If Steve Ballmer turns up dead this week, you can bet he was killed by those 7000 leap year babies.
As the international Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies continues to gripe about the 25-year-old leap year bug infesting Microsoft Excel, word has arrived that Microsoft Exchange doesn’t understand leap years either. On Friday – Leap Year Day 2008 – many Exchange installations went on the fritz because they expected March 1 instead of February 29.
With a blog post, the Microsoft Exchange team confirmed that anyone who restarted the Exchange “System Attendant” service on Friday was then unable to create or enable mailboxes. And the same problem may have hit anyone who spent Leap Year Day setting up a new Exchange server.
But there is a way to fix the problem. Now that Leap Year Day has passed, all you have to do is restart the System Attendant service. So, in the end, this isn’t quite as ridiculous as the Excel bug, which prevents the world’s most popular spreadsheet from realizing that 1900 is not a leap year. For 25 years, Microsoft let the bug stand, claiming that it made Excel compatible with Lotus 1-2-3, but it has now committing to fixing the same at some undisclosed point in the future.
In Steve Ballmer’s defense, he isn’t the only one who fails to understand leap years. Loyal Reg readers have also pointed out that the dreaded Leap Year Day bug hit Scala’s content management system and Bank of America’s online banking service.
When Mike Edwards made a deposit from the Bank of America website on Friday, it told him that his bank balance would be updated a month ago. In speaking to The Reg, he said that this didn’t exactly boost his confidence in Bank of America’s website:
Scala told us that it had already released a patch for its leap year bug, calling the problem “a non-issue”. But Bank of America did not return our request for comment. We’re guessing the Leap Year Babies got there first.
Source – The Register
Apple says it will introduce a series of business applications for the iPhone, as the company prepares to finally open the device up to third-party developers.
Speaking at a Goldman Sachs investment conference in the US, the company revealed it would introduce iPhone features aimed at businesses, potentially stepping up competition with RIM’s popular BlackBerry devices.
Apple gave no hint of what enterprise features would be unveiled, but many professional users have clamoured for BlackBerry-style push email.
“Apple has acknowledged that there has been great interest in the enterprise community for the iPhone,” says Tim Bajarin, principal analyst of Creative Strategies. “There’s no question it has great potential in enterprise given the right application.”
Apple will detail the software roadmap for the iPhone on 6 March at its Cupertino, California headquarters.
Opening up the phone to third-party developers should also bring more business features to the device. The company is expected to release its iPhone developers’ kit shortly, and analysts believe that this will give the device another timely boost.
“Apple has understood the importance of local applications and they are responding to that, and it will help them sell more iPhones,” says Bajarin. “It should release a plethora of creative applications and it will make the iPhone much more practical as a mobile applications tool.”
Sales on track
Apple also used the conference to affirm its iPhone sales goal for this year. Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, says he has “really good confidence” the company will hit its oft-stated goal of selling 10 million iPhones by the end of 2008.
Analysts have expressed concern in recent weeks over iPhone sales and the practice of “unlocking” them to run on non-preferred networks. Bernstein Research last month estimated that more than a quarter of iPhones were “unlocked”, putting pressure on Apple’s business model because it can’t collect a portion of carrier fees from those users.
Cracking down on unlocked phones could scare users away and cause Apple to miss its sales target for the device, whereas allowing them could erode profitability and make it tough to sign more carriers to similar revenue-sharing deals, Bernstein claimed.
Source – PC Pro
The European Commission has fined US computer giant Microsoft for defying sanctions imposed on it for anti-competitive behaviour.
Microsoft must now pay a record 899 million euros ($1.4bn; £680.9m) after it failed to comply with a 2004 ruling that it abused its position.
The ruling said that Microsoft was guilty of not providing key code to rival software makers.
EU regulators said the firm was the first to break an EU antitrust ruling.
The fines come on top of earlier fines of 280m euros imposed in July 2006, and of 497m euros n March 2004.
“Microsoft was the first company in 50 years of EU competition policy that the Commission has had to fine for failure to comply with an antitrust decision,” Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement.
An investigation concluded in 2004 that Microsoft was guilty of freezing out rivals in products such as media players, while unfairly unfairly linking its Explorer internet browser to its Windows operating system at the expense of rival servers.
The European Court of First Instance upheld this ruling last year, which ordered Microsoft to pay 497 million euros for abusing its dominant market position.
Last week, the firm announced that it would open up the technology of some of its leading software, including Windows, to make it easier to operate with rivals’ products.
“As we demonstrated last week with our new interoperability principles and specific actions to increase the openness of our products, we are focusing on steps that will improve things for the future,” Microsoft said.
But the firm is still being pursued by Brussels.
Earlier this month, the European Commission launched two new anti-competition investigations against Microsoft into similar issues.
Source – BBC
Redmond yesterday revealed plans for the next version of its Windows server operating system, with different flavours for small biz and mid-sized organisations.
Small Business Server 2008 (SBS), formally code-named “Cougar”, will be available in Standard and Premium editions and will cater for companies of 50 or fewer staff.
Microsoft said its standard SBS package will include one copy of Windows Server 2008, collaboration server – SharePoint Services 3.0, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows Live OneCare for Server. There will also be add-on tools for the software giant’s newly launched Office Live Small Business online service.
The premium edition will have all of the above plus an extra copy of Windows Server 2008 for a separate seat, as well as a standard edition of SQL Server 2008.
Redmond’s other product has been dubbed Essential Business Server (EBS) 2008, which was previously code-named “Centro”. It will be targeted at mid-sized firms with up to 250 computers, and will also be availble in either standard or premium versions.
EBS standard edition will carry three copies of Windows Server 2008, two of which will be set up specifically to handle Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) on either a domain controller or mail server. The remaining copy will be loaded with System Center Essentials, which runs as the admin unit.
It will also be bundled with Exchange Server 2007 and Forefront. On the premium edition, Redmond has added SQL Server 2008.
Microsoft gave a fuzzy, ball-park release date of the second half of this year for both products, which will be demoed at the firm’s “Heroes Happen Here” launch event on 27 February in Los Angeles.
Redmond admitted last month that SQL Server 2008 won’t hit manufacturing until the third quarter at the earliest.
Source – PC Pro
Windows Server 2008, due for its official launch today, is a major upgrade for Microsoft’s server platform, the first for around five years. Requiring a graphical user interface (GUI) on a server operating system always seemed odd, even back in 1993 when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1.
It has taken Microsoft until now to begin fixing the problem. Server 2008 comes with an installation option called Server Core, and although it is not quite GUI-free (Notepad and Regedit still run), it is command-line driven and lacks most of the baggage that previously came as standard. The snag with Server Core is that it is incomplete.
For example, you can install Microsoft’s web server, Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0, but you cannot install ASP.NET, PowerShell scripting, or SQL Server. PHP, on the other hand runs fine on Server Core. More about that in a moment.
To be precise, Microsoft has organized the capabilities of Windows Server into optional roles and features. There are 18 roles and 35 features available in our installation of Server 2008 Datacenter Edition. However, Server Core only supports eight roles, being essentially file and print, Active Directory and domain services, web server, and virtualization. There is also no way to upgrade a Server Core install to have full features, so it is only useful if you are sure from the outset what the box will need to do.
Another sign of progress in separating Server 2008 from its desktop cousin Windows Vista is that “Desktop Experience” components like Windows Media Player and Desktop Themes are bundled into an optional feature that presumably few will install. This may be why Server 2008 feels snappier than Vista on the same hardware, even though both share the same core code.
Why can you not start with Server Core and build it up to the complete edition? “That’s a beautiful design goal and our long-term ambition,” according to Microsoft product manager Gareth Hall.
The problem is that Server 2008 is only partially componentized. It is not yet quite what it should be but Server Core is progress, being more lightweight and manageable. According to Microsoft, Server Core is preferable to a full install in scenarios where it will work, such as for Active Directory or virtualization. IIS has a powerful command-line tool called AppCmd that is ideal for Server Core. There are also numerous options for remote management, including Remote Desktop to the command line, Microsoft Management Console (MMC) snap-ins, Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) scripts, and Windows Remote Shell.
Unfortunately for developers looking for an application server, Server Core is too limited.
That leads us on to IIS 7.0, a major upgrade. Like the open-source Apache web server, it is modular, so that you can install only those parts that are needed, and individual modules can in principle be replaced with custom versions. In addition, IIS 7.0 is more deeply integrated with .NET. In both IIS 6.0 and IIS 7.0, applications are isolated from one another through application pools, each of which can contain one or more applications.
IIS 7.0 has a new integrated application pool, which means the web server calls both native and managed modules in a single integrated pipeline. This is more efficient, and means that ASP.NET authentication applies to all content types, not just ASP.NET pages.
In previous versions, this was a huge annoyance and potential security hole. Developers had to jump through hoops to accomplish what should be simple tasks like protecting a ZIP file from unauthorized download, or use Windows authentication which is not always practical. The new pipeline means that you can use ASP.NET Forms Authentication for any content, even perhaps a PHP application. The old ISAPI application pool mode remains available for compatibility.
Another major change in IIS is the way it is configured. Most settings have been moved to the per-directory XML file called web.config. This uses inheritance, so for a particular site you can have default settings in a root web.config, and override this as needed in sub-directories. ASP.NET has always worked like this, but previously most other IIS settings could only be changed through IIS administration. This makes it easier to move applications, since they are configured in files that can simply be copied across, and makes life better for developers who only have file access to the web server, such as those using shared hosting. It is fascinating to see how Microsoft has retreated from the registry towards text configuration files, which is the Unix and Apache model.
Failed Request Tracing is another new feature worth mentioning. You can define what constitutes a failed request, by status code, time taken, or event severity, and have IIS log those requests in detail to a failed request log. The big advantage is the detail available. For example, Windows is prone to permission issues that can be hard to pin down.
Unfortunately, some administrators take the easy option and relax security generally instead of solving the specific issue. Failed Request Tracing makes it easier to identify and fix the exact problem.
PHP support is much improved. The key to this is built-in support for FastCGI, which keeps a CGI service loaded between requests with great speed benefits. A complication with PHP on Windows is that differences between Windows multi-threading and Unix multiple processes required either the use of a thread safe build, which is detrimental to compatibility with some extensions, or using a normal build but under CGI, which is slow.
Now you can use the non-thread safe build with FastCGI, which is great for both performance and compatibility. Setting up PHP on our test server was trivial, using manual configuration and the standard binary download from php.net.
IIS 7 v Apache
How does IIS now compare to Apache? Apache is the most popular web server by some margin, with more than 50 per cent market share according to Netcraft. Nevertheless, IIS has actually increased its share during the last couple of years, though meaningful figures are hard to track down because of domain parking and huge shared hosting providers. Security has also improved since IIS 6.0.
For most users, the choice between Apache and IIS makes itself. If you need ASP.NET and Windows integration, or to run SharePoint services, then IIS is the only choice. Otherwise, Apache has had all the advantages of cross-platform support, and great stability and extensibility thanks to its wide adoption and community. This balance will not change fundamentally with IIS 7.0, though some of the reasons for favoring Apache are now less compelling.
Per-directory configuration files in IIS should perform better then .htaccess files in Apache, and the most annoying characteristics of IIS for shared hosting have been resolved. We have not tested performance or scalability, though Microsoft’s developer division general manager Scott Guthrie claims substantial gains over IIS 6.0. It has been tested for up to 20,000 sites on a single box, with “acceptable performance for shutdown and startup”.
For those who do choose Server 2008, there are a bewildering range of editions, running from Web Server to DataCenter. Note that Server Core is an installation option, not an edition in itself. Significantly, the DataCenter edition comes with unlimited virtual image rights, making it best value for serious virtualization. Note, too, that the new Hyper-V virtualization technology remains in beta, even in the final Server 2008 release.
Other interesting features for developers include new Terminal Services features, including RemoteApp that lets you remote an individual application, rather than a complete desktop, and TS Web Access, which lets users start applications from a web link. In combination with TS Gateway, you can run Terminal Services over HTTPS making this a powerful option for firewall-friendly remote working.
Whereas Vista has been a PR disaster, it is unlikely that its cousin Server 2008 will meet the same fate. There are solid improvements over the predecessor Server 2003, including IIS 7.0, granular installation, improved terminal services, the Server Core, command-line control, and changes to Active Directory. Hyper-V is nicely done, and although it is nothing special in relation to competing products from VMWare and others, its integration and neat tools will win users when it comes out of beta.
Don’t get me wrong – there are frustrations. I banged my head on the desk when I saw that Server 2008 still sets “Hide extensions for known file types” and other such nonsense in IE. In other words, it’s still Windows; but a welcome upgrade nonetheless.
Source – The Register
