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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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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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On Wednesday, Microsoft announced new security features within the upcoming release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. The features are designed to combat the rising tide of drive-by downloads and malicious scripts contained within carefully crafted links embedded in e-mail and Web pages. Most of the new features require systems to be running Windows Vista SP1 or Windows XP SP3.

Perhaps the most anticipated addition is Internet Explorer’s new antimalware protection.  Opera 9.5 and Firefox 3 both recently added antimalware protection. Safari has so far not announced plans for similar protection. Using mostly its own antimalware technology, Microsoft will block emerging threats by masking the entire IE 8 browser screen with a warning to users. The addition of malware protection to the existing antiphishing protection will be re-branded as the Microsoft SmartScreen filter.

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Make no mistake about it, June 30, 2008 is the beginning of the end for Windows XP, even with Service Pack 3 available for two months now, since May 6. Microsoft confirmed that the end of this month will be synonymous with the availability cut-off date through the retail and OEM channels, although there have been customers hoping until the last minute that the company would breathe new life into the predecessor of Windows Vista.
Microsoft has already postponed once the availability end date initially planned for January 30, 2008, but the company was firm on the fact that that was an exception which would not be repeating itself.

“In industry speak, this is called “end-of-sales.” On June 30, Microsoft will stop distributing Windows XP as a stand-alone product that you can buy shrink-wrapped in the store. We’ll also stop sending it to Dell, HP, Lenovo and all the other major PC manufacturers to sell on their PCs. That said, Windows XP isn’t going to disappear overnight”, revealed Mthree Sweatt, Chief of Staff of the Windows Core Operating System Division (COSD) at Microsoft citing the new The Facts About the Future – Windows XP website.

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Popularity: 32% [?]