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A Croatian college student has created a utility that installs a seriously stripped-down Windows Vista, saying the heft of Microsoft’s biggest desktop OS was just too big to believe. “Who can justify a 15GB operating system?” asked Dino Nuhagic, a fifth-year student from Split, a Croatian city on the Adriatic. Not Nuhagic, or the uncounted users who have turned to his creation, vLite.
vLite, a free program that lets users pick and choose which Vista components, hotfixes, drivers and even language packs are installed, then builds a disk image that can be burned to a DVD for unattended installation of the operating system.
“Why did I do it? Well, it’s performance and work environment,” said Nuhagic when asked why he came up with vLite. “Performance, that’s easy to explain. The less things running, the more responsive the OS. But the environment part is where it gets down to personal preference.”
Those preferences include options for leaving out virtually every component of Windows Vista, from the minor — such as the bundled screensavers — to the major, such as the firewall or Universal Plug and Play.

Link: vLite | vLite Forums
View: Full Article @ Computer World

Ahead of its launch of Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP, Microsoft is planning to ship in late February assessment tools for IT shops so they can get their networks in order and ease any planned migrations. The Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Solution Accelerator is designed to help IT shops inventory their network, assess the readiness of their infrastructure for a migration and generate reports and recommendations.
The tool is for users planning migrations to Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista, Office 2007 and Microsoft Virtualization technologies (Virtual Server 2005 R2 and the forthcoming Hyper-V), and Microsoft Application Virtualization (formerly SoftGrid). Baldwin Ng, of the Microsoft assessment and planning team wrote in a Jan. 26 posting on the MAP blog that the assessment tool would be released on the Web in approximately four weeks. A beta program is already under way.

View: Full Article @ ARN

365 days and 100 million licenses later, enthusiasm for a safe, reliable and engaging Windows Vista experience is high.
Since the worldwide release of Windows Vista one year ago today, people are doing more and getting more out of their Windows experience. From pictures and videos, to games and family safety settings, users are finding out that they can do more with Windows Vista.
We commissioned independent studies from IPSos and NPD to explore the attitudes of users about the operating system not only in the U.S., but also in China, France, Germany, Japan, and the UK. According to NDP, 70 percent of these users say it’s an improvement over their previous operating system.
Windows Vista is the first operating system to build in parental controls. And they sure have changed things in the Charney household. For my ten-year-old, Ruby, they’ve helped make sure that her browsing habits are safe. Parental controls have also removed the argument about when she has to stop using the PC because after a certain hour, she simply can’t log on. She participated in that discussion and agreed to the rules, and now we don’t have to have that debate every night.
We’ve worked diligently with industry partners to increase the number of Windows Vista-compatible applications and devices, while also building support for them. While we were happy with what we launched with, we also built the system to update seamlessly with the new technology that has been and will be added every day.
Today, Windows Vista supports over 43,000 hardware products, almost doubling the 23,000 thousand at launch.
We pay a lot of attention to and continually work not only on the performance of Windows Vista but also on people’s experience of performance. We get data from people who file bugs - Microsoft tech support, our OEM partners - and we pay attention to press, bloggers and enthusiasts’ web sites.
Microsoft has invested heavily in security improvements for products for about six years now, and we’re seeing the results of that commitment in Windows Vista. I think it’s fair to say that Windows Vista is proving to be the most secure version of Windows to date.
There are many areas of progress, but I’d like to point to three: the ability to run as a standard user, a set of Internet Explorer capabilities that help protect us from outside threats - the Phishing Filter and improved authentication of secure transactions with Extended Validation SSL - and the efforts of Windows Defender to clean spyware and other potentially unwanted software.
Windows Vista is the first operating system we’ve built with gamers and gaming in mind. Hardcore gamers have responded with more than ten million of them around the world already running Windows Vista
For these gamers, we created a whole new graphics technology and engine in Windows Vista—DirectX 10. A new generation of games is being developed to take advantage of the capabilities of the DirectX 10 compatible graphics cards and Windows Vista, and it’s exciting to see what kind of great experiences this is creating for gamers.
We look forward to providing more exciting experiences for Windows Vista users in the coming year.

News source: Microsoft.com

According to an analysis of the top 100 U.S. Internet properties in 2007 by comScore, social networking giant Facebook.com reaped the benefits of opening registration to all users, jumping 81% versus December 2006 to 34.7 million visitors in December 2007. Facebook is of course still quite behind the social networking site MySpace, but it is quickly gaining. Other highlights of 2007’s major trends in U.S. Internet activity include:

• Wikipedia Sites gained 34% to reach nearly 52 million visitors
• Leading classified site Craigslist.org jumped 74% to 24.5 million visitors
• AT&T grew 27% to 30.2 million visitors (think exclusive iPhone carrier)
• Yellow Book Network jumped by 137% to 10.4 million visitors
• Searches at the five major core search engines increased 15% to 9.6 billion searches
• Google Search Sites increased over 30% and hit 5.6 billion searches
• Yahoo! Search Sites decreased by 4% hitting 2.2 billion searches
• Microsoft Search Sites increased 8% and hit 940 million

Mozilla has given a proof of concept Firefox vulnerability a “high severity” rating because an attacker can collect session information such as cookies and history, according to Mozilla security chief Window Snyder. Snyder said the vulnerability will be patched with Firefox 2.0.0.12, which will be pushed out “shortly.” On Jan. 22, Snyder confirmed a proof of concept vulnerability discovered by researcher Gerry Eisenhaur on Jan. 19. Simply put, Firefox leaks information that can allow an attacker to load any javascript file on a machine. This “chrome protocol directory transveral” is in play whenever there are “flat” files–common in add ons–are installed. Chances are good that most Firefox users will have at least a few of these add ons installed. That’s a lot of data leakage.

View: Full Story @ ZDNet

A breakdown in an international undersea cable network disrupted Internet links to Egypt, India and Gulf Arab countries on Wednesday, and Egypt said it could take several days for its services to return to normal. It was not immediately possible to gauge the impact of the disruption on financial institutions. Egypt’s telecoms ministry said 70 percent of the country’s Internet network was down and India initially said it had lost over half its bandwidth. “This cut has affected Internet services in Egypt with a partial disruption of 70 percent of the network nationwide,” the Egyptian ministry said in a statement. Residents of Gulf Arab countries also reported a slowdown in Internet connectivity.

The Bahrain Telecommunications Co said its services were affected after two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt’s north coast. The Egyptian telecoms ministry said it did not know how the cables were cut or if weather was a factor. Storms had forced Egypt to close the northern mouth of the Suez canal on Tuesday. India also reported serious disruptions to its services and Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India, told Reuters: “There has been a 50 to 60 percent cut in bandwidth.” Chharia told the Headlines Today news channel that a “degraded” service would be up and running by Wednesday night, but full restoration would take 10 to 15 days. “The big operators have transferred their small broadband connectivity through the Pacific route, and that’s the reason there’s no hue and cry in the country,” he said.

View: Full Story @ Reuters