KezNews.com
DownloadsOther NewsForumBlogsWallpapersJokewareSearch

News letter:


Enter Your E-mail:


Search in KezNews.com:







Gates still has a long to-do list

For years, the Microsoft chairman has been a fiery advocate, inside the company and out, for the notion that computers should be controlled, not just by mouse and keyboard, but also by more natural means, such as voice, touch and digital ink.
microsoft - comments - 19.10.2007

After 5 long years Vista RTM's Now what?

After 5 long years Vista RTM's Now what?
windows - comments - 9.11.2006

Microsoft-Novell: What a long, strange year its been

In whats been a controversial (to say the least) partnership, the Microsoft-Novell technology partnership and patent-protection arrangement has reached its one-year anniversary.
microsoft - comments - 8.11.2007

How long will Microsoft support XP and Vista?

In the Talkback section to another post, a reader asks a question about when Microsoft plans to drop support for Windows Vista. I hear variations on this one all the time, so I figured its worth covering here.
windows - comments - 22.9.2008

Forget Vista. Long live Longhorn client!

Should old, abandonned operating systems just fade away? Or is there some way to breathe new life into them without running afoul of the copyright police?
windows - comments - 27.10.2006

Microsoft's MSN Search restored after hours-long outage

Microsoft Corp.'s MSN search engine stopped working for about four hours Thursday.

Microsoft spokesman Justin Osmer said in an e-mail that the company was still trying to determine what went wrong.
microsoft - comments - 7.4.2006

DreamScene RTM dated July 19, Microsoft: what took so long?

As reported by a bunch of shops, Duke Nukem Forever Dreamscene was finally delivered to consumers who shelled out mega bucks for the ultimate operating system offered by Microsoft.
microsoft - comments - 26.9.2007

Microsoft runs out of Windows Vista Keys

Apparently, Microsoft today ran out of product keys for Release Candidate 1 version of its upcoming Windows Vista operating system.

The following message was posted on Windows Vista's Connect website:

"9-5-06 - We are currently out of additional keys for package 5342 and Up Ultimate. We will have more keys available for download within 72 hours. Please do NOT send mail to MCHelp or LHBeta regarding this issue."



jcxp.net - 08.09.2006

PINNED: Vista Build 5342 Released!

We have good news to report (when don't we?) Windows Vista Build 5342 has just been released to both testers and MSDN subscribers.

The Download is now available vis-?-vis Microsoft Connect under the downloads page. Both X86 and X64 versions are available.

It is not yet known what the new featues in this build are or if it is the official Beta 2, however we will be updating this article with more information as soon as it is released.

Keep an eye out on this article, as it will be updated


jcxp.net - 25.03.2006

Can Dell Make Money Selling AMD PCs?

PERSPECTIVE With yesterday's rollout of the long-awaited AMD-based Dimension E521 desktop line, Dell may very well have made available one of the best-performing value-class systems under $1,000. But with the company facing a number of hurdles, how long can it afford to keep margins so low?..
betanews.com - 13.09.2006

Symantec buys AppStream, but what took so long?

Yesterday, Symantec announced its acquisition of application streaming specialist AppStream, one full year after buying AppStream's long-time partner, application virtualization vendor Altiris. So what kept AppStream waiting?..
betanews.com - 11.04.2008

Cablevision rolls out muni Wi-Fi in Long Island, NY

New York triple-play telecommunications provider Cablevision announced that it has completed the initial phase of its municipal Wi-Fi coverage for the Nassau and Suffolk county areas in Long Island...
betanews.com - 05.09.2008

PINNED: Windows Vista Build 5365 Released!

Updated Sat. April 22nd 7:48 GMT

It's been a long journey for testers this past 2 weeks, with rumours coming out everyday about different dates of when the build would be released all of which were eventually proven to be fake. Although this time, it's not fake at all, Windows vista build 5365 has now been released on Microsoft Connect for testers.

The build is marked as 5365.winmain_idx05.060419-1800 is expected to have several updates. Many that have been confirmed include changes to the UAP (User Account Protection) within Vista, also noted are new Gadgets and new Visual content such as wallpapers and Display pictures.

The build is available for both 32 and 64 bit processors, The beta program managers are encouraging all 64 bit users to upgrade to this new build due to better compatibility. Downloading this beta might be somewhat of a nightmare for Dial-Up or light DSL users, the total file size for this build is marked just over 3GB at 3,098MB. For activation, your current 5342 keys will do just fine. No new keys have been released and we are being told to use our current keys.

We cannot release any information on other new features as of yet as we have yet to install this new build however it is currently downloading. On that note, the Connect servers seem to be running very well and downloads are stable.

More to come...


jcxp.net - 22.04.2006

Windows 7: Measuring the "superbar"

One of the new things that anyone would notice immediately in Windows 7 is the new Taskbar. Microsoft internally calls it 'Superbar'. The Windows Taskbar has come a long way since Windows 95 was released. With the help of the Taskbar, it becomes easier to see what are the programs currently running, switching between applications and also to access your favorites using the Quick Launch. Image Courtesy: Windows 7 Blog For many, Windows 7's Superbar looks bigger than the Windows Vista's Taskbar. Long Zheng has taken steps to prove that, after all the Superbar is not that big. Long has found that the Windows Start button is actually shrunk by about 8 pixels.

Read full story.....
neowin.net - 05.01.2009

Star Wars MMORPG announced, future console version eyed

BioWare and LucasArts today officially announced the long-rumored story-based MMORPG for PC called Star Wars: The Old Republic . It was not long before an EA exec began talk of creating a console version...
betanews.com - 23.10.2008

Microsoft Research "Group Shot" Available

If you watched Bill Gates' keynote at CES yesterday, you might remember an impressive demonstration of a feature, included in Windows Vista's Photo Gallery, which let you take the best part of two photos to make a new one that has the better parts of each photo.

Although Microsoft presented this during the Vista part of the keynote and clearly marketed it as a Vista feature, it appears that it has been developed for Windows XP as well and that it is currently available on Microsoft Research's website. The file is only a mere 1.3MB, so try it out if you found the presentation interesting!


jcxp.net - 08.01.2007

XQuery Database Language for XML Achieves 1.0 Status

After its inception among members of the World-Wide Web Consortium as early as September 1999, their proposed crown jewel of the XML toolkit had been scheduled for formal adoption five years ago. Now, at long last, the W3C has formally adopted version 1.0 of XQuery, an XML-oriented query language that, a very long time ago now, seemed poised to change the history of Web applications...
betanews.com - 24.01.2007

AOL Top Web Site Under New Ranking

Nielsen/NetRatings plans to drop its old methods of counting pageviews to gauge Web site popularity, instead opting for a system where it would measure how long a user stays on a site.

With the changing scope of Web content, the old methods are quickly becoming less relevant. More important to advertisers and investors may be how long a user spends on a site, Nielsen seems to believe.

Technologies like AJAX and other dynamic page generation techniques lessen the need for a page to be refreshed, thus decreasing the number of recorded pageviews. Multimedia also carries the same effect.

Nielsen/NetRatings will begin reporting total sessions and total time spent on a site in order to figure out site popularity. From this, an advertiser could see how long a site is able to hold onto its users...
winbeta.org - 10.07.2007

Some Blu-ray BD+ Equipped Discs Now Duplicable, But For How Long?

A mere five months after the initial specification for the long-awaited BD+ copy protection system for Blu-ray Disc was formally released, the manufacturers of the media disc backup utility AnyDVD HD released a beta that has apparently been proven capable of copying BDs equipped with BD+ protection...
betanews.com - 09.11.2007

Pre release, Pre review and preview roundup

In case you've been living under a rock for the last few months, one of the most anticipated phone launches of the year is happening this Saturday. On June 6, the Palm Pre will be available, exclusively on the Sprint network in the United States. It'll cost $199.99 with a two-year agreement. The Pre has been a long, long, long time coming for Palm. The current Palm OS (also known as Garnet OS) was first released in 1996 and while it has been upgraded and modified over the years, it has been left in the dust by the likes of the iPhone, Android, Blackberry and even Windows Mobile operating systems.

Read full story.....
neowin.net - 04.06.2009

Jajah provides shortcut numbers for long-distance calls

Internet telephony service provider Jajah introduced a service Monday that bypasses some operators' high long-distance and international charges by providing subscribers with a unique local number for each of their contacts that they can dial from fixed-line or mobile phones.



Jajah will also extend some of the "free" calls plans it offers users of its PC-based VOIP service to subscribers of the new service, a spokesman for the company said Monday.



However, the so-called free calls will only be free to customers who are not charged by their regular telephone provider for carrying local calls. While that may be the case in the U.S., European telephone subscribers pay for most of their local calls from fixed lines -- while calls from mobiles are typically charged at the same rate whether the call is local or long distance.




winbeta.org - 19.11.2007

MacBook Air Battery Issues Frustrate Users

It seems new MacBook Air owners, myself included, are experiencing strange behavior with the battery in the new MBA.

While the expected usage of 3 - 5 hours is holding true, the time to charge the battery can be as long a 9 hours in some cases. While the cause of this strangely long charge time is for the moment unknown, it is the apparent randomness in the time taken to charge the battery that seems to be causing the most confusion.

For example, running the MBA down to within a few % of 0 and plugging in the charger one can get an estimated time to charge from anywhere between 3.5 - 9 hours. There seems no apparent cause for these extra long times, but given that the next charge takes only about 1/2 the time of the last, one can only suspect that not all is well in the MBA world.


Read full story.....
neowin.net - 11.02.2008

Microsoft shuts down book search

Microsoft plans to shutter its book-scanning operation next week, the company said on Friday.



It will shut down the Live Search Books and Live Search Academic Web sites and stop scanning library and copyright books, Satya Nadella, senior vice president of search, portal and advertising
for Microsoft, wrote in a blog post .



Microsoft appears to have decided that it doesn't want to be in the business of creating digital content, instead hoping that
others will take on that task. The company will give its scanning equipment to its library and digitization partners and encourage
them to continue to scan books. "Based on our experience, we foresee that the best way for a search engine to make book content
available will be by crawling content repositories created by book publishers and libraries," Nadella wrote.




winbeta.org - 24.05.2008

Microsoft give MVP Award to Adware Pusher

A guy named paperghost over at Vital Security has written a scathing editorial on Patchous recent MVP award status. I'd like to point out that the opinion expressed herein is not that of Neowin, so don't shoot the messenger! -no pun intended.

If you'd created a program that installed Adware, would you be surprised if you were then awarded an MVP Award from Microsoft?

Well, step right up Patchou AKA Cyril Paciullo, creator of Messenger Plus! I first heard about this while stopping over at his website, and was surprised to find him lurking in the Windows Live Developer section on the MVP site. That's him, down at the bottom of the page.

For anyone who doesn't know about the controversy surrounding this program, its an add-on for Windows Messenger / Live / whatever they're calling it this week. Problem is, it comes bundled with LOP, a major source of annoyance and anger for web-users since, oh, ages ago. Yeah, it now gives you an improved option as to whether you want to install it or not - but that's hardly the point, is it? There's a long history here of potentially deceptive installs and the standard, yawntacular MsgPlus apologist line of "It doesn't do it anymore, so you have to let him off the hook, lol" is the kind of (amazingly poor) thinking that companies such as Direct Revenue are using to avoid legal smackdowns.


neowin.net - 09.10.2006

The double-decker Windows taskbar

Long Zheng: To the untrained eye, Ammunitions Longhorn PC concepts last week might look nothing more than standard industrial design renders. But if you stared at it long enough as I did, youd notice the Windows Longhorn screenshot on the monitor shows a taskbar is nothing like anything youve seen before. Since theres no official name for it, Ive dubbed it the double-decker taskbar.



Ive finally been able to track down the screenshot in its original form...




winbeta.org - 05.12.2007

Microsoft's 'big bang' could be its last

When Microsoft releases its SQL Server 2005 database on Nov. 7, it will have been five years since the last version debuted. If Windows Vista arrives as scheduled next fall, it too will follow its predecessor by five years.

Tha t's a pretty long time to make customers wait for a new release. Too long, concedes Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

"We just can't make our customers wait three or four years for the things which should have been on more interim cycles," he said at last week's Gartner Symposium/IT Expo in Orlando.

Although many Microsoft products have grown long in the tooth, the company is headed into a cycle that will see a flurry of big releases over the next year and a half. In addition to the new SQL Server, Microsoft is launching a revamp of its Visual Studio developer tools on Nov. 7. Next year will bring new major releases for both of Microsoft's core franchises: Office and Windows...
winbeta.org - 28.10.2005

Long-life Flash memory offers 100 million rewrites

Japanese scientists have developed a new form of Flash memory that could alleviate all our fears about just how long our Flash memory will last. These new memory chips, called ferroelectric Nand Flash (FNF), can be written up to 100 million times, compared to todays Flash memory that is thought to be limited to around 500,000 rewrites.



FNF has additional benefits as well. Current Flash memory is only now being produced at 30 nanometres, but FNF will work at 10 nanometres. It also uses significantly less power with todays Flash memory requiring 20 volts for rewriting, FNF needs just 6 volts.




winbeta.org - 15.07.2008