Apps, operating systems, and the software tools I use across my computers, phone, and home setup.
Sun Microsystems will pay $1 billion to buy MySQL, the popular open-source database, about $800 million in cash for its privately held stock plus roughly $200 million in assumed options. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos will join Sun's senior team.
Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 1 has been officially released. Expect greater stability: using Dr. Watson crash data, they've fixed the top software issues for each application, and SP1 also improves overall performance. A worthwhile update.
Mozilla Firefox is a fast, full-featured web browser that makes browsing more efficient than ever. Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 includes pop-up blocking, tabbed browsing, integrated Google search and simplified privacy controls to help you cover your tracks.
Microsoft has created MinWin, a stripped-down version of the Windows core that will sit at the heart of future Windows products, starting with Windows 7, due in 2010. The team has spent years reducing the dependencies tangled within Windows.
I'm not sure if you've noticed, but there's a site called Nokia Beta Labs hosting several nice S60 applications made by Nokia themselves. I only discovered it via Engadget, discussing one of its S60 apps.
At the Symbian Smartphone Show today, Nokia showed S60 running with a touch interface. It supports both finger and stylus input, full multilingual support and tactile haptic feedback, and remains backwardly compatible with the existing S60 platform.
Microsoft has released Silverlight 1.0 to the web, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering richer experiences online. Notably, Microsoft will also work with Novell to extend support to Linux, broadening the reach of the new rich-media technology considerably.
If you see the error Message could not be sent because a connection error occurred on MSN, it doesn't necessarily mean a connection problem. It may mean Microsoft is filtering your message server-side, killing messages that match certain patterns.
Adobe Creative Suite 3 has finally hit store shelves, in six flavours. Design Standard bundles InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat 8 Professional, while Design Premium adds Photoshop Extended and Flash.
Microsoft Windows Vista should be in retail stores today, and Microsoft has revamped its Vista homepage. I tried Vista and it lags my four-year-old Pentium 4 3.2GHz with ATI X800 graphics, so I'll only get it when I upgrade.
As we know, Vista was originally scheduled for 2003 but slipped over five years for various reasons. Vista is a much-improved OS, but the long delay has cost Microsoft, which is already looking ahead to Fiji and Vienna.
Microsoft Windows turns 21 today, having first launched as Windows 1.0 on 20th November 1985. Back then the PC market was barely out of its infancy, and it's amazing what Bill Gates and company achieved.
After five years of development, Windows Vista has gone gold and will reach the public by 30th January 2007. With its release to manufacturing today, anticipation is steadily building around the new operating system.
Right after Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla released Firefox 2.0. The launch was meant for tomorrow, 24th October 2006, but the file is already on their FTP. The Windows installer weighs 5,568KB and was uploaded at 08:19 GMT today.
The final version of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 is now out, available for Windows XP SP2, Windows 2003 32-bit, Windows 2003/XP 64-bit and ia64. Windows XP SP1 users will need to upgrade to SP2 before they can install IE7.
The next version of Windows will be called Windows Vista, previously codenamed Longhorn. Personally, I still prefer the name XP. I suspect 2006 will bring a whole series of software ending in Vista, like Office Vista.
First, to stop your computer restarting automatically, go to Run and type shutdown -a. Then download the patch from Microsoft, for Windows XP or Windows 2000/2003, install it, and download the removal tool to clear the Sasser worm.
A few of my friends are already infected by this very widespread virus, even though the patch was released weeks ago. If you got infected, you deserved it; be a responsible user and keep your Windows up to date.
Copied from Neowin: two packages are reportedly circulating online, one the source code to Windows 2000 and the other to Windows NT. At this stage it's hard to gauge the full impact of such a leak.
Winamp 5.0 is out, the successor to version 3.0, and I've been running it since the beta stages. It rocks. You get 3.0's skinning with nearly 2.0's light resource usage. Recommended for everyone, and it's free.
Hot on the heels of the Blaster worm, another SoBig variant is spreading fast across the Internet since Tuesday. Dubbed SoBig.F, it behaves like its predecessors, infecting Windows machines over email and blasting dozens of copies.
After reading on the Blaster worm, here are some tips: run shutdown -a from Start, Run to cancel the forced shutdown. Install the MS03-026 patch and reboot; then download and run FIXBLAST.exe to clean your system.