Microsoft Corp has won a battle to have a key document format adopted as a global standard, improving its chances of winning government contracts and dealing a blow to supporters of a rival format. The OpenDoc Society, which had argued Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format was unripe for ratification by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), published the results showing Microsoft’s win on...
Balloting on whether Office Open XML (OOXML) should become an international document standard closed at midnight Saturday in Geneva, in an apparently tight vote. The results have not yet been officially announced. In order for the measure to pass, two-thirds of participating countries needed to vote in favor of the issue and less than one-quarter of observer countries in opposition to it. A total...
With the release of Firefox 3 imminent, the rest of the Firefox team is cooking up some crazy ideas for Firefox 4. While Firefox 3 pushes the boundaries of a browser, delivering a cleaner graphical interface, numerous security upgrades, and a variety of new features, it still is far from the “perfect browser”. Of course no browser on the market could earn such a...
It may be the quickest $10,000 Charlie Miller ever earned. He took the first of three laptop computers — and a $10,000 cash prize — Thursday after breaking into a MacBook Air at the CanSecWest security conference’s PWN 2 OWN hacking contest. Show organizers offered a Sony Vaio, Fujitsu U810, and the MacBook as prizes, saying that they could be won by anybody at...
Microsoft’s latest efforts to persuade customers to upgrade to its much-maligned Vista operating system have met with a cool response from users. Historically, Microsoft’s first service pack for one of its marquee products – such as Windows – provides the impetus for users to upgrade. As Gartner analyst, Stephen Kleynhans recently noted, customers see SP1 as the sign that the OS has reached maturity...
Mozilla Corp. Thursday confirmed that it will release the final beta of Firefox 3.0 shortly, and that it expects to deliver the finished browser to users in June. Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 has been code-frozen, said Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, and is working its way toward release. “That will be the last beta for Firefox 3.0,” he said. Once Beta 5...
With Windows Vista Service Pack 1 out the door, Microsoft was largely expected to release Windows XP SP3 last week or this week. It didn’t, instead making public a Refresh build of SP3 Release Candidate 2. Microsoft says it “made this release candidate available in order to receive further user feedback prior to the release of Windows XP SP3.” But many users are wondering...
In a surprise announcement, the BitTorrent and Comcast will partner to address issues of network management and architecture, as well as content distribution. BitTorrent could be described as the bane of the cable industry’s existence when it comes to high-speed Internet services. Users of the file-sharing service routinely consume a large percentage of the available bandwidth, and Comcast has throttled some connections. Approximately half...
It builds CPUs, chipsets, and now with ATI, it builds graphics processors. So beginning today, AMD is radically reforming its marketing strategy, arguing now that it takes all three components together in harmony for customers to realize value. Between now and April 7, AMD will be releasing its first triple-core processors, announced last September, along with performance upgrades to all three of its quad-core...
Mozilla issued its 13th update to alternative browser Firefox 2, fixing six issues, two of which the company called critical. “Some vulnerabilities and weaknesses have been reported in Mozilla Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions, disclose potentially sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting and phishing attacks, and potentially compromise a user’s system,” security firm Secunia said of the...
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