LOS ANGELES (BetaNews) - It's apparent even from before the get-go that the theme of this year's Microsoft Professional Developers' Conference is winning back the marketing momentum, and bringing back developers' enthusiasm in Windows as a brand. Certainly many of them are already enthusiastic about the technologies they work with -- ASP.NET AJAX, Silverlight, C#, LINQ, the new dynamic languages like F#. But in the last round, that enthusiasm didn't translate into Vista, the consumer brand.

In other words, regardless of where developers have stood with Windows technologies -- and for many of them, it's not all that bad a place -- it's in a different world from the broad base of users who find Vista, with its frequent prompts for user consent and its infrequent compatibility with device drivers, generally irritating. Relatively few actually take the Apple ads' suggestion and cross the divide into the Mac realm, but quite a few of them share their sentiment and agree with their message, and that is a serious political problem for Microsoft.

If you're a political candidate, even if you're aligned with the majority in power, if you're several points down in the polls, you won't get far ahead by continuing to align yourself with the policies of the past. So the message of this year's PDC is, "Change is coming."

At the Sunday afternoon "pre-conference," during early registration and outside Microsoft's all-day educational seminars, the buzz in the hallways among the first to arrive is something that can basically be called the "Mary Jo Theory." Based on a hunch relating to a notice to hardware developers a few weeks ago urging them to attend next week's WinHEC conference here in Los Angeles, stating it would be the last one before Windows 7 is released, ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley has advanced the theory that the final Windows 7 could be released to manufacturing during the first half of 2009, rather than the second half as most believe, or the first half of 2010 as some manufacturers have speculated.

eWeek

Make no mistake: Microsoft has moved beyond Windows Vista, which will become all too apparent during this week's Professional Developer Conference. Windows 7 is the future, and in many ways it's the present, too.

Contrary to ridiculous assertions recently made by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Windows Vista is a flop. If businesses aren't buying Vista, after waiting six (now seven) years, it's no success. Yet, during the last day of the Gartner 2008 expo 10 days ago, Steve asserted that Vista "has been extremely successful."


A few days earlier, Steve boasted: "Vista is our best-selling product ever. So, if that takes too much getting over—we're not going to have products that are much more successful than Vista has been. We sold over 180 million copies in the first 18 months, quite successful." Really?

But who's buying this "best-selling" product ever? "We have 180 million users, mostly on the consumer market," Steve said in an Oct. 2 speech. Oh? According to Gartner analysts Neil MacDonald and David Smith, only about 10 percent of enterprises have adopted Windows Vista. That's not a high number, particularly in context of the approximately six years between Windows XP and Vista.

[url=http://www.microsoft-watch.com/content/vista/windows_vista_no_longer_matters.html?kc=MWRSS02129TX1K0000535[/url]

Microsoft will release a beta of its forthcoming Vista Service Pack 2 (SP2) to a wider group of testers on October 29.

Microsoft had been testing SP2 among a very select group of testers for the past couple of weeks. Last week, the company began signing up testers for a broader beta, which testers were told would be released sometime in the next four weeks.

As the Hotfix.Net site reported, Microsoft has begun rolling out that broader beta of Vista SP2 this week. The build number for the beta is 16489. (Thanks to Neowin for the pointer to the Hotfix site.)

Via the Vista Team blog, Microsoft said on October 24 to expect an even wider group of Technology Adoption Program (TAP) testers to get the SP2 beta bits on October 29.

ZDNet

Apple Inc. today recalled all power adapters it packaged with iPhone 3G phones sold since mid-July in the U.S., Japan, Canada, Mexico and several Central and South American countries.

The number of affected users will be in the millions. Recent analyst estimates have pegged iPhone 3G sales as high as 6 million since its July debut, with the U.S. market remaining Apple's largest. Apple has not stated its quarterly iPhone 3G sales, but CEO Steve Jobs said the company had sold more than 1 million in its first weekend of availability.

The adapters, a redesign from the bulkier version included with the first generation iPhone, pose a shock hazard, said Apple in a release Friday afternoon. The company will exchange all eligible adapters free of charge through mail-in or walk-in programs at its own retail stores starting Oct. 10.

"Under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter's metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating a risk of electric shock," said Apple, which said that although it had received reports of broken prongs, no injuries had been reported.

ComputerWorld

Remember those awful Microsoft ads with Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates? Well, now you can forget them. Microsoft flacks are desperately dialing reporters to spin them about "phase two" of the ad campaign — a phase, due to be announced tomorrow, which will drop the aging comic altogether. Microsoft's version of the story: Redmond had always planned to drop Seinfeld. The awkward reality: The ads only reminded us how out of touch with consumers Microsoft is — and that Bill Gates's company has millions of dollars to waste on hiring a has-been funnyman to keep him company. Update: In a phone call, Waggener Edstrom flack Frank Shaw confirms that Microsoft is not going on with Seinfeld, and echoes his underlings' spin that the move was planned. There is the "potential to do other things" with Seinfeld, which Shaw says is still "possible." He adds: "People would have been happier if everyone loved the ads, but this was not unexpected." Update: CPB confirms that Seinfeld spots already in the can will not be aired.

ValleyWag

THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL has axed an episode of its popular show Mythbusters which revealed how easy it was to stuff up Radio Frequency Indentification (RFID) technology after a call from the nice people who make the gear.

The show's co-host Adam Savage claimed that he set out to do an episode on the vulnerabilities of RFID but encountered some very powerful resistance.

A conference call was arranged between co-host Tory Belleci and Texas Instruments to talk about the RFID vulnerabilities. Texas Instruments showed up with the chief legal counsel for American Express, Visa, Discover, and everybody else.

Apparently the combined legal might made it really clear to the folks at Discovery that they were not going to air this episode talking about RFID hacks.

The Inquirer

Well, well, Google is finally going to release a Web browser. In beta. Today. For Windows. And someday for the Mac. It's called Google Chrome. Who says Google can't do evil? Chrome is it.

I've often chuckled at No. 6 of Google's "Ten Things": "You can make money without doing evil." I hadn't looked at the list for awhile, but now see that Google has added four paragraphs explaining what it means to not be evil. But evil is often a matter of perspective. Missing from the four paragraphs to No. 6 on the holy list of 10: Thou shalt not screw your partners.

From the perspective of some Google search partners, Chrome is evil. For example, Mozilla generates most of its real revenue from that Google search box in Firefox's right-hand corner. Sure, end users can change the default search engine. But given Google's huge search share—61.9 percent in July, according to ComScore—the default is likely to remain the same. Google wants to keep that money it gives Mozilla and other browser developers.

Chrome will compete with Firefox and other Google search-supported browsers. Oh, yeah, if that's you, Google is doing evil. If you're Mozilla and dependent on Google paid search revenue, your browser's future is perilous. How ironic if Google does to Firefox what Microsoft couldn't: Kill the browser.

Microsoft Watch

Google has added a video sharing component to its Apps Premier suite of hosted communication and collaboration software, betting that companies will find it useful for a variety of workplace uses.

The Google Video service was due to debut in Apps Premier on Tuesday, allowing end-users to upload clips and share them with co-workers using an interface very similar to Google's YouTube, the most popular video sharing service in the consumer market.

Apps Premier is the fee-based version of the suite, which also has free editions like Standard and Education. Google is adding the video application without raising the price of Apps Premier, which costs US$50 per user per year.

As online video has gone mainstream among consumers, Google believes that organizations of all sizes will benefit from extending their communication with employees via clips for purposes like training, company announcements and broadcasting company events.

InfoWorld...

Early in August, security firms noticed a worm spreading on Facebook through wall posts, claiming to contain a video requiring a new codec to be installed. Variants of this worm are now being spotted on a weekly basis.

The virus appears to be a slightly modified version of what Kaspersky Labs called Koobface; a worm elaborate in its design, but crude in execution.

Utilizing the same poorly worded social engineering tricks, the worm sends messages in Facebook with subject lines like "Hi My Friend," or "Hej!" and contains a verbose link to a video that claims to feature the recipient in some way. Instead of loading a video, it says the user's version of Flash is out of date and needs a new codec. Attempting to click on any part of the video player, including the sender's profile information, the fake comments, or settings, results in a forced download.

Up to this point where the user downloads the file entitled "codecsetup.exe", the worm's methods are exactly the same. Once the "codec" file is opened, it creates a file called "fbtre9.exe", different from the Koobface.A profile, which created a file called "mstre6.exe." This appears to be the sole difference between the two, and the twelfth time the virus has mutated in such a way (there are currently 27 different Koobface infections).

BetaNews

In what some are calling the biggest information heist in recent history, identity thieves managed to acquire a treasure chest of personal information on more than 8 million of hotel chain Best Western’s customers.

According to the Sunday Herald, the breach occurred late last Thursday when an unnamed Indian attacker found a way to gain access to Best Western’s reservations backend. Almost immediately, details were posted for sale on an underground marketplace reportedly run by Russian organized crime; buyers were able to use that information to download all of the system’s records from 2007 to 2008.

The Sunday Herald did not elaborate on how it identified the original poster to be Indian, the possibility of a probe to identify him or her, nor whether Best Western officials reported the heist to police.

Data thieves acquired nearly complete reservation details on each of Best Western’s 1312 continental European locations, which included data on customers’ names, addresses, credit card numbers, telephone numbers, places of employment, and specific reservation dates – past, present, and future. In addition to the regular fears regarding identity theft, the Sunday Herald speculates that the pilfered data could be used to create regional “burglary kits,” which contain the addresses of homes in an area and dates that their owners will not be present.

DailyTech

PhotoSynth, Microsoft’s photo-stitching technology from the company’s Live Labs division, is out of beta and is now a version 1.0 shipping product.

I’m no photographer. If I take 20 digital pictures a year, that is a lot for me. So I’m obviously not part of the target audience — at least the user-generated content part — for this technology. But I did discover a few things about PhotoSynth that I found noteworthy during my sit-down meeting recently with Blaise Aguera y Arcas, the co-creator of PhotoSynth (as well as creator of the SeaDragon seamless-browsing technology which helps power it).

If I had to choose the six things that most surprised/impressed me about PhotoSynth, this would be my list:

1. Microsoft is trying to create a whole new lexicon around PhotoSynth. Microsoft wants synth to become a commonly used verb. “Synths” are collections of photos stiched with PhotoSynth. When someone asks how “synthy” something is, what s/he really wants to know is how complete a collection of synths is. (In other words, are there large gaps missing in a series of user-generated photos of Notre Dame? Or are the transitions between photos smooth?)

ZDNet

The groundwork may have been laid by Nikola Tesla for wireless transmission of electricity, but Intel is putting it to good use through a new effort to charge a laptop in much the same manner.

At the Intel Developer's Forum in San Francisco this week, a demonstration was shown where researchers were able to power a 60 watt light bulb from an energy source that was three feet away. About 75% of the power from the source was retained.

Researchers based their tests on work done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology last year. In the simplest terms, the transmission of electricity occurs through the use of two resonant objects of the same frequency. This allows the transmitted power to react strongest with those objects.

They were able to transmit the power at a distance of seven feet, although apparently with less efficiency. Similar technologies, known as power induction, are already fairly widely used. A current example would be Philips' Sonicare electric toothbrushes, which don't have contacts but which draw their power charge through induction, just by sitting in contact with the base.

BetaNews

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Major Geeks

The issue points to a future of more junk mail for Mac heads. They are already being targetted by MobileMe phishing scams.
Click here to find out more!

The email harvesting issue arises because every MobileMe user gets a public idisk file-sharing site. These sites have an address tied into a user's email username. A user can't hide or delete their public folder and there's no way to choose what the name will be.

As a result spammers only need to map the iDisk domain using web crawler tools to extract the entire MobileMe user name list. Taking this username list and simply adding either @me.com or @mac.com will give an email list, Techcrunch reports.

Apple doesn't see a problem with its system, essentially because it hasn't received any complaints - yet.

Apple tech support said: "We’ve never had a complaint from a customer about people spamming them because of their iDisk public folder name. There is no way to remove your account name from the iDisk folders. I’m very sorry,".

The Register

Windows Vista users jumped at Microsoft Corp.'s troubled operating system's first service pack, but people running Windows XP haven't been in much of a hurry to install its newest service pack update, a Windows performance and metrics researcher said today.

According to Devil Mountain Software Inc., by the end of July, 86 percent of the machines in its community-based exo.performance.network (Xpnet) running Vista had been upgraded to Service Pack 1 (SP1).

That was a 17-point increase over the 69 percent who reported running Vista SP1 at the end of April, six weeks after Microsoft released the major update.

"There was pent-up demand for Vista SP1," said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain. "If users are frustrated with a platform, they're going to be more likely to go out and snag any update that purports to fix the problems."

InfoWorld