A management site for IT
When you have a file that has the owner as TrustedInstaller
you can not assign any rights to that file unless you take ownership. To
do that with what you need to do ist the following:
Now you have ownership and you can do anything that you want to the file.
Analysts say Microsoft will probably raise its bid, originally
valued at $31 a share, to at least $35, but could be persuaded to go as high as
$40. Yahoo's statement did not suggest what price its board was
seeking.
The proposal is not in the best interests of Yahoo! and our stockholders, the Chief Executive wrote in an e-mail to employees on Monday. We believe the Microsoft proposal substantially undervalues Yahoo!
Yahoo said the offer did not properly assess its global brand, its audience of some 500 million users worldwide and investments in its online advertising platform.
The offer also does not take into account growth prospects or substantial holdings, which include a stake in Chinese e-commerce firm Alibaba.com, the company said. Yahoo said its board was evaluating all its strategic options.
Microsoft now must decide whether to sweeten its offer, launch a proxy fight or simply withdraw. A Microsoft spokesman declined to comment.
The most likely outcome is they negotiate a higher price, said an analyst with William Blair & Co. It seems Microsoft has expressed a willingness to go to $35 or $36 a share.
A more hostile alternative could be to propose a tender offer to buy shares directly from Yahoo shareholders, although Yahoo could use a "poison pill" defense to dilute the stock holdings purchased in the market by an unwanted aggressor.
(Microsoft - Vista Blog) Here is the timing for SP1 availability for current Windows Vista
users:
The notice followed a dustup earlier this month over new
security settings in Office 2003 SP3 that blocked access to a swath of older
file formats. After users complained on the company's support forums, and a
software rival asked why its files were being barred, Microsoft apologized and
posted work-arounds to make it easier for users to unblock the formats.
Today, Microsoft announced that it would add Office 2003 SP3 to its Microsoft Update listings beginning Feb. 27. Microsoft Update, a companion service to Windows Update, downloads patches and other fixes for the operating system as well as a number of the company's applications, notably Office.
(New York Times) INNOVATION usually needs time to steep. Time to turn the idea into something tangible, time to get it to market, time for people to decide they accept it. Speech recognition technology has steeped for a long time: Mike Phillips remembers that in the 1980s, when he was a Carnegie Mellon graduate student trying to develop rudimentary speech recognition systems, it seemed almost impossible.
Now, devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to
hit the mass market, thanks to entrepreneurs like Mr. Phillips. He is the chief
technology officer and a co-founder of the Vlingo Corporation, an 18-month-old
start-up in Cambridge, Mass., that is selling services to cellular carriers and
other software companies that want to give their customers the ability to let
their mouths do the walking and the searching.
Vlingos service lets people talk naturally, rather than making them use a limited number of set phrases. Dave Grannan, the companys chief executive, demonstrated the Vlingo Find application by asking his phone for a song by Mississippi John Hurt (try typing that with your thumbs), for the location of a local bakery and for a Web search for a consumer product. It was all fast and efficient. Vlingo is designed to adapt to the voice of its primary user, but I was also able to use Mr. Grannans phone to find an address.
The Find application is in the beta test phase at AT&T and Sprint. Consumers who use certain cellphones from those companies can download the application from vlingo.com.
Mr. Phillips has spent more than 15 years in the trenches at companies that nourished speech recognition. In 1994, he was one of the founders of Speechworks, which made early interactive voice-response systems, the now-ubiquitous automated services that answer when we call a company. In 2000, Speechworks was acquired by ScanSoft, which five years later bought Nuance Communications, keeping Nuance as the name. Mr. Phillips left that year to work at M.I.T. as a visiting researcher.
In 2006, he and a colleague from ScanSoft, John Nguyen, started Vlingo because they thought that speech recognition technology, cellular networks and phones were all becoming powerful enough to allow voice navigation systems on cellphones. We couldnt have done this five years ago, he says.
Now, Mr. Phillips is in a race for market share. Another start-up, Yap Inc., based in Charlotte, N.C., is running a beta test of its service, which is similar to Vlingos but already has text messaging. Igor and Victor Jablokov, Yaps co-founders, decided to start the company because they saw their teenage sister text-messaging while in a car.
She wasnt driving at the time, but Igor Jablokov says cellular companies tell him in meetings that two-thirds of their teenage customers have either sent or read a text message while behind the wheel.
Big companies are also attracted to this market. Nuance started its Nuance Voice Control system last August, the same month that Vlingos appeared. Nuances system is in use at Sprint and Rogers Communications and can be downloaded to 66 models of hand-held phones, with many more on the way.
Microsoft is a significant potential competitor, thanks in part to its purchase of TellMe Networks last March. TellMe offers a speech-driven search application for cellphones that is available to customers of AT&T only those who were part of Cingular before the merger and Sprint. TellMes system is built-in on the new Mysto phone from Helio, a mobile phone operator started by Earthlink and SK Telecom, and is the engine for 1800call411, a free directory information service.
Over all, speech recognition was a $1.6 billion market in 2007, according to Opus Research, which predicts an annual growth rate of 14.5 percent over the next three years. Dan Miller, an analyst at Opus, said that companies that have licensed speech recognition technology would probably see faster revenue growth, as more consumers used the technology. The cellphone market holds the most potential, given its billions of phones, but cellular providers are still working out the business model for such services.
Igor Jablokov, Yaps chief executive, says that he wants his application to be supported by advertising, but that the carriers with whom he is negotiating, which he declined to name, want to charge customers for the service.
To be sure, speech recognition technology has been available on personal computers since 2001 in applications like Microsoft Office, but few people use it. But in cellphone and other markets, speech recognition is on the cusp of a curve, says Bill Meisel, editor of Speech Strategy News, an industry newsletter.
Speech recognition, already used in high-end G.P.S. systems and luxury cars from Cadillac and Lexus, is now spreading to less expensive systems and cars witness those slapstick Ford Sync commercials, featuring vignettes like one showing a young woman who approaches her office building and says door open, expecting it to respond the way her car does. It doesnt, and she and her coffee cup smack directly into it.
Sync was developed by Microsoft and Ford, and based on Nuance technology. And the speech technology chief at I.B.M. Research, David Nahamoo, says the company has an automotive customer testing speech recognition to help drivers find songs quickly while driving no more pushing buttons.
Then theres SimulScribe, a New York company that is one of several businesses using speech recognition to convert voice mail into e-mail. Voice recognition has finally hit the point where someone like ourselves can take it over the hump for specific applications, says James Siminoff, SimulScribes chief executive.
James R. Glass, a principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T., says speech technology is going to end up everywhere speech can be useful. He says machines will keep improving their ability to recognize the way humans naturally talk, even if they have strong accents, and that the technology will find myriad new uses.
THIS doesnt mean that people will always choose to speak. Genevieve Bell, director of user experience at the digital home group of Intel, says people are unlikely to want to use speech recognition to handle their finances, at least in public spaces. It also may not work well in the living room.
Ms. Bell jokes that if she could, she would yell cricket! at the television anytime she walked into a room, so her favorite sport would appear on the screen.
Even a digital expert like her cautions that some people may never be satisfied with the quality of speech recognition technology thanks to a steady diet of fictional books, movies and television shows featuring machines that understand everything a person says, no matter how sharp the diction or how loud the ambient noise. But soon we will be able to speak our minds to many of our machines, and have them obey our commands.
First,
lets look at the impact of
defense-in-depth features like User Account Control and Internet Explorer
Protected Mode. These features have
helped reduce both the risk and severity of security bulletins, giving
enterprises more time to deploy patches:
Running as standard
user, which is the recommended
configuration and made easier in Windows Vista thanks to User Account Control,
helps reduce the impact of any particular vulnerability. Of the 23 security bulletins that have
been released for Windows Vista through January 2008, 12 specifically call out a
lower impact for those running without administrative privileges: MS07-033, 034, 040, 042, 045, 047, 048,
050, 057, 064, 068, and 069. This
is a great illustration of the importance of User Account Control and why we
included it in the product. Its
also the reason I personally run as a standard user on every machine I
use.
Because of IE Protected
Mode, the
MS07-056 bulletin from
October 07 was rated important on Windows Vista and critical on Windows
XP. The bulletin rating helps
organizations determine the urgency with which they need to deploy the
update. Fewer critical updates help
organizations maintain regular processes around patch
management.
Internet Explorer 7,
which is the default browser in Windows Vista, also helps protect the personal
information of end users. Were
seeing almost 1 million phishing attempts blocked per week, representing a large
number of potential cases of identity theft or credit card fraud that were
stopped. In addition, there are
over 3500 sites with Extended Validation SSL
Certificates (EV SSL) representing an improved level of
authentication for securing transactions on these sites. Internet Explorer 7 is the first
browser to fully support EV SSL. It
turns the address bar green for EV SSL sites and notifies users about the
available identity information so they can make better trust decisions when
entering sensitive personal information while online.
Next, lets look at patch events, vulnerabilities and
infections. Were showing steady
positive progress in this area.
When looking at Windows Vista compared to Windows XP, weve
seen:
An important metric for IT professionals is the concept of patch events, which is discussed in the One Year Vulnerability Report released today by Microsofts Jeff Jones. During Windows XPs first year, updates were released on 26 separate days. Through a combination of the move to a predictable monthly release schedule, and decreased vulnerabilities, Windows Vista had updates released on just nine days in its first year. To the average security professional, this is one of the most relevant metrics: how many times did I have to activate my internal patch management process due to vendor update releases over the course of a year? Nine times is much more attractive, and cost effective, than 26 times. Jeff Jones one year report goes into this in area in more detail, and the graph below from his report shows the patch events during the first year of Windows Vista and Windows XP:

Fewer vulnerabilities: Also from the One
Year Vulnerability Report, we see that
Windows Vista in its first year had significantly fewer fixed and unfixed
vulnerabilities than Windows XP in its first year: 36 fixed/30 unfixed for
Windows Vista vs. 68 fixed/54 unfixed for Windows XP. The chart below gives you an idea of the
progress weve made:
Fewer months with
updates: Building on the concept of patch events,
since Windows Vista was released, there were three months in which Windows XP
had updates and Windows Vista did not
(December 06, January 07, and November 07). This means that an organization running
all Windows Vista clients would have had three months in which they wouldnt
have had to deploy an OS update to their clients at
all.
Fewer infections:
From January June 2007, there were 60% fewer malware infections and 2.8
times less potentially unwanted software on Windows Vista than on Windows XP
SP2, according to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report from
10/07. This illustrates how the defense in depth features built in to Windows
Vista help prevent machines from getting infected by malicious and potentially
unwanted software.
Finally, what does Windows Vista do to help organizations
reduce costs? A recent Microsoft
commissioned report from GCR on cost savings for mobile
PCs shows $251/machine per year in cost savings for Windows Vista, of
which $55/machine per year was attributed to security and data protection
features such as User Account Control and BitLocker Drive
Encryption.
Weve said it before, but it bears repeating: our job with security is never finished. But, the focus we put on engineering for security, the backing of the world-class security response process delivered by the Microsoft Security Response Center, and the defense in depth approach of Windows Vista are showing real-world benefits for customers and that something I take pride in.
Beginning immediately, Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium
can be run in a virtualized environment, Microsoft said Monday. The pair are the
cheapest editions of the operating system available at retail, selling in full
versions for $199 and $239, respectively. Previously, Microsoft only allowed
Vista Business ($299) and Vista Ultimate ($399) to be installed in a virtual
machine (VM).
In June 2007, Microsoft nearly pulled the same trigger -- it actually briefed reporters before backtracking -- but did not say why it had changed its mind. At the time, it only issued a terse statement through its public relations company: "Microsoft has reassessed the Windows virtualization policy and decided that we will maintain the original policy announced last fall." Seven months ago, however, some analysts pegged problems with Vista's digital rights management (DRM) software for the hesitation.
The only change Microsoft needed to make was to the end-user licensing agreements (EULA) of Vista Home Basic and Vista Home Premium; there has never been a technical barrier to virtualizing either version on the Mac or any other platform.
According to a blog by ZDNet.com's Mary Jo Foley, a Microsoft representative said the build contained a number of bugs that testers encountered in previous prerelease versions of SP1.
The
update is largely a collection of bug fixes and performance and compatibility
improvements, but includes some minor new features.
SP1 RC Refresh, as the update is known, requires previous versions of SP1 to be uninstalled before it can be replaced with Refresh, which may entail waiting for the computer to "reboot multiple times," according to Microsoft.
After multiple rebooting, a period of an hour is required to allow the installer service to "clean up and complete the uninstall" to prevent possible installation errors.
Those with Vista RTM need to install two to three updates, depending on their version of Vista, before they can welcome SP1 onto their computer.
Refresh is time-limited, with the deadline for uninstall being June 30, 2008. According to Foley, Microsoft still aims to have the official version of SP1 available within the first quarter of 2008.
On its Web site, Microsoft warned that it does not recommend installing this software on primary or mission-critical systems.
State announced a final rule for passport cards Dec. 31 to
facilitate travel between the United States, Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean and
Bermuda. The rule requires cards with vicinity radio frequency identification
tags to shorten delays at land border crossings. Currently, U.S., Canadian and
Bermudian citizens entering the United States across land and sea borders are
not required to present citizenship documents.Managing applications is a big business challenge today. IT departments must get involved as part of the normal desktop fix, upgrade and replace process as well as dealing with operating system upgrades.
The issue is
that when applications must be updated, installed or migrated, companies must
ensure that disruptions are minimized to keep users productive throughout the
process. Additionally, the process must be simple for the user. If application
management isnt in place, the end user might make an erroneous decision on how
to configure the software, such as installing it in the wrong directory, which
leads to problems.
Adding to the challenges of application management is the arrival of Windows Vista, which Microsoft has designed to offer more features, advanced security, and higher functionality than any other Windows operating system to date.
These changes mean that before a company moves an application to Windows Vista desktops, it must validate the application to ensure it is compatible.
This could lead to two types of challenges. First, an application may not work with the new OS. Second, the application might be okay, but the packaging of the application for installation may cause problems.
(Janco) Eventhough Microsoft owns the OS market in the commercial marketplace,
the market share of Vista is still only a little over 9% after one year.
Currently almost 95% of all systems that browse the internet are some form of
the Windows OS.
In is Browser and OS Market Share study,
which is to be release on January 3rd, Jancofound that most users are not really
interested in the OS. Rather they are interested in the way that they can
use the systems to meet their needs.
Janco found they are basically two
types of Vista users:
Many users are waiting for Vista Service Pack 1
to be delivered before they will install it on more
workstations.
(ComputerWorld) - "Service Pack 1 for the 2007 Microsoft Office system will be available for download on [Dec. 11]," a spokeswoman said today in an e-mail, adding that the update focuses on stability, performance and security improvements.
Previously, the company had pegged the SP1 ship date to the first
quarter of 2008, which makes next week's release one of the few Microsoft
updates to beat its originally scheduled shipping date.
Microsoft has been mostly mum about SP1's contents, and today it would say only that it would offer more information on Dec. 11 when it posts the pack on its Web site. But according to a Microsoft employee who posted on a company blog today, users will initially need to retrieve the update manually; SP1 will not be pushed out via Windows' Automatic Update mechanism.
That broad definition would cover individuals, coffee shops, libraries, hotels, and even some government agencies that provide Wi-Fi. It also sweeps in social-networking sites, domain name registrars, Internet service providers, and e-mail service providers such as Hotmail and Gmail, and it may require that the complete contents of the user's account be retained for subsequent police inspection.
Before the House vote, which was a lopsided 409 to 2, Rep. Nick Lampson (D-Texas) held a press conference on Capitol Hill with John Walsh, the host of America's Most Wanted and Ernie Allen, head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Allen said the legislation--called the Securing Adolescents From Exploitation-Online Act, or SAFE Act--will "ensure better reporting, investigation, and prosecution of those who use the Internet to distribute images of illegal child pornography."
The SAFE Act represents the latest in
Congress' efforts--some of which have raised free speech and privacy
concerns--to crack down on sex offenders and Internet predators. One bill
introduced a year ago was even broader and would have forced Web sites and blogs
to report illegal images. Another would require sex offenders to supply e-mail
addresses and instant messaging user names.
Wednesday's vote caught Internet companies by surprise: the Democratic leadership rushed the SAFE Act to the floor under a procedure that's supposed to be reserved for noncontroversial legislation. It was introduced October 10, but has never received even one hearing or committee vote. In addition, the legislation approved this week has changed substantially since the earlier version and was not available for public review.
Not one Democrat opposed the SAFE Act. Two Republicans did: Rep. Ron Paul, the libertarian-leaning presidential candidate from Texas, and Rep. Paul Broun from Georgia.
(C/Net) The past year has seen a massive increase in the number
of flaws found in Microsoft software, according to vulnerability-scanning
company Qualys.
Between 2006 and 2007, there was an almost threefold rise in Microsoft flaws, Qualys said on Wednesday."We have seen a huge jump in the vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office products," said Amol Sawate, manager of Qualys' vulnerability-management lab. "These charts show growth of nearly 300 percent from 2006 to 2007, primarily in new Excel vulnerabilities that can easily be exploited by getting unsuspecting users to open Excel files sent via e-mail and instant message."
Alan Paller, director of research for the Sans Institute, a computer-security training organization, said that the reason more vulnerabilities were being found was that it was becoming increasingly profitable for crooks to target the software."It isn't that Microsoft isn't doing a better job," Paller said. "The reason (is that) it is so lucrative to find vulnerabilities in Excel and Word, so there are a lot of (hackers) searching for them."
Microsoft declined to comment for this story.
With all the controversy as of late regarding the extent to which Service Pack (SP) 1 will improve Windows Vistas performance, what is Microsoft saying?
Throughout
2007, Microsoft officials have tried to downplay SP1, hoping to convince users
that they dont need to wait for the first service pack before moving to Windows
Vista. As a result, executives have been less-than-forthcoming when it comes to
the performance gains they expect Vista SP1 will deliver.
Internally, however, the company is promising some pretty hefty improvements for users who install SP1, according to sources.
Microsoft is telling its own employees - whom it is hoping to convince to install the new escrow build of the Vista SP1 Release Candidate (RC) test build in order to give the code a final check before the company begins making it available to testers outside the company that Vista SP1 will:
What else will Vista SP1 fix? Microsoft is dangling these other SP1 improvements in front of its employees internally, sources said, including: