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Microsoft put up a Q&A on PressPass with Brad Brooks. He’s the CVP of Windows Consumer Product marketing, and he announced that Microsoft is dropping the price of retail-packaged product (RPP) versions of Windows Vista when the SP1 version hits the shelves in a few weeks. From the interview:

PressPass: What did you announce today?
Brooks: Today we announced a variety of price reductions for copies of Windows Vista sold on retail shelves. In developed markets, the price changes will most notably impact upgrade retail versions of the new editions we introduced in 2007 — Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions. In emerging markets, we are combining full and upgrade Home Basic and Home Premium versions into full versions of these editions and instituting price changes to meet the demand we see among first-time Windows customers who want more functionality than is available in current Windows XP editions. In addition, we are also adjusting pricing on Windows Vista Ultimate in emerging markets to be comparable to price changes developed market customers will see.
These price changes will take effect globally with the retail release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 later this year, though some markets will see reduced prices sooner as a result of promotions many of our partners already are driving, such as Amazon.com in the United States.

Ina fried at News.com has the details. Windows Vista Ultimate drops 27% from $299 to $219, and Home Premium drops 19% from $159 to $129. I think this is great news, and will make Vista a bit more accessible. It also makes Vista Home Premium the same price as Apple’s OSX 10.5, which might explain that particular price point.
 

Link: Press Release @ PressPass

Search-engine Google has unveiled a plan to help U.S. patients gain control of their medical records and is working with doctors’ groups, pharmacies and labs to help them securely share sensitive health data. The company’s long-rumored entry into the highly sensitive field came when Chief Executive Eric Schmidt introduced Google Health at a health-care conference in Florida on Thursday. Google said it has signed deals with hospitals and companies including medical tester Quest Diagnostics Inc, health insurer Aetna Inc, Walgreens and Walmart Stores Inc pharmacies. The password-protected Web service stores health records on Google computers, with a medical services directory that lets users import doctors’ records, drug history and test results.
“We don’t know how to suck it out of the brains of doctors, but we know how to suck it out of the computer systems of doctors,” Schmidt said in an interview after his speech. Schmidt said it would likely be a few months before Google Health is offered more widely.

View: Full Story at Reuters

The WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space telescopes in the world for a seamless, guided exploration of the universe.

WorldWide Telescope, created with Microsoft’s high-performance Visual Experience Engine™, enables seamless panning and zooming across the night sky blending terabytes of images, data, and stories from multiple sources over the Internet into a media-rich, immersive experience.

It made Scoble cry, and soon it can make you cry too. The website for the latest Microsoft Research project, WorldWide Telescope, is now up at http://wwtelescope.com/. Here’s how Robert describes it:

“So, back to the World Wide Telescope. You drag around the sky. There’s Mars. There’s the big dipper. There’s Betelguese. Etc. It’s just like the star party you probably attended in college.

But it has one difference between any telescope you’ve ever looked at.

You can zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.

We picked a point of light inside the big dipper. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom. Holy ***, it’s two galaxies colliding. It looked like a star. Zoom. Zoom. Zoom.”

No sign of the download yet, with Scoble saying its in private alpha right now. If you’re interested in finding out more, Sunshine posted a bunch of info on it last week. Zakeh will let you know when its open to all.

Here is the embed of the TED talk featuring WorldWide Telescope:

NB: You can download the video here.

EDIT:

More information regarding WorldWide Telescope are as follows:

1. It’s dedicated to Jim Gray, the Microsoft Researcher who sailed out of San Francisco Bay about a year ago never to be heard from again. He started this project with a paper back in 2002.
2. It runs only on Windows. It’s coded in C#/.NET, you’ll meet the developer in our video and you’ll hear more about that then.
3. It’s free, but only in a private alpha right now. I’m not sure when it’ll be released to the public. I bet that we’ll find that out at Microsoft’s Tech Fest next week (TechCrunch and other bloggers are going to that, so Im sure we’ll hear lots more details on the other cool stuff Microsoft Research is doing).
4. There are terabytes of data, all seamlessly integrated for the first time here.
5. There are narrations and tours. I believe you can even add your own, so you can leave a little tour for your kids to see the sky in a new way.
6. Mike Arrington and Dan Farber figured it out first.

Search giant is number one business brand in the UK

Google is the number one business brand in the UK, according to the latest Superbrands survey.

The search giant came in ahead of the BBC, The Financial Times and British Airways, but will draw the greatest pleasure from pipping arch rival Microsoft to the top spot.

Apple, meanwhile, has dropped out of the top 10 despite the arrival of the iPhone, Apple TV and MacBook Air.

The survey, which was drawn up by senior business leaders, canvassed the opinions of 1,500 professionals.

Top 10 business brands:

1. Google
2. Microsoft
3. BP
4. BBC
5. Glaxosmithkline
6. Rolls-Royce Group
7. Financial Times
8. British Airways
9. Fedex Express
10. Hertz

Written by Guy Dixon -vnunet.com

Firefox just reached 500,000,000 downloads, an absolutely phenomenal milestone for Firefox. It is sort of hard to imagine what that number means. For some perspective, half a billion is roughly the audience size of 10,000 Roman Colosseums combined. It would be the weight, in kilograms, of 8,500 Boeing 747 airplanes. In dollars, for $500 million you and 15 of your friends can fly to the International Space Station. Alternately, you can effect change and invite those 15 friends to play a game and feed 25,000 people. With your help we can break another milestone with FreeRice.com by working together to donate 500,000,000 grains of rice to people in need. Help us celebrate by helping feed the hungry while picking up some new vocabulary, too!

On display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from February 24 to May 12 is a nanotechnology-equipped concept mobile device.

The Morph is the result of an ongoing partnership between Nokia and the University of Cambridge, and illustrates their ideas of how future devices will look and function. It’s a multipurpose unit with context-dependent shape; so whatever its intended use may be at the time, it can be structurally modified to fit the user’s needs.

Nokia’s partnership with the University of Cambridge began in 2007 and encompasses different projects in several areas. While these initial developments come from the nanoscience center and electrical division of the engineering department at Cambridge, other groups will be included in upcoming projects.

Nokia, in typically forward-thinking fashion, said it expects certain features shown in the Morph demo to be integrated into handheld devices within seven years.

Source: BetaNews

A critical vulnerability in VMware’s virtualization software for Windows lets attackers escape the “guest” operating system and modify or add files to the underlying “host” operating system, the company has acknowledged. As of Sunday, there was no patch available for the flaw, which affects VMware’s Windows client virtualization programs, including Workstation, Player, and ACE. The company’s virtual machine software for Windows servers and for Mac- and Linux-based hosts are not at risk.
The bug was reported by Core Security Technologies, makers of the penetration-testing framework CORE IMPACT, said VMware in a security alert issued last Friday. “Exploitation of this vulnerability allows attackers to break out of an isolated guest system to compromise the underlying host system that controls it,” claimed Core Security.
According to VMware, the bug is in the shared-folder feature of its Windows client-based virtualization software. Shared folders let users access certain files — typically documents and other application-generated files — from the host operating system and any virtual machine on that physical system.
“On Windows hosts, if you have configured a VMware host-to-guest shared folder, it is possible for a program running in the guest to gain access to the host’s complete file system and create or modify executable files in sensitive locations,” confirmed VMware.
VMware has not posted a fix, but it instead told users to disable shared folders.
 

View: Full Article @ InfoWorld
Link: VMware Security alert

News over the weekend of two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo for rejecting Microsoft’s $41.2 billion offer, is the first bit of sanity that has come out of this whole story.
The proposed class action, filed by veteran shareholder litigation firm Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossman, takes Yahoo directors to task for spurning the Feb. 1 offer and “pursuing all manner of value-destructive third-party deals.”
These pension funds are the only party who have the investor interests at heart. Regarding both Yahoo and Microsoft, it’s hard to understand what they are thinking. Why would Microsoft pay a 60% premium for the much troubled search engine company? I understand that Microsoft basically wants to replace its own troubled MSN with Yahoo, but why overpay? I am sure that if it invested a fraction of this amount of money to generate more MSN traffic, things would improve.

View: Full Article @ Blogging Stocks

Certain problems with Vista won’t be fixed by service packs or by updates but rather were actually part of the design. Users got used to XP and the way XP did things but Vista does some things differently. To help get your sanity back here are three things you can do to make Vista more amiable.
First, let’s tackle UAC. Vista’s UAC enables account controls which requires you to specify program actions when they need elevated permissions. The problem is that almost every action in Vista will require such. This can be turned off while still leaving the more important virtualization protection in place.
There are two ways to do this, by using native commands in Vista which is a 6-step process and should be avoided by everyone unless you want to create “Local Security Policy” specifically for that. I can’t recommend doing so. Instead, download Tweak UAC which will allow you to painlessly enable quiet mode.

View: Full Article @ Tech Blorge

Looks like Microsoft is ramping up the teasers for Mix08. Activewin just posted the text from a Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft Connect invitation email.

“Greetings from the Internet Explorer Team! We are nearing the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 and we will be making it available for the general public to download and test. IE8 Beta 1 is focused on the developer community, with the goal of gaining valuable feedback to improve Internet Explorer 8 during the development process…”

Not to be outdone, over on the IEBlog, they are talking about how websites can detect the new browser.

When released, the IE8 beta will introduce an updated User-Agent string.  For IE8, we’ve simply replaced “MSIE 7.0″ with “MSIE 8.0″. 

No surprises there then. Looks like this is just setting the stage for Mix08, which we’ll talk about in more detail soon. We’re hoping that IE8 will help the Windows & Windows Live Software+Services approach evolve, though the “roaming of favorites and browser settings” may still be some way off.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be any signup pages for the IE8 beta yet, but we’ll keep our eyes open.