The row between PC Tools and Microsoft over Windows Vista security escalated today with PC Tools attacking the effectiveness of Vista’s User Access Control (UAC) tool.

Earlier this week, Microsoft attacked results of a PC Tools' study which found Vista allowed 639 threats per thousand PCs compared with 586 for Windows 2000.

In a blog posting, director of Windows product management security at Microsoft, Austin Wilson, said Microsoft rejected the claims and vowed that Windows Vista was significantly less susceptible to malware than older operating systems.

However, in a statement released today, PC Tools said the company maintains its comments last week that Vista is not immune from online threats.

View Full Article: SC Magazine

Yahoo Inc. is seeking to conceal large portions of a shareholder lawsuit alleging the Internet company's board improperly thwarted Micrsoft Corp.'s $47.5 billion takeover offer, raising shareholder questions over the motives for the secrecy.

In a letter sent Friday to the judge overseeing the case in Delaware, a lawyer for the shareholders argued Yahoo is trying "to whitewash embarrassing documents" because the company thinks the information will damage the board's efforts to repel a challenge by activist investor Carl Icahn.

Angered by the board's handling of Microsoft bid, Icahn has nominated an alternate slate of candidates to oppose Yahoo's 10 current directors - including Chief Executive Jerry Yang - at the Sunnyvale-based company's July 3 annual meeting.

View Full Article: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A video is making the rounds showing how Vista SP1 has significantly improved Vista's immensely annoying User Account Control (UAC). But there appears to be less to the improvement than meets the eye --- hardly any changes were made to UAC in SP1, and it remains a very big Vista annoyance.

Microsoft blogger Michael Kleef has made a video that he says illustrates how much better UAC is under SP1 than before SP1. It very nicely shows that when you create a new folder in Program Files, you only need to go through one UAC prompt under Vista SP1, rather than four previously.

View Full Article: Computerworld

Ed Bott: Last month, I kicked off the Windows 7 release date prediction pool with my analysis on why I think Windows 7 will be released in time for the holiday buying season in 2009, picking July 29, 2009 as my entry. At the same time, I invited readers to add their guesses in the TalkBack section.

This morning, I went back and tallied the vote so far. The rules were pretty simple: Enter the complete date – day, month, and year – when you believe Microsoft will officially issue its press release announcing the release to manufacturing of Windows 7.

View Full Article: Ed Bott's Microsoft Report

WinFS was an ambitious effort to embed an integrated storage engine into the Windows operating system, and use it to create a shared data ecosystem. Although WinFS never shipped as a part of Windows, many of the underlying technologies have shipped, or will ship, in SQL Server and in other products. In this interview Quentin Clark traces the lineage of those technologies back to WinFS, and forward to their current incarnations.

View Full Article: Channel 10

Grand Theft Auto: Atlanta, anyone?

That title may not be far off, if the state of Georgia gets its way. Its latest goal, in the name of economic development, is to become the video game production capital of the United States.

Earlier this week, the state's Republican governor, Sonny Purdue, signed into law a proposal to offer greater tax incentives not only to game producers, but also to music video, movie, and TV production projects.

View Full Article: CNET News

Starting in May and continuing until the end of June a number of our partners are delivering one-day workshops to help professional embedded developers get started with our platforms. There are 23 workshops on both Windows CE and XP Embedded and will be hosted in the USA, France, UK and Germany. For more details and to register for a location near you visit the Windows Embedded Acceleration Workshops web site.

News Source: MSDN Blogs

Long Zheng: Here's an interesting campaign from Microsoft Australia to promote Office 2007. By listening to a short thirty-second demo of Office 2007 presented by a nine year old kid, Microsoft promises to donate one Australian dollar to the Smith Family - a charity in Australia to support. Although the site's terms and conditions state "Microsoft may choose to donate up to $100,000 regardless (of number of views)", the kids puts a smile on your face anyway so check it out.

View Full Article: Long Zheng's Blog

So many blogs, so little time. There are over 112 million blogs on the Internet! How do you keep up? You can take Live Spaces Vision for a spin! Yea really, a spin! Beware not to get dizzy while this shows you all recently updated Windows Live Spaces. Watch that Virtual Earth globe go round and round and round....

You can watch in 2D or 3D, the first time you start 3D mode you will be asked to install Virtual Earth 3D. To tilt and rotate the map, hold the 'CTRL' key on the keyboard whilst pressing your left mouse button. Scroll the mouse to rotate the globe on its axis.

View Full Article: LiveSide

In the four months since InfoWorld asked businesses and individuals to sign a petition at SaveXP.com asking Microsoft to keep Windows XP for sale beyond the planned June 30 general end-of-sales date, more than 200,000 have signed up to add their voices. As of May 15, the count was 200,805 signatures, excluding duplicates and fake signups.

"We're pleased and a little bit amazed that so many people from throughout the world have felt so passionately about the need to keep XP on the market," said Executive Editor Galen Gruman. "We had heard grumblings throughout much of 2007 about dissatisfaction with Vista's high hardware requirements, questionable interface changes, slow performance, and incompatibilities with third-party software, but no one seemed to want to say so in public. That's changed since the petition's launch on Jan. 14."

View Full Article: InfoWorld

Asustek Computer will launch its Atom-based 8.9-inch Eee PC 901 in June and the company is planning to add more features to it in order to clearly separate it from its competitors, according to market channel sources.

In addition to a Bluetooth module, Asustek will also add metal alloy parts to the keyboard and hinge, while its touchpad will also have a metallic border.

Although the PC's specification will remain the same as the Eee PC 900, the Eee PC 901 will replace the Asustek logo with an Eee logo at the bottom of the display and on the top of the lid, while the Linux version of the Eee PC 901 will have more software applications added to it.

View Full Article: DigiTimes

A time limited evaluation VHD containing Windows SharePoint Services and Visual Studio 2005 for use with Virtual PC or Virtual Server.

Download all parts and run the EXE. This will uncompress the Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) and the Viirtual PC and Virtual Server configuration files. Once you have the VHD unpacked you can start it in Virtual PC by double clicking the file WSS-V7.vmc or you can import the file WSS-R2.vmc into Virtual Server

Download: Windows SharePoint Services Developer Evaluation VPC Image