Microsoft looks set to make Vista Service Pack 1 available this week.
The company said last month that it would release SP1 in mid-March, giving it time to deal with a series of driver bugs discovered in the beta testing phase.
Now, it seems retailers are preparing for the full launch this week. A search on Amazon reveals that pre-packaged retail versions of Vista with SP1 will be released on 19 March.
Curiously, Amazon says the Vista SP1 products won’t be released until 4 April, suggesting that either the British arm of the web retail giant has failed to update its release dates or that British buyers may be in for a longer wait for the full retail versions to go on sale.
However, rival British retailer Dabs says that Vista SP1 boxes will be ready for delivery for within 3-5 days.
Rumours also suggest that Vista owners will be able to download the Service Pack from Tuesday, giving them a narrow headstart over retail buyers.
More than 10,000 web pages have been booby trapped with malware in one of the largest attacks of its kind to date.
Compromised web pages include travel sites, government websites, and hobbyist sites that have been modified with JavaScript code that silently redirects visitors to a site in China under the control of hackers.
Miscreants likely reprogrammed the web pages after scanning the net for insecure servers.
The malware cocktail attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in Windows, RealPlayer, and other applications to break into insecure PCs, according to an analysis by net security firm McAfee.
Components of the malware attempt to steal passwords to online games while others leave a back door that allows the installation of additional malicious programs.
McAfee Avert Labs first spotted this attack on Wednesday, 12 March. Of the 10,000 pages that were compromised, a number have already been cleaned up.
A single organisation or small group is likely behind this attack, as the malicious code on all these pages is served up from the same server in China.
Craig Schmugar, threat researcher at McAfee Avert Labs, said the attack illustrated that the conventional wisdom that surfers are safe providing they stick to trusted sites (and away from warez and porn) no longer holds true.
“Often you hear warnings about not going to untrusted sites,” said Schmugar. “That is good advice, but it is not enough. Even sites you know can become compromised. You went to a place before that you trust, but that trust was violated through a vulnerability that was exploited.”
Source – The Register
Microsoft has submitted an early version of Windows 7 to the US government, sparking speculation that the successor to Vista may arrive sooner rather than later.
According to court filings, Microsoft has handed over a test version of the next-generation operating system to a technical committee that is overseeing Microsoft’s compliance with its antitrust settlement.
“The TC [technical committee] has begun to review Windows 7 itself. Microsoft recently supplied the TC with a build of Windows 7, and is discussing TC testing going forward,” the report states. “The TC will conduct middleware-related tests on future builds of Windows 7.”
Microsoft has said very little publicly about either the contents or the release date of Windows 7. The new operating system was initially expected to arrive next year, although recent reports have suggested that launch date could be pushed back to 2010 or even 2011.
The fact that the US government has (presumably) a working version of the software indicates that Microsoft might be looking at next year after all. Given the current lack of enthusiasm for Windows Vista, Microsoft will certainly be keen to get Windows 7 into the market as soon as possible, although it certainly can’t afford another lacklustre release.
A “wishlist” of Windows 7 features was leaked last year, giving a few potential clues to features that could arrive in the new operating system, including a virtual desktop and a tabbed Windows Explorer.
Source – PC Pro
The MIT Review has revealed its list of the ten emerging technologies which it believes are likely to make the biggest difference to the way we live.
Among the more interesting innovations is a wireless power technology that could allow devices such as mobile phones and MP3 players to recharge automatically, simply by coming within range of a wireless power source.
Another of the standout technologies are “probabilistic chips”. The premise runs that for video and audio applications, processors are not being asked to return a correct answer, thus the chip doesn’t have to be 100% accurate. This could allow the voltage to be lowered, leading to significant power savings.
Among the other innovations are transistors made of grapheme, a carbon material one atom thick, which apparently has amazing conductive properties and could replace silicon paving the way for faster and smaller electrical devices.
Another enterprising group has developed tiny radios built from single nanotubes, which could lead the way to other nano-technology including medical devices capable of being injected into the bloodstream to deliver drugs directly to targeted organs.
Source – PC Pro
Every industry has a story, and VoIP’s story circa 2008 is about a technology with growing business adoption, modest consumer success and an increasing dominance of the U.S. residential market by cable providers.
What follows are a few statistical highlights of where VoIP stands in these three areas today.
Enterprise VoIP
In 2005, the big news in VoIP was that U.S. revenues had finally broken the $1 billion mark, raising the question, “Is VoIP finally here?” But in 2007, the big news was that just over $1 billion in traditional PSTN (public switched telephone network) PBXes were sold, for what Infonetics Research speculated might be the last time ever. At least for enterprise deployments, the question about VoIP has become, “Is PSTN still around?”
Of course, IP PBX systems have been stealing PSTN’s market share for some time, but in 2007, hybrid IP PBX systems made up two-thirds of all lines shipped, while pure IP systems alone accounted for 18 percent. In addition, MarketResearch.com reported that 50 percent of global telecom traffic is now handled over IP, and it predicted this figure would increase to 75 percent “in a few years’ time.”
These figures jibe nicely with Garrett Smith’s anecdotal report that sales of enterprise VoIP systems are getting both larger and easier to close — roughly 20 times the rate of a year ago.
Consumer VoIP
However, consumer VoIP adoption remains modest worldwide — Infonetics reported just under 80 million VoIP subscribers worldwide in 2007, with the strongest adoption rates in the Asia Pacific region. That said, MarketResearch.com predicted that total VoIP subscribers would rise to 135 million in 2011, and London-based research firm Disruptive Analysis Ltd. predicted a mobile-VoIP market that will rise from today’s essentially zero users to 250 million users by 2012. Disruptive Analysis reasoned that mobile providers are unlikely to keep running separate voice and IP networks in parallel and will choose IP by default.
In December 2007, German Internet-traffic-management-systems provider Ipoque sampled three petabytes of anonymous data from Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe. It estimated that while VoIP makes up just one percent of all Internet traffic, it is used by 30 percent of Internet users, and Skype Ltd. accounts for 95 percent of all VoIP traffic.
The U.S. VoIP Market
Back in the U.S., Ike Elliott assembled an interesting table ranking the top six VoIP providers by both revenue and subscribers. Four of the six are cable companies (CableVision, Charter Communications, Comcast and Time Warner Cable Inc.) while two are pure VoIP providers (Skype and Vonage Holdings Corp.).
Vonage and Skype are in third and fifth place respectively, with approximately 23 percent of revenue and 27 percent of subscribers in a market Elliott estimates at $1.44 billion in revenues. (He had to estimate how much revenue each subscriber represents to Skype, settling on $35.70 per month.) Unfortunately for these two, Elliott reports, the cable companies’ VoIP-subscription rates are accelerating while those of the pure plays are slowing. Worse still, cable has already captured 73 percent of the U.S. market for residential VoIP.
This story may be best told by this TeleGeography graphic, which shows Time Warner’s VoIP subscriber base pursuing and then surpassing Vonage’s in Q207. The four largest U.S. VoIP providers now have a total of 12 million customers, broken down as follows: Comcast, 4 million; Time Warner, 3 million; Vonage, 2.6 million; and Cox Communications Inc., 2.4 million.
However, Skype still beats all comers in terms of ease of use, as measured in a “PC Magazine” reader-satisfaction survey of whose customers needed tech support most frequently. For example, while a whopping 34 percent of Charter and AT&T Inc.’s CallVantage customers needed tech support, just 6 percent of Skype users needed a hand with their PC-to-PC calls.
This didn’t prevent Wired from running its own head-to-head test of seven VoIP services in October 2007, with the winner being the relatively unknown Lingo Inc., which won plaudits for price, ease of use and call clarity.
Lingo’s case highlights the fact that VoIP remains a fiercely competitive market that currently offers low payoffs thanks to its low barriers to entry and the legacy telephone companies’ strength. A pure VoIP provider like Jaxtr Inc. can enter the market and claim 10 million subscribers in relatively short order — but it still has zero revenue. Jaxtr is counting on its Café Jaxtr product to attract advertising dollars — but on a recent morning the sole display ad on Café Jaxtr’s homepage was for Qwest Communications International Inc.’s long-distance phone service.
