Logging The Cyber World

The next version of Microsoft Windows, the software that defines the computing experience for most people, will nag users much less than its much-maligned predecessor, Vista. PC users will be able to test the new edition early next year.

The world’s largest software maker also is making Word, Excel and other key elements of Office — its flagship “productivity” programs — able to run in a Web browser. The move is meant to help confront rivals such as Google Inc. that offer free word processing and spreadsheet programs online, threatening one of Microsoft Corp.’s most precious profit centers.

The Windows and Office news came Tuesday at a Microsoft conference for software developers.

The forthcoming Windows 7 will let users choose to see fewer alerts and warnings from their computers. Rampant notifications alerting people to security risks irked many Vista users.

Read more from Yahoo Tech News

Microsoft on Friday expanded its support for the open-source community by giving money to the Apache Software Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing open-source project.

Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free specifications for Windows Server and.NET Framework protocols as part of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company announced its plans at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now being held in Portland, Oregon.

Full Story at Yahoo News

The Windows XP era ends June 30 and soon hardware vendors will be shipping you all Vista all the time (in most cases). The save XP effort failed. The whining should cease. And now it’s time for Vista to sink or swim.

Ina Fried has a good overview of where Windows XP will stand with PC manufacturers. And Matt Asay highlights a report from Evans Data noting that 92 percent of developers are ignoring Vista. Coupling these two items together and you come to one conclusion: Folks are skeptical about Vista, but a lot of that skepticism is because XP is still lingering.

“Only eight percent of North American software developers are currently writing applications to run on Microsoft’s Vista operating system, while half are still writing programs for XP, according to Evans Data’s Spring 2008, North American Development Survey. These same developers forecast a fragmented Windows market in 2009 with only 24 percent expecting to target Vista and 29% expecting to continue with XP.”

Complete article here…

Internet Explorer 8 is set to be Microsoft’s most standards compliant browser ever. After originally stating that IE8 would default to the same noncompliant behavior exhibited by IE7, Microsoft relented and plumped for standard-by-default. The first beta of IE8 was released in March and it did indeed default to standards compliance. Web developers have been clamouring for standards compliance for a long time; IE is a long way behind the competition, requiring considerable hacks and workarounds to get pages working properly.

IE8 should make things a lot better—but it will still fall far short of the standards set by Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Some of these problems are technical, but others are cultural. Where the other browser developers are open and communicative, Microsoft is still leaving web developers in the dark.

Read more from arstechnica.com…

Microsoft demonstrated its multitouch interface for its upcoming Windows 7 operating system on Tuesday. The interface provides a touch-screen input for users to interact with their computers.

Full Article at Pcworld.

Windows XP Service Pack 3 is a huge update and will feature more than 1,000 hot fixes and patches that have been issued in the past three years, as well as at least four new features, some of which will be ports of Vista tools.

Full article at newsoxy.com.