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Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates announced a new direction Friday as he pledged $306 million in grants to develop farming in poor countries, leading the charge for corporate responsibility at a major meeting of business chiefs. Bill Gates, Bono and Michael Dell from Dell computers. The announcement by Gates, who is to step down from the computer giant later this year, drew attention from the financial woes that have dominated the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Gates received a standing ovation for his announcement at the suggestion of U2 frontman Bono. The move, the first foray into agriculture by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will help boost efforts by the annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland to shake off its image as a billionaire’s talking shop that does little to solve the problems it discusses. “If we are serious about ending extreme hunger and poverty around the world, we must be serious about transforming agriculture for small farmers, most of whom are women,” Gates said.

View: Full Story @ CNN

Many businesses are still waiting until after Vista SP1 is released before considering an upgrade.

Microsoft has sold more than a 100 million Windows Vista licenses in the year since the new operating system was released, and the company has grown its client business by about 20 percent over the same period, company officials said Jan. 24.

The software company also released the second refresh of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Jan 24 to the 15,000 core beta testers. The software has not been made available for public download.

Vista SP1 is also still on track for release to manufacturing later this quarter, but Microsoft officials have said they haven’t set the final date. That decision will be “based on quality, so we will continue to track customer and partner feedback from the beta program before setting a final date,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Microsoft also released the second refresh for Windows XP SP3 on Jan. 23, which the company is hoping to release to manufacturing by June 30. But “timing will always be based on customer feedback as a first priority,” the spokesperson said.

In a statement releasing its second-quarter financial results, Kevin Johnson, the president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division, said the software maker was “pleased with the progress of Windows Vista in the market. We’ve hit our stride with partners and customers and are looking forward to the release of our first service pack later this quarter.”

Vista sales contributed to the overall strong revenue growth the company reported in its fiscal second quarter that ended in December. Microsoft’s revenue grew 30 percent to $16.37 billion on the back of what company officials said on Jan. 24 were “robust holiday sales and enterprise demand.”

But, despite these numbers, Vista has had a slow start with businesses, many of which have decided to wait until after Vista SP1 is released later this quarter before considering an upgrade to the latest edition of Windows.

Microsoft made the release candidate for the service pack available in December, which was followed by the release of a “refresh” earlier this month.

Many business are hopeful that Vista SP1 will deliver the improvements Microsoft has been promising.

One such firm is CoreBrand, which helps companies understand, build, express and measure their corporate brand. The company is looking forward to the promised LAN/network performance improvements as well as the other improvements that Vista SP1 promises to bring, according to Jurgen Altziebler, the interactive experience director for CoreBrand in New York.

But other customers, like Gary Wilhelm, the business and financial systems manager at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, have already downloaded the SP1 release candidate and are running it on test machines to make sure that its internal applications are able to run, and to see if the service pack resolved some of the issues it identified.

Microsoft also bowed to pressure and announced Jan. 21 that it will allow all versions of Windows Vista to be licensed for use in a virtual machine environment.

But, Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s chief operating officer, remains upbeat, saying that demand for its products remains strong from both businesses and consumers in the United States, while growth in emerging markets is even stronger. “Looking across Brazil, Russia, India and China, our field revenue reached a combined growth rate over 65 per cent this quarter,” he said.

Source: eWeek.com

Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill lost both his legs above the knees when a bomb exploded under his Humvee while on patrol in Iraq on October 15, 2006. He has 32 pins in his hip and a 6-inch screw holding his pelvis together. Now, he’s starting to walk again with the help of prosthetic legs outfitted with Bluetooth technology more commonly associated with hands-free cell phones. “They’re the latest and greatest,” Bleill said, referring to his groundbreaking artificial legs.
Bleill, 30, is one of two Iraq war veterans, both double leg amputees, to use the Bluetooth prosthetics. Computer chips in each leg send signals to motors in the artificial joints so the knees and ankles move in a coordinated fashion. Bleill’s set of prosthetics have Bluetooth receivers strapped to the ankle area. The Bluetooth device on each leg tells the other leg what it’s doing, how it’s moving, whether walking, standing or climbing steps, for example. “They mimic each other, so for stride length, for amount of force coming up, going uphill, downhill and such, they can vary speed and then to stop them again,” Bleill told CNN from Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he’s undergoing rehab.

View: Full Story @ CNN

Apple has touched on a new way to help you find your way around its products. The company has registered technology in the US that could see the iPod’s clickwheel or your MacBook Air’s touchpad light-up when you finger it.
The patent application, which was filed recently with the US Patent and Trademark Office, shows in block diagram form how the inclusion of a lighting mechanism would help guide users around a device by relating menu options to lighting changes. It’s little like someone switching the hallway light on and off for every step you take up the stairs.

View: Full story @ The Reg

Windows Vista was hit by significantly fewer publicly disclosed security flaws in its first year than Windows XP and open source rivals in their first years, according to a report from Microsoft. The report, written by Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing group, is part of Microsoft’s effort to show that its work on redesigning the security architecture and adding new security features to Vista have paid off.
Jones also found that changes to the way Microsoft handles patching has resulted in less work for system administrators on Vista compared to Windows XP. The report comes on the heels of figures from Secunia, which reported fewer vulnerabilities for Windows in 2007 compared to open source operating systems in the same time period. However, Microsoft’s report compares the way each OS fared in its first full year of supported distribution.

View: Full story @ PCWorld

Reports are beginning to surface that some Web servers running Linux and Apache are unwittingly infecting thousands of computers, exploiting vulnerabilities in QuickTime, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows. One way to tell if your machine is infected is if you’re unable to create a directory name beginning with a numeral. Since details are still sketchy, the best advice right now is to take proactive steps to secure your servers.
We asked the Apache Software Foundation if it had any advice on how to detect the rootkit or cleanse a server when it’s found. According to Mark Cox of the Apache security team, “Whilst details are thin as to how the attackers gained root access to the compromised servers, we currently have no evidence that this is due to an unfixed vulnerability in the Apache HTTP Server.” We sent a similar query to Red Hat, the largest vendor of Linux, but all its security team could tell us was that “At this point in time we have not had access to any affected machines and therefore cannot give guidance on which tools would reliably detect the rootkit.

News source: it.slashdot.org

The Windows team stepped up a gear and have released SP1 RC (Release Candidate) Refresh 2 today. In the past this probably would of been called RC3.
Microsoft said this release would reach just 15,000 official beta testers who can download it through Windows Update or as a stand alone file. As with previous builds, the Service Pack requires an RTM version of Vista without earlier SP1 updates applied.
Service Pack 1 is expected to be made available in the middle of next month.

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