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The evolution of Windows in parallel with computing architectures can be mapped out in accordance to the following marks: 32-bit, 64-bit, 128-bit and even further along. But while milestones have the potential to offer a consistent growth in terms of performance, they also come with inherent setbacks when it comes down to compatibility. According to Christopher Flores, Director Windows Communications, over the past three months Microsoft has noticed an increasing trend in the adoption of 64-bit editions of Windows Vista to outpace the 32-bit variant of the Windows operating system.

The translation is simple. The Windows client is at a juncture, a point marked by the transition from x86 to x64. And 64-bit Windows is starting to become mainstream with 32-bit versions of the platform beginning to fade into the background. This scenario is possible mainly through the new direction adopted by Original Equipment Manufacturers. While end users have failed to crowd to the new 64-bit technologies and software by themselves, OEMs are offering the necessary catalyst, by adjusting their offerings to reflect the fact that x64 is the future.

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A court of law has found Carolyn M. Gudmundson, a former employee of industry giant Microsoft, guilty of embezzling approximately $1 million. Consequently, she was sentenced to 22 months incarceration time but, after she is done serving her time, she will continue to be closely supervised for a period of three years. Microsoft has been awarded monetary restitution to the amount of $923,000.

“Other employees who have similar opportunities to place their hands in the corporate till need to understand that society takes this sort of crime very seriously,” said Judge Ricardo
Martinez.

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Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer’s decision to warn financial analysts Monday that Apple’s fourth-quarter gross margins will be negatively impacted by a “product transition” should be enough to get the rumor wheels turning: of course, it doesn’t take all that much. The remark came within yet another Apple’s earnings report that produced stellar numbers for the previous quarter but an outlook below what Wall Street had been expecting.

Oppenheimer deftly avoided several questions from analysts who tried to get a little more information on just what that “product transition” might involve. He used the exact same phrase last year in July during an earnings call to warn analysts of pretty much the exact same situation: that the transition would cause lower profits for the upcoming quarter. The result? New iMacs in August, and the iPod Touch in September.

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A team of computer scientists has published source code that can in some circumstances bypass encryption used in Microsoft’s BitLocker and Apple’s FileVault and be used to view the contents of supposedly secure files.

We reported in February on their research, which describes how the contents of a computer’s memory could be dumped to a hard drive and the encryption keys forcibly extracted.

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There is a time for translucency, and there is also a time for transparency. The under promise and overachieve policy set in place at Microsoft for the Windows and Office projects by Steven Sinofsky, Senior Vice President, Windows and Windows Live Engineering Group has impacted both Windows 7 and Office 14. Microsoft is essentially ensuring that by promising nothing at all, Windows 7 will
not be a repeat of , but while, for the next iteration of Windows the silence is an item of novelty, for the Office platform, gagged details are nothing more than a tradition. Still, slowly, the company prepares to increasingly open up on both Office 14 and Windows 7.

“You’ll see a range of announcements over the next six months about the directions we’re taking with Microsoft Office,” promised Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer at the Worldwide Partner Conference 2008, on July 10. Office 14 is the next version of the Office productivity suite and the successor of the Office 2007 System.

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Now that Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3.0 are available to end users, the focus is bound to shift on Microsoft. The Redmond company has been cooking Internet Explorer 8 for over a year now, and is approximately one month away from releasing the second Beta build to the public. Since Beta 1 was set up to give web developers and designers a taste of what’s coming mainly in terms of standards support, Beta 2 is built to wow end users and, in this context, will deliver features beyond what is available in the first public development milestone, WebSlices and Activities.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is scheduled to hit sometime in August, but although the IE team
is still hammering at the release, the fact is that as early as mid June 2008, features were no longer added to the milestone. On June 19, Chris Wilson, the Platform Architect for IE revealed that: “we’re still improving quality by fixing bugs in Beta 2, but we’re not implementing new features at this point for the Beta 2 release”.

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The line for the Apple iPhone 3G began to form Friday–an entire week before the device goes on sale.

Frankly, one shouldn’t encourage such behavior by actually covering it. But if I were in Manhattan–instead of Austin, Texas–I, too, would have interviewed them in person by now.

The queue outside of Apple’s Fifth Avenue store, covered first by GearDiary and then Engadget, apparently hasn’t been formed by iPhone co-dependents, though.

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