Vista News
All the latest Windows Vista and Tech news.
Today, we have reason to celebrate, as we’ve begun to roll out the new Hotmail worldwide!
You may start seeing the new features in you inbox as early as today, features like the new Sweep menu, the freshly integrated Office Web Apps, huge new attachment limits up to 10 GB using SkyDrive, and the ability to create and send photo albums right from Hotmail. If you don’t see these features today, please hold on just a little while longer – everybody will be upgraded this summer.
You might be wondering why everybody doesn’t get the new version immediately. Well, as my friend Phil explained in his blog post Hotmail tips the scales, our Hotmail servers are grouped into clusters, and we have hundreds of clusters. We start by upgrading...
Flash Cookies: The Silent Privacy Killer
There are hundreds of applications out there from spyware cleaners to built-in browser features that eliminate cookies on the spot, and even let you set cookie policies on your computer regarding what can be stored in your machine, and for how long. I’m assuming that if you’re here reading this post, you already know all of the dangers of cookies on your computer. In all honesty, I don’t seriously believe that they’re the most dangerous form of movement or web tracking, but they can definitely be used to monitor more movements than a person should feel comfortable with.
What if there was a type of cookie that could:
Stay on your computer for an unlimited amount of time
Store 100 kb of data...
Your inbox is very personal. It’s your communications, your business, and your archives. The email you send is clearly very personal too – and it should truly be yours.
When designing the new Hotmail, we focused on helping people get the clutter out of their inboxes so that they can find important messages fast and be more productive. To do this, we added tools to help people manage the email they receive. For example, the Sweep menu lets you quickly delete or move all email from a particular sender. We also improved the filters and created a way to bring all related email messages together in a conversation view. We even took a hard look into our own practices and asked ourselves: What could we change to better respect our...
If you've been following us closely, you know we've had two different synchronization services: Windows Live Sync and Live Mesh beta. We’ve heard two things loud and clear. First, people who use either Sync or Mesh rely on the services every day to connect them back to their PCs and sync their important files across multiple PCs. And second, people want to know why we have two such similar services, and how they connect to Windows Live and SkyDrive. So, we’ve focused on making Sync a great application for people that use multiple PCs – and making SkyDrive a great service for sharing documents and photos on the web. Here are a few highlights of the new offering.
Access to your PC from anywhere – Many people used the remote...
Just a reminder that - as announced in April 2008 - as of October 22, 2010, OEMs will no longer be able to pre-install Windows XP Home on new netbook PCs. However for a majority of our customers, they may not notice much change; many PC makers have already been actively manufacturing and selling a broad set of Windows 7 netbooks since Windows 7 released in October, 2009. In fact, according to NPD’s Retail Tracking Service, by April 2010, 81% of netbook units sold at retail in the US came with Windows 7 pre-installed.
I would also like to remind people who are still running Windows XP that as of July 13th, 2010, Windows XP SP2 will also reach the end of support. You will need to install the latest service pack available (Windows XP...
More: BBC News - First human 'infected with computer virus'
Since the release of the first Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview at MIX back in March and the second in May, we’ve shown a lot of demos of IE9 with other browsers. Today, Apple announced and released Safari 5. We figured we would show IE9 and Safari 5 together running some of the demos from the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive website. Watch the Frames Per Second (FPS) Counter.
We’re incredibly excited about the engagement and feedback from developers for Internet Explorer 9 with over a million downloads so far.
More...
We have discovered that the latest update of Silverlight 4 (the “GDR0 of SL4”) which hit Microsoft Update last Thursday can cause the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – April Refresh to fail to install.
If this SL4 update has been installed and you try to install the tools CTP Refresh the installation will fail while attempting to install Silverlight 4.
If you run into this while trying to install the WPDT CTP Refresh, you can solve it by doing the following:
Go to the Programs and Feature control panel.
Locate the item named Microsoft Silverlight 4 and uninstall it.
Re-run the Windows Phone Developer Tools setup.
This issue will be addressed in a future release of the Windows Phone Developer Tools.
More...
Adobe has acknowledged a "critical" security flaw in its Reader, Acrobat and Flash Player software.
Adobe says the vulnerability potentially enables hackers to take control of affected computer systems.
Users running Windows, Macintosh or Linux might all be open to attack.
The company is working to fix the problem. In the meantime, users of Reader, Acrobat and Flash are advised to ensure their anti-virus software is up to date.
"It doesn't really get any worse than a 'zero-day' vulnerability like this," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, a security software company.
Affected software
Adobe Flash Player 10.0.45.2 and earlier 10.0.x versions for Win, Mac, Linux and Solaris
Adobe Flash Player 9.0.262 and...
Throughout our ongoing conversations with customers, specifically the business executives and IT pros, we’ve recognized a common thread across all the organizations. Regardless of size or business, there is a strong need to balance the needs of the end user with the requirements of the organization to maintain strong security and reduce costs. This becomes even more significant as the world of work begins to dissolve and the Internet becomes the new corporate network and various parts of each company have different needs:
Employees want increased access to applications and data from anywhere and from any device.
Business decision makers need to grow their businesses in cost-effective ways while ensuring the productivity of...
Microsoft has begun sharing more information on Windows Live Essentials Wave 4. In addition to Messenger, the company is now previewing Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and Sync.
Full Story: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/06/microsoft-unveils-windows-live-essentials-wave-4.ars