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First Look At Microsoft Silverlight 3 228

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the and-html-5-to-rule-them-all dept.
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller finds Silverlight 3 gaining ground on Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR in all the areas where Silverlight 2 had lagged. No longer do developers need to build desktop WPF apps based loosely on corresponding Silverlight RIAs, as Silverlight 3 adds the ability to install Silverlight apps on the desktop, update them in place, detect Net connectivity state changes, and store data locally and securely. Moreover, solid Expression Blend 3 and Visual Studio 2010 betas provide developers with much improved tools to create Silverlight RIAs. '"I do not expect many Adobe shops to give up their Flash, Flex, and AIR for Silverlight 3. I do expect many Microsoft shops to do more RIAs with Silverlight now that it's more capable and to create lightweight browser/desktop Silverlight 3 applications where they might have fashioned heavier-weight Windows Forms or WPF client applications," Heller says.'"

Comment Re:Appeal the fine? (Score 1) 469

by chamont (#27937845) Attached to: Intel Receives Record Fine By the EU

Indeed, it barely slowed Microsoft down a bit.

Hell, they have 25 Bil in cash in the bank, and just raised another 5 yesterday. And the thing is, Intel actually has some competition. Microsoft has essentially none, got a smaller fine, and continues to do exactly what they have ever done.

If the sky isn't falling, it should be.

Look Out, Firefox 3 — IE8 Is Back On Top For Now 662

Posted by CmdrTaco from the because-it-can dept.
CWmike writes "Internet Explorer 8 has shipped in its final version and is ready to take on its rivals. Preston Gralla reviewed it and says the latest version of Microsoft's browser leapfrogs its closest competition, Firefox 3, for basic browsing and productivity features — it has better tab handling, a niftier search bar, a more useful address bar, and new tools that deliver information directly from other Web pages and services. IE8 has also been tweaked for security and includes a so-called 'porn mode,' new anti-malware protection, and better ways to protect your privacy. The most noticeable new features? Accelerators and Web Slices. Think of an Accelerator as a mini-mashup that delivers information from another Web site directly to your current browser page. Web Slices deliver changing information from a Web page you're not actively visiting directly to IE8. There's one big problem for many, though. No add-ins, and there doesn't appear to be such an ecosystem on the horizon. So if you're a fan of add-ins and customizing the browser itself, writes Gralla, Firefox is superior. But for the actual browsing experience, IE8 has the upper hand — for now."
Intel

Intel Threatens To Revoke AMD's x86 License 476

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the toddlers-fighting-over-a-toy dept.
theraindog writes "AMD's former manufacturing division opened for business last week as GlobalFoundries, but the spin-off may run afoul of AMD's 2001 cross-licensing agreement with Intel. Indeed, Intel has formally accused AMD of violating the agreement, and threatened to terminate the company's licenses in 60 days if a resolution is not found. Intel contends that GlobalFoundries is not a subsidiary of AMD, and thus is not covered by the licensing agreement. AMD has fired back, insisting that it has done nothing wrong, and that Intel's threat constitutes a violation of the deal. At stake is not only AMD's ability to build processors that use Intel's x86 technology, but also Intel's ability to use AMD's x86-64 tech in its CPUs."
Space

Satellite Debris Forces ISS Crew Into Rescue Craft 171

Posted by timothy from the plenty-of-mint-gum dept.
Muad'Dave writes "CNN is reporting that the crew of the International Space Station was forced to take refuge from a possible collision of the ISS with a piece of space debris Thursday. From the article: 'Floating debris from a satellite forced the crew of the international space station to retreat to a safety capsule Thursday, according to a NASA news release. .. The debris was too close for the space station to move out of the way, so the station's three crew members were temporarily evacuated to a the station's Soyuz TMA-13 capsule, NASA said.'" Update: 03/12 18:42 GMT by T : The original story incorrectly said the ISS had 18 crew members. Luckily for the three in the Soyuz, that was a mistake.
Security

Norton Users Worried By PIFTS.exe, Stonewalling By Symantec 685

Posted by timothy from the and-nobody-saw-me dept.
An anonymous reader writes that "[Monday] evening, on systems with Norton Internet Protection running, users began to see a popup warning about an executable named PIFTS.exe trying to access the internet. The file was shown to be located in a non-existent folder inside the Symantec LiveUpdate folder. There were several posts about this to the Norton customer forums asking for help or information on this mysterious program. The initial thread received several thousand views and several pages of replies in a few short hours before being deleted. Several subsequent posts to the Norton forum were deleted much more quickly. These actions — whether actively covering up, or simply not well thought through — have spurred people to begin crafting conspiracy theories about the purposes of this PIFTS program. I for one am blocking the program until more information becomes available." The current top link on Google for "PIFTS.exe" links to one of these deleted questions on Norton's support boards, which sounds innocent enough: "I searched this forum but did not see PIFTS.exe. Any idea what this is?"
Microsoft

Microsoft May Be Targeting the Ubuntu Desktop 583

Posted by Soulskill from the no-not-with-lasers dept.
mjasay writes "Microsoft is advertising for a new director of open source strategy, but this one has a specific purpose: fight the Linux desktop. 'The Windows Competitive Strategy team is looking for a strong team member to lead Microsoft's global desktop competitive strategy as it relates to open source competitors.' For a variety of reasons, this move is almost certainly targeted at Ubuntu Linux's desktop success. With the Mac, not Linux, apparently eating into Microsoft's Windows market share, what is it about desktop Linux, and specifically Ubuntu, that has Microsoft spooked?" Reader christian.einfeldt notes Microsoft's acknowledgment of the FOSS threat to their business model within SEC filings, and suggests that this job posting could instead be about maintaining Internet Explorer's market share lead against Firefox.

Comment Re:Holy moly... (Score 1) 623

by chamont (#26755161) Attached to: Utah Mulls a Database of Bar Customers

Yeah, there are bars, but nowhere near the numbers in the real world. When you go to a bar, the lady at the front door asks if you have a "sponsor". You say "oh, that guy is sponsoring me". And they let you in. People mostly roll their eyes at the silly, inane law, but it makes the good little Mormons happy. And, it only makes the Mormons happy because for the most part they don't socialize at bars (that's what church is for). If they realized how stupid and backwards the whole process is, and how it makes Utah (continue to) look like a bunch of 19th century Puritans, they might get rid of this sillyness.

Couldn't help but rant for a second.

Incidentally, at restaurants you can order drinks but only as long as you order food.
Television

Senate Passes Another Bill To Delay Digital TV Transition 318

Posted by Soulskill from the it's-almost-like-they're-worried dept.
An anonymous reader tips news that the US Senate has passed another bill to delay the transition to digital TV. This is the second such bill to pass the Senate; the first was narrowly defeated in the House. The new version has an important difference — it would allow the transition to take place gradually over the four-month period between the original transition date (February 17th) and the extended date (June 12th). TV stations around the country could choose when they wanted to make the change, allowing those who have already begun plans to stop analog transmission to continue their shut-down operations.

Generational Windows Multicore Performance Tests 228

Posted by CmdrTaco from the spinning-yer-wheels dept.
snydeq writes "Windows XP, Windows Vista, and (soon) Windows 7 all support SMP out of the box, but as InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy notes, 'experience has shown that multiprocessing across discrete CPUs is not the same thing as multiprocessing across integrated cores within the same CPU.' As such, Kennedy set out to stress the multiprocessing capabilities of Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 in dual-core and quad-core performance tests. The comprehensive, multiprocess workload tests were undertaken to document scalability, execution efficiency, and raw performance of workloads. 'What I found may surprise you,' Kennedy writes. 'Not only does Microsoft have a firm grasp of multicore tuning, but its scalability story promises to keep getting better with time. In other words, Windows Vista and Windows 7 are poised to reap ever greater performance benefits as Intel and AMD extend the number of cores in future editions of their processors.'"
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 7.1 Released 324

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-1337-amongst-us dept.
Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads. Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework. A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client. Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3. DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."
Windows

32bit Win7 Vs. Vista Vs. XP 641

Posted by kdawson from the getting-a-feel-for-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet's Adrian Kingsley-Hughes tested the latest Win7 build against XP and Vista and came to a surprising conclusion: Win7 performs better than the other 2 OSs in the vast majority of the 23 tasks tested. Even installation. 'Rather than publish a series of benchmark results for the three operating systems (something which Microsoft frowns upon for beta builds, not to mention the fact that the final numbers only really matter for the release candidate and RTM builds), I've decided to put Windows 7, Vista and XP head-to-head in a series of real-world tests...'" This review shows only a 1-2-3 ranking for each test, so there's no sense of the quantitative level of improvement.

Comment Re:CableCard? (Score 1) 200

by chamont (#26241411) Attached to: Comcast Facing Lawsuit Over Set-Top Box Rentals

I feel like griping.

I have a Tivo with two cablecards. When I first got the Tivo, one of the cards that Comcast gave me was bad. It was an insanely painful process to figure this out. The one card wasn't just "bad" it would work, then not, then work. Call after call to "troubleshoot" the problem was a complete waste of time. I finally pulled one out, ran the Tivo for a few days, then repeated. My hell, finally. Comcast happily replaced the bad card, and to their credit, it has worked fine ever since.

Moral? Ditto to what everyone says. Cable sucks as bad as Windows. Sadly, however, there's no GNU/Cable.

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