Microsoft shopping for exclusive content to bolster Zune
Microsoft's Zune is a competent media player that has some unique features, but it has only managed to carve out a small chunk of the portable media player market so far. With Apple selling more iPods in a month than the total number of Zunes that ship within a year, Microsoft has been left in a position that it has never been comfortable with: distant second. In an effort to raise the device's profile, it appears that Microsoft is trying to persuade the movie industry to generate some Zune-only content.
View Full Article: Ars Technica
Netscape keeps users; Vista struggles to grab new ones
Surprise, surprise. In the browser game, Firefox’s market share is up a couple of percentage points while Internet Explorer’s share is actually down some 7 percent or so. But here’s something that caught our eye: Netscape - the no-longer-supported browser that probably has those die-hard AOL users to thank - is actually up one percent or so over last year, according to a report issued by Janco Associates.
View Full Article: ZDNet Blogs
Visual Studio 2008 SP1: Why not VS 2009?
Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack (SP) 1, which Microsoft released to manufacturing on August 11, isn’t just a bunch of fixes and patches.
VS 2008 SP1 — and the accompanying .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 — include a boat-load of new features, too, from ADO.Net Data Services (”Astoria” ), to the first version of the (maligned) .Net Entity Framework. SP1 also adds VS 2008 support for SQL Server 2008, which Microsoft just finalized last week.
View: Microsoft Download Center
View Full Article: Mary Jo Foley’s Blog
Jobs confirms iPhone application "kill switch"
Last week’s news that Apple had incorporated some form of application blacklist into the iPhone 3G certainly got people talking. While the purpose of said blacklist wasn’t apparent, there was still quite a bit of argument over whether or not an application blacklist was a method that Apple should be employing.
Now we’ve got confirmation from Steve Jobs himself that a “kill switch” mechanism does exist on the iPhone. Speaking to the Wall Street Journal, Steve had this to say…
View Full Article: Macworld
Intel Adds Processors, Cuts Core 2 Quad, Xeon Prices
With the Intel Nehalem chip on its way, Intel is cutting the prices of some of its high-end desktop processors and adding some chips into its lineup. The new Intel chips include the Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 processor for high-end and gaming desktop PCs.
View Full Article: eWeek
Olympics Silverlight bundling earns criticism
The Microsoft/NBC deal for online Olympic coverage is not getting publicity as favourable as planned. The International Herald Tribune has criticised the way viewers are forced to install the Silverlight software to use the service.
The newspaper, which is the international edition of the New York Times, has highlighted the likely anti-trust questions which could follow if Microsoft seems to be exercising an unfair advantage over Adobe.
View Full Article: Vista.BLORGE.com
eScrum for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help.
Download: eScrum for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System
Microsoft worried over .NET fragmentation
Multiple product groups at Microsoft are contributing functionality to the .NET Framework, but juxtaposed with that growth is the company’s concern that too many cooks might spoil the broth, a Microsoft internal document reveals.
The document, viewed by SD Times, notes that upon its introduction in 2002, .NET’s greatest value proposition was its delivery of a consistent, clean and relatively small framework that was more easily approachable by developers than Microsoft’s prior stacks. It calls out ActiveX, MFC, Win32 and various OLE libraries as examples of fragmented technologies.
View Full Article: SD Times
Flash, HTML, Ajax: Which will win the Web app war?
The days when Web pages were static collections of text and graphics are long past. But as the Web matures, there’s a fierce competition over which technology will propel it into a medium for rich, interactive applications.
On one side of the battle lines is the original Web page description technology called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language. Over the years, its abilities were augmented first with JavaScript, a basic programming language, and later a JavaScript-on-steroids technology called Ajax.
View Full Article: Webware
AMD vs. Intel: The Challenger’s New Plan
Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices says it’s about to go through a major change concerning how it makes chips, but it hasn’t said exactly what that change will be. Speculating about it has become a great guessing game among Wall Street investors and Silicon Valley’s chattering classes.
News Source: BusinessWeek
