Windows & Microsoft

Microsoft is reportedly considering paying Rupert Murdoch a substantial amount of money to remove all News Corp. content from Google's search results, and instead have them listed on Microsoft's Bing search engine. Of all the bad ideas floated by Microsoft through the years, this is one of the worst. Microsoft will have spent a lot and gained very little, Murdoch will once again pick the pockets of a partner, and Google won't even notice a revenue drop.

Does the world need a new beginner's programming language? In the 1960's BASIC, FORTRAN, LISP and ALGOL were the primary introductory programming languages. In the 1970's and 1980's Pascal, C ad Scheme were the teaching programming languages of choice. In the 1990's with object-oriented extensions to the C language, C++ took over from C as the lingua-franca for students.

Some people are disappointed that Google's Chrome plans don't include a head-to-head fight for the desktop with Windows. They shouldn't be. Google has a far more interesting way to battle Microsoft in mind.

No doubt they're breathing a big sigh of relief at Microsoft right now, after the world has had a first look at the Google Chrome operating system. Chrome represents absolutely no threat to Windows for the foreseeable future, just at a time when Microsoft is vulnerable.

After applying some updates to a Windows 2003 virtual server, this pilot fish comes in the next morning to find the server unresponsive. Then it happens again a few days later -- and soon it's happening every morning.

A man and a woman have been arrested in England, for allegedly spreading banking malware. They were charged with using the ZeuS (or Zbot) Trojan to steal bank passwords. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers cheer the Brits for cracking down.

I've just put the beta of Microsoft Office 2010 through its paces for a Computerworld review, and while there's plenty to like, there's plenty that should be made better as well. Here are five ways it can be improved.

It's time to download the beta of Microsoft Office 2010. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers put it through its paces and play "guess the release date".
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Microsoft announced more details of its Azure cloud computing plans for Windows yesterday. Ray Ozzie talked about how Microsoft's going to crush Amazon and VMware into itty-bitty pieces. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers are mostly impressed.
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Microsoft has good reason to be pleased with recent figures that show Bing has a nearly 10% share of the search market, nearly 31% higher than a year previous. But it still lags far behind Google, which has 65.4% of the market. If the goal is to catch Google, it will never happen.

According to Gartner, Windows Mobile share is being eaten up by Android...

Self service, drag and drop application provisioning store, combined with desktop personalization features, give end users more control of their virtualized desktops.

The Editor of ZDNet.com gets infected with scareware and approaches the problem from the wrong direction. It's an interesting lesson, one that shows how important it is to have disk image backups.

Microsoft admitted that it violated the GPL2 with a recent software release, and is now going to re-release the program under the right open-source license.

A Google executive has admitted what most already people know: Google Docs simply isn't yet good enough for prime time. "We wouldn't ask people to get rid of Microsoft Office and use Google Docs because it is not mature yet," Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division recently admitted. He said, though, that he expects that to change in the next year.