Windows Vista: One Year Later

Windows Vista: One Year Later

For many in the IT profession, January 30, 2007 was a day that will live in infamy. If you've blocked it from your memory, that's the day that Windows Vista was launched and available for purchase in stores and in new PC systems. And there was much rejoicing...Not! Of course, with every new major release of Windows, there has been the usual kvetching and moaning about how much more memory it will suck up, what programs are going to become incompatible, what hardware will stop working, et cetera. We saw it when we made the 16-bit to 32-bit transition from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95, the NT platform migration from Windows 95/98/ME to Windows XP, and now finally with Vista.

Full story at Linux Magazine.

Microsoft plans bumper Patch Tuesday

Microsoft plans bumper Patch Tuesday

Microsoft is set to release 12 security updates next week, matching the patch record set a year ago. Seven of them will be tagged with the company's highest threat ranking. "There's not a Windows shop anywhere in the world that won't need to deploy at least one of these patches," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle. And most everyone will be taking all 12." The tally matches the most delivered in any month during 2007 - that was February as well - and greatly outnumbers the two Microsoft handed over last month.

Read the rest at TechWorld.com.

Cosmos: An open-source .Net-based microkernel OS is born

Cosmos: An open-source .Net-based microkernel OS is born

Move over, Microsoft Singularity. There’s another microkernel, .Net-based operating system in town. And this one’s available under an open-source license.

Known as Cosmos, the new, independently developed operating system (OS) is the brain child of former Microsoft Developer and Platform Evangelism team member Chad “Kudzu” Hower. Unlike Singularity — version one of which Microsoft released last year (and only to university researchers and academics) — Cosmos is available to anyone, Hower said. The developers released Milestone 1 of Cosmos at the very end of January.

For the rest of the story, see here.

-Ken

CompTIA Security+ Training Materials and Vouchers Available in CompTIA Store

CompTIA Security+ Training Materials and Vouchers Available in CompTIA Store

CompTIA Press manuals and vouchers for CompTIA Security+ are now available on the CompTIA online store. Study on your own with quality materials from CompTIA Press, or use the materials to supplement classroom training.

Earning CompTIA Security+ proves that you have the knowledge necessary to combat security risks at your company. More than 80 percent of respondents to the 2007 CompTIA Security Study believe that security training for the IT staff has greatly improved IT security. Increased awareness and the ability of the staff to identify potential security risks proactively are most frequently identified as being the key benefits of training.

The study also found that human error, either alone or in combination with a technical malfunction, was blamed for almost 75 percent of IT security breaches (73.8...

Vive la Ubuntu libre!

Vive la Ubuntu libre!

The Linux desktop may be moving forward slowly in the United States, but it's a vastly different story in Europe. Today, Jan. 30, Chris Kenyon, Canonical's director of business development, announced on a Canonical blog that "the Gendarmerie Nationale [the French national police force] announced the migration of up to 70,000 computers to Ubuntu over the next three years." This move is part of a steady progression that the Gendarmerie Nationale has been making from proprietary to open-source programs. The Gendarmerie, which approximates the U.S.'s FBI, had already moved from Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office to Firefox and OpenOffice.

The rest of this article can be found at DesktopLinux.com. I also found another article of interest along these lines called...

Internet failure hits two continents

Internet failure hits two continents

Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope. One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean. India's Internet bandwidth has been sliced in half, The Associated Press reported, leaving its lucrative outsourcing industry trying to reroute traffic to satellites and other cables through Asia. Reports say that Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain are also experiencing severe problems.

Story at CNN.com.

Firefox approaches 30 percent take-up in Europe

Firefox approaches 30 percent take-up in Europe

Mozilla's Firefox browser ended 2007 by capturing 28 percent of the European market, according to a French web metrics company. The open-source browser's average European market share improved five percentage points during the year in the 32 European countries tracked by XiTi Monitor, a web measurement site operated by Applied Technologies Internet. Firefox's gains in Europe, as elsewhere, came at the expense of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to XiTi Monitor, Firefox posted its largest market share in Finland, where it accounted for 45.4 percent of all browsers used at the end of 2007. Rounding out the top five Firefox countries were Slovenia, where the open-source browser's market share was 44.6 percent; Poland, where it had 42.4 percent, Slovakia, where it had 41.2 percent, and Hungary, where it had 40.3 percent.

Read the entire story at...

Second Shot has been extended through June 30, 2008!

Second Shot has been extended through June 30, 2008!

You can still get a free second chance to pass your Microsoft IT Professional, Developer, or Microsoft Dynamics certification exam with the "Second Shot" offer from Microsoft Learning and Prometric. Due to popular demand, Second Shot has been extended through June 30, 2008. Register for this offer before your next exam and receive a free exam retake if you don't pass on your first try.

Link to sign up.

Link to read the FAQs about this offer.

Customers who have already registered for the offer will receive a separate e-mail with more information about the extension.

Microsoft refreshes SP1 ...again

Microsoft refreshes SP1 ...again

Microsoft has released a new build of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) for the second time within a fortnight. It has sent the new version, Vista SP1 Release Candidate (RC) Refresh 2, to its invitation-only group of approximately 15,000 testers. "This group includes corporate customers, consumer enthusiasts, software and hardware vendors, and others," a company spokeswoman said. "The code is not available for public download." Microsoft made the same claim two weeks ago, when on 11 January it released SP1 RC Refresh, saying then that it would keep the build private. Two days later, however, it posted the refresh to the Windows Update service.

The full story can be found at TechWorld.com.

Vista more secure than XP and open source

Vista more secure than XP and open source

Windows Vista was hit by significantly fewer publicly disclosed security flaws in its first year than Windows XP and open source rivals in their first years, according to a report from Microsoft. The report, written by Jeff Jones, a security strategy director in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing group, is part of Microsoft's effort to show that its work on redesigning the security architecture and adding new security features to Vista have paid off. Jones also found that changes to the way Microsoft handles patching has resulted in less work for system administrators on Vista compared to Windows XP.

The rest of this report can be found at TechWorld.com.