microsoft

Got to hand it to my main man Mark Murray at Microsoft. (How's that for alliteration?) Sir Mark, the company's corporate PR guy, is the poor schnook charged with sanitizing his bosses' missteps.

To wit: A few years ago Microsoft sent Murray to Washington as its chief spinmeister during the company?s antitrust trial. "Today is another good day for Microsoft," he would invariably intone before his afternoon summations of the day's events. It was a valiant albeit fruitless exercise because the Justice Department's David Boies was picking apart Microsoft's witnesses to the … Read more

Security expert Bruce Schneier recently criticized two-factor authentication, which is designed to improve security by pairing passwords with a second test such as a thumbprint or physical token. This week, he took pains to clarify his position with a defense of the technology as useful if not a cure-all.

In the earlier essay, Schneier said two-factor authentication "solves the security problems we had 10 years ago, not the security problems we have today." Phishing and Trojan horses, for example, are attacks that rely on weaknesses beyond the issue of whether a particular computer user is authenticated.

Schneier's … Read more

Scott Moore, the first publisher of Microsoft's online magazine Slate, and former general manager of MSNBC.com, is leaving the software giant and heading south to Yahoo, according to the blog Paid Content. Moore most recently worked on initiatives for the MSN Web portal, such as MSN Video, according to the blog.

Yahoo and Microsoft representatives contacted did not immediately comment on whether the report is true.

If Moore is joining Yahoo, he will become the Web giant's latest hire from the editorial world. Last November, Yahoo hired Neil Budde, a newspaper veteran who was the founding editor … Read more

Mandrakesoft, a French Linux seller that's seen hard times competing with better-known brands such as Red Hat, has updated a product for high-performance technical computing.

A new version of the company's Mandrakelinux Clustering product includes support for the InfiniBand high-speed networking technology used to link numerous lower-end machines into a single computational engine, the company said Wednesday.

One software user is Hewlett-Packard, whose 240-processor HPC1 computing cluster can be used by customers in the manufacturing, bioinformatics, and oil and gas industries. That system employs an InfiniBand switch from Voltaire.

Mandrake isn't the only one interested in the … Read more

In response to last week's story about Greasemonkey, the Firefox extension that lets you customize Web pages on the fly by stripping out ads, adding competitive content or changing style elements (Firefox add-on lets surfers tweak sites, but is it safe?, March 23, 2005), an anonymous reader wrote in to point out two similar, pre-existing applications, Privoxy, which itself is based on Internet Junkbuster, and Proxomitron. So if you're an IE diehard with user script envy, there's hope.

Firefox diehards might be interested in a book out this month from O'Reilly: Firefox Hacks: Tips & Tools for Next-Generation Web Browsing, … Read more

Microsoft plans to announce a significant operating system upgrade at its own Windows Hardware Engineering Conference in April: support for the 64-bit memory extensions in newer x86 processors.

The company already had committed to an April release after earlier delays. But Andy Lees, corporate vice president of marketing for Microsoft's server and tools business, shed a little more detail on the release timing Tuesday during an event in San Francisco where Intel unveiled new 64-bit Xeon processors.

"We'll announce the availability of that at WinHEC," he said about the new 64-bit Windows edition.

In addition, Microsoft … Read more

Kudos to the New York Times for its story Tuesday about Brazil's movement toward open source software (Brazil: Free software's biggest and best friend, March 29, 2005).

"Since taking office two years ago, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has turned Brazil into a tropical outpost of the free-software movement," the Times reported in its story on Brazil's PC Conectado, or Connected PC, initiative for getting computers to the poor.

It's worth noting, however, that Brazil has been at this free software thing a little longer than the Times suggests.

"The cradle of … Read more

It'll come down to the wire, but Advanced Micro Devices expects to meet its deadline to fully disclose details of its "Pacifica" technology to help processors run multiple operating systems simultaneously.

The chipmaker had said it planned to reveal details by the end of March. On Monday, a company representative said the announcement is expected Wednesday, March 30. Microsoft and EMC's VMware subsidiary, which each have software that dovetails with the processor "virtualization" technology, will lend their support to AMD's technology, AMD said. The chipmaker also is working with the competing open-source Xen software project. … Read more

Microsoft called itself the winner earlier this month when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit sent the University of California's "Eolas" patent infringement case back to the district court, registering substantial complaints about the $565 million judgment against the software giant. But a declaration of victory hasn't kept Microsoft from requesting a rehearing of part of that decision it didn't like.

In a court filing dated March 16, Microsoft asked for an "en banc" rehearing--or a hearing by a larger panel of judges--on the so-called Golden Master section of … Read more