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Microsoft Corp. has forced graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. into arbitration over the price of chips made for the Xbox game console, and Nvidia said on Monday that if it loses the case it may have to make the chips at a loss. The net result could be either a gain of $13 million as deferred revenues from the Microsoft deal comes on to the books if Nvidia wins the case, or the prospect of having to pump up production, pay damages and slash prices if it loses, executives said.

A telephone company executive on Monday disputed allegations that strong antitrust penalties are needed to stop Microsoft from frustrating future voice and data messaging systems. Under questioning, Sutherland said he has very little experience with unified messaging services and started a related project for Qwest less than a month ago. He also said he "skimmed" the states' penalty proposals and the federal government's settlement, but claimed to have no opinion on them.

Microsoft Corp. announced it was honored in Software Development Magazine's 12th Annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards. In the Libraries, Frameworks and Components category, the Microsoft .NET Framework -- among more than 700 books, products and Web sites nominated in six categories -- was awarded the prestigious JOLT Award. This award is one among many that have been awarded for .NET throughout the course of the past year, including the PC Magazine Technical Excellence Awards, Dr. Dobb's Journal Excellence in Programming award and InfoWorld's technology of the year award.

Two interesting but uncorroborated looks at future Windows versions had the rumor mills working overtime this weekend. The first is an "official" Microsoft UK magazine report which purports to reveal that the company will be releasing a Windows XP Second Edition (SE) in early 2003. And the second is a supposed look at the next major Windows version, Longhorn, and its new Start Menu replacement. Microsoft expects to ship Longhorn in 2004. Are either of these items real?

Microsoft on Friday released its witness list for the coming week, but it appears to lack the star power seen earlier in the courtroom. Testimony by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates dominated most of the sixth week in court during a proceeding that could eventually determine a remedy for the software giant's antitrust violations. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is still identified as a witness, but he is not on the schedule next week. The testimony is expected to go for at least two more weeks.

As the remedy proceeding begins to wind down, Howard University law professor Andy Gavil said to look for the states to begin prepping a modified remedy proposal for Kollar-Kotelly. "The danger for the states is for her to say the states offered up specific remedies and failed to support those remedies with evidence." In that case, she could dismiss the states' case, a scenario they would absolutely want to avoid, Gavil added.

Meet Microsoft's new tough cop: a security czar who says he will draw heavily on his government background to shore up the holes in Microsoft's software that make it a popular target for hackers -- one of the company's top missions for the year.

"I'm going to spend a lot of time commuting between the two Washingtons," Scott Charney told Reuters in an interview. Charney assumed his new role as chief security strategist at Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft on April 1.

Charney, formerly the Justice Department's computer crime chief, has two priorities: reviewing Microsoft's products and working with its customers to figure out how to protect key area's of the nation's computer infrastructure, much of which runs on Microsoft software.

In the 2.2 release addresses fixes mostly for WindowsXP. IAA is build for computers with Intel i8xx chipset running on Win98+ and WinNT+.

• Faster Boot Time via Accelerated Operating System Load Time
• Accelerated Disk I/O for Games, Graphics Applications, Disk
• Utilities, and Media Authoring Applications
• Performance-enhancing Data Pre-fetcher for Intel Pentium 4 processor-based systems
• Support for 137GB and larger hard drives

Thanks to NeoWin for this link. A video of Longhorn has surfaced, whether is authentic that remains to be seen.

The mobile Internet has been slow to get off the ground, according to new research, but software makers are becoming ever more fanatic behind the scenes to gain support in an industry they view ready to take off. Just last week, Microsoft's Juha Christensen invited the 20 biggest software developers allied to arch rival Symbian to breakfast in an effort to win them over, much to the chagrin of Symbian executives when they found out.

It is the latest stab below the belt in a battle that is developing nasty edges as the two companies fight to become the dominant software provider for hundreds of millions of future mobile phones and organizers that will be able to play games, music and video clips and receive multimedia messages.

Instel'S next 64-bit server processor will now possibly be referred to as "Junior" by the original Itanium chip. he chip maker on Thursday announced it has named its next 64-bit Itanium processor "Itanium 2," according to representatives for Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel. ormerly code-named McKinley, Intel's upcoming Itanium 2 will be the second chip of the company's 64-bit line of Itanium processors. Sronger and faster than Itanium, Itanium 2 should offer as much as twice the performance of its parent chip, according to Intel..

Scheduled to arrive in mid-2002, Itanium 2 will be the first chip of the Itanium line ready to shoulder mission-critical computing tasks in application and database server environments. The original Itanium chip was generally regarded as proof-of-concept for Intel's 64-bit processor technology and was used primarily in servers porting applications to Intel's 64-bit platform.