As you know, every year VMware holds its VMworld show, and for the past few Microsoft has crashed the party with a few announcements. This year, Microsoft unveiled Hyper-V Server 2008 R2, a far more enterprise-worthy product than its departmental-oriented predecessor.
Besides Live Migration, which lets a VM easily move from a failing server to one that actually works, R2 has far more capacity. The new tool can address a full terabyte of RAM (I'd like to see the bill for that!) and eight processors, which themselves can be multicore, as I understand it.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/02/20091 comments
Directions on Microsoft is one of my favorite research firms. In fact, I don't trust many firms or analysts, but Directions on Microsoft I do trust. Nearly all (or maybe all) of its analysts are ex-Microsoft executives.
Analyst Michael Cherry is particularly smart and particularly opinionated. So when Mr. Cherry argues that Windows 7 is a great fit for businesses, I believe him. Cherry's main point is that Windows 7 is a huge improvement over XP and solves the most glaring Vista problems.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 09/02/20093 comments
The Associated Press is a venerable news institution that has brought us solid reporting for 163 years. AP syndicates articles, which means newspapers around the world pay to run them, and that money pays for more reporting and AP's staff of over 4,000 employees. It was a nice little virtuous circle -- at least, until Google and the other aggregators came along and began killing off AP's biggest newspaper clients.
While Google has an AP licensing deal, it shows little interest in paying other news organizations, nor does Google have any interest in developing stories on its own. Instead, it wants to pull those stories into Google News and sell its own ads against them. It's kind of like me selling beer out of your refrigerator.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/31/200910 comments
So you think your Web e-mail account is safe? Wrong. An increasing number of users, including some Redmond Report readers, are reporting that hackers are breaking into their accounts and using them to mail out worm-laden messages -- to their contacts! Most hackers use brute-force methods to crack your password, and then they're off and running.
Two Redmond Report readers reported such attacks. In one case, Microsoft was very responsive. The other got ignored like Bill Gates at a high school dance.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/31/20092 comments
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 (SCVMM 2008 R2) evaluation version -- whew, what a mouthful -- arrived this week.
Rambling name notwithstanding, it must work fairly well because System Center products remain a bright spot in Microsoft's recently slumping financials. IT pros can give SCVMM 2008 R2 a spin for 180 days and see if they want to buy it when the complete product rolls out in October. The new R2 can even manage virtual machines running on VMware vSphere 4.0 -- imagine that.
Posted by Kurt Mackie on 08/28/20091 comments
Two of Microsoft's PC manufacturing partners are supporting Redmond's appeal of a final judgment against it in a patent dispute with Toronto-based i4i LP.
Dell and HP both filed amicus curiae documents with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Monday. Their briefs support Microsoft's appeal in the case which, as Doug covered last week, involves i4i's "custom XML" technology, found to be used with Microsoft Word's .XML, .DOCX and .DOCM document formats. Microsoft will have to stop selling copies of Word that use the technology by Oct. 10.
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Posted by Kurt Mackie on 08/28/200911 comments
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) kicked off a public awareness campaign on Wednesday called "Windows 7 Sins," which, as you can probably guess from the name, lists seven deadly sins of Microsoft, honing in on its latest Windows 7 OS. (Incidentally, you can check out this feature in our latest issue that covers the seven things Windows 7 did get right.)
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Posted by Kurt Mackie on 08/26/200914 comments
Microsoft delivered IE 8 to IT shops using Windows Server Update Services yesterday. Of course, you didn't ask for it. It just arrived, like a security update.
Some IT shops may still be using IE 6, but Microsoft doesn't really encourage it. IE 6 isn't standards-based like IE 8, nor does it provide the same level of security. For those still using IE 7, Microsoft tried to ease the transition by adding a Compatibility View function in the browser that switches from IE 8 to IE 7 rendering.
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Posted by Kurt Mackie on 08/26/20094 comments
You may have heard that Microsoft got into some legal trouble recently because of the XML-based file format in Word. Tony writes in defense of .DOCX and of Office 2007 in general:
It is not like MS (or everybody else) hasn't tweaked file formats in the past! It's called advancing the technology, and if it didn't happen, we might as well be running Word version 2 in a runtime version of Windows 2 (yes, I do have lots of gray hair). The file size improvements are good, but the truly cool improvements will show themselves over the next few years -- Office docs getting easier to integrate into other packages, far more intelligent drag-and-drops, that sort of thing.
It's about time Microsoft tried something new -- hence the ribbon. I think Office 2007 is innovative, and MS usually gets bagged for not being that.
-Tony
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/26/20090 comments
Last Friday, Doug wrote about Microsoft's plan to "de-anonymize" the Internet to unmask hackers. Richard likes the plan, but for a different reason:
Totally agree with you. It's all too easy to say whatever you feel like when you can hide. If you are bold enough to criticize, put your name after it.
-Richard
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/24/20090 comments
It's official. Microsoft will fight a court order denying the sale of Word in the U.S. The approach is two-pronged. First up is a hoped-for emergency stay, which will be heard Sept. 23, a solid month before the ban is to go into effect. At the same time, Redmond is seeking a full appeal.
My guess is that this will still be settled out of court. Meanwhile, new patent suits appear to be cropping up, as noted by InformationWeek.
Posted by Doug Barney on 08/24/20090 comments
I was driving on Cape Cod this weekend when I chanced across an honest-to-goodness hippy -- Jimi Hendrix shirt, worn-out pants, long tangled hair and ratty beard. But it wasn't, in fact, an honest-to-goodness hippy, as this dude was around 20 dressed just like me back in 1974. Ah, but what's old is new again, in fashion, music and even hacker techniques.
Case in point: A bunch of low-life hacker losers attacked sites in South Korea and the U.S. last month with moderate success. These guys (or gals) aren't the brightest hackers the world has ever seen; they simply stole old techniques and code and flung it at unpatched computers to see what would stick. Unfortunately, some of it did.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 08/24/20090 comments