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Polycom has licensed the right to distribute Microsoft RoundTable, originally launched by the software giant in October 2007. As of April 13, 2009, Microsoft will no longer be selling RoundTable, and instead the product will be available as the Polycom CX5000 Unified Conference Station. Microsoft will continue to support all RoundTable devices already sold, and Polycom will support all Polycom CX5000s.
Polycom is known as a leader in telepresence, video, and voice communications solutions. This, along with the fact that the company's portfolio offers a full suite of devices that integrate with Office Communications Server 2007, makes Microsoft's choice of Polycom unsurprising. Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president in the Unified Communications Group at Microsoft, elaborates upon this decision with the following statement:
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Before Wikipedia finished off the encyclopedia as we knew it, Microsoft's Encarta started the venerable multi-volume reference works on their long path to oblivion. So it is somehow fitting that because "people today seek and consume information in considerably different ways than in years past"--that is, they turn to Wikipedia-- Microsoft announced today that it is killing off the MSN Encarta Web site effective Oct. 31 (the Japanese version will linger under the end of the year.}
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AV-Comparatives is known for the thorough tests it does on security software. Following its November 2008 retrospective report, the company has released its February 2009 on-demand comparative roundup. Seventeen products were updated on February 9 and tested against 1.3 million malware samples received between May 2008 and early February 2009, which can be broken down into the following categories: 71.5 percent of trojans, 19.9 percent of backdoors/bots, 4.2 percent of worms, 1.9 percent of Windows-specific viruses, 1.6 percent of other malware, and 0.9 percent of scripts/macro viruses. The security company looked at how many malware samples each software missed (graph above) as well as false positives (shown below).
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After various problems, the replacement for Microsoft Expression Media 2 Service Pack 2 has finally arrived. The build number is 2.0.2096.0 but it will be a while before this version of SP2 trickles out via Microsoft Update and the Mac AutoUpdate. Thankfully, the new SP2 is also available on the Microsoft Download Center for Windows (3.5 MB) and Mac (62.5 MB). If you are on the original SP2, you will need to roll back to SP1. If that doesn't work, you will have to uninstall and install SP1, and then patch with SP2. The replacement service pack fixes the following issues in the original:
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In a post last week on the Microsoft's Environment Sustainability Blog, Rob Bernard, Chief Environmental Strategist, explained Microsoft's goals for the environment: "Today, I want to focus on our carbon footprint goal. We understand that environmental action must begin at home. Today, Steve announced to all employees that Microsoft has set a goal to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of revenue by at least 30% compared with 2007 levels by 2012. We'll achieve this goal by improving energy use in our buildings and operations, reducing air travel, and increasing our use of renewable energy." I recommend checking out the full letter as it's a good read.
The announcement comes hot on the heels of last month's news of Microsoft giving enterprises running Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 a free tool, dubbed the Environmental Sustainability Dashboard, for tracking their environmental impact and energy consumption.
In related news, Microsoft has also relaunched its Microsoft Environment portal, "with improved navigation, refined design, and more content." The new Green IT section provides information on how Business and IT professionals can "Save energy. Save money. Save the environment."
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Forbes has updated its World's Billionaires list, and boy have things changed. The list has lost 373 people: last year there were 1,125 billionaires and this year there are just 793 people rich enough to have the title. Even these 793 have lost an average of 23 percent of their wealth. The economic downturn isn't being very picky. The average net worth sits at around $3 billion, which is essentially where it was six years ago. Of these 793, Bill Gates has managed to regain the top position, despite a loss of $18 billion. That's right, Bill Gates is once again the richest man on Earth.
Gates lost the title in July 2007 to Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú. Helú was second last year, but now sits at third after dropping $25 billion. Warren Buffett, who was first last year, saw his fortune decline $25 billion. Here's the top 10 list as it currently now stands:
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Channel 9 has a rather interesting video interview with Brad Abrams, group program manager for the .NET framework, regarding business Web app development with Silverlight 3.0. While there are unannounced aspects of the new version that Scott Guthrie will be detailing during his keynote at MIX09 next week, Abrams still manages to give a sneak peak on what it will be like to create a Silverlight 3.0 application as well as some of the new controls that are coming. I've embedded the video below (and yes, it does require Silverlight), and I've also included a quote from the video that I believe best summarizes what businesses need to be aware of:
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Back in November 2008 when everyone was still speculating about what Windows 7 editions were coming down the pipeline, one morsel of information that we found was a mention of a "Windows 7 for Small Business (future)" in a job posting for a marketing manager.
Once the six Windows 7 SKUs were revealed last month, it was clear that there was nothing named Business, let alone Small Business. However, CRN now has a story on Microsoft quietly unveiling the Windows 7 Small Business Ignite Program last week, which is probably what the previous tidbit was referring to.
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At Convergence 2009, the semiannual New Orleans event for Microsoft Dynamics lineup of business-management solutions, Microsoft Business Solutions Corporate Vice President Kirill Tatarinov outlined a Microsoft vision referred to as the Dynamic Business, a way for organizations to combine the unique value of their people, businesses processes, and connections with their customers and trading partners to increase relevance, responsiveness, and impact. He also highlighted three new ways that the software giant is trying to help businesses maximize their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) investments so that they can fight back against the economic downturn, at no additional charge:
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Now that we all have our beta copies of Windows 7 to play with, Ars thought it was time to take Vista's successor for a spin on the Apple side of the street. After all, it isn't every day that recent switchers and established users get to (legitimately) try out a copy of Windows for free, so we burned a couple of ISOs and got to work.
We covered all the major bases for our experiment, and just to keep things interesting, we worked on a unibody MacBook with those multi-touch trackpads that don't even play well with Vista yet. We installed both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 natively in Boot Camp, then moved on to virtualization with VMware Fusion 2 and Parallels Desktop 4 just for good measure.
Overall, things went well, but since this is a beta OS that is supported by exactly zero parties involved, there were naturally some drawbacks and a few dead-ends. We'll run through installation procedures and best practices, and share some general tips on what to look out for. Ultimately, we found that Windows 7 is definitely doable—even usable—on a Mac under the right circumstances, but "beta" definitely means beta for now.
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According to the Microsoft Security Response Center, Microsoft will issue three Security Bulletins on Tuesday, and it will host a webcast to address customer questions on these bulletins the following day (March 11 at 11:00 AM PST, if you're interested). One of the vulnerabilities is rated "Critical" and the other two are marked "Important." The first one earned its rating through a remote code execution impact, meaning a hacker could potentially gain control of an infected machine. All three patches will require a restart.
The list of affected operating configurations includes Windows 2000, Windows XP (x86 and x64), Windows Server 2003 (x86 and x64), Windows Vista (x86 and x64), and Windows Server 2008 (x86 and x64). Microsoft does not plan to release patches for Internet Explorer nor for Office this month, and the latter is a bit odd considering the security bulletin the company issued regarding Excel last week.
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I wrote a few weeks ago about changes Microsoft has made to Windows 7's User Account Control (UAC) that make the component less secure than it was in Vista. Though the company has responded by saying it will change some of the problem behaviors, yet more problems have emerged that indicate that a real fix will be harder than first expected. But more than that, the flaws call into question the entire purpose of the Windows UAC feature, at least in its commonplace "Admin Approval" mode.
The decisions Microsoft has made not only make Windows 7's Admin Approval mode less secure than Vista's, they also undermine the entire purpose of the UAC system. Redmond maintains that UAC's foremost objective is to ensure programmers update their programs to behave properly when users have limited access rights. But the way that the Windows 7 UAC "improvements" have been made completely exempts Microsoft's developers from having to do that work themselves. With Windows 7, it's one rule for Redmond, another one for everyone else.
The combination of significant security flaws and the inconsistent, "Do as I say, not as I do" attitude towards UAC should give Microsoft pause for thought. There's no point in retaining Admin Approval mode as it currently stands, and it should be scrapped completely.
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Microsoft and the EU aren't going to be exchanging love letters anytime soon, but the EU's decision to relax the level of scrutiny it previously mandated should help ease tensions between the two behemoths. In a statement issued Wednesday, the Commission announced that it would no longer require an
independent oversight committee to maintain constant vigilience over Microsoft, thanks to "changes in Microsoft's behavior, the increased opportunity for third
parties to exercise their rights directly before national courts and experience gained since the adoption of the 2004 Decision."
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Microsoft today released the Release Candidate build of Service Pack 2 (6002.16670.090130) for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 to the public. You can grab the standalone installer package from the Microsoft Download Center for 32-bit (MB), 64-bit, and Itanium systems. There is also an .iso image available, as well as a patch that will allow you to get it via Windows Update. While this is a public release, it is still a Release Candidate, and Microsoft is recommending that the average customer "wait until the final release prior to installing this service pack" and reminding testers that "a Service Pack is not a feature release—we are not looking for new feature suggestions, only SP2 regressions, crashes, and confirmation of fixes we've made will be considered for this milestone."
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