Todays New
The 10 Best Words That Aren't RealWhat's your favorite word that isn't in the dictionary? Every year, the good people at Merriam-Webster humor us everyday folk and allow us to offer up our favorite words that aren't real. How chizzy is that?
Here are the top 10 awsometastic words:
1. ginormous (adjective): bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous
2. confuzzled (adjective): confused and puzzled at the same time
3. woot (interjection): an exclamation of joy or excitement
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4. chillax (verb): chill out/relax, hang out with friends
5. cognitive displaysia (noun): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you're on the highway
6. gription (noun): the purchase gained by friction: "My car needs new tires because the old ones have lost their gription."
7. phonecrastinate (verb): to put off answering the phone until caller ID displays the incoming name and number
8. slickery (adjective): having a surface that is wet and icy
9. snirt (noun): snow that is dirty, often seen by the side of roads and parking lots that have been plowed
10. lingweenie (noun): a person incapable of producing neologisms. (A neologism is a word, term, or phrase which has been recently created or coined. Get it?)
Rat Study Shows Cancer, Aspartame Link
But Critics Charge That Research Is Flawed
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Nov. 18, 2005 - A study in rats links the popular artificial sweetener aspartame to a wide range of cancers, but industry officials charge that the research is badly flawed.
Aspartame is found in the low-calorie sweetener Equal and in many other sugar-free products under the brand name NutraSweet. It is the second best-selling nonsugar sweetener in the world.
Researchers in
They report that the product is a potential cancer-causing agent to humans even at levels that are less than half of what is considered safe by the
Critics Respond
The study appears in the Nov. 17 issue of the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, which is published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
But critics charged that the investigators did not follow the guidelines for scientific study outlined by the NIEHS' own research group, the National Toxicology Program. They further noted that the NTP's own animal studies involving similar levels of aspartame exposure showed no link between the sweetener and an increase in cancers.
And an NIEHS spokesperson said Friday that the agency had "no role in the design, performance, or interpretation" of the newly published study.
Rat Study Shows Cancer, Aspartame Link
But Critics Charge That Research Is Flawed
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'Findings Speak for Themselves'
The study was conducted by researchers from the European Ramazzini Foundation, an independent group located in
One hundred male rats and 100 female rats were followed from 8 weeks of age until their deaths from natural causes. The rats were fed aspartame at doses approximating a wide range of human consumption levels, from very low levels to very high.
Each rat was autopsied following its spontaneous death, and exposed animals were found to have a higher rate of leukemias, lymphomas, kidney and pelvic cancers and a brain cancer.
Researcher Morando Soffritti, MD, and colleagues called for an "urgent re-evaluation" of the current guidelines for the use of aspartame.
"The findings speak for themselves," he tells WebMD. "They show the potential carcinogenicity of aspartame in animals."
Soffritti said the fact that the rats in the study died of natural causes rather than being sacrificed at a specific point in their lives helped the researchers to better identify the cancer links.
But critics contend that this was a big problem with the study. Most cancer study guidelines recommend the sacrifice of research animals at specific ages -- in the case of the rats used in the study around 104 to 110 weeks.
That would be the equivalent of age 60 or so in humans. The last rat in the study died at 159 weeks of age.
"Rats, like people, develop a wide range of cancers in old age, and establishing whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship (at an age when cancers are common) is not possible," says Joe Poulos, a spokesman for Merisant, the company that makes the aspartame sweetener Equal.
"More than 200 toxicological and clinical studies have been conducted over the past 30 years, all of which have confirmed the safety of aspartame," he tells WebMD.
Rat Study Shows Cancer, Aspartame Link
But Critics Charge That Research Is Flawed
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Widely Considered Safe
Poulos says that regulatory agencies in 130 countries have reviewed aspartame and found it to be safe.
Most scientific organizations that have weighed in on the question have come to the same conclusion, including the American Medical Association, the American Dietetic Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Cancer Society.
In its report on aspartame, the American Cancer Society concludes that "current evidence does not demonstrate any link between aspartame ingestion and increased cancer risk."
In the newly published study, Soffritti and colleagues speculated that methanol, which is a byproduct of aspartame, may explain the increase in cancers seen in the study. Methanol is metabolized in both rats and humans to form formaldehyde, which is a carcinogen.
Beth Hubrich, MS, MD, of the artificial sweetener-industry group Calorie Control Council, tells WebMD that all kinds of foods contain methanol. She calls the newly published study "seriously flawed."
"You can actually find six times more methanol in a glass of tomato juice than in a beverage sweetened with aspartame," she says. "And there is no difference in the way that methanol is metabolized by the body when it comes from aspartame or from some other source like tomato or orange juice."
SOURCES: Soffritti, M., Environmental Health Perspectives, Nov. 17, 2005; online edition. Morando Soffritti, MD, scientific director, European Ramazzini Foundation for Oncology and Environmental Sciences, Bologna, Italy. Beth Hubrich, MS, RD, Calorie Control Council. News release, CCC. Joe Poulos, spokesman, Merisant. News release, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Tom Goehl, editor and chief, Environmental Health Perspecitves. Beth Hubrich, MS, RD, Calorie Control Council. American Cancer Society, Statement on Aspartame.
New Xbox Goes on
· Reprints
By MATT RICHTEL
Published: November 21, 2005
The transition to a new generation of video game consoles kicks off tonight at midnight when retailers begin selling Microsoft's Xbox 360.
The event is a much-anticipated step in an intensifying business battle between Microsoft, a relative newcomer to the video game industry, and Sony and Nintendo. Sony plans to release its own successor console, PlayStation 3, in the spring, while Nintendo is expected to follow later in 2006.
The new consoles are, in general, considerably more powerful than their predecessors, but they will be more expensive, as will the games made to be played on them. The high-end version of the Xbox 360 is priced at $399 and the basic version at $299, though some enthusiasts are not blinking.
"I'll be there at midnight," said Ibe Ozobia Jr., 31, who said he planned to pick up his new Xbox at a local retailer in
"I can't deal with old technology," said Mr. Ozobia, who works in technical support at a computer company and spends 30 hours a week playing video games.
For Microsoft, the challenge is whether it can build its base of consumers beyond the hard-core game players that supported the first version of the Xbox, which came out in 2001.
A key to Microsoft's success is whether there will be enough mainstream video games to attract a range of consumers to the console, industry analysts said. Analysts have said it is too soon to say whether that is the case, though they consider the number of games available at the outset, 18, to be relatively healthy.
Some Wall Street analysts said they were puzzled by the question of how many consoles would be immediately available for sale. Microsoft has declined to comment about its supply, leaving analysts to estimate that there are two million to three million to be distributed in North America, Europe and
Microsoft has said that within 90 days, it expects to ship 2.75 million to 3 million consoles worldwide.
Wall Street analysts expect a shortage in the
Indeed, some stores have already sold out their allotment through advance orders and Internet sales. GameStop, the nation's biggest video game specialty retailer with 3,500 stores, sold out its initial order two weeks ago. Individual stores have been calling consumers, telling them to show up within 48 hours of the introduction or risk forfeiting their console and receiving a refund, said Chris Olivera, a GameStop spokesman.
Microsoft is "trying to turn this into the Cabbage Patch Kids," said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities. He said he expected Microsoft to constantly publicize stories of stores that were sold out to inspire press coverage and water-cooler talk of when the next shipment would arrive. "It's brilliant marketing."
Molly O'Donnell, a Microsoft spokeswoman, said the company was not trying to pique demand by holding down supply or withholding inventory from retailers.
"The reality is that our manufacturing facilities are running at full capacity and churning out as many consoles as humanly possible," Ms. O'Donnell said.
Skype Says RadioShack to Sell Kits for Its Web-Based Phone Service
· Reprints
By REUTERS
Published: November 21, 2005
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 20 - Skype, the Internet-phone company that eBay Inc. acquired for $4.1 billion, is reaching for the American consumer mainstream by selling its telephone kits in RadioShack stores.
Skype Technologies, which counts 66 million users of its free- and low-cost Web-based telephone services, mainly in Europe and
The move into the retail market promises to raise Skype's profile with American broadband users, who have begun to switch from traditional phone systems and use alternatives that rely on Internet connections.
Skype, which has signed up many more users than other broadband phone alternatives, offers simple-to-install software to allow users to call other computers or phones. It works like a music file-sharing service and needs no central phone network switches as a rival, Vonage, does. That makes Skype's service cheaper to operate.
RadioShack provides a missing link by supplying phone headsets or handsets that most consumers will require in order to use low-cost Web-based calling. Skype will be featured in RadioShack holiday mailings and catalogs.
Beginning Monday, RadioShack will also have a special kiosk to feature Skype products, including a new Motorola headset that uses short-range wireless Bluetooth technology to make calls via Skype, priced at $100. It will sell a $40 headset from Logitech and a $129 cordless phone from Linksys, a unit of Cisco Systems.
The RadioShack kiosk will feature Skype starter kits for $5 with a simple earpiece/microphone, software and 30 minutes of free Skype calling time to any number in the world. Sales clerks will offer training videos and software to customers.
Website reveals Windows 2000 and XP SP1 DoS vulnerability 11:35AM
A potential vulnerability in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 has been publicly revealed by the French Security Incident Response Team. The organisation has drawn the ire of Microsoft by publishing details of a proof-of-concept exploit that targets the vulnerability.
According to the author, a specially crafted request to upnp_getdevicelist can cause services.exe to eat up memory to a point where the target machines virtual memory gets exhausted. As result, user requests like opening a window would slow to the point of not executing at all and precipitating a denial of service attack
Microsoft has admitted that the exploit is genuine. In a security advisory it confirmed the vulnerability with Windows 2000 and Windows XP Service Pack 1. However,
Microsoft is a little tetchy about the release of the exploit saying that it was 'concerned that this new report of a vulnerability... was not disclosed responsibly, potentially putting computer users at risk'.
Microsoft Issues Windows Bug Warning
Off-schedule bug fix addresses denial-of-service vulnerability in Windows 2000, XP.
Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld
Friday, November 18, 2005
Microsoft has issued an out-of-cycle advisory warning users about a newly disclosed denial-of-service vulnerability in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Windows XP Service Pack 1.
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The company was prompted to issue the advisory because of reports about proof-of-concept code that seeks to exploit the flaw, the company said in its advisory.
Advisory Explains
"Microsoft is concerned that this new report of a vulnerability in Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 and Windows XP Service Pack 1 was not disclosed responsibly, potentially putting computer users at risk," Microsoft says in its advisory.
The advisory adds that Microsoft is currently not aware of any attacks that have resulted from the exploit code. However, "Microsoft is actively monitoring this situation to keep customers informed and to provide customer guidance as necessary" the company said.
In the meantime, companies need to ensure that their systems are properly updated and have all recommended patches installed, Microsoft said.
The advisory states that "on Windows XP Service Pack 1, an attacker must have valid log-on credentials to try to exploit this vulnerability. The vulnerability could not be exploited remotely by anonymous users. However, the affected component is available remotely to users who have standard user accounts. Customers who have installed Windows XP Service Pack 2 are not affected by this vulnerability. Additionally, customers running Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 are not affected by this vulnerability."
Bug-Fix Process
Since Microsoft moved to a monthly patch release cycle about two years ago, the company has rarely issued out-of-cycle patches such as the one announced Thursday.
The company has been working with security researchers and bug hunters to agree on a practice by which vulnerabilities are reported directly to the software vendor, giving it a chance to fix flaws before details are released publicly.
Microsoft is an afterthought in supercomputing. Changing that will take overcoming Linux--and recruiting a new breed of employee. | | | |||||
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The most powerful lessons in life sometimes draw from long-ago experiences. So it may have been when Bill Gates reminisced last week about bypassing Harvard's computer-science classes 30 years ago. "I was taking physiological psychology and economics," the school's most famous nongraduate recalled. "If you look at my course sign-up, you wouldn't think I was a software person at all." Now, like its founder back then, Microsoft is taking a more-interdisciplinary approach. Broad changes in computing, science, and education are compelling the company to look beyond personal and business computing for its next advances. One of the most important is the rarified stratum of supercomputing, where its Windows operating system is a nonfactor today. Gates predicts the kind of supercomputing server clusters used by a small but growing number of companies will become a foundation of business computing, helping drive the next breakthroughs in science, medicine, product design, and finance. To even get its foot in the door, however, Microsoft needs better products to unseat a well-entrenched Linux operating system. And perhaps more difficult, it needs new talent. The explosion of fields like genomics and nanotechnology is interwoven with leaps in software, which means many of today's most-computer-savvy graduates major in biology, physics, or chemistry--fields where Microsoft isn't seen as a prestige employer. Those realities will put Gates' interdisciplinary approach to the test.
In a keynote at the SC05 supercomputing conference and a subsequent interview in "When we say science, think about people designing cars, think about people designing planes, think about people thinking through the design of a Web site," Gates said. "It's not just new medicines, although that alone would justify all this work. It's not just modeling the environment, although that alone is a supercritical thing that we absolutely need to do." Microsoft last week issued a second beta-test release of a new version of Windows designed for scientific workloads due in the first half of next year. The 64-bit operating system, Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, is designed to distribute computing across clusters of as many as 100 or 200 machines--relatively small potatoes in the supercomputing market but far more than the company's software has been capable of. Microsoft says it will be priced lower than the business edition of Windows Server 2003, which runs $800 in volume. The company also is designing new capabilities for its graphical development tools that could help scientists program those clusters. "Scientists have all this data but can't really bring it together and get insights into it," Gates said. "They spend a lot of their time not thinking deep scientific thoughts but rather re-entering data and writing code that they shouldn't have to." The Linux Challenge The maker of commercial and military aircraft engines, a longtime supercomputing user, has added to its arsenal a network of 2,050 engineering workstations running Windows for message-passing applications when the machines sit idle at night. It also has a 64-node Windows cluster at its |
'Trickle-down' computing
Sales of technical computing systems grew more than 30% last year, to $7.25 billion--faster than revenue growth in personal and business computing, according to research firm IDC. Sales of clusters are growing even faster, up 96% last year. And technical systems account for about 16% of all servers sold worldwide.
Microsoft is betting that growth will ratchet up even more as businesses' research-and-development arms take advantage of high-performance computing techniques borrowed from university labs. Procter & Gamble Co. uses supercomputers to design packages for Folgers coffee, Pringles potato chips, and Pampers diapers. Rolls-Royce plc uses high-performance computers to track data from sensors installed on aircraft engines, then analyzes it to predict if faults might arise. And new streams of data are coming from satellites, environmental sensors, industrial radio-frequency identification tags, and medical devices, all of which could feed a market for software that can house and analyze it.
"There's this new era of hybrid computing," says Steve Wallach, a longtime supercomputer designer and adviser to CenterPoint Ventures, a venture-capital firm. The importance of data mining, visualization, and pattern recognition for business applications means commercial and technical computing markets are using each other's tricks. "You need thousands of processors," he says. "You have to access terabytes if not petabytes of data. And the computing isn't initiated by hitting carriage return. It's happening in the background."
By tapping into the world's high-performance computing expertise, Microsoft is positioning itself and its customers for an era in which the computing power resident in today's high-end systems becomes commonplace in workgroups or even on the desk. It's a problem as well as an opportunity. As chip designers run up against physical limitations to build ever-faster microprocessors, engineers at Advanced Micro Devices, IBM, Intel, and Sun Microsystems are packaging two or four processors on each chip to boost performance. But that makes it harder to program software that takes advantage of those chips' design. The problem will only get worse as the industry moves toward perhaps 64 processing cores on a chip by 2012, and hundreds by 2015. To prepare its products for those scenarios, Microsoft will need the supercomputing sector's know-how; those researchers have been distributing algorithms across scores of chips for decades.
"There's a trickle-down effect," says Jack Dongarra, a computer-science professor at the
New Breed Of Talent
To speed up the incubation process, Microsoft is funding 10 Institutes for High-Performance Computing, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars each, at the universities of Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Cornell; Stuttgart University in Germany; and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, among others. In exchange for the grants, professors will supply Microsoft with design help and feedback on its products. Getting respected industry figures such as Dongarra on board could boost Microsoft's credibility among a skeptical audience of supercomputing users.
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The company also is expanding its on-staff talent with supercomputing ties. In June, Microsoft hired Tony Hey, a former director of the
But the star power also reveals a weak link: Microsoft attracts computer people. It needs to work more closely with scientists in disciplines outside of computing, as Mundie and Gates apply more of the company's brainpower to broad societal problems in science, medicine, and engineering. "The only raw material you feed into Microsoft is smart people," Mundie says. "They come from all walks of life, not just computer science. In the R&D part of the company, we're still overweighted toward people who come out of computer-science programs."
Microsoft traditionally has funded university research through grants to computer-science professors. That helps attract graduate students to projects and potential employees to Microsoft. Now Mundie wants to put company resources where they can benefit projects in broader fields. Gray, an authority on high-performance databases, has worked with astronomers for several years to virtually connect their databases of telescope observations using Web services into an online storehouse that can search for 100 million celestial objects. Another Microsoft researcher, physician David Heckerman, recently applied machine learning and data-visualization technology developed at Microsoft to AIDS research at the
Top grads in physics, chemistry, and biology are expected to be adept computer programmers, Mundie says, but Microsoft is short on connections to attract them. New types of collaboration could net a broader swath of the "intellectual elite," he says. "We have to look more broadly at people who are knowledgeable users."
Supercomputing Impact
Microsoft isn't the first company to pursue low-cost supercomputing. Intel in the early '80s introduced a "personal supercomputer" that failed in the market. And the rise of symmetric multiprocessing led to a number of "mini-supercomputer" companies, including Mundie's Alliant, which never took off.
Today, the world's fastest machine is IBM's Blue Gene/L, installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to help maintain the country's nuclear weapons stockpile. Blue Gene/L reinforced its lead with a top speed of 280.6 trillion calculations per second, according to a new list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers released by
To Dave Turek, VP of deep computing at IBM, one virtue of Blue Gene--there are 19 of the systems in the Top 500--is its ability to grow or shrink in size as customers need. "Blue Gene/L is a pretty effective price/ performance machine," he says. "From a design perspective, we don't present customers with discontinuities as they scale up or down. You don't suddenly need to put in new software or change your application."
Still, the high-performance segment is largely characterized by customers' ability to choose operating systems, middleware, and applications from different vendors to achieve the best performance. Microsoft's entry "has the potential to change the dynamic of the market in some ways," Turek says.
Smaller Installations
Among the most powerful systems, Windows is nearly absent. According to the latest Top 500 list, only a system at
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For now, Microsoft is aiming for much smaller installations--clusters of fewer than 200 machines. That's the fastest-growing part of the market and the most profitable. "Microsoft is being very strategic and going after the sector of the market that pays margin," says Scott Studham, CIO at Oak Ridge National Lab.
Part of the appeal of Windows for technical clusters would be the ability to rapidly prototype mathematical models on a desktop PC or notebook, then run a simulation on a powerful cluster without porting the code. Merck & Co. is testing Windows Compute Cluster on 20 machines running The MathWorks Inc.'s widely used Matlab program. Eric Schadt, a senior scientific director for genetics, says the drug-design industry's frantic growth can strain software-development cycles. "The biology field is exploding," Schadt says. "We're constantly developing new algorithms. When we find something that works, we don't want to wait another six months to get that prototype running on Linux. We'd like to go directly from prototype to running it in the high-performance computing environment."
Microsoft is raising the ease-of-use quotient by building into its new version of Windows point-and-click management tools that would let a biologist configure a cluster, and a version of the popular MPI middleware for clusters the company developed with Argonne National Laboratory. Also in the works are visual-development environments for scientists and extensions to Office apps for scientific note-taking or outsourcing Excel calculations to remote systems. "We can make this technology available to more people," Mundie contends. "Today, there's too high a degree of wizardry."
At the Seattle conference, Microsoft demonstrated a prototype "personal cluster" of four machines running at 25 gigaflops--equivalent to the power of about 10 PCs--that it says could fit under a desk and sell for less than $10,000. Microsoft showed the workgroup system running a rough series of genomics computations, then offloading them to a larger system in another city for more detailed analysis. That kind of wide-area supercomputing could have business appeal. "If you can let somebody submit a job onto the Internet and find the cheapest place to run it, that's not just interesting for scientific cluster computing, that's interesting for business computing," Gates said. Rare types of analyses or jobs that run remotely in a disaster-recovery scenario could benefit from the resource-sharing work Microsoft is developing. "We'll get plenty of benefits from these advances in the business realm," he added.
Where will these trends leave the industry? Probably with unimaginable computing power at users' disposal within a decade--or maybe two. The IBM chip inside Sony Corp.'s PlayStation video game uses vector-processing techniques that were a hallmark of Cray Research supercomputers in the '80s, and the work done by today's clusters could run on a single chip in 15 years. That could usher in simpler ways to interact with technology. Exponential increases in computing power could yield computer vision and speech interfaces that work in daily life or more intelligent filters for what information crosses our desktops.
Microsoft won't pull off any of this unless it can feed its voracious need for new talent--and expand the pool of people eager to work there. "We're always on the lookout for somebody who loves software but knows it so well they're seeing how it can be applied in different ways," Gates said. But declining enrollments of computer-science grads could hinder Microsoft down the road. So could difficulties recruiting from the hard sciences. Yet if Gates and Mundie are right, and the future of everything from medicine to finance hinges on hyper-talented people working with better software, integrating these fields could help us all. Said Gates, "The fact that we need software understanding to advance the sciences means the shortage is all the more acute."
Microsoft Cluster Server Enters Second Beta | ||
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Company chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates last week announced the second beta for Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, a 64-bit operating system for industry-standard x64 processors. Gates used his keynote address at the Supercomputing show in "We expect our customers to start preproduction deployment evaluations of the product with this beta," said Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's director for HPC (high-performance computing), adding that the team is not planning a third Windows CCS beta, so a release candidate will be next. Asked what feedback Microsoft had received from the developers who tested Beta 1, Faenov said it became clear just how important it is to provide them with diagnostic tools. "To a large degree, it is not as much the software challenges but the hardware challenges that come into play when some cluster configurations are deployed," Faenov said. "So, diagnostics become really important, and we have done some good thinking and made some improvements in that area. There was also a lot of focus during Beta 2 development on optimizing the performance." Some users, such as David Robert, a systems manager for a global consulting and engineering company in "We are in the process of setting up a three-way Oracle [Corp.] cluster on Linux that uses a shared file system, and it has been a bear, what with the lack of documentation and problems with our backup program not being compatible. I'm sure Microsoft will do a better job in this arena than Linux," Robert said. To help ISVs rapidly migrate their code, Microsoft showcased about 19 applications, such as a car crash simulation guide and a weather modeling guide, as well as a demonstration of BioTeam Inc.'s Inquiry software—which includes 160 open-source BioTeam applications—on a Windows CCS cluster at its booth at the Supercomputing show last week, Faenov said. "These companies were all able to move to Windows 64-bit if they were not already there, pick up our FDI [file decompression interface] and just run with it, and that has been very encouraging," he said, adding that the product is still on track to ship in the first half of next year. Asked what its strategy is toward the Linux and open-source community, given Linux's dominance in the HPC field and the fact that Microsoft is including the MPI (Message Passing Interface) in the product, Faenov said Microsoft has no such strategy per se. "Our strategy is to deliver the best value and help grow the market, and we are making very pragmatic choices based on specific requirements we hear partners or customers want. MPI was an example of this, and if there are other places where this makes sense for us, our customers and/or partners, we'll look at them," Faenov said. All the major OEMs, including IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co., Dell Inc. and NEC Solutions America Inc., as well as all the major interconnect vendors, have announced support for the product, Faenov said. Microsoft will release a single 64-bit-only version of CCS 2003, which will also run on all the hardware platforms supported by Windows Server 2003 SP1 (Service Pack 1), on which it is based. "We are going to work with our hardware partners to tailor the systems to particular market scenarios and then to do benchmarks and evidence generation for key applications," Faenov said. The announcement of Beta 2 marked a milestone for the There are three main pillars for Microsoft: business computing; consumer computing; and, now, technical and scientific computing, an area in which there is room for many software advances, according to Faenov. In his keynote, Gates also pointed to the need for software to help scientists and researchers focus on their work and not on the underlying IT, Faenov said.
In addition, Gates talked about Microsoft's multimillion-dollar investments in and multiyear commitment to 10 Institutes for High Performance Computing around the globe, where it is creating funded research positions at facilities such as the "The centers we chose have a unique blend of expertise, as they do research in HPC systems and, in many cases, are closely affiliated with an HPC center, giving them a unique insight from both a scientific and industry perspective on what will actually help solve real problems," Faenov said. The agreements with Microsoft will see the staff at these centers deploy the vendor's HPC and other products and then work with Microsoft staff to explore and maximize its product road map going forward, Faenov said. |
Windows 1.0 let users peer into the hi-tech future
But after 20 years of software evolution, Microsoft faces fans who are much harder to impress
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Steve Makris |
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Saturday, November 19, 2005
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Now its audience, a fan base that once lined up for the latest release, is harder to impress and new versions of Windows are a tough sell.
According to industry watchdog, IDC, there are more than 580 million installed consumer and professional Windows computers in 2005.
It's hard to believe it all started on Nov. 20, 1985, when Windows 1.0 showed the world that computers could be used by anyone by simply moving icons and windows on a bright electronic screen.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, already a 10-year veteran in the business, outmanoeuvered bigger competitors to win the race to make a people-friendly computer operating system and free users from the frustration of the DOS prompt.
"We weren't kidding that we bet the entire company on it," Gates recalled in a recent PCMag.com interview. "The strange thing was we were a much smaller company at the time. We were competing to establish this platform with companies larger than ourselves."
Big companies like Digital Research, Xerox, Apple and Quarterdeck had their GUI systems (graphical user interface) on the go. IBM and Microsoft, who co-developed IBM's OS/2 graphical interface, eventually parted ways as Windows caught on.
Microsoft enjoyed huge financial success winning the minds, hearts and wallets of computer makers, software writers and consumers eager to abandon typewriters and experience the power of computers without becoming experts in the geeky arts of finding and saving files.
When Windows finally allowed computers to connect to the Internet, Microsoft burst into the business office scene with desktop and server programs making their flagship Office programs a global success.
But popularity brought its own set of problems as Windows became a target.
Hackers, originally known for their innocent hobby-like tinkering with computer code, became virus and worm creators, raising havoc with personal and business computers.
Shortly after the release of the security-touted WindowsXP, Microsoft (whose first 1985 Windows press release never mentioned the words secure or safe) put the brakes on release of new versions of the operating system.
Gate's famous "trustworthy computing" internal memo in 2002 directed software writers to take a deep inward look at Windows XP leading to an improved free security-laden patch called SP2.
According to company officials, Microsoft spent more than $100 million US in the first year of its trustworthy computing initiative retraining 8,500 developers to improve security in Windows XP.
But improvements weren't enough to excite much of the computing world, which stuck with older but proven Windows 98 and Windows 2000 operating systems.
"In many ways Microsoft is now competing with itself since many customers are happy with what they have," said Michael Cherry a senior analyst with Directions on Microsoft, an independent watchdog and consulting company based in Redmond, Wash. "It's like TVs. Most of us don't think about replacing until we go to turn it on and it doesn't work."
Windows 1.0 let users peer into the hi-tech future
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...Continued
Microsoft is still working on its next generation operating system, initially code-named Longhorn, officially called
"What is really striking about Windows Vista is that some key technologies are present in the recent preview releases, but there's many of them that are really yet to make a full appearance," said Cherry, adding Microsoft has a substantial amount of work to get
The final version will have to be made available to computer makers by next September to meet Microsoft's self-imposed 2006 holiday deadline.
"This means we are sitting nine months away from Microsoft's target date and that has some significant implications for the content of the product," said Greg DeMichillie, also an analyst with Directions on Microsoft who specializes in Microsoft's development tools and strategies.
Since some of Vista's features are now in Windows XP, Cherry thinks Microsoft is pitching the upgrade to users of older Windows versions and, more importantly, to reassert its OS leadership position.
But will Microsoft, after the longest delay between new versions in the 20-year history of Windows, be able to again excite consumers?
Cherry said there will never be another Windows 98 where customers lined the stores at midnight. "Unlike Windows 98 that was revolutionary and compelling, Vista is evolutionary and its success will depend on whether Microsoft can get software developers to build exciting applications on
Still, facing a stubborn "what I have is good enough" attitude from customers, Microsoft will have a tough time selling its new software.
"It's harder to find reasons why you just can't live without the next release," said Cherry who, like DeMichillie, worked at Microsoft for a decade, never meeting each other till they joined Directions.
"In the end, all the customer cares about is the experience of the system they use," he said.
smakris@theJournal.canwest.com
WINDOWS OVER THE YEARS
- 1985 -- Originally called Interface Manager, Windows 1.0 is released. Multiple applications could be opened but windows couldn't overlap.
Windows 2.x resolved that issue two years later and started looking more like today's version. It used more computer memory for more interesting programs.
- 1992 -- Windows 3.1 made the grade with software writers and computer makers who started selling PCs with pre-installed Windows.
Windows 1.0 let users peer into the hi-tech future
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...Continued
- 1993 -- Microsoft releases its first Windows NT 3.1 professional operating system parallel to its consumer line.
- 1995 -- Bill Gates refers to Windows 95 as one of his proudest accomplishments. It marks the beginning of plug-and-play compatibility with external devices, the end of the 11 character limit on file names, and DirectX gives computers access to the sound and graphics system, making Windows the new gaming platform.
- 1998 -- Windows 98 partially integrates Internet Explorer and offered the best DOS-based system.
- 2000 -- A reliable Windows NT 2000 is launched with the looks and ease of use of Windows 98.
- 2001 -- Windows XP says goodbye to DOS, with new security features to counter a virus-infested Internet.
- 2002 -- Windows XP Media Centre Edition combines regular computing with an easy-to-use TV-VCR interface for playing songs, music and television. Windows XP Tablet Edition allowed handwriting on a laptop's entire computer screen.
- 2005 -- Windows XP 64-Bit Edition arrives. It allows access to faster RAM memory, but is a niche system.
- 2006 -- Microsoft is expected to release Vista Windows in time to be loaded onto computers for the Christmas season.
Ran with fact box "Windows Over The Years", which has been appended to this story.
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