Microsoft Responds to the € 899 Million Antitrust Fine

On February 7, 2008, the European Union Antitrust Commission fined Microsoft no less than € 899 million, or approximately $1.3 billion, for failing to comply with the March 2007 ruling until 22 October 2007. The Commission underlined the fact that the penalty payment of € 899 million was connected exclusively with the company's non-compliance

with its obligations under the March 2004 Decision, and nothing more. Microsoft had been ordered back in 2004 to share interface documentation with its rivals, namely the Windows server and communications protocols. I have contacted Microsoft in regard to the new financial penalties announced and the company had this to say. "We are reviewing the Commission’s action. The Commission announced in October 2007 that Microsoft was in full compliance with the 2004 decision, so these fines are about past issues that have been resolved. As we demonstrated last week with our new interoperability principles and specific actions to increase the openness of our products, we are trying to focus on steps that will improve things for the future," a Microsoft spokesperson revealed, providing no additional comments beyond this. In her own statement about the matter, European Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes stated that Microsoft has set a precedent in the EU antitrust arena. The Redmond company is in fact the first to be fined for failure to comply with an antitrust ruling in no less than 50 years of EU competition policy. The original March 2004 Decision was supported in September 2007 by the conclusion of the European Court of First Instance, in Luxembourg. Kroes added that she hoped the new € 899 million antitrust fine would be the final dark chapter in Microsoft's non-compliance saga. On February 21, 2008, Microsoft, in a move that the company claims is unrelated with the latest antitrust financial penalty, announced a new direction in regards to both its strategy, technology and business practices in order to expand interoperability.

Performance of Hyper-V Virtual Machines Is Superior to Virtual Server and Virtual PC

Despite the fact that Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 1 was released to manufacturing on February 4, 2008, and that February 27 is the official global launch of the server platform, there are aspects of the product still cooking over at Redmond. An illustrative example in this regard is Window Server 2008 Hyper - V Beta. Microsoft's hypervisor-based server virtualization technology went into Beta stage in mid-December 2007, as Window Server 2008 hit the Release Candidate 1 phase, and

will not be completed until well into 2008. And although Hyper-V will indeed evolve until it will be released to manufacturing, there is one area of the product that will remain virtually untouched. According to Ben Armstrong, Microsoft Program Manager on the core virtualization team, the performance of installing an operating system into Hyper-V will remain inferior to what Virtual Server and Virtual PC have to offer. "Yes - operating system installation on Hyper-V is slower than on Virtual Server / Virtual PC. No - I do not expect this to change much for the first release of Hyper-V. Yes - once you are up and running and have integration services installed performance of Hyper-V virtual machines is much better than Virtual Server / Virtual PC," Armstrong stated. While Hyper-V virtual machines are faster than what Virtual Server and Virtual PC have to offer, once the operating systems have been installed and they are up and running, the actual deployment experience on Hyper-V will not improve from the Beta to the RTM build. "With Virtual Server and Virtual PC we only had emulated devices to use - and as a result we spent a lot of time optimizing and tweaking the performance of these emulated devices. When we implemented the emulated devices under Hyper-V we had to remove many of these optimizations due to the entirely different architecture of Hyper-V. We did not, however, spend much time re-optimizing the emulated devices on Hyper-V because we had the new synthetic device architecture where we have focused our attention for performance tuning," Armstrong added. In other words, Hyper-V emulated devices are and in fact will also remain slower than Virtual Server / Virtual PC emulated devices. This is the reason for the inferior OS installing experience. Still, at the same time, Hyper-V synthetic devices beat Virtual Server / Virtual PC emulated devices in performance, and this will not change.

Gmail Chat Has Hidden Emoticons

Imagine the Star Wars way of text scrolling up the screen while the theme is playing in the background:) For years, the stage of the Instant Messaging services had been dominated

by the strong Yahoo! armada which reigned supreme among its peers, squashing in its infancy any other service’s attempt to overthrow it. It was all quiet, as the Yahoo! Sith started building the Death Star, also known as Messenger for Windows Vista, an experience never seen before and that would change the way the Universe looked at instant messaging.The time was right for a new challenge to emerge out of the backwaters of some garage in Menlo Park, California. It was named Google, and would soon develop Google Talk, the one to challenge Yahoo!’s supremacy. How was that for an intro? Now don’t get me wrong, the stage was set with only mild exaggeration, and I only took into account the people who choose their instant messaging service and don’t just use the default Windows Live. The fight is being fought right now at an user level, each of the two is constantly trying to add to its slew of features something shinier that would top the other. Yahoo! has audibles and hidden emoticons, Google Talk has just introduced the smilies in hiding. There’s a crab available (V.v.V), a diabolic… something (}:-)), a broken heart (Valentine’s isn’t so far behind us.
At the same time, the Japanese version of Gmail has inserted emojis. "These images can be used as placeholders or icons to identify a link or other elements in your page. There are emoji of common use such as airplane or a train and there are some that may indicate emotions, sun, moon phases and more," The Wireless FAQ explains.

iPod Hi-Fi

The perfect match for iPod
Any iPod with dock connector plugs easily into the integrated Universal Dock for iPod. With newer iPod models, you can view full-screen album art and even tweak the tone settings on iPod Hi-Fi to get the best sound depending on the room or type of music.* Of course, iPod Hi-Fi will charge any docked iPod when it's on AC power. On DC power, you can also get a 30-minute quick charge.

Iphone

Introducing iPhone

iPhone features a rich HTML email client and Safari — the most advanced web browser ever on a portable device — which automatically syncs bookmarks from your PC or Mac. Safari also includes built-in Google and Yahoo! search. iPhone is fully multi-tasking, so you can read a web page while downloading your email in the background over Wi-Fi or EDGE.iPhone combines three amazing products — a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, maps, and searching — into one small and lightweight handheld device. iPhone also introduces an entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting you control everything with just your fingers. So it ushers in an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, completely redefining what you can do on a mobile phone.