The coronavirus outbreak through the eyes of a South African doctor in Seattle
Steve Ballmer has been CEO at Microsoft for eight years, but he will finally get to move into the corner office vacated by Bill Gates.
Hundreds of coffee-obsessed consumers in the United States chimed in moments after Starbucks launched a website asking customers to pitch changes the company should make to revive its struggling US business. And they have kept those thoughts coming, by the thousands.
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/ 28 February 2008
Microsoft is to stop making HD DVD players for its Xbox 360 video game system after Toshiba ceded the high-definition video-format battle to Sony’s Blu-ray. Microsoft said on Saturday it will continue to provide standard warranty support for its HD DVD players.
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/ 28 February 2008
Microsoft launched a new version of its server operating system with great fanfare on Wednesday, but analysts said Windows Server 2008 is an incremental update rather than a giant leap forward. It also unveiled a new edition of Visual Studio 2008, used by computer programmers to create desktop and web applications.
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/ 23 February 2008
A federal judge has said consumers may go ahead with a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft over the way it advertised computers loaded with Windows XP as capable of running the Vista operating system. The lawsuit said Microsoft’s labelling of some PCs as ”Windows Vista Capable” was misleading.
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/ 19 February 2008
Microsoft unveiled a new initiative on Monday that will give college and high school students around the world free access to technology tools used to develop and design software. The development and design tools are available immediately to college students in the United States, Western Europe and China.
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/ 10 February 2008
Senator Barack Obama swept the board on Saturday, pummelling Hillary Clinton in three Democratic nominating contests as Republican Mike Huckabee gave John McCain a run for his money. Obama, who is locked in a battle with Clinton for the party’s nomination, won big in Washington state, Nebraska and Louisiana, outscoring the former first lady by two to one.
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/ 22 January 2008
Microsoft on Monday announced several moves it says will help its business customers take advantage of a technology called virtualisation, and in the process help the software maker catch up with VMware, the front-runner in that area. Virtualisation allows one physical computer to house multiple ”virtual machines”.
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/ 28 October 2007
A federal grand jury is investigating allegations that magician David Copperfield raped and threatened a Washington state woman at his estate in the Bahamas, a newspaper reported. The Seattle Times reported on Saturday that at least three federal law-enforcement officials, whom the paper did not identify, confirmed the grand jury investigation.
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/ 12 September 2007
Microsoft released four software patches on Tuesday to fix security flaws, including one that could allow hackers to take over computers running the company’s instant messaging programs. Only one of the flaws carried the company’s most severe ”critical” rating, and it only applies to the Windows 2000 operating system.
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/ 5 September 2007
Boeing’s new 787 jetliner will not begin flight testing until mid-November or mid-December, months later than originally planned, because it is taking longer than anticipated to get the first plane ready, the head of the company’s commercial airplanes unit said on Wednesday.
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/ 4 September 2007
Microsoft says it will release a major package of updates and fixes for the Windows Vista operating system in the first half of 2008. The company says a ”beta” test version of Service Pack 1 will be released ”in a few weeks to a moderate-sized audience”. The pack fixes some common problems that cause computers to crash or freeze.
Microsoft will send out replacement parts for its Xbox 360 Wireless Racing Wheel after 50 reports that the video-game controllers overheated and released smoke when plugged in, the software maker said last week. The steering-wheel-shaped controllers mimic the physical sensations of race-car driving.
Microsoft will not say what went wrong inside its Xbox 360 video-game consoles that could lead to -billion in repairs, but bloggers and their online readers seem to have their own answer: heat stroke. Frustrated gamers have been going to blogs and forums to swap horror stories and voodoo-like solutions for problems with the consoles.
Microsoft announced on Thursday it will extend the warranty on Xbox 360 video-game consoles to three years, and said too many of the machines have succumbed to ”general hardware failure”. ”We don’t think we’ve been getting the job done,” said Robbie Bach, president of the entertainment and devices division.
Amazon.com will begin selling high-definition independent films in the HD DVD format through its on-demand DVD-printing service, the company said. The web retailer said it will waive processing fees for the first 1 000 films it accepts for production by its CustomFlix Labs subsidiary.
Google says in a court filing that it is pressing for an extension to the United States Justice Department’s oversight of Microsoft’s business practices, most of which is set to expire in November. Over the past year, Google has complained to state and federal regulators about Microsoft’s ”Instant Search” program.
Microsoft launched a redesigned MSN portal optimised for cellphones on Sunday, stepping up its offering at a time when more powerful devices increase the demand for richer content on handsets. There’s a new battle, a new frontline developing on the mobile phone,” said Phil Holden, Microsoft’s director of mobile web services.
Microsoft will unveil a coffee-table-shaped ”surface computer” on Wednesday in a major step towards Bill Gates’s view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interactions using voice, pen and touch. Microsoft said it will manufacture the machine itself and sell it initially to corporate customers.
Microsoft has signed deals with Volvo and whisky maker Chivas Brothers to support two new web-only video series from Reveille, the production company behind TV shows The Office and Ugly Betty. The two new shows will arrive on Microsoft’s MSN website in the next six months.
In a big win for a little Wi-Fi startup called Fon, Time Warner Cable will let its home broadband customers turn their connections into public wireless hot spots, a practice shunned by most United States internet service providers (ISPs). Fon has forged similar agreements with ISPs across Europe.
Watching users fumble and nearly drop an early version of the FlipStart compact PC practically gave Robin Budd a heart attack. The culprit was the three-key sequence, Control-Alt-Delete, required to log off or reboot a Windows PC. When the shrunken-down laptop goes on sale later this month, early adopters might get a kick out of FlipStart’s solution.
Microsoft is taking aim at Google’s rival book-scanning project, saying the search company ”systematically violates copyright”. In prepared remarks he is scheduled to deliver on Tuesday to a publishing industry group, a Microsoft lawyer also said Google is cutting into the profits of authors and publishers.
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/ 16 December 2006
The worst windstorm in more than a decade tore through the north-western United States on Friday, leaving more than a million people without power and killing at least six. Winds gusted to a record 111kph at about 1am on Friday at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, breaking the old mark of 105kph set in 1993.
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/ 9 November 2006
Microsoft’s Windows Vista, the software giant’s first major upgrade of its operating system in five years, is complete and will be available to retail customers on January 30, a senior executive said on Wednesday. In the first year of release, Vista will be installed on more than 100-million computers worldwide, according to research firm IDC.
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/ 7 November 2006
The head of Boeing’s 787 programme said on Monday the company is confident it can lighten the hot-selling plane by two-and-a-half tonnes — enough to fulfill promises that it will be much more fuel efficient than any similar commercial jet flying today.
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/ 6 November 2006
Microsoft said on Monday it has completed the software code for its Office 2007 suite and will begin to offer the world’s most popular package of desktop software to corporate customers on November 30. The new Windows Vista operating system and 2007 Exchange e-mail server will also then be made available to business customers.
Microsoft on Tuesday released new test versions of what company co-founder Bill Gates called its three most important products: Windows Vista for desktop computers, Windows for servers and the Office business software suite. The new beta products were unveiled at Microsoft’s annual Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.
Microsoft has developed technology for people to pay by the hour to use a computer in their own homes, similar to the way many people use pre-paid cards for cellphones. The technology, called FlexGo, will be used as part of efforts to sell computers to lower-income consumers in developing countries.
When Microsoft researchers learned recently that a software flaw had been made public and could prompt internet attacks, the company ordered a team to fix the flaw and make the repair work with other products. But some security experts complained that the software company wouldn’t help people fast enough.
A professor at the University of Washington Medical School who moved to Botswana to help alleviate a shortage of doctors there, was killed when a crocodile dragged him from a canoe, his family and colleagues said. Richard Root (68) was on a wildlife tour of the Limpopo River in remote north-eastern Botswana with his wife, Rita O’Boyle, on Sunday when it happened.