Posts Tagged ‘microsoft’

Google intros Exchange migration tool for small businesses

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Google is continuing its quiet war on Microsoft Office by making it easier for users to switch from Exchange to Google Apps for e-mail. The company has launched a new server-side tool called Google Apps Migration for Microsoft® Exchange , which not only migrates your company e-mail, but also moves your calendar and contact info into the cloud. According to Google’s Enterprise Blog , the migration is only four steps long and works quickly to bring in the information that you choose. There’s even the option to import the data in phases, which makes life easier if there’s too much to bring in at any one time. The tool works with both hosted and on-premise Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 and is free to those who already subscribe to Google Apps Premier and Education edition. The announcement comes less than two weeks after Google announced its acquisition of DocVerse , a company that allowed Microsoft Office users to edit their documents collaboratively on the Web. Both companies said that they had a “shared vision” for enabling Office users to edit documents online, and Google is undoubtedly planning to integrate DocVerse’s features into Google Docs. With its Exchange migration tool and the acquisition of DocVerse, Google is definitely treading on Microsoft’s territory and trying to make it even harder for small businesses to resist “going Google.” Read the comments on this post

After Google dustup, should the US ban Chinese computers?

// March 17th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Should the Google/China spat over censorship start a trade war that puts an end to Chinese-made computers? One international trade lawyer argues that it should: “If China shuts out our Internet companies, we need to shut out their hardware that the Internet runs on.” The sentiment comes from Gil Kaplan, a former Commerce Department official who is now in private practice . Writing Tuesday at The Huffington Post , Kaplan argued that free trade deals are all about reciprocity—and that the US has opened its markets while China has not. Read the comments on this post

Unsurprisingly, IE9 won’t be supported on an obsolete OS

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch all but confirmed today that the next version of Microsoft’s Web browser, Internet Explorer 9 , will not be supported on Windows XP. Hachamovitch stopped short of explicitly saying that XP would not be supported, but said that building a “modern browser” required a “modern operating system.” IE9 will be heavily dependent on hardware acceleration, courtesy of its use of Direct2D and DirectWrite; neither API is available on Windows XP. That IE9 would use these features has been known since last year’s PDC, and so the lack of XP support should come as a surprise to few. Nonetheless, there are sure to be some who will gripe that the newest browser (not likely to hit until next year at the earliest) won’t be available for a decade-old operating system. Read the comments on this post

Windows Phone 7 Series in the Enterprise: not all good news

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Microsoft has been quite explicit on the matter: Windows Phone 7 Series is being designed first and foremost for the consumer market. The result is the emphasis on a strong, consistent, effective user interface, possibly at the expense of functionality; Microsoft wants to have this thing out in time for the “holiday season” this year, so there’s a limited window for further development, at least for the initial release. That said, the phone does have features aimed at the enterprise market. Obviously, there’s Exchange support, with ActiveSync, providing push mail, address book sync, and all those features that we know and love. In common with Outlook 2010, Windows Phone 7 Series also seems to support multiple Exchange servers concurrently. I say “seems” because it didn’t quite work when we tried, but that seemed to be due to a bad password rather than any fundamental flaw—the phone was happy to accept the configuration and created two distinct Outlook Tiles on the Start page, so it looked like it was doing the right thing. Read the comments on this post

Intel goes to Gulftown, launches 6-core Xeons

// March 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Intel has launched its next-generation Xeon 5600 line, the 32nm “Westmere-EP.” The new lineup brings more cores, more threads, Turbo Boost, and more instructions, all in the same socket format and thermal/power envelope as the older Xeon 5500 line. At the top end of the 5600 family is the six-core, 3.33GHz X5680, and at the bottom end is the quad-core, 2.40GHz E5620. All of the parts in the 5600 range are hyperthreaded, have 12MB of cache, and support Intel Turbo Boost, the AES new instructions (AES-NI), and Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). Let’s take each of these features in turn. Read the comments on this post

Microsoft avoids being lost in translation with new framework

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The Microsoft Translator team has given up and concluded that “no matter how many machines you throw at translation, it is still impossible to get the correct, error-free, contextually accurate translation every time.” Microsoft’s solution to this problem is the Collaborative Translations Framework, which supposedly combines the scale and speed of automatic machine translation with the accuracy and context awareness of human translation. At MIX 2010, Microsoft Translator API version 2 was announced. In addition to the collaborative features, version 2 includes a batch interface to translate large amounts of data, support for communicating with the service securely via SSL, and a “Translate-and-Speak” feature (text-to-speech functionality). The translation APIs are available at no cost to developers and partners in SOAP , HTTP , and AJAX flavors so that developers can choose the one that best fits their requirements. All you need to get started is a Bing Developer AppID. Since the Microsoft Translator team works closely on Bing, the Translate-and-Speak functionality will be available on the Bing Translator user site after you hit translate (you should notice a speaker icon that you can click on to hear your translation). Currently, this feature is only available in seven of the 30 languages Bing supports: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian. The Microsoft Translator widget, released just under a year ago , offers real-time, in-place translations on your website into the languages your users choose. Built on top of the new translation API, version 2 of the translator widget also adds collaborative features that help tailor the translations of a website. This means website owners can not only offer their site in multiple languages, but they can also ask their community or professional translators to improve those translations of their site’s content. Each MIX10 attendee received an exclusive invite code in their attendee bags to enable Collaborative Translations features in their widget. If you are not attending MIX, you can add yourself to the Collaborative Translations feature invite list after you get the widget. Microsoft still plans on polishing the translation widget, toolbar, and alternatives UI as well as analytics for site and app owners based on user feedback. There is also more customizability on the way, such as limiting the number of languages site owners can show as part of the widget. In addition, Microsoft is working on making the Silverlight translator control available as part of the Silverlight toolkit release that will ship when Silverlight 4 goes final. All this new functionality is still considered prerelease, so you’ll want to check out the known issues list before diving in. You can submit bugs and suggestions on the MSDN forums or via mtcont@microsoft.com . Read the comments on this post

Microsoft shows off Windows Phone 7 Series dev tools at MIX10

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

The big theme at Microsoft’s MIX10 developer conference today was developing for Windows Phone 7 Series, and key to this was the new Silverlight 4. For the first time, Microsoft showed off third-party applications for the forthcoming phone platform, and talked about how third-party applications integrate with the platform. Silverlight is becoming increasingly widely available for the browser, with Microsoft claiming 60 percent of all Internet devices now support it (up from 45 percent in October last year). The new version, available as a Release Candidate today with a final version next month, boasts new features to make it more useful for developing both in-browser and standalone applications, including support for microphones and webcams, printing, and the clipboard. Read the comments on this post

Controlling multiple qubits with hyper-entanglement

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Scientists are quickly putting the single-qubit system out of fashion with new setups that can simultaneously manipulate and read multiple qubits. An international collaboration recently completed an experiment involving the control of up to ten qubits at once, using hyper-entanglement and simple “cat states.” While the system doesn’t always read out perfectly, the approach could be further refined to produce better results. Because qubit behavior is based in probability, it is difficult to exert a lot of control over a qubit. This problem gets a bit more significant as each additional qubit is added to the system, which has limited the number we can entangle at once. To hold down uncertainty and increase control as they add more qubits, scientists are now experimenting with hyper-entanglement, or entangling qubits on multiple levels at once. To put that another way, instead of entangling 10 different quantum objects, the authors entangled two separate properties of five items. In this new experiment, scientists hyper-entangled sets of six, eight, and ten qubits in “cat states,” or an equal superposition of two states (named after Schrodinger’s cat, which occupied a superposition of the states “dead” or “alive”). The photons were entangled in two degrees of freedom: their polarization and their spatial modes. To get output from the photons once they were entangled, scientists used a special kind of interferometer that could gather information about one of the degrees of freedom without disturbing the other. When the photons were measured, the photons produced the desired state around 60 percent of the time, with anything greater than 50% considered to be good enough to indicate that the system works at all. The eight-qubit system gave the best results, at 77.6 percent. The greatest limit of the system, according to the authors, was the photon detection efficiency, which will need to be significantly improved before implementation would be practical. (Incidentally, the references to cat states start in the title—”Experimental demonstration of a hyper-entangled ten-qubit Schrödinger cat state”—and continue from there, with references to “ideal cat states” and “the hyper-entangled 2n-qubit cat state.” “Cat” even appears as a term in some equations. Nature Physics , 2010. DOI: 10.1038/NPHYS1603  ( About DOIs ). Read the comments on this post

40% of Blackberry users willing to trade in for an iPhone

// March 15th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

BlackBerry users may be ready to move on to other smartphone platforms, suggesting that RIM isn’t keeping up with consumer demand in its efforts to combat growing encroachment from the likes of iPhone and Android. In fact, two in five BlackBerry owners plan to swap their current device for an iPhone when it’s time to upgrade, according to market researcher firm Crowd Science. The iPhone has had a lasting effect on the smartphone market, changing the conception of what a smartphone should be almost overnight after the launch of the original iPhone in 2007. Despite RIM’s entrenchment among business users, however, the iPhone platform has grown at a faster rate than the BlackBerry over the last year. Perhaps the trend can be explained by Crowd Science’s findings that many are using their smartphones for both personal and business use. Nearly a third of iPhone owners use their device for strictly personal use, versus just 16 percent for BlackBerry users. Just one percent of iPhone owners use their device for business only—no surprise there—so two-thirds are using an iPhone for business and personal use. And, while the BlackBerry has a reputation as the best enterprise mobile device, a scant seven percent of BlackBerrys users dedicate the device to business use only. That leaves over three-quarters of BlackBerry owners using their device for dual purposes. The iPhone isn’t the only platform attracting the attention of BlackBerry users, though. Interest in Android-based devices has grown since the introduction of Google’s Nexus One , with 32 percent of BlackBerry users surveyed saying they would swap their current device for a Nexus One. “These results show that the restlessness of BlackBerry users with their current brand hasn’t just been driven by the allure of iPhone,” John Martin, CEO of Crowd Science, said in a statement. “Rather, BlackBerry as a brand just isn’t garnering the loyalty seen with other mobile operating systems.” About 90 percent of current iPhone and Android users plan to stick with their current platform for their next phone upgrade. Read the comments on this post

0-day exploits for IE flaw another reason to switch to IE 8

// March 11th, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech News

Microsoft confirmed on Tuesday a new flaw affecting version 6 and 7 of its Internet Explorer web browser that could allow remote code execution. The security advisory noted that targeted attacks using the flaw were already in the wild. This information was confirmed by McAfee , reporting that exploitation of the flaw was originating from the domain topix21century dot com over both HTTP and HTTPS. The drive-by attacks install a backdoor which connects to a command-and-control server. Analysis by Symantec reveals that the exploit works effectively on IE 6. IE 7 tended to crash instead, and IE 8 is, as stated in the Microsoft advisory, immune. The attack loads some malicious code, and then makes repeated changes to the HTML document eventually provoking execution of the malicious code. The best solution is to upgrade to IE 8, as one of the many improvements found in this browser also seals off the security hole. Failing that, enabling Data Execution Prevention in IE 7 should provide some level of mitigation, as the current exploits do not circumvent DEP (though they could probably be combined with DEP bypass techniques ). Removing access to the file iepeers.dll using either of the mechanisms described in Microsoft’s advisory prevents Internet Explorer from loading the flawed code, but may also break print and web folder functionality. Finally, disabling of scripting and ActiveX in the Internet and Local Intranet security zones should also provide protection against exploitation. Microsoft has still made no indication whether this flaw will receive an out-of-band update, but with exploits in the wild and documented analysis of the exploit, clearly this flaw is something that needs fixing, and soon. Read the comments on this post

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »


eXTReMe Tracker