution of malicious code.

Microsoft Corp., which faces mounting competition and price pressure focused on its Office desktop productivity suite, is set to release the first beta of an Office upgrade. Due later this year, the beta will feature far greater use of XML and Web services for reporting, analyzing, importing and exporting information-particularly in Outlook and Excel, Steven Sinofsky, senior vice president for Office, in Redmond, Wash., told eWeek. Although many users agreed XML and Web services will become important, some said additional features for Word, Excel and Outlook are unnecessary and could add unwanted complexity. According to Microsoft's Sinofsky, the company plans to continue to innovate and add value to Office. That, he said, will result in greater productivity gains for users. "While we have started adding e-mail, calendaring and desktop management information in Outlook, that is going to be the No. 1 area where we are investing and innovating with Office," he said.

Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are two of a handful of companies agreeing to divert 20 percent of their charity donations to the cause of providing developing countries with Internet and telephone service. At a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly on Monday, both companies announced they had joined the CEO Charter for Digital Development, an initiative by the World Economic Forum being administered by the United Nations. In the case of Microsoft, which donated dlrs 36 million in cash and dlrs 179 million in software last year, funds given to alleviate the so-called digital divide should surpass dlrs 43 million. Hewlett-Packard is expected to add around dlrs 10 million of its philanthropy budget, which was about dlrs 50 million last year.

Oracle's sales representatives may be willing to do whatever is necessary to make a deal. And that, critics say, is where the problem begins. Customers and current and former Oracle employees say many companies that have purchased products from the database leader--most recently its customer-relationship management applications--have complained that they were misled about the technology's capabilities during the sales pitch, leaving them with software riddled with problems from the start.

"We had an order-entry product that didn't work," a former Oracle sales representative said. "We were successful in making the sale and getting them to implement it, but (the product) didn't work for them. We had a lot of pressure to sell the applications, even though they weren't ready for prime time."

Microsoft will extend the security measures now found in its Windows XP operating system to Windows 2000 and the slimmer version of the OS used in handheld devices. Warren Barkley, Microsoft lead program manager for the Windows networking division, told attendees of the 802.11 West conference in Seattle on Monday to expect the enhanced security measures, called 802.1x, by August. This follows earlier announcements about implementing more security by spring 2002. About 150 companies and businesses have already signed up to test the new release, he said. Microsoft is perhaps the biggest company yet to make a commitment to the new security standard called 802.1x, a standard set of instructions that is supposed to strengthen WEP. It adds new levels of security that WEP does not have.